I have always been depressed, but by early 2022, observing the acceleration of climate change from the vantage point of a wildfire zone, I felt I had run out of rope. I had known for about five years that it was too late to do anything about environmental collapse, and that it was likely fascism would come with it. I sensed that my understanding of this fact made me a doomer, someone who did not care about children because I did not have any, a hater of hope, anti-future. I was weighed down by a new and horrible self-repugnance about being a middle-aged white woman terrified that capitalism had come for me — the nerve. But I really did feel a deep conviction that we had all been robbed of our birthright, to enjoy the air, the rivers, the oceans, to see people younger than us grow old, possibly even to grow old ourselves. Perhaps worse than my despair was how impossible it felt to turn away from self-pity, especially since most of the world seemed to want me to do that more than they wanted to witness my sadness. The only solution that seemed to present itself with any regularity was to take my own life.
My partner sent me an episode of a Marxist podcast, on which the host talked earnestly about the possibility that ayahuasca and other plant medicines might offer hope to those who saw “the 500-year death machine known as imperialism, capitalism, and colonialism” with clear eyes. The guest said that as long as he could remember, he’d “felt ecological destruction in his bones,” and a sustained practice of drinking ayahuasca — a sense of some consciousness beyond this one — had helped him to live with happiness, pleasure, and hope.
I’d never been especially interested in ayahuasca, as most of what I read about it involved personal liberation. I wouldn’t have called myself a completely healthy, wholly nonaddicted person, but I was way past wanting to heal my relationship with my family or improve my body image. I wanted something beyond what I knew of this world to show itself to me and give me some kind of strength to stay in it.
There have been times in my life when I wouldn’t have taken seriously the possibility that a South American psychedelic could help ease the horror of systems collapse. But I was not doing at all well, and this podcast guy had been on the same terrible page. Here was someone who had wrestled with the fact that an American doing ayahuasca was embarrassing, who had a well-developed but non-groveling sense of himself as a resident of the imperial core, but who had in the end decided the benefits of advocating for Indigenous plant medicine outweighed the drawbacks. He recommended the center in Peru where he “drank.” The shaman was reputable, famous in a way I found promising, and the ayahuasca good quality. I filled out a contact form on the center’s website.
Weeks passed without a response. I wrote to the podcast guy, a friend of a friend, who wrote to Kara, the center’s director, and within a day or two I got an email explaining that the servers at the center were often down and that my contact form had disappeared. The email was signed “Love & Light, Kara.”
I filled out the contact form again. There was much to arrange, and each step (availability, receipt of deposit, flight plans) needed to be completed before taking the next, but Kara’s responses were sporadic. I booked my flight but then had trouble getting the wire transfer approved, and then when I did it was unclear if I’d sent enough. At every turn Kara sounded as if I were bothering her. I pictured her in tunics and wooden earrings, engaged in some intense form of spiritual bypass which had made her think schedules were a drag, even though the main task of her job appeared to be scheduling.
“I’m not a hippie either,” I told him. “I’m just here because I don’t want to kill myself.”
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A month before my departure, there was at long last just one more thing to arrange: transport from the small Amazonian city of Iquitos to the remote ayahuasca center, which was in the Peruvian Amazon and did not have what is commonly referred to as an address. This required a boat — not a ferry, operated by a company, but a little tiny boat, operated by just some dude. Kara said she would make it happen, Love & Light, Kara.
During that month I went off Wellbutrin and cut out any substance that ayahuasca protocols name as interfering with one’s ability to access its benefits: meat, oil, caffeine, alcohol, and marijuana. I wrote Kara several times to firm up the final leg of the journey, but she never wrote back.
On my layover in Miami I wrote the podcast guy an unhinged message about how I was halfway to Peru and still had not heard from Kara. He gave me Kara’s WhatsApp and said to just give her a place and time and let her deal with it. I wrote: Pick up 10 AM Casa Morey Wednesday please. She wrote back right away that she’d check with the driver and would confirm on Tuesday morning. Finally, I thought. We are in business.
I knew that Peru was rich in minerals, gold, silver, copper, and lead, and that many of its mines were owned by American, Chinese, and Canadian companies. And so, although I did not ask any one of the guests at the Lima airport Hilton what they were doing there, I invented the story that anyone in a golf shirt and pants who seemed like they were in a bad mood worked for a mining outfit. The ones in golf shirts and shorts, in lighter moods, were there to see ruins and eat Peru’s legendary food.
No one presented as a fellow traveler, that is as someone who would pay thousands of dollars and travel thousands of miles to drink what is essentially the powerful hallucinogen DMT, plus another chemical that prolongs DMT’s effects, which together compel the drinker to vomit, witness their own death, or — my hope — develop a capacity to endure life. Later I realized such people were indeed in Lima, but they were younger than I was, and more inclined to thrift.
My boss was in Peru at the same time, eating and sightseeing. I do not want to draw a moral distinction between us. Anthony Bourdain, Paul Theroux, and others have made much of the difference between the tourist and the traveler. But from what I have observed, an American may be many things to himself, but to everyone else, he will never be anything but an American.
Iquitos was dusty, humid, and about what you’d expect from the former headquarters of the Anglo-Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company. Around a well-maintained plaza recalling former, deadly prosperity, long bank lines formed around sagging colonial and drab modern architecture. Ayahuasca’s place in the local economy was evident in the ubiquitous ayahuasca-themed murals, which look like all psychedelic art but extra goddess-coded, and lousy with jaguars.
The windows in my colonial-era hotel were double paned with heavily scratched plastic, and sealed shut. It was frustrating to have such large windows that lacked the window’s essential quality of transparency. I began to feel like my struggle to make out the lush date palms outside summed up my unbearable sense of a beautiful world that had been stolen from the Incas five hundred years ago, and then stolen again from almost everyone. As the sun set on Tuesday, I willed Kara to send her promised confirmation. She did not. I slept poorly.
In the morning I resolved to get to the center by myself. It would be hard, but surely not impossible. Also, what was I going to do? Go home? Hang out indefinitely in Iquitos, penning Shantaram 2? I went back to the business district for batteries and extra cash. I also bought a knife.
When I got back to the hotel at ten-thirty, a guy standing outside next to a moto taxi looked up from his phone and asked, in English, “Are you Sarah Miller?” I said I was. “I’m Victor. You were supposed to be here at ten,” he said.
Not far into my explanation I realized Victor didn’t give a shit.
“My day is all fucked up now,” Victor said. “Let’s go.”
We drove through Iquitos, past a technical university that I remember as having the shape of a Mayan temple under layers of a purplish ’80s lacquer. It was for sale. Most of the billboards along the roads were campaign posters for Peru’s upcoming elections, and each candidate had some object or animal, like a chicken, or an acorn, or a cherry, next to their photos and names. What the hell? We turned onto a road with ruts so deep a child could have hidden inside them.
Americans were idiots. All we did was take drugs and then, like little babies, we came down here to have Ignacio fix us.
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Victor drove me as far as a shore on what I later learned was the Nanay River. I climbed into a skiff with a small outboard motor that took me through a series of ever-narrowing channels. After forty or so minutes we landed at another beach and I got out. The driver of the boat led me through a muddy town, whose residents took note without real interest. A fat dog was lying on a strip of grass. When we got closer, I saw that it was dead.
The sign advertising the center was faded and overgrown. At the entrance to the compound was a guard station, manned by four men carrying automatic weapons. Beyond the guard station was a clearing in the jungle, with a collection of thatch-roofed structures of various sizes on five or seven acres of fine white sand.
I was taken to Kara. She was Canadian, in her mid-thirties, slim, and moved as if floating. She wore a tank top and flowered pants that billowed around her.
I was nice for the handshaking. When I lit into her about failing to confirm — failing to do the very thing that society was built on! — her expression went from compliance-officer neutral to wounded doe. “Oh,” she said sympathetically, “The internet here is out all the time. I am so glad you made it! I am so sorry!”
I felt stupid. I had been unnecessarily hostile. I was here in part to temper feelings like these.
Kara told me ceremonies were on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Wednesdays and weekends were for rest. She said, “It seems like you could use some time to relax. You’ll get used to how things work in the jungle.” I was free to do what I wanted, she said, until tomorrow morning. “And then you’ll take your purgative, after breakfast, though, of course, I tell all the pasajeros that I don’t recommend eating before!”
This is what visitors to the center were called: Passengers, said in Spanish without an accent. Passa-harrows.
The shaman, Ignacio, appeared. He was in his late forties or early fifties, medium height, wiry, dressed in a track suit. I had seen him on the internet wearing something more traditional, tribal, but now he looked like a soccer coach before a big match — not just his clothes, but his unsmiling gravity. He was well respected in the world of ayahuasca. His evangelism of the Medicine was articulate, poetic, and widely read.
I gave him an envelope of cash. He gave a curt nod, counted it in front of me, and shuffled off in his Puma slides.
In my cobweb-laced hut I lay down on a hammock. The soporific effect of the intense heat was strangely magnificent.
When I woke up fifteen hours later, it was time to vomit.
Along with the pre-arrival dieta, vegetables and fruits were now out. Salt was out too, and with it went all the cheer of existence. Our meals would consist of rice and lentils, plantains, some potatoes, and plain baked or boiled fish.
In preparing for the journey, I had been fastidious about giving up everything except coffee. And so it came to pass that I headed into my vomitivo, or purge, with a massive caffeine withdrawal headache. The vomitivo was the last step in preparation for “drinking” and took place in the medicine hut, at the far end of the compound, presided over by a cousin of Ignacio’s, Antonio. He had a gold tooth and the broad smile of someone who had lucked into a reasonable living in a nation whose GDP is around 1 percent of the United States’. He brought out a small bowl of a foul liquid to make me vomit, and a larger, empty one to catch it.
Nico, an unusually tall German in his thirties, and one of ten or so facilitators making a small stipend to help out pasajeros, was there to assist. I complained about my caffeine headache. “Chug the shit out of this,” he said, handing me the vomit inducer — a watery concoction swimming with herbs, possibly tobacco, and God knows what else. “In a few minutes you’ll feel fucking great.” While I chugged he described his home city, its old bridges, its walled center. Wow, I said, cool. A split second later I was convulsing into the larger bowl while Nico offered spirited encouragement like “Yes,” and “Do it,” and “You’re amazing.” There was not then or ever any kind of attraction between the two of us, but the experience was for me deeply carnal.
I would drink this stuff, the shamans would chant, I would have these memories or revelations, I would vomit and shit, and things would be resolved.
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As I continued to puke and puke, he told me about his adored wife, his hated former job in IT, and how he had known after drinking a few times that he needed to spend a year “with the Medicine.” I was encouraged by his cynicism for the world in general, which he maintained while also believing that ayahuasca was a useful, non-bullshit thing. “I’m not a hippie either,” I told him. “I’m just here because I don’t want to kill myself.”
“I promise the ayahuasca will help,” he said. My headache was gone, so I believed him.
Someone named Denise, who had been scheduled to vomit with me, showed up as I was finishing.
Nico went to see about procuring her vomitivo. Denise and I smiled at each other shyly. “Nico’s really fun to throw up with,” I said.
I was gratified when she laughed out loud. She was blonde, toned, attractive in late middle age but in a washable prAna travel dress way rather than a Botox way. She explained that she was late because on the rutted dirt road between Iquitos and the boat, her luggage had bounced straight out of the back of the moto taxi. All she had was her wallet and passport, and one other dress. She seemed remarkably good-humored about this. “Victor is arranging everything,” she said. She added that he was rather extorting her but she didn’t mind.
She asked what had brought me here.
“I’m suicidally depressed as a result of climate collapse, encroaching fascism, and my inability to do anything but be scared and feel generally bad,” I said. “What about you?”
“Gosh,” Denise said. “That’s quite a lot to deal with.” Denise had retired from a stressful career and was ready to heal people with plants, and to “meet Madre Ayahuasca.”
“What did you use to do?” I asked Denise. “Before you retired?”
“I worked at an aerospace company,” she said. She named one of the big ones.
I stood up. “I have to go,” I said.
Antonio appeared with Denise’s vomitivo setup. “Gracias,” she said to him. “What a beautiful smile you have!” She waved to me. “Hope to see you later. Bottoms up!”
All the buildings at the center were made of wood and painted green with red trim and I felt like I was always in the same place. Around the perimeter were cabins for visitors and facilitators. Larger buildings in the center included the dining and lounge area, and, right next to it, Ignacio’s house. At the far end was the medicine house, and in the middle, a perfectly round building called a maloka, where the ceremonies would be held.
We were under strict orders not to walk by Ignacio’s house, which was nerve-racking, because sometimes, without trying, you would look up and be like “fuck, that’s Ignacio’s house.”
Ignacio had a much younger wife, never introduced, and two teenagers with a different mother. A few yards from his house, what would have been the front lawn if there were lawns in the Amazon, was a monkey cage about the size of a New York City kitchenette. I would hear later that during Covid, no one in town had work, money, or food. Ignacio had helped out, supposedly, but people said it had not been enough. People were starving, killing the monkeys in the jungle for food. Someone, it was rumored, had tried to eat these monkeys, and had been kept away by force.
A handful of people were in the middle of long-term stays at the center, there for months or even a whole year. They were doing dietas of other sacred plants, drinking a daily dose of tobacco, or rose, or white sage, in the hopes that the plant’s properties would heal them. (The rose, for example, is supposed to open the heart; white sage, to provide wisdom.) They also drank ayahuasca, though not four days a week every week for the whole duration.
These people alternated between acting as helpful mentors and tedious know-it-alls. When I said I didn’t like the fish and was only eating rice and potatoes, a woman who had been there for six months or so turned to me, eyes wide with concern. “Two weeks without real protein or fat will be catastrophic for your health,” she said.
I wasn’t about to be coerced into eating gross fish, or to be out-know-it-alled by a person high on stewed rose petals. In any case this struck me as so American, this panic over conditions that were above average for most people, and I’m sure it was my way of distancing myself from my own painful sense of entitlement when I said, “More than half the world lives on a starch monodiet.” I had invented this statistic on the spot. “I’m sure I will live to tell the tale.”
The head facilitator was a Romanian woman named Maria, who spoke six languages and was so hot that when someone mentioned her boyfriend, I thought, wow, there’s actually a person who gets to have sex with her, that’s crazy. Before a ceremony, pasajeros would meet with Maria or Kara to let them know what they wanted the shamans to “clean.” Having tried and failed to refrain from telling absolutely everyone how much I hated Kara, I was assigned to Maria. Then, not wanting anyone as hot and generally composed as Maria to know how catastrophically miserable I was, I kept my list short. It went something like: clean antidepressants, clean insecurity, clean deprimida del clima, tristeza por las guerras y estado del mundo. It amazed me how quickly she could compress my anguish into a few words that could be passed onto the shamans so they’d have a sense of what to address. Before the ceremonies, the facilitators came around and read the list out loud to each pasajero without fanfare, as if checking what you needed from the store.
Ignacio and two other shamans sat at one end of the maloka, and pasajeros sat in a semicircle on cheap mattresses. Next to the mattresses were clean vomit buckets and rolls of toilet paper, ashtrays, and cigarettes, rolled not from tobacco but something called mapacho.
At first blush, ayahuasca tastes like fermented, spicy chocolate. As it came on, the Medicine seemed to draw me into a dark room, alone. Nico had warned me that I would want to lie down, but I should try to sit up. The warm air smelled strongly of mapacho and Florida Water, which, oddly, my grandmother had worn. I hadn’t smelled it since well before her death, in 1977, and had always thought it was just some drugstore scent, but apparently it was sacred, and, like mapacho, meant to offer light and strength if demons arrived.
I had followed the curriculum, so why was the plant spirit giving me extra reading?
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No demons arrived for me that first night. Right away I had a small-scale but satisfying revelation: One of my best friends would never read anything I wrote unless I begged him to. This had always made me mad. But sitting there in the pitch-black maloka,as fellow pasajeros began to vomit all around me, I realized it was fine. It just made me love him more. He didn’t care what I wrote, he didn’t love me for my insights. He loved me for my presence, as I loved him.
Kara came over to help me up. “What’s happening?” I asked. “It’s time for your song,” she said. She led me across the room to a cushion. I sat on it and felt her turn me forty-five degrees. Gradually I realized that there was a person seated across from me, chanting. I realized that in fact I had been hearing this chanting all night. Though the ayahuasca greatly altered my sense of space and time and reality I understood the music had greater significance than, say, hearing Brandi Carlile’s “The Story” at the food co-op, but maybe not much. But as I sat there it dawned on me that maybe the music was why I was even here.
It might have behooved me to have some sense of what was going to happen when I went to Peru to drink ayahuasca. The podcast had surely explained that icaros, the sacred songs in the Indigenous language called Shipibo, were a cornerstone of the ceremony, and it was their sound, in combination with the heightened receptiveness created by the Medicine, that encouraged emotional and spiritual repair. But once I heard enough to attach myself to the idea that ayahuasca might do something for me, I guess — it sure sounded like something I would do — I had stopped paying attention. Icaros, I was learning now, involve chanting at a fast clip, with a lot of repetition. They sound like a mouth harp sung with a human voice. It is not a sound Americans are accustomed to, and I found it uncanny in the worst possible way.
As the chanting intensified, I felt half of whatever was in my stomach decamp to my lower intestine and the other half slosh up toward my throat. I saw myself at 17, giving a guy a blow job that I hadn’t exactly wanted to give. I saw myself fighting and then giving in. I barely made it back to my bucket, and I clung to it as I vomited, and then I went outside to the toilets and got rid of the rest. Washing my hands, feeling a sense of time return, I thought: This is a piece of cake. I would drink this stuff, the shamans would chant, I would have these memories or revelations, I would vomit and shit, and things would be resolved, including, eventually, my desire to be dead. Thinking this had all been a very good idea, I was lulled to sleep on my mattress in the maloka by the sounds of people who were not me vomiting — sounds that filled me not with disgust, but with fondness.
There were probably forty people in and around the center, fifty if you included the workers — women cooking and washing clothes, men guarding and cleaning — plus the long-termers. The long-termers mostly kept to themselves, and for a social circle I was left with my fellow short-term pasajeros. Among them: two 40ish women, best friends, who had left Georgia as refugee children in the ’90s and now worked in Silicon Valley. I thought they were both giant bitches until I realized just one of them was. The nice Georgian had a terrible husband who was mean to her, but he was also Georgian, a tie to the past. Every time I talked to her I said, “Maybe you should leave your husband,” and she would look off into the distance as her eyes filled with tears.
Two boomer professionals who knew each other and were maybe even cousins showed up a few days into my stay. One of them was a doctor, one of them was an architect. This visit was part of a longer vacation for them — after this they were going to see ruins. They arrived with a good-looking guy in his early forties who had been married for a long time, had three kids, and, though he never came out and said it, had all the red flags of a serial cheater and sex addict. I was wary of him, but I was also always hoping he would make a pass at me so I could prove at least one of the many theories I had come up with about the members of my ayahuasca community.
There was Kitty, a rich Iranian woman who lived in Paris. Kitty had been at the center for months and was now in the middle of her final ayahuasca dieta and therefore drinking nightly. I thought there was no way she could be as awful as she came off.
Did I have any friends? I did. Nico, who loaned me an amazing battery-powered bug-bite zapper and also thought Kara was awful. Kenny, a thin, sarcastic 30ish Northern Californian who was here because he hoped taking drugs would be a good way to get over taking drugs. My understanding was that he’d left a job in tech, where being surrounded by loaded Silicon Valley ultrabelievers had made him turn to intense self-medication. He had meant to come to the center for two weeks. Ignacio was allowing him to stay on for free indefinitely because he thought that another shaman had put a curse on Kenny by successfully encouraging him to trip on kambo, a toxic venom harvested from the slimy coating on a tropical frog. “Don’t ever try kambo,” Kenny said to me several times, and I assured him that while I was stupid enough to come here, I was not quite stupid enough to do kambo. Kenny laughed and said I was “a real one.”
He said he wished I had met him before he did kambo. I said he seemed fine the way he was. “No,” he said. “You have to understand. This isn’t me. That shaman stole my personality.”
There were two young facilitators. One of them, Grace, had been born in Bolivia and came to the US as a young girl. The other was Marisol, who had been born in Michoacán. Grace was totally apolitical, Marisol was a fervent anticolonialist. One day Marisol and I found out that Grace listened to Joe Rogan, and we started pleading with her to never listen again, and she said, I don’t like being pressured to do things, and so Marisol and I went outside and hugged each other and cried.
Finally, Denise. My vow to ignore her because she worked in the defense industry had been derailed by the inconvenient fact that the two of us were soulmates. On our third morning she told me a story about how as a kid she and her sister shared a bedroom next to the garage, and that their drunk father regularly crashed his car hard into the garage wall, right on the other side of their beds, and that, jerked suddenly awake by the impact, they would clutch each other in the dark, laughing to the point of wetting their pants. After that we were together all the time. We did yoga together in the open-air gym and talked for hours about our many love affairs, our jobs, our families, always trying to move on from the conversation, always saying “Just one more thing.” Her smile was electric, her laugh throaty and confiding. She listened like she was on good drugs, and everything that came out of her mouth, unless it was about the military-industrial complex, was funny and fascinating. We had grown up in a world that was gone, that had many horrors but also pleasures, and it would have been impossible to process all that I saw and mourned but also hated about that world without her help.
On the secondnight the ayahuasca tasted terrible, like the entire jungle had shit into my mouth. The first sign of intoxication came in the form of a ticking sound. Next, I felt that there was a seam being stitched into my face. The seam was not painful, but something was tugging at it, the same entity that was making the ticking noise, and as the ticking noise increased, the tension also increased. When I imagined my face, in my mind’s eye, it was blank, no features, not even skin, covered with thick stocking fabric. I searched in vain for the part of my brain that could remind me this was not real. What was my name? What was the name of this scary drug I was on?
The ticking sound turned into the sound of rustling feathers. I sat up, trying not to give in to the Medicine, but then I had to lie down. The rustling went on and on, for hours, and I saw nothing but dirty feathers, broken plates and cutlery and swatches of fabric, refrigerator interiors and bathroom tiles and grandmothers’ wheelchairs and enema bags and pill containers and tomato egg timers and Pet Rocks from homes I’d been to in elementary school. Sometimes I would think it was over, but then that ticking would start again, and my face would become that cloth mask again, and these towering figures, with small, mean eyes but no other features, which seemed to be made of cloth, twisted into cones, stood over me.
I was so relieved when the icaros ended and Ignacio lit a candle. I turned to Denise and detailed the horrors I had just endured. Denise told me how she had floated among angels and gone to distant planets and surfed on salmon-pink beams of light. The contrast between our experiences was so unfair that we couldn’t stop laughing. A Swiss pasajero named Anne, who was puffing a fatly rolled mapacho cigarette, sending positively Krakatoan, dance-club-dry-ice-machine volumes of smoke our way, glared at us and hissed “Shhh,” and we laughed harder.
Over a breakfast of unsalted rice and plantains, I described the cloth figures as “kind of like clothespin dolls.”
“Wait, I want to see Machine Elves,” people cried out. The boomers and the (alleged) (by me) sex addict were the most disappointed and jealous. I thought these machine elves were my private nightmare, but it turned out they were a thing. Terence McKenna, an American ayahuasca pioneer, had coined this term after hearing about a similar form from many people who drank. I had never heard of Terence McKenna. “You have to read him,” one of the boomers said. I promised I would, a lie. I just wanted ayahuasca to show itself to me, to let me know I was not alone, to help me. I wasn’t interested in these Alan Watts motherfuckers who invented terms like “machine elves,” even if it was kind of genius.
After people had been drinking for several days, themes began to emerge. The architect boomer was always having a great time, the lucky bastard — you’d have thought he was taking MDMA. The doctor boomer kept vomiting, and he saw lots of snakes. Ignacio said it was going to take ages to get all the prescription drugs out of his body, and that he should stay here at least a month. The doctor said he couldn’t — he was meeting his wife at Machu Picchu — and Ignacio shrugged. Marisol’s grandmother came to her and told her to avenge her ancestors. The sex addict guy got in a screaming fight with his father, who came in the form of a cyclone. Kitty, whom Ignacio seemed to find enchanting, reported running through a field of flowers.
“Is Kitty really as bad as she seems?” I asked Marisol.
“She is worse,” Marisol said.
Kenny went on a three-day fast to rid himself of his demon and on day one said he was cured and had never felt so full of love. When he completed his fast, the cooks made him an omelet as a special treat, which delighted him, but an hour later he fell into darkness once again.
The ayahuasca started to taste more and more terrible, and my ceremonies increased in severity, and I began to dread them as I have never dreaded anything in my life. There was always the ticking, the tension in the face. There was no pain, only pressure, and the sense of being worked by demons who hated me. Whenever I saw something clear, it was sad. I saw myself in the future, burying my red heeler, my Ruthie. My sadness had no bottom. Another night, I went back to 1977, where my father sat with his head in his hands at my grandmother’s bedside in a hospital in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, as she died of bone cancer.
There was a worker at the center, a white kid from the Northwest who had trouble talking. One night, I said something to him and he just stared at me and laughed and walked away. The next day, a friend of his showed up, although no one was expecting him. He had a big blue duffle. In the afternoon, I started to wonder if the duffle was filled with guns, and by the time I drank my dose of Medicine, I was sure it was. All night I kept waiting for machine gun fire, and was relieved and surprised when I woke up the next morning alive.
After that, I began to have a series of journeys that felt personalized, as if the plant spirits had heard my list of problems to clean. I saw the outline of the Americas from space. North America was belching out strands of fat pearls, diamonds, gold and silver coins, swimming pools, cars, high-end watches, like the whole landmass was a slot machine with thousands of volcano-size receptacles. The coastline was rimmed with mounted machine guns, thousands of them, pointing outward. South America was made of mud, and I could see all layers of Earth, and the bones and skulls in it. The raised line of the Andes was not mountains, but enormous fountains of blood. I also saw fat cylindrical pink creatures, with small eyes.
“Why don’t I get to see anything fun?” I said. “Why is everyone else solving family trauma or doing the two-step with purple jaguars and every night I just see that?”
“I know it’s not fun, but it’s good,” Marisol said. She was a true ayahuasca believer who referred to Madre Ayahuasca as if she were some cool lady she’d met at the club. “Madre Ayahuasca and I had a whole conversation about those people last week. The ones who just have fun every time and don’t learn or see. She told me they will pay later. You’re paying now.”
She said it was better this way. She said that the Medicine was trying to show me something. I said I already knew that Peru had been colonized by the Spanish and that as a Marxist I understood that primitive accumulation was ongoing. I had followed the curriculum, so why was the plant spirit giving me extra reading? I felt like the drug was making fun of my feelings, I told Marisol. The ayahuasca was mocking my guilt and my fear, it was saying to me, you think you suffer? Let me show you how others have suffered and suffer. I felt like ayahuasca was telling me how selfish and weak I was, a message I had already been getting from myself and the rest of the world. “But now that a plant has said it,” I told Marisol, “I know it’s true.”
“Madre Ayahuasca would never hurt you,” Marisol said. She seemed almost mad that I thought this. “I know you will see what she is trying to show you, but trust me, she is not trying to hurt you.”
At a post-ceremony meeting with Ignacio and the other pasajeros, I described those menacing pink creatures with small eyes. Ignacio wanted to know if I ate pork. I said I hadn’t had any for two or so months. But before that, Ignacio wanted to know. “Seguro,” I said. “En gran cantidad.” He laughed. Pigs were mean and smart, he said. When we ate them we were eating all of that meanness and intelligence. I said, “So what I am seeing is essentially small pigs? Or chunks of pork, with eyes?” He did not dignify this with a response. He told me that in his next icaro for me, he would “clean pork.”
Nico selected me as his Settlers of Catan partner one night. “You’re smart,” he said confidently, as we squared off against Marisol and Kenny, and Grace and the nice Georgian woman. I assured him that I was so bad at Settlers of Catan it would blow his mind. He didn’t believe me, but by the end, he did. We won solely because of him and he stared at me and said, “I have never seen anyone worse at this game than you are.”
At the post-ceremony meeting the next afternoon, Ignacio was in a bad mood. Kenny was begging Ignacio to help him. Ignacio ranted in Spanish as Maria translated in low, calm tones. The gist of Ignacio’s issue was that Americans were idiots. All we did was take drugs and then, like little babies, we came down here to have Ignacio fix us. Then he singled out Kenny. “No hay nada dentro de ti que te posea. ¿Sabes qué te pasa? ¡Tú!” Maria’s echoing whisper, “There’s nothing inside of you, possessing you. You know what’s wrong with you? You!” was more haunting than Ignacio’s shouting.
“If you stop being sad I will stop listening to Joe Rogan,” Grace pleaded.
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Denise and I looked at each other. “Poor Kenny,” she whispered, “Poor kid.” He was slumped against a wall. I knew how he felt. I wasn’t a drug addict, but I was aware of wanting to be fixed by a shaman, and the humiliation of the shaman knowing.
“There is only one person among you who is spiritually clear,” Ignacio said. “Just one. That is Denise.” Denise has no artifice, he said. She was simply warm and kind. He said that Denise didn’t even have to take ayahuasca anymore, because she didn’t have anything left to fix.
I asked Denise if we could have a difficult conversation. We went to her cabin and faced each other in plain wooden chairs and I just came out with it. “I don’t understand how you don’t understand what you did for a job.”
She looked confused. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, you built weapons to kill people. If the Plant Spirit is real, how does the Plant Spirit not know this?”
Denise said that her job was defending America and its allies. She brought up the Iron Dome. I stood up.
She said she’d also worked on the Mars program. “You don’t think it’s cool that there are people in space?”
I said I hoped we were still friends.
She said of course, but she still wanted to know why I didn’t think outer space was cool.
I began to develop a real fear of Ignacio. The podcast guy had said he wasn’t warm and fuzzy and I had been fine about this, but I was starting to distrust his relationship to the pasajeros. Was he scamming us? Did he just want us to worship him? I didn’t blame the guy for being ambivalent about a bunch of wealthy Americans who, when they weren’t crying about their families or their divorces, were talking about restaurants, vacations, and the other drugs they had tried and where. But, I thought, something was off. It had been apparent in the way Ignacio had spoken to Kenny. It was apparent, too, in his rapturous praise for Denise — if Ignacio had allegedly transported his spirit into the center of the Earth and into the cosmos many times over and returned with wisdom and power beyond the scope of human understanding, how could he not see that Denise had worked in an industry predicated on world domination? That her wildly appealing sense of peace came from being oblivious to this violent fact? Plus he worked with the clearly terrible Kara. I was ashamed to have these negative thoughts, and further ashamed to feel like I needed help thinking through them from Ignacio himself. It was clear that he wouldn’t or couldn’t help me.
My sixth ceremony was the worst. As the drug kicked in, I had a vision of a reality where I had written an article about this place, which had been created to take money from Westerners to punish us for being killers or just douchebags. It was then staffed with people like Kara, and the guy who couldn’t talk, to encourage us to go insane faster. The ayahuasca here was extra potent, and we were all going to lose our minds and spend the rest of our lives trying to recover.
My article was called “Pirates of the Ayahuasca,” and when it came out, to much fanfare, Ignacio would be ruined but I would be left living in fear of his powers.
Then the ticking started. My face was sewn up. It was not just Ignacio, but the ayahuasca plant itself that hated me. Ayahuasca laughed at me, at my attempts to understand, to empathize, to grieve the Earth’s conquest, and for having the audacity to be gripped by the fear of its destruction speeding toward me faster than I had thought possible. Ayahuasca was the one tugging this thread on my face, pulling it taut, standing over me. Its message tonight: There is nothing to understand except misery and death and the end of beings, of sound, of scents, of all beauty. My life was a selfish joke. My desire to express myself was risible. I had come here to find hope but what I found instead was the definitive end of it.
The next day was Saturday and Victor was offering an excursion into Iquitos. I didn’t want to go but Denise made me. We took a boat to a zoo, where we saw a giant snake, then to an island, where friendly monkeys jumped on us, then to another sort of animal park where we saw crocodiles and piranhas, and then to a tiny museum where we saw photos from the rubber trade, of barons and their slaves, and finally to see a ceiba, an enormous tree. Victor even told us why everyone running for office had some animal or piece of fruit next to their picture. “It’s for people who can’t read,” he said. “So they also know who they’re voting for.” We had a decent meal, in keeping, more or less, with dietary restrictions, but of well-prepared fish, and rice made with oil and salt. The boomers drank beer.
I thought I had somehow recovered. But the trip to town had been for me like Kenny’s omelet. Once it was gone, and once we had arrived back at the center, the horror came back, more intense than before. You know now, a voice kept saying to me, you know that everything is just as empty as you thought. Emptier.
Grace found me sitting in the middle of a patch of sand at the edge of the property, crying. When my friends found out how sad I was they came to me. Kenny said my jokes were one of the only things that made it past the wall of kambo. Grace and Marisol took turns hugging me. “If you stop being sad I will stop listening to Joe Rogan,” Grace pleaded. Marisol promised me that the relationship to Madre Ayahuasca was beautiful. “I want you to experience her one day,” Marisol said, crying too. “I know you will.”
I was instructed to have a longer conversation with Maria, the sexy Romanian facilitator. I had been afraid to tell anyone my bad feelings toward Ignacio, my deep distrust of him and the sense that he was actively trying to hurt us. Maria’s lack of alarm at my revelation put me at great ease. She said it was very normal. “Many people have feelings of fear or resentment of the shaman,” she said. “Those feelings about the shaman, of fearing him, those are about your fears, your fear of yourself.”
So developing a terror toward the shaman was just normal Ayahuasca Transference 101 shit.
Nico told me Kara was getting fired. “Oh God,” I said, “I feel bad.”
“Ha,” he said. “You think you’re the reason Kara got fired? Do you always think everything happens because of you?”
“Doesn’t it?”
On my seventh night, a plant spoke to me. It wasn’t an ayahuasca plant. It was just a simple rose plant on the grounds of the center, near the medicine hut, a plant I liked. It appeared to me and it talked to me, with a mouth and everything. It explained to me that plants ran the world. They kept the Earth from blowing away, they kept the sea from rushing headlong over the Earth, they made things cool, they were food, plants were everything. You’re not in charge, the plant said to me, as clearly as if it were a person. We are in charge. Your health is good or bad because of us. We are everything, and you are here as our guests.
This last part was meant to be reassuring, not cruel.
Nico had also drunk that night. I told him I had something funny to tell him, if he was sober enough to understand a weird story. I’m just a little high, he said, whatever you are about to tell me will be that much funnier. “OK,” I said. “My journey the other night was that I was going to write this article about Ignacio, exposing him as someone who took lots of money from people, and then gave them super potent ayahuasca to make them crazy.” I started to laugh and so did Nico. “And the article would be super popular, viral, and it would make me famous.”
Nico was gasping. “Very famous!” he said. “Very important!” He giggled wildly into his hands.
“And the article would bring Ignacio down, but then, in the spirit world, he would have his revenge.” Nico was now shaking, he was laughing so hard. “In the midst of my worldly success, he would find me and kill me.”
“It’s so good.” Nico could hardly breathe. “‘Pirates of the Ayahuasca’! I’m going to die. It’s too much!”
“Have you ever heard anything,” I said, “I mean, literally anything so self-important in your life?”
“Never.” Tears were streaming down his face. “You’re so crazy. It’s so unbelievable. You are so crazy. Also, you’re clearly an idiot because you can’t even play Settlers of Catan. People are so fucking crazy.”
Grace and Marisol, who had also drunk that night and were still coming down, wandered over and sat on Nico’s mattress. They wanted to know what was so funny.
“Tell them,” Nico howled. “Tell them.”
The next day, Victor arrived to escort me and the possible sex addict to the airport. We had the same flight out of Iquitos to Lima.
We walked past the guards into the jungle. I thought about how most of my experience of going to Peru to drink ayahuasca had been about working through the shame of having done such a thing in the first place. I spent half a month’s salary and met some awful people and a few good ones to discover a fact that I disclose with not a little embarrassment: plants can communicate. Some people will think I’m a crazy asshole for saying so, but they never gave a plant money and had the plant tell them actual facts in return.
We saw Kenny on the road. He had gone to the tiny town for gum. I asked if he was still leaving in a few days.
“No,” he said. “I’m sticking around for another two weeks at least.”
“I thought Ignacio just said the demon was you,” I said. “I mean, shouldn’t you just go back to Mountain View and, I don’t know, get a job? Join a gym?”
“Ignacio changed his mind,” Kenny said. “He said the demon is still in me.”
I looked at the plants around us. I was aware of them being aware of us. In six months, Denise would text me that the Georgian woman had left her husband. A year later, Grace would realize Joe Rogan was a dick. Almost three years later, I am still alive.
“You seem remarkably calm,” I told Kenny.
“Oh, yeah,” Kenny said. “I am. Ignacio says now he thinks he knows how to get it out. So I’m feeling optimistic.”
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