Pihkal

by Alexander Shulgin

  I opened my eyes. The Observer scanned the passage of time since the circle formed, and said it had only been one or two minutes in the clock world. Shura was looking at me questioningly.

  I smiled and nodded at him to indicate that I was all right, and that I wasn't having any more trouble staying put in my body.

  George muttered, "Phew!" and opened his eyes. David chuckled, "I think being in the circle makes it even more intense, not less!"

  Ginger squeezed my hand and gently bumped the side of her head against mine, then said, "This is the damndest level of anything I've ever taken. Did I say that right? What I mean is, I don't remember ever being quite so - ah - "

  "The word is 'high,' love," laughed Shura, and the circle broke up in giggles and remarks about appropriate words for certain mental states, Ben suggesting "Zonkered," David throwing in, "Clobbered," and Ruth asking, "How about just plain ole 'stoned'?"

  "Anybody having problems?" asked Shura, his voice suddenly serious, as he looked at each of our faces.

  "Pretty intense, but okay," reported George, adding, "I don't think I'd want to try any higher though. At least, not until I'd had a chance to get used to this. And getting used to this could take a long/ long time!"

  Leah, her eyes soft, said, "This is beautiful, Shura. I know what you mean about being anchored, though. I keep feeling I could drift out into space - or somewhere - quite easily, if I didn't hold onto my bod."

  "Well, let yourself go, if that's what you want to do," replied Shura, "We'll call you back for soup and bread, when it's time to eat."

  John reported that he was feeling fine, had never felt better, "As long as you stay off the piano keys, that is."

  "Promise," laughed Shura, "But you'll have to admit, those notes had an interesting effect, didn't they?"

  "Very interesting effect, yes," said John, smiling despite his effort to sound sarcastic, "Memorably interesting effect, as a matter of fact, and one I would just as soon forego during the rest of the day, if you would be so kind!"

  Some of the group decided to try the outside again. George expressed an interest in checking the soup, now that he had been reminded of it by Shura's remark to Leah, and Ruth went with him to the kitchen, holding his arm.

  Shura put a hand against my back and gently pushed me through the kitchen, down the hallway, and out the back door.

  I stood next to him in the open air, looking around. Every tree, every bush radiated light. I remembered my peyote experience, when I'd had to squint against the pulsing colors of the flowers. Now, the nasturtiums clustered on the bank to the right of the path were glowing rich yellow and an orange-red which I could feel in my stomach, while the grass sang life in the key of green.

  Shura put a hand on my shoulder and said, "I wanted to bring you out here to tell you something I've always kept to myself before. You already know my other secrets, and I suppose this is the last one I have." I looked at him and waited. "The first time I took mescaline," he said, "I was astonished to discover that the world I found myself in - this world - was what I had been surrounded by, as a child. I spent my childhood in a reality that looked and felt like this. Of course I thought everyone else saw and felt things the same way I did, until it gradually dawned on me that maybe it wasn't the same for other people. Other boys my age didn't seem to want to spend time looking closely into flowers or merging with beetles, as I loved doing when I was alone. Eventually, I began getting the idea that I was different in some way, and I learned not to talk about that kind of thing, and to imitate the behavior of the other boys at the school, so I wouldn't draw attention -"

  Shura leaned against the wall of the house, his eyes off in the distance.

  "- because I knew instinctively that if others my age sensed any kind of difference, they would attack. So I behaved like everyone else until school was over and I could go home and have a couple of hours by myself doing what I liked to do.

  "Just a few minutes ago, I was looking out of the front window in the living room and there were two dogs in the field, down below the house. They were in their world, in their reality, and knew nothing of me, in mine. I was simply an interested observer, so I observed them, and I saw that, although they were following one-another, they weren't moving."

  "Not moving?"

  "Of course they were moving - intellectually I know that - but the magic of a material like this, mescaline or any other effective psychedelic, is that it lets you put aside the intellectual overlay for a while and just have an immediate, direct experience of something. When I had my first mescaline experience the memory came back of seeing little bugs on the honeysuckle vines that grew over a fence behind my home - when I was very young - and I remembered that the bugs didn't really move; they simply changed their location in my reality, from time to time. Like the dogs in the field today. They weren't moving; there was just a change in where they were, now and then. At least, from the point of view of the reality I was in while I watched. I can't speak for what the dogs were experiencing, of course."

  "You know, sweetie," I said, slowly, "I suspect that all children see the world this way at a certain time, very early in their lives. It sounds to me as if your only difference was in maintaining that state, that vision, longer than most others manage to."

  Shura glanced at me thoughtfully, then looked away again, "You're probably right. When you're little, you live in what we would call a psychedelic world, surrounded by it."

  I said, "I remember, with the peyote, I had the same feeling of familiarity about the world I was seeing. The territory wasn't strange at all; I had just forgotten it."

  "Exactly. I can only say, for myself, that with that first opening experience with mescaline, I was in a completely friendly environment and I'd recovered the ability to do things that had once been simple, which had been lost in all the years since then. I was home again." His voice with thick. After a while, he groped in a pocket and blew his nose on a rumpled handkerchief.

  "Did your parents know any of this? I mean, that you were still seeing your world differently than most kids your age?"

  "I think my mother knew some of it, at least had some suspicion. I knew that she worried sometimes; she probably worried about my ability to get along in the world that everyone else shared, but she never said anything directly to me about it. I suppose the fact that I did well in school helped allay some of her fears."

  "What a difficult childhood that must have been!" Shura turned and smiled, "Actually, I had a wonderful time, especially when I could be by myself. I remember when I was about six or seven, I think, I could travel all the way across the park near my house, without touching the ground - just traveling in the interlocking tree branches! It was great!"

  I laughed with him. "Well, that certainly sounds like normal boy-stuff!"

  He went on. "There was a certain amount of strain, I suppose, in trying not to be singled out, when I was in school, acting like other boys - but I got pretty good at it."

  "When did you lose the - that kind of vision, do you remember?" "I can't recall any particular time; it just gradually faded, like I guess it does with everybody else. I eventually forgot how it had been. Until the mescaline. Then it all came back; I remembered seeing the world this way before/ and I began recapturing the memories."

  I said, "I wonder why some people find a mescaline experience frightening?"

  "Maybe their childhood world was frightening, or damaging in some way; maybe a lot of it has simply been pushed out of memory by the need to deny and repress the bad memories. And then, to have something reawaken that past, and in an authentic way such as this - it could be terrifying. It could be a dreadful experience, having all of it open up again."

  "Yes, yes -1 hadn't thought of that."

  I looked again at the trees, at the grass, at the flowers, and felt the radiance moving in my own body as it was in their's. We were creatures of light, Shura and I, standing in a little piece of the universe that was showing us, reminding us, how things real
ly were. This intenoeaving, this shared energy; it exists between all living things. My Beloved Friend of the spiral is living the story of all things alive, everywhere.

  Shura had taken my arm and was leading me up the path to the lab. We walked slowly, in silence, stopping every few steps to look at an exquisite line or flare of color. Every turn of branch, every curve of flower stalk was a word of language, a communication from the particular shape taken by the energy that flowed around us.

  I again remembered when I was sixteen, at boarding school, making the great discovery that line could be translated in my mind to sound. It had first happened when I went walking alone and looked up to see a bird moving silently, very high up against the clear sky, and the single pure moving line became a single pure curving note of sound. I began experimenting, after that, looking at the back of an antique chair, the outline of a vase sitting on a table, and confirmed that any line, moving or not, could make a sound in my mind. I shared the discovery, of course, with no one.

  I talked to Shura about this kind of association, which I now knew had a name: synesthesia. I went on to tell him the story of how I came to love the music of Bach.

  The first man in my life, the first love, was a young Russian of considerable brilliance. We had fallen in love during our senior year of high school. After years of separation, he came back into my life just after my divorce from Christopher's father, while I was living in the housing project with my baby. His name was Vadim Michel Ivanoff, and he loved Bach. When he found out that I couldn't understand the music of his favorite composer, he informed me that he was going to teach me to hear it as it should be heard.

  One evening in my apartment, when my small son was asleep upstairs, he ordered me to sit on the old couch in the living room, and not talk. He then brought out a box of twenty household candles - the cheap, plain white kind - lit one, then turned out the lights. While I watched in obedient silence, he fastened the rest of the candles in place with the hot wax and lit them. They stood in a line that went from the concrete floor up the side of the white-painted concrete stairwell, until the small room was blazing with candlelight.

  Then he took a record and put it on my record player, and the music of Bach (I didn't know which piece it was and he gave it no name) filled the air around me. I lay down on the couch and closed my eyes and caught my breath in surprise. Before me had appeared a crystal mountain which was being built by the music, and as I watched, the music showed me blue-shadowed crevasses, shelves and peaks and a beauty that belonged to another world. That night, I fell in love with J.S. Bach, as Vadim had intended.

  "I'll always be grateful to him," I concluded, "For two things: teaching me how to make Russian hamburgers and how to hear the music of Bach. The rest of my relationship with him was mostly pain and grief, but those two gifts deserve acknowledgement."

  Shura was smiling, "I don't know what Russian hamburgers taste like, but certainly, being able to appreciate Bach is one of the things I consider essential to a fully lived life!"

  I laughed, "So do I - now."

  Shura took my hand and it was like being grasped by my own skin. I found myself thinking how marvelous it would be to make love right now. I didn't share the thought; it would be ungracious of us to leave the group for so long. We were the hosts. Perhaps later.

  As we walked back toward the house, Shura said, "I want to remind you, before we rejoin the others, that I've never told anyone else what I just shared with you about my childhood. You may be right, that the only real difference between me and others of my age was in the fact that I continued moving around in that world a lot longer than most children do. But at the time, it was one hell of a difference, believe me!"

  "It'll remain between us. But why did you never tell Ursula?"

  I'm assuming he didn't.

  "Because I've been used to keeping a lot of things to myself most of my life, especially things that I grew up thinking would make people regard me as an oddball. As it was, I was considered an oddball anyway, but it wasn't for lack of discretion about my interior workings.

  It's only been with you, for God knows what reason," he smiled down at me, "That I made the decision to be truthful and open about who I am and what goes on inside me."

  I said, "Thank you."

  If I have to go on without you for the rest of my life, I'll have that as my treasure - being the first person you ever trusted so completely. No use telling you that this great secret of yours would be understood by more people than you think.

  In the kitchen, Ruth and Leah were laughing uproariously. Leah tried to explain to us, "It's the stove! You see, it's really much more complicated than you realize, understanding what 'front right' and 'rear left' mean - what they really mean - and what they have to do with heating up a pot of soup. You think it's simple, I know! I always thought it was simple, myself. Little did I realize the elaborate connections that have to be made by the mind, between those silly little words on the dials and -" she doubled over again, holding her stomach.

  Ruth had tears running from her eyes as she joined Leah, crying, "You try counting soup bowls, Shura! Just see how far you get before you lose track! I've tried and tried, and it keeps slipping away after three or four bowls. How many people are we, anyway?" We joined in the laughter and Shura took over the counting of soup bowls. He had no trouble at all, which for some reason sent the two women into further paroxysms until they were both gasping for air.

  Then Ruth reached out to the wall rack over the stove and held up a soup ladle as if it were an unrecognizable object lifted out of an archaeological dig, and we left the kitchen to the sounds of renewed gasps and croaks.

  Ben grumbled from his armchair, "What in heaven's name is going on in the kitchen? I haven't the slightest desire to move, at the moment, so you'll have to tell us the whole thing."

  Shura simply shook his head, "Ya hadda bin there." David was on the floor pad, a few inches from John. Both of them were lying on their backs, eyes closed. David was smiling, I guessed in response to the sounds in the kitchen.

  George spoke from the couch, "I must say, Shura, this is quite an experience!" From George, those words could mean one of several things, but his face showed no anxiety and his smile was full, so I assumed they meant that he was enjoying himself. Since Shura did not ask him any questions, I supposed he must have read George's face and reached the same conclusion.

  I sat down on a floor cushion and watched Shura quietly move through the room, looking intently at faces, checking for any signs of distress. What he saw apparently contented him, because he slipped off his sandals and sat down in the chair next to Ben, leaning his head back and closing his eyes.

  For a long time there was complete silence in the room. I gave thought, finally, to the matter of Ursula. Ursula and her trunk full of books.

  There's no feeling of reality about Ursula coming and staying. It's as if that whole scenario is only one of several possible outcomes of this story, tills particular script, and not the one that's going to be the final choice, in the end. But then, I'm not the playwright. Who does make those choices, in this play?

  By the time my watch and the kitchen clock agreed on 6:30, we were all seated at the table and the previously incomprehensible ladle had been put to its proper use. We were eating, tearing bread with enthusiasm and refilling our bowls, talking about the day's experience and comparing it with others. There was a telling of stories - remember when Dante got stuck in his guilt and self-negation and Shura and Ben played verbal torture games with him until he finally rebelled and decided that being victim wasn't all it was cracked up to be?

  Dante bent over the table, flushed from laughing. I hadn't had a chance to talk with him yet, but I was already in love with his face, with its marvelous mixture of expressions - extroverted warmth and inward searching. "Remember/' someone said, "When Helen finally took the plunge with mescaline and couldn't bring herself to step out of the car, up in Tilden Park, because the gravel looked like the jeweled
back of a huge snake and she didn't want to put a dirty shoe on such a beautiful thing?"

  I asked if Helen had been afraid of the snake. Shura said, "No, she wasn't afraid of it - she knew what she was seeing was really just the side of a road - but she couldn't bring herself to disturb the pattern of jewels. The rest of us had to spend time persuading her that she wouldn't injure it, that it would still be there if she placed her feet on that scintillating back.

  She finally dared, but it took a while, believe me!"

  No one mentioned Ursula.

  George and Ruth stayed the night on the pad in the living room, because George could not trust himself to drive safely. He was still having visuals.

  Shura and I made love slowly, holding on to the mescaline effects as long as we could, neither of us able to reach orgasm, laughing at our own futile efforts to focus minds and bodies in the way necessary for such a result. We settled for pleasure and the melting of boundaries, the my-skin-is-your-skin, the light glowing behind our eyelids, the sense of being children playing in the fields of the Lord.

  Finally, we curled together spoon-style, my stomach to his back, and fell asleep in the middle of something sweetly familiar by Schubert which neither of us could name.

  CHAPTER 29. THE LETTER

  Shura often gave me Ursula's letters to read. He knew that seeing her writing for myself gave me an independent, if limited, view of the person which I could get no other way. Sometimes he used me as a reality check. Feeling too close to her, too deeply involved to trust his own judgement, he might hand me a letter and ask what I thought of this or that. I would read carefully and reply with scrupulous objectivity, heart turned off and only head operating.

  Ursula's letters were always passionate - not in the erotic sense, but spiritually and emotionally. She never referred to love-making, except by delicate implication, but she often referred to the soul. When she spoke about her future joining with Shura, it was always in terms of the spiritual, the cosmic. She wrote well, sometimes beautifully, considering the fact that her native tongue was German. The occasional temptation to elaborateness and honey-sweetness had to be understood as the efforts of a woman in love trying to convey the urgency of her feelings in a language not her own. My preferred self-image of a fair and honest witness demanded that I keep all that in mind.