12 Post-Trip Diary
The professor moves on to the effects of drugs. Eve wonders if he’s ever taken anything – probably, but not in the way she has. Narcotics are a learning tool for Eve, like info-dense lectures and errors in judgement. She looks around. All these people could learn a thing or two about drugs.
The professor explains the effects of psychedelics on time. Stimulants activate dopamine and alcohol dulls your senses, but LSD, mushrooms, DMT, they unlock something. He describes a study of forty people on doses of twenty micrograms of psilocybin. They measured dots appearing on a computer screen and blah, blah, blah. Eve knows the script of these sterile experiments. They’re always inconclusive, and advise more caution and more expensive studies. Funny that.
“One thing to understand about psychedelics experiments,” he says as though he’s just dropped a couple of tabs at a house party, “is their purpose is not to measure how these chemicals ‘destabilise’ our bodies.”
Eve doesn’t ‘experiment’ with drugs, contrary to her flatmates’ jokes. She welcomes them like old friends, makes time for new experiences, invites them back for coffee instead of nightclub knobheads.
“In his book The Doors of Perception, Aldus Huxley describes an experience of mescaline where duration is replaced by the perpetual present. The drug added layers of extra-real perception.”
An urge builds inside her. She’s not trying to ruin the guy’s lecture, just, for some reason, Eve can’t hold it in. Before she can stop herself, she shouts, “Anyone got any mescaline?”
Heads turn, lots of them.
The professor looks up, but sees an empty space where Eve’s voice was. She’s ducked into the footwell behind the solid desk. Cangemi peers at the troublesome empty seat, then carries on with his lecture.
“A bet with your mind.” That’s what it is, according to Jim Morrison. Swallow a tab and there’s no going back. No why or what comes next.
This time, Eve has hidden the clocks, completed reaction tests on a website and rigged up a camera. She remembers Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing. Now it’s her in a hotel room with nothing but a microphone and her own fucked-up sense of reality.
Post-Trip Diary: Watching the webcam video feels wrong. There is a CCTV version of me who knows exactly where she is, but is completely lost…
Space blends and curves. Eve becomes a sort of non-self. The tabs she bought from Nav are strong. The poster of an all-seeing eye on her wall fires rays of red, but she’s not here to document visuals and shooting colours. She tries to mark time, but her spidery handwriting transforms to coded pictures on the page.
The girl in the video goes at eight times speed. Time passes around her. She is a ghost, staring into the soul of the wall, looking for answers. A curl of hair wraps around her finger over and over. 01:20, she talks into the dictaphone. The recordings are garbled messages about the one night she wishes she could get back…
How long’s it been? The dark house gives no clues. Anyone could burst in, even Nav. That night comes back each trip. Good hook-ups aren’t easy to find; Eve keeps buying and he keeps dancing around the issue.
For around two hours, I offer myself to a string of updating moments, but at 03:05 a look takes hold. ‘That night’ has arrived. You can chase the everlasting present, but the past catches up with you eventually. It was easier to give in than pay my debt to Nav, then it wouldn’t be rape in the back of a Ford Fiesta and I wouldn’t be damaged.
Eve completes the computer tests again with similar results. It’s wearing off. She’s not tired, so she watches videos about the effects of LSD and the life of Aldus Huxley. Then, the coloured lines recede and she powers down. Can any other twenty-year-olds say they’ve journeyed as deep as her? Before sleep, she orders a copy of The Doors of Perception. Apparently, it’s how Jim Morrison chose the name for his band.
Time elapsed: 87 times the duration of the sexual assault that cleared a drug debt