'La Leocadia' (ca.1820-1823), by Goya.
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Devastate Me

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There’s a call button to ring if I feel like I’m dying, to the right of the chair in the treatment room. Before anything can happen, the doctor and I talk for a while. I’m asked to explain the whole thing, why I’ve come to such a place. The explanation is full of shards, edges, pieces that don’t fit. Life was always like this but then it got much worse.

I’d come and gone for such a long time, in and out of clarity and understanding. Wouldn’t it be nice to get the inside of my head to just calm the fuck down.

I had never been much of a drug person. Well, alcohol, yes, and some occasional weed. A brief episode with pills. But not even a peek into psychedelics. Too much fear of loss of control.

A sensitive kid, some bouts with depression. What sane person wouldn’t be depressed by this world? And it was in the family lineage.

The doctor asks a series of questions to determine if I’m a good candidate for ketamine therapy. He takes his time, seems careful and conscientious. This is the responsible way to do ketamine. (Not like with Matthew Perry. Not like with Elon Musk.) A young woman sits in on the conversation and dutifully takes notes; she must be some sort of assistant in training. At one point, as I tell my story, she stops writing and just looks at me.

It turns out I’m a good candidate.

The atmosphere feels sterile and medical, but they obviously went all out on the chairs. The chair in the treatment room is so plush, with so much padding, and both reclines and lifts my legs if I want. And there is that call button to push, just to my right.

The doctor acknowledges that some people do have the feeling that they’re dying—some refer to it as “going down the K-hole.” It feels as though you’re crossing over and may not come back. For some that might be a little scary. To me it sounds… interesting.

At any rate, the doctor says, you’re safe here.

He describes what some of the initial reactions might be. One of the first things many people feel is a numbness around the mouth. Then there could be a spreading sensation of weightlessness. Then, perhaps, dissociation.

Have I ever dissociated before? There was that one memory of being eight or nine, sitting on the kitchen floor petting one of the cats, such an ordinary day, couldn’t have been more ordinary, and suddenly I was next to myself, as though removed and watching. Almost as though I could take in the whole scene around me—cat, linoleum floor, the two grand pianos in the living room, hallway leading to front door—without being of the scene. Unburdened. A neat trick, and there were no drugs needed for that.

A youngish male nurse covered in tattoos comes in to get the IV infusion set up. He looks like someone I would have had a crush on in 1992. He can tell I’m nervous and tries to allay my trepidation. You got this, he says. He acknowledges that that sounds trite, but he means it, he says. And somehow I believe him. If I feel nervous it has to do with the worry that absolutely nothing will happen. I want something to happen. To just remain the same as ever would be the biggest letdown.

He finds the vein and in it goes. Horse tranquilizer. He asks if I need anything else. A blanket? Some water? I brought my own water, and I’m warm enough. Lights off? Yes please, I say. Just the late-afternoon waning winter daylight filtering through the window shades.

The IV is making an interesting clicking sound, like an old machine. It has a little wheeze to it—old-timey sounding.

The doctor, who had ducked out to see another patient, comes back and opens the door partway, asks how I’m doing. So far so good, I say, although I’m not actually feeling anything yet.

He says some people listen to music; there are ketamine playlists online. He waves me off on my voyage and closes the door.

I check my phone and there are indeed ketamine playlists with hundreds of songs. I am not one to put on arbitrary playlists, but I try one, because I hadn’t thought of this ahead of time, I hadn’t thought about listening to music or what to play, what might be “safe” to listen to. Music could be a cannonball shot straight into a battleground you didn’t adequately protect yourself from.

Then my mouth, or rather my lips, start to numb. Well, this is interesting. My one hand is gripping my phone, which is now playing instrumental music from the playlist. A quick glance suggests a lot of Scandinavian artists. That’s appropriate, somehow. That Scandinavian remove—I can relate to that. With my other hand, I touch my lips. They are still there.

Then something starts to move—something is flowing underneath me. Or maybe I’m flying, but slowly. Gliding, more like it. Diagonally out there and somewhere far, far away, space opens up.

I lose the weight of the physical self. I feel this but I don’t actually think it. The mind is no longer steering this ship, flying this plane.

From the outside I probably just look like a woman sleeping, or maybe a woman passed out drunk.

Soon, a soaring lift of the heart. My heart is now out there somewhere along with everything else. And something else is happening. (Happening?) I become aware of people coming back to me. My dead mother, my dead father, my dead brother. Mostly my brother, the most recently gone. He’s showing me what it’s like to be where he is now. I’ve been so worried about how he’s been since he left without a word. He’s showing me now—this is what it feels like out here! He’s showing me that the worries stop.

Everything starts to fuse with the music I’m listening to. Let’s just say that it feels almost like I’m the pipes of an organ, that I am breathing the music out of myself.

Further away now. I’m vaguely aware that I am still in the room, but most of me is now somewhere else. Or maybe the somewhere else is just coming to me, a somewhere else I’ve had a hunch was always out there but couldn’t quite find.

Am I still breathing? I probably am but have no sensation of it. I’m much more aware of—what should I call them—these portals, or channels, stretching out in front of me. Tubes, sort of. Almost as though they are my awareness, or consciousness, itself. Am I sensing the inside of my brain?

Then there are tears. A sudden spilling of emotion, which, because I’m crying and am aware of tears, wetness, I assume is sadness, but instead it’s a feeling that has no label or judgment or attitude attached to it, nothing scary, nothing to brace myself against. Nothing to brace myself against. That is more or less the essence of what’s going on.

Every so often an insight rises to the surface, like a message floating into focus on a magic 8 ball. It’s all about the frequency. About the way something, you know, vibrates.

Still further away.

Everything feels deeply okay, everything is all right. You can’t go back and change anything that has happened. All that stuff you do when you’re in the other place, the everyday place of regular life, where you try to figure out what led to what and why things happened the way they did and who might be to blame and how you might be responsible and how things went wrong, how things didn’t go the way they were supposed to—well, none of that stuff fits here.

More tears, abruptly. Although not exactly crying, just the sensation of tears streaking down from closed eyes. They seem to be connected to a recognition of loss, of things that changed in ways I didn’t want, but it’s not even a thought that has caused this reaction. It’s just a fact. And it doesn’t even hurt.

Deeper in the experience, there is the sense, the knowing, that things that happened in life were, if not exactly fated, then still inevitable. That things had to turn out precisely the way they did because of the fact that they turned out the way they did. It’s such an unbelievably simple and absurd truth to finally apprehend.

The music now fuses with those insights. Now it all seems to be about suspension and resolution. The parts of the music that have suspended chords are almost unbearably tension filled, but not tension in a bad way, the way tension often feels in the other place. More like tension as in waiting, or not knowing, not knowing when, or how, things will wind down to some kind of resolution. So I abide with it. The chords feel long and vast, like oceans, and I just keep the faith that they will resolve. And they do.

The resolution feels like heaven, like the rightest thing that has ever been right. It’s the thing that makes a circle a circle—that last little part that makes it fully round.

The interpreting part of the brain has gone offline. I’m out here with the stars.

So I cycle around into phases of suspension and resolution. And this starts to feel like the way of everything, this starts to feel like this is just what we do, and that each phase is right in itself, that each phase has to be there so that the other one can exist.

Eyes closed, there hasn’t been anything to see, nothing projecting onto the darkness of the shut lids. It has all been sound and feeling.

Even further, deeper. This just keeps going! It’s not as though there’s even a particular point I’m trying to get to.

Mother, father, and brother have all cycled in and out. Nothing scary about it, not even particularly surprising. Kind of like those recurrent dreams I have where brother is still here, although I know he has died, really, but nobody else seems to know that but me, and here he is, just interacting with us all again as though he’d never left.

There is a beeping sound now to the left of me, and I vaguely recall that the doctor said something would make a noise when the fifty minutes was up and the IV had stopped. So that’s what it is. There is a demarcation, but it’s like a finger running through water, wavering and indistinct. I’m still mostly out there gliding through space.

But thoughts start to come. Can I open my eyes? See if you can open your eyes.

I take a peek and see that the room is still there. The chair—it’s still underneath me. I can move my toes.

I’m talking to myself again. That voice that’s me is back. I’m an earthbound person again. Soon I will wonder if my hair looks bad, or if anyone has texted while I’ve been so far away.
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~~~
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I’ve never found it easy to be a human being. Where should I put my arms when I sleep? Do I smile enough when I’m talking to someone? Where do I stand? Did I do the wrong thing in 1982? And what about all the things I neglected to say to people who needed to hear they were worth my time.

I go back to the ketamine place several times over the course of two years. I want to shed the skin suit again and again. That’s what happens at the ketamine place. And with the shedding of the skin suit is a glorious hour or so of no worries, like the removal of electric prods from the brain.

Each session has its own character, a sort of predominant theme. Or one family member comes through more than another. Connections, it’s always in some way about connections.

In one of the sessions the words “Show me” keep coming back. Am I asking this of someone, or of myself? Am I asking it of life? All I know is that it’s essential. Show me and I will see what I need to be, what I need to do, how I need to live. My job is to be able to look and see what’s being shown, to be curious and open and unafraid. If I’m closed off I won’t see what I need to see.

And during the time in between sessions, which might be months, the brain does seem a little different. It doesn’t automatically lock into its usual grooves and ruts. I even test it sometimes, as though my tongue is worrying a sore place in my mouth. Let’s try thinking this thought that usually gives way to bad feelings. Oh, it didn’t happen this time!

Occasionally I tell someone I’ve been trying this stuff out, this ketamine stuff. But then I struggle to describe what it’s really like (“everything feels okay,” “there’s this feeling of connection”) and people’s eyes begin to drift to the corners of the rooms. My sister is the most interested, probably because she wants to feel the peace I’ve been feeling, and the fact that I can’t just transfer it to her—that’s such a frustration that it’s painful to talk about.

One friend keeps sending me articles about the dangers of ketamine. I assure her I’m doing it the safe way.

I go back sometimes in my mind to the awareness of the absolute absurdity of thinking/wanting/expecting anything to be other than the way it is. This is maybe the strongest thing that comes through in that other place.

“Everything happens for a reason.” How I always hated when people said that. It always seemed essentially meaningless, banal, and it still does now, but it also now feels true if I don’t dwell on it, don’t try to analyze.

In other words, one thing leads to the next. Once something happens it can’t go back to unhappening.
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~~~
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I’m far away in another country trying to write about this. Why do I always think I have to go away?

This particular going-away feels a little different because I’ve done the other going-away, the ketamine-away, and maybe something from that has stuck.

I’m in the poorest region of Portugal, and at this moment, a hateful, treachorous, mentally unstable past American president has not yet been re-elected back in the U.S. There is still the hope he won’t be.

The acres surrounding me are owned by an arts foundation that invites artists of all kinds to come and work, but the land before that was an abandoned farm, and before that was a working farm where, in 1974, after a national coup, the farmers rose up and ran the greedy landowners out. What a beautiful story. Seemingly powerless people seeking justice for themselves and actually succeeding.

I write with the sound of sheep bells ringing and clanging in the field across the valley. Or sometimes while sitting by the ruins of an old mill that used to make grain for bread, underneath a railroad bridge that can no longer be crossed. Disconnected from roads and just surrounded by fields and trees.

This particular time and place won’t come again. An almost constant and acute awareness of this follows me.

Why did I never understand that you can’t change something that has already happened? Why did it take horse tranquilizer for that to sink in?

I’m in a heavenly place trying to write about ketamine, which for the most part has been a heavenly place for me. Heaven/heaven. Where’s the tension, where’s the edge?

The tension and edge will come on the next to last day, but we haven’t gotten there yet.

In any direction there are paths through fields and woods of cork and oak trees. I wend through them every day. Wild fennel grows everywhere. Sometimes I pick a thin stalk and break it in half to smell it more deeply; sometimes I bite into it for a jab of flavor.

Interactions between the writers and artists—eight of us—are lighthearted and pleasant. There are no prima donnas jockeying for attention. We are all doing such different things that there is no point in competing. The two directors of the foundation, Ludger and Carolien, a married couple from the Netherlands, are kind and present and take care of us. They are like parents to us weird children.

This discrete and temporary span of time is like an alternate life. I’ve been going on writing residencies since I was in my twenties, and thirty years later, I’m still doing it. Which means I’m still writing. I have had some outward success but not as much as I’d once dreamed of and quite some time ago I stopped thinking about that.

The mirror in the bathroom is kind at certain times of day and very unkind at others, depending on the light. I don’t look into it much, because there is no need to, really, but when I do, it’s a portrait of me as no longer a young woman. No longer the young woman who came to these sorts of places in her twenties and was often the youngest one in residence, the one who sometimes became the crush of a confused man looking for a break from his marriage or his stultifying academic job or the writing career that never quite took off. No longer the young woman who didn’t know what to do with all the attention.

Most everything is low around here. The buildings are low, the trees are low, the hills are low. The Portuguese people tend not to be tall. Ludger, though, is a tall Dutchman, and when I see him from a distance, he reminds me of my brother.

I decide I’m no longer in love with nostalgia. Nostalgia is just an abstraction of a past feeling and tends to hurt, and I’m tired of hurting myself.

In addition to the sheep, there is a pig farm across the way. The acoustics of the valley make them sound very close. Their snuffling and squealing are strangely loud, as are the cries of the farmers. Their commands to the pigs sound gruff and other times a bit singsong. A hundred years ago, two hundred years ago, it must have sounded basically the same.

One night over dinner I learn that chickens eat rocks, which aid in their digestion. How did I never learn this at some point in my life. I find out about this through an artist here who, the day before, visited a nearby chicken farm so that she could butcher a chicken and see the rocks inside its gizzard. She photographs them. She says some of the rocks in the chickens are pink, some are blue. As she talks about this, I feel such envy for the tactile element of what she does. On her Instagram page I see a photo she took of herself with rocks in her mouth. Why did I never think of putting rocks in my mouth? I loved rocks when I was a child and collected them. At some point, later, so much of my time went toward abstraction, toward writing, toward words, which seem like the opposite of rocks.

There was no need for me to come to Portugal just to realize I’d like to put rocks in my mouth. I could have done that at home. And still.

In ketamine world, everything is true and clear. I can’t recall a single moment when I felt I was fooling myself during those hours in that chair, can’t recall a false note or a second of ambivalence.
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*
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On my next to last morning in Portugal, a thick, dark fog rolls in across the valley and obscures everything in view from my screened door. What is normally pastoral and serene is now ominous and almost theatrically severe, like over-the-top special effects. But I must not squander precious writing time over some enervating heavy weather. I have been trying for three weeks now to write about what it felt like to take ketamine.

That morning, seeping in through the heavy fog are noises from the pig farm across the way. Are they the same sounds I’ve been hearing when the pigs get excited at feeding time? No, these sound different.

I stand up and look out the screen door. It’s still absolutely dense and dark out there, the fog is so thick it feels like night.

The pig noises get more hysterical. It sounds like one particularly loud pig at a time, with other distressed pigs making noises in the background.

The loudest pig sounds like it’s screaming. Hysterical screaming. And then I realize what’s going on. Not sure why I didn’t understand this immediately.

Looking out into a sea of fog and hearing a pig in the process of being slaughtered is a suspended chord that you want desperately to resolve.

And this goes on for a long time. The other artists and I start to text back and forth on our group thread as it dawns on each one of us what is going on. I have to close the glass deck door eventually, I can’t bear to hear it. I put earbuds in and try to write while listening to music, the same music I played during some of my ketamine sessions. The same heavenly floaty everything-is-okay music that helped back then and there.
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~~~
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The fog eventually lifts and the sun comes out, and I take my earbuds out. It’s quiet outside again. The pigs have been taken away.

The next morning I say goodbye to my compatriots, I say goodbye to Ludger and Carolien and head to Lisbon. From Lisbon I return home to late fall in New York.

In November, on my birthday, I wake up and find out the sadistic ex-American president has been re-elected. That day and many subsequent days feel hopeless and marked by dread.

There are no more ketamine treatments on the horizon because they are too expensive and my health insurance has never covered them. There are too many other things to pay for. More pressing things.
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~~~
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I can’t go back, but I can know I was there. Little tastes of it come sometimes. A burst of a memory of a feeling before it disappears again.

You’re safe here, the doctor had said.

The only time I didn’t feel safe in Portugal was when the pigs were being killed. Even though it was happening to them and not me.

The rest of the time, I didn’t think about being in harm’s way. But harm, in varying degrees, has a way with everyone eventually.

Maybe it’s better to trust anyway, to not be braced, to be the way the pigs must have been when they woke up that morning, like any other morning. They couldn’t see ahead. They smelled the air like any other day. I will put rocks in my mouth and it will feel like a new and shattering thing every single time.

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