Jonathan Kellerman - Alex 03 - Over the Edge

by Over the Edge

  But I continued reading anyway. And proved myself wrong.

  I found two promising references. What had seemed at first a perfunctory allusion to psychological poisoning in a Swedish article on chemical warfare led me to the botanical section of the stacks, in search of a monograph by McAllister et al. of Stanford University. But the book was missing. I took the elevator to ground level and went to the front desk on the off chance that it had been checked out and returned but not yet reshelved. The librarian was a husky black quarterback type who spent five minutes computer punching and page flipping before returning, shaking his head.

  'Sorry, sir. That hasn't been checked out. Which means it's probably circulating within the library. Sometimes people take their books to the Xerox machines and leave them there.'

  I thanked him and searched the area around the machines but didn't find it. Trying to spot a single volume in a place as vast as BioMed made the old needle-in-the-haystack game look easy, so I went looking for my second reference, taking the stairs down to the lowest level of the stacks, four storeys below ground.

  I found myself in a musty corner of the basement, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling metal cases jammed with antique volumes - collections deemed marginally relevant to high-tech medicine and sequestered like senile oldsters.

  It was a bibliomorgue, silent and dim, the ceiling a tangle of exposed pipes, the walls mildewed and rust-spotted. One of the pipes had sprung a slow drip, and a pool of water had

  collected at the base-of one of the cases; some of the books were softened and curled by moisture.

  Many of the volumes were foreign: Latin, German, or French. Most were dog-eared. I had to squint to make out faded titles on weathered spines. Finally I found what I was looking for and carried it to a reading cubby.

  It was bound in stiff white canvas that time had darkened to cafe au lait, a seventy-year-old volume, the size of an art book, filled with thick pages of elegant type and vellum inserts festooned with hand-coloured engravings. The Taxonomy and Botany of Phantastica and Euphorica: The Products of a Search Among the Primitives for Narcotic Alkaloids by OsgoodShinners-Vree,M.B.E.,A.B., A.M.,Ph.D.,D.Sc, Professor of Botany and Botanical Chemistry, Oxford University, Research Fellow, The British Museum.

  I turned to the introduction. The writing was pompous and a tad defensive, as Professor Shinners-Vree attempted to justify a decade of jungle-hopping in search of mind-altering herbs.

  'The history of human experimentation with the vegetal environment in order to manipulate the sensoria is as old as Mankind,' he wrote. 'But only in this century has Science developed the techniques to elucidate the chemical properties of the species I have classified phantastica, for the betterment of Mankind. Such benefits lie primarily in the treatment of the dementias and other nervous and mental diseases, but doubtless others will accrue as well.'

  The first chapter was a history of witchcraft in medieval Europe. Shinners-Vree's thesis was that witches had been skilled apothecaries who had used their talents for 'unwholesome commerce' - pharmacologic hit women selling their services to the 'less moral members of the Upper Classes'.

  Hired by the nobility to poison political and personal enemies, witches concocted brews containing:

  Phantasticants of an alkaloid nature including, but not limited to, Black Henbane (Hyoscyamus niger) and the various derivatives of Belladonna (Atropa belladonna)

  These flora have the ability to simulate fits of confusion and madness that persist from days to weeks and are, in larger concentrations, lethal. The highly skilled crone could be depended upon to blend the alkaloids in her brew with such precision that the outcome of imbibing was highly predictable: transient confusion, prolonged dementia, or mortis - all were at her command.

  Thus, the witch of the Middle Ages was no more than a clever chemist, though she encouraged false attributions of demonic power in order to create an aura of omnipotence. The same can be said of the shamans and voodoo priests of Haiti and other Caribbean islands. The mental and physical disturbances brought about by their so-called spells are nothing more than intoxication achieved through the cunning use of alkaloids.

  In Chapter Two Shinners-Vree charted his travels to Latin America and noted that 'an unusually high concentration of mind-altering plants are indigenous to the New World. The gi-i-wa puffball of the Mixtecs, the sacred mushroom known as teonancatl (divine flesh) by the Aztecs, the tree fungus of the Yurimagua of Peru, the hex potion ayahuasca distilled by the Zaparo from the banisteriopsis vine as described by Villavicencio (1858) - all can be said to produce alkaloid exudates similar, chemically, to that obtained from Atropa belladonna. All are Phantasticants, all worthy of further study.'

  'I, however, have chosen to concentrate my attentions upon a specific source of belladonna: the tree datura, specifically the subgenus brugmansia, because of its unique vegetative properties. The remainder of this volume will be dedicated to that end.'

  I flipped through the illustrations - vivid and detailed renderings of shrubs and small trees, all sporting broad leaves, drooping, trumpetlike white or yellow flowers, and large, smooth, podlike fruit - and jumped into Chapter Three.

  As the intrepid Professor S-V told it, 'Brugmansia is the archetypical Phantasticant, both because ingestion of its various parts produces behavioural states that mimic, uncannily, the symptons of acute dementia and other mental diseases and because of the degree of human control that can be exercised over its effects.'

  Human control. I read on, heart pounding:

  Such control is due to the fact that brugmansia shrubs tend to mutate spontaneously and rapidly and that these mutations can be easily propagated by sticking a piece of stem in moist earth. So simple is the process that, in principle, even a dull child could rise to the task.

  I have discovered in the valleys below the High Andes, the prevalence of curiously malformed 'races' of the species, some so misshapen that any resemblance to the parent plant has disappeared. Remarkably, each has unique and predictable Phantasticant properties, caused, no doubt, by minute chemical alterations. Use of these races is not peculiar to one tribe. The Chibchas, the Chocos, the Qechuas, and the Jfvaros are only some of the primitives who have grown expert in its application. (Matters of personal safety prevented contact with several of the others.)

  The Indians use these 'races' quite specifically. One is earmarked for the disciplining of wayward children, who are forced to drink a potion of its seeds ground up in water. Auditory disturbances follow, during which long-dead ancestors appear and admonish the youngsters. Another is believed to reveal the existence of treasures buried in graves; still another, to prepare warriors for battle by presenting to them the macerated faces of those they must kill. Though I have not witnessed this firsthand, I have been told that one of the more savage tribes employs a 'race' of b. aurea to intoxicate the wives and slaves of dead warriors so that they acquiesce without struggle to being buried alive with their masters.

  The 'races' vary in potency, with the shamans of

  each tribe quite knowledgeable as to which are weak and which are strong. What is most remarkable, in fact, is the degree of sophistication with which these so-called primitives are able to manipulate the human mind through the selective application of intoxicating alkaloids.

  I put the book down, feeling chilled and queasy. A little more than a year before I'd stepped into a greenhouse of horrors - horrific clones, the product of one madman's revenge against the fates. Now here I was, once again, confronting Nature at her most perverse. My thoughts were interrupted by footsteps. I saw Jennifer, carrying an armful of books, descend the stairs and head toward the section where I'd found Shinners-Vree's book.

  'Hi,' I said, and she jumped, arms flying out reflexively, books tumbling to the floor. She put her hand over her heart and turned toward me, pale and wide-eyed.

  'Oh.' Deep breath. 'Alex. You scared me.'

  'Sorry,' I said, getting up and walking to her side. 'Are you okay?'

  'Fin
e,' she said hastily.

  I stooped and collected the books.

  'Silly of me to be so jumpy,' she said. 'It's just that it's spooky down here.' Nervous laughter. 'As if we're the first people to come down here in ages.'

  'We probably are,' I said. 'What are you looking for?'

  'An old botany book. I've found something, and it's the original source.'

  'Come with me,' I said, and led her to the cubby. After laying the books down, I lifted the big canvas volume.

  'This it?'

  She took it and thumbed the heavy pages.

  'Yes!'

  'You wouldn't happen to have been drawn to it by a reference in an anthro monograph from Stanford? McAllister, et. al., 1972?'

  She looked at me, astonished, then pulled a thin volume out of the pile on the desk, opened it, and read:

  'The Use of Herbaceous Anticholinergic Alkaloids in the Maintenance of Social Order: The Brugmansia Rituals of the Indians of the Valley of Sibundoy, Southern Colombia. McAllister, Levine, and Palmer. How did you know?'

  'A footnote in a piece on chemical warfare. What about

  you?'

  'A cross reference from an anthro journal on live-burial

  rites. Amazing.'

  'Great minds travelling in the same direction.' We moved from the cubby to a large table. She listened while I summed up the Shinners-Vree book, then lifted the McAllister monograph and said:

  'The Stanford group retraced Shinners-Vree's steps, Alex. Used his book and went into the Sibundoy Valley, searching for hallucinogen cults. McAllister was the prof; the other two were grad students working under him. When they got there, they found things virtually unchanged from the way Shinners-Vree had described them: several small, obscure tribes living in the jungles at the base of the Andes, cloning brugmansia and using it for every aspect of their life - religion; medicine; puberty rites. The Colombian government was planning a highway that threatened to destroy the jungle and eradicate the tribes, so they hustled to collect their data.

  'Levine was into the biochemical variations between the clones. He found that the psychotomimetic ingredient in all of them was some kind of anticholinergic alkaloid - very similar to atropine and scopolamine. But his analysis failed to pinpoint the minute differences between the clones, and I never found any further publications of his, so his research may have come to nothing.

  'Palmer was more culturally oriented. And a lot more productive; the book's her master's thesis. Do you suppose they put her name last because she was a woman?' 'It wouldn't surprise me.'

  'Thank God for feminism. Anyway, her research was a detailed description of how the anticholinergics were used for social control. Her main hypothesis is that for the Indians, drugs took the place of God. In the discussion

  section she speculates that all religions had their origins in psychedelic experiences. Pretty radical stuff. But the main thing, Alex, is that those Indians knew exactly which clone to use to elicit exactly the system they wanted. That's proof it can be done.'

  'Atropine poisoning,' I said. 'A modern-day witch's brew.'

  'Exactly!' she said excitedly. 'Anticholinergics block the action of acetylcholine at the synapse and screw up nervous transmission. You could thoroughly mess someone up by using them. And a psychiatrist wouldn't think to screen for them routinely, would he?'

  'Not unless they were abused on the street. Did you come across anything like that?'

  'No, and I combed the psychopharm indices. In minute dosages, atropine and scopolamine are relaxants, and they're used in over-the-counter medicines - sleep remedies; allergy potions; those little patches you put behind your ear to combat seasickness. But years ago they were prescribed in higher concentrations, and there were major side effect problems. Scopolamine was given to women in labour in order to help them forget the pain. They mixed it with morphine and called it twilight sleep. But it damaged the foetus and caused psychotic attacks in some patients. Atropine was used for Parkinson's disease as an antispasmodic. It reduced the tremors, but patients started to become pseudosenile - forgetful, confused, and paranoid - a real problem until they developed synthetic drugs with milder side effects.'

  Pseudosenility. That recalled something - the shadow of a memory - but it darted through my mind like a minnow and hid behind a rock.

  'And at the turn of the century,' she went on, 'there used to be something called antiasthma cigarettes, belladonna blended with tobacco. Dilated the bronchioles, but too many puffs and it caused major freak-outs: delirium, hallucinations, and profound memory loss. Which is another important point: Anticholinergics destroy the memory. If Jamey were stoned on them, you could pick him up, set

  him down, manipulate him like a puppet. Ask him about it the next day, and he'd have forgotten all about it.'

  She stopped, caught her breath, and opened her notebook.

  'Something else,' she said, flipping pages rapidly. 'I found this little ditty on the symptoms of belladonna poisoning and copied it down.'

  She handed me the book, and I read out loud:

  'Mad as a hatter, dry as a bone, red as a beet, and blind as a stone.'

  'Dry mouth and flushing,' I said. 'Parasympathetic effects.'

  'Yes! And when I read it, I remembered the day Jamey got all agitated in group. And the other times I saw him freaking out. Alex, during each episode, he was highly flushed). Red as a beet! Breathing hard! I'm sure I mentioned it.'

  'You did.' And so had Sarita Flowers. And Dwight Cadmus, describing the night Jamey had torn apart his library. I concentrated and reeled in the exact words: red and puffy and breathing hard.

  Looking at the books she'd collected, I asked:

  'Anything there on drug interactions?'

  She extracted a thick red volume and handed it to me.

  I turned to the section on anti-Parkinsonian drugs and scanned it. The warning to physicians was midway through the paragraph on counterindications and had been placed in a black-bordered rectangle:

  Anticholinergics were potentiated by Thorazine.

  Administration of most of the standard antipsychotic transquillisers could prove harmful, even fatal, to Parkinson's patients and others who'd been given atropine or one of its derivatives, scrambling the nervous system and creating intense deleria and pseudomadness. Pseudosenility.

  That set the minnow free and allowed me to net it: The throwaway I'd picked up that first night in the lobby of the hospital - The Canyon Oaks Quarterly - had featured an article on anticholinergic syndrome in the elderly, the misdiagnosis of senility caused by drug-induced psychosis

  If Jamey had indeed been poisoned with belladonna derivatives, the drug Mainwaring had pumped into him in the name of treatment had plunged him into a man-made hell. The evil doctor scenario was looking better and better.

  I put the book down and tried to look calm.

  'This is it, isn't it?' said Jennifer.

  'It fits,' I said, 'but you'd need brugmansia clones to pull it off. Where would you get hold of something like that?'

  'From someone who'd been to the jungle,' she said, 'before they bulldozed through it. A botanist or explorer.'

  I picked up the Stanford monograph and scanned it. At the end of the text were several pages of photographs. One of them caught my eye.

  It was a stone carving, an idol used in a hallucinogenic burial rite. I looked at it more closely: a squatting toad with the face of a slit-eyed human, a plumed helmet atop the rough-hewn head. Crude yet strangely powerful.

  I'd seen one just like it not too long ago.

  Turning quickly to the front of the monograph, I read the names of the authors: Andrew J. McAllister, Ronald D. Levine, Heather J. Palmer.

  Heather J. Palmer. A name out of a newspaper clipping. A June wedding in Palo Alto. The bride's mother was a stalwart of the DAR. Her late father, the diplomat, had served in Colombia, Brazil, and Panama, where the bride had been born.

  The future Mrs. Dwight Cadmus had done field work after all.
r />   'THE AUNT,' said Milo. 'Jesus. This case is a goddamn cancer. Every time you turn around, it's spread somewhere else.'

  He warmed his hands on the coffee mug, took a bite of bagel, and went back to reading the McAllister monograph.

  The rains had started late in the afternoon, gathering strength with ferocious haste, courtesy of a tropical storm blown inland. The last time it had come down this hard, the canyons had turned to fudge sauce and a healthy chunk of Malibu had been washed into the ocean. Despite its outward frailty - perched flamingo-like on stilts and canti-levering improbably over the hillside - my house had withstood all previous onslaughts. But that didn't stop me from stockpiling sandbags and fantasising about arks as each new sheet of water slapped against the redwood siding. Outside, the glen seemed to be melting, and I was shot through with melancholy and that special California sense of transience.