He unwraps the book with her.
They will share this.
The book, this book, it's a rarity, it existed, until this moment, only in the imagination.
It is a banned book.
Oversized in the manner of an old atlas, a pair of supple white leather gloves fall out the wrapping paper with it, there is first a note of caution:
"This book offers you the means to exchange knowledge for experience..."
The note continues...
The pages, lightly bound of different papers, weights. Some, heavy, fine calligraphy, instructions. Illustrations of fairies dancing about mushrooms by the light of a yellow moon, tinted with various vitamins and minerals. The instructions, to fill a sterile jar with cooked brown rice, clip a piece from the page, roll it and place within the rice.. in a few short weeks this paper, impregnated with the spores of the mushroom you just planted, will give your first crop.
There follow descriptions of how to maintain and time the temperature, light and humidity.
Another page, thick, this of the peyote button and flowers arranged in a Mandela, this, a proper commitment, you must follow the instructions and wait up until 10 years until you reap the reward.
Instructions as to the type of soil, acidity, PH, exposure.
The next page, a sampling of blotters, each ready to consume. Wear the gloves. The full pantheon of Indian Gods in glorious polychrome, Orange Sunshine, others, ready to go, merely take a tab on tip of your tongue.
There are the classics, Papavar Somniferum, with instructions to various preparations and abundant cautions as to it's use, bright pictures of poppies, coca leaves, cannabis, sassafras and morning glories, The Mimosa Hostilis, drawn, again, plant the seed, review the instructions on how to prepare. A bubbled page filled with tablets of 2C-B, another with seeds from "Banisteriopsis Caapi" and "Psychotria viridis" with details on how to prepare the vines, the leaves. A beautiful vomiting symbiosis that will see you healed. This is a modern herbology, empathogens, hallucinogens, psychedelic's, depressants, vivid dreams drawn and colored beyond the margins, beyond even the marginalia, dreams of terror and isolation and profound communion and enlightenment.., dreams that slip from the page and into the abyss...
This page should see no sunlight, and this should be rolled into papers and smoked, this can be taken as is, and this, only under threat of madness, a trip to be taken and might be never returned from, pack your bags accordingly...
There are Instructions, rituals, rites, formulas to be followed at every step. Disregard them at your peril.
In the margins are drawn little fairies, gnomes, elves, gremlins, and the occasional grey or insectoid alien. This, fair warning for what to expect, with notes as to certain well known 'personalities' you might encounter who might impede or further your experience, depending on how favourably they regard your intrusion.
Were you invited?
There are lost preparations from "De Materia Medica" by Pedarius Dioscarides, from the "Pen ts'ao kang mu" by Li Shih-chen, tested again by Shulgin with his notes, there are tinctures and eyedrops that promise to enable you to see in the dark, colors otherworldly and fluid, colors drab will swirl and pulse, you'll see the wind, watch sacred geometries unfold, the same drops in your ears would fine tune, attenuate your hearing so that you would understand the birds, hear the whisperings of the dead, make enough and rub it on your skin and you will feel them beside you, their brushes and pinches, switches and tweaks, swabbed in your nose would make you pursue scents like a dog, realize how tiny your experience of it was so far.
And there are times - certain recipes recommend themselves as being most potent when harvested in the summer and prepared in the fall, propitious, even, when prepared with the required ceremony, there are ointments for women that should be rubbed upon body and broom, fair preparation for Walpurgis Night, for the men there are unguents and stimulant's, candy-flipping combinations to keep your enthusiasm going an entire week-end...
There are poisons with the corresponding antidotes, the point, to bring you close, the deathbed visions, the penultimate spiritual tourism, taken to its limit, this page without notes, merely instructions to create first the antidote before attempting the poison. Prepare the antidote first. Always, always, prepare the antidote first, for, once poisoned it is very unlikely that you will have the attention or resources to devote to making the antidote. And - to be sure, the page containing the poison recipe is printed in an invisible ink that will only be visible when sprayed first with the antidote.
It continues, how many pages? The periphery of all thought, human experience, the illustrations, scripts, varied to suit the contents, the combined perspicacity and insanity of madmen, prophets and saints.
Salvation and Damnation, should you change your mind, here for the first time together on this blotter, a fine Thangka; no, thank you...
This book is amazing, a maze, there is no exit. Not easily, not here.
There are prescriptions for Melancholia, for Bile, for Phlegm, for Ennui, to enable Memory or Forgetting, there are philters, tonics, panaceas, the pages unfold fractal geometries and make plain your most intuitive understandings.
The colors, page to page a fair representation of your visions, there are hidden pictures within pictures that will become apparent only when under the influence, there are litmus papers to be stirred into your tea, check the acidity, drawings that required a change of perspective to decipher, interpret, a bending of the mind, anamorphic drawings without the mirrored sphere to assist, optical illusions that morph and move under sober observation....
Time now to close it. Together they will make a plan.
She is perhaps not as enthusiastic, but in his enthusiasm he misses this.