IT WAS A COUPLE of years after my father died that my mother told me about the acid trip they took together, the one that made her briefly insane. We were in my living room in North Carolina and she seemed torn between telling it as an amusing anecdote from the early years of her marriage and as something darker, an injury, perhaps a betrayal. “We went to a party in the Village,” she said, “very glamorous, full of fascinating people. We got glasses of punch from a bowl on a table and the next thing I knew I was flat on my back on the floor and the ceiling was spinning.” She gave an unhappy, theatrical laugh.
“Nobody warned you?” I asked.
“We lay in bed for days. Eventually your father managed to get up, but I still couldn’t move. I was in pieces.”
That made me think for a second. “How old was I?”
“Maybe five.” My mother stopped and looked at me, her eyes hooded, self-protective. She seemed to want me to say something, but I had a dim awareness that this story was no longer about an acid trip, that it was about something else, something I might not want to consider. Without saying a word, I went and got a broom and started sweeping the floor with great concentration, keeping my head down. The image of my parents flat on their backs, out of their minds—it made me frightened, queasy.
My mother sat down on the couch and picked up a book, her way of acknowledging that she had said too much. I went upstairs and called my sister, Perrin. It turned out she’d heard the story already, a few days earlier. “Does that sound possible to you?” she asked. “A punch bowl full of acid and nobody in the room tells them it’s spiked?”
“You think they knew?” I asked, startled.
“They knew.”
I fell silent. She was right, I could see that instantly, even if everything in me pulled in the other direction.
“Mom told me she fell so deep into herself she couldn’t climb out,” Perrin said to me. “You’re the only reason I came back,” Mom had told her. “I looked into your eyes and decided I had to come back and take care of you.”
“Who was taking care of me?” Perrin had asked her.
“Why, me, of course.”
“But who was feeding me?”
“You were a baby, you were still breastfeeding.”
“Mom, the LSD would have been in your breast milk, so I must have been tripping, too.”
“Ah, that would explain some things.”
I listened to Perrin describe their conversation, running one hand nervously over my forehead. There were definitely many things I remembered from that age: my mother’s cat-eye sunglasses, the red snowsuit my brother insisted on wearing, even in the summer. It felt odd to me that I couldn’t recall something as momentous as our parents’ complete psychic collapse.
After hanging up, I sat for a while, trying to reconstruct what it must have been like to be marooned in a tiny apartment high in the sky with your parents tripping. I tried to picture them sprawled in their bed, unable to get up. Would it have looked like sleep to me back then, at the age of five? In my imagination, that sleep went on and on, even when I tried to shake them awake, even when I shouted in their ears. My brother and I must have gone to the kitchen to feed ourselves. We must have gotten on chairs and climbed onto the kitchen counter so we could reach the food in the cabinets. We watched a long unfurling river of TV. When night came and the windows went black, we crawled into our parents’ bed to sleep between those big bodies, so familiar to us that they were like extensions of our own.
The more I rehearsed this scenario, the more it felt like an idea, an imaginative reconstruction, not a memory. And then I remembered something I had not thought of for a very long time, a night from around the same age when my father took me to the emergency room with an ear infection. The side of my head throbbed and I was hot with fever, but there was another father-son pair in the big waiting room, and the son, a teenager, was staring at something and talking in a way that seemed strange, heedless. His father stood behind him with a hand on his shoulder, crying.
I had never seen an adult cry before. Tears falling down a grown man’s face—it seemed impossible. Father and son were right next to each other, touching, but the son couldn’t see or hear his father. It was like they were in two different rooms.
“LSD,” my father said, putting an arm around my shoulder and pulling my face into his chest so I couldn’t watch anymore.
The warmth of his body, the scent of his shirt: forty years later, I can still conjure those sense memories instantly, vividly. They are real.
There was a part of me that wanted to let my mother’s story drop and be forgotten, but the next day, I found myself still circling, unable to veer away. “Did you really not know what was in those drinks?” I asked her.
She was sitting on our beat-up blue couch, the one with all the cat hair on it, dressed in a black satin pants suit and heavy gold jewelry, looking wary and vulnerable. “What do you mean? Of course not.”
“It just sounds so awful for no one to warn you.”
“Maybe your father knew.” She seemed angry, but I wasn’t sure whether it was at him or me; she avoided looking me in the eye. “He must have known. He handed me a glass and said, ‘Here, drink this.’” She stalked off, and I went upstairs and called Perrin again.
“Does that sound like him?” asked Perrin.
“No.” The man I knew was erratic, reckless, but never intentionally mean.
“She blames him for everything, doesn’t she?”
“Including dying,” I said.
Perrin gave a long sigh, and I could hear her mind shifting in another direction. “She hated when he ran out the door, it made her so mad.”
This was a prominent part of our childhood: the phone would ring, he’d answer, and then throw on his coat and dash out, gone for the rest of the night to deal with this or that incredibly urgent but somewhat vague client emergency. In the morning, he’d be sprawled out on the couch in his underwear, a magazine over his face.
“Do you think he, you know, partied?” I asked Perrin. The thought shouldn’t have been that surprising—the clients were drug dealers—but it surprised me, left me tight and a little out of breath.
“Maybe,” said Perrin. “I don’t know. Who can say now?”
I began rubbing my forehead again, in that newly acquired nervous gesture. “He was a teetotaler.” Teetotaler was the slightly fusty word he always used. He said that over and over again, and it seemed true: if we went somewhere and someone insisted on giving him something alcoholic, he’d ask for Harveys Bristol Cream Sherry and leave most of it untouched. I’d reach over when no one was looking and take a sip. That thick sweet musty syrupy cough medicine taste: to me, that was him.
“He was a mysterious person,” said Perrin.
MY MOTHER’S VISIT CAME to an end a couple of days later and I was left with her story in all its improbable weirdness. Weren’t we the least likely family to almost end in a case of child endangerment? My parents were lawyers, for god sakes, loving, kind, careful. I had a roomful of books and toys. I went to private school. We played across the street in Gramercy Park, which is private, as my mother told us over and over again—marveling, perhaps, over how far she’d come from her childhood in Brooklyn. You needed a key to get in, and you only got the key if you lived in one of the elegant old buildings facing the park. Yet as I circled those simple facts, a voice just a little altered from my own argued the other side, pointing to a different set of facts:
—Your father was a criminal defense attorney. He represented drug dealers.
—That was just his work; he kept a strict separation.
—The clients came over to the house all the time. The family went out to dinner with them. They picked you up at school when your father got held up in court.
—We didn’t try to act like them.
—Your mother would talk about how interesting they were.
—Interesting for her was the opposite of ordinary, that’s all. We had a definite fear of being ordinary.
—She would repeat conversations about the higher significance of psychedelics, how they were going to take humanity to the next level of evolution. [Switch to her voice, now audible in my head]: I’m not saying I agree, but he has a coherent theory . . .
—Again, that fear of being ordinary.
—You’d think she’d avoid the whole subject after having had such a terrible experience.
—We sometimes skipped over contradictory patches of experience.
—There was the big scary painting hanging in the living room.
—John Glykos’s self-portrait on acid. He was a painter friend of my parents.
—You stood in front of that painting when she was yelling at you about your brother, the morning after he dropped acid.
—I was too upset to notice the painting.
But I remembered the moment itself with absolute clarity: the odd blankness that filled me as I stood in front of my mother that morning, the living room full of bright morning light, strangely quiet, no radio, no TV. A little bit of that silence was still inside me even now, forty years later, a sort of numb coldness. I could feel it under my skin.
I began rubbing my forehead.
My brother was fourteen when he dropped acid. He did it at a party in the neighborhood and was carried home in the middle of the night by some friends. Our mother answered the door and found him lying in the hall, unable to stand up, hallucinating. Our father took him to the emergency room, the two of them becoming, in essence, a re-creation of the father-son pair I had seen so many years before in that same ER. By the time they got back home, he was speaking a little more coherently. He said that he hadn’t taken anything, that someone must have spiked his drink. (Of course, this is the exact same explanation our mother used in my living room in North Carolina, maybe the generic one. Or is it possible that she decided to borrow it from him?)
I didn’t actually see any of what I am describing here: my mother told it to me the morning after. What I actually remember from that night are my eyes opening in the dark of my bedroom, and moments later, a polite knock at the front door downstairs, followed by a single agonized wail. It sounded nothing like my brother, but I knew it was him, and in a purely instinctive choice, I decided to retreat back into sleep, where I would be safe.
In the morning, I went downstairs and found my mother standing in her nightgown, agitated. “For him to do this to us,” she said. “Despicable, selfish, stupid, cruel.” Her voice grew more self-conscious and theatrical as she went on, as if she were addressing a big audience from a stage. “Your father wanted a son, not a client.”
Those words made me feel as if I had crossed the line in tandem with him, somehow. I went back up to my room and sat on my bed in an agony of guilt and shame, running over the facts as she had given them to me, trying to make myself feel better. If someone had put the LSD in his drink, he—we—were innocent victims, I concluded; that was the most important thing to remember. Of course, this also meant there were people out there who would poison you with LSD if you weren’t on your guard. It would be so simple to do, and you would never be able to stop it; except for one sickening moment at the very beginning, you wouldn’t even know what had happened to you. The whole world would just suddenly disappear and be replaced with . . . I thought of the terrible wail I’d heard in the middle of the night, the sorrow it carried inside itself.
I ran over these thoughts again and again for the rest of the day, picturing a hand with a dropper putting LSD into a can of soda, then imagining my brother on the floor, his face contorted in anguish. By nightfall, I’d burned myself out and fallen into an exhausted, dreamless asleep. The next morning, I opened my eyes and found that my room was gone: walls, ceiling, carpet, shelves, replaced with a single flat expanse of the color red. My heart began hammering so hard it felt as if the muscles in my chest were tearing. I couldn’t breathe. At the same time, a single thought streaked through my mind: This is what he saw.
A moment later, I shifted my head and the pillow fell off my face. My room became my room again, with its blue carpet and wooden bookshelves. I sat up, trembling. The pillow in its red case tumbled to the floor.
It was a Monday. At school, I reviewed the moment over and over again, trying to figure out its meaning. What had happened to my brother had almost happened to me. The evidence wasn’t the pillow, it was the arterial gush of fear, and the terrible cry I’d heard that night. If I didn’t want that to happen to me I would have to be careful, incredibly, fanatically watchful. At lunch, I looked at my sandwich and threw it away.
That night, I examined my dinner for signs of tampering. The more I scrutinized the chicken, the string beans, the water in my glass, the harder it was to tell if they were safe. I had never looked at a chicken breast so closely and had no idea what was normal. That tiny irregularity in the surface could be nothing, or it could be the after-mark of a syringe, cleverly used to inject LSD into the meat. And yet we were at home, my mother had cooked the meal, and the five of us were sitting together at the big round table in our usual configuration, familiar and comforting. I searched my brother’s face for evidence of change, the marks of the drug, but saw nothing; my parents were quiet, perhaps a little sad, but at least not angry.
It wasn’t till I finished the last of the chicken that I understood my mistake. I started to feel warm, and then a little dizzy. By the time I got back to my room, I was having trouble catching my breath. The walls shimmered, my vision became grainy and dark. I sat down on my bed, then dropped to my back. It’s finally happening, I thought, a really toxic, grown-up sort of grief beginning to pool at the back of my head. This is real.
But it wasn’t real. Whatever was in fact happening—a panic attack, I guess—had reached its hidden limit and began to subside. My heart, which had been trying to slam itself open, held together, slowed; my lungs filled with air; I watched the normal world seep back in: the old wool blanket with the fraying edge, the wooden nightstand . . . even as a part of me wondered if it wouldn’t be better to get it over with already, once and for all. The waiting was now the worst part.
In the weeks that followed, I learned the rules that would let me avoid false alarms: examine food slowly, till you are fully satisfied. If something is unusual, cut it away and throw it out. Better yet, throw out the whole piece. Eat from sealed packages whenever possible. Drink from unopened bottles. Listen for the crack of the seal breaking, the hiss of the air leaking out. If you do not hear those things, throw the bottle away. Do not leave food unattended. Better yet, stare at it until you’ve finished eating. Make sure no one else touches it, or gets too near it. And leave some food unfinished on the plate, so the police can test it afterward and exonerate you.
But there were so many potential situations that the rules kept branching, multiplying: someone bumped into me on the subway, and I realized my mouth was open. I clamped it shut, my hand flew to my lips, but it was too late. I needed to get home before the worst began to happen. The problem was that the station was packed, and I marched in slow lockstep with the dense mass of people moving down the tunnel, even as I felt the telltale rush of blood to my head, the dizziness.
That night, I tried to stay awake as long as I could, because in the hours since getting off the subway I’d figured out what should have been obvious from the start: my mouth fell open when I was asleep, too. In fact, I was pretty much defenseless when I was asleep, even if my mouth wasn’t open—even if I taped it shut with packing tape (which I actually tried and rejected). And when I thought about that problem, lying there with the radio playing, my siblings in their bedrooms across the hall, my parents downstairs, the idea of getting dosed with LSD and going insane while I was asleep seemed lonelier than anything else I could imagine, just like that father and son in the ER, trapped in their separate rooms, invisible to each other. Asleep, dreaming, I wouldn’t even know I’d gone insane. I’d be locked in a dream forever, thinking it was real.
I started to nod off, so I got out of bed and went downstairs, walking back and forth in the living room to stay awake, back and forth past the shadowy furniture.
“What’s going on?” It was my mother in her white nightgown, almost glowing in the otherwise dark room.
I stopped. “Nothing.”
“What are you doing up?”
A part of me wanted to tell her everything, to let it all rush out, but another part understood just how incredibly humiliating it would be, how crazy it would look. I couldn’t even say who was trying to poison me, or why—or why it kept not happening. I had no proof, other than that one despairing cry. She looked at me oddly, and I suddenly realized that I was shaking hard, almost rattling.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” I wrapped my arms around myself, trying to hold still.
“Are you sick?”
“No, I’m fine.”
She studied me carefully for a long time. “Are you in love?”
It took a moment to figure out what she meant; it was just so oddly out of phase, such a strange choice of non-sequitur; it left me outraged for years afterward. But in that moment, the trembling got worse, became waves of shuddering. My teeth clattered together. It was so hard to speak that I could only whisper a few scattered words, like the clues to an acrostic.
“I see,” she said, listening with great concentration. “You mean you’re afraid that what happened to him will happen to you.”
I nodded, even though hearing it said that way made it seem almost made up, a story or mental construct, the painted backdrop to a play.
“I’ll call Mr. Borell in the morning,” she said, naming her psychoanalyst.
I tried to stand up straight without shaking. “Not necessary,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”
“Well, let’s just see.”
And that was enough, somehow. The trembling subsided. I went up to bed and slept, and in the morning, my brother came up to me for the first time since his acid trip. “Mom said I should talk to you,” he said.
The truth is that we were not generally friends at this point, though we had shared moments of closeness in the past. Why else would he have been at the center of my convoluted, hysterical thoughts? Why else would I have confused the two of us, as if we were shadow images of each other? There was some kind of bond, clearly, perhaps dating back to our parents’ acid trip, when we had spent days and nights watching TV in a world empty of grown-ups.
Now we stood side by side; he was facing one way, me the other, the two of us avoiding eye contact. “Mom told me that you’re afraid that someone will put LSD in your food,” he said.
I nodded, too emotional to speak. It sounded so stupid, so weird.
“Believe me, that’s never going to happen.”
“But it did happen.”
He gave a snort. “Just think about it for a second, why would anybody waste their expensive drugs on you?”
I got his point right away, of course—that the story we had been sharing, the story I had adopted so fiercely as my own, was just a bullshit excuse. I got it, and yet for some reason I couldn’t hold on to it; in another second, the insight was gone.
“What was it like?” I asked.
I glanced over at him. His face contorted as if he were suddenly about to cry, and I realized with horror how fragile he was, that the memories hadn’t left him yet. “There was a doll with no eyes,” he said, and then bolted into his room and shut the door.
THE NEXT DAY, MY mother sent me to see her psychoanalyst, Mr. Borell. His office was in the neighborhood and I walked there by myself, keeping my mouth shut to prevent someone from slipping acid down my throat. Mr. Borell’s office would have been the absolute worst place to lose my mind.
I had never met Mr. Borell before, but I had a fully formed picture of him in my head. He had been a part of my mother’s conversation for as long as I could remember, the all-seeing, all-knowing character in the story whose job it was to give the final opinion on everyone and everything. This role was a function of his position at the center of our world: many of my mother’s friends had become his patients over the years, and he seemed to share with her what he had learned about them. It was as if he sat at the center of some intricate panopticon, taking in all of human folly; my mother was his disciple, the special beneficiary of his astringent wisdom, and I was her disciple.
This made me different from my father. “Mr. Borell believes that your father is completely incapable of insight,” she said to me once. “That’s why he terminated his treatment. It was a waste of time.”
And yet it was my father who called Mr. Borell after the acid trip, once he finally managed to get up and saw my mother’s condition. She told me this in North Carolina. “Mr. Borell came to the house. I remember him standing by the bed, looking down at me from a great height. ‘She may have to be hospitalized,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to start over from scratch.’”
Of course, I had no idea when I went to see him that he had been a part of that earlier story, that there was an earlier story. I slumped in a chair, completely focused on not weeping in front of him. He was leaning back behind an enormous desk. “I don’t want you saying that you’re seeing Nat Borell now, so everything’s going to be all right,” he told me, referring to himself in the third person. “Nat Borell isn’t going to fix you. You’re going to fix yourself.”
I nodded in tearful silence, convinced that he was a charlatan and I would never get rid of this thing that had attached itself to my mind like a leech.
Yet over the next couple of years, I would find that Mr. Borell was actually right, that I would in fact fix myself—or more exactly, that some form of workable accommodation would take place inside me, in spite of myself. I still examined my food for tampering, but the false alarms started to feel less all-consuming, to the point where one day I found myself almost a little bored: I knew that if I waited, the attack would pass. After that, the attacks started to taper off, so gradually that I can’t quite say when the last one took place. I was still careful to drink out of a sealed bottle, but a part of me was learning to hover above my thoughts, watching them happen while not quite participating in their reality.
The way I came to describe the problem: There were two private screening rooms inside of me playing two different but almost-parallel films that diverged at one key point. In one, I am myself, the beloved son of extravagantly caring parents; my world is safe; I am protected. In the other, someone off-screen has slipped LSD into my drink for no clear reason and I am tripping, going insane. Which movie would I rather be in? I have learned to watch the first and avoid the second, but that doesn’t mean the second isn’t still playing in its little dark theater, or that it doesn’t have a certain seductiveness to it. Even now, decades later, I will occasionally pick up a cup of coffee that has been sitting half drunk on my desk all morning, and think, How do I know?
It’s a deliberate choice not to take a seat and watch the movie.