Mushroom.Man Page 6

  ‘Can I get you another drink?’

  ‘Thank you, no.’

  ‘I’ll just refresh mine. Excuse me.’

  I stood up and Hartfield beckoned me.

  ‘Let me top that up. Françoise and I were talking about horses.’

  Françoise, that was it. Françoise the French girl. Like France. She looked French, very gamine, short cropped hair, thin – even her casual look was carefully contrived. Striking, but not pretty. I stood with them, sipping my champagne, listening to talk of hunters, rides and gallops. Yelena had moved to talk with the tanned woman, Tony’s wife. Tony and Dave were still engrossed when Gordon came in.

  ‘Dinner is served, Mr Stanley.’

  No one appeared in a hurry to move – Giles was still playing and it seemed polite to listen. White Cloud got up and stretched. She was younger than Hartfield, I guessed around thirty, while he was probably in his fifties. She had a neat trim figure but surprisingly heavy facial features. A wide, broad face, large nose and a heavy jaw. Her eyes were dark and hooded, her long black hair was plaited in a single braid which hung down her back. She took Hartfield by the hand.

  ‘Can we go in now? I’m hungry.’

  ‘Of course, my dear. Giles is nearly finished.’

  ‘Well I’m going on in now.’ She turned to me. ‘Are you coming?’

  I followed her through the hall into the dining room. It was lit entirely by candles; in the chandeliers, in the sconces and on the table. I noticed that there seemed to be no electric light fittings in the room at all. It was candles or daylight in here.

  ‘You’re sitting here.’ White Cloud showed me my place.

  ‘How do you know Dave?’

  ‘I don’t really remember. He was just sort of there, if you know what I mean. He’s been very good to me and Yelena.’

  The others began to file in and I found myself once more next to Yelena. Opposite me sat White Cloud; Hartfield sat at the head of the table on my right. Dave and Tony walked in last, Tony rubbing his nose and sniffing. As we ate I became aware how attentive Hartfield was to White Cloud. He stroked her arm, held her hand when she wasn’t using it to eat, filled her glass, made sure everything was passed to her. She seemed to take it as her birthright; never smiling, never responding. Her face remained impassive and not once did she address Hartfield. I was uncomfortable: Hartfield wanted to talk to White Cloud, not to me; she wanted to talk to no one as far as I could tell, and Yelena wanted to talk to me with lots of eye contact. Short of shouting down the table it was Yelena or silence.

  ‘You are an otter.’ She told me.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘The otter is your familiar. You eat like an otter.’

  ‘You mean fish?’

  ‘No. The way you put food to your mouth. The way you look around quickly before you put a forkful into your mouth. Like an otter.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Why don’t you look at me? Are you afraid?’

  ‘No. I don’t find it easy to look at you while I’m eating. It’s not personal.’

  ‘Look at me.’ I did. I thought the turban absurd. Was it fashion or simply covering unwashed hair? ‘You think me dangerous, don’t you? I won’t harm you, trust me. You live alone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought so. Like a badger in a set.’

  ‘An otter you mean, surely?’

  ‘Don’t play with me. I am not to be trifled with. I am a Blavatsky.’

  White Cloud looked at her intently, then said loudly, ‘No she’s not. She’s Ellen Tranter. Not a Blavatsky anywhere in her family tree. I’ve known her since first grade; I should know.’

  Yelena stared at White Cloud silently, as though making up her mind about something. She turned to me briefly.

  ‘White Cloud? Bullshit. Mary Collins from Boston more like. What was it, Mary? Your great-grandmother was a Shawnee? Or was it great-great-grandmother? She’s only been Rain Cloud since she met Hartfield.’

  ‘White Cloud. And at least I’ve got native American blood. The nearest you ever got to Russia was a bottle of vodka.’

  Hartfield looked edgy. ‘Come on, girls. This is no place to start an argument. We have guests.’ He patted my arm. ‘We all evolve personalities to suit our circumstances, don’t you agree?’

  ‘I suppose that’s true.’

  The two women avoided each other’s gaze, both apparently struck by the pattern of the wallpaper. It may have been rude – bad manners perhaps to bring up the past – but it was hardly a major revelation. I thought no worse of Yelena. It really made little difference to me what their names were. I may not have changed my name, but I too was creating a new persona to live in. That’s probably what stopped me from telling this absurd group of people how silly and shallow they seemed.

  We spent the rest of the evening back in the drawing room where I became horribly drunk on seventy-year old Armagnac. I couldn’t find any other way of dealing with the absurdity of the evening. I’d spent years trying to avoid banal conversations and empty-headed discourses and here I was surrounded by it. It may have looked glamorous to Dave, but it was simply unreal to me. It all seemed so pointless and contrived. Dave offered me a trip to the loo, but I was too drunk to want to move. I began to imagine that the room was full of cardboard cut-outs: Dutch Dave who wasn’t Dutch, White Cloud who wasn’t native American, Yelena Blavatsky who wasn’t Russian – and what of me? Who was I? I was the mushroom.man.

  Stropharia cubensis. The Starborne Mushroom.

  Small to medium size. To 6 inches high.

  White to pale yellow.

  Habitat tropical in areas of high humidity.

  Coprophagic, specially on animal excrement. Hallucinogenic.

  five

  The mushroom.man was right: I had no vocabulary to understand his thoughts on psychedelics. Well, that’s not strictly true, I had an academic vocabulary and a huge library at my disposal, but I knew that wasn’t what he meant. The only thing that really made sense was the idea of psychic weightlessness allowing the self to be blown around like a leaf in the wind. Since I’d come to the university that was a good description of what was happening to me. Without the contact and the support of my family and friends I felt rootless. I felt like a piece of flotsam, going wherever the tides of fortune took me.

  The only goal I had formulated was using the mushroom.man as research for my own aggrandizement in the eyes of my peers. As much as anything this was my touchstone, and yet it too was being undermined by the mushroom.man. I felt that his last message was a little patronizing – explaining that he could tell me nothing because I wouldn’t understand it. It annoyed me.

  It occurred to me that the principal difference between me and the mushroom.man was a sense of place. He was clearly rooted to his geographical place physically and emotionally. I, on the other hand, was living with almost no sense of place or belonging. I was a traveller who had simply stopped for a while, but who would continue his travels soon enough. The feeling of ‘just visiting’ was probably what was keeping me from making real friends at the university while at the same time chasing an electronic friend across the net. Anyway, I continued the e-mails and he continued to reply.

  Attn. mushroom.seeker.

  Subject: personal history.

  11 July.

  I know little about you, other than your interest in mycology. But you are obviously computer-literate or you wouldn’t be on the net. Given that, I thought this might be of interest:

  Back in the city days I worked for an engineering company. It specialized in sensing equipment and was big and rich. They had decided to computerize the business, bought a mainframe and hired an operator. It was my first job and my introduction into what my supervisor called the real world. Tom Greenan, my supervisor, was a man in his early fifties who had worked all his life in the accounts department. He was short, overweight and balding. What little ginger hair he had was parted over his left ear and pulled across the top of his head like stray strands of coir
embracing a boiled egg. He peered through thick glasses which made his eyes look tiny and piggy. He didn’t wash much, his breath smelt of gum disease, and dandruff sat permanently on the collar of the crumpled blue suit that he never seemed to change. Apart from his physical unattractiveness he was stupid and aggressive. I now have a Leghorn cock that I call Tom because of his mindless aggression and inability to learn anything.

  My job was to run the computer program that did the accounts. Dull donkey-work and badly paid, it would have been penance enough in itself without Tom breathing down my neck and in my face. The fact that he knew nothing about computers didn’t deter him from constant interference. He was on my case from morning to night, kept calling me a witless hippy in what he thought was a jokey way, kept telling me to get my hair cut so that I wouldn’t look like a girl. He should have been a prison guard. He couldn’t really deal with the change. Because he had always filled out everything in triplicate he insisted that the computer printouts did too. I couldn’t make him see that it was pointless; the information was already saved in the computer’s memory and could be retrieved at will. He just couldn’t understand that the computer was a new way of doing his old job, not just his old job mechanized. No, it had to be done his way. Do you know what’s it’s like to work for an idiot? To have a complete moron have the power to organize your day, your life? It was soul-destroying, as relentlessly grinding as the task of that poor bastard Sisyphus.

  One day Tom came to tell me that the company had decided to put its inventory on computer and tie it in with sales and ordering. I explained that our computer already had the capacity to do that. He told me that I was a witless hippy and that he was in charge, not me. I lost it; I told Tom all the things I’d wanted to, and went to see the boss. I explained to him slowly and carefully that I knew the machine well. That it was my job to work on it, that I knew how to set up the inventory – that if I could be left unhindered by Tom it could all be done in-house without the outlay of any more money. He seemed to take it in and told me he’d look into it.

  What I didn’t tell him or Tom was that the computer came already programmed with what they wanted. It was standard practice then, the entire accounting package was on the machine the day you bought it – nominal ledger, sales, ordering, final accounts. The computer salesmen didn’t tell you that, though. You had to buy each module, and when you did an engineer would come and spend a day fiddling at the back of the machine, looking busy. All he would do was make a connection which I could have done myself. I knew this because the engineer that serviced it had been in college with me. He showed me how it worked. It was a low-level scam, and I thought that by explaining it to the boss I would earn some respect. Instead I was fired the next day. Greenan arranged for the company to spend a great deal of money and I was left with no job.

  I didn’t care, really. I got on the books of an agency and got temporary, short-term jobs. But the work was mindless and repetitive, there was no room for experiment or flair. Greg had gone to America. I got the occasional postcard from him with snippets of news. He ended up as a researcher at the California Institute of Applied Technology, doing what he always wanted, chasing the rainbow of artificial intelligence.

  Jane and I were living together. We’d just drifted together after Greg had left for the States. It wasn’t really a passionate affair, but it was comfortable. Despite what I’d imagined about Jane’s sexuality, sex between us was never wild and uninhibited. It was, as I said, comfortable. We never talked about the night in the van, and even when Greg was still around it was never mentioned and never happened again. It was funny, after that night Greg and Jane drifted apart and she and I drifted together. Drift is an exact word, because it makes me think of tides moving things about, things that have no choice, things that simply go where they’re moved to. It was a lazy way to start a relationship, and I suppose there was a fear that talking about the three of us could bring ideas to life that were best kept secluded. Yet that night in the van was important, because it first brought Jane and me together. Strange that we couldn’t talk about it.

  Jane had a job in a boutique that sold overpriced clothes to bored, rich women, and men who thought of themselves as executives. It described itself anywhere it could as exclusive, whatever that means. Anyone could walk in, so it wasn’t exclusive in that sense. We lived without much money in a rented flat in what was once an elegant Georgian house. The area was run-down and full of cheap bedsits; no sense of community since people never stayed. Not any longer than they had to.

  We used to talk at length about the hills. We saw them as freedom from the repetitive routine of daily life. We’d take the bus most weekends and go to the forests. I would take psilocybin and Jane would walk with me. She never took any; she said that she hated the idea of losing control. I didn’t argue. Sometimes I thought it was wrong that she couldn’t share it with me. I was increasingly comfortable in a world that she knew nothing about – that she wanted to know nothing about. It was an exciting world where I could let go, my mind racing around the universe gorging itself on all the new experiences that were there for the taking. Whenever I wanted to re-enter the world I’d left, Jane was there to bring me back. She got good at that, like one of those men with ping-pong bats that bring in taxiing aircraft. The weekends in the hills were good; but the bulk of my days were not.

  Looking back it wasn’t dull. There were parties and visitors to the flat. Mostly we’d sit, get stoned and listen to music. It seemed like fun then, meeting new people, going to discos and generally cutting loose. But it nagged me that my work was nothing like I had expected. Maybe it’s just that routine dulls the edge of excitement. I suppose that as usual it was Greg who became the catalyst for change.

  It was early summer when Greg turned up unannounced at our door. He looked great; tanned, fit and rather prosperous. That sort of sleek look that comes with well-being. He’d been in the country for a week, but had been to see an old friend. He made himself at home at once and managed to create the illusion that it was like old times once again. He talked of sun, surf and Californian sex, his face glowing with health and fulfilment. He seemed to me to be a shade or two blonder. We looked weedy, pale and dull in our sorry flat and dingy clothes. Greg was burning with a passion for what he was doing and full of new and exciting ideas. That night over a couple of bottles of wine he talked of his work, dreams and mushrooms.

  He told us about psilocybe cubensis, an American species of psilocybin mushroom that he called ‘star-borne’. He had met the mushroom intelligence, talked to it about his work, learnt from it. It was a trade, he explained. The spores probably arrived on earth on a meteorite. They found the ecosphere to their liking and grew.

  You have to understand that the bit of the mushroom you pick – the bit above ground – is only the fruit. The beast itself is big, spread over acres, sometimes over square miles. It is a life-form like no other on this planet and is still little understood.’

  When Greg talked to the mushroom the deal proposed was simple. The mushroom would give Greg and all mankind information about the boundless universe; in return it wanted no more than passage for its spores when our technology led us to interstellar travel.

  Jane smiled indulgently, as though listening to the imaginative ramblings of a child.

  ‘How do you talk to a mushroom?’ she asked.

  Greg took a breath, slowed down, realizing that he had run ahead of himself. ‘You don’t talk to a mushroom like I’m talking to you. It’s not verbal communication. I say talk because that’s the easiest way to describe it, but that’s not what it is. When you eat the fruits – what I call the fruits of knowledge – you get a sense that somehow there is someone else present. Not another person, but another intelligence. It’s not clear whether the intelligence is now part of your mind or external to it; it doesn’t really matter. What’s important is the sense of dialogue. That there is a real exchange of information between our way of thinking and an entirely alien life-form. It m
eans, amongst other things, that we have to redefine what we mean by intelligence. If we define it in terms only of human understanding then only humans fit the definition. But that doesn’t square with my experience of the star-borne mushroom. There is a very real sense of communion with another being. The fruit is only the gateway to meeting it.’

  ‘You really believe that mushrooms come from space?’ Jane asked incredulously.

  ‘Originally yes.’

  ‘That’s a little hard to believe.’ She looked at me. ‘What do you think?’

  I looked at Greg’s face, full of earnest evangelism. It was an interesting thought. I’d certainly never talked to a mushroom, and none had ever started a conversation with me. He seemed strangely vulnerable at that moment, desperately wanting approval and agreement.

  ‘It’s possible. I don’t see that over billions of years there couldn’t have been galactic coincidences like meteors bringing spores to this planet. Sure, I believe it’s possible.’

  ‘I think you’ve both done too many drugs. You’re losing touch with reality. Sorry, Greg, I really can’t believe that.’

  ‘It’s OK. You don’t have to. Maybe I got a little carried away.’

  ‘No, not at all,’ I said. ‘Tell me more.’ I wanted to encourage him, give him support.

  ‘Well, there’s a lot more to this mushroom thing than most people will believe. There’s this guy in Hawaii called Terence McKenna who’s a genius. He grows psychedelic mushrooms, he knows everything about them, it’s his life. You’d be interested in his ideas on the evolution of human self-consciousness, because it applies equally well to artificial intelligence.’

  Jane got up and left the room. Greg watched her leave and turned back to me.

  ‘You see, if you think of human intelligence as I do, as a kind of high-level program that gets passed on genetically, you run up against the problem of self-consciousness. How does the program become aware of itself? This is no new question, people have asked it for millennia. You can say it was God who did it, you can believe in visiting spacemen, you can believe it just magically evolved. Or you can believe Terence McKenna, like I do. Somewhere along the line some proto-hominids ate psychedelic mushrooms. That’s not too hard to believe. Most simians eat mushrooms as part of their diet – the idea that they may have eaten psychotropic fungi is not far-fetched. If intelligence that is not self-conscious as we know it is like a simple reactive program – stimulus/response – then you have to have an external impetus to make the loop. Somehow the program has to loop back onto itself. It has to have a kick-start to do that, I can’t believe it happens accidentally. Mushrooms make a simple explanation possible for an extraordinary event. How else can you explain that it needs such tiny amounts of psilocybin to completely change the nature of the brain’s chemical bath? There’s an affinity between our brain, its synapses and the mushroom that is physical as well as mental. It’s already a part of our genetic heritage. That’s why we respond so easily to it.’