Yigal was more harsh. ‘I’m having trouble with calculus. I sure as hell don’t want to muddle up what little brains I’ve got,’ and Monica cried, ‘You’re just being chicken, chicken, chicken,’ and Yigal stared at her, but Joe said, ‘I don’t think you have the right word, Monica. Not for this little bantam rooster.’
In irritation Monica turned to me and asked, ‘You worked in Asia, Uncle George, where they know about expanding the mind. What do you think?’
‘I can’t understand why anyone would take such risks with an unproved drug,’ I said, but again Joe cut in: ‘Because she’s a damned fool.’ This occasioned much discussion, with Monica claiming, ‘It’s a new development of the human race. Hell, Uncle George, you couldn’t be expected to understand. It wasn’t even discovered till 1938. Nobody tried it till 1943.’
‘How do you know?’ Joe asked.
‘Churchill told me. He makes it for the whole Algarve. Gets his chemicals from Switzerland. But the point is, it’s a new experience and you can’t dismiss it until you’ve tried it.’
To my surprise, this reasoning took root in the one mind that I would have judged least likely to be receptive. One morning Gretchen came to me as I was talking with Joe near the stone poet, and said, ‘Uncle George, I seek a favor. You’re to watch over me while I try LSD.’
‘Are you out of your mind?’ Joe asked.
‘No, but I want to be. I suspect Monica’s right. This is a vision of the future. It could be a whole new pattern of life.’ She looked down at her hands and said, ‘God knows I don’t approve of the pattern I have.’
‘You think LSD offers a solution?’ I asked.
‘I don’t think anything. But I’d like to see for myself.’ Again she looked down at her hands. ‘What I need is a vision of the world—a consistent vision in which things fall into place. I can’t devise it by myself.’ She fought to choke back a catch in her throat. ‘By myself, I simply can’t do it.’
‘LSD won’t do it either,’ Joe warned.
‘But it might.’
She was so insistent that I finally consented to drive her into Albufeira, where we found Churchill, gray and pasty as ever, his thin hair plastered down on either side of his forehead. Gretchen said, ‘Monica sent me. She said you’d supervise …’
‘This morning I’m busy.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Gretchen said, and her disappointment was so obvious that Churchill took my arm and said, ‘But, if he’s willing to stay with you, no problem.’
‘I know nothing about LSD,’ I protested.
‘You don’t need to know anything. Just sit with the subject and reassure her from time to time. You see, the imagery becomes quite involuted, and a point of reference is required.’
He convinced Gretchen of this theory, clinching it when he said, ‘Anyway, you’ll be taking only half a spot, I shouldn’t wonder.’ He led us to his third-floor room, and as I stared out at the ocean he took from his wallet one of his spots, held it against the light to see how much LSD it probably contained, tore it neatly in half and handed one portion to Gretchen, with the command, ‘Allow the rice paper to dissolve in your mouth, then swallow it.’ And he was gone.
As Gretchen held the fragile paper in her hand, I tried one last time to dissuade her from tampering with her mind. ‘You don’t need it,’ I assured her, but she repeated the refrain that people my age were hearing throughout the world: ‘How can I tell until I’ve tried it for myself?’ I grew impatient with such reasoning from a girl of her ability, and growled, ‘Doesn’t education teach you that some things are to be taken on the wisdom of the race? Suppose you were pregnant and wanted to use thalidomide to relax your tensions, and I told you, “From the horrible consequences we’ve seen in Germany we know that thalidomide ought not to be used by pregnant women.” Would you, in spite of the evidence, feel that you had to prove the facts again for yourself?’
Like the intelligent person she was, she paused, looked at the paper, and analyzed what I had said. From the way her eyes narrowed, I judged that she was agreeing with my argument, and I expected her to tear the paper up. Instead she shivered and said quietly, ‘You can’t even guess how miserable I am. If LSD holds even a remote possibility of providing an answer …’ Defiantly she popped the paper into her mouth.
She kept it there for about a minute, during which she told me, ‘At least it doesn’t taste bad.’ I saw her swallow and expected some kind of quick reaction, but none came. She remained totally normal, and for nearly an hour we talked about the camping trip from Torremolinos to Portugal.
Then, suddenly, she was asleep. For about an hour she lay inert, and I could not help seeing what a lovely, well-proportioned girl she was. She lacked the conspicuous signs of beauty but possessed such a harmony of appearance and liveliness and personality, you knew that in her late forties she would be more beautiful than any of the young lovelies now surrounding her, for she would mature with all components of her being commensurate with one another. She was one of those young women to whom good things ought to happen.
At the beginning of the third hour she began to twitch slightly, and moaned, ‘It’s so magnificent,’ and a kind of kinesthetic movement took control of her body, as if great waves were passing through the room, affecting first her head, then her shoulders, then her torso, and finally her feet. Quite obviously she was in the grip of a force she could not control, and would not for the next four or five hours. Remembering my instructions, I assured her, ‘It’s going splendidly.’
Apparently, I was close to the truth, for she continued to mutter phrases like ‘magnificent,’ ‘so gentle,’ and ‘the colors, the colors,’ and these words lulled me into a kind of relaxed dozing. From what I could see so far, LSD was generally beneficent and I began to wonder if my presence was needed.
Accccchhhhh!’ came a scream from the bed. I leaped out of my chair to see Gretchen torn by some wrenching force that literally jerked her head in one direction, her torso in the opposite. She went into a wild convulsion, screaming only the horrible ‘Accccchhhhh!’
I tried to pin her shoulders to the mattress, and in this way we struggled for some time until the passion diminished, whereupon she went limp, sobbing quietly to herself and shivering in great contractions that tensed her body in reverse waves from her toes up to her head. During this time she said nothing. Even though I was terrified, I tried to reassure her, but she did not hear.
In this cycle, repeated three times, the next two hours passed and my apprehension grew, but as the fifth hour began, she subsided again into her benevolent sleep and entertained once more the visions which had given her so much pleasure before, and I judged that the crisis had passed and that she would remain quiescent for the remainder of the trip. I was glad that I had been there for the bad hours and wondered what she might have done in the grip of those great passions she had been alone.
The room was quiet. Suddenly she uttered a scream much more terrible than before, then went into convulsions that racked her body and against which I was powerless. It was hideous to see their effect upon her: face distorted, shoulders jerking, arms and legs thrashing, and over all, the screams of a girl in torment.
It was now that I began to sweat—rivulets running from my armpits, ugly and sickening in their smell—as I wrestled with the sleeping girl. Try as I might, I could not hold her on the bed, for alternately her head or her feet would slide off to the floor, twitching and writhing as if they had separate lives of their own. Her clothes became torn, and at one frightful moment I began to laugh hysterically, I suppose because all I could think of was that she looked like one of the debauched Egyptian whores in the banquet scene of a Cecil B. DeMille movie.
Now for the first time she uttered the word death. She said it first in a low, croaking voice, then with increased terror, until the little room seemed filled with the presence of Death himself, come personally to take her. She pleaded, writhed to escape him, begged me for help, aware of my name and the fact that I was w
ith her. Her face became ashen-gray, and for some moments she went into a catatonic trance which I interpreted as death, or its near approach.
‘Gretchen!’ I shouted, slapping her about the face to bring her back to life. I was now sweating all over; my hands were wet and slipped away as I grabbed at her shoulders to shake her.
‘Death!’ she cried repeatedly, adding a pathetic plea, ‘Uncle George, don’t let me die.’
Whatever I did was useless, and with anguish I watched her come close to dying; her breathing seemed to stop, her extremities grew rigid. I found a glass, filled it with cold water, and threw it in her face, but this had no effect except to make her hair look stringy and snakelike. Her mouth fell open and her tongue protruded, and she looked hideous.
Anguished, helpless, I went to the head of the stairs and started yelling for Churchill, cursing him, holding him to blame for this disaster, but of course he did not reply. He was selling his spots in Faro and other seaports along the coast.
When I returned to the bed, Gretchen had surrendered to a passive state which in some ways was more terrifying to me than the active, for now she moaned that she was beset by snakes crawling across her body, their cold heads twisting under her armpits and down her flanks. The glorious motion that had seduced her so pleasantly at first had degenerated into snakes, whose writhings induced new cries of terror.
‘God, God, take them away!’ she pleaded. Her forehead was covered with perspiration that glowed in the darkened room and she continued to quiver as the snakes attacked her.
‘Kill them!’ she pleaded, and once when I went to the bed to try to quieten her, she clutched my hand and begged me to find a broom There would be one in the corner. I must use it to drive away the snakes.
With the sixth hour, death returned. From the bed came horrible screams and contortions which so sickened me that I had to turn away, but Gretchen, fearing that I might abandon her, crawled off the bed to grab at my legs and plead with me to stay. When her hands found the reassurance she needed in the hard leather of my shoes, she collapsed on the floor, and I was powerless to get her back into bed. She remained there, a quivering mass.
I cannot accurately describe the next half hour, for it was a damnable hell, with moaning voices, sobbing throats, a dozen arms clutching at me. Looking back, of course, I realize that Gretchen was not about to die; she was merely in the grip of some powerful delusion, but at the time it was the most terrifying experience I had ever had to suffer through. My panic was increased when she returned to the long-drawn ‘Accccchhhhh!’—but after she had uttered this cry a dozen times or so, she began to relax and the gentle waves that had passed over her body at the beginning of the trip returned, bringing with them the expansive colors and the protracted sounds.
She spent the seventh hour sleeping, the first half on the floor, the second half in bed, for now when I tried to hoist her up, she cooperated and clung to me for a moment. ‘Thank God you were here,’ she whispered, and lapsed into the final unconsciousness from which she would emerge a human being once more.
Gretchen was never able to tell the others of her trip. Apparently the terrors had been so destructive that she considered herself fortunate to have survived them, and now banished recollection from her mind. But when Monica and Cato kept pestering the others to try the acid—they even propositioned me to join them—Gretchen was infuriated when they approached Joe. Placing her hand on Joe’s arm, she said, ‘If I saw things as clearly as you do, Joe, I wouldn’t need any mind-expanding,’ to which Monica replied, ‘But how can he tell what the world’s like until he sees it for real?’ and Gretchen said, ‘What I saw, I didn’t need to see,’ and Monica goaded her. ‘Were you afraid?’ and Gretchen replied, ‘No, I accepted what I saw and made my peace with it. It’s buried. And I’m content to leave it buried.’ To this, Monica said, ‘Until the day it explodes and destroys you,’ and Gretchen said, ‘I think that’s what life is—keeping things in balance, delaying the explosion a little longer. When it finally comes … it’s death.’ To Joe, she said, ‘You’d be insane to try it. You don’t need it.’
‘Are you implying that I do?’ Monica demanded.
‘We’re all different,’ Gretchen said. ‘Maybe you can handle it. I can’t.’
‘You suggesting Joe can’t?’ Monica asked. ‘Big man like him?’
‘If you ask me bluntly, I do have doubts that Joe could handle it. He has such an intense personality it might blow him to hell.’ She paused and stood back and studied Joe, then said, ‘Sometimes it’s the big strong ones that destroy themselves. You don’t need to prove anything, Joe.’
So Monica and Cato turned to Yigal, asking how he could comprehend the inner structure of science if he failed to perceive it in its LSD forms. ‘Believe me when I say this,’ Monica insisted, ‘the new discoveries in science will come from men who use LSD. They’ll see relationships you clods will never dream of. Look, if an ignoramus like me can look at a fragment of broken concrete and see every molecule … each of them standing alone by itself …’ She shrugged her shoulders at his obstinacy.
But when Monica and Cato renewed their pressures on Britta, they encountered a vigorous and final reaction. For several days she fended them off with polite refusals, but when they argued with her one morning in the plaza that she would never understand sex unless she participated in the act while under the influence of LSD, she became angrier than we had ever seen her; she raised her arms against them and said, ‘Goddammit, you lay off me. You’re just like my father and the gramophone records.’
This was such a startling statement that we all stared at her. She was leaning against the statue as she said, ‘I take my beliefs from that experience, and none of you can change them, so don’t try, Monica.’
‘What beliefs?’ Monica asked mildly. It always surprised me how these young people could come to the edge of a fight and retreat without damaged egos. It was a marvelous attribute, which we lose as we grow older. If Britta had spoken so harshly to me, I’d have been subdued for three days, but little Monica blithely said, ‘Okay, let’s hear her pitch.’
‘I told Mr. Fairbanks about how my father had an obsession about an opera,’ Britta said. ‘Pêcheurs de Perles. It’s involved and has to do with Ceylon, but accept the fact that when I was a little girl he used to play its arias incessantly. He really loved them. They were a part of him.
‘He knew them only on old records made by Italian singers. Caruso, Tetrazzini, Gigli. Good, but Italian. So with the first paycheck I got from Mr. Mogstad—I worked for him, the jerk—I sent away to Oslo to get an Angel recording of the complete opera. It was the most money I’d spent up to then—bringing him the opera he loved wrapped in glassine paper. He had tears in his eyes when he took it. He put the first record on his machine as if it were a jewel—you know, not touching the edges.
‘Then the damnedest thing happened. When he heard the voices singing in French—the way the opera was written—he grew quite angry and shouted, “What are they doing?” I’ll never forget one passage. The priestess is asking the gods to protect the fishermen. In the Italian record, to save money they didn’t use a chorus, just the soprano’s voice with a violin representing the chorus. In the new record, of course, they used a full chorus, and the effect was stunning, but he cried, “What are they doing back there?” And you know, he played that wonderful opera only once. The French voices, the real music, a live chorus—they were too much for him.
‘He wanted to imagine the opera as it had been on his first old records—wispy voices singing in Italian. I realized then that if he ever did get to Ceylon … it would destroy him. He’d expect it to be like the colored photographs he’d seen years ago when he was hiding in the mountains. Real Ceylon would kill him.’
‘Meaning what?’ Monica asked.
‘What you seek, Monica, is a vision of the world … not the world.’
‘And you?’
‘I want the world exactly as it is. If God wrote it in French, I
don’t want it in Portuguese.’ She laughed at the pretentiousness of what she had just said and told us about an experience in Tromsø.
‘In the winters we had constant snow. On the whole island you wouldn’t see one patch of earth or highway. All covered. So much snow fell that our plows piled it up along the sides of the road, maybe eight feet deep. Our roads became canals cut down through the snow—a kind of safety wall on each side, so that nothing bad could happen to you unless you crashed into somebody at an intersection. Late at night we kids used to look for a mad taxi driver named Skaanevik. We’d give him what money we had and pile in for a drive across the island to the airport. Why did we do this? Because Skaanevik was the craziest driver in Norway. He’d get his taxi up to fifty miles an hour and go roaring down one of these roads protected by snow walls on each side. To turn a corner, he’d slam on the brakes—and we’d ricochet off the walls for a hundred yards, side to side. What could happen to us? When he came to an intersection he’d flash his lights off and on, and anyone on the side road would stop and the driver would say to his passengers, “We’d better wait. Skaanevik may be driving.” And we’d go roaring through, lurching from side to side and bouncing off the walls. It was marvelous, with the stars overhead and wind blowing through the pine trees.’
‘So what?’ Monica asked.
‘So I’m not afraid,’ Britta said. ‘I was the one who told Skaanevik, “Go faster.” But I want the thrills to be real ones … made out of this earth … with me in control. I don’t want dreams. So you lay off.’
Monica propositioned her no more.
I tried to be judicious in what I said about marijuana and LSD to the young people, because I did not want to be a fraud. As a former fund salesman, and now an international investor, I had often found myself skating on the far edges of truth and had been forced to develop what the English call ‘a nice regard for honesty.’ I refused to tell young people what I did not believe myself, and in my reactions to drugs I was on tricky ground.