by Rob Doyle
‘There’s the theory that all of time exists simultaneously,’ said Kelly. ‘There’s no difference between the primordial past, and this moment with you and I walking here, and the deepest future, when humans are long gone. The passage of time is an illusion residing only in the mind. That’s what the mystics say too, but only today have I ever understood it.’
‘It might be the drugs,’ I said.
Soon the market would be closing. The sellers were slowly packing their wares in boxes, counting bills, recording profits in little notebooks.
Suddenly we were out of the labyrinth of aisles and in a large room so incongruous it might have been disturbing were it not so marvellously tacky and lurid. We had seemingly been teleported out of Paris and straight to Mexico (the most surreal country on earth, according to Breton), into a gaudy cantina whose every surface was cluttered with knick-knacks: fairy lights; bunting; religious baubles and icons; beer advertisements that flashed like Tokyo hoardings. On a low wooden stage a grizzled Latino with a toothpick protruding from his mouth played a synthesiser over a tinny beat. Perched high on a stool at his side, a pot-bellied man in a sombrero gestured flamboyantly, while singing a gushing love song to the scattered customers who sat over glasses of beer or pastis and plates of food.
‘When did we come in here?’ I said. ‘I don’t seem to remember stepping through the door.’
‘Well, we must have done,’ Kelly reasoned, ‘because we are definitely in here as opposed to out there.’
At a long table in the centre of the room we sat down on red plastic chairs. A man with sallow skin shuffled over to present us with menus. The song fizzled out and the singer waved us a drunken greeting. He turned to his keyboardist and made a fisting gesture, said something about ‘esta mujer!’ and started cackling. The duo embarked on an even more melodramatic song as we ordered Picon Bière.
‘The great thing about Picon Bière is that it has beer in it and liquor too,’ I said. ‘Not just beer, and not just liquor either. Picon Bière.’
Kelly gazed about in wonderment as the drinks arrived.
‘This … can’t be real,’ she said quietly. The shadow of some suspicion darkened her face. It lasted an instant and then her expression became neutral again.
Looking back, it was then that I should have recognised I was out of my depth, that we urgently needed to wind this down, get clear of that place, turn the trip around. We did none of these things: I just said, ‘It’s not real. It’s not even surreal. It’s simply unreal. In fact, we’re in an unreality TV show. Congratulations, honey.’
‘Stop,’ she hissed.
‘It’s like Celebrity Big Brother, but with no celebrities, no house, nothing.’
Her hands covered her face. The Mexican wailed lyrics about the endlessness of love, the ardour of his heart, the misery of his nights without his betrothed.
As the song climaxed, Kelly lowered her hands and rested them on the table.
‘Okay now,’ she said. ‘It’s okay now.’
‘Will we have another?’
‘Yes.’
When we got back home she seemed herself again, jocular and affectionate. We were tired, overstimulated from the day, the acid wearing off but still lapping over us in gentle washes.
Down in the street a group of friends laughed and shouted, heading out for the night. Then it was quiet. I poured two glasses of gin and splashed in some flat tonic water.
Kelly said, ‘Let’s not sleep at all, then take the rest of the acid at dawn. There’s only a few places left we need to go. We mustn’t stop till I take the last photo. Then I’ll understand what it’s all been for.’
We undressed each other slowly, kneeling in the lamplight and the green glow of the HOTEL sign on the rooftop opposite my window, whose first two letters were bust and unlit. I kissed her mouth and my skin tingled. She lowered her hand and pressed two fingers against herself, then held them up to examine. Her period had started.
As we coiled across the bed we left dabs of blood on the white sheets, lurid and pretty in the lysergic afterglow, like animals bleeding in the snow.
‘There’s so much of it,’ Kelly said as we lay there afterwards, finding our breath. ‘It can’t all have come from me.’
I laughed. ‘Then who?’
‘It’s like we’ve been murdered,’ she said.
‘Maybe we were. In the multiverse, by paedophile children.’
I must have blanked out because now it was dawn, murky light inching under the blinds. I felt for Kelly’s shape in the bed beside me but she was not there. I looked up: she was sitting at the desk, writing in her black notebook.
‘What are you writing?’ I said quietly.
She snapped the notebook shut, turned to me, her face strange and feral. ‘Automatic writing,’ she said.
She glided over to the bed, lay across my chest. I stroked her back, her neck. With her fingertip she traced spirals on my chest, which was smeared with gore like warpaint. ‘I’m not awake and I’m not asleep,’ she said. ‘Let’s go out now.’
It was foolish to take the acid but we took it anyway. I poured drinks, more gin than tonic. We drank by the window, looking over the courtyard and the fallen leaves. My hands were shaking. ‘Je t’aime,’ I said. ‘Oh, oui je t’aime.’
I topped up my glass with gin and turned on the little radio I’d bought at a one-euro shop. A voice said in English: God may have forgiven you, but I have not. There was a din of shrieks and hisses, some hellish avant-garde broadcast.
‘Turn it off,’ Kelly said.
We cycled towards Bastille, past the boarded-up skeleton of the Bataclan. The city was domed under a bleak sky as we reached the point where the canal flows into the impassive Seine. We clinked the bikes into automatic locks by the river, traversed the Île de la Cité on foot, and found our way to the Place Maubert. There was supposed to be a plinth bearing the statue of some historical figure. But there was no plinth, only a dismal city square, some pigeons bickering by a drain.
‘Breton said this place filled him with unbearable dread,’ said Kelly, raising her camera.
I knew where Breton was coming from: everything filled me with unbearable dread that morning. Life’s surface was fraying, peeling off to reveal a prospect of nightmares. I needed to drink.
We sat on the terrace of a cafe that was sleepily opening up, and again ordered Picon Bière. A motorbike farted past, on to the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Some men gruffly heaved crates off a truck down a side street. On the table next to ours, someone had scratched the words NO ONE HERE GETS OUT ALIVE. I hurriedly covered it with a red napkin so Kelly wouldn’t see. I drained my beer. As I signalled through the window for another round, Kelly began speaking about an article she’d read. Physicists were claiming that the universe may be a simulation. An unseen mega-intelligence, or our posthuman descendants in the depths of the future, had initiated the code that emanates all that seems to be in our hallucinated universe. What were their motives, I wondered. Kelly didn’t know – entertainment, or sheer evil.
‘But it doesn’t matter,’ she said, sounding far away. ‘The world is ending now, whether it’s real or not. It’s all coming asunder. Don’t you feel it? Look there.’
She pointed at a window in the second floor of the old building across the street. ‘It’s dark now, but soon it will be red.’
I watched the window, drunk. In no more than a minute the light in the room came on, illuminating the curtains in a reddish glow. I felt nauseous; I walked into the cafe and downstairs to the toilets, where I dry-retched over the bowl. I pulled down my jeans and shat freely, hot and liquid. I put my forehead on the sink and rested there. It was cool on my skin. I closed my eyes and saw fractal shards, silent gods, a bloodied eye, fires at the edge of a city, snakes giving birth to humans, funeral pyres by a filthy river, Anubis silhouetted on a hill.
When I came back out, Kelly was weeping. Feebly I put my hand to her shoulder but she shrugged it away.
‘It’s all wrong,’ she groa
ned, shaking her head. ‘It’s all wrong.’
I stood there, tired and indifferent. A tramp shambled past. I sat down and gulped my beer.
‘This was a terrible idea,’ I said. ‘Let’s go home. We can knock ourselves out with your pills, and hopefully when we wake up things will seem right again.’
‘There’s one more place we have to go,’ she said.
I left too much money for the beer and we walked wearily past Notre-Dame, over the bridge to the island in the river. We stepped through the narrow alley that led from the Pont Neuf into the secluded square of the Place Dauphine – the loneliest place in all of Paris, it seems to me now. The wide square was lined on two sides with restaurants and cafes, but there was no one, not a single person to be seen. Drops of cold rain wet our faces; a wind blew through the alleys, past the chairs and tables on deserted terraces. It was as if the world had fallen to plague, a planet drifting through space like the Mary Celeste. The Palais de Justice loomed at the far end of the square: it appeared to me as the temple where hearts are weighed as souls cross into the underworld. Its bleak facade sent a wave of fear through me, like a prisoner being dragged to the site of his final agony.
‘They burned them here,’ Kelly whispered.
I did not ask.
‘Imagine the screams. Imagine the pain. Oh God.’ She dug her fingers into my arm, so hard that I gasped. ‘They’re burning her,’ she said. ‘She’s burning. She’s screaming. She’s signalling out through the flames.’
She was babbling now and I thought she would faint or have a seizure. I led her to a bench in the middle of the square. The rain was falling heavier. Kelly was sobbing, dejected. I was numb to the cold; shivers of euphoria coursed through my misery. Dark clouds raced across the sky, far too quickly in all directions. Some windows in the Palais de Justice began to blink on, one by one, a dim red glow like the building was on fire. I could hear chanting, as if from an immense crowd. I drew Kelly into me, tried to comfort her.
‘Is it true?’ she murmured. ‘Did they die? Where is she now? Oh God. Do we get out?’ She moaned and I squeezed her hard, as if crushing our ribcages together, fusing us.
‘Please, Kelly,’ I said.
‘Oh God,’ she whimpered. ‘Oh God.’
I could feel her tears soaking through my jumper. She rocked softly, trembling. I flickered in and out of consciousness. Voices gabbled as shadows swarmed the sky. I don’t know how long we were there. Gradually her trembling stopped. She was heavy and still in my arms. In the distance, beyond the Palais de Justice, thunder boomed. Rain pelted the cobblestones across the deserted square, as the doorway to the Palais slowly opened and the shadow of a lone figure emerged.
Sunday was the warmest day this year. All of Paris was out on the streets and in the parks, drinking on the terraces. Students played football in the courtyard. A Brazilian religious group sang songs and danced in the building across the street with the doors and windows open. I set out and walked for hours: down to the Seine and past Notre-Dame, through the teeming Marais, along the Canal Saint-Martin, into Bastille and the eleventh arrondissement, up the sloping streets of Ménilmontant and Belleville. I arrived finally in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, where I watched the sun sink from the hillside. It was one of those simple days when you delight in being alive, the warmth of the air, the colours and sounds of the city, free of anxiety and gloom.
The book is turning out differently than I anticipated. I’ve changed as I’ve written it – the process of writing it has changed me. I no longer believe what I used to believe when I started it, nor disbelieve what I didn’t use to believe. I’ve told you, haven’t I, that my intention from the outset was to write a book that, through whichever blend of memory, dream, learning and invention, was a celebration of elsewhere, of life played out anywhere except the place you happen to be from, which is the only kind of life I’ve ever really imagined. But it’s also an account of the changes that have occurred, are occurring, and will occur – the timelines are tangled, as if time is folding in on itself – between the moment I first set pen to paper and the moment I type the final full stop, when everything will become possible again. I’ve held nothing back, but there is much that it’s still impossible to write about, that it will take ten years to see clearly. That, I think, will be the why that sees me through the how, whatever the how looks like (at the moment, it looks quite good).
I know all this means that an ending is approaching, which means that you’re soon to disappear from my life, and I from yours. Then we can get back to the lifelong, meticulous work of disappearing from our own lives. And now all that’s needed is a final chapter.
Threshold
For years DMT – the most mysterious thing in the universe – was conspicuous in my life by its absence. Then, suddenly, it was everywhere.
I had first heard about DMT while drinking yagé in Peru and Colombia, and reading everything I could about the psychedelic plant brew. I learned that the psychoactive component in ayahuasca is DMT (N,N-dimethyltryptamine), a molecule produced naturally by the human brain. Smoked or injected in its pure form, DMT differs from ayahuasca in that it is extremely quick to take effect, short-lasting, and intensely powerful. Whereas an ayahuasca trip lasts for six or seven hours, with DMT it is all condensed into about ten minutes. After I left South America, my fascination with plant psychedelics gradually subsided under the myriad distractions and projects of life. I maintained a vague hope of smoking DMT but did not actively seek it out. In part, this was due to an apprehension that the reports I had read of DMT experiences instilled in me. Smokers of DMT, including the drug’s great fanatic Terence McKenna, reported bewildering hurtles through ‘hyperspace’ – being blasted right out of a familiar reality (to the accompaniment of a tremendously loud tearing noise) into realms that are unimaginably bizarre, and populated by non-human entities with baffling intentions.
After leaving South America, I lived in London for a few years. There I attended the first UK screening of Gaspar Noé’s film Enter the Void. It was on a Wednesday night at the Rio, a one-screen theatre in Dalston. I went with my friend Zoé, who was in London developing a play. Gaspar Noé was present at the screening – an intense, bald, walrus-moustached man. Before the film, he flitted between rows of seats as the mostly young audience nudged each other and nodded towards him. I had high expectations: from what I’d heard, Enter the Void contained so many elements that mirrored my own fixations – Tokyo, drugs, expatriate slackers, underworld sleaze, techno, mysticism, sexual obsession – it may as well have been written with me in mind.
The red curtains parted and the film began. In the electrifying opening-credits sequence, words forty feet tall in lurid neon colours flash past at incomprehensible speed, as an industrial-ambient soundtrack ignites into the brutal breakdown of LFO’s ‘Freak’. Pummelling and brash, the sequence makes clear that this will be no casual experience – this is cinema as ceremony, ordeal, total immersion.
Now we see the world through someone’s eyes. More exactly, we see a grungy apartment, cluttered with drug paraphernalia, movie posters, psychedelic trinkets and a copy of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. From the blinking point of view of what we now realise is a young American man – his barely awake thoughts are mumbled in voiceover – we step out on to the balcony. Below us is the Tokyo night: rooftops, flashing signs, a warren of streets and alleys promising limitless sin and danger. A gorgeous young woman joins us on the balcony, wearing only her underwear. ‘Oscar …’ she says sleepily. It’s the young guy’s sister, glowing with a forbidden sexuality. An aeroplane appears on the horizon and trails across the night sky. We point towards it. ‘Imagine being up there, like, looking down on all the lights and stuff. All the people would be like tiny insects.’
‘I wouldn’t want to be up there,’ says the girl sullenly, turning to us, lurid in the city’s reflection.
‘Why not?’
‘I’d be afraid of falling … into the void.’
The sist
er leaves for her night’s work – she is a stripper in a club called Sex-Money-Power – and it is at this point that the DMT appears.
Back in his squalid flat, Oscar lights up a vaporiser pipe. He draws deeply on the fumes as the pipe’s contents smoulder in an orange glow. This drug tastes like shit, he thinks. As it takes effect he lies back and gazes at the ceiling. A heaving vortex opens up above him – a breathing, pulsating mass of tendrils, plumes and weird snaking shapes. He draws again on the pipe, then once more. For the next seven or eight minutes, in one of the more original uses of CGI in mainstream-ish cinema, we drift out through the elaborate, eerie psychedelia of Oscar’s DMT trip. It’s an audacious piece of film-making – minutes tick by and what we are seeing adds nothing to the story, gives no insight into character or motivation, only visual entrancement and hallucinatory splendour for their own sake. Ambient noise and the gibbering, staccato DMT voices all garble together, carried on a plaintive synth wave. In its bold psychedelic grandeur, this remarkable scene, like all of Enter the Void, is Noé’s bid to emulate his highest cinematic ideal, Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
After the screening, Noé spoke about the technical challenges the film had presented and what he had been trying to achieve.
When the discussion was opened up to the audience, Zoé raised her hand. A microphone was passed along the aisle, to facilitate the exchange I would later mythologise as ‘Zoé versus Noé’.
‘Did you smoke DMT when you were making the film?’
Noé nodded. ‘Yes. Several times. I took ayahuasca too. Maybe I didn’t take enough – I never had the out-of-body experience that people talk about, where you leave it behind absolutely and this world vanishes. I wanted to, but it didn’t happen.’
‘What was it like, the DMT?’ she asked.
Noé drew his fingers along his moustache, like a bald Nietzsche. ‘It is very strange, very intense,’ he said. ‘There are weird realities, other entities. Some people even feel like their minds are being raped.’