Trick or Treatment

Shit.

This was Adam’s response to his brother’s question, How are you doing?

Adam has a terminal illness, is how he is doing, and is beyond all treatment except the palliative. He pretty much only gets out of bed to go to the bathroom. He can still walk and get around outside, if he wants to, but he never wants to. When he has to go out to see his doctors, to submit to some tests, to be scanned and handled and abused by instruments, he is scared and miserable and thinks only of getting back to where he can be scared and miserable in his own bed. He was nothing before he was born and he will return to nothing before the end of the year. Life has been nothing all along. At least pain is something, even psychic pain, but it is too much now. If he wasn’t terrified of death he would kill himself. 

His brother’s attempts to offer reasonable consolation have been useless. Adam answered Aasif’s timid suggestion that perhaps happiness can be found only in submission to the will of God with a scornful cough. Neither of them had ever been religious.

Aasif didn’t know what to say. He was desperate to help Adam any way he could to manage this existential emergency. He had come across the phrase “existential emergency” in an article he read about new research in the treatment of that malady at a university hospital. Terminally ill patients, like his brother, who were suffering from depression and anxiety, like his brother, were given a dose of psilocybin. The results have been significant and encouraging.

So why not volunteer for the study? It would be a change. Get high for a few hours. Maybe it’ll help.

Maybe I’ll flip out.

True.

I’m already in Hell.

Adam called the number Aasif had obtained. He filled out paperwork and endured preliminary talk therapy sessions. The day of the acid test arrives. The session is in a hospital room tarted up in colorful fabrics, flowers, and abstract paintings to look like a New Age den. It is meant to provide a serene setting for the psychedelic experience. 

Trust and let go. Be open to what happens, the therapist reminds him.

The capsule is in a handmade ceramic bowl and is presented to him like a sacrament. He swallows it and puts on the eye shades and the earphones. Some kind of non-offensive world music evokes Mexican deserts or Tibetan ceremonies and his mind wanders and he is bored. He removes the earphones.

And then he is off, launched into something scarier than he has ever known, a super nova of sensations, a whirlwind of horrific visions of zombie crusades and burning skyscrapers and ICE Nazis in red baseball caps crucifying Buddha, waterboarding Moses. One has the Prophet in a chokehold and others surround a cage in which the Brown Christ, a very young boy wrapped in Mylar, is weeping. 

Projections, he remembers. These are projections of my own fears. Let go, go with the flow, be open. The hallucinations can teach him something. What are you doing in my brain? he asks. His own laughing corpse confronts him. What are YOU doing in MY brain? — but then a wave compassion comes over Adam for the corpse, for that sad self he was, and the dried out husk of his ego crumbles to dust and is blown away by the breath of the Creator.

A stranger on a strange path is walking forever down a dark damp narrow tunnel, a birth canal. 

To be reborn you must be reconceived, a woman’s voice suggests. 

The stranger carries an old iron lantern that holds a very faint light, no greater than the light of a firefly  and he can barely see the way, but as he stumbles along the light grows brighter, lighting further ahead until he comes to the Dead End, a grey concrete wall that extends on either end and is higher than he can see. He lifts his light, illuminating the barrier that now shines like white gold and sees it is not a wall but a Door with no determinate shape — now it is square and now it is round with concentric circles, wheels within wheels. He steps closer and sees the Door is covered with intricate carvings, a pictorial calligraphy in which is written all that is known. Within the revolving circles the history of the universe is depicted as wheels of creation and destruction from Big Bang and onward to the genesis of the Milky Way, the birth of the Solar System, the formation of our planet, the birthing of our species and the long human pilgrimage that is the evolution of consciousness, a crazy story of oppression and suffering and struggle, and his own family history, refugees from a holy land full of holes, coming to America, and his own birth in a hospital bed and his own death in another hospital bed. These images before which he stands are not static but change as he reads them and he understands that the Door is a kind of hologram that shows the totality of information he has stored in his mind, everything he thinks he knows, the world he thought he knew, the self he thought he was, and the ongoing activity of processing it all.

There is a soft knocking. Someone  on the other side? Who’s there? Trust and let go and be open. He finds a hole at the center of the Door and puts his hand inside and the Door is gone and all the suffering drops away, like the booster stage of an Apollo rocket, and he is gone, beyond all time and gravity and sorrow. 

He takes off the eye shades.

How are you? asks the therapist.

Beautiful! Adam is laughing to find himself in the here and now.

Tell me about it.

I don’t think I have the words. It was intense and profound and I found something I didn’t know I was looking for. Paradise has found me here on this couch.

Fascinating, the therapist says. Sounds like an extraordinary experience.

That was some heavy shit you gave me.

How would you feel, the therapist asks, if I told you you had been given the placebo?

Placebo?

Yes, you were given an active placebo, Niacin. At most, you should’ve felt some tingling.

No way. You made a mistake and gave me the psilocybin.

That is not possible. We follow a careful protocol and I took inventory of the capsules. There is no doubt you took the placebo.

Adam is laughing again. Perfect! Perfect!  It doesn’t matter! How it happens doesn’t matter!  The veil has been pulled away.

The therapist regards him passively. He is wearing his professional mask. Adam sees this clearly. It is the psychology game and the doctor doesn’t think this data will be useful for his study.

It is possible you had a spontaneous psychotic episode. It might be best to keep you here for observation. If necessary we could prescribe an anti-psychotic.

Because my hallucinations weren’t real hallucinations? You think I was hallucinating hallucinations? That won’t be necessary. I’m fine.

Adam called his brother to tell him he didn’t have to come get him.

How was it?

Awesome. I can’t wait to tell you all about it. You’ll laugh your ass off.

How are you?

Wonderful. Beautiful.

God is great, Aasif replies in Arabic.

It is a perfect late summer afternoon Adam steps into and the city is alive and glowing in the clear light of reality. He is inspired to walk home over the bridge. Halfway across he stops and looks over the river at the glorious sunset. Past the Manhattan Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge the Statue of Liberty stands in New York Harbor.

He raises his fist and salutes her.