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By Root 892 0

Bay who had spent their previous summers in the Hamptons scooping ice cream, all marching off into the jungle ready to ingest anything that was given to them. The way they opened their mouths and closed their eyes you would have thought the Lakashi were distributing communion. Actually, the ceremony would have made a striking program for interdisciplinary studies—biology, anthropology, world religion. I certainly found it compelling as a medical student to see how long a person could sustain such a low heart rate. In the whole lot of them there wasn’t a pulse over twenty-four. I once brought a cuff with me and monitored the Lakashi and the students every twenty minutes for five hours after they had reached a state of unconsciousness. Their diastolic pressure ticked in slightly above dead. I was only testing for my own interest but if I could have put together a committed control group it could have been an important study over time.”

“Did you—” Marina wasn’t exactly sure how to phrase the question.

“I did, of course, but mycology was never my field. I was more interested in recording the subjects. Let the botanist take notes on his own trip, I say. I was of great assistance to Dr. Rapp in this way. He never had a graduate student who was willing to abstain for purposes of observation. I didn’t mind that, of course, I was glad to help the science. The real problem was the Lakashi themselves. Once the women realized I wasn’t going on the trip anymore they started piling all the babies around me, all the children. I put a quick stop to that.”

“The children were participating?”

“I suppose that conflicts with your ideas of good parenting. In retrospect, I can see how you would have preferred me to stop them, but I didn’t know you at the time.”

“That’s fine. I’m not interested in the children,” Marina said, and in fact she was telling the truth. From what she could tell, the Lakashi children were constructed out of titanium. They ate random berries and were bitten by spiders and fell out of trees and swam with piranha and they were fine. She could hardly see how a regular dosing of hallucinogens could make a difference. “But when you did go on the trip, as you say, did you enjoy it?” Marina had given her youth to studying, believing all the propaganda of the dangers of drugs while her worshiped professor was spending her weekends in the Amazon eating mushrooms. She felt she deserved to know at least secondhand if it had been any fun.

Dr. Swenson took off her reading glasses and pressed her fingertips hard against the bridge of her nose. “I keep hoping that you are more than you show yourself to be, Dr. Singh. I am just on the verge of liking you but you dwell on the most mundane points. Yes, of course it was interesting to take part in the ritual, that was what we had come here to do. It was slightly terrifying the first time, all of the screaming and the smoke, in that way it was a little like your experience coming up the river at night, except that you are all very close together in one giant, enclosed hut. Seeing God was worthwhile, of course. I doubt seriously that anything in our Western tradition would have shown Him to me so personally. I remember Dr. Rapp would feel quite humbled for several days after the experience and would continue to see a great deal of purple. We all would. But in the final assessment I am a person who loathes vomiting, and there is a great deal of vomiting involved in the Lakashi ritual. It is an unavoidable part of the program. The body isn’t capable of processing that amount of poison without—” Dr. Swenson, who was sitting on a low stool in front of a table she used for her desk, closed her eyes as if she were remembering the experience. She kept her eyes closed for entirely too long.

“Dr. Swenson?”

She held up her hand and shook her head almost imperceptibly, warding off further questions. Then she stood up, looking watery and pale, and, going quickly out the door, vomited next to the front steps.

Dear Jim,

It is true that no one here has a telephone. I believe it has something to