We had plenty to talk about the next time we met. My failure to recognize her, my seeing her as a “replica,” she thought, was a complex form of defense, a dissociation which could only be called psychotic. I disagreed and maintained that my seeing her as a duplicate or impostor was neurological in origin, a disconnection between perception and feelings. The ability to identify (which was intact) had not been accompanied by the appropriate feeling of warmth and familiarity, and it was this contradiction which had led to the logical though absurd conclusion that she was a “duplicate.” (This syndrome, which can occur in schizophrenia, but also with dementia or delirium, is known as Capgras syndrome.) Augusta said that whichever view was correct, taking mind-altering drugs every weekend, alone, and in high doses, surely testified to some intense inner needs or conflicts, and that I should explore these with a therapist. (In retrospect, I am sure she was right, and I began seeing an analyst a year later.)
The summer of 1965 was a sort of in-between time: I had completed my residency at UCLA and had left California, but I had three months ahead of me before taking up a research fellowship in New York. This should have been a time of delicious freedom, a wonderful and needed holiday after the sixty- and sometimes eighty-hour workweeks I had had at UCLA. But I did not feel free; I get unmoored, have a sense of emptiness and structurelessness, when I am not working — it was weekends which were the danger times, the drug times, when I lived in California — and now an entire summer in my hometown, London, stretched before me like a three-month-long weekend.
It was during this idle, mischievous time that I descended deeper into drug taking, no longer confining it to weekends. I tried intravenous injection, which I had never done before. My parents, both physicians, were away, and, having the house to myself, I decided to explore the drug cabinet in their surgery on the ground floor for something special to celebrate my thirty-second birthday. I had never taken morphine or any opiates before. I used a large syringe — why bother with piddling doses? And after settling myself comfortably in bed, I drew up the contents of several vials, plunged the needle into a vein, and injected the morphine very slowly.
Within a minute or so, my attention was drawn to a sort of commotion on the sleeve of my dressing gown, which hung on the door. I gazed intently at this, and as I did so, it resolved itself into a miniature but microscopically detailed battle scene. I could see silken tents of different colors, the largest of which was flying a royal pennant. There were gaily caparisoned horses, soldiers on horseback, their armor glinting in the sun, and men with longbows. I saw pipers with long silver pipes, raising these to their mouths, and then, very faintly, I heard their piping, too. I saw hundreds, thousands of men — two armies, two nations — preparing to do battle. I lost all sense of this being a spot on the sleeve of my dressing gown, of the fact that I was lying in bed, that I was in London, that it was 1965. Before shooting up the morphine, I had been reading Froissart’s
After a while the scene started to fade, and I became dimly conscious, once more, that I was in London, stoned, hallucinating Agincourt on the sleeve of my dressing gown. It had been an enchanting and transporting experience, literally so, but now it was over. The drug effect was fading fast; Agincourt was hardly visible now. I glanced at my watch. I had injected the morphine at nine-thirty, and now it was ten. But I had a sense of something odd — it had been dusk when I took the morphine; it should be darker still. But it was not. It was getting lighter, not darker, outside. It
