path: root/veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/open your eyes.txt

 	… It is just, it is just about to, it is just about to rolywholyover.  —James Joyce
Eigenstate One (The Year 1999)
	Open your eyes to Los Angeles, 1999, the sun is coming up and in state of sleepnonsleep you start to feel, for the first time, the pre-millennium tension building.  The room is nearly dark but the translucent glow of morning is beginning to bleed through the window.  The clock reads 6:23.  The distant sound of crashing waves jars a notion of abstract and ocean size uncertainty into the backbrain of a terminally nebulous domesticated primate.
I lie there for a while just staring at the rough plaster ceiling and wondering if it’s texture is as close to the surface of the moon as I imagine it to be.  Sometimes in that half sleep state I try to imagine I am slowly orbiting the moon at about five hundred feet instead of lying on my back staring at a ceiling.  I jilt myself out of this mini-eigenstate by lighting a cigarette and turning on the lamp, the warm murky-yellow glow of the rice paper shade is harsh in contrast to the dark room and I am forced to squint until my eyes adjust.  The room is of modest size and contains the bed I am sitting up in, a nightstand with a lamp and a half-size bookshelf; the walls are decorated with black and white photographs of New York, Paris and the rural south, some of them I took myself and others are by professionals.  The bookshelf holds mainly science textbooks interspersed with occasional antique occult/magic tomes, all of which are related to my work; on top of it is a small meditation shrine which I set up as part of an elaborate personal joke.  
I don’t normally get up this early but right now I am still living on New York time.  I wear two watches, one is a twenty-four hours stopwatch that I start over everyday when I wake up and the other has the local time of whatever country or continent I happen to be in.  I started this practice years ago when I decided to live in a Quantum Relativity State.  Not long after I read a joke somewhere that said the man who wears a watch always know what time it is, the man who wears two is never quite sure, I am never quite sure about anything and time is certainly as transient as anything else.  
	This is, as I said earlier, nineteen ninety-nine on the modern calendar, but it is not technically Los Angeles its actually Sunset Beach, a small ocean community about half an hour south of LA proper; but I refer to everything within a hundred miles of LA as being LA.  I never did have a high regard for lines that don’t exist.  The house I am staying in is on Huntington Harbor and although I don’t personally own it do I pay any rent on it, nevertheless I think of it as one of my homes.  I don’t live anywhere, really, but I have homes here, New York, Paris, and one that actually is in my name —a farm outside of a small town in rural Georgia.  I travel a lot between the three cities and only go to The Farm for research and recruiting purposes.  
	I crush out the cigarette and get up for a shower and shave after which I spend half an hour doing Hatha Yoga followed by some push-ups and sit-ups.  This has been my morning routine for three years now and I find that in spite of my love for cigarettes I am in better shape than most people in the western world.  This routine also helps to center me in whatever eigenstate I happen to be inhabiting, and serves to remind me at the start of everyday that is just one eigenstate among countless and it is subject to radical and irreversible change at any given point.  (Note: an eigenstate is a fancy name for any point at which an observation is made.  In Quantum Physics this term is used to denote the activities of particles when they are being measured and helps to differentiate from the actual activity of the particle which may be quite different at other points.  In laymen’s terms it means nothing.)  Any one interested at all in transcendence or brain modification should take up Hatha Yoga immediately, I also happen to think that Hatha combined with Kundalini can be viable sure for addiction, to quote the master addict himself “anything that can be done with chemicals can be done without.”
	I took up yoga because I had a hypothesis that consciousness was a result of the antenna that was receiving it; in other words I thought for a time that we see what we see because of our physical shape.  It turned out I was grossly underestimating the complexity of things, but I did walk away with a lifelong habit that keeps me in good physical shape.  I have two major drug addictions and no plans to kick either of them and this morning like any other found me at the coffeeshop ingesting caffeine and nicotine until around noon.  Of course I was also working a case, but I will be the first to admit that it was a definite second priority.
	This particular case had been open, but remained unsolved for eleven years before I was called in to help, and I am pretty sure that I was a last resort for my employer since he has gone to great pains to make sure that there is no trail between him and me.  What is it you ask?  We will come to that, but let me first say that I am not a cop or a private dick or anything of that sort; I am a specialist and I am not cheap.  I started off by soliciting my services in private circles where law does not tread and when I produced results where no one else had, word traveled and now my clients seek me out.  This leaves me the luxury of choosing which cases to take and which to walk away from.  I have recently gotten in the habit of taking on jobs that do not at first appear solvable to me; it’s the only way I could figure to keep myself on my toes.
	Naturally before I committed to this case I checked out my employer who it turned out it was an ex-CIA man with a career that stretched all the way back to the old OSS days.  He had, from what my sources told me, worked this case himself for several years without results and apparently it had gotten to him enough that even after he retired he was still working it.  And now he wanted my help.
	Over coffee and in between cigarettes I hacked my way through some networks and got in touch with an old associate in Rangoon who had some connections that dated back to the OSS; I also put a man on my employer told him to watch but remain hidden.  This meant that we could lose him for a while, after all he was CIA and therefore stone paranoid that somebody else might have more information than he did.  Such a man can rarely be relied upon to make good judgements, and I knew that he was never going to give up all his information without some effort on my part.  I didn’t want to play any card I didn’t have to and most of all I didn’t want him to feel watched, but I did want to know what he was up to.  I have found that if you watch people they will usually tell you what you want to know without you having to force it out of them.  William handled the grunt work for me without questioning why I was wasting his talents on spook stuff, which was a good thing, because I didn’t really have an answer for him.  It just felt right; I thought about the job and he came to mind that’s the way I work.
	The CIA man (his agency name was Raptor which was so cheesy and stupid I decided to keep it for him) had made a muck out of project way back in the nineteen fifties.  The project was one of those stupid black ops things that are rarely actually operations and never black.  “A Secret Agency is an oxymoron run by morons and build on the hard work of more morons,” William used to say.  He harbors some bitterness toward the NSA for not recognizing his talents as legitimate, but he is basically right and this case was a spectacular example of an intelligence op that was well neither intelligent nor much of an op.
	It was called WAIBEN for the doctor/agent that initiated it and it was really not an issue so far as I could see —they gave some LSD to prisoners several decades ago to see what the drug would do.  They were trying to figure out mind control, but the tests had been inconclusive and the project was abandoned in 1963. Waiben had had an accident crossing the street in 1990, but he was old to begin with and had probably threatened to write his memoirs or the like, so they got rid of him.  The CIA looking for mind control devises is like a monkey trying to find a monkey.  How can you study mind control when you have all the minds working for you under your control?  No wonder they didn’t have any luck.
	William’s voice was echoing in my head when I put the report down.  The gist of it was that it had been a fuck up, and indeed it was true from what the documentation showed it had blown up in Waiben’s face, but where was the case?  I noticed a list of names at the back which I assumed were the prisoners who had been given the LSD, two pages and nothing I recognized, but then on page three a name was highlighted Eugene Sean Patriman.  On the back of that page held in place by a small paper clips were two photographs; one which showed Mr. Patriman in the traditional mug shot pose, it was dated 1963.  The other was color and showed Mr. Patriman eating what looked like breakfast at a table outdoors, he was wearing sunglasses and the photo seemed to be taken from quite a distance, it was dated 1989.  None of this struck me as unusual at first glance, Mr. Patriman looked to be well adjusted to society and seemed in good health… really good health on second look, and then after looking at the two side by side… far too good of health.  Mr. Patriman should be sixty-one years old in the second photograph, but there was not wrinkle on his face…. I found it unsettling, but I still saw no case.
	William dropped some mail on the net that Raptor was preparing to leave for New York and that he had been reading the project reports, apparently there were some pages missing from mine.  I read them over quickly and caught a cab to the airport, by ten thirty local I was at café Dante in the East Village waiting on William.
	 William arrived right on time, he was driving a cab an in the back was Raptor.  They were having some sort of argument from the looks of things and eventually I saw Raptor look over at me.  I was wearing a smiling Richard Nixon mask to piss him off and through him off guard; I was all ready catching the eye of nearly everyone waling by and if there is one thing that a CIA man hates it’s conspicuity.  Raptor was not the timid paranoid man I was expecting, but he did seem truly frightened to be seen with me.  Spooks are so easy to throw off their guard its really not even fun to me any more.  I need to work with an exhibitionist to see if I can throw them off guard.
	Raptor had collected himself by the time he reached my table; he sat and stared at me in silence.  In moment or two the waiter came and he order a burger fries and coke which he never touched through out the meal.
	“I hired you because you have a perspective that I don’t and its is now obvious to me that I underestimated your capacities for the more mundane aspects of our work so now I will come clean with you.  I’m not sure entirely what your man was able to get his hands on, but hear is my information.  This case is the biggest thing you are ever going to work and I suspect that you will be killed before you solve it, but if you want to know what really happened in that cell is that the subject made contact with decidedly unfriendly and seemingly alien agencies which you can read as individuals and/or organizations.  This sounds ridiculous every time I say but I have found no other explanation for these events that are one these tapes.  
	He handed me an envelope, which I could tell by touch held three VHS tapes; he kept talking as the waiter set the food down in front of him.
“You have to see the tapes to understand what you are dealing with but the basic gist of it is that some sort of alternate reality seems to exist quite parallel to out own, but frighteningly different and decidedly alien.  Dr.Waiben’s experiment –in ways we still don’t understand- appears to have inadvertently created a bridge or passageway between these realities.  The really interesting part is that the bridge or link or whatever… is a man.  We haven’t been able to get in touch with him since 1989, but we have found photographs of him as far back in time as the American Civil war.  Apparently he can um well as improbably as it sounds…he can move through time.  The consequences of this experiment remain largely unknown… as if that wasn’t enough….  I know your background in Quantum events… you will understand what I mean when I say we aren’t entirely sure anymore that any of this ever happened that is we have come to question everything and found nothing to be reliable… 
“We put timothy Leary on the case for a while but he couldn’t make heads or tales of it either and in the end he concluded that his talents were needed elsewhere… its been hard finding people to work on this sort of a case… rather sensitive you understand… there are two people one I know you are familiar with… operating out of Rangoon I believe.  The other wishes to remain anonymous for the time being… I have had about all I can take of this case… I feel like something is taking over my body, my mind, like I am no longer in charge…like there is no control left… I am going to disappear… but the best of luck to you… look up your friend in Rangoon he has been on this one for a couple of years now, he’s the one who took the picture earlier this year good man…
	He abruptly jumped up from the table and sprinted down the street.  I was in shock.  William yelled and started to pursue Raptor but I yelled back to let him go.  I took off the Nixon mask and motioned him over to the table. I stood as he approached and told him to bring all of our people to the farm within the next three days.  I ran out into the street, jumped in the cab that William had been driving and headed to La Guardia again.  
	By the time I touched down in Atlanta my brain was spun through, looped and twisted beyond everything.  Its one thing to live by certain mantras like changes in perception can come at any second, any one who had ever read a few Quantum Psychology book or been to a transactional theripist new as much as I did they just never thought to use them as tools to make money, but it is an entirely different proposition to be told that everything you hoped was true was indeed true.  This was going to be the biggest case I had ever had in fact I had the distinct feeling that after this nothing else was going to matter.  The first call I made was to Rangoon.  Sil agreed to come to The Farm; it would be the first time we had met since I took it over from him.  The second call I made was to a girl; she promised me she would look after me if I lost my mind which by now seemed inevitable.
	I put in the first video the minute I walked in the door.  It was shot from a ceiling camera and started with a man in a white coat injecting Mr. Patriman with what I assumed was LSD.  What followed was largely uninteresting except for a phrase that he kept repeating (it seemed wholely incongues to me) I can’t believe its not butter, I can’t believe its not butter….  At 04:58:23 on my VCR counter, Partiman calmly stood up and walked through the wa	ll!  I rewound the tape so many times it was in danger of being damaged.


Eigenstate Two (The Year of the Logitician)

Sil Hawkard awoke with a cramp in his neck.  He found himself lying on a cold cement floor inside a small room with bare cinderblock walls and two tiny windows that were high up on the walls, near the ceiling.  He did not know how he had come to be in the room, there were flashes of falling distant memories of panic that might have been from a movie or might have actually happened.  The room felt fake as if suspended in between the known and unknown, not unlike a train station and Sil half imagined that at any moment a giant coastal flyer engine might come crashing through the walls.  The windows were too high to see out of and they gave him a dizzy feeling that made him quesy. 
He got up to take his mind off the churning in his stomach and see if there was a way out; the door opposite him was locked so he jumped up and down trying to see out the windows, but only glimpsed what he figured was probably another room just like the one he was in.   He thought about yelling but was wary of attracting attention.
	Far off as if it were traveling a long cooridor came an echoing voice, it was garbled by echo andSil could only hear the word Tribune or was it fly, June?  In any case it did not help, you rarely get to the castle in situations like this so Sil resigned himself to waiting.  The voice gave him some feeling that at least something somewhere was happening and—good or bad—that thought gave him the comfort to sit down facing the door.  He did not remember falling asleep, but he was reasonably sure that the door opening had awoken him.
	The door opened and two official looking gentlemen entered, they were wearing uniforms that Sil didn’t recognize.  The second one in the door had a syringe in his hand and Sil sae bad things in his future, but the first man very politely asked if he would come with them.  They led him down a long hall lined with doors that Sil assumed were more rooms like his own.  At the end of the hall was an arched entrance that led into a mezzanine where various officials were milling about and other prisoners were being processed through a serious of desks.  His guards led him up to the end of the line and simply left him there.  Sil assumed escape was not an option.  None of the other prisoners appeared to be trying anyway.
Then Sil realized that such a thing did not technically mean that one could not.  He broke out or line and walked toward what seemed like sunlight.  That is he went in the brightest direction, no one seemed to pay him any mind and he was soon out of the lobby and found himself on the street

I hit the street running and the first thing I noticed is one of those old time banners they used to string up between light posts downtown by the park, back when they had light posts and parks, such things being out of favor today.  But today for moment I got to get me up outta these old bones and that old banner dragged me kicking and screaming all the way back to San Francisco, Chinatown, big red streamers hanging from windows and red banners with indecipherable Chinese characters strung up between buildings.  I was with Mike Cultch and we were mosing our lazy way up to Coit tower to sleep on the cold stone wall on the ast side where the bushes grew up and you could hide from the washout cops.  Security guards being the most dangerous form of human know, we like Coit in spite of them.  Plenty of light to read by and no one goes up their except the tourists and they're all gone by sundown.  Just us and the handfull of wash ups who were mostly too drunk and stoned to notice anything that wasn't trying to bite them.  
	not that we didn't have few close calls on the day.  Like the rent a gun downtpwn standing by the gate of parking lot like he really was Neil Cassady or something and he thinks he smells some shit from my cigarette.  he trys to pull a real cop routine on us and mike starts to turn around and I pipe up hey can I see your badge their mister washout.  Now he didn't like that name to much so he comes at me swinging and I just duck.  he punches the side of a car and it makes this awful crunching sound like when you're biting into a stale rock hard pretzel.  I was ready to get out of their on the double, but Mike is pissed cause he got suckered so he starts kicking the cop in the side.  I can tell by Washouts expression that its cracking ribs and more than likely creating one hell of mess with his internal organs.  I felt sort of bad, but Mikes crazy when he gets mad so I wasn't about to take one in the face for a washout.  By the time he let up on him the washout was spitting blood and coughing uncontrollably.  we split and never looked back.  Maybe that Washout learned the fine are of minding your own business, but more than likely he just beat the crap out of someone who reminded him of mike.  Violence as a virus rarely does anything but duplicate and breed.
	Today's a long way from washouts, chinatown and the whole San Fransisco scene;  today is New York, slivers of sky and me, walking memory, invisible to others because I see them first.  I make it my point to see them first that way they don't notice me as much.  someones got to be paying attention and as long as someone else is giving off the vibe of paying attention some little nuerocircuit in the back of the brain relaxes and they don't see me.  Its an old trick I learned from a voodoo priest one night walking around New Orleans.  He had this bone staff with a human baby skull tied to it along with bead and teeth and other little artifact of his trade.  I saw the skull, but I never saw him.  He distracted my mind and controlled the situation.  It so happened that later I did see him sitting on some steps later on in the evening when the salt air was turning to fungus and laying the rest down to sleep.  He asked me for light and I noticed it wasn't a cigarette he was smoking so I made myself and home and he shared the joint with me.  By and by we feel on the topic of straights and how dope frees up the mind and makes you hyper observant and one thing led to another and I learned how to do invisble.  One of the handy thing about this skill is that you can cut through the static of humanity and you start to notice who sees you and who doesn't.  As old Bull would say you get to meet the johnsons.  right now here walking down the street, long past the red banner and moving up town I am on my way to meet some Johnsons.  Nice family, good neighborhood, mind their own business and they were good enough to ask me to dinner. 
	Living on couches and corner mattresses crawling with tick and bed bugs and fleas you come to miss the home cooked meal.  Eventually you stop craving it stop even being aware that such a thing exists, but its a good thing to let someone remind you of every now ans then.  I can almost taste it
	I closed my eyes and saw a finger print.





Eigenstate Two (The Year of the Beast)

Scene one:  ONE DAY IN MAYA'S APARTMENT
MAYA
PETE
NARARATOR
(Stage is a smallish square room with deep red walls, two couches perpendicular to the audience and facing each other with a table between them.  MAYA is a slinky sexual girl of twenty-four with fiery grey-green eyes, short black hair like ravens trying to get out of her head and slender arms and legs that slip around her body like ribbons.  She is wearing tight black satin pants and a green spaghetti strap tank top which is also tight.  She is sitting cross legged on the left hand couch smoking a cigarette.  PETE sits across from her watching her with a puzzled look on his face.  He is obviously younger than her and of a tall lanky build with an insecure awkwardness that is betrayed in his shifty mannerisms —as if he were not quite comfortable in his own skin.)

Narrator (sitting on a stool stage left)  ...Pete watched Maya with absolute fascination, he had never met a woman, no he had never met anyone, as intelligent or as goddamn sexy as her.  He did not fully realize it but he was devastatingly in love with her and this we know meant that she would devour him and destroy his life.  He did not know this yet, but the thought did pass through his mind occasionally when he masturbated —imagining her in all sorts of ridiculous situations where the end result was always her sweet innocent but wise voice begging him to Cum all over me...ya come on my face.    (aside: wouldn't you?)  Pete was smart enough to realize the unlikelihood of him having sex with Maya but dumb enough to pine after her nonetheless.  
PETE:(existentially in his own mind) please pleeeeeeease have sex with me.
MAYA:  Would you like to see me naked?
PETE: (too eagerly)  Yes!
MAYA: huh... I guess that's better than not.  (she makes no move to get naked)

NARRARATOR: It especially disturbed Pete that she seemed to take so much delight in teasing him and frustrating him further.  It also disturbed him when she went out with other men instead of him, especially when the other men was Jared Towers.  Towers was in Pete's World Religion class and represented a peace of humanity deeply disturbing to Pete, he represented strength and masculinity.  Pete was young and still believe that masculinity is limited to those specimens of the male population that look like they just walked off the cover of GQ or its ilk.  Later, like the rest of us he would come to realize that these cro-magnon motherfuckers are in fact far to fragile to satisfy a woman in bed and spend the majority of their adult lives desperately trying to convince themselves that they are not gay.  But, Pete had fixated on a rumor that Jared had a twelve inch cock, thick as a flashlight and had convinced himself that this was why Maya went out with him.  It served the need for self torture that Pete's brain seemed to possess.

MAYA:  "Will you do something for me?"
PETE: (hesitantly) "Maybe"
MAYA: (with deadpan sincerity) "take off you clothes"
JARED: standing as if to strip and then thinking better of it sits back down) "NO"
	
	(A seven headed snarling beast of unknown but leaning towards demonic origin leaps out of the floor from stage rear he first bites at PETE; several heads lay into his flesh and rips off first his arms and then his legs, and then holding Pete upside down by the stumps of his legs it chews on his balls staring out at the audience.  The beast leaps on the narrator and tears him to bits as a laugh tracks play offstage.  MAYA is still watching sitting behind the beast on the couch oblivious to the goings on.  The beast leaps down and starts to eat the audience; critics first the juicy fat ones in the front row and then the rich lesbians behind them all the way to back ripping up art fag kids who snuck in without a ticket cause there friend works at the door.  The beast runs snarling into the streets of New York devouring east village types causing people to go into panic and leap from the tops of burning buildings.  Carnage and Mayhem abound.)
Curtain falls.


Eigenstate two (year of the Logitician) 
	
Maya was living on the western edge of Usinc (a state labeled Fornical) in a town by the name of Long Beach, which did not in Maya's opinion possess a beach that would lead any rational person to call it Long.  She lived in the upper left hand apartment of a fourplex building.  The aforementioned Pete lived below her and next to him was a sweet quiet old woman whose life went on interminable pause between visits of her two grandchildren.  The remaining apartment directly across from Maya's belonged to a man who called himself Cary, but Maya suspected that that was not his real name.  He was rarely home, extremely wealth, extremely brilliant and seemed vaguely powerful in some way Maya couldn't quite place.  Certain people when you meet them give off an air understanding that makes them appear powerful to others who don't have that sense of omnipotent confidence —like they are aware that their "self" is not the sum total of experience. Maya had met him a few times and said hi but she did not know him very well.  She wanted to though and when she found out from the old woman down stars that Cary's daughter went to the university Maya enrolled in one of her classes.  
	Anna was a beautiful girl with black raven hair that swung across her shoulders and bounced when she laughed.  Which she did a lot when talking to Maya.  She was nothing like her father seemed.  She was however always in a good mood and did not seem to have the psychosis of most people in Long Beach.   But Maya was disappointed that she couldn't get Anna to divulge any scandalous details of her father's life.  But Maya did use her as an impetus to talk to Cary more.  This led to vague friendship consisting of a  cursory discussion of his world travel habits, lack of official citizenship, and an invite to use his balcony whenever she liked.  He did not lock his door and professed not to believe in property instead he had the entire place wired with cameras so that if indeed someone stole something from him he could find them and ascertain whether or not they needed the item more than he did.  All of this intrigued Maya and secretly she wanted to know more, but she was happy to just use his balcony which was the largest one in the building.  It opened virtually right into a palm tree and gave one the feeling of being at some Mediterranean villa.  It made Maya want to waltz around in a leopard trimmed chamois wearing platform  shoes and sipping pina coladas.  Maya's balcony was drenched in afternoon sun and not a pleasant place to read so she would go to Cary's in the afternoon and read his books and drink pina coladas in her underwear and pace back and forth in her leopard trimmed chamois.  She didn't know there was a camera in the tree as well and that it could be remotely moved and zoomed so as to allow Cary to see what she was reading.  In fact Cary knew a rather lot more about Maya then Maya realized.  That was only because Maya was looking on a different map scale, Cary's map was much much larger.  But this is Maya's story and now a one act scene to show character development:

	 (The End) 

	
	Jared was not really Maya's type either she only went out with him because she liked nice dinners, but didn't like to pay for them.  Jared was rich or rather his parents were rich and he would do pretty much whatever Maya told him to.  She had never had sex with him and didn't want to.  You can't have sex with a man who let you hypnotize him and then revealed under hypnosis that his father once chased him a around the house with a meat cleaver when he caught the boy masturbating to a picture of the Virgin Mary.  Maya used to wonder over fine french food: what kind of sick fuck finds the mother of god sexually appealing?  I mean if sacrilege is a turn on masturbate and think of fucking god in his own ass like he thinks of fucking you in yours...Maya had laughed for hours on that one, of course she didn't tell Jared anything about the revelation or how far into his mind she had gotten that afternoon.
	
	Pete had left and Maya had changed clothes and was heading out the door to meet Jared for dinner when she noticed light leaking under Cary's door.
	"Cary?      It's Maya are you home?"  She knocked and hearing no reply she pushed gently on the door which floated open as if on its own accord.
	A voice floated languidly in from the balcony and said, "Come in... I'm outside..."   Maya went out onto the balcony and there was Cary sitting and smoking a cigar shaped object which smelled like hash.  
	"Hi." 
	"Hi."
	"Sit down," he took another drag and exhaled.  It definitely smelled like hash.  He caught her staring at it as she sniffed at the smoke.  Cary laughed, "would you like to smoke some hash?  I brought it back from Morocco..."
	"That would be lovely," Maya felt the awkwardness of a setting too intimate for the relationship that was being cast onto it.  Cary did not appear anything but relaxed, but of course he was likely quite stoned.  Maya accepted the blunt and smoked it for a while before handing it back.
	"Have you been enjoying this balcony in my absence?"
	"Oh ya, I sit out here in the afternoons and read," the hash hit fast and hard and Maya had to fight to keep her wits about her, she thought vaguely of Hassan I Sabbah and his brainwashing techniques and for a moment she understood why he was so effective.  
	"This stuff hits hard at first but it settles down and leaves you in a nice contemplative frame of mind, I only smoke it in the evenings.  I prefer something more active for the daytime."
	"I would never have guessed that you smoked pot..."
	"That's the idea." he smiled, handed her the blunt and leaned back in his chair reaching for cigarettes.  Maya took the blunt and reached in her bag for her own smokes, lighting one she asked,  "What exactly is it that you do?  Your daughter told me you own a casino or a mine or something?"
	He laughed. "Doing research are we?" Maya blushed, but Cary just kept laughing.  "What I do has nothing to do with either of those things.   I just believe in diversifying my financial assets...so that if one particular area of the world economy goes snafu I don't lose everything...just good business you know........ but yes I do have both of those things, but they are just things  and not even ones that I'm actively involved in..." his voice trailed off.   "What I do is more complicated...some might say that I am trying to figure out what the hell is going on down here...others say that I already have figured that out and I have moved on to far more nefarious projects..."
	He said the sentence like he knew that Maya would recognize it and the realization gave her an acute sense of paranoia which was accented by the canaboids floating in and out of her brain.  Banish fear.   Someone knowing you well without having spent any time with them is not necessarily a bad thing...people fall in love and they seem happy about it .  Secretly I think they're deluded but this is different.  Its a common phrase perhaps we've read similar books or maybe more people are into this sort of thing than you realize.
	"So do you know what the hell is really going on down here?" Maya asked as coolly as she could in her stoned state.
	He just smiled, "you're the one studying in college trying to figure it out... why don't you tell me?"  He settled back in his chair as if waiting to listen to a lengthy discussion on the subject.
	"It would take more than pot for me to tell you that..."
	"I have more than pot if you would like it."
	"What do you have?"
	"Do you know anything about South America shamanism?  They make a hallucinogenic brew  —some people call Yage some call Ayahuasca, I call it the orange  stuff that bubbles....
	"Ya I know what Yage is, William Burroughs went looking for it, I read that book...."
	"Ah yes the Yage Letters...unfortunately mister Burroughs was an acute heroin addict at the time and heroin tends to not put one in a positive state of mind...the book is a careful and imaginative account of one man's failure to transcend himself."
	"I like Burroughs," Maya said slowly, "but sometimes his whole nightmare apocalyptic routine gets a bit old, but he's good at seeing what could go wrong in any situation.  If you want to know what could go right, you've got Leary or McKenna."
	"You've read a lot of interesting books...I overheard you saying something about Aleister Crowley this afternoon... that's why I decided it was okay to let you know that I can get you anything you want...drug-wise and otherwise....you seem very intelligent."   Maya blushed slightly and couldn't decide if Cary was hitting on her or if he was just a genuine intelligent man trying to be nice.  "It would be easier to know if we had a script wouldn't it???"
	"Excuse me?"  Maya had been lost in her internal musings and the question seemed to come out of nowhere
	"Nothing I was just listening...I'm going to give you some Yage that I had brewed up for me, its a healthy dose but I think you've the skepticism to handle it.  Are you interested?"
	"Yes I'd love to but um," Maya hesitated not wanting to be rude,  "not to be rude but I don't particularly want to do it right now... in front of you...."
	"Of course not, you should go back in your room and drink it on an empty stomach and lie there in the darkness and just watch the back of your eyelids...that's the way you get into this stuff."  He was staring at her with his piercing, but unobtrusive green eyes, "but you have to promise me that you'll take it tonight and tell me about it tomorrow afternoon sometime because I have to early the next morning and I want to know what you get out of it"
	"Ummm, okay ya," Maya thought for a second, "I can cancel my plans tonight,"
	"You should he's a waste of time."
	Maya started, confused "you know Jared?"
	Cary smiled and pulled a vial of Ayahuasca out of his pocket "know I didn't even know you were going out, but since I changed your plans with an exotic blend of South American hallucinogens, he can't meant much to you."
	She blushed and took the vial, "thank you.  I'll see you tomorrow."