William Vollmann - The Atlas

The mushroom laugh was the crowd of raven masks. By the time we got to the first lake, where Jenny was waiting with the picnic, it had started to devour me.

Paul, that gangly mushroom veteran, wanted to help, and assured me many times that day that I could control the laugh and do what I wished with it. That had certainly been my experience with psilocybin before. But on this occasion the mushrooms were very strong; and perhaps there was some poison in them. My joy sneaked off, and up strode an immense pain which convulsed me into a ball, like a wolf in a strychnine cramp. I lay on my side at the edge of a lake which continually changed its shape. When I closed my eyes I saw sickening neon lines as in some hellish disco, which would not remain still or even unique; they doubled and tripled nauseatingly, remaining one even when they were three; and it was only later that I thought of Catholic theology. When I opened my eyes I was compelled to watch the shelf of rock I lay on changing color from pink to green, while my jacket did likewise, and its camouflage blotches crawled, oozed and contracted. I thought that if I observed any of these phenomena very long I'd go mad. The state I was in already resembled madness. My existence therefore became a constant struggle to change my perceptions, to focus my senses on something new which the mushrooms had not yet contaminated; of course this battle could not be won because whatever I found the mushrooms immediately seized. There was one stem which I had eaten only recently, and I knew that this stem was inside me, laughing the mushroom laugh, waiting to wrestle with me in its own time even as I fought with the others.

There's something in this batch that we have to fight, Paul was saying, his face pale.

I could not answer him.

Jenny, who had not yet been affected, came and put her arm around me. After a long time I was able to say to her: I love you. — These words were a leathery thing, part boat and part seedpod, which came out of my mouth and crossed the space between my understanding and hers. I felt that we were falling farther and farther away from each other, dwindling out of each other's souls.

Lifting my watch in an attempt to learn how long I'd have to wait for the drug to wear off, I saw the minute hand, pure black on the golden dial, contract into its own shadow, turning inside itself and passing through the center of the watch until it pointed to a different plane than the hour hand.

He's curled into a salamander, I heard Paul say to Jenny. He's watching the bugs in his head.

This terrified me. I believed then that Paul could see everything about me, that he could look into my head where my soul lay curled on its side, and my soul was a huge, fat, bewhiskered white maggot which Paul despised.

I tried to eat a biscuit to help absorb some of the drug, but it was all I could do to chew. The lump of sweetened starch tasted hideous under my tongue; everything nauseated me. It refused to dissolve, crouching under my tongue, soaking up saliva until my mouth was a desert; it was another inimical foreign thing that I had to war with. Raising my head in an attempt to swallow, I saw Paul, and his face dissolved into a pale white cheese as he soundlessly screamed backwards into space, leaving a contrail of black blood in the air before his mouth. Even as this happened I was aware that Paul had not been hurt, that this was a memory of my two friends who'd died outside that city of scorched silence.

Paul and Jenny wanted me to get up.

I knew that I was in a place I was a part of, so much a part of that I could never find my way out; there was not any in or out. I'm sure that this must be the way that animals perceive, this experiencing without reasoning. I don't mean to say that reasoning is good or bad. I enjoy my ability to reason, and yet I also recognize that reason is a prison. With great effort I was able to find rags of that shimmering tent of conventions I lived in. For example, when Jenny asked me if I could remember the name of a certain mountain in Tasmania, I thought for a long time, then finally was able to uncover half the name, which I thought might be helpful. I wasn't certain whether this was the first or last word in the mountain's name (which I did know was composed of two words). The word was peak . And I could not understand why Jenny laughed after I thought that I had helped her.

Jenny has a dog which is not very intelligent. Sometimes when I call the dog it will come a few steps, then get distracted by some sunny spot or rotten smell, and I'll have to call it again. That was how I was on this day. Jenny would call me and I would follow her; sometimes she would take my hand or even push me, and I'd know that she was there and react to her, but in the fifteen-second intervals between her calls or touches she would cease to exist for me. It was not that I ever forgot her; her reappearances never surprised me; nor did I stop walking, but she was no more or less important than everything else. This is true and not true. In some way she was very important to me, but without being in my mind except when she called to me. I did not want to hurt her or make her anxious. This in turn increased my own anxiety, because I wanted to do whatever she wanted me to do; and at the same time I knew that her sense of direction was very bad and that she might very well get us lost in the forest, but I was unable to explain to her why she should not be leading me further into the mountains — or perhaps she understood well enough that I did not feel right about going with her, but Jenny can be very obstinate and anyway she was my guardian; I could not reason, so it did not matter what I thought.

I felt terribly alone. Even though she was not far ahead of me on the trail, continually calling to me from just out of sight, I felt that she had let me go. (Paul I could not see.) There was no blame attached to this. I did not feel that she had deliberately rejected me; it was simply that we were drifting farther and farther apart. Often I would look around me and see only trees and rocks and lake and sky, all alien and borderless and vivid like those paintings of dense dark forests in old Canada; and I would feel so alone and believe that I might possibly be there alone forever. So I was freed from the cage of rationality, and imprisoned in the cage of brutishness. Then Jenny would call my name again, and I'd understand that I was not alone after all and that I was still walking. Then I could not understand what the trail was anymore. I heard her calling my name over and over from not very far away, and after an immense struggle I succeeded in saying that between every two trees was a trail. I stood staring at those hundreds or thousands of trails in front of me, and finally Jenny had to come to lead me by the hand. Then she was gone again, and I passed through the forest, which I experienced in a low wide way like a four-legged beast. I was alone, and I always would be alone — and not just always, but also forever and infinitely. I had already been alone forever — so alone! — and this grieved and exhausted me beyond description but I understood that I could do nothing about it but struggle to endure. My soul was maimed and suffering. God was all around me but I felt no less alone. The twisted silvery trees were all growing toward and inside God, conscious of Him as He was of them and me, but they could not reach me as I could not express myself to them because only the relationship with God was real and I could not get at God or come to grips with Him because He was everywhere and I was only toiling through Him, just as a person can walk all day and never put the sun behind him. And I strained to speak with God. It was no easier to express myself to Him than it had been to Jenny, but no more difficult. I was burdened with sadness and also with pain from the mushroom poison which resembled a steel spider with scorpion claws crouched inside my rib cage, pinching from my heart all the way to my belly; and the pain was the same as the sadness. I was crying for my dead friends, and I asked God whether what I was now suffering, which seemed more intense than any other agony I'd ever felt, was worth having been spared in Bosnia. And God was in the trees and between them; I was speaking with God and walking with Him, asking only this question, and only once; it echoed like a note on the piano when the reverberator pedal is pressed; and then I asked Him why He created people only to shatter them. I was so sad and I had no answer but I knew that He heard me and I was going on; I would go on until He smashed me to bits, and I accepted that. There was a moment when I was able to pray for my friends and also for Jenny and Paul and for myself. Hours later, when the drug let me go with a snap of its claws, I was surprised to find that I felt calm and at peace. I think it was because I'd been heard, had asked and accepted the fact that there would never be any answer, that I must go on in my solitude just as I'd had to do in the car when my friends slumped dead and bleeding and I waited for the next shot.