Dear Cary - Dyan Cannon [106]
The specter of prying Jennifer loose from Cary with divorce was more terrifying, more painful, and more unbearable than any session of LSD. The way things were, there were three of us in a lifeboat that only had room for two. I had been drinking salt water for too long, and I wouldn’t last much longer if I kept it up. But to push Cary out of the boat and separate him from his family? He would drown, I thought. He would drown in anguish. Of course, he would be able to see her, but I felt deeply that he needed the complete family—Jennifer and me—to keep his dream.
I was convinced of this. I was sure I was the only thing holding the three of us together, individually and collectively, but I was not far from drying to dust and scattering to the four winds. Even if I managed to keep myself in one piece, though, what would the poisonous and oppressive atmosphere do to Jennifer?
Over and over, I tried to balance these ideas against each other. I got nowhere.
I was scared for myself. I was scared of dying. Something was wrong with me. I hadn’t been myself in a while, and I wondered if it had something to do with LSD. I had been having memory lapses and midstream gaps in my concentration. I would forget what I was saying in midsentence, forget what I was doing in midaction, forget where I was going, even from room to room. I kept thinking tomorrow would be better. I was certain tomorrow would be better. But what about today?
I brooded over what to do. Cary was obsessed with the idea that LSD would make me whole. I wished I could believe him, but how could I when the wondrous benefits he claimed to have received from it were invisible to me? But I had to do it, I decided. For the sake of being able to say I’d tried everything, I had to give it one more shot.
That night we lay on the bed in the dark, each stretched out with our arms folded over our chests, like two bodies in repose on a funeral slab.
“If you want me to try LSD again, I will,” I said.
Cary stretched his arm across me and pulled me closer. “I knew you weren’t a quitter,” he said. “You almost made it last time. Dyan, I can’t even describe to you what’s waiting for you on the other side. Only that it is a whole new universe.”
“Is that where God lives?” I asked wearily.
“Thank you for trusting me, dear girl. You won’t be sorry.”
So, to reach one more time for that golden star of transformation, I went back for another dose. I took Vince and Artis up on their long-standing offer to take Jennifer and the nanny for a day. They came for them at about ten, and we took the drug at eleven. An hour later I looked out the long living room window at the swimming pool, from which sprang a tall, powder-blue maple tree, into which a huge flock of crows descended. I could hear them cawing, and the sound of it grew louder and louder, becoming ever more distorted until it sounded like the motor of a chain saw, except much lower. The crows and the whole tree turned red—and then faded into a rose-colored glow that reminded me of the taillights of an old Chevy. Then the birds dissolved into a unified mass around the tree in the shape of a gigantic heart that throbbed and thrummed with a terrifying echo.
Cary asked what I was seeing, and I described this to him. “Stay with it,” he told me, but I was getting very uncomfortable.
I was utterly convinced that my blood vessels were going to burst through my skin any minute. Oh, and my teeth were buzzing. “Cary, I think I’m really going to lose it.”
“You can handle it. You’re getting there.”
“Getting where?”
“Let your mind enter the vision. The truth is wrapped up inside of it.”
I looked at Cary. There was a kind of energy pulsating from his body that I wasn’t sure I could see but that