Because no one is gonna tell me you de-differentiated your goddamn genetic structure for four goddamn hours and then reconstituted! I'm a professor of endocrinology at the Harvard Medical School. Mason Parrish: I'm gonna show these to someone who can read them right, 'cause you're reading them wrong, that's all there is to it. That's strictly simian! I obviously regressed! To some quasi-simian creature. There was clearly something anterior to the larynx that looked like a laryngeal sack. Eddie Jessup: It wasn't an ischemic attack! It wasn't a seizure. Mason Parrish: Transient ischemic attack, that's what it was. I tried to indicate this was just a transient thing. Mason Parrish: Are you all right? Eddie Jessup: I'm fine, Mason. It's bad enough we've got this nosy X-ray technician. Eddie Jessup: I'd rather not have everyone in the Brigham in on this. Mason Parrish: I want someone to look at those x-rays who can read them. Arthur Rosenberg: Well, why do you think I called you for? Let's see you stop him. You guys are supposed to be scientists, not two kids in the dorm, freaking out on Mexican mushrooms. Mason Parrish: Well, It's gonna stop right now. You guys are shooting up an untested drug that stacks up in the brain, works in the nucleus of the cell, and don't call that dangerous? Arthur Rosenberg: For the record, we don't actually shoot up. Mason Parrish: Well, I don't believe this. And what's really screwy is it heads straight for the brain. Mason Parrish: Just how dangerous is this stuff he brought back from Mexico? Arthur Rosenberg: I didn't say dangerous, I said it was weird. When he comes out, he's chipper as a bird but doesn't remember a thing. Sometimes they last as long as four hours. Arthur Rosenberg: Do you want me to bring you down now? Mason Parrish: What happens now? Arthur Rosenberg: He's blacked-out. Arthur Rosenberg: Are you okay? Eddie Jessup: I'm fine. I'm watching the birth agony of a mountain. Can you hear me above this noise? Oh, my God. Arthur Rosenberg: Are you okay? Eddie Jessup: Get this stuff. I'm telling you now because I think you have a right to know what kind of a nut you might be getting mixed up with here. If you love me, Eddie, DEFY IT!ĭialogue Eddie Jessup: I haven't told anyone this in ten years. He finally embraced the absolute, was finally ravished by truth and it goddamn near destroyed him. What happened to Eddie tonight, that was Eddie's idea of love. Reality to Eddie is only that which is changeless, immutably constant. Nothing in the human experience is real to him. And one way we do that is we love each other. We spend our lives persuading ourselves we're alive. Well, human life doesn't have great truths.

You are a Faust-freak, Eddie! You'd sell your soul to find the great truth.

I feel like I'm being harpooned by some raging monk in the act of receiving God.

You carry on like a flagellant which can be very nice, but l sometimes wonder if it's me that's being made love to. No matter who I'm eating with or walking with there's always this pain because it isn't him. No matter who I'm in bed with I have to imagine it's him or nothing happens.

Do you know how many men I tried to fall in love with this past year? But it won't work. Of all the God damn men in this world, why do I have to love this one? I can't get him out of me.We might even have a link to another universe. We may be opening a black box that may scrap our whole picture of space-time. This is an all-bets-are-off sort of thing.That our other states of consciousness are as real as our waking state. It's just possible I'm not mad, you know! I'm asking you to make a small quantum jump with me, to accept one deviant concept.I sit around the living rooms of other young married faculty members talking infantile masturbation: 'Who's sucking up to the head of the department?' 'Whose tenure is hanging by a thread?' For God's sake, Arthur, is that how you imagine me? A respected and admired figure? A devoted father? A loving husband? Well, I've also published nearly two papers a year for the last seven years and not a fundamental piece of work in the lot.So the purpose of all our suffering was just more suffering. So the end was terrible, even for the good people like my father.

Altered state