The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (42 page)

During that period just after our experiment, I spent most of my time wandering in my own private world; my contact with anyone else’s was tangential and occasional. That’s a crucial difference between what Terence thought I was experiencing and what I really was experiencing. My thoughts and deeds in what I understood to be hyperspace were far more real to me than external events, even the anomalous ones I participated in and may have caused. But however real those internal processes seemed, they are hard to reconstruct, partly because they lack sequential structure, a chronology that would lend my fragmented memories some coherence.

That Terence retained a chronological sense of the interlude in question is another clue to our different experiences. There were times when my rants or just my wild gaze, absent my glasses, brought him “brief stabs of despair,” he writes. He’d been reminded again how far away was the place from which I had to return. Nevertheless, he clung to his position that I was steadily getting better and just needed some time.

Chapter 33 - The Bell Tower and a UFO

While we were reintegrating ourselves, life continued to unfold in the real world shared by Vanessa, Dave, and Ev. Though Ev had observed the experiment and would witness some bizarre events after it, she hadn’t been so powerfully affected. As someone I’d describe as half in and half out of our reality, she became a kind of emissary between the camps. Several factors were slowly nudging us toward the merger of our shamanic timeframe with theirs. Put more plainly, we were under growing pressure to accept the consensus view that we ought to engineer our exit from La Chorrera sooner rather than later. Vanessa’s injured ankle, twisted on the log ladder into our hut, was still swollen and painful; it was hard to imagine her retracing the long hike in. Meanwhile, our supplies were running low. The decisive factor arose suddenly, however, and began with me.

By the morning of March 10 my reintegration had progressed well; I could carry on a conversation and was almost rational in my responses—deceptively so. Terence wrongly assumed he could briefly leave me alone at the hut while he and Ev slipped away for a little Lepidoptera hunting, a field trip they extended for a little lovemaking in the semi-privacy along the trail. Leaving me untended proved to be a mistake. No sooner had they left than I bolted from the hut and headed for the mission’s main square, where I created a huge racket by vigorously ringing the church bell, a ritual usually reserved for calling the faithful to Sunday mass. Terence heard the bell and came running, though by then the damage was done. As for me, all I remember is my desire to leave the hut and go among the people, overwhelmed by a messianic impulse to heal. I had discovered the power and I was eager to use it.

Until then, we’d pretty much kept to ourselves; we had little contact with the mission personnel or the area’s few Witotos. There had been rumors that one of us was a little bit off, but my spectacular performance at the bell tower turned that to fact, and our isolation abruptly ended. Whatever my reasons, my actions were a serious breach of protocol, and the resulting stir wrested my care out of Terence’s hands. Vanessa, already insistent that we get out of there, now had the backing of the padre and the police. Moreover, as she learned, a plane just happened to be on the way. The others quickly decided that Dave would leave on the plane, return to San Rafael to collect our stored supplies, and make his way back up the Putumayo and eventually to Bogotá. No sooner had Dave collected his gear than the plane landed on the water, he got onboard, and the plane took off, vanishing into the clouds.

With Dave’s departure, our badly strained brotherhood was now four: Terence, Ev, Vanessa, and me. The others moved me from the forest house into the river house, close to the police station where I could be monitored. Vanessa and Ev took over my care, leaving Terence alone in the other hut. A day later, word reached us that the bush pilot had agreed to return in a few days for the rest of us, a plan Terence had little choice but to accept. None of us knew exactly when the plane would arrive. We were told to have our gear packed and be ready to leave on a moment’s notice.

The forces we’d unleashed—whether in our heads, in the external world, or in both—remained at play. Many of the oddest and least explicable events involving apparent eruptions of the paranormal occurred in the period between Dave’s departure and our extraction five days later. It was shortly after Dave had left that I manifested the silver key. Terence had been freed from the need to keep his sleepless watch over me, but that didn’t mean he slept. He passed his insomniac nights beneath the starry canopy, haunting the pasture and trails near the
chorro
, lost in reveries of time and space with the great wheel of the galactic mandala reeling above as though in reflection of the cosmic cycles unfolding in his waking dream. There is a fervent and beautiful vividness to his account of the sweeping thoughts and visions he had in the company of “the deeper something that shared my mind.” A reader can’t help but feel those hours he spent alone may have been among the most fateful of his life.

Shortly before sunset one evening, Ev noticed a thunderhead suddenly develop on the southeastern horizon, roiling upward into the shape of an enormous mushroom cloud towering over the Amazonian plain. As Terence and Ev were witnessing this, Ev reminded Terence of my quip about the nuclear mushroom cloud being a biophysical pun on the transformative power of
Psilocybe cubensis
. The mushroom at the end of history was of fungal not thermonuclear origin, I maintained, an actual mushroom that would lead our species beyond history. As they stood and watched that churning mass assume its immense form, a bright shaft of light emerged out of the cloud’s base and fell on the landscape below. It could not have been the sun because that was setting to the west and they were gazing toward the southeastern horizon. Over the new few days, oddly turbulent clouds, shimmering patches of refracted light, and other atmospheric anomalies persisted in the southeastern sky. The Teacher, still very much in our midst, informed Terence to keep watching. His vigilance continued through yet another sleepless night, this one spent beside the lake; it ended on the morning of March 14 with an encounter that, in his words, “marked for me the culmination of our work at La Chorerra.” Here’s how he describes it in
True Hallucinations
:

In the gray of a false dawn, the wave of internal imagery faded away. I rose from where I had been sitting for hours and stretched. The sky was clear, but it was still very early and stars were still shining dimly in the west. In the southeast, the direction toward which my attention had been focused, the sky was clear except for a line of fog or ground mist lying parallel to the horizon only a few feet above the tree tops on the other side of the river, perhaps a half mile away As I stretched and stood up on the flat stone where I had been sitting, I noticed that the line of fog seemed to have grown darker, and now seemed to be churning or rolling in place. I watched very carefully as the rolling line of darkening mist split into two parts and each of these smaller clouds also divided apart. It took only a minute or so for these changes to be executed, and I was now looking at four lens-shaped clouds of the same size lying in a row slightly above the horizon, only a half mile or so away. A wave of excitement swept through me followed by a wave of definite fear. I was glued to the spot, unable to move, as in a dream.

As I watched, the clouds recoalesced in the same way that they had divided apart, taking another few minutes. The symmetry of this dividing and rejoining, and the fact that the smaller clouds were all the same size, lent the performance an eerie air, as if nature herself were suddenly the tool of some unseen organizing agency. As the clouds recoalesced, they seemed to grow even darker and more opaque. As they all became one, the cloud seemed to swirl inward like a tornado or waterspout, and it flashed into my mind that perhaps it was a waterspout—something I still have never seen. I heard a high-pitched, ululating whine come drifting over the jungle tree tops, obviously from the direction of the thing I was watching.

The siren sound was rapidly gaining pitch, and in fact, everything seemed to be speeding up. The moving cloud was definitely growing larger rapidly, moving straight toward the place where I was. I felt my legs turn to water and sat down, shaking terribly. For the first time, I truly believed in all that had happened to us, and I knew that the flying concrescence was now about to take me. Its details seemed to solidify as it approached. Then it passed directly overhead at an altitude of about two hundred feet, banked steeply upward, and was lost from sight over the edge of the slope behind me.

In the last moment before it was lost, I completely threw open my senses to it and I saw it very clearly. It was a saucer-shaped machine rotating slowly, with unobtrusive, soft, blue and orange lights. As it passed over me I could see symmetrical indentations on the underside. It was making the whee, whee, whee sound of science fiction flying saucers.

My emotions were all in a jumble. At first I was terrified, but the moment I knew that whatever was in the sky was not going to take me, I felt disappointment. I was amazed and I was trying to remember what I had seen as clearly as possible. Was it real in the naive sense in which that question is asked of UFOs and tables and chairs? No one saw this thing as far as I know. I alone was its observer. I believe that had there been other observers, they would have seen essentially what I have reported, but as for “real,” who can say? I saw this go from being a bit of cloud to being a rivet-studded aircraft of some kind. Was it more true to itself as cloud or aircraft? Was it a hallucination? Against my testimony can be put my admitted lack of sleep and our involvement with psychedelic plants. Yet curiously this last point can be interpreted in my favor. I am familiar through direct experience with every known class of hallucinogen. What I saw that morning did not fall into any of the categories of hallucinated imagery I am familiar with.

Yet also against my testimony is the inevitable incongruous detail that seems to render the whole incident absurd. It is that as the saucer passed overhead, I saw it clearly enough to judge that it was identical with the UFO, with three half-spheres on its underside, that appears in an infamous photo by George Adamski widely assumed to be a hoax. I had not closely followed the matter, but I accepted the expert opinion that what Adamski had photographed was a rigged up end-cap of a Hoover vacuum cleaner. But I saw this same object in the sky above La Chorrera. Was it a fact picked up as a boyhood UFO enthusiast? Something as easily picked out of my mind as other memories seem to have been? My stereotyped, but already debunked, notion of a UFO suddenly appears in the sky. By appearing in a form that casts doubt on itself, it achieves a more complete cognitive dissonance than if its seeming alienness were completely convincing.

It was, if you ask me—and there is no one else really that one can ask—either a holographic mirage of a technical perfection impossible on earth today or it was the manifestation of something that which in that instance chose to begin as mist and end as machine, but which could have appeared in any form, a manifestation of a humorous something’s omniscient control over the world of form and matter. (TH, pp. 157-159)

A day later, on March 15, with the UFO incident and Terence’s account of it still echoing in our memories, a flying object distinctly of this dimension appeared on the horizon. A moment later the bush pilot’s floatplane settled on the water and taxied to the dock. It took only a few minutes to toss aboard our gear, which we’d reduced to our notebooks, plant presses, the butterfly net, and specimens, leaving much of the rest behind. Moments later we had cleared the treetops, and the humped cattle in the verdant pasture at La Chorrera disappeared into the mists.

The pilot dropped us off in Leticia, a port town on the Amazon in the far southeastern corner of Colombia, near the borders of Brazil and Peru. We checked into a cheap hotel and enjoyed our first hot showers and restaurant food since we’d left Florencia some forty-five days earlier. After a couple of days there, we headed for Bogotá.

To all outward appearances, I was much improved. I knew where I was, more or less, and could carry on a conversation, more or less, at least according to Terence. From my own sketchy recollections, I’d say I was far from fully well. I could put on a brave face and maintain decorum in public, but I hadn’t yet entirely left the world of fantasy, puns, and wild ideas. Then again, I was definitely on the mend. Whatever had happened to me, whether a protracted biochemical imbalance or a loss of my way in a trackless shamanic wilderness, I was slowly returning.

The Bogotá interlude passed quietly. We spent much of our time in Ev’s apartment, where I mostly stayed in bed, often engaged in conversation with a large, skull-shaped stain on the ceiling. Words in conversations would set me off into poetry and puns. I was still in a dream state most of the time, awake or not; but the bizarre ideations and voices were slowly fading.

Terence mentions that on March 20 we all celebrated at one of Bogotá’s finer restaurants, and that the others agreed I was “totally back.” They weren’t aware that, in my mind, I was in telepathic communications with all the waiters, and that our dishes were being wafted to the table by telekinesis. Rather than alarm them, I kept that to myself. But except for a few episodes like that, I was doing all right. I didn’t want to talk about triggering the alchemical transmutation of my own DNA and the end of history. I was happy my private voyage had been allowed to play itself out, but I was just as happy to be a human being again, rooted in space and time. I was acutely aware of how close I had come to losing it completely, and I was grateful for my good fortune, my guardian angels, and my brother, Terence, who though he may have driven me mad, also brought me back, back from the screaming abyss. I am certain to this day that without him I would have remained lost forever.