Pihkal

by Alexander Shulgin

  "It's fading," he complained, "I was in the most amazing place, and lots of things were going on, but I'm losing it now. I don't want to forget it. Have to tell you as much as I can remember, before it all goes."

  We clustered around him, in chairs and on the floor, while he spoke, slowly, trying to hold on to the images, "I remember the sea. I was on a long, curving beach and the sky was deep blue. Beautiful. At one point, I remember seeing what looked like the bands of a spectrum, and for a while I thought they were some kind of expression of my energy levels/ but now I think maybe the horizontal lines were just my mind's way of trying to make something familiar and recognizable out of whatever was going on.

  "Eventually, I could see real images, but they were tremendously distorted, like Cubism paintings by Picasso, with intense and very strange colorations. There were colors I've never seen before, but it's getting hard to remember them, now. Why am I losing them so fast?"

  We urged him to tell us as much as he could before the amnesia curtain came completely down, and he said, "I know I wasn't afraid at any time. Everything was benign. As I began coming down, I realized I'd had an extraordinary experience, but I wasn't prepared for it to start slipping away like this!"

  Shura asked, "Would you be willing to take this material again?"

  George didn't hesitate. "Yes, I'd certainly take it again, but at a way smaller dose, next time."

  We all joined in the laughter.

  "I asked that question when I did," said Shura, "Because it was important to get your spontaneous reaction to the idea of a repeat, while you were still in the after-glow, so to speak."

  "Sure," beamed George, "That was one singular, unique, fantastic experience, and I can assure you I'm going to get homesick for that beach. It was the loveliest, most satisfying place I've ever been in my life, though I can't even begin to tell you why."

  Later we all grouped around the table again, to sing Happy Birthday and watch the Birthday Boy open cards and small nonsensical gifts. Then Shura went around the circle and asked for summaries.

  Theo said, "It's a no-win, for me, I regret to say. The food helped my stomach, but even now, I'm not really comfortable. If there had been something spectacular going on mentally to compensate for the physical, it would have been a different story, but there wasn't."

  I repeated what I'd said earlier about the cloak made of lead, and said that I, too, regretted having to conclude it was not my cup of tea. I added that I would probably pass on any future tries of the material, although I still loved its name.

  Emma said, "I'm feeling almost guilty, at this point, for having had such a good time, but I did!

  I liked it!"

  We said things like. That's okay, and Don't apologize, David adding, "After all, somebody had to enjoy the poor thing!"

  Emma added, "I do agree with one thing Theo and Alice said, though. There wasn't much content, when you get down to it. Very relaxing and I felt terrifically good-humored, but there wasn't much else going on inside. It hasn't the richness of my favorite ones." Ruth, her chair pulled as close to her husband's as it could go, said, "There's one very positive thing I've got to say about my experience. All the time George was upstairs, going through his troubles - I gather he didn't think he was in trouble, but the rest of us sure did! - anyway, all that time, I wasn't really frightened. I knew I should be, but I just had a strong feeling, as I told Alice, that everything was going to turn out all right. A little voice told me not to worry, so I just kept busy and stopped worrying, believe it or not!"

  Shura said, softly, reaching over to grasp her hand, "I was prepared for you to be pretty angry with me, kiddo. I'm very relieved to hear you didn't feel that way, what with your man suddenly wandering around in outer space, and one of my drugs the apparent cause. It would have been understandable, at least for a while there, if you'd damned me and all my works to bloody perdition!"

  He was smiling, but his eyes were moist.

  Ruth shrugged, "Well, I probably have to give credit to the 5-TOM for keeping me from panicking, because I couldn't help having the thought that maybe he wouldn't ever come out of it, you know - "

  "That did cross my mind, too, at one point," admitted Ben, and Shura grimaced in agreement.

  She went on, " - and that's when I got the message it was really okay. As for the rest of my experience, aside from the worry over George -

  David interrupted, grinning, with the old joke, "Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?"

  Ruth chuckled, "Yes, right. Well, actually, the rest of the play wasn't bad, although I didn't really keep track of things after George went upstairs. I think the first hour I was quite restless; it felt sort of bumpy - that's the only way I can describe it - but nothing else of great interest to report."

  Shura was making notes. "Would you take it again?"

  Ruth said, "Nope."

  The summaries continued. Ben said, "I had no difficulty at all, body or mind. It was thoroughly enjoyable, in fact, with a great deal of fancy footwork in the pun area with you, before George went and captured our undivided attention!"

  George laughed with the rest of us.

  Leah said she'd had a nice experience, but that she couldn't see any reason to take 5-TOM

  again. She explained, "There are a lot of other materials which give more than just relaxation and a general feeling of pleasantness. This one doesn't appear to have much depth or richness, as Emma said. Not enough to justify spending the time to explore it further, especially considering the cloud there is over it, now."

  John was thoughtful, choosing his words carefully, "I had a restless feeling, too, during the early part, and I'll go along with the others, when they say it lacks depth. I couldn't work with it, there was no insightful thinking, and my general impression was that it's a stoning material, and not much else. And no," he added, anticipating Shura's question, "I don't think I'd go out of my way to take it a second time."

  David reported, "Not too good for me. My body was okay, but I guess I'll always associate 5-TOM with getting into a loop of sad and very lonely thoughts that I couldn't get away from.

  Maybe it wouldn't do the same thing to me another time, but I'm not eager to find out, to tell you the truth."

  Finally, George spoke up, "I had the best experience of all, it seems! I don't know where I went, but I do know it was truly fantastic! I wouldn't mind taking it again, maybe at something like 5 milligrams, just to see what happens."

  There was a medley of amused responses around the table, Ruth's being the last, clearest and most appreciated, "You and I are going to have a little heart-to-heart talk, sweetheart!"

  When we'd settled down again, Shura folded the paper on which he'd been making notes. He leaned back in his chair and said, "Well, it is something of a mixed bag. Some of us seemed to be in a pretty much okay place, but several had a rough time of it."

  He looked over at George, "And I suspect that you have a strange and wonderfully idiosyncratic sensitivity to 5-TOM which there was no way of predicting."

  "Well, I have been pretty sensitive to other sulfur things," George observed.

  "Yes, a little. But nothing like this. As I recall, you always tended to cocoon with the Alephs, but today was more than the usual cocooning;

  this time, you went full pupa!"

  John went into one of his helpless fits of laughter, holding his sides, and the rest of us, watching him, slowly dissolved into giggles and croaks. John's fits were always catching.

  When calm was restored, George asked, "Do you think there's something about sulfur that my body doesn't like?"

  "I don't know," responded Shura, "But I doubt it, somehow. Your responses to the other 2C-T

  compounds have generally been okay, remember - in fact, you've had a great time with them, on the whole - and they all have a sulfur somewhere on the ring."

  "So it's probably just this one particular compound, then, that I'm super-sensitive to? Just the 5-TOM?"

 
Shura nodded, "That's what I suspect. But we could test it out, just to be certain."

  He turned to David, "How about putting together a sulfur thing that's inactive - totally inactive - and give it to George to see if, by any chance, he just might metabolize sulfur differently in some way, compared with the rest of us?"

  David leaned forward eagerly, "Hey, good idea! Why don't we give it to the whole group and collect urines all round and do a real study! If George turns up with something really unusual, it might just be publishable in some journal!"

  Theo laughed, "You could title it, "The George Effect; A Hitherto Unknown Response to Sulfur in the Five Position."'

  "Or maybe, A Close Call with a Sulfur Atom," Shura added. The puns had started again.

  I thought of the laughter, how heartfelt it was, and how deep the relief underlying it.

  Later, hugging Ruth and George goodbye, Shura said, "Well, I guess this has been one more reminder of our favorite maxim: 'There is no casual experiment."'

  Ruth agreed, "I suppose it's good to keep in mind that if you're going to do this kind of research, you have to expect to be surprised, every once in a while!"

  5-TOM was never taken again.

  CHAPTER 37. FUGUE

  (Shura's voice)

  The word "fugue" has always had a most pleasant sound for me. It is a French word meaning flight/ or escapade. Some adventurous event that lasts only a short while. "On fait une fugue,"

  is an idiom that means he ran away from home, but only for a few days.

  Musically, a fugue is the spinning of a phrase against itself. It is the flow of a line of music followed, after a few moments' delay, with the same line of music played again, totally locked in pace. The line may be identical, it may be harmonically offset, it may be inverted, but it is clearly recognizable. Yet/ the two substantially identical lines, with just a displacement in time, can make a two-voice melody which paints a picture that is quite new and different from the original. There is the feeling of the original theme chasing itself, and you are never quite sure how it could ever end, if it cannot catch up with itself. How can two children chasing one another ever have a winner? Bach was the master of this idiom.

  In the world of psychology, a fugue is - as I understand it - a state of mind involving amnesia, and a loss of connection with oneself for a period of time. It is brought about by extreme stress. It is not organic, not a seizure; it is purely psychological.

  Three times, I have experienced something I call a fugue, although I probably shouldn't call it that, because I can recall what happened, I can describe every detail, and the only thing I can't do is make any sense out of it. But I love the word, so that's the word I'm going to use.

  It's my story, after all.

  My three experiences were essentially the same; they differed only in duration. There was a separation of about ten years between each of them. Let me try to reconstruct the first, and longest lived, of these events. It happened one day somewhere in the mid-1970's. I got up, put on my clothes, started down the road to get the morning paper, and became aware that everything about me had been rotated ninety degrees. I was in completely familiar surroundings, where I knew that north was straight ahead of me, east to the right, and so on.

  But it was as if I had been lifted up, given a quarter turn, and put back down, so that when I again faced the direction that I knew was north, it seemed to be west. Everything was somehow wrong, all around the compass.

  Probably everyone has had some encounter with this sort of location-vertigo. Maybe you were once at a convention being held in a giant box-like hotel in a strange city. You park outside, and go in by the closest of the four entries on the four bordering streets. Inside, there are halls that make right and left turns, meeting rooms off these hallways, and alternate exits from the rooms to other halls.

  After a full day, with no attention having been paid to the tally of right and left turns, something somewhere slips a cog and, upon exiting by what you thought was your original door, you find yourself on an unfamiliar street. Which way is the car? You know you're in the wrong place, but you can't be sure why or how it's wrong, and there's no way to intellectually straighten it out. However, in this case, you have only to walk around the hotel to put your surroundings in proper perspective, and free yourself from confusion.

  On the other hand, in my fugue state, even though the landscape in all directions was completely familiar, the sense of rotation persisted. There seemed no way of making myself right, again. I was going to have to live with it/ and there was no telling for how long.

  Back in the house, I discovered another strangeness, a disquieting uncertainty involving the meaning of certain words. It was at this point that I began making the notes which I completed the next day.

  "Any words that have concrete meanings are fine and completely friendly. That thing outside the window is a tree. The soft whatsis underfoot is a rug. That is a photograph, over there on the bookcase. I am at peace with these representational names, the tree, the rug, the photo, the bookcase. People's names are OK too, I guess because they represent things. That photo there is of Manuel. Because Manuel is a concrete thing, I recognize his face. So, the representation can lean a little bit towards the symbolic, and proportionally away from the actual tangible reality. The photograph of a person is equivalent to the person.

  "But words which are meaningful only in their immediate context come at me as total strangers. The photograph of the face of Manuel makes sense, but reading the time from the face of the clock does not. There is no face, there. Manuel is a face, but there is no such thing on the clock. The time displayed on the front of the clock is a little too abstract. The meaning is not apparent from looking at the individual numbers and letters, or trying to analyze these components."

  I remember a psychological test for certain forms of mental disturbance that asks the patient to explain the meanings of idiomatic phrases. The rolling stone gathers no moss. A stitch in time saves nine. I am sure that, during my fugue, I would have been able to deal only with the literal meanings of each of these expressions, and so have failed the test hands down. I would even have had trouble with the phrase, "hands down." It would have been fascinating to have challenged myself with a familiar foreign language.

  Early in the fugue experience, I didn't think of using the radio as a source of spoken language, to test my comprehension. I rather suspect that the sound of speech would have been all right, but that, if I'd had to read a written text corresponding to what I was hearing, I would have found it quite a bit more troublesome.

  The best way of making clear the nature of this fugue state is in the use of numbers. Each of the three times it happened to me, I found that the careful, structured use of numbers was an excellent way of defining and describing the actual experience.

  "Numbers are straightforward. I can add them, manipulate them, count backwards by sevens from a hundred, or by 27's from 275, and I still can mentally extract square roots. But - as with words - when numbers are presented in a form that requires context, everything falls apart. Telephone numbers have no logical connection with people. I can come up with all sorts of telephone numbers from memory, but the dialing of them has no meaning. Intellectually, I know that if I push the buttons, someone's voice will materialize in the ear piece. But I can't really understand what the pushing of a series of phone buttons has to do with talking to anybody!

  "A street address is just as nonsensical. Let's say, I live at 3038 Birch Terrace. Birch, okay; terrace, nearly okay, but the 3038 thing makes no sense, in that context.

  "The numbers on the digital clock are equally worthless. They can give me absolutely no insight as to what time it is at the moment. Sure, it is 10:40, but where and what is a 10:40?

  "The date is equally mysterious. It is June 19, 1978. What is a 1978? It adds up to the sum 24, and the reduced integer is 6, but I can't see any apparent relevance to anything else, including the birth of Christ.

  "I remember having
looked at the morning Chronicle a half dozen times to make some connection between the printed date and the assignment page in my appointment book. The paper says today is June the 16th. It is a Monday, and my little book says that, at 2:30, I have to be in Federal Court as an expert witness for the defense in a criminal case. I must be in a courtroom on the 17th floor.

  "The digital clock on my desk has a 10:40 on it. How does that come together with a 2:30?

  And what is the meaning of 17th floor?

  "The day of the week is certain from the morning paper, and from the calendar on the wall, but it has no absolute position in the flow of time as I am experiencing it. Can I find boundaries to contain the phenomenon, then shrink these limits sufficiently to pin-point the Now, with complete certainty?

  "Perhaps I am maybe just the slightest bit light-headed. I can hear it now - 'He clearly was suffering one of the most notorious evils associated with consciousness-expanding drugs, a flashback/which this decidedly is not."

  Are there such things as flashbacks? Yes, but they are pretty rare, and there is always some uncertainty involved in connecting them to the action of a drug. There have been proposed both chemical and psychological mechanisms. The chemical argument - the unexpected re-activation of a lingering molecule - is without merit. If 100 micrograms of LSD was effective today, and if the blood level dropped with a half-life of a couple of hours, then in a few days there will be an undetectable amount of the drug present in the body. If such a vanishingly small quantity of any drug were to be active, it would mean that that drug would have an overwhelmingly high potency. No such compound is known to exist.

  So it is not a physical thing. Can it be psychological? Absolutely. But I would give good odds that any flashback will turn out to be related in some measure to a traumatic experience. Say, for instance, you had a bad driving accident, several months ago, in which you swerved your car to avoid hitting a pedestrian in a red shirt who had suddenly appeared in front of you, and you crashed into a large beer truck. You broke your right leg and had over $2/000 worth of medical bills which your insurance never covered. I'll wager that the appearance of a red shirt in the pedestrian crosswalk, in front of your car - months later - might well produce a sharp pain in your leg. Your right leg, specifically. That is the mechanism of a flashback, whether drug-related or not. It's a conditioned response.