Crystal watched the low white clouds beginning to flow into the canyons. Although the weather had been extreme and unseasonal, scorching for an hour and then snowing heavily, these clouds had a decorative innocence. Near the camp there was a large round cactus that reminded her of a geodesic dome made of tightly packed segments. She had seen it the morning before, beads of dew clinging to its steely spikes, and in the seams between its segments, the buds of red flowers gleaming like drops of blood. Two of the flowers were open and blazed with astonishing intensity against the grey-green of the cactus’s skin. When she returned from her hike these blood-red cups were filled with crystals of snow. It was so beautiful.
God, she could feel the mushrooms starting to come on. The urgent luminosity of the mescalin was giving way to the more sumptuous eruptions, the hesitating fountain of the psilocybin. An iridescent sheen played over the mother-of-pearl surface of a cloud. She watched it shifting lazily from a baby’s sleeping face — it was her own face, how peaceful she looked — to a team of heavily maned white horses kicking up a cloud of mauve dust with their galloping hooves. Oh, yes, it was like a slow fuck, this erotic divulgence of Proteus to her fervent imagination. The unfurling leaves of the cottonwood trees were now a few yards to the right, the slender branches pulsing with spring, leaves like unclenching fists surrendering to the warmth and generosity of life.
Another jet flew overhead and she remembered Thich Nhat Hanh saying how you could use the ring of the telephone like a meditation bell to cut through to mindfulness, and so she imagined the passage of the jet through the sky like a blade cutting through the canvas of a tent and opening outwards on to the sparkling darkness.
Yes, that sound was her mantra. The mushrooms contained such extraordinary teaching. She was deep into the sacred nature of psychedelics which revealed the sacred nature of everything else. They were one of the gateways into the luminous field.
‘The mushrooms are coming on,’ she called quietly to Jean-Paul.
‘Mushrooms!’ said Jean-Paul. The word alone was enough to infuse his bloodstream with the spoors of a deeper paranoia. ‘This trip will get stronger?’
‘Different,’ said Crystal. ‘Sexier.’
‘Sexier? You mean the first part was sexy for you? For me it’s not so sexy to have an angry man with a blowtorch trying to dismantle the structure of my identity! Even le Marquis de Sade, with an unusual but imperative continence, would have resisted the concept of sexual excitement on this occasion.’
‘Don’t use so many words,’ smiled Crystal, ‘just look at stuff.’
‘But when I look at stuff I see “stuff”.’
Crystal walked over to him and kissed him on the mouth. ‘Calme-toi,’ she whispered.
Jean-Paul smiled back. He was far too anxious to think of making love to her. Besides, rangers were no doubt on the ridge with their government binoculars, ready to shoot them for rolling around in the kryptobiotic soil. He pretended to be persuaded by her kiss and resumed his homeward march.
Where was the eternally derailed train of his thought? Oh, yes, this landscape, this obligation to be in awe. If he fell to his knees, what would he be worshipping? Wind erosion? Sandstone? The weather? The relative scale of human and inhuman phenomena? No, he would be worshipping the spirit which Rousseau had marketed so cunningly for the Western mind, the spirit of egotistical sublimity. But surely the essence of this landscape was its inhumanity, its harshness, the way in which it stood just out of range of the eager reach of pathetic fallacy. The civilized landscapes of Europe, the Alps, Provence, Tuscany and so forth, were the nymphomaniacs of the sublime, constantly accommodating the sensitivities and reflections of every visitor, lying down and gasping as one after another they brought their intimations of immortality, their sighs of appreciation, or their easy conviction that, as Rosanov had said, happiness consists of picking one’s nose while watching the sunset.
Canyonlands, on the contrary, was the coldest of virgins who could only be approached on her own terms, through a grille in the convent wall. She was not interested in one’s longings, only in one’s worship, and in the end she was not interested in that either. She simply embodied something so strange and extravagant that the road of Rousseauesque communion with Nature forked towards incomprehension on the one hand and self-annihilation on the other.
How would one ‘surrender’, what mental act was involved in that ‘awful daring’? Was it something to do with humility, a subject on which he was no expert, or was it, on the contrary, a sense of special destiny which filled one with universal awe?
He tried to force himself again to look at his surroundings rather than read them, and then to feel them rather than look at them. He only had to make these decisions for them to be fulfilled, but he found himself feeling something other than universal awe. He and it, subject and object, inside and outside, seemed to be superimposed on each other, as if he were looking at a glazed painting through a shop window on a sunny day, but instead of the vitreous ghosts being effects which he witnessed from a known centre, he felt that there was no part of the ghostly scene that was not animated by his presence. By the same token this dispersal of himself into the shimmering fabric left him utterly lost, as if the echoed flash of sunlight caught on the bumper of a passing car and reflected in the window could steal his soul, so dangerously thinned by being interfused with everything.
Was the problem that he needed to describe what was happening and the description contained the very terms, like ‘subject’ and ‘object’, that were abolished by the experience he was attempting to describe? He must know the answer now!
‘It’s called “Don’t know mind”,’ said Crystal, pausing on the trail. ‘Sometimes you have to stay with the position of not knowing. I don’t know why I said that … I guess I have to stay with the position of not knowing. God, it’s one of those loops.’
‘But it’s incredible,’ said Jean-Paul. ‘I was thinking how I must know what things mean when they are happening.’
‘I guess I picked that up.’
‘What does it mean to “pick that up”? We are having telepathic communication?’
‘Don’t know,’ Crystal had said, hearing the scepticism and alarm in his voice.
Contemplating the changes that had swept over Jean-Paul after that day, Crystal had often wondered if it was the idea of telepathic communication and the permeability of his own mind which had disoriented him beyond recovery.
She sat up in bed. It was three in the morning in San Francisco, and she had to see a bunch of people the next day. She crossed her legs and breathed out deeply, trying to dispel a feeling of guilt and abandonment. Eventually she relaxed into meditation, and from there into exhausted sleep.
3
‘Is there any chance of your going back to Kleinwort’s?’ sighed Mrs Thorpe.
‘I don’t know,’ said Peter, to whom it seemed rather less likely than an invasion from Sirius. Kleinwort’s was utterly remote to him at the moment. Over the last few days the rest of the world had receded like clouds melting in the heat of an atomic blast. He didn’t dare tell his mother that he’d forgotten her telephone number.
‘You must be running out of money,’ she said hopefully.
‘Not yet.’
‘You can’t just say you don’t know,’ said Mrs Thorpe.
‘Even if it’s the truth?’
‘But I don’t think it is true, not deep down.’