She had lost all vital abilities and was put on full life-support. I watched the sensitive encephalographic instruments being used to look for traces of brain activity. None were there.
Increasing the sensitivity of detection in the search for some residues of brain function, only the heart signals could be seen; it alone remained strong. Breathing was done almost entirely artificially, by a large, impersonal machine that blinked its red light at some clock-run intervals.
There was no comfort I could give by staying in the hospital. I would accept a dinner with a friend here, or a family there, or simply stay at home, but always with a phone number and my exact whereabouts being left with the supporting crew in ICU. There were heartbreaks, "Her kidneys have failed," and there were hopes, "Urine is flowing again," and with each change I would rush to her side and watch the respirator breathe for her. But there was never a hint of brain activity.
I made a decision to place a long distance call to Germany to let Ursula and Dolph know of this tragedy. I knew they were about to leave for a trip to the Sahara. I also knew, from Ursula, that they were hoping she would return from the trip pregnant, thus strengthening a sometimes faltering marriage.
All I could think of was that I had to get hold of them before they left for the desert, to warn them of what was undoubtedly going to happen while they were away, out of touch.
It was only much later that I was able to acknowledge my real motives in making that call.
Soon, I faced a third and most difficult decision. The doctor who was in attendance in ICU had the terrible task of objectively explaining to me all the likelihoods and unlikelihoods, the possibilities and impossibilities. Now, he told me, "Life may be maintained indefinitely, but there is no possible way that a dead brain will live again. What is to be done, and when it is to be done, is in your hands. I can't decide for you. No one else can decide for you."
The simplest way was to let her try to breathe without mechanical help, leaving it to her own body and soul to decide her fate. I asked to be alone with her, and I reached out to her silently, just touching her hand. It was warm, but there was no reflexive response of any kind.
I asked her to tell me what to do. There was no audible reply, but her answer was there in my mind, clear and matter-of-fact, "I've done all I can for you and Theo. It's now time for me to go on to things I really want to do for myself."
I joined the doctor and said the hardest thing I've ever had to say in my life, "Take her off the machine, and let her choose," and he quietly gave the order to have the respirator removed. I stood and watched the gradual simplification and the shrinking of her heart wave on the monitor over her head. At some critical point, an alarm buzzer sounded, and my white-coated companion reached up and turned a switch. The horizontal green wave continued to flatten, until finally it was a straight line. The oxygen-starved heart had ceased to function. Ma femme est morte.
The next two or three days were chaos, and they will remain largely lost to memory. I cannot recall the details of any of it; the conventions of advertising of the death, the disposing of the dead or the mourning for the dead.
I was lost; I was liberated.
I felt, at times, the kind of despair that threatened a permanent darkness inside me, a grey Hell in which nothing moved, or would ever move. At other times, a surge of something came over me which I felt as liberation;
it told me I was free to discover, to form new purpose, to live among the living. I didn't know which was true, which could - or should - be my reality, and for a while it didn't matter what I thought, because I had to experience whatever imposed itself on me and, in between, get up in the morning, put my clothes on and trudge to the end of Borodin Road for the Chronicle, pay the bills, eat some food, and go to sleep. I drank a lot of wine in the evenings.
Maybe I should become a hermit, stay in the lab, pretty much avoid the outside world. It would be an uncomplicated life, and most changes would be of my own making. No surprises.
Set up my own schedules and find regimens that were comfortable. Or maybe not. Should I try to maintain interactions with the outside world, rejoin friends, and risk making new ones? It was a choice, a question, that I never clearly stated to myself, but it was there. I could not foresee that I would find an answer some two weeks later, on the other side of the country.
Six months before, I had fallen deeply in love - for the first time in my life - with Ursula, the wife of Dolph Biehls, of whom I was very fond, and who considered me one of his best friends.
While they had been studying with my friend Terry, for almost a year, I had found myself responding to the gentle, soulful affection that Ursula had shown me from the beginning of our friendship. When I had tried to express my confusion of feelings, perhaps hoping that she would snap me out of it with a sharp, unmistakable rejection, her response was, instead, one of passion and frank expression of desire.
Dolph and Ursula had become not only my friends, but friends of Helen as well, and I marveled at Ursula's ability to continue interacting with both Dolph and Helen as if there had been no change of any kind in her relationship with me. I learned to be casual, when the four of us were together on a beach in Mendocino County, laughing and shouting to each other over the sound of the sea, picking up driftwood and seashells/ and I learned not to seek to meet her eyes, and not to hesitate in putting my arm around her as I would around the other two.
We met, Ursula and I, two or three times in some inn or private place sufficiently far away from the Bay Area to minimize the possibility of being seen by a friend or acquaintance, and I discovered for the first time what it was to feel unashamed, uncensored, joyous sexuality.
Being in love, like any other kind of consciousness alteration, makes small but real changes in the way you view things about you, and in the way you behave around others. Over the years, my friends had come to accept me as what they affectionately called a "difficult genius," and were quite used to my habitually ironic humor, cutting commentary, and somewhat sour view of the world. One of the hardest things I had to do, in my unaccustomed role of secret lover and beloved, was to avoid giving expression - in the company of family or friends - to the feelings of optimism and even outright niceness which overtook me now and then, and which I knew would cause some degree of concern if they were detected.
I knew my wife very well, and I know that she never suspected any of this. Helen and I had lived together for 30 years, and our relationship had become a comfortable, uninspired, non-confrontational acceptance of mutual disappointment, not unlike most of the marriages we saw around us. She had been supportive of everything I had wanted to do, including changes in career which might well have daunted a less courageous wife, and I was grateful for this attitude and for what I felt was her belief in my ability to succeed. But we had not shared excitement.
One day, a number of years earlier, I had been on my way to Stanford to give a lecture on something-or-other and, on the Highway 101 freeway headed south, found myself caught in impossibly slow traffic. By the time I got to Foster City I was way, way too late for the seminar, and I saw a sign on an airplane hanger, "Learn to Fly - First Lesson Free." I turned in on impulse and accepted the lesson.
Within a few weeks I had soloed and done stuff like cross-country navigating and cross-wind landing. But I also learned to say little or nothing to Helen about my progress, or about the extreme pleasure I experienced in the little training plane. She was terribly afraid of the possibility of accidental death or injury. Even going out for a day's sail on our little 20-foot sailboat was a strain on her, and after a while, she would beg off from sailing with Theo and me. I did not try to persuade her, knowing full well the phobias she lived with.
After the birth of Theo, she had told me that she did not want to go through childbirth again; it had been too painful and frightening for her. This was an immense disappointment to me, since I had been raised an only child, and had hoped to spare my son that particular kind of loneliness. We never di
scussed adoption. With time, even the excitement and physical openness of love-making was interpreted by her as a threat, with her fear of physical or emotional vulnerability, and our relationship in this respect had become, sadly, more and more careful and restricted.
So it was that, after her death, I relived the shutting off of Helen's support system with more than the usual agony. I had, after all, been emotionally opened by my relationship with Ursula, and although I knew deeply and surely that the decision I had made in the hospital had been unavoidable, there was a persistent cloud of doubt that further darkened my grief, forcing me to wonder how pure my motives had been. I was always asking myself questions such as, would I conceivably have decided differently, if I had never developed an emotional intimacy with Ursula? I always worked through to the same answer. There could not have been a different decision, given Helen's state. But the dark doubts would still descend on me when I least expected them.
Some time before Helen's death, I had accepted an invitation to participate in a seminar in Birmingham, Alabama, with the understanding that it was to be followed, a couple of days later, by a lecture to the biochemistry students at the University at Memphis, in Tennessee.
There was no question but that I could renege on my agreement, having an excuse that would be sympathetically accepted, but I decided not to do so. The thought of traveling to a place I had never seen before, and interacting with people who had no previous connection to either Helen or me, gave a distinct lift to my spirits, and presented itself as a possible first step on the road to healing.
It was thus that I found myself, only a couple of weeks after the funeral, laying out my travel clothes and dusting off some of the potentially impressive psychedelic compounds which I had toyed with over the past couple of years/ but had not moved up into any reasonably high priority. I planned, for myself a program of serious assaying which, in retrospect, might be seen as being somewhat too demanding, considering my emotional fragility. My rationalization of all of this was that, by insuring that my attention would be focused on the drug assays, I would have less time for memories and grief.
I began my tasting program on the following Saturday with a new level of 4-thiomescaline, 40
milligrams, and found it impressively rewarding. The next Wednesday, I was on the red-eye flight to Atlanta, and tried a new level of 2C-B, 16 milligrams, sitting in first class with a totally unresponsive crowd of fellow travelers of the airplane sort, rather than of the psychedelic sort.
I learned the hard way that one should never try to evaluate a new level of a drug in the environmentally dull atmosphere of a midnight flight. It was a waste of time and a waste of energy. I squirmed in my seat for hours, feeling utterly stupid, since all I could do was sip orange juice and wish I could find some way to get to sleep.
Two nights later, having explored the city of Birmingham by bus and by foot, I tried to recapture my sense of equilibrium. It kept eluding me. I took 140 milligrams of MDMA, and the only result was that I found myself pacing my motel room, unable to sleep for the rest of the night. I was certainly giving maximum expression to the stimulant component of any drug I tried.
Saturday was my day to meet my hosts. Professor Pelletier and his wife, at the airport in Memphis. Despite a driving rainstorm and broad electrical power failure, they were there to greet me. Off we went to their home, and I settled in for the weekend. I was looking forward to the next day, Sunday, when my assay program dictated the trying of a new level of 2C-E, 20 milligrams. I had no lecture obligations until Monday, so why not? I was staying busy.
Charles Pelletier's home was a comfortable place, large enough to be called a mansion, with a sprawling garden and an atmosphere of relaxed ease. After a good, quiet night in their guest room, I decided to take a walk into the center of Memphis, to see the waterfront and to get the feel of the city. I started off just before noon, and as soon as I was out of sight of the house, I took out of a pocket my assignment for the day, the 20 milligrams of 2C-E, opened the vial and swallowed its contents.
I continued into the center of the city and, as I looked across the Mississippi river, I felt the first tinglings of effect. It seemed very important that I was standing at the interface between two states. I was here, and Arkansas was over there, and between us, surprisingly far below me, flowed the river. Tom Sawyer probably drifted down thataway, and just a few miles to my left he would have found himself in the State of Mississippi.
A strange sense of decadence came over me. I realized that I was alerting with the 2C-E, and feeling a hint of discomfort. I turned and walked the mile back to the house, to my nest in the pretty guest room.
When I reached the house, it was the one-hour point after ingestion of the drug, and I was fully aware that the next hour would take me into new territory. Lunch was being served, and my hostess, Marlene, called me into the dining room to join the family in eating. I managed to carry it off reasonably well, despite the growing awareness of visual changes, which were rapidly becoming visual distortions, some of them disturbing, most of them hilariously funny. I knew that I had to get out of there and be by myself; there was no way of guessing where all this would lead. I excused myself with some muttered words about needing to be alone for a while and rest. Everyone knew me to be in mourning, so there were no protests, only understanding murmurs. I began the third hour of the experiment safely in my room.
The hours that followed proved to be a time of concepts, revelations, compelling fantasy and authentic memory that was very frightening and yet, in retrospect, of extraordinary value.
What I faced, over those three or four hours, were some impressive angels and demons, and I asked questions and experienced insights that went to the roots of my psyche.
My notes begin with the number of hours since ingestion of the little vial's contents. And my retrospectives follow each of these directly.
[2:45] "Lunch over. Charles'backside! Child's face!"
As I retreated from the company of lunch, I looked about me and saw the backside of Charles, who was at that moment standing at the sideboard, and I was amazed at the fact that a man who was not only the head of the Department of Psychopharmacology, but also a deacon in his local church, could have such a rear end! It appeared to be monstrous. It dominated the room.
The word steatopygia reverberated in my mind. And the face of one of his daughters surprised me with its revelation of boredom and chronic resentment underneath what I had previously seen as an expression of good-humored pleasantness.
[3:15] "Completely out of control. About equal to 300 mikes of LSD. I have cracked up. I must control. Am scared shitless. I have made a fool of myself. Am I catalytically fixed? I am counting the minutes - entertainment long gone. I must not try to go to sleep, as I don't dare lose the visual connection to sanity. I see myself dying." When I lay on my bed, I saw myself as an old, old man, many years in the future. I was appalled to see my forearm as a withered, dry-skinned, almost-bone which could only be that of someone dying. I looked down at the rest of me, and I was thin, emaciated, brittle, shallow. I knew I was alone in this time of my life, this time of my death, because a long time ago, back when my wife had died, I had chosen to be alone. Who was I? I was seeing myself, but why was I seeing me here, now, at this dying stage of life? Was I sharing the experience of dying with Helen; was it some kind of final obligation I had, to share death with her this way?
[3:45] "A nihilist illusion, consummated by a nihilist organism - a nadir of nothingness. If I can conceive of such nonsense, I must be repairing. I hope. I am extremely scared. God help. This is the insanity game."
Within those few minutes, I became a nihilist. (The seeds from which this evolved must have been there for quite a while.) But I thought, if I can recognize this insanity, if I can identify my nothingness, I must be doing it with something that exists. I called to Ursula for help, then realized with a shock that I had a bond to her which could influence my world. Had it influenced those fateful last moments with
my dying Helen? Was I my own agent after all?
Was there even a "me" there? I was fully aware of the layer upon layer of these thoughts, and strangely enough, these layers gave body and, in some sense, substance to a me that was feeling essentially non-existent.
[3:50] "Okay again? Not okay again. Was the Vermeer scene out of the window real? Still life?
What an intellectually shitty way to commit suicide. Why not with a gun like a man?"
I had gotten up and looked at the window, which was the same as looking out of the window. I was looking at a painting of a window, through which there could be seen a girl outside who was holding a watering can full of water, intent on watering some flowers in the garden. But as I looked, I saw that it really was a window and the painting of the watering-can girl was on the outside. How could that be? And when I looked back at the outside painting a moment later, it was still the same artist's style but the girl had been relocated. It was my hostess Marlene with a sprinkling can, watering flowers in the garden below. But she was frozen, from scene to scene, each different, each without life or motion. I could see the brush strokes, and the entire image was done on a flat canvas with cool and friendly colors. A 17th century lady (whose name was Marlene) with a tight-fitting head-scarf was standing over a geranium with a watering pot, obviously watering it, being watched through the window by me, and she and the window were both part of the painting. If things were moving, it was in somebody else's time.
The entire mood was one of death, or dying. I felt that I was avoiding the final act by letting time and nature do everything for me; making the world about me inanimate and letting myself deteriorate. By living, I was somehow escaping the inevitable.
[4:00] "Possibility of repair? No, I have lost it again." [4:20] "More okay than out, but when out, really out. The window is a sense game. Fine. This is stark insanity. My father, clear, immediate, right there, speaking to me in Russian, reading to me, with his patient voice. I am very little, sitting on his knee. I was not hostile, just arrogant."
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