However, I always felt there was some wormhole in this story, something hidden from the spotlight, some nasty twist you couldn’t quite express.
In fact, Dmitry’s program allowed you to steal information, and theft is always bad wherever it happens – in a shop, at a BP gas station or on the internet.
But on the other hand thousands of people claim that information has to be free. Do people pay for something that they hear on the street, on the train, in a wood or in a field?
I didn’t really think that deeply about it, though. For me, it was enough that Neolani and the garagers, my friends, were for Dmitry – so, then, was I.
We went in two cars. The guys went in an old Ford with a big panel saying ‘Release Dmitry!’ and Neo and I went in a small Toyota. We were picking up some weed from some acquaintances of Neo’s so after the demo they could really get their rocks off.
We chatted and made out all the way and a few times we nearly came off the highway. Neo’s little beast was as fast as a track car, though she said it was a cheap Japanese model.
After Pasadena, we turned left before Glen Bernie onto the street with the amusing name Avahart Road. But there was nothing else amusing in that street. In fact, nothing in that whole district. It was ‘frankly shit’ as Pincher would say. But it’s in exactly that kind of place that drug dealers live.
Neo stopped the car near a two-storey house covered in plastic plates. This, it seems, is called siding. In Wilmington, only snackbars or municipal buildings are sheathed that way.
‘Come on,’ Neo said and dragged me along. I smiled – I’d learned a cool smile to say, don’t worry about me – and got out of the car to follow her. Of course, there was always the thought that drug dealers aren’t too keen on extra eyes and ears in their work.
When Neo pulled out a key to open the door, I was really surprised. Then she took off her shoes, presumably because there were mats everywhere. I took my shoes off too.
We went into the house, passed through a big room with a sofa and fireplace, and slid between a curtain with Chinese bamboo bells and dream-catchers into another room. Here, probably, lived a mad hippie-nymphomaniac artist. All the walls were covered in drawings and pictures in which naked women were depicted in obscene poses. Women were fucking with live snakes, giving birth to toads, vomiting severed dicks and other activities which made me genuinely nauseous.
‘Look at the books here. I’m going to the attic for weed,’ Neolani said, and I listened to her bare feet pad up the wooden steps of a ladder.
There were certainly books on the shelves, a lot of books. I’d only seen so many in the school library before. Well, except perhaps in Mr. Isenberg’s office where he had a huge case.
We didn’t have books at home and none of my friends did either. No, the Bible doesn’t count. My schoolmate, Mathew Turkle still had some ancient books from Europe, either his great-grandfather brought them, or his great-great-grandfather. Pictures in these were black-and-white, creepy – various demons with a skeletal knight on a horse fighting against them. The book wasn’t written in English, and I didn’t understand the name, but something was about Don Quixote de la something else.
Neolani’s books were very different. I read the names of the authors on their spines: Huxley, Camus, Heinlein, Orwell, Ortega y Gasset, Fukuyama – and realized they meant practically nothing to me. Besides that there were some books that seemed totally nonsense to me: Huang-di, Lao-Tzu, Gian Daolin, Ge Xuan and Five Pecks of Rice.
My attention was drawn by a big, black book with the intricate, clear name of The Anarchist Cookbook by a certain William Powell.
I opened it at random and read: ‘Cooking with marijuana. Many people throw away the seeds, stalks, and branches after purification of raw materials. I strongly recommend you to keep them since there are many recipes for using this waste’. And there followed simple and detailed instructions for making marijuana tea. I turned the page. Here it gave a recipe for narcotic desserts. ‘This Mr. Powell was rather inventive,’ I thought, flicking through the book. ‘But what have anarchists to do with this? So what next?”
The answer came with LSD, where it explored Artaud’s and Huxley’s experiments with mescaline and peyote and talked about Artaud’s idea of the creation of a great society based on psychotropic drugs. Peyote changed Artaud. He found he could comprehend and understand ideas on another level. He could depart from rationalism, and even the modern truth. Artaud found his own truth and own structures. But they locked him up.
I died at Rodez under an electroshock. I died. Legally and medically died. Electroshock coma lasts 15 minutes. A half an hour more, then the patient breathes. Now one hour after the shock, I still had not awakened and stopped breathing. Surprised at my abnormal rigidity, an attendant had gone to get the physician in charge Who after examining me found no more signs of life in me. The coma after the electroshock lasted 15 minutes.
The lines were so-so, of course, but the story is about a person who describes his own apparent death, under the influence of LSD. It interested me, and I began to read further: ‘Preparation of LSD in laboratory. To synthesize acid, you need knowledge of fundamentals of chemistry and access to a laboratory.’ And Powell went on to give a simple recipe.
But I don’t understand chemistry so this was boring. Flicking through further, I came across peyote. It always seemed to me some dull Mexican cactus. But the author of the book revealed that this nondescript plant contains the strong psychedelic mescaline, and described his first powerful encounter with it.
Neolani was taking a long time. I listened to the sounds from above, but I could hear nothing but faint muttering, including a woman’s voice. It was baking hot and I was thirsty. We needed to get to the rendezvous point for the demonstration and time already was short.
I was going to call Neo, but decided to wait five more minutes for decency, and I was again engaged in the book. My next finding was a chapter named ‘A Treatise About Toads’ in which he described the extraction of a hallucinogen called bufotenin from the skin of toads…
‘Here,’ I showed her. ‘Interesting book.’
‘Second-hand stuff,’ she contemptuously pulled her shoulder. ‘Compositions of Uncle Billy and his disciples. Ok, let’s go, I have the weed. Real Mexican, from Chihuahua!’
I put the book down, and we went out.
‘Whose house is it?’ I asked when Neo closed the door.
‘Oh, just…’ she fell silent then answered abruptly as we got near the car: ‘My parents.’
All the rest of the day in Baltimore, we horsed around, drank beer in the lanes and gateways where there were no police officers, then we were dumped on by some local citizen. Or a few locals. Some nose in a window saw that minors were drinking beer behind a store, and called the cops. They arrived, but we ran away. It was a riot!
As we ran, we ran into a procession of evangelists and got lost in the crowd, just as in a film. We slipped away from the cops. So all of us got lost in the melee.
We hung out with some goths and some gays from Washington, and marched through the streets with posters and shouted: ‘Freedom for Dmitry, May he screw up together with his shitty Rushka!’
Do you think we had much interest in this hacker? Absolutely none! We were just having fun. Yes, there those principled people at this fucking demonstration who raised fists and were ready to dive under the wheels of police cars. But did we care? We were free artists, we lived in the present.