The Answer to Everything (23 page)

~

After the article appeared, Drew Woollings stopped taking my calls. I expected that. What I didn’t expect was that it would be a problem, that I would still need him.

An editor at a small but well-regarded publishing house read my
T.O. Mag
piece and floated the notion of doing a full-length book on the Answer Institute. I loved the idea. Journalist/author. Author/journalist.

The snag was that I’d need a lot more material. More details, multiple sources and perspectives. And I had lost my insider. My key to the kingdom. Even offers to share whatever advance I may receive, or any future profits, failed to bring Drew around. He wouldn’t respond to my emails or calls. And I knew better than to try to go through Mama Bear, who sent one rather succinct text a day after the article came out:
SHAME ON YOU!!!!!
I also noted the snippy missive Moina Quinn and Perry La Farge had posted on
T.O. Mag’
s website, so they wouldn’t be letting me in any time soon.

Could I get more out of Eldrich Becker? Yes. Definitely. He was clam happy to be interviewed for the article and continued to answer emails and calls after it came out—but his responses were growing more and more erratic. He’d
answer normally for one or two emails, but then get daffy as hell for the next. For example, I’d send a request for a certain Seeker’s contact info, and he’d send back an entirely-beside-the-point proverb. I’d thank him, ask again for the same info, and he’d send a link to a song on YouTube. The more specific the question, the more obscure his response. Was he a total nut job or just yanking my chain? My last correspondence was a sensitively wrought, multi-faceted email question, which he answered with a photograph of a polar bear on an ice floe. Annoying. When I asked if the polar bear was meant to be him, he sent a link to an Emerson quote:
Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God
. Terrific. Bully for you. But obviously no help with my book proposal—the editor told me she’d want an outline of how I planned to “flesh out” the story.

I didn’t have a plan. There was no flesh. Only the dry bone of Drew Woollings’s experience. Most of the Institute insiders were dead. And the survivors weren’t blabbing. Xavier Raine Maddox was unreachable. Even his publicist had stopped returning my calls and emails. Amy McCullough and John Aarons, the sources I really needed to tap, continued to decline contact—Amy, politely (thanking me via text for the wine or flowers or chocolates, and apologizing for not being able to help); John, not so graciously (the whiskey and craft beers would disappear without so much as a “Thanks, Bub” or a “No comment”). Radio silence from John-boy, and also from
many loyal Seekers who were either steamed by my article or warned by compadres not to share.

It was frustrating. And discouraging. I really wanted to make this thing happen, but no matter how many times I twisted it in my brain, I couldn’t figure out a way to tell the complete story.

I just didn’t know enough about how the Institute came to be.

Oddly, it was only after I had completely given up on making the book a reality that it came to me, mid-lather during my morning shower. A eureka moment when I wasn’t even trying.

I instantly knew how to do it. I knew exactly how to make them all talk.

How could this have happened?
That’s what everyone wants to know.

And how I feel about it. Like that matters.

I don’t really know how it happened. And obviously I feel awful. Especially for those who lost loved ones, and who will never truly understand what went on at the Institute. I wish I could change things. But I can’t. I can’t go back in time and unmeet John Aarons. As soon as my toes touched that quicksand there was no escape, just a slow sucking in. Even though my lawyers think I’ll be fine—since I told people to go inside, and since the drugs were used sacramentally—it’s still upsetting to have all these lawsuits hanging over your head. They say it could take a year or more before they’re resolved. So I just have to live with this undercurrent of tension. It’s not easy. It’s affecting my health. I have this red stuff all over my hands. Eczema, the doctor thinks. From stress.

How could this have happened?
I don’t know. I wish people would stop asking.

And I wish they would stop asking how I, Amy McCullough, could have possibly been mixed up in it. That’s what my parents and my sister and Barb van Vleck and her shiny new fiancé and all my old Facebook friends can’t seem to
comprehend. How could someone as
normal
as me have been involved with something as bizarre as the Institute? I mean, it’s not as if my folks ever thought I’d be a golden girl like Allison, I’ve always been the screw-up by comparison, but I don’t think they ever expected their younger daughter to be facing a raft of wrongful-death lawsuits and criminal drug charges. It’s humiliating. Now I’m not just the dropout, I’m the “crazy sex-cult freak.” Right. All I can tell you is that things are being distorted by the media, who seem to want to paint me as some kind of calculating cult-meister, while John and Eldrich come off as all soulful and genuine. I have to say, I was shocked to learn about John’s parents in a magazine article. Whenever he talked about them it was as if they were alive and well and going about their business across town. It hurts that he confided in Eldrich and not me. I guess he never trusted me. But I can see why he had trust issues.

Another thing the media has done is make things at the Institute sound weirder than they were. I mean, I know we ended up in a strange place, but it was a long time getting to that point. And humans don’t really notice things that come on incrementally. Think of Milgram’s electric-shock experiment. People would never breeze in and administer a full fatal shock. But if they started at fifteen volts and then slowly moved their way up, well …

It’s like aging. All the time there are tiny changes happening to your face and body, but you don’t really notice them. You’re not surprised every day when you look in the mirror. It’s just another morning. Now imagine if your twenty-year-old self woke up and saw your sixty-year-old self in the
reflection. You would freak out. Grab at your flesh. Refuse to believe. That’s what the Institute was like. It got just the tiniest bit stranger every day, so while we did end up in a very odd place, it happened so gradually that no one really noticed.

Of course, the final night was the strangest of all. Our first ayahuasca ceremony. Anne-Marie’s son, Richard, helped Peter Scheibling set up a maloca at the end of the yard. It wasn’t exactly authentic; it was basically an event tent with a pitched canvas roof and open sides. Peter put sheets of plywood under the tent and laid Peruvian rugs and pillows on top. It looked really nice, actually, tucked under the giant oak, all colourful and cozy. Things could have easily gone smoothly. It could have been just another typically strange night at the Institute …

How could this have happened?
How does any accident happen? Something unexpected occurs. Someone makes a bad decision. It’s hard to think about with so many “what-ifs” swirling.
What if we’d held the ceremony the day before or the day after? What if we’d held it in the basement or the pool house?
You can drive yourself nuts with what-ifs.

I know I’m lucky to be here. And I find it interesting that I am. I mean, if I drank a full cup of ayahuasca, I likely would have stayed outside with everyone else. But something stopped me from taking more than a couple of swallows, and it wasn’t the disgusting taste. No. It was an overpowering feeling that I should just have two big gulps. And it came to me as soon as I took the cup in my hands. I know it sounds loony, but it was as if the medicine had a message for me and I couldn’t hear it until it was between my palms. Peter, our shaman, urged me to drink more, said I wouldn’t feel anything if
I didn’t finish it, but I refused and eventually he moved on to Phil, who was to the right of me in the maloca. Because he had been ill, Phil took only a sip. Scheibling told him that even if he didn’t go deep into the ayahuasca realm, it would still be beneficial to have the power of the sacred plant in his system. I figured the same held true for me. And I did feel something. I started to feel very warm and relaxed as I watched fat snowflakes drift down around the sides of the tent. The flakes left colourful trails, and I began to see bright squiggly lines when I closed my eyes.

I became hyperaware of the audio around me. Peter was playing Peruvian songs on a ghetto blaster. I liked the singer’s voice, but the rhythm of the maracas was annoying. I’m not usually sensitive to that kind of thing, but it was scratching at my nerves in an oddly prominent way. Then I started to hear people retching, and that was vile. But after a while, something different came breaking through. Heather. I heard her crying, and all the other sounds faded into the background. It’s hard to describe because it was one of the most profound experiences I’ve ever had. I felt like Heather’s sadness was leaving her body and entering mine through sound waves. Her sobs were tiny flying things, moving toward me. The grief creatures entered my ears, squeezed down my throat and settled into my chest, making it really hard to breathe and giving me a kind of sonic sea-sickness as I took them all in.

At a certain point I didn’t hear Heather anymore, and I got the feeling that her sadness was moving out of my chest and sinking down into my stomach. I was horrendously nauseated, but at least I could breathe. I began to see images—a
lot of swirling, three-dimensional geometries. Strange organisms began to appear: half-plant, half-animal beings that I understood to be guides from the spirit world. I felt deeply connected to these creatures and to the universe as a whole. I had a sense that ayahuasca’s purpose was to teach humans about connectivity—it seemed like a fundamental substance, and I felt overwhelming affection for it. Then my mind started racing and I started seeing things from my past. I saw my family in all these different situations and started to understand things about our relationships in new ways. It was bizarre. I don’t know how long I was immersed in this movie of my life. The last memory was with my mom and my sister. It was this day when Allison got to pick out a new coat because she got all As on her grade-six report card. I’d remembered it as her parading up and down the store in her leather jacket, flaunting and taunting because I didn’t get anything. But when I was reliving it on ayahuasca, it seemed as if she was just really happy to be getting the coat, and she wasn’t paying attention to me at all. And what I had interpreted as malice on the part of my mom (i.e., you don’t get anything ‘cause you’re a dumb-ass) was actually her trying to motivate me. It was like I could now see it for what it really was.

I was kind of marvelling at this experience and coming out of the visions when I heard the first rumble. It was loud and angry, and it scared me. It also confused me. Could there be thunder in winter? Was this a real, ordinary thing or a once-in-a-lifetime message from the spirit world? I heard Tyson shouting then, something about the glamour of Satan, about rejecting the glamour of Satan, and he began chanting
yes,
yes, yes, yes
, over and over again. The second blast snapped me back to reality.

My trip was over.

I suddenly realized how windy it had become. The whole maloca was shaking violently. I said, “I think we should go in.” I stood up just as the tarpaulin ceiling peeled halfway off the roof structure and started flapping crazily. There was more thunder. Closer now. I said it at least once more—that we all needed to go inside—but nobody was listening. Everybody was still deeply tripping. Could I have forced them all indoors? I doubt it, but who knows? All I know is that I suddenly got this intense stomach cramp, like my intestines were being twisted and my bowels were about to let loose.

As I hurried back to the house, I passed Catelyn heading toward the maloca, dragging Staci behind her. She told me they were going to check on Heather. I said I didn’t think they should be out there—there were huge gusts of wind and it was snowing hard. I offered to take Staci back with me, but I must have looked dangerously stoned or sweaty or wild-eyed because Staci didn’t want to take my hand and Catelyn didn’t try to persuade her. Unfortunately, I had no time to argue. I rushed past them toward the house and just barely made it out of my snow pants and onto the toilet—they don’t call it
la purga
for nothing. As I sat there, basically peeing out of my butt (sorry for the grossness), I had the strange thought that back in the maloca I had literally absorbed Heather’s sorrow into my body, and now I was getting rid of it for both of us. When I was done, I felt very clean and calm and, I admit, virtuous. I drank some water, curled up on the family-room
couch and fell into a deep sleep for what felt like about an hour but was probably longer. I have a vague recollection of being partially roused by a loud noise,
the
loud noise, I guess, but it didn’t wake me. There may have been a bump in my sleep, but there was no consciousness. I swear.

When I did finally wake, everything was quiet. I checked the bedrooms. Nobody. Not even Catelyn and Staci, which was weird, since it was the middle of the night. A four-year-old should have been in bed. I had a bad feeling. I knew Catelyn was pissed about having to look after Staci and skip the first ceremony—Scheibling told her that ayahuasca is good for addicts, and she was desperate to try it. Maybe her braving the storm to “check on Heather” was just an excuse to join in. Maybe she was out there right now, tripping or being sick all over the place with Staci watching. Not cool.

I put my damp snow things back on and headed out across the backyard. It was still windy, but no thunder. As I got past the pool, I saw something strange, what I thought at first was the blown-off roof of the maloca, hanging from some high branches, but as I moved closer to the edge of the woods, my eyes started to make sense of what I was actually looking at. It was the oak—that massive magnificent old tree, gaping wide open.