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“If you’d seen her eyes, you’d know better.”
“Have you spoken to a lawyer?”
“Aaron’s working on that.”
Walter lays a tremulous hand on her wrist. “You’ve weathered worse, Koala.”
Holly’s eyes fill with tears, but she blinks them away. “Even if I have, I’m not sure I can do it again.”
“You’re stronger than you think. Always have been.”
“And you’re blind when it comes to me.”
He lets go of her wrist. “That’s what macular degeneration will do.”
“Not funny.” Holly hates it when her grandfather jokes about his frailty. She can’t bear the thought of losing him, though she realizes he won’t be able to live on his own for much longer. And she knows that for Walter, losing his independence would be worse than death.
They sip their drinks in silence. Finally, Walter uses both hands to push himself up from the table. “You know what might help?”
“What’s that?” Holly asks, although she already has an inkling of what he has in mind.
“I’m too old and feeble to take you back to Peru. But maybe I can get you there in spirit?”
The comment confirms her suspicions. “Really, Papa?”
“Come,” Walter says as he shuffles out of the room, heading toward the solarium at the back of the house.
She follows him into the bright sunroom and, after he points to the black beanbag chair in the corner, drops down onto it.
Walter slides an LP out of its sleeve and places it on the turntable. Soon, the sweep of orchestral strings fills the room, and Holly recognizes the soothing melody for the first movement of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, one of their favorites.
Walter opens a decorative black box near the turntable and extracts a long, slim silver canister.
She laughs out loud. “Since when do you vape?”
“My eyesight’s not good enough to pack a pipe. Besides, the fingers are too arthritic. This wouldn’t be my first choice, but these vape pens come preloaded with predictable doses.”
She nods to the pen. “DMT, right?”
“Yes, dimethyltryptamine. The active ingredient of ayahuasca.”
She exhales. “The God Molecule.”
“Nonsense. What a loopy term for a neuroactive biochemical,” Walter grumbles. “Then again, it’s not solely hippies and psychonauts who are prone to such hyperbole. The Incans used to call ayahuasca the ‘spirit vine.’ ”
“Speaks to its potency, doesn’t it?”
“I’d brew you a tea like we used to drink in Peru, but that would take hours and hours to have any effect.”
“But smoking DMT is so intense. Way more powerful than LSD or ketamine.”
“True. But it has a very quick onset and then offset. The whole trip will last thirty minutes or less. With any luck it will reboot your mind. Reframe your thoughts. Perhaps it’s exactly what you need right now?”
Holly can practically see herself as an eighteen-year-old, sitting cross-legged on a patch of dirt under a dense canopy of leaves across from her curandero, her trip guide, who wore the same traditional Peruvian chullo hat and alpaca-wool sweater every day. She vividly recalls the brilliant visions that swirled inside her head soon after she drank the earthy, bitter ayahuasca tea. Her father was central to those visions. She remembers how her chest warmed at the glowing sight of him. And how he repeatedly told her, in the most loving and conciliatory tone, that she wasn’t responsible for the car crash that killed him.
At the time, the visions felt so real that Holly accepted her dad’s reassurances as fact. They freed her from the spiral of self-recrimination and suicidal thoughts. She returned home from Peru a different person. Almost whole. But since the ayahuasca had never conjured specific memories of the accident itself, in time doubt began to creep back in. More and more, Holly wondered if the exoneration her dad offered her in those visions was simply the product of her wishful imagination. And she coped the only way she knew how: by avoiding thoughts of the accident and never seeking out details of what actually happened that day.
Walter now holds the vape pen out to her, and Holly hesitates a moment before she takes it between her fingers. He digs in a drawer behind him and pulls out a black blindfold, which Holly also accepts and then slips over her forehead.
