One year after my mother’s suicide, we took the cruise. Our ship set sail from Fort Lauderdale, and as we motored beyond the coastal lights of Florida, I stood on the balcony of our first-class cabin, watching an apocalyptic sunset smear the sky. Soon we’d be on the open ocean, and from there the stars would show me the way to the Path of Souls. At least, that was my plan. A plan that, I admit, when uttered aloud, made me sound like a child who misunderstands the statement, Mommy has gone to heaven. And so responds, Well, how do I get there to bring her back?

I hung my head over the balcony railing. Several stories below the ship’s turbulent white wake churned the Atlantic, and I wondered whether I was as high up now as my mother was then. I wondered how free she felt letting go. I could let go too, simply drop my duty, the burden of writing this book, and what came next. I could simply chuck the vape pen with the DMT I had smuggled aboard to speed the journey and watch it fall end over end, silently, peacefully into the sea.

Over the past year, I had done the requisite psychotherapy, but it didn’t seem to be reaching the deepest regions of my brain, which is why I needed the DMT, to access the otherwise inaccessible, to find my mother on the Path of Souls before I lost her forever. I knew it was too late to bring her back, but I needed to know why she left, because I feared the answer was me.

In the absence of a note other than Do Not Resuscitate, I was left to wonder. The only thing I was sure of was that I was open to believing just about anything. For example: that dimethyltryptamine simulates a near-death experience and shamans in the Amazon use the DMT in ayahuasca to ascend to the Milky Way where they’re reborn, that both Native Americans and ancient Egyptians believed that after death our soul makes a leap into a portal in the constellation of Orion where it begins a dangerous journey along the Milky Way to the afterlife, that the similarity of these beliefs isn’t a coincidence but rather the result of a link between the cultures deep in prehistory and lost in a great cataclysm caused by a giant comet. Allie mostly indulged my theories—only rarely rolling her eyes.

“Over the past year, I had done the requisite psychotherapy, but it didn’t seem to be reaching the deepest regions of my brain, which is why I needed the DMT, to access the otherwise inaccessible, to find my mother on the Path of Souls before I lost her forever. I knew it was too late to bring her back, but I needed to know why she left, because I feared the answer was me.”

Inside our room, she was dancing. Gucci Mane’s “Heavy” played on her phone, muffled but audible through the sliding glass door that separated us. Five years of marriage and I still got a thrill perving on my wife. I watched her perform for the vanity mirror, singing along as she unpacked the accoutrements of her beauty, laying serums and cremes, powders and crayons in an untidy array on the sink. Five years of marriage and I still adored her limited repertoire of dance moves: the Dougie, the Dip, and the Face-Down-Ass-Up. Two nights earlier at a mega-club in Miami, I had been at the bar ordering us tequilas when her go-to-moves caught the eye of the actual Gucci Mane. I was separated from her by the crowd and looked on helplessly as a henchman in Versace from the rapper’s entourage chatted up my wife, inviting her to the VIP area where Gucci stood surveying the club from his dais, like a pharaoh with a foot in two worlds. From where I was, stuck in line at the bar, I saw what appeared to be indecision in Allie’s two-colored eyes, as though she was weighing the offer before her and its promise of ascension. I tried to convince myself that night, as I do now, that what I witnessed in her eyes wasn’t conflict, but rather confusion, caused by the molly we’d eaten. When I returned with the tequilas, Allie was right where I’d left her, waiting, yelling into my ear that she would always wait for me, and never for a moment had she considered leaving without me. I wanted badly to believe her, to believe in the permanence of our love, to believe that together we could look forward to long lives of loving and being loved by each other. So why couldn’t I? 

I’ll say this: it’s easy to imagine anyone choosing to leave, once someone you love chooses to die.

Allie slid the glass door open and joined me on the balcony. She was happy, clearly, that we had paid to upgrade to first-class from the room in steerage that came with our ticket. But I couldn’t help feeling like we were cheating, throwing money at the problem, thereby getting a less authentic experience, and that we should have stayed in the windowless room in the bowels of the boat that came with the scam cruise package my mother had purchased. Of course, then I would have been cut off from the stars, which were just then beginning to appear in multitudes, more than I’d ever seen, as last light fell. Allie came to the railing and stood in front of me, and I wrapped my arms around her.

I felt wise and important guiding her through the maze of constellations to find Orion. Although, if I’m being honest, during winter north of the equator it’s easy to locate the pattern of stars resembling a skinny man guarding the western boundary of the night. In humanity’s past, we followed the stars on paths that required religious devotion, and a miscalculation in any direction could mean death for the average person. These days, who can blame us for forgetting? At night in cities and suburbs, we’re lucky to look up and see any but the most brilliant stars, dim as anemic royalty. They could all be falling and who would notice?

The view was different out there on the ocean, where the heavens were open, inviting as they’d been since the beginning. I pointed out the stars of Orion’s Belt—one-two-three in a row. Allie said she saw them, but how could she with the wind whipping her hair in her eyes? That cluster of blurry light that hung from Orion’s Belt, that was the portal, the door in the sky which the Egyptians and Native Americans believed led to the afterlife. 

I see it, Allie said, his penis.

That’s his sword, I said.

She insisted it was a penis, and I tried not to get angry—in those days when I did, I couldn’t stop. She was only teasing. I explained to her matter-of-factly that what we were looking at was, in fact, a massive cloud of dust and gas where stars are born. A stellar nursery. Allie liked that and nuzzled against me saying that someday we would have a stellar nursery for our baby star.

I asked if she was ready to smoke the DMT. She was. She had been eager to try the vape since buying it from our drug dealer and giving it to me at Christmas. Psychedelics were de rigueur in the whisper network of group texts and voice memos where she and her girlfriends shared esoteric truths gleaned from their gurus—other thirty-something white women with podcasts and brand sponsorships. But I had made us wait for what I determined was “the right moment” to smoke the dimethyltryptamine, a moment like that night on the cruise, when the stars aligned. What’s the plan again? Allie asked, fearlessly, and kissed me. She’d only taken psychedelics one other time, a pleasant trip on scrawny psilocybin mushrooms we ate while lounging on a white sand beach in Bali on our honeymoon. I feared this trip would be intensely different, and I worried for us both. Although I’d done a lot of experimenting with psychedelics, even selling LSD and mescaline for a while—which I never passed up a chance to brag about—that was in my teens and early-twenties, and I’d stopped abruptly after two bad trips during which I seriously considered killing myself. I was glad I hadn’t, holding Allie in my arms, kissing her under the gathered stars, Venus and Mars, spy satellites, and the moon, white as her breast I was groping. I felt we were in love, and thought, yes, maybe we should have a child, maybe there was no new cataclysm on the horizon, maybe the world wasn’t ending, and I had survived for a reason, and perhaps the reason was making a baby with Allie. I also felt an obligation to my mother, who hadn’t survived. I felt it was the right time to smoke the DMT and find her on the Path of Souls, to make amends. I noticed a mass of clouds moving across the sky, threatening to cover Orion. If I was going to smoke the DMT and make the leap, it would need to be soon. I would need to stop unhooking Allie’s bra.