Jason's dentist had recommended that he have his wisdom teeth removed. The procedure seemed trivial. The dental assistant gave him some Valium and within a few minutes Jason felt an overpowering sense of euphoria followed by drowsiness, which quickly sent him under. When he awakened his jaw line was numb.
By the next day, the numbness had left and his back teeth hurt. Jason took painkillers for it and within a couple days, the pain subsided.
It was around this time that Jason's acne got worse. His forehead broke out and it wasn't long before white pustules, interspersed with blackheads covered his entire face. With the skin disorder came feelings of hopelessness and depression. Alone, in bed, unexplainable fits of crying would seize him.
One day after school Toby approached him and said, “I've got something that might cheer you up.”
“What?”
“Come over to my place and see.”
Jason assumed it was probably a good strain of marijuana. “Sure.”
He had always enjoyed smoking from Toby's glass bong, but when he got to Toby's room, he realized it was something better.
Toby placed some mushrooms on the table and said, “These were growing in the park.” The mushrooms were small with white stems, slightly darker caps, and a blue ring around the stem just beneath the cap.
“What do they do?”
“They give you a body high with hallucinations.”
“What are the hallucinations like?”
“Nothing big. Just distortions in vision. You wanna try some?”
Hearing Toby speak of the body high reminded Jason of his ascension in astral and he longed to regain that height. “Sure.”
Toby handed Jason some of the mushrooms. “Make sure to chew them for a while before you swallow,” advised Toby. “You get a better high that way.”
Jason put the mushrooms in his mouth and chewed them slowly.
Toby did the same.
After Jason had swallowed the mushrooms he asked, “How long does it take?”
“It should be about an hour. Wanna watch a movie?”
“Sure.”
Toby turned on 2001: A Space Odyssey and placed another video called Acidburn Flashback Tabu on the table. “That's for later,” said Toby. “By the time Acidburn Flahback Tabu comes on we'll be high as hell.”
“What's that about?”
“It's a collection of psychedelic animated shorts.”
“Cool.”
The thought of getting high on mushrooms filled Jason's stomach with a pleasant sensation. Within an hour the pleasant sensation transformed into a pleasurable warmth that radiated throughout his entire body, carrying him into a higher mental plane. The movies seemed distant, yet understandable, like he was seeing them from outside himself. When a voice in Acidburn Flashback Tabu warned about using a sword in anger and losing yourself to hate, the idea of wanting to strike out at anyone seemed alien to him. Hurting other people just didn't make sense.
It was the day after the psychedelic mushrooms that Jason first felt himself twitch in public. He was walking past a couple on the street and he felt something in his brain jerk outward, forcing his head to twitch.
“Wonder what that guy's been doing,” said the male.
“Spending too much time alone,” replied the male's girlfriend.
The twitch and the couple's response to it disturbed Jason. He immediately thought about the mushrooms he'd done the day before and assumed he must be having adverse after effects from it.
From then on the twitches became a daily thing. When Jason first realized this was going to be the case he looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and broke down into tears. He hated thinking he might have to live with something like this for the rest of his life.
In his parent's kitchen, Jason bit into an apple, and he felt a tingling in one of his front teeth, accompanied by something that sounded like a Spanish speaking radio station, coming from within his head. Jason knew enough Spanish to understand what language it was, but he couldn't understand what the man was saying.
The male voice spoke fluent Spanish over radio static sounds for a few minutes, while Jason finished the apple. Then the voice, the radio static, and the tingling in his tooth left.
Jason assumed it was probably just an after effect of the psychedelic drugs. As far as he was concerned, it was another harmless experience of the paranormal and he quickly dismissed it.
It wasn't long before Jason began thinking he had developed an ability to hear people from unnatural distances. When someone spoke something about him on the other side of the lunch room, he could distinguish exactly what the person was saying from among the many voices and all the other sounds around him. In the car he could understand what people on the side walk were saying as he went past them.
Marijuana helped Jason to cope with his depression and his feelings of alienation. When he was high on it, none of those other people being cruel to him seemed to matter anymore. Life seemed like an adventure again while it was in his system.
In order to buy the marijuana, Jason obtained a job as a dishwasher in a restaurant after school. The work was simple and kept him busy. Each night after work he would go over to a friend's house and smoke marijuana or cigarettes.
The phenomena of hearing voices at unnatural distances progressed into hearing distant voices while alone at home. The voices mumbled indistinctly, just above being completely inaudible. The strange presence that had been forcing unwanted thoughts onto him seemed to flit in and out of his consciousness, like an unwanted inner specter. Jason assumed that this was a result of the psychedelic drugs also.
During an appointment with Dr. Newland, she asked, “Have you been hearing any voices?”
Jason hadn't mentioned anything about hearing voices and he was impressed by the doctor's intuition. “Yes, I have.”
“Can you understand what they're saying?”
“No. It's just voices mumbling.” Jason felt the need to add that he'd been suffering twitches, but he felt a drain weighing down his mind as he thought about telling her. Jason's need to find a cure for the twitching overrode the fear of the drainage pressing against him and he added, “I've been suffering twitches though.” It was the first time he'd told someone else about the twitching and the drain set in over him, compressing and weighing down his brain.
“There is a medication that might help” said Dr. Newland. “It's called Adilify. I can write you a prescription for that as well as the Doloft.”
“Sure.” It was the hope for a cure that guided Jason's hand as he took the two prescriptions from his psychiatrist.
The first night on Adilify, Jason suffered the most vivid nightmare he had ever gotten. There was dark metallic noise in the background, which emanated a fearsome vibration hinting at the utmost disturbing possibilities and in the foreground was Jessica screaming at the top of her lungs. She was bent over a doctor's table, naked, and Dan, the heavy set counselor from the psychiatric hospital was violently ramming her crotch. At the point of penetration a vortex spun inward, draining Jason's sanity within it.
Jason awakened with a start, feeling wetness all around his lower body. It was another unconscious ejaculation, but this time more semen than ever before covered his bed. The dream had been every bit as vivid as astral projection. In fact, he remembered the dream even more vividly than his experience in astral. There was still a recollection of the metallic vortex music, forcing an alien disturbance over his mind.
A weight pressed down over Jason's eyes and he lay back down, feeling too drained to get up. He assumed it was just another nightmare and he fell back to sleep.