The Cloisters(56)

“What is he doing here?” Rachel said.

“Leo is going to help us with a very important experiment.”

At this, Leo offered me a quick smile before pulling a handful of plastic packets out of his pocket. He threw them on the table, and I recognized them immediately. They matched the packets he had been selling at the greenmarket, the ones he had sold exclusively from under the table—bespoke herb mixtures and tinctures, carefully mixed in the greenhouse of The Cloisters.

“I’ve been thinking,” said Patrick, approaching the table and picking up a small, clear packet, “that maybe we’ve been going about this the wrong way. I think we should consider approaching the cards differently, in an entirely new state, if you will.”

“You think we should take drugs.” Rachel said it without emotion, bluntly, as if it were a request for us to pull an old book from the stacks. But it struck me that she knew what Leo was offering in these packets, maybe had opportunities to try them herself.

“No. Not drugs. Not in the narrow sense. Not as we understand them today,” Patrick said. And in that moment, he sounded like himself, like the curator who had hired me, like the curator who felt a deep sense of curiosity about the things that had come before us, and not the curator who was frustrated by his lack of progress, by the slow unraveling of his own passion.

“As you both know,” he continued, “medieval mysticism has been widely studied. And we know that those who experienced visions had some help. Henbane and mandrake may have played an important role in helping facilitate the visions of medieval mystics. But this is not—was not—drug use for recreation. But for research, for understanding. So that we might get closer to our own intuitions, our instincts. It’s a process of understanding, not intoxicating. I’ve been talking about doing this for a while now, and Leo has been a great help.”

Leo picked up and shook one of the plastic packets. “Thirty percent henbane, sixty-five percent mandrake, and very small amounts of belladonna and thorn apple. None of this is enough to hurt you,” he explained. “Both henbane and mandrake have hyoscine in them. It’s a hallucinogen, a psychotropic. Belladonna and thorn apple both have atropine, it works like a muscle relaxant. It will help to even everything out.”

Rachel looked at Patrick. “You’ve got to be kidding, right? You want us to take poisons Leo has prepared?”

“We thought about that, about your concern. So—” Leo pulled a thermos out of his back pocket and set it down on the table. “Here, they’re all the same.” He mixed up the packets on the table. “Pick one and I’ll take it right now.”

Rachel selected a packet and handed it across the table to Leo, who emptied the contents into his thermos and swirled. Then he drank, the thermos tipped back and his throat working methodically until he showed Rachel an empty container.

“It’s safe,” he said. “I promise. Everything in here is fine in a small quantity.”

I had already seen Leo selling these mixtures to women on the Upper West Side, women who were looking to escape their own lives, looking for their own kind of revelations. And perhaps it was because of that that I felt safe drinking the herbs Leo had prepared for us. Or perhaps it was my desire, like Patrick’s, to go deeper. To see what else we might be able to open up in the cards, in ourselves, with a little help. Patrick procured three cups and a carafe of hot water, pouring us each a cupful and handing them out with the packets.

“How long will it take to kick in?” I asked Leo.

“Around twenty to forty minutes. It has to be processed into your bloodstream. It comes on slowly, not fast. You’ll only notice by accident.”

Rachel took a sip of her tea. “It’s really foul, Leo.”

“Bitter,” he said. “Not foul.”

I took a sip, and it was bracing. A dark slurry of pungent, grainy liquid, and part of me wished there had been an option to take it in one swallow, so that it might be done and over with.

“Thank you, Leo,” said Patrick, sipping from his cup delicately.

“I’ll be in the garden shed if you need me.” Leo moved to leave.

“Why don’t you come check on us in two hours,” Patrick said. “Just to be sure everything is going okay.”

Leo nodded. “I’m sure you’ll be fine. But I’ll come back.”

While we waited for the drugs to take effect, we cleared our worktable and propped the windows open. Patrick brought two candelabras from his office and lit them, their flames flickering in the gentle drafts that sifted into the space. A silence had settled in between the three of us, and no one dared break it. Perhaps out of fear that the next words might be those we couldn’t take back. The red wax quietly dripped pools onto the oak table.

And it was these pools of limpid wax that first made me realize something unusual was going on. At first, they seemed to shimmer and shake, to swirl on the table without any direction from us. I kept blinking and rubbing my eyes in an effort to clear whatever it was that was making my vision hazy and unstable. But when I was unable to arrest the movement in the wax, I noticed that the things in the room around me—the books and lamps, the Gothic windows and curved beams—seemed to take on a brighter quality, too, as if lit from within.

Rachel, I could tell, had begun to feel the effects, and when she grabbed my wrist, I could see it in her eyes—the belladonna, her pupils dilated to shiny black dimes.