The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (71 page)

I wasn’t invited, which was OK with me; I was more on the science side of things and would not have had much to contribute. Terence and I hadn’t fully resolved the tensions that had developed between us over the last few years, but we were at least getting along. In the meantime, I was busy producing the herbal-supplement desk reference and lining up other consulting gigs. I wasn’t focused on developments in Hawaii.

I got the news on May 23, when I picked up a voice mail left the previous day on my office phone. It was from Dan Levy, Terence’s friend and former editor. Terence had suffered some kind of seizure, Dan said, and was currently in The Queen’s Medical Center in Honolulu, where he had been airlifted by helicopter.

I immediately called Dan to get the full story. He wasn’t sure exactly what had happened, he said, but he’d gotten an urgent message from Christy. Terence had recently returned from a long, exhausting tour on the East coast, she said, and had been feeling poorly for several days. He’d been suffering flu-like symptoms and had taken to his bed. That alone was not unusual. Terence was often exhausted after a tour and would sometimes be sick for a few days afterward. But this time was different; he hadn’t bounced back. As Christy told Dan, Terence had gotten up at one point and suffered a massive seizure. They both knew this was serious, and he had to get to the hospital. Somehow, Christy managed to get Terence into their jeep and started careening down the hill on the rugged road as Terence faded in and out of consciousness. She had called 911 from the Internet phone connection; they had no cell phones. While they waited at the bottom for the ambulance, Terence had another seizure, lost consciousness, and appeared near death.

Christy flagged down two passing motorcyclists for help. As it turned out, one of them had EMT training and was able to resuscitate Terence, almost certainly saving his life. The ambulance finally arrived, and the paramedics administered anti-seizure medication and took him to Kona Community Hospital. At the hospital, a CT scan revealed no signs of an aneurism, but it did detect what was called a “shadow” in the right anterior part of Terence’s brain. That was all Dan knew, but the word
tumor
hovered unspoken in the air.

I hung up the phone and collected my thoughts. I made arrangements to leave immediately for Honolulu.

When the taxi left me off at the medical center after an overnight flight, Christy was already there, as was Terence’s son, Finn, who had been staying near him on the Big Island. It was the first time I’d met Christy, who was blonde, blue-eyed, and petite. Her feat of getting Terence down to the road seemed that much more remarkable when I saw how small she was. We would get to know each other well over the following months. Terence’s daughter, Klea, was in Europe when she got the news; she soon arrived as well.

Terence had gotten an MRI by then, and the higher-resolution technology confirmed our worst fears. There was a dark mass, a tumor, about the size of a walnut, buried deep in his right forebrain. It would take a biopsy to determine the type of cancer, but we all feared the worst: glioblastoma multiforme, the most common and aggressive form of brain cancer. Fewer than two percent of glioblastoma sufferers survive more than a year after their tumors are detected. It’s a rare cancer (about 20,000 cases in the United States each year) and all but incurable: surgery and radiation might prolong life at most a few months. Terence’s neuro-oncologist was a compassionate man and an excellent doctor. He also struck me as one of the more depressed physicians I’d ever met, possibly because, as a specialist in this lethal disease, he’d never saved a single patient. His advice to Terence was blunt: he advised him to put his affairs in order. Terence might have a year to live, probably less, and no more than eighteen months. The chances that the tumor was benign were slim to none, the doctor said, and the biopsy soon verified that.

By the time we had this conversation at Terence’s bedside, he was feeling pretty good. He’d been given massive doses of anti-seizure medicine and steroids to reduce swelling. The combined effects, bizarrely, made him slightly euphoric and pumped. He was sitting up in bed, fully conscious, no pain, cracking jokes, while the rest of us were looking glum. The hospital had a nice inner courtyard and garden, and Finn and Terence and I sat there for a while under an enormous banyan tree in the late afternoon sun and tried to sort things out. I was agitated, overwhelmed with feelings of fear, apprehension, helplessness, and desperation. Any residual anger with Terence over our petty differences had evaporated. My job was to be there for my brother as fully as I could.

My conversation with him in the garden was intense and strange. It was almost as if we were back at La Chorrera, twenty-eight years earlier and thousands of miles away. This was the next twist of the helix, I told him; what we had started at La Chorrera was not finished. Our experiment was still in progress and only now nearing its resolution. We were about to encounter each other again, moving backwards and forwards in time, as we had been then, and ever since. But now it was my turn to be the anchor, the one who stayed behind; Terence would be the hyperspatial explorer, the one taking the shamanic hero’s journey to the edge of the universe, perhaps never to return.

I don’t know where my inspiration came from, whether I was channeling the Teacher, which is what it felt like, or whether I was slipping again into some kind of manic state. Perhaps I was just trying to frame the conversation in terms that were familiar, and that would give Terence (and all of us) some hope. But I had a clear vision of the task in front of us. I told him our theory at La Chorrera had been right: beta-carbolines and tryptamines did intercalate into DNA, as other investigators since then had confirmed. The brain tumor, like any tumor, was a mass of rapidly dividing cells. We had to carry out what amounted to shamanic surgery, by administering massive doses of Ayahuasca and/or psilocybin, and directing sound energy—the “hypercarbolation buzz”—at the tumor. The buzz would trigger the intercalation of the compounds and would block replication of DNA in the rapidly growing cells. The net effect would be to arrest the growth of the tumor and cause it to shrink.

That was the best outcome; but if it didn’t work, I said, our shamanic surgery would build Terence’s resurrection body; we’d reconstruct him as the starship, the hyper-dimensional object, the philosopher’s stone, all the images of a super-technological fusion of mind and matter we’d invoked at La Chorrera. In other words, the treatment would either save Terence, or transform him into a hyper-dimensional vehicle that, at the moment of transition, would allow him to seize the controls and sail off, painlessly, joyfully, and triumphantly, into the sunset of eternity. We’d almost done that in La Chorrera; this was our second chance.

I really don’t know why I was saying these things. I was babbling, grasping at straws, reaching for any metaphor, any scenario, that might cast a hopeful light on this terrible situation. I don’t know that I really believed it, but I was saying it.

Over the previous summer, I’d been doing Ayahuasca workshops with Luis Eduardo. I knew he’d been planning to visit Hawaii in July, which suddenly seemed providential. Luis Eduardo, one of our closest friends, had become an excellent
ayahuasquero
. I’ve told the story of how Terence had met him after his second trip to La Chorrera, and how later Luis Eduardo and I worked and traveled together over the years, sharing many adventures. We’d invite him to take part in this shamanic work with us, I said. I don’t know if my raving convinced Terence, but he reluctantly agreed at least to give it a try.

Back in the world of allopathic medicine, Terence was facing very limited options. His biopsy had confirmed that the tumor was indeed glioblastoma multiforme. Moreover, the tumor was inoperable. Conventional chemotherapy drugs tended to be ineffective, the oncologist said, because they didn’t readily cross the blood-brain barrier and thus had trouble penetrating the tumor. With surgery ruled out, his doctor recommended a procedure called “gamma knife,” which targeted the tumor with a beam of focused, high-energy gamma radiation. The beam could potentially “stun” the tumor and slow its growth, or even force it into remission in rare cases. That procedure would be followed by six weeks of focused soft-radiation therapy to catch any surviving cancer cells. Such tumors often recurred; the follow-up therapy improved the chances of remission after the initial gamma-knife procedure. According to the doctor, the diffuse border of such a tumor sends articulations into the normal surrounding tissue. He compared these to “mycelia,” as opposed to the “fruiting body” of the main tumor mass.

What were the long-term consequences if the treatments actually worked? Most likely dementia, we were told: possibly moderate, possibly severe. To think of my brother’s beautiful, scintillating mind being eaten away by a malignancy, or burned away by radiation, left me shaken. There were no good options. The gamma knife, crude as it was, seemed better than nothing. We agreed that the best course would be to have the procedure and then see what happened. After a brief time to recover, Terence would then begin the follow-up radiation treatments, which were intended to buy time and quality of life during that time. The treatments were never referred to as a cure.

Word of Terence’s situation soon got out. Jill, his former girlfriend, showed up unexpectedly, having flown over from the Big Island as soon as she’d gotten the news. I was surprised and impressed by her compassion for Terence. To his credit, Terence received her warmly, and Christy did as well. Christy certainly hadn’t bargained for anything like this when she and Terence had hooked up. Now, as the person closest to Terence on a day-to-day basis, she’d been cast into the stressful role of primary caregiver, and she proved herself more than equal to the task.

Dan Levy, Terence’s agent, flew out from New York to see him. Thanks to the steroids and the anti-seizure meds, Terence felt quite well, and there was no reason for him to stay in the hospital after he’d recovered from the biopsy procedure. Friends who had places on Oahu offered us accommodations while Terence awaited the gamma knife procedure. The situation was almost surreal. We were going out for expensive meals every night and acting like a bunch of good friends on holiday. Terence seemed more cheerful and upbeat than I had seen him in some time.

A few days after the biopsy, the gamma knife “cybersurgery” went off without a hitch, as far as any one could tell. This high-tech procedure was akin to magic in that it harnessed invisible energies whose effectiveness we accepted on faith. Our faith was in science and technology, of course, but afterward there was no outward sign that anything had changed. Terence looked the same and felt the same, except for a little fatigue. But the docs assured us they had zapped the tumor good; there was nothing to do but wait. Their plan was to monitor the effects for a few weeks and then begin the six weeks of radiation therapy. Terence and Christy went home to the Big Island. I returned to Minnesota to handle some business matters and clear the decks as much as possible. We agreed that I would come back out later in the summer with Luis Eduardo after Terence had completed his radiation therapy in Honolulu.

As May turned into June and the weeks rolled on, word of Terence’s dire situation reached his fans. Many responded with an incredible outpouring of good wishes, love-energy, and many suggestions for alternative therapies. It was touching, and humbling, to realize that Terence was loved by so many. He had an enormous extended family, and everyone was pulling for him. It became impossible for him to respond to the hundreds of emails he got every day. Fortunately, Dan Levy, who maintained the levity.com servers where Terence’s website was housed, set up a page where we could post periodic updates, which are still there (
www.levity.com/eschaton/index.html
).

This excerpt from a post by Terence gives some hint of what he was thinking at the time:

June 25, 1999

Dear Novelty Folks:

I am not properly set up, mentally or technologically to receive or respond to email while I am in Honolulu getting my cancer treatments, but my goal is to come home to my secret rebel base on the Big Island every two weekends or so. And once again I am there. Just a bit of an update on my situation: it is now more than three weeks since I had the gamma knife surgery. The further it recedes into the past the better I feel. However I am having focused radiation treatments five days a week and the docs assure me that in a while, a couple of weeks or more I will begin to feel less well under the impact of that treatment. So this time is being presented by the allopathic guys (and gals) as a window of good feeling sure to fade. Naturally I go through all sorts of changes about my situation, and the drugs I take, seizure suppressing carbamazepine and the steroid decadron combine in different ways at different times and move me around from a kind of “whatever” euphoria to very emotional and thought provoking states.

I have had all sorts of advice and well meaning suggestions…but here is my sort of general position on my personal fight with brain cancer. I think that it was wise to have the gamma knife surgery, though it was radical and high tech and somewhat experimental it was important to reduce the size of the tumor. The follow-on soft focus radiation is more controversial in my own mind but as an old mushroom cultivator I know how very important it is to work clean and to not assume that a little contamination is a containable thing. I have so far refused chemotherapy…these therapies may have to be tried if things get worse further downstream. But my intuition is that the people who survive unusually long times are those who follow the surgery and radiation with extreme attention to cleaning up their diets and then supplement their diet very wisely. It is a wake up call to be very attentive to what goes into my body. You would think that an old psychonaut would have learned that long ago but what can I say? In other words attention to the details of food and nutrition will significantly prolong my life. How long? Who can say? People who are taken hostage for long periods inevitably develop accommodating relationships with their oppressors. Cancer seems to be a bit like that, at least to me now. If it insidiously undermines me I may change my tune but for the moment I accept no diagnosis, though I have deep respect for my doctors and I simply wish to believe that those who wish to live and who inform themselves concerning the details of human nutrition and metabolism have the best luck with these sorts of situations.