IN THE ALTIPLANO THE WATER IS CLEARER. In the mirrory reflection I see a Sunshine uncompromised by age, experience, or fate. She walks with ease through the laboratories of The Man and the committee rooms of The Move, not letting jangling anklets get snagged in the talons of either.
I'm told Leary took a trip like this, six years ago while he was still a Harvard bigwig. At night I see the bomber jet planes and watch and wonder at the shrapnel. One hot hunk pierces my eye (third) like a slight of mind, and I understand there's a man somewhere as caught up in the inadvertent mess as I am. There may be no way to reverse the fierce genocide in place in America, an attack on another other continent as a result of paranoid opposition. But I know that even powerless I have no recourse but to cast my lot with the resistance. Now there's nothing I can do but climb aboard the train before it's too late. . . .
Far off in the desert of Mexico there's a shed skin of myself that invokes tragic tidings, then glows in the throes of existential exhaustion. Ali told me we were going to a lair where none other allows entrance for awareness of identity and its masquerades. Is it the shed skin I left behind, or the think in itself--I the chrysalis? I think I'm going to throw up. I think she.