"The tank itself was unusual in that it was vertical and looked like an old boiler." "Inside the tank, the subject wore a heavy glass bubble and you would have thought the whole contraption uncomfortable to say the least." "It was, however, effective." "Of the 23 students tested, only two found the experience unpleasant." "Some even called it exhilarating." "A number of students hallucinated." "Dr. Jessup found the encephalographic evidence especially interesting." "And one Saturday afternoon, in April 1967 he decided to try the experience for himself." "Arthur." "Hey, Arthur." "Are you there?" "Can you hear me, Arthur?" "Arthur, answer me." "Is that it?" "You want me to come in and get you out?" "Yeah." "I want to get a look at those EEG tracings." "Come on, mate." "How do you feel?" "Not bad." "I hallucinated like a son of a bitch." "A variety of dream states, mystical states a lot of religious allegory, mostly out of Revelation." "You were in there close to five hours." "It felt like an hour." "I'd like to try that myself sometime." "You should." "You'll like it." "Did we have any communication?" "Sure." "I kept checking you out like you told me to." "How did I respond?" "Very orderly." "At one point you were crying." "You mean, actually crying?" "You were sobbing." "There were tears on your face." "When I asked you what was going on, you said you were re-experiencing your father's death." "Did you make notes?" "It's all there." "I'd like to try this again next week, Arthur." "Do you think you could make it again next week?" "What are we looking for?" "I don't know, yet." "There's really very little literature on this kind of research." "There's some good people in the field, Tart, Ornstein and Deikman but most of it is radical-hip stuff, drug-culture apologias." "Obviously, the first thing to do is set up some sensible methodology see if we can't study these experiences under controlled laboratory conditions." "It will not interfere with the work we're doing with Hobart." "Well, what are we getting into?" "A new sensory deprivation?" "Isolation studies?" "I mean, you know, where will we be going with the tank stuff?" "We're not writing up a grant." "Strictly bootlegging, just for kicks." "As long as we've got the use of this tank, let's play around with it." "Let's find out where it takes us." "It's fascinating stuff, Arthur." "I think we ought to get into it." "I didn't even know they had one of those isolation tanks at New York Hospital." "Must be some guy in the psychology department doing sensory deprivation studies." "What's Jessup doing with it?" "You've got me." "He's been taking students out of his classes and testing them." "Think he's been doing this for three, four months." " Did you know..." " Arthur." "...Jessup was into this kind of stuff?" "Not till you just told me." "What do you want, honey?" "How long are you going to let it ring?" "It's okay, I'll get it." "He's the last guy in the world I figured to be screwing around with anything as flaky as altered states of consciousness." "Well, let's face it." "Jessup is pretty flaky himself." "That's him." "Arthur says you're very shy." "He wants me to draw you out." "Draw me out?" "That doesn't sound like Arthur." "Well, what he actually said was you were a high-handed, arrogant prick." "A little nuts, but brilliant and that if I ever got you talking, I would find you fascinating." "That sounds more like Arthur." "He says you're doing some work with him..." " And Alan Hobart at Payne Whitney." " Yes." "What sort of work?" "Toxic metabolite stuff." "We're replicating Heath's and Friedhoff's strategies trying to find maverick substances specific to schizophrenia." "I think we're chasing our tails." "What do you do?" "I'm a physical anthropologist." "I'm sweating out my dissertation." " Where?" " Columbia." "Holloway and that bunch." "You're kind of young for a Ph. D., aren't you?" "I'm 24." "That's still pretty good." "I didn't get my Ph. D. Till I was 25 and I'm supposed to be a whiz kid." "I'm a whiz kid, too." "Anthropology seems to attract good-looking women." "So you don't think schizophrenia can be reduced to a single etiological agent?" "I'm not even sure it's a disease." "You think madness is simply another state of consciousness?" "There's a body of evidence to support that." "You don't like to talk about your work, do you?" "As a rule, no." "I've always been interested in interior experiences especially the religious experience." "The only reason I'm working with schizophrenics now is that religious experience is so significant in schizophrenia." "There's only so much you can do with animals." "I worked with monkeys, but monkeys can't tell you... what's going on in their consciousness." "You need human beings for that." "You're not allowed to ablate human beings and you can't stick electrodes in their skulls so I have to use some kind of trance-inducing technique and the isolation tank seemed the least risky." "Listen..." "I'd like to go home with you tonight." "Would that be all right with you?" "I've got a roommate." "We'll be confined to the living-room couch." "What's wrong with the living-room couch?" "You tend to slip off a lot." "I'm sure we'll manage." "Yeah, I'm sure we will." "So, whenever you want to go there, you let me know." "How about right now?" "What are you thinking about?" "God." "Jesus, crucifixions." "As a rule, do you usually think about..." "Christ and crucifixions under sexual stress?" "When I was nine years old, I used to see visions visions of saints and angels, even Christ himself." "Of course, I don't do that anymore not since I was 16." "Were your parents religious?" "Anything but." "My father was an aeronautical engineer." "My mother, a clinical psychologist." "What happened?" "I mean, how did a little kid who saw visions of Christ turn into a physiologist teaching at the Cornell Medical College?" "I stopped believing." "It was very dramatic." "My father died a protracted and painful death of cancer." "I was 16 years old and very fond of my father." "I used to race to the hospital every day after school and sit in his room doing my homework." "He was very heavily sedated." "The last few weeks he was in coma." "One day I thought I heard him say something." "I got up and leaned over him my ear an inch away from his lips." ""Did you say something, Pop?"" "Then I heard the word he was desperately trying to say, a soft hiss of a word." "He was saying:" ""Terrible. "" ""Terrible. "" "So the end was terrible, even for the good people like my father." "So the purpose of all our suffering was just more suffering." "By dinnertime, I had dispensed with God altogether." "I never saw another vision." "I haven't told anybody about this in 10 years." "I'm telling you now because I want you to know... what sort of a nut you might be getting mixed up with." "Arthur was right." "You are a fascinating bastard." " Hi." " Hi." "Well, it's settled." "Metcalfe spoke to Spencer again this morning and it's definite." "The job's mine." "So, I'll be in Nairobi doing my post-doc work July and August and in September, I'll be teaching at Harvard." "Terrific." "So looks like we'll both be teaching at Harvard in September." "Looks that way." "Well, you can't get any tidier than that, can you?" "We're going to be together in Boston, and I think we should get married." "You know, of course, I'm supposed to be at least a little bit nuts." "A little bit?" "You're an unmitigated madman!" "You don't have to tell me how weird you are." "I know how weird you are." "I'm the girl in your bed the past two months." "Even sex is a mystical experience for you." "You carry on like a flagellant, which can be very nice but I sometimes wonder if it's me that's being made love to." "I feel like I'm being harpooned by some raging monk in the act of receiving God." "And you are a Faust-freak, Eddie." "You'd sell your soul to find the great truth." "Well, human life doesn't have great truths." "We're born in doubt." "We spend our lives persuading ourselves we're alive." "And one way we do that is we love each other, like I love you." "I can't imagine living without you." "So, let's get married and if it turns out to be a disaster, it'll be a disaster." "We'll shake hands and say good-bye." "He's giving her dimethyltryptamine." "It takes effect in about a minute and she'll trip out for about half an hour." "Do you feel different now?" "Yes." "Less anxious?" "Much less." "Do you have any special feelings?" "I feel like my heart is being touched by Christ." "There's a lot of religious delusion among acute schizophrenics." "Some guys say schizophrenics are physically different from the rest of us." "It's almost as if they were trying to change their physical selves to adapt to their schizophrenic image of themselves." "All right, we'll get married, since it's that important to you." "I'm not comfortable with women and I'm not likely to find anyone half as remarkable as you again." "I think I can make a reasonably good husband." "I don't want to lose you, you see." "I suppose that's the closest thing to a declaration of love that I will ever get out of you." "Am I really that weird in bed?" "Sometimes." "Shall I try to change?" "No, I kind of like it." " Daddy, I'm tired." " Here, we'll give the little lady a ride!" "Hey, Mason, be careful." "How you doing, Eddie?" "Hi, Mason." "How about a beer?" " Lf I didn't see this, I wouldn't believe it!" " You were supposed to come next week!" "Hi, what's your name?" "My name's Mason Parrish." "This is Margaret." "This is Mason." "Mason, Mr. Rosenberg I'm always telling you about." " How are you?" " Mason Parrish, nice to meet you." "Look at the family man!" "Oh, why, Eddie, you look so wonderful!" "I don't believe it." "Not again?" "When did this happen?" "Well, it's a long story." "You look wonderful." "Have you found a place yet?" "Yep." "We got a nice little place near Huntington Field." "My God, it's been seven years since we moved to San Francisco." "Arthur's going to teach at Boston U!" " Eddie's been telling me." " It's been seven years!" "I hear you just got associate professor." "Boy, you guys must be loaded!" "Two professors in one family..." "Listen, we've got a place in Maine you can use for the summer." "I'm going to Africa again in June." "Eddie will be in Mexico." "Do you know a guy named Eccheverria, University of Mexico?" "Says he worked with you in California." "Sure." "A very bright young guy." "He's here at the Botanical Museum." "We'll all have to get together." "I'm going back to Mexico with him in June." "What's in Mexico?" "Eccheverria's got this witch doctor down there, the Hinchi Indians." "They're an isolated tribe in Central Mexico who still practice the ancient Toltec rituals, sacred mushroom ceremonies that kind of thing." "Apparently they use some kind of hallucinatory drug that is supposed to evoke a common experience in all users." "Maggie's fallen asleep on the couch." "Will you take care of her?" "Sure." "Did you ever get into an isolation tank since New York?" "No." "Did you?" "No, but I've just found out there's one here at the medical school." "I didn't think anybody was doing those kind of studies anymore." "I thought we did some interesting stuff in that tank in New York for the couple of months we played around with it." "Maybe when I get back from Mexico we'll get into it again." "Okay, why not?" "A terrific housekeeper she's not." " They're getting a divorce, you know." " Who?" " I don't know if they're actually getting..." " What are you talking about?" "She and the kids are moving to a place in Cambridge." "That's why this place is such a mess." "They're moving her stuff into storage tomorrow." "Then she's going off to Africa for a year with the kids and he's going to Mexico." "And when she comes back, she's going to live in Cambridge and he's staying here." "It's him who wants the divorce, not her." "Listen, I'm surprised they stayed together this long." "When did all this happen?" "She just told me five minutes ago." "What about all those letters she kept writing us about how happy they were?" "Don't ask me." "She's still crazy about him." "He's still crazy." "Listen, Sylvia just..." "Sylvia just told me you're getting a divorce." "No, we're getting separated." "Anyway, we probably won't get around to the divorce till next year." "I mean, I know it's none of my business, but why?" "You are married to a great woman who adores you." "My God, if anybody has it made, you have." "You are a respected and an admired figure a full professor on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School." "For God's sake, is that how you imagine me?" "A respected and admired figure?" "A devoted father?" "A loving husband?" "Well, I've also published nearly two papers a year for the last seven years and not a fundamental piece of work in the lot." "I sit around the living rooms of other young married faculty members talking infantile masturbation:" ""Who's sucking up to the head of the department?"" ""Whose tenure is hanging by a thread?"" "Emily is quite content to go on with this life." "She insists she's in love with me, whatever that is." "What she means is she prefers the senseless pain... we inflict on each other to the pain... we would otherwise inflict on ourselves." "But I'm not afraid of that solitary pain." "In fact, if I don't strip myself of all this clatter and clutter and ridiculous ritual..." "I shall go out of my fucking mind!" "Does that answer your question, Arthur?" "What question was that?" "You asked me why I was getting divorced." "Listen, it's your life." "I'm sorry I even asked." "Listen... why don't I call Eccheverria and we'll all go out and have some dinner?" "As a matter of fact, Eduardo, my year in India was disappointing." "No matter how you slice it, yoga is still a state-specific technology operating in the service of an a priori belief system on which..." "We scientists have a moral obligation to the public as well as to our own research." "It just never occurred to baboons that they could shorten that time to five minutes if they used a stick." "Originally, man was just another savanna-living primate like the baboon." "What dignifies the yogic practices is that the belief system itself is not truly religious." "There is no Buddhist God, per se." "It is the self, the individual mind, that contains immortality and ultimate truth." "What the hell is not religious about that?" "You've simply replaced God with the original self." "Yes, but we've localized it." "At least we know where the self is, it's in our own minds." "It's a form of human energy." "Our atoms are six billion years old." "We've got six billion years of memory in our minds." "Memory is energy!" "It doesn't disappear!" "It's still in there!" "There's a physiological pathway to our earlier consciousnesses." "There has to be!" "I'm telling you, it's in the goddamned limbic system." "Jessup, you are a wacko!" "What's wacko about it, Mason?" "I'm a man in search of his true self." "How archetypically American can you get?" "Everybody's looking for their true selves." "We're all trying to fulfill ourselves understand ourselves, get in touch with ourselves face the reality of ourselves, explore ourselves, expand ourselves." "Ever since we dispensed with God... we've got nothing but ourselves to explain this meaningless horror of life." "You're a wacko." "Well, I think that, that true self that original self, that first self, is a real, mensurate, quantifiable thing tangible and incarnate and I'm going to find the fucker." "What are their chemical properties?" "Are they safe?" "The mushrooms are almost certainly Amanita muscaria a very powerful psychedelic, and a little dangerous." "It contains belladonna-like alkaloids atropine, scopolamine." "The sinicuiche plant is highly regarded among a number of Indian tribes." "I've seen it as far north as Chihuahua." "The Indians say it evokes old memories even ancient ones and the Hinchis call it "the first flower. "" "The "first" in the sense of primordial?" "Yes." "In the sense of the most ancient." "I'd like to try it." "Do you think they'd let me join their ritual?" "Well, they seem like agreeable people." "He says it's all right for you to participate in their ceremony." "Good." "Ask him what kind of an experience I can expect." "Are they gathering these mushrooms for the ritual?" "No, they're being harvested for next year." "Brujo!" "Your soul will return to the first soul." "Ask him what this first soul will look like." "It is unborn stuff." "Then you will propel into the void." "You will see a spot." "The spot will become a crack." "This is the crack between the nothing and out of this nothing will come your unborn soul." "He wants you to hold the root." "Put out your hand with the palm up." "Eduardo!" " Jesus Christ." " Are you all right?" "We only have their word I killed a lizard." "You didn't see it and I have no recollection of it!" "And this whole hideous business is just a joke the Indians have played on me to make the gringo look like a fool!" "Look, you asked me what happened and I told you!" "You drank the mixture and you went outside." "After a while there was a scream and some dogs were barking." "I started after you." "The screaming stopped and the brujo yelled at me to come back and forget it." "Oh, bullshit!" "Then why did you ask the brujo to give you the mixture to take back to Boston?" "I thought I'd like Arthur to analyze, maybe synthesize, it." "The noise is stupefying." "The sun became black as sackcloth." "The full moon became like blood." "Then a great mountain burning with fire... was thrown into the sea." "And the beast ascends from the bottomless pit." "The angel of the bottomless pit." "His name is..." "Abaddon." "He is off the wall." "Are you okay?" "Get this stuff!" "It's new!" "It's deafening!" "The noise is deafening!" "Can you hear me above this noise?" "Oh, my God." "The most unbelievable thing I've seen!" "I'm watching the birth agony of a mountain!" "Oh, my God." "Are you okay?" "I'm fine." "Really, I'm fine." "Do you want me to bring you down now?" "What happens now?" "He's blacked-out." "His blackouts can get pretty freaky." "Sometimes they last as long as four hours." "When he comes out of it, he's as chipper as a bird but he doesn't remember a thing." "Just how dangerous is this stuff he brought back from Mexico?" "No, I didn't say dangerous, just said it was weird." "It hangs around too long and what's really screwy is it heads straight to the brain." "Well, I don't believe this." "You guys are shooting up with an untested drug that stacks up in the brain and works in the nucleus of the cell, and you don't call that dangerous?" "For the record, we don't actually shoot up." " Eddie drinks a 10-milligram..." " It will stop now!" "You guys are supposed to be reputable scientists not two kids in the dorm freaking out on Mexican mushrooms!" "Well, why do you think I called you for?" "Let's see you stop him." "This ain't LSD, goddamn it." "This ain't no serotonin antagonist you're drinking!" "How many grams of that stuff do you think you've already got in you?" "Two?" "Three?" "You could be working up one hell of a case of cancer... with the truckload of antimetabolites in you." "The Hinchi Indians have done it for centuries with no incidence of cancer." "Fuck the Hinchi Indians!" "You don't know anything about those mushrooms!" "They seem to have fantastic staying power!" "We've shot up at least 30 rats with that stuff." "Some of them have a whopping load in them and none of them have been noticeably affected." "Where are we going now?" "I thought we were going to get something to eat." "Eddie wants to show me an isolation tank." "Isolation tank!" "You guys get flakier every time I talk to you!" "I thought all that isolation tank stuff went out in the '60s... with Timothy Leary and all them other gurus!" "Will you shut up for a minute and let somebody else say something?" "What happens during these blackout periods is you get the feeling of phenomenal acceleration like you're being shot out over millions, billions of years." "Time simply obliterates." "You sense the hallucination is going on, but you get no images." "I want to break through that blackout barrier." "I want to know what those images are that I know are going on but I can't see." "We can't raise the dosage of the drug because we're close to toxic levels now." "The only way to intensify the experience is to take the 200 milligrams along with the tank." "There's more I'd like to do to that drug before you take it again." "I'd like to do a half-life determination." " That would take us a year!" " I'd like to know the transport system." "I'd like to find some analogues." "All I know is this Mexican stuff is an extraordinary substance and every instinct I have tells me I'm onto something hot here and another 200 milligrams isn't going to kill anybody." "There it is." "Oh, it's horizontal." "It's smaller than the one we had in New York." "If they're doing sleep studies here, it must be..." "I don't think anybody's used it in years but I checked it out yesterday and it works." "It won't take a week to clean this place." "Get your ass in a sling if it ever gets out you're using an untested drug on human subjects." "Don't worry." "Nothing's going to happen to me." "Let's go get a quick hamburger." "I'm seeing one of my students tonight." "All right!" "Do what you want to do." "I think you're both irresponsible as hell." "Don't call me and tell me you're worried about Eddie putting all this shit into him!" "I'm telling you right now, don't you put any more of that shit into him until you know a hell of a lot more about it!" "I've offered you the use of my lab and all the rats you can cut!" "That's as much as I want to be implicated in your dumb experiments!" "Go get your own dumb hamburger." "I've already got my own date I'm an hour late for!" "I already did these first three." "You do the rest." "Well, well, well." "Couldn't resist, right?" "Well, somebody's gotta keep on eye on you two sorcerers." "What have you got in there, some kind of salt solution?" "Ten percent magnesium sulfate, for buoyancy." " Weird, man." " Excuse me, Mason." "One, two, three, four." "One, two, three, four." "Okay, you're fine." "Wednesday, January 7, 4:28 p. m." "Hey, this is terrific!" "I'm on a plateau..." "He went into beta like a shot." "No spindling, nothing." "Grasslands, savannas." "I feel..." "I am actually alive and inside this landscape." "A density of woodlands about a mile away." "Beyond that, mountains that seem to be smoking." "Newly born mountains, Cenozoic, latter Tertiary." "I'm in an edge-area." "Utter tranquility, but alive." "Life in the trees." "Life in the sedge." "Oh, my God the birth of man." "That's got to be it!" "My God!" "There it is a protohuman." "The first, and the original, truly human form tiny, perhaps four feet high, completely furred chimp-like, but erect." "No knuckle-walking." "Shorter arms." "He's moving along so gracefully." "There's two, three of them." "Bipedal, tiny, little furred humanoid creatures got a chunk of lava in their hands, they're stalking or hunting something." "For Christ's sake." "Are you okay, Eddie?" "I'm becoming one of them." "I'm no longer observing." "I'm one of them." "Killing, I'm killing a goat." "I'm killing..." "I'm eating..." "I'm eating the blood, hot flesh of a goat." "Are you okay?" "Beautiful." " Do you want to come down?" " No!" "It sounded like he was having a bad trip to me." "Some of these tank trips can get pretty creepy." "What the hell was that?" "Are you okay?" "Beautiful." " Do you want to stop this?" " No." " Do you want me to leave you alone?" " Yeah." "I thought you said these things don't last more than four hours." "It's quarter to 9:00." "He's coming out." "I don't like being out of contact for these long periods of time." "I think he's in shock." "He must have had a seizure, hit his head or something." "Now, hold on." "What do you want blood tests for?" "What's he say?" ""Buccal smear, blood for a karyotype..." ""also pictures for the Goodman and Sarich's lab." ""Pictures of my neck, now, before I..." ""reconstitute. "" "Before he what?" "Before he reconstitutes." "Then take his damn blood, and maybe he'll let me have a look at him." "Do you mind if I examine your neck for a minute?" " Any masses?" " No." "Stop talking shit!" "Are you trying to say your dumb hallucination has externalized?" "What did he write?" ""Not common aphasia." ""Time-space fallout from the hallucination. "" "You are a fucking flake, Jessup." "So get dressed." "I'm gonna take you over to the Brigham and do a complete workup on you." "You are a very sick dude, you dumb son of a bitch." "I'll look down your throat, do some skull films get a CAT scan, maybe even an arteriogram and I'd like an unbiased eye to look at those EEG tracings." "What's he say?" ""X-ray. "" "All right, finish up with him, Arthur, and let's get him over to x-ray." "Be right back." "Is it possible it's purely mechanical?" "Well, if it isn't neurological, it's got to be mechanical." "I'd like some plain films of this guy's neck." "A PA, a lateral and oblique." "Jesus, Doctor, I'm backed up to my ass!" "Just take the damn pictures!" "This is an emergency!" "Okay." "Might be a TIA." "I guess we'd better not tell Eddie he had blood all over his face when he came out of the tank." "He'll claim it was goat's blood from that goat he was eating in his hallucination." "You know, you're really getting as weird as he is!" "Well, what do you think happened?" "He's not the type for hysterical conversion so I'm thinking seizure." "He came out of that tank in a fugue state and had blood all over his face." "He must have had a seizure while in the tank bit his lip while convulsing, and is postictally aphasic." "I thought maybe he had a vascular insult, a stroke, a flipped embolus but neurologically he's intact, so I'm thinking seizure now." "Now you just take it easy." "None of us are so terrific at reading x-rays." "What are you guys looking for?" "Just put these in an envelope." "Who's reading tonight in radiology?" "Dr. Wissenschaft." "I want someone reliable to look at them." "I'd rather not have everyone in the Brigham in on this." "It's bad enough we've got this nosy x-ray technician." "Are you all right?" "I'm fine, Mason." "I tried to indicate this was just a transient thing." "A transient ischemic attack, that's what it was." " He's got his voice back." " It wasn't an ischemic attack!" "It wasn't a seizure." "You saw the x-rays, Mason." "There was something anterior to the larynx that looked like a laryngeal sac." "That's strictly simian." "I obviously regressed to some quasi-simian creature." "I'll show these to someone who can read them right." "'Cause you're reading them wrong." "That's all." "Because no one is going to tell me you de-differentiated your goddamn genetic structure for four goddamn hours and then reconstituted!" "I'm a professor of endocrinology at the Harvard Medical School!" "I'm an attending physician at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital!" "I'm a contributing editor to the American Journal of Endocrinology!" "And I'm a fellow and vice-president of the Eastern Association of Endocrinologists!" "And president of the Journal Club!" "And I'm not going to listen to any more of your cabalistic, quantum, frigging, dumb, limbo mumbo jumbo!" "I'm gonna show these to a radiologist!" "Do me a favor." "Conclusion:" "Bilateral aspiration pneumonia." " Do me a favor and take a look at these." " What's the story in this case?" "A 35-year-old white man, acute onset of aphasia, no history of trauma." "What are you looking for?" "It looks to me like the architecture is somewhat abnormal." "Somewhat?" "This guy is a fucking gorilla!" "Are you okay, Dr. Jessup?" "Yes." "Are you all right, Dr. Jessup?" "I'm fine." "I just want to make a few notes." "Mr. Daniel Craig..." "Emily!" "...information counter, American Airlines." "My God, you look so marvelous!" "How have you been, Eddie?" "Just fine." "You?" "Fine." "Look, there's your Daddy." "Are you going to drive us to our new house?" "You bet your life." "And depending how nice you are may even take you to a Chinese restaurant." "Anyway, don't let anybody tell you baboons aren't occasionally carnivorous." "I observed instances of predation... which involved the unmistakable behavior of hunters." "A pair of baboons killed a Thomson's gazelle and ate it." "There was even a rudimentary communication between the two baboons." "So I've become fascinated with the work being done on nonverbal communication with apes." "I've been corresponding with the Gardners at the University of Nevada." "I may just go out and spend a couple of weeks there this summer." "I've got nothing else to do except write up my report." "I don't suppose you recorded any of those baboon sounds?" "Yes, of course I did." "Why?" "I'd like very much to hear them." "Of course." "Mrs. Tally said she'll be here tomorrow morning at 10:30 to help you put everything away." "She wanted to know if you wanted her to come back to work steady." "I got a letter from Mason about a week ago just before we left Nairobi." "He says that you've been working with a very complex drug... which you brought back from Mexico." "It hasn't been thoroughly tested yet and is dangerous as hell." "What else did Mason write you?" "That over the past year you've taken about two grams of that drug yourself and that you had a very unusual instance of genetic regression about three months ago." "You may have leukemia or lymphoma." "He's been trying to get you to go for a complete workup but you've refused to go." "He's worried stiff that you're cracking up." "He thinks you're behaving very strangely and he begged me to talk to you about this when I got back." "Mason is pathologically incapable of keeping his mouth shut about anything." " He's a stupid, starched, doctrinaire idiot!" " Mason is a first-rate doctor!" "It's not leukemia!" "Or any other kind of cancer!" "I've let him do a liver-spleen scan on me and a CAT scan." "I have been probed, scoped and palpated!" "Mason's had a mirror down my throat or up my ass for the last three months and there is no evidence, no suggestion whatsoever, of cancer!" "What else did Mason write you?" "Which of these has the baboon vocalizations on them?" " I'd like to hear them." " Why?" "Did he write to you that during the regression I went through..." "I had an aphasic experience for about four hours?" "The only sounds I could get out were clicks and grunts." "My hunch is they're like the baboon vocalizations on your tapes." "Mason said you took blood tests and the lab report showed some characteristics of simian blood group systems." "As well as antigens specific to man." "I'd like to see that data." "The thing to do is for me to get back to that isolation tank and try it again!" "Let's see if it happens again!" "None of us really believes it happened." "After three months, I'm beginning to wonder if it ever happened myself." "They won't go back to the tank." "Mason's taken over the whole project." "He's got Arthur up in his lab every day fractionating rats' brains!" "What the hell am I supposed to do while they're fractionating rats' brains?" "Mommy." "Everybody thinks your father's going nuts." "Mommy, when are we going to eat?" "Run along now and play with Grace." "I am convinced that the regression was triggered by an act of consciousness." "When I was in the tank, I entered another consciousness!" "I became another self, a more primitive self and the drug in some way triggered the externalization of that other, more primitive self." "At least look at my data!" "Of course." "Maybe tomorrow afternoon..." "Don't patronize me!" "It's just possible I'm not mad, you know!" "I'm asking you to make a small quantum jump with me to accept one deviant concept that our other states of consciousness are as real as our waking state and that that reality can be externalized!" "You're screaming." "I've gotten this patronizing shit from Arthur and Mason for three months." "I'm sick of it!" "We've got millions of years stored away in that computer bank we call our minds!" "We have got trillions of dormant genes in us, our whole evolutionary past." "Perhaps I've tapped into that!" "I just want to get back into that tank and repeat the experiment." "The most elementary laboratory behavior!" "Repeat the experiment." "Confirm it!" "I would like other responsible scientists with me when I do it!" "I would like a little consensual validation on this." "We may have demonstrated a whole new force in nature!" "For God's sake, don't you agree it merits further investigation?" "I have the tapes, notes and everything at home." "What time would you like to come and look at the stuff tomorrow?" "2:00, 2:30." "I just want to get the girls." "I'll be right back." " I'll get it, I'll get it." " No, no, I will." "It's 8:30, so get washed and changed right now and I don't want any trouble from either of you tonight." "Got it?" "Hello?" "Oh, Mason." "Thank you for calling." "I assume you've spoken to Arthur." "No, no, I just got back from dinner with the kids." "Well, I just don't know what to say." "I think you're absolutely right." "He's on the verge of a breakdown." "He was here all afternoon and carried on like a madman and then just disappeared." "Ordinarily I wouldn't be this panicky, but I just am very worried." " What's the trouble?" " There's an animal loose in the basement!" "What kind of animal?" "Monkey, I think!" "Charlie!" "Charlie Thomas!" "Where are you?" "Hey listen, we've got some kind of animal loose here at B-building basement." "I'm heading into the north corridor leading to the boiler room so you guys come down the other way." "Now, watch your step." "He's a pretty good-sized ape." "Call the animal rooms and find out what the hell he's doing down here." "Must be in here somewhere." "I'm gonna take a look up here." "What the..." "Get out!" "Get on out of here!" "Hey!" "Get on out of here!" "What were you doing in the tank room?" "I remember large fragments of what happened, but not all of it." "You'll have to be patient with me." "I've had Mason looking all over Boston for you all night." "It's okay." "I'm all right." "I suppose getting a call at 2:30 in the morning from the police to the effect your husband has been found sleeping naked in the city zoo might have caused you some concern." "Yes, I think you could say that." "And Mason, writing to you this whole time that I'm having a nervous breakdown and you figured I'd finally flipped out altogether." "I'm sorry, Emily." "Forgive me." "I know what a harrowing day I've caused you." "I suppose you've been sitting here all this time trying to figure out how to get me to a psychiatrist." "As a matter of fact, I have." "I don't know how you've put up with me all these years." "I loved you." "My God, Emily, I don't know how to tell you this." "I really don't." "The implications are staggering." "Apparently I entered a very primitive consciousness." "All I can remember is what was comprehensible to that consciousness." "I don't remember, at least not clearly, how I got out of the tank room." "The first thing I remember are the dogs." "I followed a pack of wild dogs to the zoo." "That's how I got there." "In the zoo, I hunted down, killed, and ate a small sheep." "I was utterly primal." "I consisted of nothing more than the will to survive, to live through the night to eat to drink to sleep." "It was the most supremely satisfying time of my life." "I may have killed a man tonight." "I remember beating on a..." "You don't know the trouble I had getting these clothes." "I had to go down to the security office." "They want you to call the security office right now." "There was some kind of ape loose in your isolation tank room tonight." "Do you know anything about that?" "This ape almost killed a security guard." "You didn't bring some ape down to that tank room tonight, did you?" "Your watch and stuff are in your jacket pocket." "You all right?" "Is he all right?" "Tell Mason what you've been telling me." "I want to hear Mason's views on all this." "I think Mason's views will be predictable." "My God!" "There it is a protohuman." "The first and the original, truly human form tiny, perhaps four feet high, completely furred chimp-like, but erect." "No knuckle-walking." "Shorter arms." "He's moving along so gracefully." "There's two, three of them." "Bipedal, tiny..." "Killing, I'm killing a goat." "I'm killing..." "I'm eating hot flesh." "I'm eating the blood of a goat." "Are you okay?" "Beautiful." "Beautiful." "It sounded like he was having a bad trip to me." "Some of these tank trips can get pretty creepy." "What the hell was that?" "Did I wake you?" "It's Emily." "Eddie, I'm in a kind of wild panic." "I need to talk to you." "I don't know how even to put this into words but I'm beginning to think that what happened to you... was not just a hallucinatory experience." "I've got this gut feeling that something phenomenological did actually happen that there was some kind of genetic transformation." "I don't know why I think this, in defiance of all rationality, but I do." "And now that I do, I'm terrified." "I mean really terrified." "Petrified." "So am I." "I don't want you doing this experiment again next week." "I have to find out if it actually happened." "I'm asking you to put the experiment off until we understand a little more, in order to minimize the risk." "You can't understand this without working back from the event." "But you may be causing yourself irreversible genetic damage!" "We're not dealing with genetics!" "We're beyond mass and matter here, beyond even energy." "What we're back to is the first thought." "I'm trying to tell you I love you." "I know that." "And I'm trying to tell you, this is an all-bets-are-off sort of thing." "We may be opening a black box that may scrap our whole picture of space-time." "We might even have a link to another universe." "For God's sake, Emily, you're a scientist." "You must know how I feel." "Yes, I know how you feel." "It's very late, Eddie." "Would you like to stay here tonight?" "I could do with a little love and a little reassurance right now." "You'll stay, won't you?" "If I come out of that tank anthropoid, I'll be in a very primitive state and impossible to relate to, so sedate me while I'm still in the tank otherwise you'll have to chase me around and subdue me." "Okay." "I'll tell you one thing, you come out of that tank looking like an ape and I'm going over to Mass." "Mental and commit myself." "If it happens, we'll bring him down with a big bolus of Amytal." "What do you mean "if it happens"?" "Everybody keeps saying "if it happens!"" "Do you think something is gonna happen?" "Because I'd like to know." "I'm sorry." "I'm just nervous as hell." "Listen, so am I." "Anything happen?" "I just checked him 10 minutes ago." "Did you order chicken or turkey?" "I hope chicken is all right." "Look, I've got nearly 11:00." "That's more than two hours now." "I think we should stop this." "I'll tell you frankly, I'm really frightened!" "We could be screwing around with his whole genetic structure!" "Now how do we stop this?" " Can you bring him down?" " He's gonna be sore as hell." "We should never have let him do it!" "I don't know how we let him talk us into this." "We were humoring him, but we know he's not crazy and we all know, deep in our hearts that he may be onto something that is beyond our own comprehension!" "Now, because I believe him, I want this thing stopped!" "His signs are all good." "He'll probably sleep a day or two, come out a little stuporous." "He's got a whopping load of drugs in him." "It's not uncommon for a psychedelic experience like this to whack you out for a couple of days." "You'd hardly call this just a psychedelic experience." "His heart is good." "His pressure is good." "I'm more worried about you than I am about him." "I'm all right." "Of all the goddamn men in this world, why do I have to love this one?" "I can't get him out of me." "Do you know how many men I tried to fall in love with this past year?" "No matter who I'm in bed with, I have to imagine it's him or nothing happens." "No matter who I'm eating with or walking with there's always this pain because it isn't him." "I'm possessed by him." "Oh, it's crazy!" "I think that's the way it's supposed to be." "But he doesn't give a damn about me!" "Emily, you're the only thing he cares about outside of his work." "I was never real to him." "Nothing in the human condition was ever real to him." "He's a truth lover." "Reality to Eddie is only that which is changeless, immutably constant." "What happened to Eddie tonight, that was Eddie's idea of love." "That was consummation." "He finally got it off with God." "He finally embraced the absolute, was finally ravished by truth and it goddamn near destroyed him!" "He never loved me." "You knew him as well as I did." "We were all bits of transitory matter to him." "All right, now, you're going into shock." "I'm going to get you something." "We reached a point tonight where physical science just breaks down." "We're in blue skies!" "Tonight was history, and what are we gonna do about it?" "I'm gonna do nothing about it!" "Tonight scared the hell out of me!" "That tank just blew up!" "Whatever happened inside that tank released a hell of a lot of energy." "For God's sake, let's drop this goddamn thing." "I don't want to talk about it." "I can't help it!" "You may want to go to sleep right now but the way I feel I don't expect to go to sleep for a year." "I'm on fucking fire!" "I am in there mopping up the goddamned tank room and I would like to know why!" "Do you believe in supernatural agencies, Mason?" "No, sir, I do not!" "Then what we saw tonight was a physical phenomenon an inexplicable physical phenomenon!" "If it's phenomenological, then it's explicable." "I've got to know why." "Let me talk, for Christ's sake!" "I have been in there mopping up that goddamn tank room for the last three hours..." "I don't want to think about it!" "I can tell you what I would like to do!" "We have got to repeat this with other human subjects!" "We need a selective sample." "We will put up a notice in the student union for volunteers." "And get five or six subjects and go back to square one with them and step up the doses of the drug in a graduated fashion and check them against Eddie's values!" "We could even get a grant, for Christ's sake!" "The big moral stand and here you are, willing to use an untested drug on innocent human beings!" "Please stop shouting!" "How are you?" "Would you like to go back to sleep?" "Yes." "Would you mind if Mason had a quick look at you first?" "It's a good idea." "Maybe you ought to have a quick look at him, Mason." "Oh, I hope it isn't the kids." "Hello?" "Everything's fine, Arthur." "He's fine." " It's Arthur." "Are you fine?" " Yes." "Arthur, I'll call you back when I'm more awake." "Everything's fine." "God, I wonder what time it is." "I should call the kids." "I can't tell you how much you mean to me how much I need you and the kids." "I just wanted you to know that." "You saved me." "You redeemed me from the pit." "I was in it, Emily." "I was in that ultimate moment of terror that is the beginning of life." "It is nothing." "Simple, hideous nothing." "The final truth of all things is that there is no final truth." "Truth is what's transitory." "It's human life that is real." "I don't want to frighten you, Emily but what I'm trying to tell you is that, that moment of terror is a real and living horror, living and growing within me now and the only thing that keeps it from devouring me is you." "Why don't you just come back to us?" "It's too late." "I don't think I can get out of it anymore." "I can't live with it." "The pain is too great." "Defy it, Eddie!" "You made it real." "You can make it unreal!" "If you love me, Eddie if you love me!" "Eddie!" "Defy it!" "I love you, Emily."