Let me tell you a story. I was 19 years old, in Sydney Australia and in a very bad way. What follows is an extract from my unpublished autobiography, Before I Forget. I was in the grips of a familiar but profound depression and had just found myself incapable of turning up for my soul-crushing job at the Redfern Mail Exchange.
…
We were drinking a cup of tea, talking about it all and what I could do, when there was an urgent knock on the door. They weren’t holding at the time so Gary just opened the door to let in a guy called Martin, sweating heavily and looking weird in a suit, white shirt and tie he had obviously scored from the Salvation Army shop. He was carrying a leather briefcase.
“Do you want some acid? As much as you want. I’ve got ten thousand trips in here and they’re all going into the harbour. The cops are on to me and I have to ditch them.”
Was he nuts? The cops were onto him, he said. We could hardly load up on his surplus acid. If he was right they might come barrelling through the door at any minute.
“Nah,” said Gary. But I wouldn’t mind a trip.”
“Me too,” followed Jill.
“Hell,” I said. “It can’t make things any worse than they already are. I’ll have one.”
And right there you have one of the most calamitous misjudgements of my entire life.
Before I get into what happened next, I have to ask you to believe this bit. I don’t know what you’ve thought of this account so far. Maybe you believe some of it, maybe other parts you take with a grain of salt. Take your pick, it’s a free world
I went mad. I lost contact with reality. I had already been turning over in my mind the profoundly unsatisfactory nature of mere verbal communication. The un-sameness of shared experience. When I taste that orange, do I have the same experience that you have when you taste the other half? How can we ever know? I knew I was strongly red-green colour blind, so what I called red or green had another meaning that others did not share. How much more of that was there? Maybe, I suspected, all of it, a horrifying thought.
When I use a word that word is imbued with a lifetime of associations, cultural and personal assumptions, connotations; the result is that in absolute terms that word, perhaps most of the words we speak, actually mean something different to me than they do to you. Communication is a rough approximation at best. We are alone, islands, stranded in our own unique take on experience. Separate. At least, that is what I believed at the time.
That concept crossed from abstraction to reality on that acid trip. Across a table from Gary and Jill that seemed as wide as the Sahara, I ceased to understand them. They showed worry as they looked at me. But what came out of their mouths was gibberish.
And it didn’t stop, not for days. Oh, I came to understand speech again, but I had fallen into psychosis. I had difficulty distinguishing between the animate and the inanimate. I heard voices. And of course, I thought someone was following me. Them. I didn’t know who they were, but they were shadowing me, scuttling my attempts to regain safe shores.
Here’s the interesting bit: I knew what I needed to turn it off. Opiates. Don’t ask me how because I don’t know how I knew, I just knew. It wasn’t the craving of the habit I didn’t yet have. I could feel inside my head that the place things had gone haywire was exactly where the opiates hit home.
Over the next couple of days I spent the last of my funds on taxis, calling on anyone who might be holding. A single shot would do it. Of course I looked like shit, spooked, was probably not making a lot of sense. No-one was going to give hard drugs to someone in that state even if they had them which they probably didn’t. Who knew what it might do? Maybe I wanted it to OD, to top myself. One guy, nervously, told me he had a bit of hash, maybe a toke would help.
Two tokes and I was right back in the worst of it. Hearing voices saying things I couldn’t understand. I started trying to call home from phone boxes. I would pick up the receiver, hear the dial tone, dial 0 and suddenly it would cut off. It never occurred to me that I couldn’t make toll calls from Sydney phone booths. Or maybe I needed to put money in first. I never got that far because I knew what was happening. They were watching and cutting the lines. I saw them moving out of the corners of my eyes but when I looked straight at them they were gone.
Finally a thought occurred to me: Kings Cross Post Office. They had phone booths inside the building! They wouldn’t be able to see me, know I was in one of them calling Mum. I knew the post office well, and they knew me, because we all used it as a Poste Restante mailing address.
I approached the counter to ask to use a phone for a collect international call. Yes, of course, the woman said. But you’re Mr Hegan, aren’t you? My antennae crackled. Oh shit! But there was no use denying it. Yes. Why?
We have a telegram for you. She gave me an envelope with a telegram in it. It read more or less as follows:
WHAT HAS HAPPENED STOP ARE YOU IN TROUBLE STOP CALL HOME AT ONCE STOP TERRIBLY WORRIED STOP MUM
If you believe nothing else, believe this. Elaine knew. From twelve hundred miles away, my mother knew I was in some serious trouble. Later I would ask her if Gary or Jill had called her, though I didn’t think they had her number. No. She just knew, woke up with the stone certainty that something really, really bad had happened to me.
This is not a new story. Ho hum. Sure, mothers sometimes know when their kids die or are seriously wounded on distant battlefields. And all that. But what does it mean? People tend to place such occurrences in the realm of the spiritual but I believe, no, I am certain, that it is down to an as yet unknown realm of physics. There is a whole level of interactivity going on in this world that we haven’t started to think about. Frankly, I think there exists something I call the Field of Influence. It would explain the Pauli Exclusion principle. This is what Einstein called ‘spooky action at a distance’ and refused to believe in but was demonstrated conclusively by Dr Nicolas Gisin of the University of Geneva and his colleagues in 1997 when they showed two photons seven kilometres apart acting instantly in concert. No energy loss. No information transfer. Not at the speed of light. Not faster than the speed of light. Instantly. Of course, if the two objects were connected, say by a piece of absolutely rigid string, you would get that instant response. Well, they are. It’s just that we have not yet divined what that string consists of. Apparently it can stretch all the way across the Tasman Sea.
Now here’s what bugs me. Ask physicists how this can be and they will look away and mumble about how busy they are. Science isn’t even dialling that number. When it does, and gets an answer, the world will change as dramatically as it did when Einstein scribbled Σ=mc2 on his notepad.
A field as ubiquitous, as universal as the electromagnetic spectrum, as gravity and the strong and weak forces. It might even lead to Hawking’s abandoned Grand Unified Theory. It might be a function of dark matter.
Hello? Anyone?
More than half a century later, now, they just might have found it.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/495563/scientists-at-fermilab-close-in-on-fifth-force-of-nature
Exciting times!
PS For the record, 24 hours later I was back in New Zealand where I knocked off a pharmacy on my first night. One shot of morphine and I was fine. Not high – just normal. It needed only the one. I had flipped the switch I knew was there all the time. They now know that the opioid receptors in the brain play a role in schizophrenia.
PPS I am looking for beta readers of my autobiography, covering the first quarter century of my life. The 50s, 60s and 70s. Shipwrecked. Jailed in Thailand. Smuggling drugs. I was a Buddhist monk for a while. A junkie. A stowaway. Santiram you say? Yawn …
Leave a comment and I’ll be in touch.
Play With Strangers 