Psychedelic Marine

by alex seymour

  The next ceremony was dark. The crew had used machetes to clear a circular ceremony space on a small island. The mosquitoes were especially thick—a real infestation. Each insect that flew into my head-space felt like a minute hostile alien invader. Tonight I felt considerable unease. At the beginning of the ceremony, it felt like a black tentacled entity was creeping malignantly through my head, a bad primal energy. Shadowy spectral images loomed. I couldn’t even remember the intention I had set for the ceremony; whatever it had been was obliterated by a pervasive sense of wickedness. Lying still and silent became a herculean task, and I continually jerked and twitched.

  Others were purging, making painful groans and terrible gasps as they fought to regain their breath after exhausting bouts of sickness. Yet no one asked for help. The cacophony of pain and discomfort sounded horrific, each person struggling valiantly to stick with his or her intention. The combined simultaneous retching of both men and women rang out, sounding like the wildest of animals. Take the guttural bass of a tiger’s snarl, melded with the trilling shriek of an elephant, then add in something indescribably alien. The ungodly acoustic accessory was the bucket. Swill the sound of each person’s suffering around in their puke bucket and there you have it—something approximating the most horrible sci-fi soundtrack. Even the icaros sounded mournful. César and the eight Shipibo shamanas were singing, but their songs tonight were high-pitched wails. It felt like the clearing in the jungle had become some kind of a battlefield on which wounded souls cried out pitifully for help. What the hell was happening here? People sounded as if they were not just dying but actually undergoing a metamorphic shift, transforming from one wretched creature into another. The unpredictability of this trip was becoming eye-poppingly surreal.

  Goading, enfeebling thoughts persisted. You are weak. Images of me going down with heat exhaustion and cramps in Afghanistan played over and over. Anxiety encroached like a swarming pestilence. My God, how the hell was this experience helping me, or any of us?

  Andreas sat presiding in his chair, witnessing the collective anguish and doing precisely nothing. Corpulent, bald, and despicably silent, his only movement was to occasionally swab his sweating brow and face with the handkerchief he held in one hand. In the other, he grasped his ornate staff. He could hear and sense all this suffering. Why was he not helping us, or using his own energy to shift ours? Isn’t that what a shaman is supposed to do? I began to convince myself that he had a ruthlessly opaque objective, and we were the unwitting victims. But there was no reaction from him or from any of the ayahuasqueros. What was his dreadful intention? Did he have a plan? Must we face our inner demons? He had continually encouraged us to “go deep,” but deep into what, exactly?

  Perhaps something truly horrible happened here on this island. Badness oozed, and it felt beyond eerie—at times even grotesque. It was with enormous relief when César and Andreas brought the ceremony to a close. Perhaps this was a lesson: there is no avoiding the duality that exists in the world. Irrefutably, good and evil exist; only our choices determine which path we will take. So be wise and choose carefully.

  I was lying next to Eddie, and we began to discuss the ceremony. It had been just as unpleasant for him. As we got up he told me he had spent much of his time immersed in critical thought. In a low voice, almost a whisper so he’d not disturb the others, he began to explain his theory of why certain regimes in certain countries manipulate populations the way they do. Ordinarily, I enjoyed listening to him but not then. I was anxious and wanted nothing more than to return to the ship—away from the insects and the aura of malevolence. Eddie was deep into a diatribe, one based on experience, no doubt, since he advised many a government. As if sensing my mood, he explained, “You see, what manipulative regimes do to control people is . . .” I interrupted him.

  “Sincerely,” I said, looking directly at him so that he would know I was serious, “I already know what manipulative regimes do.”

  He put his hand on my shoulder and gently squeezed. “Sorry. Of course you do. Of course you do.”

  “I had a pretty rough ride tonight, and right now, I’d like to move away from the dark.”

  Josh, the young Californian, came over, his presence instantly lightening the mood. “Oh, man, that was intense!” he said, the whites of his eyes comically wide and bright in the darkness. Clearly, he had just been through his own ordeal. For some reason, he’d chosen to wear only a vest through the entire session, so his arms and shoulders were covered with swatches of red welts, although he didn’t appear to notice. When I pointed them out, he just looked at his ravaged insect bitten skin and shrugged.

  We were ready to leave and flicked on our torches to check that no kit had been left behind. Evidently, Eddie was still in critical-thought mode. As we walked single file along the jungle path back toward the boat, he said, “You know, I’ve been thinking . . . And you know what? This here—right now—what we’ve been experiencing on the Mythic Voyage with Andreas at the helm, you know what this is? It’s a cult. That’s what this is.”

  Alarm swept through me, the proclamation a double gut punch of betrayal. Right there and then, in that three-second moment, Eddie ruined everything. All the doubts about Andreas came flooding back, and any trust I’d had was now burst like a punctured balloon. Memories of the events of this voyage flooded back. He was right! Jesus Christ! How could I have been so naïve? I’ve been fucking played here. Andreas had drawn me into a goddamned cult!

  Emotional pain blasted through me. The shame of being duped, trust violated, upset for having sleepwalked into a situation in which my vulnerability had been manipulated. Andreas was enormously charismatic, in some ways autocratic, and if I was honest, he sometimes seemed a little unhinged.

  Cult. Cult. Cult. The words seared. My brow furrowed into an involuntary frown. You complete dick, I thought. How the fuck could you let yourself become so exposed? Only the weakest get duped like this, and now you’ve blundered out here, trapped in the middle of nowhere with a madman holding all the cards! My mind raced as we all clambered into the canoe and headed back to the riverboat.

  Andreas sat directly opposite me in the canoe, less than three feet away, our knees practically touching. He was staring at me and smiling. Well, that’s just great. It took enormous self-control to stop myself from actually groaning out loud that he was sitting so near while I was feeling so mistrustful. My lips were tight, face frozen in a frown. I tried to act casually, but it was useless. I was utterly on edge. Still hallucinating slightly (just what I didn’t need), I sensed that Andreas knew exactly what I was thinking. He’s reading my mind! I thought over and over. He knows I know. Then he looked right at me, leaned forward conspiratorially, and almost silently mouthed the words that I had to strain to hear. “ Homo luminous, Alex,” he said, smiling, nodding gently and pointing to his heart. “ Homo luminous.”

  I fought the temptation to lip-sync, “You’re fucking insane!” but censored myself, literally forcing my body language to be passive and neutral, although my mind was the exact opposite. Things had just gotten even more sinister. This is an existential truck smash, and now I just want to kill the bastard.

  The crewmen pushed the canoe off the bank, and Andreas made an announcement, bellowing, “Argonauts! Tomorrow morning at nine o’clock precisely everything will become apparent. There will be a big revelation! You will all see!”

  He stared directly at me, his gaze unrelenting. This must be an act of bravado on his part because he sensed my dizzying collapse in faith. His eyes continued to bore into mine as he said histronically, “Yes! A very big revelation. Everything will change at nine o’clock. Just wait!”

  His declaration sounded dangerous now, more like a threat given what I now knew. A kind of psychic lava oozed, destroying all goodwill. The whole world felt as if it were crashing down. I now perceived Andreas as a serious threat—not just an emotional threat but a very real physical one. Thinking back to his introductory speech as we had gathered on the
boat about to start our adventure, he had roared, “Argonauts! You are all now fucked. Because you are all now mine! We are going on a journey hundreds of miles from anywhere, and you must trust me and do what I say.”

  My trust turned to vapor and vanished. All I was sure of now was that I was God-knows-where in the jungle, confined to a riverboat with a bunch of strangers who called themselves argonauts and entirely adrift within myself.

  17

  Never Get Out of the Boat

  B ack on board the boat, my mind blared at DEFCON 1, manifesting as white noise panic turned up to ten. Concern amplified, with the realization that no one but Andreas knew about the safety of the ayahuasca. No one but him really knew how this batch was made or what was in it. The ceremony had been dreadful, so perhaps he was monkeying with the traditional recipe? The safe ingredients were the traditional natural ones—ayahuasca vine, chacruna leaves, and water. The Mythic Voyage website had extolled the benefits of other psychedelic compounds such as mescaline, which comes from peyote or San Pedro cacti.

  The most troubling thought was that he might have added in datura—an extremely powerful psychotropic plant occasionally used by shamans in very tiny quantities. Its lethality is well known, as it can be fatal in high doses. It is notoriously unpredictable and difficult to measure a safe dose. Certainly not a compound to play around with. For centuries it had been used in parts of Europe and India as a poison. It has long been associated with witchcraft—one of its effects is to produce the sensation of flying. Sometimes users can’t distinguish fantasy from reality, and it pushes them over the edge into delirium. It was not uncommon in Amazonian regions for small doses to be used as an additive to ayahuasca. With my distrust heightened for both Andreas and the ayahuasca, I thought about the book by Carlos Castaneda that I had read while holed up in the hotel in Iquitos waiting to join the voyage. Castaneda sold millions of books worldwide, and his is arguably the most recognized name among the pioneers of shamanic exploits. But what many people don’t know is that he had been adversely affected by datura. Later in life, when living as a recluse in a walled compound in Los Angeles, accompanied only by his “witches”—apprentices and former anthropology students from when he taught at UCLA—he reminisced that he had suffered immense physical and psychological damage from datura as part of his shamanic initiation.

  “If you’re not paranoid, you’re not contributing to the team.” War wisdom still percolated up, the kind that doesn’t help you in peacetime.

  At breakfast I kept to myself, necked the food in six big gulps, and left the room. I needed to get a second opinion about the cult. The short-term plan was to find Robert. Then follow up with Eddie. If he insisted on making cult accusations, then he was going to have to justify himself. As I searched for Robert, thoughts spiraled off into dark corridors of paranoia. I wasn’t on this journey to do datura or some other unknown potent substance. I was here to recover physically, mentally—to grow spiritually—not to be poisoned in some lame replication of the Jim Jones’s Jonestown Kool-Aid massacre.

  In November 1978, 913 American cult members, all of them devout followers of the charismatic leader and self-appointed minister Jim Jones, died in a commune called Jonestown in Guyana in the South American jungle. Jones was a fake faith healer from the Midwest, and his devout following of believers were ordered to drink cyanide-laced Kool-Aid in the largest ritual suicide in history. Hundreds of victims were children. This sickening waste of life was as incomprehensible as the bombings of schools by the Taliban. Repellent religious beliefs gone rotten.

  Andreas had us all over a barrel, our vulnerability assured—and he knew it. We were deprived of sleep, on a restricted diet, had no contact with the outside world. Perhaps he had the intention of using psychotropic compounds to control our consciousness—the possibilities for manipulation were endless. I even spun out an Apocalypse Now scenario, with Andreas playing the role of the rogue and demented Colonel Kurtz. We were all doomed. As Martin Sheen had said in the movie, “Never get out of the boat. Absolutely goddamn right.”

  I couldn’t find either Robert or Eddie before the time came to return to the dining room for Andreas’s 9 a.m. revelation, and so with a heavy heart I joined the others. Unfathomably, the “big revelation” turned out to be some kind of absurdist theater, a bizarre piece of performance art. The dining-room table had been moved out of the way to create a large open space where Andreas could perform. He began by ranting for five minutes, stamping the floor with his feet, smacking his forehead violently with the palm of one hand, while shouting a string of words, including “Belief!” and “Trust!” I was mystified. Others looked embarrassed and uncomfortable, not knowing how to react. Surely this was a man in the midst of a mental breakdown. The performance was soon over—time to get out of there. I saw Eddie and seized my chance. This was no time to vacillate, so I marched straight up to him, looked him dead in the eye, and ordered, “You, me, my cabin—now!”

  We sat down on opposite beds facing each other, and I began to rant, “Listen, last night when we left the ceremony, you said that you thought we were immersed in a cult. Where I come from that’s a serious word—I’m sure it means the same where you’re from. So don’t tell me there’s no fuckery afoot here! The last thing I want right now is another leader—I’ve had enough of them. One of the biggest problems we have is our addiction to leadership. I’m freaking out thinking we’ve been manipulated, that we’re vulnerable—exposed—in the hands of a madman who plans to do who knows what with us while we’re playing out here off the reservation, completely out in the middle of fucking nowhere!”

  Eddie replied steadily and evenly. “OK, cool your jets—no need to start flipping tables. Look, you saw the guy’s performance this morning, right? He’s clearly losing his shit. Didn’t that look to you like a man who’s unhinged? The power’s gone to his head! It’s as clear as day that he is undergoing some kind of a mental breakdown.”

  Exactly. A breakdown! Fuck. What to do? I calmed down, searching for logic.

  “It’s not a cult. Surely. There’s no real estate involved. None of us has given up our worldly possessions and renounced our families to go and live with him on a permanent basis. That’s what cults do, right? We’re not that stupid. We came here to have some kind of redemptive cathartic experience, didn’t we? This is supposed to be a journey of discovery. Besides, many people have been here several times, so if he was going to do something dangerous, surely it would have been exposed by now on previous trips? Look at the following he has here—people love him! You and I both have every intention of returning to the normal world and resuming our lives, don’t we?”

  He agreed—a huge relief.

  “OK, I’m sorry. Maybe I was being a little too provocative.”

  Perhaps Eddie had begun to have his own doubts and had been looking for others’ opinions without expressly asking, or perhaps what he said about this being a cult had been just a throwaway line. I didn’t know, but now he was getting my opinion with both barrels.

  “The thing I’m most worried about,” I said, “is what exactly is in the ayahuasca? Based on my experience it feels like ayahuasca to me. But I’m honestly concerned that Andreas may slip in something insidious—something experimentally toxic—as we get further and further away from civilization. He may want us to get more out of it for reasons that are unknown to us. And I don’t want to have a really bad trip and come out of the experience with some long-term psychological damage. I’ve got real-world responsibilities, as do you. I’m not about to piss all that away. I didn’t come here for that.”

  Eddie continued to pacify me, and I stopped flapping and came down from the ceiling. I spent the next hour listening to his head-spinning life story. Finally, I had to escape the cabin and get some fresh air. I also desperately sought out Robert in an effort to evoke some expeditionary solidarity. I found him on his own on the upper deck. “Robert, may I speak to you for a minute, please?”

  “Of course, anytime.
” He motioned toward the empty chair next to him.

  “How’s things?”

  “Oh, you know, just feeling . . .” He paused, rummaging for the right word. “. . . very, very quiet.”

  His voice was barely audible, and he had such an ethereal quality about him, so gentle—and he looked so pale. His introspection bordered on melancholy, and who on Earth could blame him? In that instant I vicariously felt the burden of responsibility that he carried. Not only did he have a severely autistic daughter, but every week he plunged, quite literally, into the hearts of men and women, applying surgical skills in do-or-die situations. Inevitably, some would not survive the surgery, so then he had the added burden of dealing with the deceased’s distraught family, not to mention his own emotional upset. The responsibility must be immense, and I didn’t envy him at all. Of course he was feeling quiet and reflective. He was entitled to. I felt guilty for disturbing him, yet still a little desperate to air my own concerns. I held back from my own agenda and instead reached out.

  “You know, Robert, if you need to talk, I’m here for you. Whenever you want to talk.”

  He didn’t respond. I couldn’t read his expression, but as sincere as my offer had been, what comfort could I really offer him?

  After a short period of silence, it was my turn to be provocative. “You know, I feel that, to some degree, we have both led extreme lives, although obviously in different ways.”

  His eyes darted to meet mine, alert at the use of the word extreme. He began to open up. “I live in a nice house,” he said. “I have a loving wife and three children—all the material wealth and success a man needs. But I can’t help thinking what else I could have done with my life. Since the age of eighteen, my life has been mapped out for me.”