A person feels guilt, or sorrow, and wishes to transform the feeling into something outside the boundaries of self. The parasite takes this desire for transformation and offers a false path—energetic self-loathing, most often, or immobilizing self-doubt—which provides a false sense of escape while keeping the energy inside the system. A system to which the parasite now belongs.

Figure nineteen is dangerous not only to individuals but also, more dramatically, to the group. Its story is a version of gaslighting. Its defense, what makes it so resistant to being found out and killed, is a version of the Drunkard’s Search.

THE NEIGHBORING TOWN

The tent party showed no sign of letting up, but it did show signs of eventually burning out; how long could people continue to swarm and agitate at this pace? The sensory stimulation was at peak or beyond, the capacity of the tent at peak or beyond, Marina danced with her eyes open and began seeing things, and the things she was seeing made her think of DMT, with which she was familiar from her studies but not from personal experience. Pablo danced with his eyes closed and began seeing things, and what he saw also made him think of DMT, with which he had personal experience but the study of which, as with those phenomena called epigenetics and intergenerational trauma, he had chosen to avoid.

There was no perceptible break, no segue between this scene and the scene that followed, which was in some sense just a return to the previous scene.

Pablo and Marina sat at their table, Marina flipping through her Manual and Pablo taking out his tobacco pouch and removing a pinch from his dwindling supply. Each of the eleven other tables—save one—was tended by a vendor, but now, as Pablo and Marina would discover once they lifted their focus from their tasks, those vendors were able to notice their presence. A child in a dress sat at a spinet piano in a dark corner of the tent, practicing scales.

Once they lifted their focus from their tasks, Marina and Pablo would also notice that the takers for each vendor’s service were carrying items, blenders and televisions and sewing machines, cracked pitchers and broken chairs, sometimes waiting in lines or in groupings of three or four around a particular station, sometimes quietly solitary and sometimes chatting vigorously with their neighbors. But instead of lifting their focus and seeing all of this, Marina continued to reread the chapter called “Setting the Tone,” and Pablo made a beeline for the door.

The person who approached Marina’s table was wearing an orange vest over coveralls and mud-splattered muck boots and held a walkie-talkie, a spiral notebook, and a pen. Marina listened to the person for a minute, then took a minute to gather her things, and in another minute, she was following the person who’d come to fetch her across the floor and outside.