Crux

by Jean Guerrero

  Certain drugs can unlock these chains of categorization, Huxley argues. Ecstasy works by stimulating two neurotransmitters in the brain: serotonin and dopamine. In The Neuroscience of Religious Experience, the neuroscientist Patrick McNamara says dopamine and serotonin are central to psychosis and religious experiences. Together, they trigger what some scientists describe as “apophenia”: the perception of meaningful patterns in random data. “When this circuit is stimulated in the right way, you get religious ecstasy. When the circuit is over-activated, you get various forms of religiously tinged aberrations,” McNamara writes. Ecstasy, I concluded, stimulated the circuit the right way, provoking a perception of the meaningful interconnectedness of all things. I was not a slave of my genetics. I was not the prisoner of a prophecy. All the power in the world lay in my hands—and the hands of others.

  On the night before I turned twenty, I launched a digital magazine, Spectacles, with essays, fiction and artwork from various students. The centerpiece was my “Empathy Manifesto,” which encouraged everyone to take Ecstasy. I likened the drug to the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden: Open your pupils. Take a bite of the fruit. The home page featured an illustration of a bespectacled boy plucking an Ecstasy pill from a tree branch. My friends helped spread the word about the website by scrawling the link on blackboards: “Got Apathy? Put on your Spectacles.” Students wrote me messages to thank me for introducing them to the wonders of MDMA. At parties, strangers stopped and asked: “Aren’t you the Ecstasy girl?”

  I considered Ecstasy a spiritual catalyst, and used it only four or five times that following year. But some of my friends used it monthly or weekly, and not everyone responded the same way. The ones who used it most frequently experienced memory loss. Others had bad comedowns. I realized unique brains could respond distinctly to the same substance. Then MDA flooded the market. It was indistinguishable from MDMA in Marquis reagent chemical tests and cheaper to make. It was poisonous. One night, after taking what I thought was an MDMA pill, I became impatient and took two more. I ended up hallucinating in bed for days, muscles feeling pulverized, lips swollen and bloody from chewing on them. I decided I no longer wanted to put my brain at risk. I quit taking Ecstasy. I removed my manifesto from the Internet.

  * * *

  •

  My neurochemical experiments had renewed my childhood faith in planes outside the perceivable. I decided to focus on natural paths toward them. I started meditating. I launched a weekly column in the Daily Trojan, Scientastical, seeking connections between spirituality and science. I studied everything from parallel universes to the spooky way time slows down for fast-moving entities. My bookshelves filled with paperbacks on neuroscience and quantum physics. These relatively nascent sciences made no effort to downplay the hugeness of their enigmas. I learned that qualia—the subjective experiences of properties such as color and textures—possess an ethereal existence that has so far eluded microscopes and brain scans. I investigated the seemingly supernatural role of perception in quantum experiments: photons act as waves until the gaze of a scientist petrifies them into particles.

  For years I had thought that if the world could be explained by mathematical equations and periodic tables, it could be reduced to those things as well. But how and why questions are different. I was starting to rediscover the beauty of the latter question, the thrill inherent in the world’s mystery. I was learning that minds and materials interact in ways that scientists are only beginning to understand, and that what had always scared me about the world was in fact not the unknown but the idea that the unknown was nothing, that mystery was an illusion, that the world was this, just this. It was not. Science was teaching me that. Although we can describe how light waves interact with the brain to yield color, we can’t justify or measure the result—we have no clue where qualia reside in the brain, if they reside there at all. Nobody has ever encountered them in the physical world.

  * * *

  •

  A question occurred to me: what if my father was not Schizophrenic? I was studying the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the bible of psychologists. Its history revealed that some diagnoses were arbitrary, sometimes even as fictitious as the hallucinations they purported authority over: Homosexuality had once been deemed a mental illness. So had “pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder.”

  In her book Agnes’s Jacket, the psychologist Gail A. Hornstein calls for paying close attention to the stories of people who appear to be mentally ill. She writes: “Madness is more code than chemistry. If we want to understand it, we need translators—native speakers, not just brain scans.” The title of her book refers to a jacket a German seamstress made in a mental institution. Agnes stitched into the fabric endless symbols, most of which seem indecipherable except for one phrase: I plunge headlong into disaster. Hornstein believes there is meaning in all of the jacket’s symbols, which look like writing in a dream, edges blurring and curling. She argues that the U.S. psychiatric community is blind to the insights in stories like the jacket’s because they are dismissed rather than deciphered.

  For the first time in years, I longed to ask Papi about his experiences. What if my father’s symptoms were in fact not nonsense but insights into the true nature of reality? The cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman demonstrated that, contrary to popular belief, even the most sober perceptions are not accurate representations of the world. In a research paper called “Natural Selection and Veridical Perceptions,” he and his colleagues observe that veridical perceptions can be driven to extinction “by non-veridical [survival] strategies that are tuned to utility rather than objective reality.” In a TED Talk, Hoffman explained: “How can not perceiving reality as it is be useful? Well, fortunately, we have a very helpful metaphor: the desktop interface on your computer. Consider that blue icon for a TED Talk….Now, the icon is blue and rectangular and in the lower-right corner of the desktop. Does that mean the text file itself in the computer is blue, rectangular, and in the lower-right-hand corner of the computer? Of course not. Anyone who thought that misinterprets the purpose of the interface. It’s not there to show you the reality of the computer. In fact, it’s there to hide that reality. You don’t want to know about the diodes and resistors and all the megabytes of software. If you had to deal with that, you could never write your text file or edit your photo.” I began to wonder if my father’s “hallucinations” and “delusions” were in fact veridical perceptions of the diodes and resistors of reality. Maybe Papi saw more of the world than most.

  * * *

  •

  I drove to San Diego to celebrate my twentieth birthday and my grandmother’s seventy-first birthday at her house. My aunt Aimee had ordered catering from a Mexican taco company. Papi was there, drinking a beer by himself. As the mariachi band played, he dragged a chair beside mine and said: I like your hair like that. I had dyed it brown. Thanks, I said, surprised. My father hadn’t complimented me since I was a child playing a song on the piano. I still remembered the elation I had felt when he emitted his wow.

  He leaned in and said: I have something to tell you.

  The CIA had experimented on him between 1999 and 2003 using electromagnetic and radio-wave technology, he said. The goal was to test the remote technology’s power in manipulating enemy psyches. They had chosen him, he said, because as a crack addict with a green card he had no credibility. They knew if he spoke up, everyone would dismiss him as insane. Moreover, eradicating his addiction would prove the technology’s efficacy as a war weapon—what greater evidence of radically altered behavior than that? My father traveled to Mexico, Belgium, the Netherlands, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines to escape their experiments. He was pursued by men in suits and black SUVs with American license plates, by taunting voices, by “painful electric shocks” that felt like icebergs erupting in his organs. In the end, he lost the battle: he was forced to quit smoking crack.

  I stare
d at my father in mute shock, not wanting to break the spell that was causing him to trust me. Finally, I said, tentatively: What you’re describing sound like hallucinations. How do you know you weren’t hallucinating because of the crack?

  He rolled his eyes. I’m sure. I’m sure. I’m sure.

  But how are you 100 percent sure? Crack cocaine can induce psychosis, you know. I learned in neuroscience that it milks dopamine neurons for all they’re worth, and can confuse—

  He interrupted: Bee-caaauuse, Jean. Bee-cause look. I would be sitting here like this, and all of a sudden, I would hear the voices. Then I would move my head like this, and I could not hear them no more. Then I would return my head to the initial position, and I could hear them again. So obviously it was some kind of radio-wave—or electromagnetic—technology that those fuckers were using to beam voices into my head. They lost the signal whenever I moved abruptly.

  My first thought was that my father was misinterpreting the diodes and resistors of reality. He was trying to find a coherent story in the chaos, and the most compelling narrative he found was that the CIA had targeted him for illegal experiments. But then I realized it was presumptuous to assume I understood my father’s experiences better than he did. For years, as I sought to recover my father by conjuring him in myself, I had been seeing him through my eyes. For once, I wanted to see him through his.

  * * *

  •

  I started researching Project MKUltra, a covert mind-control project begun by the CIA in 1953. For nearly twenty years, CIA operatives slipped hallucinogenic drugs to unwitting civilians, causing them to hallucinate while operatives pursued them in large, intimidating groups. They targeted social outcasts: drug addicts, prostitutes, immigrants and other minorities who would self-censor or whose complaints would be dismissed as insane. MKUltra sought to determine if this combination of induced hallucinations and stalking could dramatically alter the personalities of subjects.

  Prompted by a New York Times investigation, the U.S. Senate formed the Church Committee, which exposed MKUltra and other illegal operations by the CIA and other intelligence and national security agencies within the government. Those agencies appeared to abandon mind-control research.

  But in 1980, the journal Military Review published an article, “The New Mental Battlefield,” calling for renewed experimentation in “mind-altering techniques” such as “manipulation of human behavior through use of psychological weapons effecting sight, sound, smell, temperature, electromagnetic energy or sensory deprivation.” Had the CIA or some other government agency developed more sophisticated mind-control weapons at the turn of the millennium, perhaps to alter the personalities of religious extremists and combat terrorism? My father told me he was one of thousands of Targeted Individuals tortured by the CIA in the early 2000s. I discovered forums, YouTube testimonials and ebooks from Targeted Individuals. I learned that in the late 1990s, the Air Force started testing the Active Denial System, which remotely transmits millimeter waves to create intolerable burning sensations in enemy targets, according to Wired reporter David Hambling, who obtained documents under federal sunshine laws. “The beam produces what experimenters call the ‘Goodbye effect,’or ‘prompt and highly motivated escape behavior.’ In human tests, most subjects reached their pain threshold within 3 seconds, and none of the subjects could endure more than 5 seconds,” said a 2006 Wired article. The “painful electric shocks” my father described sounded a lot like the Active Denial System. Perhaps my father was telling the truth.

  * * *

  •

  I responded to a Craigslist ad offering a pirated operating system. A young Asian-American with dark circles under his eyes brought it over and installed it. Jay looked like a character from a book, hunched mysteriously in his hoodie. I was curious about him. I asked him to meet me for lunch. At a seafood restaurant he chose, Jay confessed he was a crack addict. This alone was not a problem, he claimed, because crack was an acidic compound, beneficial for the body. But the CIA was torturing him with radio waves. Sometimes, if he wrapped himself up in aluminum foil, he could protect himself from their intervention. But it’s not like he could wear aluminum foil all the time. People would think he was crazy.

  I gawked at Jay. I told him about my father.

  It’s happening to a lot of people, Jay said, shrugging matter-of-factly, and suggested that I read a 2007 Washington Post article called “Mind Games,” which features the testimonies of Targeted Individuals from across the United States.

  How do you know you’re not hallucinating? I asked.

  That’s a fair question. I considered it. But imagine this. I’m sitting around, minding my own business, and bam, I’ll hear voices. Then I’ll move my head like this and, bam, they stop. So I have to conclude they’re pinpointing my location in space or something.

  Jay insisted on paying for our meal. His illegal business netted about $500 daily in cash. He lived in an ocean-view Marina del Rey penthouse, bought gourmet dog chow for his terrier, shopped at Whole Foods and smoked crack. When I got home, I read the Washington Post article he recommended. In the piece, the national security correspondent Sharon Weinberger delves into the history of clandestine mind-control research in the United States. In the 1960s, the Pentagon’s Project Pandora tested the effects of microwaves on human behavior and biology. In the 1990s, the U.S. government started looking into V2K, or voice-to-skull technology. In 2001, Dennis Bushnell, the chief scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center, “tagged microwave attacks against the human brain as part of future warfare.” In 2002, the Air Force Research Laboratory patented a technology that uses microwaves to send voices into people’s heads. Weinberger concluded: “Given the history of America’s clandestine research, it’s reasonable to assume that if the defense establishment could develop mind-control or long-distance ray weapons, it almost certainly would. And, once developed, the possibility that they might be tested on innocent civilians could not be categorically dismissed.”

  * * *

  •

  I listened to Jay’s stories with rapt attention, being perhaps the first sober person to entertain the possibility that he was telling the truth. Like Jay, Papi chose me as his confidante, calling on a regular basis, probably for the same reason: no one else had ever bothered to listen. My father’s logic wasn’t exactly bulletproof, but he clearly did not have Schizophrenia, which my neuroscience books described as a degenerative and debilitating disease. It appeared that Papi no longer hallucinated. Temporary drug-induced psychosis was more likely. But my father hadn’t smoked crack in years and maintained, adamantly and articulately, that the government had subjected him to years of torture.

  * * *

  •

  Mexico continued to exert its gravitational pull on me. Footsteps north of the border, I discovered a forest cluttered with car tires, plastic bottles, Barbies and dog carcasses carried in from Mexico by the Tijuana River. I trekked through the knee-deep sewage with trash bags tied around my legs, investigating cross-border pollution for an environmental-journalism class assignment, which I later sold as an article to an alternative weekly. Papi drove me to a Tijuana slum where much of the garbage originated. We stopped for mangoes, driving with the windows down so that Papi could smoke. I ate the sticky fruit, carving off pieces with a knife as he told me about his battles with the CIA. When we arrived at the canyon, I launched into my interviews, accosting squatters as if I were a paparazzo, causing them to clam up in confusion. Papi sighed, rolling his eyes. You can’t treat people like that, he said. You have to be a person first, then a journalist—watch me. He approached a man at a fruit stand. He pulled his Marlboros out of his back pocket, placed a cigarette between his lips and asked the man if he had a lighter. The man procured a match. My father offered him a smoke. The man declined. After taking a long drag of his cigarette, Papi asked the man how long he had been living in Los Laureles. I tried to memorize my
father’s posture. Without hunching over and in spite of his height, he made himself almost disappear. His limbs were loose and comfortable. He nodded slowly as he listened. He was close to the stranger, but angled slightly, squinting one eye.

  After a minute of small talk, Papi leaned back a little. He casually told the man why we were visiting. Would the man mind answering questions for a news article? I did not know it at the time, but I would go on to use my father’s lesson throughout my career—in the mountains of Mexico’s most dangerous states—convincing smugglers, illegal drug growers and murderers to confess their secrets.

  * * *

  •

  My mother was launching a private practice in San Diego. After two decades of working for men who compensated her less than her colleagues, she decided to work for herself. Her last boss owned a multimillion-dollar home in San Diego and a ranch in Lima, Peru. He vacationed at his leisure. Meanwhile, my mother was struggling to pay off her mortgage and pay for tuition at my university, one of the nation’s most expensive. When her boss had finally offered her a raise so she would stay, she said: You can’t afford me. Dr. Del Valle left with her chin up. Her patients followed. Her income quadrupled. She hung a large black-and-white portrait of her bespectacled father in the waiting room, inscribed with the words This Practice Is Dedicated to Luis Del Valle. She remained single. Jeannette hadn’t fallen in love with a man since Marco Antonio. She felt fulfilled on her own. She had sent both of her daughters to college—Michelle had decided to pursue her artistic ambitions after all, enrolling in San Francisco’s Academy of Art University. Both of us were doing well. My mother had achieved her own version of the American dream.