Pihkal

by Alexander Shulgin

  I nodded.

  There must be something else I should be asking. What do I have to know before Sunday?

  "Is there anything I should do ahead of time, Sam? I mean, do I have to prepare in some way?

  Am I supposed to have an empty stomach?"

  Sam was rising with his tray, "Ah - glad you reminded me. Yes. Empty stomach on Sunday morning. You can drink all the fluids you want, but no food. You'll probably vomit anyway.

  People usually do."

  He turned to go, then looked back at me, "And don't put cream in your coffee. Nothing with oil or fat. Retards absorption. Oh, yes. Better have some orange juice in your fridge. See you Sunday morning."

  I watched him moving between tables and around chairs on his way to the tray disposal, and I thought a jumble of things, a tangle of images, apprehensions and excitements. I wondered for a moment whether I might die during the experience, and was amused to note that the thought didn't scare me at all.

  I was up and dressed in blue jeans and a light blue sweater by 8:00 AM on Sunday, an hour when I would normally have been deeply asleep, making up for all the weekday risings at 6:30. I sipped coffee with sugar and no cream and waited at my living room window for Sam. I had an absolute certainty that what would happen this day was going to change my life in ways I couldn't begin to guess at. And I knew that I was ready. It's time, I thought. It's time.

  At five minutes past 9:00 he arrived, carrying a large paper bag under one arm. My stomach was growling occasionally with emptiness and anxiety, and I sat down on the couch, arms folded tightly across my chest, smiling weakly, "How do we do this, now?"

  "Do you have some orange juice?"

  "Sure. Wait a minute." I got the bottle of juice and two tall drinking glasses, carried them to the coffee table and sat down again. Sam was still standing, and while I watched, he opened the paper bag and pulled out a large jar half filled with a thick brownish-black liquid with lumps, and placed it carefully on the table. I muttered, "Good grief, that looks awful. Is it the peyote?"

  "Yup, it's mashed peyote buttons. We'll mix it with the orange juice; that may help the taste a bit."

  "Does it taste as horrendous as it looks?"

  "Oh, much worse," said Sam, cheerfully, sitting down beside me, "It's probably the vilest taste in the whole world!"

  I remembered what he'd said in the cafeteria, about vomiting. I felt a sudden shortness of breath, as I stared at the jar.

  "Sam, what happens if I do vomit -1 mean, will that ruin the whole thing?"

  "No," replied Sam, "For some reason, vomiting doesn't seem to have any effect on the experience, as long as you've managed to keep it down for a little while before it comes up again."

  My God, this is going to be a lot harder than I realized.

  I squinted at the witch's ooze. "How many buttons do you have?"

  "I mashed 14 large buttons, so we'll each have seven, if I can measure it out very exactly, which is what I'm going to do right now."

  I watched, rocking slightly, while Sam sat beside me and dribbled a little of the thick, dark stuff into first one glass, then the other, and continued the careful, slow process until each was a third full. Then he opened the bottle I'd brought from the kitchen and poured out enough juice to fill the glasses to within an inch of their tops. That done, he leaned back on the couch and expelled a long breath.

  I muttered, "Now, we drink, yes?"

  "Now we drink."

  He stood up. I stood, too, and touched the rim of my glass to his.

  He smiled and looked directly into my eyes, which was unusual for Sam; he was, in some ways, quite shy.

  "May the Gods bless us," he said. I was both surprised and touched. It was not a typical Sam thing to say.

  I took a small amount of the mixture into my mouth and immediately spat it back into the glass. "My God/ Sam! That's AWFUL!"

  "Yeah, it is, isn't it," he agreed, proudly. I watched him. He kept taking swallows, his face scrunched up, eyes closed, while I looked at the dreadful mixture in my hand and thought, how will I ever get this down? The taste was not just bitter; the moment it hit the tongue, the gorge rose in response. It was as if the body had decided instantly that this was something not intended for human consumption and was ready to resist its passage down the throat any and every way it could.

  I carried my glass through the archway that divided the living room from the bedroom and sat down on the side of my bed, from where I had a direct view of the toilet in the bathroom. I'll be able to make a quick dash to there from here, I thought, then took one swallow, and began concentrating on not thinking about what I was doing.

  Half an hour later, I was still sitting on the bed, my glass drained, and Sam was pacing the floor of the living room, drinking the last of his liquid, neither of us having spoken a word to each other since the ordeal began. I didn't want to move, and I didn't want to talk, either. I was going to just sit and be very quiet so that my tummy would continue to occupy its normal place and not go anywhere else.

  Suddenly, Sam was coming through the archway, running across the wooden floor. He disappeared into the bathroom. I heard the sounds of vomiting, and stuck fingers into my ears immediately.

  Don't let the idea in. Think about the light coming through the windows in the other room; think about lying down on this bed and not moving ever again; think about how nice and peaceful it is in here, how quiet.

  When I finally unplugged my ears, the only thing to be heard from the bathroom was the sound of running water. I eased myself very gradually onto the bed, and lay down.

  No fast movements. Everything slow-motion.

  The bathroom door opened. Sam emerged and stood there, looking faintly embarrassed. I grinned at him, "You okay?"

  "Yeah. Always happens to me. How 'bout you?"

  "So far, so good. I'm just going to stay very still for a while."

  He climbed onto the bed and stretched out beside me, "Good idea. Me, too."

  It was very quiet in the room, and there was no tension, no feeling of awkwardness about lying on the bed with Sam next to me. I folded my arms under my head and gazed up at the ceiling for a while, waiting for something to happen, but all I could be sure of was that I was finally comfortable, my stomach was staying in place, and it was so wonderful not to be drinking that terrible stuff any more.

  I wondered briefly whether I would ever be able to look at orange juice again without feeling sick, and decided I would, because I liked orange juice. Then I thought about women and vomiting and about whether men had a harder time with nausea because they didn't have to deal with it as often as women did; some women had upset stomachs with their periods, and most women had some morning sickness when they got pregnant. They learned how to move slowly and how to keep the stomach quiet with water and dry crackers and patterns of thought that were smooth and even. Men probably fought nausea like an enemy, I thought, squeezing themselves tight against it, which is no way to calm a queasy stomach.

  I turned my head to say something about this to Sam, but stopped with my mouth half open.

  His eyes were closed, and the soft light coming through the archway from the living room outlined his face. His mouth was that of a serious child, a bit vulnerable and wistful except in the corners, where a firmness was quite apparent.

  Firmness. What's the difference between firmness and stubbornness? Of course! When you like the person and agree with him, it's firmness; when you're in opposition to him, he's stubborn.

  There was a soft radiance about that grown-up child-face. I had never before spent time searching Sam's face; one didn't, after all, stare curiously at someone who was neither relative nor lover - not in our culture, anyway - and it was remarkable how very much of him was revealed in that mouth, once you took the time to look.

  It seemed perfectly natural to be examining him closely.

  I broke the silence with something else I was seeing, "I just realized, Sam; you really are the outsider, aren't you? And that's
the way you want it; you like being the strange one." I was childishly pleased with myself, for perceiving so much, so well.

  Sam's eyes opened; they were brown, and they looked straight at mine, without any shyness at all.

  He asked, "What are you seeing?"

  "I'm seeing a fascinating combination of things that show especially in your mouth, and it just came to me - I don't know why - that you've chosen to stay outside the usual, you know, medical fraternity. The doctor club. It isn't so much that they don't understand you, make friends with you; you don't want to be accepted, because you don't like them. And that means I don't have to worry for you, after all, which is something I tend to do."

  I wondered if what I'd said made any sense to him.

  He smiled slightly and looked away. After a while, he said, "Take a look around you. See anything interesting?"

  I sat up and gazed around. The first thing that occurred to me was that I had moved without thinking about my tummy. I looked down at my body and felt it out; everything seemed all right. No nausea, no more feeling that I'd better stay still. I was free to pay attention to other things.

  The surface of the bedroom walls moved with a faint shimmer of light. If I focused deliberately on any single point, the movement in that place stopped, but the rippling continued on the periphery.

  There was another difference in the way everything looked, but for a few moments I couldn't pin down exactly what the change was. The bed was still a bed, the lamp was the same old lamp, sitting on the small bedside table which was still a table.

  Through the archway, I could see the windows of my living room illuminated by the soft spring light. The furniture looked familiar and friendly. Nothing had turned into anything else. No creatures danced on the floor. There was a feeling inside me that was new, though. I would have to look closer at that. And time was different. It didn't seem to be passing, at least for the moment.

  I looked down at Sam, "Everything looks the way it's supposed to. I mean, the chairs haven't become mythical beasts or anything, but something's very different about all of it. The way it feels is very personal, sort of nice and intimate, as if my two little rooms like me -1 know that's not the most scientific observation you've ever heard, but - well, there's a kind of - a friendly feeling to all of it."

  "I didn't ask for a scientific observation," observed Sam mildly.

  "And time -," I added, "Time isn't moving in the usual way."

  I sat for a while just gazing, then said, "The light in the room out there is simply beautiful.

  There are little dust motes floating in the air and I think they're singing songs."

  Sam said nothing, but the silence in the room was perfectly comfortable. I thought about how comfortable the silence was, and how I wouldn't mind if it went on forever, and that I wouldn't mind if it were broken, either. There simply was no tension anywhere, no anxiety. Just the radiance and utter peacefulness.

  I said, "My insides are smiling. And I have the impression that all is well with the world. At least, all's well right here, in this corner of it."

  "Good," said Sam briskly, swinging his feet to the floor, " We'll be taking a look at the rest of it pretty soon."

  "Oh, Lord. You mean, outside? Do you think it's safe to do that?"

  Sam turned around, "Safe? Why wouldn't it be safe?"

  He's wondering if maybe I'm not feeling all right.

  "I'm fine, Sam, but I just wondered if people outside will notice - I mean, I feel very different, and I don't know how different we're going to seem to other people."

  "That reminds me, this is a good time to do something very important," said Sam, "Go take a look at yourself in your bathroom mirror, then come back and tell me what you saw."

  "Okay." I stood up, observing that my body felt light and very strong. I was aware of some kind of energy moving through me, without any specific tingling or sensitivity anywhere.

  I snapped on the bathroom light and looked in the mirror. The face I saw was myself at 18 or 19, when I had resembled the actress Ingrid Bergman closely enough to be mistaken for her by strangers, a few times - to my great delight - and had not yet earned the lines in the forehead and around the mouth. The eyes were grey-blue, the pupils huge. There was something really likeable about that face, I decided, and there were no traces of anger or bitterness, where usually there were faint signs around mouth and eyes that said. Careful, don't barge in unless invited. Now there was only kindness and humor and it really was a nice face to look at.

  I thought to myself, with a sense of having stumbled onto something important: this is a good human being; this person I'm looking at is to be treasured. All her faults and all her failures do not take away from the warmth and the ability to care and love that's there. I saw the reflected eyes blur with the start of tears, and felt a burst of amusement at such sympathy for myself.

  I turned off the light and reported to Sam, "I look ten years younger. Is that usual?"

  "That often happens. It must have something to do with the relaxation, dropping the usual defenses and tensions. Anything else?"

  "Yes," I thought about how to say it, "I liked the face I saw. I mean, I really liked that person in the mirror. I'm not exactly used to that. I suppose most people aren't."

  "My turn." Sam jumped off the bed and went into the bathroom, and I thought, his tummy is over its problems, obviously. When he emerged, I looked at him and waited, but he only smiled at me and walked on into the living room. I followed. He was wearing blue jeans and a toffee brown sweater, and I realized I hadn't registered details like that earlier; I'd been too anxious and distracted.

  He went over to the bay window and squinted through the blinds. "Sunlight's fading. Got a raincoat you can take with you? The radio said chance of rain, so we may as well be prepared."

  "Raincoat?" I stood there, trying to make sense out of "raincoat". My mind was intensely occupied with the glowing immediacy of everything around me, the sense of light that still suffused the room, even though the shafts of sunlight had disappeared. The glow was as much felt as seen.

  "You're okay, aren't you?" asked Sam, "I mean, your stomach's settled down, hasn't it?"

  "Oh, yes, it feels fine."

  "Then I think it's time to go exploring. Don't worry about anybody noticing you. People only see as much as they want to see."

  "All right." I went to the closet and took out my blue plastic raincoat. It was pretty flimsy, but at least it had a hood. I asked Sam, "Do you have one?"

  "In my car. I'll get it on our way." I remembered to pick up my purse. I pulled the strap over my shoulder and stood there, trying to look intelligent and normal.

  "Got your door key?"

  I searched inside the purse and found it, "Yeah, it's here."

  "Okay, let's go."

  Thank heaven I'm with someone who can think of ordinary necessary things like keys. My mind wants to wander all over the place.

  Outside, Sam put on his coat and held out one arm, bent for me. I took it and we started down the sidewalk together. He said, "Whenever you want to stop and spend time with something, just tell me. We're not in a hurry."

  "Okay, yes. Thanks." I was looking around at the sidewalk, the buildings, the lamp-posts; everything seemed to emit a subtle light. We passed a tiny garden in which the low bushes seemed to present themselves, calling out for attention, for acknowledgement. I smiled at them and said Hi, under my breath.

  An elderly man in a worn coat was walking slowly ahead of us. As we moved past him, I glanced at his profile, trying to see inside. I could feel invisible walls and a dull, irritable tiredness, a readiness to be annoyed. I thought, if only it were possible to stop him and say something like, "Dear sir, just open your eyes and look around you; it's an incredible world!

  Don't close yourself off from all the life and beauty around you!"

  I had been basking no longer than a few seconds in my own niceness and wisdom when a piece of information shoved itself at me and I suddenly k
new that, first, the man needed his walls just exactly where they were, and didn't want to be rescued from them. Second, that it was not my right, not anyone's right, to tell him that there was another way to live, a better way to be, to urge him to see or hear what he didn't choose to see or hear. It was his choice to live the way he was living, and I must not make the mistake of passing judgment on the conduct of a life I knew nothing about.

  Oh, boy. Just got slapped.

  I remembered my mother telling me that there is a basic rule in spiritual matters: never offer what the other person hasn't asked for. Her phrase was, "Wait until you get the question before you volunteer the answer."

  I thought about all the books - millions of books all over the world - in which human beings in many places and times had written about the human psyche, about life and death and the nature of God, and of how few people read them. I thought, how many people have taken peyote? I've heard lots of people talk about Huxley and his mescaline experience, wishing they could explore the way he did, have that kind of adventure, but how many of them actually go looking for mescaline or peyote to try it themselves? Most people hold onto the familiar. Who wants to actually risk having his universe changed? I do. Me.

  Sam was saying, "How about the park? It's only a few blocks more."

  "Yes, sure."

  We were walking hand in hand, now. Every time I saw someone on the sidewalk or across the street, I would open myself to the feel of that other body's movements, trying to be inside the person, to sense whether there was unhappiness or daydreaming or anticipation and pleasure.

  I found it easy to pick up the emotional field, and had to remind myself that there was no way to know whether what I believed I was perceiving had any relation to reality - the other's reality.

  Doesn't matter; I'm enjoying it.

  After a few blocks, I realized I was walking with an easy, rhythmic stride which somehow matched everything around me. I was feeling completely in-tune, and everything I saw - a child running up a short stairway to the door of a house, a woman leaning out of a high window to shake a piece of cloth, a man in a leather jacket digging in the earth around a rose-bush - was music. In being who we were, in feeling what we felt, in moving as we moved, all of us were creating a silent music.