Ice-Cream Truck, Out of the Warehouse
“C an anyone explain to me how the March is supposed to remember when he finds the mushrooms?” Constance asks in the backseat.
Jack had worked on the abandoned truck outside and ignited it back into life. I guess he was also a mechanic in Wonderland or something — Fabiola commented that he liked to fix cars.
Now we’re all stuffed into this ice-cream truck, with Jack driving. The best thing about the truck is that the locks on the doors are still intact, so we are safe inside. I would have preferred a big, badass police van, the one that transports prisoners and has barred windows. But hey, where is such a vehicle when you need one?
“I am assuming that he needs to eat the mushroom,” Lewis explains. He and Tom Truckle are sitting opposite of Fabiola and me. We couldn’t get the Mushroomers on board in our travels, so we locked them safely in the warehouse — after we found a new food and drink source — and promised to come back later.
“Eat?” Tom asks.
“Don’t hang on every word,” I tell him. “We’re experimenting here. So why mushrooms, Lewis?”
“What do you mean?” he grips his weapon tighter.
“I mean you took a mushroom to forget. The March needs one to remember,” I say. “In the books, I have been depicted as the girl who grows taller or shorter when she eats mushrooms. What’s this all about?”
“It’s magic mushrooms,” Tom grins, being an expert in pills and hallucinatory drugs. “I heard the first documented hallucinogenic mushroom experience took place in 1799. Guess where? In Green Park, London. That’s why you’re all bonkers.”
“Are you saying madness is induced?” I ask him.
“Well,” Lewis says hesitantly. “There are theories that madness didn’t exist before that date, or even in Green Park, 1799.”
“But that doesn’t add up,” Constance says. “Madness had been reported all through history, way back.”
“Those were possessions,” Fabiola suggests. “Or mere diseases that had been mistaken for insanity.”
“Like vampires,” Tom says. “There are no vampires, but certain diseases centuries ago made people need to drink blood — or made them think they needed to drink blood, to be precise.”
“Don’t say there are no vampires.” Constance grins at him with scary teeth. Tom leans away from her.
“Fabiola is right,” Lewis says, as we’re rocking to Jack’s driving now. The sounds of war outside are worrisome, but Jack only takes smaller, abandoned routes. “Take me for example. I have a split personality. Inside me, there is a monster called Carolus. He was born out of my suffering from migraines—”
“Or out of the figment of your imagination,” Tom snickers.
“The point is,” Lewis continues, neglecting Tom. “Did Carolus appear because of the migraines, or the medicine I took for the migraines?”
“It’s like shock therapy,” Constance still eyes Tom. “Did it help or did it make people who’d been just ill and mistaken for insane, actually insane.”
“So tell me more about this event in 1799,” I ask Lewis.
“A British man who had been in the habit of gathering mushrooms from the garden and cooking them ended up experiencing hallucinations,” Lewis says. “Black spots, odd flashing colors, disorientation and such. Then, when he went to the doctor he forgot why he was there.”
“Wicked,” I chew on the words. “Like most of us with half memories, not knowing why we’re here.”
“And so it’s been reported in the British Medical and Physical Journal as the first incident of its kind,” Lewis says.
“So why is this significant?” Constance asks.
“Because not one incident like it had been reported before,” Fabiola replies. “It is proof that insanity didn’t exist before.”
“And it’s because of mushrooms?” I tilt my head.
“That could be…” Lewis says.
“Nonsense,” Tom adds. “That could be nonsense.”
Lewis says, “Later people reported seeing others with weird dilated pupils, infrequent pulses and breathing everywhere when they cooked the mushrooms.”
“Then,” Fabiola says, “people started to fear for themselves. They were afraid to die. Mushrooms became the equivalent of apples: a poisonous food that could kill.”
“I don’t see how this induces insanity?” Constance says.
“A year later, another British man had different symptoms from eating the mushrooms,” Lewis says. “As the reports describe it, he had an attack with fits of uncontrollable laughter.”
“That was the first time doctors noted that symptoms of eating mushrooms are out of this world.” Fabiola says. “And,” she exchanges a look with Lewis, a slight smile on her lips, “it’s been the first documented time a doctor writes a very peculiar word in their reports about a mushroom-eating patient.”
“What word?” I ask.
Lewis smiles too. “Nonsense. The word was nonsense.”