True Hallucinations Part 3

The next day was spent relaxing, catching up on insect and plant collecting, washing clothes, and chatting with the priest and brother in residence, who were both part of an austere Franciscan order that did missionary work. Through them we put out the word that we were interested in people who knew things about medicinal plants.

That afternoon a young Witoto named Basilio came to the ca-sita and, having heard of our interest from the priest, offered to take us to see his father, a shaman with a local reputation. Basilio a.s.sumed we were interested in ayahuasca, the better-known hallucinogen in the area, which is generally available for the asking. The oo-koo-he was a much more sensitive subject. There had been a murder at La Chorrera a month or two before we arrived- actually several murders-and Guzman claimed they all had to do with oo-koo-he. Supposedly a shaman had murdered one of two shaman brothers by painting the top rung of a ladder with a DMT-containing resin.

When the victim grabbed the rung, the resin had absorbed through his fingers and he had gotten vertigo and fallen, breaking his neck. The shaman whose brother had been killed struck back by causing an accident. The alleged murderer's wife, daughter, and grandchild had been in a canoe above the chorro and, unaccountably unable to reach the sh.o.r.e, they had been swept over it. It was generally a.s.sumed that they were victims of magic. Only the wife had lived through it. It was not the time to be poking around asking about oo-koo-he.

Basilio insisted that the ayahuasca was a day upriver at his father's malloca, or house. He had a small canoe, so only two of us could go with him. After consultation, it was decided that Ev and I should go. We left at once for the river and I took my film canister of snuff with us.

The day was calm and the sky blue. An extraordinary peace and depthless serenity seemed to touch everything. It was as if the whole earth was softly exhaling its exhilaration. Had such a mood

developed no further it would have pa.s.sed into being but a pleasant memory; in light of later events, I now look back to that afternoon of deepening contentment and almost bucolic relaxation as the first faint stirring of a current that was shortly to sweep me toward unimaginably t.i.tanic emotions.

When we arrived at Basilio's village late in the day, we found our new Witoto acquaintances very kind, a different sort from the Witoto of San Jose del Encanto. We were shown a matted tangle of cultivated ayahuasca plants and given cuttings and a bundle of the vine so that we could make our own brew. Basilio described to us his own single experience with ayahuasca when, several years before, after days of fever from an unknown cause, he had taken it with his father. He described the ayahuasca as a cold water infusion, rare for that area, where vigorous boiling usually plays a part in the preparation. After soaking the shredded ayahuasca for a day and a night, the unboiled water becomes hallucinogenically potent. There had been many "fences" to cross in Basilio's visions. He had a sense of flying. The father had seen the "bad air" that had weakened his son as coming from the mission, which was recognized as a place of ill omen. After this experience, Basilio recovered his health and was less often at the mission, he told us. It was all very interesting, our first exposure to "field conditions,"

and it accorded well with our data on ayahuasca usage and beliefs in the area.

We hung our hammocks in a small hut near the main malloca that night. I dreamed offences and the pasture back at the mission. Early the next morning we were rowed back to the mission by Basilio. Our collections of Banisteriopsis caapi were reason enough for pride, but again I felt the elation whose depth could not be found.

"Peculiar," I muttered to myself as we swung into sight of the mission overlooking its placid lake, with a row of date palms sweeping up from the boat landing.

"Peculiar."

CHAPTER FIVE.

A BRUSH WITH THE OTHER.

In which we move to a new home, and Dennis has a bizarre experience that divides our group.

RETURNING TO OUR FRIENDS, we learned that during the day that we were gone some teachers, professores who had been expected to arrive to teach in the mission school, had finally appeared. They had been ferried in by a bush pilot, the notorious George Tsalikas, who served as La Chorrera's emergency link to the outside world and who brought the mail once a month. This meant that we needed new lodging, since we had been staying in the professores' quarters. The priest offered us the temporary use of a run-down hut that stood on stilts on a small rise below the mission, though it was well above the broad lake created by the chorro. It was in this small hut, instantly christened "the knoll house," that we proposed to live while we made arrangements to move farther into the nearby jungle and away from the somewhat confining atmosphere of the mission.

That morning we rested, pa.s.sed a joint around, and planned our next move.

Dave and Vanessa had learned in conversations with Brother Luis, a white-bearded ancient who was the only other resident representative of the Church aside from Father Jose Maria, that there

was a quite st.u.r.dy Witoto house which was unused and lying down the trail toward the village where our hopes for oo-koo-he centered. It normally stood empty but was now occupied by the people who had brought their children to the mission for the beginning of the school year. It is the practice of the Witoto to leave their children in the keeping of the padres for six or more months out of the year; the times of gathering at the mission at the beginning and end of the school year are high points of the Witoto social swirl and an excuse for soccer games and evening bailes, for the Witoto are inveterate dancers. We were in the midst of such a gathering time, but in a few days all the families would leave and there would be ample empty housing in the jungle. Dave, Dennis, and Vanessa had already inspected one place and determined it to be ideal, close to good insect- and plant- collecting and definitely in the jungle itself. We transferred our equipment to the knoll house and reslung our hammocks. It was cramped, but it would do until we could move into the forest. Then, almost in a collective motion, we set out in the early afternoon to the pastures behind the mission. Find the mushrooms. That was the thought on everyone's mind. We returned that evening to the house, each with six or eight carefully chosen specimens. These we ate and then, as the evening's trip deepened, we smoked joints rolled out of shavings of the freshly gathered Banisteriopsis caapi. The caapi smoke was delicious; it smelled like a light incense, and each toke synergized beautiful slow-motion volleys of delicate hallucinations, which we immediately dubbed "vegetable television."

Each burst of imagery would last about fifteen minutes and subside; then we would take another hit of the caapi smoke. The c.u.mulative effect persisted for a couple of hours. We triggered it repeatedly, and excitedly discussed it as an example of the sort of thing that sophisticated shamanic technicians must have been whipping up for each other's amazement since the late paleolithic.

As the evening wore on, our conversation drifted toward and around the possibility of violating normal physics, discussing it in terms of a psychological versus a naive/realist view of shamanic phenomena. We were especially interested in the obsidian liquids that ayahuasqueros are said to produce on the surface of their skins and use

to look into time.* The idea of a kind of hologramatic alchemical fluid, a self-generated liquid crystal ball, seemed to me very strange and somehow compelling. The question of whether or not such things are possible is actually a more gut issue in disguise: Is what we moderns have remaining to learn about the nature of reality slight and will it require only light fine-tuning of our current way of looking at things; or do we understand very little, missing the point entirely about the nature of our situation in being? I found myself arguing that reality is made of language and that we somehow had to step outside the cultural prison of language to confront a reality behind appearances. "If you would strike, strike through the mask!" That sort of thing.

Rhetoric waxed hot and heavy. Ev, Dennis, and I became pa.s.sionate defenders of this view. Vanessa and Dave insisted on a psychological-reductionist approach to unusual events. They argued that everything could be seen in a context of fantasy, delusion, and wish-fulfillment. For them nothing that occurred during hallucinations happened in the real world; only mental events were taking place. Then, ideology forgotten, they denounced the pa.s.sion of our commitment as naive and obsessive. We retorted that they repressed the real power of the unconscious and that if they had come along to try to vindicate some behaviorist/materialist view of man, then they would be in for a surprise.

And so on.

The life of an expedition is full of stress and aggravated differences, and tension had simmered under the surface for weeks. But I believe that the real cause of tension even then was a sense that something in the mushroom experience was pulling everyone toward it, or at least precipitating a crisis during which we had to decide whether or not to go deeper into a dimension whose precise nature could not yet be seen.

Each exposure to the mushroom was a learning experience with an unexpected conclusion. Three of us were ready to become alchemical children, ready to strip down and climb into the sophic fountain and take the measure of the thing from the inside.

[* See Terence McKenna and Dennis McKenna, The Invisible Landscape (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975), chapter six.]

Call it Faustian or obsessed, that was our position. I considered it continuing the program of investigations that brought us to La Chorrera in the first place. For Vanessa and Dave, however, the reality of the dimension we were exploring, or rather our growing insistence that somehow it was a dimension with elements more than merely psychological, was seen as a threat. So there we were, a group of friends sharing a common set of symbols, completely isolated in the jungle, struggling with an epistemological problem upon whose eventual solution our sanity would seem to depend.

And so, and in short, Dave and Vanessa withdrew from us, withdrew from the excited speculative conversations with their intimations of the possibility of being overwhelmed by the unseen. There were no arguments or scenes, but after that night there was a tacit and mutual understanding that a fork in the road had been reached. Some of us were committed to going more deeply into the idea systems of the mushroom trance, and some were disturbed by the sudden depth of things and preferred only to witness the occasion.

The cramped knoll house and the polarizing of our two approaches combined to inspire Vanessa to expand her checker-playing contacts with the police garrison of three young Colombians forlornly homesick for their Andean homes. After several closely fought games, she had a full-fledged invitation to relieve our crowded conditions by moving with Dave into an unused riverside house nominally in the care of the police. Later, this house, which was at the river landing of La Chorrera, would be the site of my own brush with the Other. Vanessa and Dave took down their hammocks and quietly moved down the hill to the new "riverside house." Their departure was friendly. They would spend more time in the water now, Vanessa laughed.

It was the sixth day of our residence at La Chorrera. We had taken the mushrooms three times. We were healthy, relaxed, and delighted with ourselves for having come so far in such good shape. There were insects and plants to collect and the lake beneath the chorro to swim in. My new relationship with Ev seemed promising and was well launched by then. We were being lulled by the warm, tropical sun in the depthless blue sky. Such unconsciousness seems almost the precondition for change. Events were stirring on some deep and unseen level.

That morning, after the departure of our two friends, Dennis, Ev, and I each lay in our own hammock, lost in thought as the heat and insect shrill built toward midday. My journal entries had ceased, my careful writing now replaced by long flights of reverie, dizzying and beautiful, the faint traces of the deepening contact with the Other, though I did not then recognize it for that. Another warm night came upon us, and we slept long and well. When the morning ground fogs had burned away, this new day was revealed to be as pristine and as flawless as the days always seemed to be in this marvelously beautiful, jungle-isolated settlement. Each day seemed like an alchemical pearl born from the warm and starry night preceding.

We used that day to explore the extraordinary lake edge in the direction of the chorro.

With its abrupt narrowing of the Igara-Parana and sudden terrible increase of power and speed, the chorro is impressive enough. But the lake into which it empties its waters is no mere catch-basin for the rapids; it is the site of some ancient geological catastrophe that shattered the basaltic layer deep beneath the earth's surface, peeling back a great hole and laying thousands of house-sized rock fragments near the cliff, on the northern side of the lake. The mission is perched on the top of this basaltic knoll and is the highest point in the immediate vicinity.

We followed the river and then made our way along the bluffs leading down to the chorro, until finally, a couple of hundred feet from the chorro, it was so steep that we could go no further. But at that distance the ground was shuddering with the throbbing reverberations of millions of tons of water cascading through the rock walls of the chorro.

Unusual ground-clinging plants seemed endemic there in that turbulent atmosphere of mist-whipped sand and thundering noise. The feeling of being so small among such sharply shattered stone and so close to the energy of the rapids was eerie and somewhat disturbing. I felt considerably relieved as we climbed hand over hand up the bluffs and made our way back through the meadows and pastures that the mission had cleared over the years with the free labor of its Witoto parishioners.

Once on level ground and still well within the aura of the chorro, we rested. There, on the point of land overlooking the entire surrounding area, the mission had long ago established a small

cemetery. Within a rudely fenced, hexagonal area, perhaps two dozen graves, many of them obviously of children, were eroding away. The shocking red of the lateritic soil was here laid bare. It was a place touched with sad loneliness even on a perfect sunny day.

Our respite finished, we hurried away from the odd combination of emptiness, solitude, and the distant roar of moving water.

Our walk and the exposure to so much sun and stone sent us as if by instinct toward the unbroken green wall of the jungle across the pastures behind the mission. Broad sandy trails led to the system of Witoto, Bora, and Muinane villages that are the "indigenous component" of Comasaria Amazonas, the rest being a few missions, police, and uncla.s.sifiables-traders mostly-and ourselves.

We wandered down the trail, checked on our home-to-be, and found it still occupied.

Returning through the pastures under a spectacular sunset, we gathered more mushrooms, enough for Ev, Dennis, and I to each take more than we ever had before, perhaps twenty mushrooms apiece.

It was during that walk through the pasture that I noticed for the first time, or at least mentioned for the first time, that everything was very beautiful and that I felt so good that I had a strange sense of being in a movie, or somehow larger than life. Even the sky seemed to have a slight fish-eye lens effect, as though everything were cinematically exaggerated. What was this? Was it a slight distortion of s.p.a.ce brought on by acc.u.mulating levels of psilocybin? Psilocybin can induce such perceptual distortions. I felt ten feet high; just a touch of the superhuman, or a bit like Alice, whose mushroom eating made her alternately tall and small. It was odd, but very pleasing.

Back at the knoll house we kindled a fire and boiled rice for a light supper. Rain was falling intermittently. After dinner, we smoked and waited a long time, thinking that Vanessa and Dave might visit. Finally it began to drizzle a bit harder, and so we withdrew into the house and each of us ate a large pile of mushrooms. The onset of the Stropharia was rapid, and the hallucinations very vivid, but despite the larger dose, after an hour or so the experience did not seem to be particularly different from the earlier trips. We came out of our reveries and conversed softly about our reactions.

Dennis complained that he felt blocked from a deep connection by concern for our father in Colorado, about whether or not he had gotten our last messages to him before we set off down the Rio Pu-tumayo. Dennis seemed melancholy, as if his homesickness had been amplified by the hallucinogen. At least that's what I supposed. I tried to rea.s.sure him, and we talked softly in the darkness for several minutes. He said that his trip consisted of many things, a suffusing inner heat and a strange inaudible buzzing that gave him, so he said, insight into glossolalia-like linguistic phenomena, which I had experienced on DMT and had described to him before. I asked him to imitate the sounds that he was hearing, but he seemed to think it was not possible. While we talked, the drizzle lifted somewhat, and we could faintly hear the sound of a transistor radio being carried by someone who had chosen the let-up in the storm to make his or her way up the hill on a small path that pa.s.sed a few feet from our hut. Our conversation stopped while we listened to the small radio sound as it drew near and then began to fade.

What happened next was nothing less than a turn of events that would propel us into another world. For with the fading of the radio Dennis gave forth, for a few seconds, a very machine-like, loud, dry buzz, during which his body became stiff. After a moment's silence, he broke into a frightened series of excited questions. "What happened?" and, most memorably, "I don't want to become a giant insect!" Dennis was clearly quite disturbed by what had happened, and both Ev and I attempted to calm him. It was obvious that what to us had seemed only a strange sound had far different effects on the person who made it. I understood his predicament because it was familiar to me from DMT experiences, where a kind of glossolalia of thought, which had seemed the very embodiment of meaning to me, seemed mere gibberish when verbalized and heard by other people.

Dennis said there was a tremendous energy in the sound and that he had felt it like a physical force of some kind. We discussed it for several minutes, then Dennis decided that he wished to attempt the effect again. This he did, but for a much shorter time, again reporting that he experienced a great amount of energy being

unleashed. He said he felt as if he might have left the ground if he had directed his voice downward. We wondered if one could make a sound capable of having a synergistic effect on metabolizing drugs, while Dennis suggested that chanting might make some drugs metabolize more rapidly. According to Dennis, from the inside it felt as if he had acquired a shamanic power of some sort.

He began pacing around and wishing aloud that Vanessa would appear out of the gloom with her skepticism, which he felt would crumble when confronted with his testimony of the reality of something strange. I told him that she would only think of it as a peculiar sound in combination with a hallucinogen she was growing uncertain of.

At one point Dennis became so excited that we all left the hut and stood looking out into the pitch darkness. Dennis contemplated going immediately to find Vanessa and Dave to discuss with them what had happened. Finally, a bewildered Ev and I convinced him to return to the hut and leave it all for the morning.

Once back in the hut, we tried again to figure out what was going on. I felt Dennis's amazement was perfectly reasonable; it was my own encounter with the visionary and linguistic powers of DMT that had originally sent me looking into hallucinogens and their place in nature. It is incredible to see all that you believe about reality changed around by these plant metabolites. Excitement is a reasonable reaction to such an edifying, even terrifying, experience.

My brother and I had been close over the years and especially close since our mother's death, but there were experiences that I had had while traveling in Asia that we had not yet shared. To calm us all and to argue for the universality of the kind of experience that Dennis had just had, it occurred to me to tell a story.

CHAPTER SIX KATHMANDU INTERLUDE.

In which a flashback to Tantric excesses in the head nests of hippie Asia illuminates strange mushroom experiences at La Chorrera.

Two YEARS BEFORE, during the spring and summer of 1969, I had lived in Nepal and studied the Tibetan language. The wave of interest in Buddhist studies was just beginning, so those of us in Nepal with Tibetan interests were a tightly knit group. My purpose in studying Tibetan was different from that of most Westerners involved with the language in Nepal. They were nearly all interested in some aspect of Mahayana Buddhist thought, while I was interested in a religious tradition that antedated the seventh century and the introduction of Buddhism into Tibet.

This indigenous pre-Buddhist religion of Tibet was a kind of shamanism closely related to the motifs and cosmology of the cla.s.sical shamanism of Siberia. Tibetan folk shamanism, called Bon, continues to be practiced today in the mountainous area of Nepal that borders Tibet. Its pract.i.tioners are generally despised by the Buddhist community, being thought of as heretics and as generally low types.

My interest in Bon and its pract.i.tioners, the Bon-po, arose out of a pa.s.sion for Tibetan painting. It is common in such painting that the most fantastic, extravagant, and ferocious images are drawn from the pre-Buddhist substratum of folk imagery. The terrifying, multi-armed, and multi-headed guardians of the Buddhist teaching, called Dharmapalas, with their auras of flame and light, are autochthonous Bon deities whose allegiance to the late-arriving Buddhist religion is maintained only by powerful spells and rituals that bind and secure the loyalty of these forceful demons.

It seemed to me that the shamanic tradition that sp.a.w.ned such outlandish and fantastic images must at some time have had the knowledge of a hallucinogenic plant. Shamanic ecstasy in Siberia was known to be attained through the use of the mushroom Amanita muscaria, and Gordon Wa.s.son has made a good case for the use of the same mushroom in Vedic India. Since Tibet is situated roughly between these two areas, it did not seem impossible that, before the coming of Buddhism, hallucinogens were part of the indigenous shamanic tradition.

Amanita muscaria was only one of several candidates that might have served as a hallucinogen in ancient Tibet. Pegamum harmala of the Zygophallaceae family is another suspect. It, like Banisteriopsis caapi, contains the hallucinogenic beta-carboline alkaloid harmaline in considerable quant.i.ties and is probably hallucinogenic by itself. Certainly in combination with a DMT-containing plant, of which the flora of India boasts several, it should yield a strong hallucinogen whose composition would not differ chemically from the ayahuasca brews of the Amazon.* My interest in Tibetan painting and hallucinogenic shamanism led me to Nepal. I had learned there were refugee camps in Nepal and near Simla in India whose populations were nearly entirely outcast Bon-po, unwelcome in the camps where Buddhist refugees were housed. I wanted to learn from the Bon-po whatever knowledge they still retained of hallucinogens they might once have known and used. I wished, in my naivete, to prove my hypothesis [* The giant river reed, Arundo donax for example, occurs in India and its roots contain DMT. See S. Ghosal, S. K. Dutta, A. K. Sanyal, and Bhattacharya, "Arundo donex L.

(Graminae), Phytochemical and Pharmacological Evaluation," in the Journal of Medical Chemistry, vol. 12 (1969), p. 480.]

about the influence of plant hallucinogens on Tibetan painting and then write a monograph about it.

As soon as I arrived in Asia, the enormity of the task and the effort that this project would require were seen more nearly in their correct proportions. My proposed plan was actually an outline for a life of scholarly research! Naturally, I found that nothing could be done at all until I was familiar with the Tibetan language, so I put aside all my research ideas and resolved to dedicate myself to learning as much Tibetan as I could in the few months that circ.u.mstances gave me in Nepal.

I moved out of Kathmandu, away from the pleasures of the hashish dens and the social swirl of the international community of travelers, smugglers, and adventurers that has made the town its own. I moved to Boudanath, a small village of great antiquity a few miles east of Kathmandu and recently flooded with Tibetans from Lhasa-people who spoke the Lhasa dialect that is understood throughout the Himalayas. The people of the village were Buddhist and I made my arrangements to study with the monks there without mentioning my interest in the Bon-po. I sought lodging and came to terms with Den Ba-do, the local miller and a Newari, one of the main ethnic groups of Nepal. He agreed to rent me a room on the third floor of his prosperous adobe house, which fronted the muddy main street of Boudanath. I struck a bargain with a local girl who agreed to bring me fresh water each day, and I settled comfortably in. I whitewashed the adobe walls of my room, commissioned a huge mosquito net in the market in Kathmandu, and arranged my books and small Tibetan writing bench inside. Finally at ease, I set about cultivating my image as a young traveler and scholar.

Tashi Gyaltsen Lama was my teacher. He was a very kind and understanding Gelugpa. In spite of his advanced age, he would arrive every morning promptly at seven for our two- hour lesson. I was like a child; we began with penmanship and the alphabet. Each morning, after the lama departed, I would study for several more hours and then the rest of the day was my own. I explored the King of Nepal's game sanctuary farther east of Boudanath and the Hindu cremation ghatts at nearby Pashupathinath. I also made the acquaintance of a few Westerners who were living in the vicinity.

Among the latter were an English couple my own age. They were self-consciously fascinating. He was thin and blonde, with an aquiline nose and an arch manner typical of the model product of the British public school system. He was haughty and urbane, but eccentric and often hilarious. She was small and unhealthily thin- scrawny is the word I used to describe her to myself. Red-haired, wild-tempered, and cynical, she, like her companion, possessed a razor wit.

They had both been disowned by their families and were traveling hippies, as we all were then. Their relationship was bizarre- they had come together from England, but the relaxation of tension, which arrival in bucolic Nepal had brought, had been too much for their fragile liaison. Now they lived apart, he at one end of Boudanath and she, alone, at the other. They met only for the combined purpose of "paying calls" or of abrading each other's nerves.

For some reason, in that exotic setting they managed to charm me completely. Whether they were alone or together, I was always willing to pause from my studies to pa.s.s the time with them. We became fast friends. Naturally we discussed my work, since it involved hallucinogens; they were very interested, being familiar with LSD from their days in the London scene. We also discovered that we had mutual friends in India and that we all loved the novels of Thomas Hardy. It was a very pleasant idyll.

During this time the method I had evolved for probing the shamanic dimension was to smoke DMT at the peak point of an LSD experience. I would do this whenever I took LSD, which was quite occasionally. It would allow me to enter the tryptamine dimension for a slightly extended period of time. As the summer solstice of 1969 approached, I laid plans for another such experiment.

I was going to take LSD the night of the solstice and sit up all night on my roof, smoking hashish and star-gazing. I mentioned my plan to my two English friends, who expressed a desire to join me. This was fine with me, but there was a problem; there was not enough reliable LSD to go around. My own tiny supply had arrived in Kathmandu, prophetically hidden inside a small ceramic mushroom mailed from Aspen.

Almost as a joke, I suggested that they subst.i.tute the seed of the Himalayan Datura, Datura metel, for the LSD. Daturas are

annual bushes and the source of a number of tropane alkaloids- scopalamine, hylosciamine, and so on-compounds that produce a pseudo-hallucinogenic effect. They give an impression of flying or of confronting vague and fleeting visions, but all in a realm hard to keep control of and hard to recollect later. The seeds of Datura metel are used in Nepal by saddhus (wandering hermits and holy men), so their use was known in the area. Nevertheless my suggestion was made facetiously, since the difficulty of controlling Datura is legendary. To my surprise, my friends agreed that this was something they wanted to do, so we arranged that they would arrive at my home at six P.M. on the appointed day to make the experiment.

When the evening finally came, I moved my blankets and pipes up to the roof of the building. From there I could command a fine view of the surrounding village with its enormous Stupa, a conical temple with staring Buddha eyes painted on its higher portion in gold leaf. The upper golden levels of the Stupa were at that time encased in scaffolding, where repairs necessitated by a lightning strike suffered some months previously were under way. The white-domed bulk of the Stupa gave the whitewashed adobe mud village of Boudanath a saucerian and unearthly quality. Farther away, rising up many thousands of feet, I could see the great Anna-purna Range; in the middle distance, the land was a patchwork of emerald paddies.

Six o'clock came and went, and my friends had not arrived. At seven they still had not been seen, and so I took my treasured tab of Orange Sunshine and settled down to wait.

Ten minutes later, they arrived. I could already feel myself going, so I gestured to the two piles of Datura seeds that I had prepared. They took them downstairs to my room and ground them with a mortar and pestle before washing them down with some tea. By the time they had returned to the roof and gotten comfortably settled, I was surging through mental s.p.a.ce.

Hours seemed to pa.s.s. When they seated themselves, I was too distant to be aware of them. She was seated directly across from me, and he farther back and to one side, in the shadows. He played his flute. I pa.s.sed the hash pipe. The moon rose full and high in the sky. I fell into long hallucinatory reveries that each lasted many minutes but felt like whole lifetimes. When I had emerged from

a particularly long spell of visions, I found that my friend had stopped playing and had gone away, leaving me with his lady.

I had promised them both that I would let them try some DMT during the evening. My gla.s.s pipe and tiny stash of waxy orange DMT were before me. Slowly, and with the fluid movements of a dream, I filled the pipe and gave it to her. The stars, hard and glittering, stared down from a mighty distance on all of this. She held the pipe and took two deep inhalations, sufficient for a person so frail, then the pipe was returned to me, and I followed her into it with four huge inhalations, the fourth of which I held onto until I had broken through. For me it was an enormous amount of DMT, and I immediately had a sense of entering a high vacuum. I heard a high-pitched whine and the sound of cellophane ripping as I was transformed into the ultra-high-frequency o.r.g.a.s.mic goblin that is a human being in DMT ecstasy. I was surrounded by the chattering of elf machines and the more-than-Arabian vaulted s.p.a.ces that would shame a Bibiena. Manifestations of a power both alien and bizarrely beautiful raged around me. At the point where I would normally have expected the visions to fade, the pretreatment with LSD synergized my state to a higher level. The cavorting h.o.a.rds of DMT elf machines faded to a mere howling as the elfin mob moved on. I suddenly found myself flying hundreds of miles above the earth and in the company of silvery disks. I could not tell how many. I was fixated on the spectacle of the earth below and realized that I was moving south, apparently in polar orbit, over Siberia. Ahead of me I could see the Great Plain of Shang and the ma.s.s of the Himalayas rising up in front of the red-yellow waste of India. The sun would rise in about two hours. In a series of telescoping leaps, I went from orbit to a point where I could specifically pick out the circular depression that is the Kathmandu Valley. Then, in the next leap, the valley filled my field of vision. I seemed to be approaching it at great speed. I could see the Hindu temple and the houses of Kathmandu, the Temple of Svayambhu-nath to the west of the city and the Stupa at Boudanath, gleaming white and a few miles to the east. Then Boudanath was a mandala of houses and circular streets filling my vision. Among the several hundred rooftops I found my own. In the next moment I slammed into

my body and was refocused on the roof top and the woman in front of me.

Incongruously, she had come to the event wearing a silver satin, full-length evening dress-an heirloom-the sort of thing one could find in an antique clothing store in Notting Hill Gate. I fell forward and thought that my hand was covered by some cool, white liquid. It was the fabric of the dress. Until that moment neither of us had considered the other a potential lover. Our relationship had functioned on quite a different level. But suddenly all the normal sets of relations were obviated. We reached out toward each other, and I had the distinct impression of pa.s.sing through her, of physically reaching beyond her. She pulled her dress over her head in a single gesture. I did the same with my shirt, which ripped to pieces in my hands as I took it off over my head. I heard b.u.t.tons fly, and somewhere my gla.s.ses landed and shattered.

Then we made love. Or rather we had an experience that vaguely related to making love but was a thing unto itself. We were both howling and singing in the glossolalia of DMT, rolling over the ground with everything awash in crawling, geometric hallucinations. She was transformed; words exist to describe what she became- pure anima, Kali, Leucothea, something erotic but not human, something addressed to the species and not to the individual, glittering with the possibility of cannibalism, madness, s.p.a.ce, and extinction. She seemed on the edge of devouring me.

Reality was shattered. This kind of f.u.c.king occurs at the very limit of what is possible.

Everything had been transformed into o.r.g.a.s.m and visible, chattering oceans of elf language. Then I saw that where our bodies were glued together there was flowing, out of her, over me, over the floor of the roof, flowing everywhere, some sort of obsidian liquid, something dark and glittering, with color and lights within it. After the DMT flash, after the seizures of o.r.g.a.s.ms, after all that, this new thing shocked me to the core. What was this fluid and what was going on? I looked at it. I looked right into it, and it was the surface of my own mind reflected in front of me. Was it translin-guistic matter, the living opalescent excrescence of the alchemical abyss of hypers.p.a.ce, something generated by the s.e.x act performed under such crazy conditions? I looked into it again and now saw in