Episode 7: Waking Up; With The Plant

Episode Seven: Waking Up;

With the Plant

The sun is beating down on my back. Blinking and slowly shaking my head of cobwebs, I try to get my bearings. A goofy smile spreads my lips when I realize where I am: standing on the stoop of my office.

I look to the sky, the sun, and try to remember the last thing I can. Francis... Giorgio... Regina.... I frown. How is it before noon? Wasn't I going to go to the tavern today? Wasn't it after noon when I left?I'm looking at my door – like I'm just returning. Had I?

I laugh aloud.

How much did I drink? I can't even remember. Must have had a good time, then. I hoped. It's difficult not to imagine doing something regretable after a blackout. I hadn't eaten that much opium... had I? And why did I feel so... sober?

The clarity of sobriety to the habitually intoxicated does not feel like clarity. It feels jarring, like stepping into the sun after living in subterranean darkness. Except... that isn't right. Not exactly. It isn't shocking. It is agonizing, yes; but not painful. It is, closer, to what it feels like the first time you get drunk or stoned – or whatever verbiage you want you use. Not a sudden bucket of cold water in your hot shower – but not pleasant, either. If it isn't evident, this is difficult to describe.

An addict's brain, whatever the addiction – whatever the chemical dependency – is an infant crying for the nipple. I'm not a neuroscientist – and, frankly, neuroscience – and Psychology for that matter – is too young a science to know anything. But I am an addict. It should be clear in my behavior, thoughts, choices, by now that my diet consisted mostly of cannabis, opium, and the nicotine-like areca nut and its constituent leaf. I don't want to get in to the relationship between serotonin and dopamine. In my advanced age, there are, perhaps, many things people might say that I am an expert in. But, as much as I have decided to sermonize, I have no interest in telling you how to regulate you brain – and gut – chemistry.

I'm not your drug dealer. Sorry— Psychiatrist.

All of this is a wonky attempt at saying that, to the chemically dependent, sobriety feels like hunger – like fear, like an itch in a spot you can't reach. Like watching white noise when you want your TV fix – like a bad WiFi connection. You are aware of what is missing. For me, it is the feeling of the haze in my being, the gap between stimulus and response – decision and action. Simply, the mental amusement that the body and brain I inhabit being poisoned, functioning at levels that feel higher than but which I know to be lesser than normal. The internal challenge to be myself – who or whatever that is – despite how I torture my brain and body.

In the single instant, describable only as waking, coming to – on my stoop, I notice I am aware of all of this. Sensory data floods my consciousness. I am hot. Sweaty. Exposed on the street. How long have I been here? Did I leave at all? What happened between m leaving and my return? Did I decide, in fact, not to leave after all? Had I been standing here arguing with myself long enough to forget to leave?

The addict will be familiar witht his – familiar with waking up with no recollection of falling asleep, as I described in the first episode – with losing track of days or weeks or years. The so-called Manic-Depressive will recognize mountains of especially high activity and canyons of un-noteworthy nothingness. We believe, all of us, to a great or degree, that we are under control, whatever our method.

I laugh at my racing thoughts.

“Calm yourself,” I whisper at the gibbering lunatic controlling the reward center of my brain. There were plenty of drugs in my office to remedy the problem.

I should, no doubt, have been alarmed that sobriety was for me a problem to be solved.

And perhaps I was. Perhaps even then a small voice, maybe even Reason himself, was whispering that boredom was the problem – inactivity, inexpression, was the problem – and intoxication was but suicide. I won't say, because if it did, I discarded, disregarded, it along with all the other mad, panicked thoughts that capered like Calendimaggio revelers in my head.

“Calendimaggio,” I muttered.

I looked south, to where I could not hear the sounds of festive celebration. Maybe I had gone down there. That could explain what had happened. This wouldn't be the first time I'd eaten too much opium and smoked too much hash and drank too much and fell asleep in a gutter somewhere. Hell, even on this very stoop. Calendimaggio was over, and life could get back to normal.

I'm telling myself this and remarking on the fact that I actually don't mind being sober a while – indeed, that I'd actually like to stay this way for a – little – while when I got to reach my hand to open my door.

And realize that something is very much not right.

I'd paid no mind, these waking moments, to what I had been doing with my hands.

I look down, and find that I am cradling something against my chest, very much like a child securing a prized package or clutching tight a safety blanket or doll. Fear, inexplicable and unidentifiable froze the sweat drenching my body. Certainty of the sort that only comes to the doomed and the damned in their final moments overcomes me. Whatever I am holding is part of the puzzle of whatever I'd done yesterday.

Praying that it wasn't something terrible – every blackout's worst nightmare made flesh – and with a decided effort of will, I force my arms to uncoil themselves that I might see.

A sack.

I am holding a plain cloth sack, about the size of half a dozen good-sized apples. But, I know immediately, it does not contain apples. Not only because why would I clutch apples to my chest like my most prized possession – but also because, as full with something as it obviously was, it weighed next to nothing. Trying my damnedest not to guess at what it contains, my heart racing, feeling like time has slowed to a stop and the air has turned to molasses, I uncinch the rope keeping it closed and gently tug open its mouth.

And stare, unbelieving, at its contents.

Weed, to use the anachronism. I am holding in my hands at least half a pound of beautiful, plump cannabis buds. But they aren't what strike me with immediate and profound horror.

“The Plant,” I breathe.

We have to step aside a moment.

There are, no doubt, no few of you listening to this who are growing – or have already grown – frustrated by the stop-and-start nature of this story. Blame me – I do. If I were better at this – and hopefully the doing will help me get there – if there were not a galactic gulf between my life and your ability to understand it – a span of ignorance which is by no means your fault and in many (many) ways is mine....

I cannot name for you what I must call The Plant. Just as I did not know the tavernmaster by name and demonstrated that The Captain eschewed his true name – under promise of violence – in favor of the title – in any language containing it— I cannot identify The Plant.

There are already many things of which I have – and will yet – changed. Either to protect their memory, as in the cases of Francis and Regina – or to protect your life. I am breaking so many rules, so many taboos, to use the Polynesian word. I would prefer to do this thing in vagaries and tropes of Thriller fiction – to distance us all from the real and present danger the Truth present to and for you. Not so much to or for me.

I have wished for, sought after, death for slong long, I not longer believe they can give it to me. I've asked. They've tried and failed. But you.... If they thought hurting you will silence me, I have little doubt they will.

But I was talking about The Plant and diverted myself.

During my childhood, I traveled the then-known world, being initiated into and absorbing its mystery traditions.

One of the societies I was introduced to used the Plant in their rituals. Let's call them the People of the Plant. The Plant is their most closely guarded secret. It remains a secret, a mystery, to outsiders to this day. As many rules as I have broken, as many promises as I have made and failed to keep, across the one and a half millenia of my unnatural life – and there have been many – I have never before broken this one – my promise not to disclose The Plant's identity. Nor will I ever. Not even if some wily anthropologist manages to figure it out.

And, some ten years later, here it is, in my hands. The key ingredient to a potion of Seeing – or, if you like, an hallucinogenic or psychedelic brew. A potion I know how to make. And how to use. Why in Hell do I have it?

Then I remember:

Stumbling away from some frolicking dance, a pantomime I can't recall to identify, with a group of naked prostitutes, to sit by myself to rest and ease the spinning of my drunken head. Approached by a Hindi merchant. Seeing this one portion of the Plant, enough for one Trip. Buying it and the reefer in a mad whim. Convincing myself that, coincidence that it is that I alone west of the steppes of modern Afghanistan would know its use, I should have it. Just in case.

You never know when you're going to need – or want – to go on a Vision Quest.

Little wonder I clutch it so. It is precious.

I suddenly look from side to side, then turn in a slow circle. There is no one around. Had anyone seen me with him – the Hindi merchant? Had I carried the sack like this the whole mile – all the way here from the docks?

Paranoia and inexplicable fear drive me practically at a dash, into my office. Kicking the door shut behind me with a reverberent bang, I very nearly run through the dark of my office, past my desk, to the rear wall. Finding, with some silly fumbling along the pine panelling, the trigger for the door secreted in it, I press it; and am soon in another darkness. This one filled with the cool and the smell of stone steps descending to my basement laboratory.

There will be time to describe this place later, when I am not navigating it by feel alone, praying that I don't bump into and knock over an explosive concoction of chemicals and volatile gasses. At length, I come to a table nearing the right corner, opposite the stone spiral staircase.

Discarding for the moment the sack, yesterday's prize and today's curse, I fumble around until I find a Draig. By this meager ligh, I locate and light a nearby candle. Thinking only that I needs must hide The Plant – desperate, heed- and careless of why exactly – it's not like it's a Schedule One drug or anything. Even if it were – illegal, that is – who would recognize it that would be concerned more by its being in my possession than the very existence of this room? Alchemy, by contrast, was – very – forbidden in Christendom.

And I can confidently claim to be the only person practicing it in the first year of that tenth century of the Common Era, that year in the heart of our Age of Darkness.

Unless there is some secret group gathered beneath darkened churches in search of the Secrets of the Universe.

Now would really not be a good time to get a visit from the Venatores Maleficarum.

These thoughts, unbidden as they were, stopped me as still as a rabbit in the presence of a fox. Then revelation dawned on me:

“What am I thinking?” I ask with a laugh. “The Venatores have been disbanded for 500 years.”

Have they?

And the Scholeio were destroyed before that.

By them.

I shudder. They're right.

Nothing is impossible – only improbable.

As was often the case, the Master's voice echoing down the halls of my memory was as comforting as a hug from a ghost.

Mustering my courage with the help of anger born of old hurt, old disappointment, old betrayal, I make my way back up the steps to my office proper. At the top, before I can push open the door and emerge once more into my office, I blow out the candle I'd forgotten is in my hand.

Why had I done that?

What if someone is waiting for you?

Like a Iustitiarius.

That was patently absurd, I tried to reassure myself – with neither words nor cogent thoughts – and doing very little toward succeeding. Even if they did still exist, what would they want with me?