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
