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“You know, Mark, this is certainly turning into a strange trip.”

“You ought to see it from here, Simon. You ought to see it from here.”

I hoped that all the terrors were simply a matter of earning a place on the ferry, that God or whoever simply didn’t want me in the Powell River area. But once we were on, the shit didn’t stop, it just got worse. Maybe the next ferry or getting to Vancouver would do the trick, but I was fast losing hope that whatever was going on was going to have a nice simple answer.

“You know, Mark, this whole thing is really giving me a whole new outlook on mental illness.”

“Yes, I expect it would.” If Simon wanted to think that that was the explanation for what was going on, it was fine with me. Whatever model he wanted to use was fine.

“You know, I don’t think I ever really understood it very well before. This puts a whole new light on it.”

“Doesn’t it? Even though I worked in the hospital and have dealt with it and thought about it a lot, I never really caught on before.”

“It’s giving me a whole new respect.”

“It’s been a very well-kept secret. No one talks about it at all. It makes sex and drugs look like apple pie.”

That crazy people were into something very real, some sort of truth, was not a very original thought. The only thing that had kept me out of the nut house till now was a certain form of denseness and/or cowardice. That the truth was what was driving me nuts, followed.

In my more lucid moments I realized that insanity was a fairly reasonable explanation for what was happening to me. The problem was that it wasn’t useful information. Realizing I was crazy didn’t make the crazy stuff stop happening. Nor did it give me any clues about what I should do next.

For me to have sat around calling the crazy stuff “crazy” would have been the most wasteful, unimaginative thing I could have done. There were so many much better things to do with it. Like acid revelations, some of it now looks trivial or meaningless, but much of it remains as valuable to me now as it was then.

The trouble was that there was much too much, much too fast. A lifetime course in sexuality crammed into five minutes, followed immediately by all of Russian literature and a career as a prizefighter, playing in stereo with an exhaustive study of medieval imagery related to theories of higher math. No five minutes to get from class to class, let alone evenings to think it over. What I suspect about most of the stuff I’ve thrown out as nonsense is that if things had gone a little slower, if I had had time to copy over my notes and get the right perspective on it, those things too would have been important.

I was thrilled to be picking up so much so fast, but always in the back of my mind was the ominous: Something’s trying to fill me in on everything at once. There must not be much time.

THE VOICES. Testing one, two, testing one. Checking out the circuits: “What hath God wrought. Yip di mina di zonda za da boom di yaidi yoohoo.”

By this time the voices had gotten very clear.

At first I’d had to strain to hear or understand them. They were soft and working with some pretty tricky codes. Snap-crackle-pops, the sound of the wind with blinking lights and horns for punctuation. I broke the code and somehow was able to internalize it to the point where it was just like hearing words. In the beginning it seemed mostly nonsense, but as things went along they made more and more sense. Once you hear the voices, you realize they’ve always been there. It’s just a matter of being tuned to them.

The voices weren’t much fun in the beginning. Part of it was simply my being uncomfortable about hearing voices no matter what they had to say, but the early voices were mostly bearers of bad news. Besides, they didn’t seem to like me much and there was no way I could talk back to them. Those were very one-sided conversations.

But later the voices could be very pleasant. They’d often be the voice of someone I loved, and even if they weren’t, I could talk too, asking questions about this or that and getting reasonable