Devil's Breath
Carlos answered the bell without thinking about it.
A woman stood in the doorway, attractive and apologetic, explaining that she had just moved in upstairs and wanted to say hi. She was planning to have a little housewarming party to get to know the neighbors and wanted to know if he'd like to come sometime next week.
Of course, I'd love to, welcome and nice to meet you.
As he stepped forward she leaned in close and blew a fine white powder into his face. He didn't flinch or step back, but something behind his eyes went quiet.
She walked in and sat down.
…
The next morning, Carlos's alarm clock didn't wake him up.
When he opened his eyes, something felt a bit off. For a moment he didn't quite know where he was. He was lying on his spare mattress in an empty apartment.
The television was gone, the stereo, his laptop with all his research. His hard drives, the wooden box his father had given him where he kept his passport and his cash. His phone was missing.
He stumbled through every room in his underwear, opening cupboards that had nothing in them, standing in the kitchen where the table used to be. He opened his safe that was bolted to the floor: all gone. Even his favorite bowl and cup were missing.
At the police station they showed him the footage from his apartment block. Carlos watched someone who looked exactly like himself carry his belongings down four flights of stairs and load them into a van parked on the street below. There was the woman, and another man who he didn't recognize.
On the camera he saw himself making trip after trip up and down the stairs. He was careful with the fragile things. He smiled on the stairs when the woman said something that made him laugh. He watched himself hold the entrance door open with his back and wait for her to come through carrying one of his favorite paintings. When, at last, the van was full, the camera showed him wave them away, like old friends.
The detective then showed him a second clip. A different man, same week, standing outside a nightclub on Carrera 7. A woman leaned in close beside him. Over the next two hours they both visited four ATMs across the city. At each stop he entered his PIN with the focused attention of a man who wants to get something right, counting the notes before handing them over.
…
The drug is scopolamine, extracted from the borrachero tree that grows in gardens all over Bogotá, Colombia. It produces delicate white flowers that smell faintly of honey. Children pick them on the way to school.
It is a beautiful tree. It doesn't sedate you or slow you down or make you feel that anything is wrong.
It does one thing only — it dissolves the barrier between your own will and someone else's instructions, so that what you are told to do becomes what you genuinely want to do.
And from inside your own head you cannot feel the difference.
The US State Department estimates 50,000 cases in Colombia every year. The victims tell police the same thing. They felt completely fine. They felt helpful and warm and present. It felt, from the inside, entirely like their own idea. They wanted to do it.
Carlos sat on the plastic chair long after the detective left the room, holding his head in his hands, staring at his smiling face frozen on the screen.
How was this possible?
The Box
10.15am, March, Sedona, AZ, COVID
I speed down the winding hill past the school. Mountains shine in the distance. Glowing red rocks, cut at strange angles. The sun glares in my face as I turn off the highway, twisting around corners as fast as I can. The red rocks give way to pine and juniper trees, past a few desolate houses until the paved road turns to dirt.
I kill the engine and look around to make sure no one saw me.
The silence of the desert. For miles and miles.
I grab the locked metal box and hurry up the path through the scrub, past the cactus and dry grass until I see the old tree.
No one would know.
Tiptoeing off the beaten path, I try my best to leave no trace. Behind the tree, the grey rocks sit in a pile exactly where I remember them. I pry them aside, drop the metal box into the hole I'd carved out before, and heave everything back into place. I step back and look carefully. Fresh eyes. I crouch and look again.
There is no way anyone would know. And why would anyone be all the way out here anyway?
On the drive back, a smile creeps up on my face. A small victory. Something heavy lifts. A sense of exhilaration bubbles up. I roll the window down and let the desert air play with my hair. The mountains look different now. Brighter. More magnificent. Glowing.
I can breathe.
…
When I walk back into my house, the whole place — the house, the world, my mind — feels lighter. Bigger. Expanded. I feel like I've been released from jail. Or recovered from an illness. The whole world has more air in it. More light, more color. I can actually see things.
That night I sleep more deeply than I have in years.
The next morning I wake to another world, because I know I have space now. A week later I barely recognise my life or myself. My brain and thoughts have slowed down. Time has expanded. I notice the stars and the moon. I hold conversations differently. I sit in the sun and just am. I sip my tea in my little rose garden and can actually feel grateful for life.
I feel so good I worry if what I'm doing is illegal. Have I somehow tricked the system and now someone is coming for me?
But I know it won't last.
Two Paths
November 1997, Cambridge England. The Vicarage.
Day and night, a grey-blue sadness hovers around my head like a rain cloud. I have become a collection of addictions and desires. I feel like I'm carrying a dying old man inside my body, locked in a dark room inside my mind, wondering if I'm going mad.
My father is a priest, my mother is a yogi, and we live in a vicarage. I have spent my life rebelling against all of it. I come home at 4am high on all kinds of substances and meet Mum on the stairs as she's going down to meditate. In a curious, timeless moment, we look at each other on that old staircase. Then we continue our separate ways — she to connect with some Divine Light, me to collapse in a lump still wearing my shoes.
One bitter-cold November evening I sit on the floor of my mum's studio with some of my weed-reeking friends. Half intrigued, half wondering when we can leave and go smoke something. When the talking stops, we close our eyes.
I have no expectation that anything will happen: part of me thinks it's all a bit silly. But I let go. All of a sudden I find myself propelled from my body. I see myself walking on a path in the middle of nowhere. A simple path on a green hill that stretches far out into the future.
Then it splits into two.
I know that whichever path I choose, I will have to renounce the other. One has to die and be laid to rest. The old path is my world. I can see it clearly ahead of me. Everything I know. Everything I am. But that path has led me to inner boredom and depression — a lost soul with a wounded heart and nowhere to mourn. The new path scales upward to the left. Beyond the crest of a hill, a glimmer of sunshine.
I stand there in silence. In my heart I know.
I take that first step onto a new path.
…
When I come back into the awareness of that room, everything has changed.
Friday Night
Winter, 1998
My desire to smoke, drink, and party has faded away as if it had never existed.
Normally I'd be heading out for a toxic night on the town right now. It's Friday at 8.30pm. But I'm lying in bed alone, meditating peacefully, giving thanks, deep in my soul, with my heart glowing and tears in my eyes.
It is the happiest moment of my life. I give up everything and yet I have everything.
The Lake
My first phone, Nokia 5210.
The lake was beautiful. But I couldn't see it. My whole being had been hijacked by something. I wasn't used to this — the split. I had been feeling so blissful and free, living in a new world. And now, there I was, physically walking around a lake. But only very remotely there.
Some text I'd sent. Silence on the other end. Would she get back to me? What did she think? Should I send another message? Or wait? Probably better to wait.
This is NOT working for me.
Over the last few months, I'd become a version of myself I didn't recognize. Some of the joy has faded. And now here I was just standing there, staring at this little blue phone that my friend gave me.
Waiting. Wanting. Needing.
So sad. So desperate. Needy.
And what for? For that little message on a little grey screen from some girl I barely knew.
…
I stood on that bridge overlooking that lake. A crack in the clouds let some light through that danced playfully on the water.
The ducks were doing their thing.
Something in me. Just. Snaps.
I calmly watch… as my hand reaches into my coat pocket. I feel my hand grip the phone… vaguely. I am aware that my arm has pulled back. Now forward…
And now the phone is flying through the air… in slow motion… flipping and twisting past the ducks… past the lilies swaying in the breeze…
Plop.
Ripples pulse towards me.
I stand there laughing, actually laughing, because the relief is so immediate and so total and so completely disproportionate to what just happened.
Freedom.
I take an involuntary deep breath. And another. I am slightly dazed and a little surprised at what I just did. But on a deeper level I'm proud of myself. Now I'm back.
I look around. And I can finally see what I'm looking at.
I had no idea what I was dealing with.
The Loop
Monday. This week.
I just took two days completely offline over the weekend.
No phone, no wifi, no screen.
By mid-morning the first day something releases.
My mind unwinds slowly, the way a fist opens when it finally stops gripping.
My sleep becomes deeper and more restful, or maybe I just feel normal and have forgotten what normal feels like.
I take care of the house, happily tidying and organising all the little things I hadn't noticed or cared about while I was in an internet-induced trance.
A deeper part of me that had been suppressed comes back to the surface, as if I'm coming out of a trance, waking from a strange dream I hadn't known I was having.
I go out and spend real time with real people, looking into their eyes. We have tea and cake and deep conversations about life. We walk. Laughter. Sitting in the sun, playing with kids. There are honest awkward moments and it’s ok. It makes the relationship deepen.
I arrive home feeling full and whole. I sit for a couple of hours of meditation and it is easier and deeper. I can drop in. I actually want to do it.
Insights come. Whole downloads that stay long enough to write down. I sleep well and wake up refreshed.
Then I go back online.
I have no choice.
I plug in the wifi and pick up the phone.
I know what's coming.
I tell myself I just need to check one quick thing. Thirty seconds. A couple of minutes. Only the important stuff.
In the moments between that intention and what actually happens, the fog rolls in.
I'm entranced.
Somewhere in the misty minefield I start prodding at icons.
Not because I need to. Not because I've decided to. Not even because I actually, truly want to. It just happens. One app, then another, then back to the first. I open things, close things, open the same things again — sometimes within seconds — without realising I've
already seen them.
For a split second some part of me can feel the hungry ghosts gathering, frustrated and demanding their feed. My mind and body feel irritated and dissatisfied, wanting more, like eating a tube of Pringles at midnight knowing full well what you're doing and doing it anyway.
I don't know how long it lasts. That's the point. Time doesn't work properly when you're in it.
Then something snaps.
Irritation breaks through the trance.
I look down at the thing in my hand and don't recognise it for a second.
I throw it on the carpet and recoil like it's a poisonous snake.
Two days of clarity.
Twenty minutes back online and I'm sleepwalking through my own life. Again.
Even knowing everything I know. Even having just felt the difference with my own body.
What is this?
What AM I doing?
How is this still happening?
This is not a healthy relationship.
This is not a healthy relationship.
I did not sign up for this.
…
In gambling engineering, the mechanism is called the ludic loop. Effortless action. Unpredictable reward. No stopping point. You never decide to stay. You just never hit a reason to leave.
I call it the loonie loop.
Because that's what it feels like from the inside.
Going in circles. Can't stop. Can't remember why you started. Your time, your attention, your clarity — skimmed off a little more each lap.
I need to really understand how it works and how far back it goes…
The Rat
In 1954, a psychologist named James Olds made a mistake that would indirectly affect the lives of billions of people. He was trying to implant an electrode in one part of a rat's brain but missed. The electrode landed somewhere else entirely. He connected it to a small lever inside the cage and turned it on. Every time the rat pressed the lever, it received a tiny electrical pulse.
The rat pressed the lever. Then pressed it again. Then it didn't stop.
Seven thousand times an hour. That's almost twice a second. Press. Press. Press. A frantic, mechanical rhythm that didn't slow down, didn't vary, didn't pause.
It stopped eating. Food sat untouched in the cage. It stopped drinking. It stopped grooming — its fur matted, then clumped, then began to fall out. It stopped sleeping. Its body began to consume itself, muscles wasting, ribs surfacing through skin.
When researchers placed food on one side of the cage and the lever on the other — separated by an electrified floor that would shock its feet with every step — the rat walked across the grid. Burns on its paws. It didn't care.
A mother rat abandoned her pups. They cried. She pressed the lever.
It chose the lever over food. Over water. Over its own children. Over pain. It pressed the lever until its body gave out. Different rats. Same result. Every time.
Then they looked at the brain scans and found something that changed everything.
The stimulation wasn't producing pleasure.
It was producing wanting.
The rats weren't enjoying it. They were unable to stop. The craving for the next pulse began before the last one had ended. A hunger that feeding made worse.
The rat was not getting what it wanted. It was being locked into the feeling of wanting it. Forever. In the early 1960s, they tried it on a human.
A patient identified only as B-19 was given a button that stimulated the same neural region. In one three-hour session, he pressed the button 1,500 times.
When the researchers tried to end the session, he became agitated. Then desperate. Then he begged. He didn't describe it as pleasurable. He described it as a compulsion he couldn't override. He needed the next press. Not wanted. Needed.
The clinical notes contain one sentence I haven't been able to forget: "The subject appeared to have lost the capacity for autonomous decision-making
regarding when to stop."
The ethics board shut it down. Too cruel for a rat. Too cruel for one man pressing a button in a lab.
The mechanism has a name. Variable reward schedule. Random, unpredictable rewards. Sometimes the lever gives you something. Sometimes it doesn't. That uncertainty — that maybe — is what makes it impossible to stop.
The experiment they shut down in 1954 because it was too cruel for an animal is running right now on three billion humans. They didn't shut it down. They just repackaged it.
Pleasure Island
The coachman comes at night. His coach is puled by small grey donkeys, oddly silent on the road. He goes wherever the boys are, lost boys, the ones nobody is watching, the ones who've run away or been forgotten or simply slipped through the gaps. He has a gift for finding them. He is friendly and approachable. He offers them a ride to a place built entirely for boys. No school, no parents, no curfews, no consequences.
Pleasure Island, he calls it, an island where everything is free and nothing is forbidden. An island where they can eat what they want and break what they want and stay up all night and sleep all day, where there are funfairs and puppet shows and billiard halls and food stacked so high it takes both arms to carry. A special place where nobody tells them to stop and nobody tells them anything at all.
The boys climb on board. They always climb on board.
Lampwick is twelve years old and he is the loudest one on the coach, already talking about everything he is going to do when they get there. The other boys feed off his energy.
And the island delivers. It really does. That is the important thing to understand — it is not a trick, not a bait and switch. The island is exactly what the coachman promised.
The funfairs really do run all night. The food is extraordinary. There are no adults
anywhere, no lessons, no one to answer to. Whatever you want, whenever you want it, all of the time.
The boys tear through it like they have been starving for it their whole lives, and perhaps they have. They break things, because they can. They eat until they are sick and then eat some more. They sleep when they want and wake when they want and there is no day or night on Pleasure Island, only more and more of whatever they are doing.
Days fade into nights. Weeks pass. But Lampwick does not notice the weeks passing because there is nothing to count them against.There is so much to do it all starts blending into itself.
The first sign is the ears.
He is sitting in one of the billiard halls, laughing, smoking, mid-game, when he reaches up to scratch his head and finds something wrong. His ears are long. Covered in grey fur. They sit on top of his head where his own ears were and they swivel when he turns toward a sound, involuntarily, like an animal tracking something in the dark.
He stares at them in a mirror and starts to laugh, because what else do you do, this is absurd, this cannot be real. He is laughing and he opens his mouth to say something and what comes out is not words. The sound that comes out of him is a bray. Not quite human, not quite animal, something in between.
His hands go next. Right there at the billiard table, holding the cue, he watches his fingers thicken and fuse and the skin harden to something grey and dense.
The cue falls to the floor and he cannot pick it up because he has no fingers left to pick it up with. Now hooves where his hands were. He holds them up and stares at them with the expression of a person for whom the ground has just stopped being solid.
Hair spreads up his arms and across his chest and up his neck and across his jaw, which is pushing forward now, extending, reshaping itself into a muzzle while he watches. while he is fully awake and present and understanding everything that is happening to him with perfect clarity.
He tries to speak again.
He tries to say anything, to scream, to call for someone, to say his own name out loud as though that might anchor him, and his voice comes out as a long hollow bray that echoes off the walls of the billiard hall and means nothing.
He drops to his knees.
His spine begins to reshape, forward, down, onto all fours, and the floor comes up to meet his face. He is weeping except that donkeys don't weep.
The last thing is his eyes.
For a moment they are still his, still the eyes of a twelve-year-old boy who got on a coach one night because someone offered him something for free. Still wide and alive and fully present to the horror of what is happening.
And then something behind them shifts, and dims, and the boy recedes to somewhere very far back, like a face seen through frosted glass, and all that’s left is a donkey.
Standing on the floor of a billiard hall, quiet and still and dull-eyed.
The cigar is still in the ashtray. The cue lays on the floor near his hooves.
The donkey stares blankly around. There are others. The hall is full of them. Some are fully transformed. Some are still in the middle of it, still making sounds that have not quite finished being human, hands still reaching.
The coachman's men come in quick with crates and ropes. They are efficient and precise about it. They know the timing exactly.
The donkeys are loaded and shipped out before morning.
To salt mines, to circuses, to farms in places with no names, where they will work until their legs buckle and then work a little more. And the coachman will be paid for each one, and he will ride his silent coach back into the dark to find the next group of lost boys who need somewhere to go.
He has never run short of boys.
Enchanted
A tiny village in Oxfordshire, England, 1985
I am five years old and have almost lost all my hearing. The world is muffled. I don't know what is happening. I just feel so alone.
My mother wants me to drink disgusting yellow liquid on a spoon. She says it will help.
Why am I being punished?
My back is to the window. I sit in front of a giant TV screen, volume turned up as high as it will go so I can hear some of it if I focus.
I am left out. Lost. Broken.
I can’t explain my feelings… but I am no longer really here.
The noise is… muffled… but the images mesmerize me.
As I sit there, I vanish.
I am alone, but not alone anymore.
The pain disappears. I become these fascinating people doing amazing things.
I am in another world.
I am home. I am safe.
— end of Part I —
The dive goes deeper in Part II: In The Water — the rich jerk, the hungry ghosts, the hypnotist, and the long way home.