Nine Perfect Strangers

She could never have applied the new protocol without his medical expertise. If anyone should pay, it was Yao.

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ he said. ‘No matter what happens.’

Over a year ago now, Masha had come across an article about micro-dosing in Silicon Valley. White-collar professionals were using micro-doses of LSD to increase their productivity, alertness and creativity. Micro-dosing was also being used with some success to treat mental illnesses like anxiety and depression.

Masha was fascinated in her typical Masha way. Yao loved her sudden wild enthusiasms and the fearless way she strode into unfamiliar territory. She tracked down the person who wrote that first article and phoned him. That’s what led to her learning about psychedelic therapy, where people were given ‘full doses’ of psychedelic drugs. Within a very short time, she became obsessed. She ordered books online. She made more phone calls to experts all around the world.

This was the answer, she said. This was what would take them to the next level. Psychedelic therapy, she said, was the magic shortcut to enlightenment. Scans showed that the brain activity of someone who had taken psilocybin bore striking similarities to the brain of

an experienced meditator during deep meditation.

At first, Yao had just laughed in disbelief. He had no interest. When he was a paramedic he had seen the terrible impact of illegal drugs. The man who had held a knife to his throat had been suffering the psychotic effects of crystal meth. Yao had treated junkies. They were not a good advertisement for the wonderful effects of drugs.

But Masha chipped away at him, day by day.

‘You’re not listening. This is nothing like that,’ she said. ‘Would you not use penicillin because of heroin?’

‘Penicillin does not affect brain chemistry.’

‘Okay then, what about antidepressants? Antipsychotics?’

That low, persuasive, accented voice in his ear, those green eyes fixed on his, that body, that beautiful hold she had over him.

‘At least study the research,’ she said.

So he did. He learned about the government-approved clinical trials of psychedelic drugs being used to help ease the anxiety of patients with terminal cancer. The results were overwhelmingly positive. So, too, were similar trials with war veterans suffering PTSD.

Yao became curious and intrigued. Eventually he agreed to try the therapy himself.

Delilah got the supplies on the dark web, including the drug-testing kits. Yao did all the testing.

He and Delilah both agreed to be the guinea pigs. Masha would be the psychedelic therapist. She herself, because of her medical history, could not do the therapy, but that was fine because she had already had transcendent experiences through her meditation and her famous near-death experience.

The psychedelic therapy had been, as Masha promised, transformative.

Even if medicating the guests turned out to be a mistake, he would never regret that.

It started with a journey down a tunnel that was possibly a waterslide (but the water was not wet, which was a brilliant idea) that ultimately spat him out in a cinema, where he sat on a red velvet seat and ate buttery popcorn while he watched as his whole life was played back to him, frame by frame, from the moment of his birth, right through school and university, up until the moment he arrived at Tranquillum House, except that he didn’t just watch it happen, he re-experienced every incident, every failure, every success, and this time around he’d understood everything.

He understood that he’d loved Bernadette, his fiancée, more than she’d ever loved him and that she was never going to be the right woman for him. He understood that his parents had never been suited to each other either. He understood that he had the wrong personality to be a paramedic. (He was depleted, rather than energised, by bursts of adrenaline.)

Most significant of all, he learned that his phobia about mistakes had begun when he was a child.

It was an incident he was sure he had never heard about from his parents or remembered before, but under the influence of psychedelic drugs he re-experienced it in vivid detail.

He was no more than two or three years old, in the kitchen of their old house. His mother briefly left the room and he thought to himself, I know! I’ll help do the stirring, and he’d carefully pulled a chair over to the stove, and he was so pleased with himself that he’d worked out this smart solution. He’d climbed up on the chair and he was about to reach out to the bubbling saucepan when his mother came back into the kitchen and shouted at him, so loudly, and his heart leapt out of his chest and he fell from the chair into endless space and his mother caught him, and shook him so hard his teeth chattered. He understood at last that he had internalised his mother’s terror at her mistake, not his.

Delilah, who refused to reveal much about her own experiences, had been unimpressed by Yao’s revelations. ‘So it’s your mother’s fault you’re a nervous nellie? Because she saved you from being scalded? What a terrible mother. No wonder you’re so damaged, Yao.’

Yao ignored her. Sometimes Delilah seemed angry with him. He did not know why and he didn’t care, because the day after his psychedelic therapy he woke dizzy with a new freedom: the freedom to make mistakes.

Perhaps this was his first mistake.

He looked at the screen showing nine people who did not look to be transformed in any way. They looked tired, agitated and angry. They were meant to be out by now, beginning the next stage of their ‘rebirth’.

The ‘code-breaker puzzle’ should have taken an hour at most. It was meant to be a fun, stimulating group activity to help them bond as a group. Back in Masha’s corporate days, she’d once been on a team-building retreat where they’d done a similar exercise and everyone had loved it. She said that people had come out of the room laughing and high-fiving each other.

Masha said she had come up with something sophisticated, subtle and symbolic that would integrate perfectly with their psychedelic experiences. (‘Never afraid to blow her own trumpet, is she?’ Delilah had said to Yao. Yao had put it down to jealousy. What woman wouldn’t be jealous of Masha?)