You Are Here to Confront Yourself

By Geoff RicklyJuly 25, 2023, 12:57 pm UTC • 28 min

On Tuesday, Geoff Rickly of the bands Thursday, No Devotion, and United Nations releases his debut novel, Someone Who Isn’t Me, on Rose Books. Based on Geoff’s real-life experiences with heroin addiction and an ibogaine clinic in Mexico, the book is a feverish journey through the psyche of someone who no longer recognizes himself. Below is an excerpt. To purchase Someone Who Isn’t Me, visit the Rose Books website.

Huddling behind a parked car across the street from our apartment, I watch our front door, waiting for Liza to leave. She has a work event tonight. I’ve kept track of them in my calendar so I know which nights I’ll be able to use openly in the comfort of my own home. When she finally steps out, she looks incredible—armored in a lightweight, thigh-length, chain mail dress, shoulders draped in a chic, black trench coat, makeup sophisticated and smoky.

It burns, seeing her like that. I tell myself, Sometimes appearances are all we have. She probably feels worse than you do. Taking stock of myself—a man hiding behind an old Toyota Corolla with a garbage bag in his hands—I know it isn’t true. She doesn’t feel worse than I do. No one does.

When she turns the corner, I run in to grab my passport and fill a small backpack with a sweatshirt, some underwear, and three pairs of clean socks. I pull a Thursday tour laminate from the stack in my closet and loop it around my key chain. It feels right. For a second, I’m in charge. For a second, I’m someone.

In the apartment, all the blinds are closed, all the curtains left shut. No noise seeps in from the street. One of Liza’s scarves has fallen from its hook to cover the mirror, extinguishing the last reflective surface in the apartment. It’s just as well. I don’t think I could stand to see myself right now. No one else is home but the silence in this place is so concentrated, it has a physical presence. Usually, silence this pure only comes to the city in a blizzard. But that kind of silence is expansive, an infinite canvas to paint our dreams on. This silence is a trash compactor, pressing me down into myself.

I grab a book from the shelf: Brother by the twin poets Matthew and Michael Dickman, about the suicide of their older brother. I flip through the pages of the book. It’s filled with ticket stubs and Polaroids—souvenirs. I like that. It feels like the kind of thing a person would take on a trip that they might never come back from. The book goes into my backpack.

On the way out the door, I turn around for one last look at the apartment. Liza’s care and attention clings to every surface. This is it. This is the dream. I hear my eyelids close. The image of the apartment remains fixed. Stable. Every detail is inside me now. My dream house: books on the shelves, mangoes ripening on the counter, bunches of lavender drying above the dresser. I take them with me. I take it all with me.

On the plane, I dip in and out of consciousness, reading and rereading the first poem from Brother, over and over, as if for the first time, until my eyes settle on one particular phrase and I put my hand against the page, touching the words to make sure they’re real:

I wish I could look down past the burning chandelier inside of me.

Yes, that’s it, that’s it, that’s …

I see the grey fabric of the carpet below my feet and the dim strip illuminating the aisles. The world looks like shit so I know I must be awake—awake and coming down. The whole cabin shakes with turbulence.

I sit up. Flight attendants collect empty soda cans with white rubber gloves. A flat plane icon crosses the map on the screen in front of me. Almost there. I pick up the book of poetry again, this time fanning the pages. There’s a printout tucked between them. It says Crossroads Mexico at the top. I unfold the paper and read: Ibogaine offers more than just a physical detox and neurological rebalancing. Ibogaine is unique in that it offers people the chance to dive deeply into their own psyche … but I’m not ready for that so I refold the printout and slide it back into the book’s pages.

Just then, a little flit of bookmark or ticket stub falls out from a fold in the book. It lands on the plastic drop-down table top in front of me: a miniature white envelope with the letters RED DEATH printed on it. When did I slip this in here? My man hasn’t had RED DEATH for at least six months. I look around but no one else sees, so I take it as a sign from God, open it up, and do the dope right there in my seat.

At altitude, drugs and alcohol hit harder, so this small bag of heroin is a kind of prayer, that the world might be redeemed, here, above the clouds. Now, I whisper, now. Please. Work. A small vibration starts in the center of my chest, before moving out through my limbs. My heart swells with gratitude. I reach my hand up to buzz for the stewardess but the button’s too far away. I need to tell her it was all just a big mistake. They can turn the plane around and take me home now.

Leaning against the window, I look out at the grey clouds. Already they’re starting to glow. Already my eyelids are pulling down like heavy curtains. Already the sky is smoothing out and, with it, our plane, sleeping across the darkened face of the earth.

“Sir, are you alright?”

I hear the flight attendant’s voice before I open my eyes. When I shake myself awake, she’s pursing her lips, making little kissing motions, just like Liza does when she’s worried. It takes something out of me.

I smile up at her. “I can honestly say, I’m feeling much better.”

She tugs on her ear lobe and leans back in the aisle, whispering across to one of the other flight attendants before turning back to me, “We’ll be landing shortly, so you might want to gather yourself.”

“I’m good,” I tell her, turning to the window. There’s a bit of resistance, a sharp pain in my left nostril. Several spots of rust stain the window pane. When I put my hand to my face, I realize there’s a dollar bill jammed up my nose. Blood trickles down its length. I pull it out and watch the sky, emptying itself of color. I’m good, I whisper to the clouds as they slip by. I’m good. I’m good.

“You should start getting acquainted with the others as soon as they arrive. You’re all about to go through it,” a representative from the clinic tells me at the San Diego International Airport’s baggage claim.

Two men from our group arrive on the next flight, carrying camouflage backpacks. They’re the same height, an inch or so shorter than I am, but standing tall with a martial, straight-backed posture.

The one directly beside me raises a Styrofoam cup to his lips, spits out a thick brown liquid, and says, “Duane. Marine. How y’all doing?” He stops himself, looks down into his cup. “Well, shoot,” he drawls in a soft southern accent. “I’m not sure that was a polite question, considering the circumstances.” Though his head is shaved, he has a soft round face and innocent, nearly colorless blue eyes. It’s hard to picture Duane carrying an assault rifle.

The man standing next to him adjusts a hunting cap. “Name’s John. Happens that I was a Marine as well.” John clasps his bony hands together to stop them from shaking and pins them against his chest. Although it’s only 7:15 a.m., John has the look of someone who’s been working all day at a thankless job. He’s still in his thirties but appears much older. When he smiles, his gaunt face fills with creases, only to flatten out again when he looks down at his shaking hands. Unlike Duane, John is easy to picture with an M4 carbine rifle. Maybe his hands only shake when he’s without one.

John whispers something to Duane and Duane looks over at me, knitting his brow.

“Hey man,” he asks me, “you wearing lipstick?”

I touch my lips. My fingers come away purple. “That’s blood.”

Duane slaps John on the back. “Well shoot, partner, that’s a whole different story.”

All the creases come back to John’s face. He says, “We’re gonna get along just fine.”

A third man emerges from the bathroom and lumbers over to the group, with a slow, wide step. His head is bowed in a way that hides his features but his shoulders speak for themselves: if Duane and John are Marines, he’s the tank they rode in on. When he pulls his hat off and looks at us, his pupils are pinned, though it’s hard to see them below his eyelids, which are half-closed and further obscured by thick black lashes. His golden skin has sharp, regal features that sag slightly on his face. “I’m Faruk,” he says, smiling at us, dreamily, before lowering his eyes to attend to a small drop of blood running out from the crook of his arm.

A woman joins our circle just in time to watch the blood make its way down Faruk’s arm to the band of his watch. Face expressionless, her features are fixed with a flat ghostly whiteness. But her large, blue eyes radiate a kind of telepathic hunger. She adjusts her sleeves so that they cover the tops of her hands. Then she crosses her arms over her chest and disappears behind a cascade of straight black bangs. “My name is Kate,” she sighs. “I’m not a Marine.”

Someone just beyond the edge of our circle is shouting, “No, I said now, stupid, not in ten minutes. Now.” She comes out of the ladies’ room with large, dark sunglasses covering half her face and long, greasy hair spilling down over the shoulders of a pink hoodie with the words Queen Bitch bedazzled across the chest. She enters the circle, with a cellphone pressed to her ear, yelling, “You want to talk about money, asshole? You know me.”

The representative raises his skinny hands toward the phone, “I’m sorry, Ms. Thompson, but you can’t be setting up a drug deal at this airport.”

She ducks away, raising an acrylic nail in his face, and takes the phone off her ear to look at it. “Excuse me, motherfucker. You think you can hang up on me?”

She takes off her sunglasses. She’s twenty-two years old, if that, but already her skin has gone sallow. Even the whites of her eyes are turning yellow.

“It’s for the best,” the rep tells her. “We’re about to cross the Mexican border. At the clinic, your belongings will be searched. There’s a screening process; we need to take some blood. Put you each through a battery of tests. Make sure you’re healthy enough to survive the treatment.”

Faruk’s shoulders sag. Our two Marines help steady him.

The rep says, “The search for illicit items is thorough.”

“Whatever,” she shrugs. “You think I can’t find drugs in Mexico?”

We’re in an anonymous white van, crawling along the approach to the border, which looms ahead of us in all its prehistoric, shadowed glory. From the passenger seat, I can hear the others whispering behind me. Faces of people in passing cars dissolve in a high glare of morning sun. Walls rise on each side, forcing traffic to flow in only one direction, like a slow, angry river.

I pull my keys out of my back pocket and grasp the old tour laminate firmly in both hands. If I close my eyes, I can almost convince myself that this is all normal, that I’m still on tour, still surrounded by familiar things. I can almost feel Thursday’s beat-up van idling roughly beneath me, hear the squeak of its busted shocks, smell Febreze wafting up from the carpeting. In back, Tim, Tom, and Tucker take turns punching each other on the arm. They give off stale sweat and fresh deodorant. I can almost taste the Gold Bond powder in the air. Steve’s in the driver’s seat, asking if we have our passports ready, checking his pockets, adjusting the radio.

We hit a rumble strip and the picture gets fuzzy. But they’re still here with me. I can sense the heat of their bodies. Tucker’s got Tom’s passport open, asking him how his head’s so fucking crooked. Tim can’t stop laughing. I can see them all through the haze of time. It’s so real. Such a relief.

There’s a knock on the window. I open my eyes and a border agent is staring down at us from his booth.

“Passports.”

Behind me, the woman in the pink Queen Bitch sweatshirt kicks my seat, “Fucking cops.”

We arrive at the clinic just after 8:30 in the morning. It’s in a strip mall. The rep walks us up to a storefront window. A man in a pair of black-rimmed glasses and neatly pressed dark blue scrubs opens the door and smiles widely. “Please, come inside.” His name tag says Javi.

The rep waves us in but stays where he is at the door. “This is where I leave you. I wish you all lots of luck.”

“Lots of luck? Are you serious?” The woman in the pink sweatshirt turns to the rep. “This place is disgusting. Is he even a real doctor?”

“I am a registered nurse,” the man in scrubs tells her, adjusting his black-rimmed glasses as he looks around the immaculately clean reception area. “My name is Javier, but you may call me Javi.” Everything about Javi is healthy and well manicured. His hair is slicked neatly and his smart black mustache is tightly trimmed.

The rep turns to leave, swinging his keychain around his pointer finger. “You’re in good hands with Javi. He won’t let anything happen to you.”

Faruk lowers himself into a plastic chair and immediately begins to slump forward, his body folding until his chin rests on his kneecaps. Fast asleep. Kate looks down at him and licks her lips. The woman in the pink sweatshirt manages to wedge one of her white sneakers under Faruk’s armpit. She leans all of her weight into him until his head flops back, exposing an expression of total absence. She snorts, “I know this motherfucker—he’s from L.A. His family is R-I-C-H. Rich, like Shahs of Sunset rich.”

Kate props a couch cushion under Faruk’s head. “He comes from money?”

The woman in pink turns to John and Duane. “This chick just got wet.”

Kate adjusts the pillow, strokes Faruk’s forehead, “Hard to believe. All those resources and still he ends up here. He’s obviously been disowned. This place is the last resort. For people who’ve been thrown out. For people with nothing to lose.”

The woman in pink raises her voice, “Calling me garbage, lady?” She takes off her pink sweatshirt and drapes it over a plastic chair. “I’ll take you out. For free.” She stretches her neck, extends her arms out from the sides of her body, raising miles of collapsed veins around her. She looks truly beautiful, like a suspension bridge in its last moment of belief.

Javi steps in front of her, “Not today, Ms. Thompson.”

She leans away and hisses, “Did I give you permission to address me, Mr. Nurse?” Then she steps into the hallway bathroom, slamming the door behind her. The walls shake. We stare at her pink sweatshirt, Queen Bitch sparkling under the fluorescent lights.

Five minutes later, the bathroom door squeaks open, followed by the sound of rapid footsteps padding down the hallway. John walks to the window. “Not sure who all cares but Queen Bitch just hopped in a Mazda Miata with Mexican plates.”

Duane asks him, “You seen a state or principality on them plates, partner?”

John reads, “Charlie-Hotel-India-Hotel.”

“This place is the last resort. For people who’ve been thrown out. For people with nothing to lose.”

Duane turns to Javi, “Chihuahua. Ain’t that where Juarez is?”

Javi pulls out a cell phone, heads for the door.

Duane says, “Shiiiit.”

My phone battery is dying but the messages keep coming:

Steve: |Don sent us a note to let us know what’s up. Sounds pretty intense.

Tim: |I had no idea you were going through this, man.

Tucker: |You got this, buddy.

Tom: |Not gonna lie, I watched some news stories—ibogaine looks scary as fuck.

Nothing new from Liza. The last three texts I sent her sit on the screen with a small check, indicating they’ve been read.

Still, no answer.

“Duane, John, Kate, and Geo. F. Frey?” Javi steps into the waiting room, reading our names off a clipboard.

“You can just call me Geoff, like J-e-f-f.”

Javi squints at us, rubbing his mustache with his free hand. “I’ll make a note of that, Jefe.” Javi checks the clipboard again. “It won’t be much longer now. Faruk is going to have to recover here in the clinic for a few days. It seems he took too large a dose of heroin before we picked you up at the airport. And we have located Ms. Thompson’s telephone through the laptop she left behind. One of our security men is going to pick her up and bring her to meet us at the beach house so she can get the help she so desperately needs. The rest of you should grab your things.”

Kate gathers the pink sweatshirt. “Wouldn’t want Queen Bitch to lose her crown.”

Just after noon, Javi pulls the beat-up white van into a garage, where he unloads us through a small door into a large communal room with three red leather couches oriented around a central fireplace. Behind the couches, there are two steps up to a table already set for lunch.

Hardly any of this registers, though, because the house has one dominant feature, which sucks up the attention from all the others: glass walls through which a vast grey ocean breaks against three miles of white sand. Sunlight streams in. Wind pushes through the rooms in short, uneven bursts.

“Welcome to Crossroads,” Javi says. Beneath the mantle, the fire jumps. “Each of you has a room. Put away your things. After lunch, we’ll have preparatory classes.”

Kate raises the Queen Bitch sweatshirt up in front of Javi’s face, a bright pink question mark.

Javi shakes his head, “Nothing yet.”

“You are sitting in a canoe,” Javi says. “See? Here’s the canoe.”

The chalk goes scratch, scratch, scratch on the board. A little boat appears. Squiggle, scratch: A stick figure on the boat’s left side.

“And here you are, rowing the canoe this way. You are facing this way. Okay?”

Scratch, scratch, scratch. An arrow and two simple oars appear. The stick figure sits in the back of the canoe and rows forward, in the direction he’s facing.

“But here is your subconscious mind.”

Scratch, scratch. A second stick figure appears in the front of the boat.

“Like a passenger, your subconscious mind is always with you, observing, judging, even recording.”

The stick figure on the right gets filled in solid, like a shadow of the one on the left.

“Now, the problem is, in your cases,” Javi intones slowly, motioning to the four of us sitting on the couch in front of the chalkboard, “the subconscious mind is rowing this way, against you.”

A long scratch and a squeak. He throws the chalk on the desk and folds his arms.

“Can anyone tell me where all that rowing’s going to get you?”

I raise my hand but Javi’s cell phone rings and he walks to the glass wall to answer it. The stick figures face each other, both leaning away at the same angle, thrusting their oars with equal and opposite force.

Over the sound of the waves, we hear him say, “How did she end up way out there?”

John laughs, “Gotta be Queen Bitch. Fifty bucks she’s all the way in Chicago. Or New Jersey. Fuck, she might be in France already!”

Duane nods along with him, “The things these people get up to.”

Kate pulls the pink sweatshirt into her lap. “I’m keeping it. She can try and fight me, I don’t care.”

Javi asks, “Was she still breathing?”

It gets quiet.

“I know, I know, I know.” Javi continues to repeat the phrase, each one softer than the last until finally he closes the flip phone. Kate finishes folding the sweatshirt and places it on the couch’s red leather arm. Javi stares out through the glass wall. “I’ve got some liability waivers for all of you to sign.”

John says, “For what? Is the ibogaine going to kill us?”

Javi turns around. “It is statistically unlikely. Still. I want each of you to think about this carefully tonight: How do you envision your own death? What would it mean to make peace with it? Tomorrow, you’re going to come back in here and give me an answer.”

Out on the beach, the waves go ca-chic-ca-chic-shhhhhh, ca-chic-ca-chic-shhhhhh. Over and over again.

Midnight. I can hear it in the waves falling blind against the shoreline. I can taste it in the black salt air on my tongue. Tonight, the moon is low, drawing only an outline of a palm tree on the deck’s glass doors. The water goes slack against the beach, the currents reaching a temporary equilibrium, before the tide turns, again, and drags itself toward the horizon.

I close my eyes to try and call up the comforting Dream House image of my apartment. I see aprons hanging by the front door, records spinning on the turntable. Orange blossoms in the bedroom. Despite the perfect, fixed quality of the Dream House, I keep getting pulled into the heavy gravity of its closed-up cellar. That hidden room is getting stronger, expanding, swallowing up the rest of the House.

Daylight, the common room is blazing. Kate puts on an oversized pair of shiny, black sunglasses as she sinks into the red leather couch.

Javi clears his throat, points at John, “How are you going to die?”

John tells us about some bullet fragments lodged in his skull. “That shit’s carcinogenic. I’ll probably get some awful cancer that’ll fuck me right up.”

Duane nods along before adding that he’s always had a premonition that he’d be kicked in the head by a horse. He chuckles to himself, “And I love horses. Can you believe that shit?”

“There’s a scene in some horror movie where a girl falls into a pit of hypodermic needles,” Kate pauses, lifts her sunglasses. “For me, I’ll take anything but that.”

It’s my turn. I clear my throat. “I’m doing this for my girl. Liza. I’ve broken her trust, over and over again. Letting her down already feels like dying. If ibogaine kills me, at least I know I went out trying to make things right.” I look around the room and the others murmur their assent.

“That’s a good answer,” Duane tells John. “I’m gonna use that one on the wife.”

“This is not about other people,” Javi says, calmly rapping his fist against the chalkboard. “You are here to confront yourself. Your true self. This is the equivalent of one thousand hours of therapy. This is profound exposure.” Javi stands, walks to the window. Outside, all of creation carries on without us.

Javi clears his throat, points at John, “How are you going to die?”

After a few minutes, he finally turns around. “You are heroin addicts. You take your lives into your hands every single day. No matter how perilous this treatment may seem, surely you must see that it’s nothing compared to the danger of your current predicament. You have an explicit illustration of the consequences in the case of Ms. Thompson.”

Duane turns to John, spits into a Coke bottle. “Is he saying what I think he’s saying?”

“People only end up here when every other option has failed. We cannot save everyone. Addicts are their own worst enemies. This is why it is so essential that you ask the ibogaine to reveal yourselves to you. To show you your own true selves. This may be your last chance.”

I’ve only ever imagined my self as the broken thing that I’m trying to get away from. But what if there’s another me: a somehow heroic alternate Geoff, buried under the drugs? That comet blaze that Liza saw in me. If I can find that Geoff, maybe it’s not too late to fix things.

Javi opens the door to the dispensary. I lean in, taking him into my confidence. “Do you know what they’ve got us watching in there, Javi? Confronting Your Shadow Persona? Flashing images of Marilyn Monroe, JFK, and Elvis at us, like we’re in A Clockwork Orange?”

Javi pulls me into his office. “It’s only meant to prime your subconscious, Jefe. Iconographic suggestion. So that your visual language center will have some stable references.”

“So someone here might see themselves—deep down—as OJ Simpson?”

“It’s an old tape.”

I sit down and look out the window. The beach pulls a curtain of water across the sand, whispering in through the window, shhhhhhh.

“I read ibogaine sessions can last forty-eight hours.”

“Those kinds of experiences are more common in ritual practice. Here, we derive an active compound from the bark to control the dosage. The visionary experience lasts from ten to twelve hours. Then, the reflective period for sixteen to twenty-four hours. At this stage, the emotions return. You may get quite sentimental. The third period is less easily defined. You will find you are no longer physically or psychologically dependent upon heroin.”

“I heard it wears you down. Like being worked over in the gym.”

Javi looks up from his papers. “The gym?” A big smile breaks over his face, sudden light from a bank of clouds. “Where do you think you are, Jefe? Club Med?” He takes the calendar down and shows me our schedule for the week. Under Wednesday: IBOGAINE SESSION. All Day. Clinic. Then, in the box for Thursday, there’s nothing but a black X drawn in thick marker.

“See?” Javi says. “It’s a grey day.”

I stare at the black X. Out the window the ocean plays a janitor, pushing seaweed up a golden sidewalk with its long blue broom.

Javi snaps his fingers in front of my face. “It’s okay. Don’t be scared.”

“I’m not scared. I’ve taken psychedelics before.”

“Mushrooms? A little LSD?” Javi looks back at his papers. “This is nothing like that.”

“That’s a relief.”

The door opens. Juan, an orderly with a shy smile and big round cheeks, walks in and begins whispering to Javi in Spanish. Javi’s eyebrows raise up above the black rims of his glasses. He turns to Juan and they continue to whisper, Javi glancing at me with a frown. My stomach sinks. Javi puts his hand up, stopping Juan midsentence.

“He says he caught you trying to get into the dispensary last night after lights out.”

My hands are sweating in my lap.

“We have worked with many other addicts before you,” Juan says. “We know all the tricks.”

“You’re an addict. We don’t judge you for that. But the real question is,” Javi pauses, “how bad do you want this?”

“Do you even want to get better, man?” Juan asks, sounding personally hurt.

“I couldn’t sleep. I think from withdrawal.”

“Not possible,” Javi stops me. “You’re on the highest maintenance dose of morphine.”

“Before you came here, how much did you use, a day?”

“About 300 dollars’ worth.”

Javi scrunches up his eyebrows.

Juan shakes his head. “I think you were paying too much money for your drugs, man. Way too much.”

“Probably.” I think about it for a second. “But I was using about twenty to thirty bags a day.”

Javi’s watch ticks, cah-chic, cah-chic. The ocean breathes out a long, bored sigh.

Juan counts something on his fingers. “It’s good that you came here, man. Just take it seriously, okay? No more games.”

He turns to leave but Javi leans back in his chair and stops him with a quick volley of Spanish. I can’t tell what they’re saying but Juan stops in his tracks and turns to me, jaw dropped. Javi bursts into laughter. “I swear to you, I tell him, ibogaine is NOT like LSD and … èl dice … es un alivio!”

Juan grins, shakes his head. “No, man. It should not come as a relief. Believe me. Ibogaine is not like LSD. It demands respect. Muy serio.”

Javi looks back down at his papers. “He’s right, you know. Ibogaine is not for the faint of heart. The drug is an oneirogenic. Can you comprehend what that means?”

I shake my head no.

“The visions are waking dreams. Think of a computer drive that’s been corrupted. That’s your brain. Ibogaine functions as a program, defragmenting the hard drive. In the process, it opens different memories, different files, and plays them for you. These are all files that have been compromised by wrong actions. When you act against your conscience, your operating system makes a note. Enough of these notes pile up without some internal maintenance and things eventually go wrong with the system: depression, insomnia, drug addiction.”

“If it’s a psychological reformatting process, how does the clinic deal with the physical symptoms?” I picture gears and disks whirring around inside of me.

Javi smiles, “I told you, Jefe, this is not Club Med.”

We arrive at the clinic just after eight o’clock in the evening. Juan greets us at the front door, wearing a puffy North Face jacket over his scrubs, and leads us into a spacious room, which feels more like a day spa than a hospital ward. There’s a row of potted ferns, a table with freshly prepared cucumber water, and a nondescript grey painting of geometric shapes over the couches. In all the low-lit beige, it’s easy to miss the heart monitors, wheelchairs, and the two rows of hospital beds along opposite walls.

We’re each to choose our own spots now. Kate, John, and myself gather together on one side, John taking the bed in the corner. “Good for operational awareness,” he says, peeling off his work boots. Kate sits cross-legged in the bed next to John’s and I take the one on the other side of her.

Duane, the only one of us that’s done this before, occupies a lone bed across the way. “Don’t want to be all on top of y’all when people start losing their lunch,” he says, adjusting the recline on his mattress with the remote. “See, I’m easy with this. Slept right through it last time. No puke. No nightmares.”

“Lucky bastard,” John grumbles. He takes off his beat-up camouflage cap and places it on top of his boots. He crosses his hands in his lap as if he’s settling down in front of the TV after a long day’s work.

Juan hands each of us a glass of water and a small paper cup with a capsule in it.

“Just the test dose,” he says, “to make sure you’re not allergic.”

I take my sneakers off, then empty my backpack, placing the book of poetry on the bedside table. The lights in the clinic shut off and Javi clicks a device sitting on the floor in the middle of the room, causing a pink pool of light to gather on the ceiling. A bag of saline hangs from a stand on the left side of each bed, where orderlies run lines to the backs of our hands. I imagine that we’re all together on a fishing trip: our beds, simple paddle boats, tied to the dock with IV lines. We float around on the water at sunset. The sky, framed by the woods around us, a pink lake projected on the ceiling.

Juan misses my vein. I flinch.

“It’s okay, man,” he says, quietly. “Don’t be scared.”

Juan returns with another glass of water, another paper cup. This one has three capsules.

“Feel anything yet? Hear any insects?”

“No,” I say.

“Okay. That’s okay, man. This is what’s known as the flood dose. It will start the session.”

The first sign of ibogaine kicking in is supposed to be an aural hallucination, usually something primal: wasps, hornets, crickets. I listen for a swarm but hear only Javi’s shoes, squeaking on the other side of the room, and the uneven beeping of our heart monitors. I watch the big clock on the wall. Its minute hand slides silently over to thirty-three minutes past eight.

“Oh shit,” Kate says. “Hear that?”

It’s been half an hour since the test dose.

I see Javi, Juan, and a doctor huddled around Duane’s heart monitor. The doctor is nodding her head. I can see small gold hoop earrings glinting behind the tight brown curls of her hair. Javi looks over at the clock and taps her on the shoulder.

They all approach my bed. The doctor asks, “Do you always watch the clock like this?”

“It’s just a nervous habit.” My eyes flit to the clock then back to their faces.

Juan shoots a serious look at the doctor, who bends down and whispers to me, “We find that it’s a good idea not to look at clocks while on ibogaine.”

“This is especially true inside of the hallucinations,” Javi adds.

“Clocks become,” the doctor winks at Javi, “very unreliable. It makes some people upset.”

“Don’t look at calendars either, man,” Juan lowers his voice, nodding gravely, while sticking his fists deep into his jacket pockets.

“Try not to worry about time at all,” the doctor says, straightening up and fixing me with a reassuring smile. “It has a different motion on ibogaine.

Seven minutes have passed since the flood dose.

“Anything now, Geoffrey?” Javi asks. “Some sounds maybe? An echo? Or some tracers around the lights when you turn your head?” He’s got the doctor with him.

“Nothing yet. Unless you think I just haven’t noticed.”

A scoff escapes from Javi and the doctor slaps him on the shoulder. They look at each other, shaking their heads and stifling laughter. “We’ll give you a little bit more.”

“Seems like I’ve had an awful lot already.”

“Ah, this is good, then,” the doctor reassures me. “After all, there is danger in having too little. Our emotions form a dense forest inside of us. You need enough of the drug to break through the canopy and rise above. This is called the treetop effect. Believe me, the last thing you want is to get tangled up in feelings.” Javi unscrews the lid on a brown glass bottle and shakes another capsule out into her hand.

“Whatever you think.”

The doctor hands me one last capsule. “Don’t worry, Geoffrey, after this, you will definitely notice.”

I steal a glance at the clock. Twenty-three minutes since the flood dose.

Something’s happening. The doctor clicks her pen. An echo replicates and flies away, out over the treetops. I can hear the distant rush of leaves but there’s no wind. Down the street, motorcycles burn out across an intersection and turn away. In the distance, their engines merge with the rustling leaves; a cloud of television static at the edge of the world.

Everything’s normal again. My fellow patients lie silently in their beds. I listen to the seconds clicking by, punctuating the steady hum of motorcycle engines. It’s so faint that I think, This must be the sound of memory, as I lay my head back on the pillow.

It’s getting hot. Things drip, drip, drip, just beyond the edge of my vision. A single cricket chirps in the distance. Nurses huddle in shadows, whispering to one another in a secret medical language.

Someone says, “They’re coming back.”

Javi laughs. Juan shakes his head.

I can hear a swarm of insects, advancing. But it’s unnatural somehow. The sound is mechanical, ultravivid: thousands of engines rev inside tiny abdomens. Rubber tires screech beneath the buzz of wings. I hear them cresting hills, cutting valleys. Now they turn right. Now they turn left. Now they trace the great curve of the earth.

The sound is so clear, I can taste it. A chrome hive on the swarm, closing the distance, pitching engines up, up, always up, even through the downshifts. I hear them circling from both the right and the left. Suddenly, they’re everywhere, gears grinding, engines snarling, radios tuned to static. Burning up road. Passing through walls.

I turn to Kate.

She closes her eyes and whispers, “Oh god.”

It’s inside. It happens in the sliver of a second: a stick through the skin of a drum. I was expecting rockets launching in my head but this feels effervescent, like bubbles rising in a glass of soda.

Flood dose: two words that form a cascade, eradicating every imaginable boundary. Ibogaine rushes through my body, a relentless chemical messenger sent to scour my receptors. When I close my eyes, I see it swimming in my system: a trillion black tadpoles, sightless and single-minded. Microscopic teeth chew on nerve endings. So I force my eyes open. I lie back in bed, keep still, stare up at the pink light on the ceiling. The world’s ending all around me but I feel utterly compelled to remain calm, act naturally.

I turn to look for the book on the table by the side of my bed and, to my enormous relief, the words on the cover are still legible: Matthew Dickmann / Brother Michael Dickmann. A mixture of honey and motor oil drips from the ceiling. Great clouds of metallic bees migrate around the room.

An orderly next to my bed says, “Don’t look at them,” in a raspy voice.

The spine of the book makes a crackling noise when I open it to the first poem.

I clear my throat and begin reading.

Turning my head to the facing page, streaks appear in the corners of my eyes. I look up from the book and more streaks appear, refusing to fade when I blink. They stay in place, as if I’ve dragged a knife across the painted surface of the clinic, exposing bright white canvas underneath.

I ask the orderly standing next to my bed, “Is that supposed to happen?” But then I realize he’s only a straight metal stand used to support my IV bag.

Lights flicker. More paint chips crumble off reality’s surface. No telling how much time’s left before it all falls away, so I fix my attention to the page and continue reading the first poem. Through the white space in the pages, I can see the twin brothers, writing to illuminate what they lost. But light can burn, even as it brightens. I feel heat sleeping in the walls, small flames holding their breath inside the light fixtures. I shake my head and the page is solid once again. Although the room is breaking down all around me, the text remains legible. My eyes settle on a familiar phrase and I put my hand against the page, touching the words like a talisman: I wish I could look down past the burning chandelier inside me.

I, too, know what it’s like to close my eyes and see nothing past the blinding fires within. Only I can’t imagine how it must feel to hold such a precious, fragile thing within you, glittering and clear. No. When I look down inside myself, I see a different kind of fire.

Geoff Rickly is a musician who fronts the bands Thursday, No Devotion, and United Nations. His book, Someone Who Isn’t Me, is out Tuesday from Rose Books.

Geoff Rickly

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