Alien Genesis

3. Trees, Gold, and LSD-4

“During those days at Mayo, each morning I awoke with more and more recollections; more and more notions of things about which I could not possibly know. And it was not only after sleep that these images emerged. I would be reading something or watching something outside the window and suddenly an unbidden idea or memory would pop into my head.

“It seemed my only relief from the crazy thoughts came while I was doing physical therapy. So I tried to exercise all the time. At first the medical staff applauded my tenacity, but it became clear my regimen was too compulsive to be laudable. In actuality, escaping into physical activity didn’t really work anyway. After I’d showered and relaxed a few minutes, the brain’s floodgate would open to torrents of new ideas and memories.

“As is often the case with people in the middle of a crisis, I believed somehow geography would mitigate the fix I was in. Because I was making such good progress physically, and because I kept my mouth shut about the emotional turmoil, I was released to return to Charleston within a few weeks.” The admiral chuckled, “As you might guess, American Airlines therapy wasn’t successful. In fact the change of scenery only seemed to provide more fodder for new and increasingly disturbing thoughts. At some level I knew these ideas were not the product of dreams. But because I had no way to understand what was happening to me, I slipped further and further down the rabbit hole.

“While I could deceive Rayleen about the source, there was no way to hide the fact that I was in trouble. She talked to our doctor. I was too confused, proud, stupid—take your pick—to do so myself. He again assured her my progress was remarkable, particularly given that the medical professionals had believed I’d probably never recover.

“This time she was not so reassured. She had to go home and deal with a man who’d come out of a coma but didn’t want to come out from under the bed covers. I was on extended medical leave. My commanding officers assumed that was because I was still overcoming the effects of the encephalitis, not because I was too depressed to work.

“I told Rayleen she needed to just put me in a psychiatric hospital.” Cortell looked away and sniffed. “But she had an aunt who suffered with depression and was in and out of a facility over in Georgia. Back in those days a routine treatment for people with severe depression was electroshock. The protocol was to strap a person to a table and fire massive jolts of electricity through the brain, usually without the benefit of anesthesia or muscle relaxants. During one session her Aunt Tabitha had such a severe seizure she broke the ulna in her right arm. There was almost always significant memory loss subsequent to the treatments. I knew about the memory loss side-effect and was hoping electroshock might wipeout my unwanted memories. Thankfully, Rayleen was adamant that no one, under any circumstances, was going to hook me up to an electroconvulsive therapy machine.

“I was too confused and depressed to even have the energy to argue with her. I began to believe that brain damage was causing me to hallucinate. We talked about going to see a psychiatrist but remember this was 1954. Rayleen said she would support whatever decision I made. Then she asked, ‘If it ever leaks that you’ve seen a shrink, are you willing to retire in twenty years as an Ensign?’ Her question stunned me. I hadn’t really considered the impact of mental illness on my career. I’d always envisioned someday being a ship’s captain.

“So it was, I made the decision to get better—as if it would be that easy! The fact that I was able to make myself get out of bed, put on the uniform, and go to work did not make my “hallucinations” go away. I thought I was losing my mind. As the collection of memories kept growing I found myself having subvocalized conversations with people I could remember but did not know—people who didn’t even look like us.

“I was able to do my job well enough I suppose. I smiled and spoke confidently. I laughed at the right kind of jokes and chastised sailors for the wrong kinds of jokes. People on the base went out of their way to welcome me back. I was liked and respected. I should have been awarded an Oscar. But by the time I got home each evening I would collapse in bed from the exhaustion of pretense. I lost a lot of weight because I often skipped dinner.

“Finally, I became so desperate I spoke to my father about what was going on. I didn’t tell him about the exact nature of my hallucinatory thoughts, but I shared enough for him to understand that I was in trouble. I told him Rayleen was shaken but standing firm.

“Again my dad put in a call to Surgeon General Scheele, and again strings were pulled. I was assigned temporary duty at the U. S. Embassy in Great Britain. That was our cover story anyway. The real reason we went to Britain was to see a doctor named Ronald Sandison at the Powick Hospital near Worcester.

“It was about a two-hour drive from London to Worcester. Each time I had a couple of days off, Rayleen would get a car and we’d drive over and stay the night at an inn. I met with Dr. Sandison several times for what he called diagnostic assessment. His staff performed a thorough physical exam and he interviewed me and Rayleen extensively.

“It was not until our fourth or fifth visit to the hospital that he proposed a radical treatment. At the time we didn’t appreciate just how radical. We’d never heard of psychedelic therapy. The only thing we really understood was that he wasn’t going to pound my brain with electricity. Even if I had known what lysergic acid diethylamide was, I’d have agreed to the treatment. Partly because Dr. Sandison was an impressive guy, but mainly because I was just so desperate to make the bizarre thoughts go away.

“Sandison was an unapologetic proponent of using psychedelic drugs as a tool in the psychiatric regimen. Now he wasn’t a Timothy Leary kind of nut case. He didn’t believe LSD was the source of spiritual enlightenment. In fact, Sandison was a rather religious man, and a sailor too by the way.

“Some years later, just out of curiosity, I did some research on his use of the d**g. He treated several hundred patients with LSD during the 1950s and 60s, but it was not his treatment of choice for most patients. He used it as a fallback therapy for the treatment of neuroses and depressions that were resistant to more traditional approaches.

“He believed it likely that I’d sustained some subtle but profound brain damage from the encephalitis. For that reason, he didn’t consider me a great candidate for what was in that era the standard psychoanalytic approach. He seemed to understand from our interviews that I was on a slippery slope and sliding fast.

“Sandison invited us to his home. We arrived at mid-morning on a Saturday. He offered us tea and biscuits. Actually, he offered Rayleen biscuits and told me it would be better not to eat anything prior to ingesting the d**g. His wife, Evelyn, joined us and we all sat in the parlor talking and relaxing for almost an hour. Evelyn asked Rayleen to ride into town with her to do some shopping. Dr. Sandison led me to a bedroom they had converted to a combination library-office. He put on a record of soft melodic music and asked me to take a seat on a Victorian style couch. He began regaling me with stories of his sailboat adventures. Soon he went to his desk and produced a tiny vial of liquid.

“I drank the sip from the vial and sat back while Sandison continued his stories of sailing and fishing. As I listened I became aware of perception distortions and an altered sense of time. In fact, the complete buckling of time is what I remember most. I wouldn’t say I enjoyed the experience nor was it a ‘bad trip.’ Psychologically speaking, I’d say the d**g had no real therapeutic effect.” Cortell stopped and held up his index finger and shook it dramatically. “Except for one thing—one very, very important thing. After taking LSD I knew what a hallucination was and how it felt. I knew for a fact my strange thoughts, the incessant internal dialogue with people whom I’d never met, my impossible recollections were absolutely not hallucinations.

“We spent the night at the Sandison’s home and Rayleen drove us back to London the next morning. I can remember exactly where we were when the realization that I had not been hallucinating struck me. I remember the very moment my recovery began. That awareness occurred over a period of about thirty seconds. I spent the next thirty years coming to terms with what it all meant.”

Cortell leaned across the table, his clasped hands extended in front of him. The barely touched second martini rested behind his interwoven fingers. He stared in our direction with a somewhat unnerving expression and said, “You see those bizarre thoughts—those mental images are memories. I remember a life that was lived thousands of years ago. I have vivid recollections of that life. I remembered more and more details of that life as time passed. Even to this day I continue to remember more specifics of events that transpired many millennia ago.”

Carla and I could not take our eyes off the admiral. After a moment he continued, “With that I’m sure you think I’m a crazy old kook. Let me assure you I may be old, but I’m not crazy. I’m not saying that I lived before—that I am some kind of reincarnation. You see, I know enough of that long-ago life to understand how it is I have these memories. I remember the life of one of the fallen angels. That’s the story I want to tell you. It’s a story recorded in my junk DNA. It’s the story I want you to write!”

Incredulously, I said only, “What!?”

The admiral and Frank were sitting directly across the table from Carla and me. They turned toward each other, then exploded in uproarious laughter. Frank crowed, “I told you that’s all he’d say.”

Carla and I were yet too stunned to join in the levity. With a toothy grin Frank added, “If you think that disclosure was bad, wait until he drops the next bomb on you.”

Regaining his composure, the admiral continued, “What you must understand is the fallen angels were anything but angels. They were travelers. They were industrialists. They were scientists. They were scholars. They were many things. They were egotistical and fallible—oh God how fallible they were! As it turns out though, they were not just passing through. They came and they stayed. They’re still living in every cell of our bodies.”

“What does that mean?” I implored.

“Now you’ve heard the claim by the so-called pro-life crowd that life begins at conception.”

“Of course,” Carla replied.

“I absolutely assure you that is patent nonsense. Was the ovum not alive before fertilization? What about the sperm? Could a dead sperm swim upstream to find and enter an egg? Of course it was alive too. Life began long before the fertilization of any egg in a womb. You see, life has been surging forward in fits and starts for billions of years. What the not so angelic angels did was tinker with this planet’s DNA. We, sitting around this table, are the product of their intelligent design.”

We sat, each with our own thoughts, for several moments when Carla asked, “What did you mean when you said you continue to have new memories of that past life?”

The admiral looked into her ocean blue eyes, “I’ve spent a good deal of time over the years thinking about that. I’ve come to believe it has to do with the way human memory works. Let me give you an example. Tell me what you remember about second grade.”

With no hesitation Carla responded, “I remember sitting for my school photo with cat scratches on my face.”

“There you go,” Cortell said. “For whatever reason, that was a profound experience for you and it created a powerful memory. Without even thinking about it, that image surfaced almost immediately in your consciousness. Now tell me everything else about your second grade year.”

“Pfft, I don’t think so! My kids have long accused me of having ‘Carla’s-heimers’.”

Cortell laughed. “You make my point. We can remember some things almost instantly, but most of our memories come to us as the result of external stimuli. Sometimes memories pop into our heads because of something someone said or something we saw or read.

“But most memories are ephemeral and fleeting. The old bedrock of jurisprudence, eyewitness testimony, has proven to be horrendously unreliable. That’s because over time our memories are altered by interceding events. They fade with age. We repress some memories. We change some memories to make them worse than the events really were. We also sanitize memories through a kind of mental alchemy.

“We cannot remember everything that happened to us in the second grade,” gesturing toward Carla, “because we either lack the catalyzing stimuli or the memory has been altered. But perhaps more important than all of that, most of the events we’ve experienced during our lives are simply not recited to memory. Given all that, just imagine the problems with a human brain trying to recall a life lived thousands of years ago—the life of an extraterrestrial.”

When we retired that evening I had little doubt what our decision would be. Nevertheless, the next morning at breakfast I had to ask again, “Why would you want us to compile your story into a book?”

“For the last several years Frank and I have been searching for a writer with the time and, more importantly, the temperament to take on this job.”

Mischievously Carla asked, “And just what makes you think Gary’s crazy enough for you?”

Laughing, the admiral asked, “Well he is, isn’t he?”

“No doubt! But that hardly answers the question!” Carla teased.

Feigning insult I asked, “Crazy or not, what do you mean by ‘the right temperament’?”

Frank shared one of his finely honed observations. “It seems to me that in order to do this story justice the writer must be open-minded enough to embrace the unbelievable, yet agnostic enough to ask the right questions.”

The admiral pursed his lips and nodded. “That’s quite good, Frank.”

Turning to us he said, “Now if you decide to join us, you need to understand it will be a full-time commitment. Oh, we’ll find some time to go to the beach and do a few scuba dives, but as I said earlier, I’m no youngster. While we never know when departure from this life might come, at my age one can be certain the end draws nigh.”

PART TWO

We returned to Santa Fe, engaged the services of a house-sitter, and arranged auto-drafts for our recurring bills. Three weeks later we were back in Puerto Rico.

On our first morning back at the hacienda, when the admiral finished his second cup of coffee, he stood and said, “It’s time for us to get started.”

Following him into the library, we did not fully appreciate the enormous leap we were taking into the abyss of humanity’s dark prehistory.

The narrative set down from the story told by James Cortell.