The Sermon on the Balcony at Bùi Viện

After five years without incident, I escaped the containment field of “drug-free” South Korea and ordered a questionable three-dollar pre-roll from a bar in Saigon. I reflected on my personal endeavor to cure psychosis — a medical miracle, aided by turmeric, ashwagandha, magnesium, sobriety, hiking, and various questionable Russian nootropics — as I struggled to light the joint against the wind. I looked perfectly respectable: khaki shorts, red Lacoste polo, brown sneakers, white socks. I was not wearing my watch, as the glass face had mysteriously shattered on the plane as it crossed the South China Sea.

Something appeared on the horizon: a feeling of dread, a lightness of breath, a rebounding ember from Phaethon’s chariot. The corona engulfed me. It took no more than a minute for a horrifying wave to crash over me: I was psychotic again.

Suddenly I was seeing things in the sky, watching for strangely dressed men giving me hand signals. Unable to communicate and under imminent threat. The impulse to surrender to this instinct had been lying dormant, persisting beyond my rationalizations, behind the grinning face of my recovery, in spite of every attempt to extinguish it.

I try to stand up and immediately collapse. I don’t want it and I don’t like it, but here I am on the floor.

A dreaming corpse, my hallucinating body creaks and groans. Psychosis had been a storm that passed through me, in the past. At its center was a smoldering discontinuity, a numinous mindfuck that cast me into a void where the world was signified differently. I worshipped this void, cursed it and interrogated it. I took my meds, regularly attended therapy, and abstained from nearly everything, but the void persisted, taunting and simpering through the fog. And then, one day, it was over. I hung up the phone, flushed my pills, and left the country. The void consumed itself, and I returned, as best as I could manage, to the life I led before. For me, psychosis was a story: it had a beginning, a middle and an end, and when it ended, I simply shut the book.

And yet, in all stories, the seeds of recapitulation lie dormant, lurking beyond the corners of a world overgrown with signification: the monster in the pond before the credits roll.

Katy Perry sings, “Just because it’s over doesn’t mean it’s really over” on a horrifying loop as I open my eyes.

* * *

I wake up on a couch and sit there for a few minutes sweating and reacquainting myself with my body. My arms are covered in scrapes; I must have attempted to break my fall, or was I attacked? I can’t trust anyone around me. The music directs my attention to a bottle of water; I hear the word “drink” and take a sip. Next, it draws me to my beer glass, my vape, my phone. I slowly re-encounter the strange debris of my existence. I begin writing notes on my phone.

Over time, the playlist dictates an entire course of action, from moving my feet in a specific pattern to editing a photo of a UFO I had found on my phone. Each song is an epiphany; a message conveyed from the quantum foam. Chinese and American intelligence operatives cooperate to share the data of what I’m typing, working in lockstep to take me out before I decipher the hidden messages in the photo. Lights flash and blink on the roof of a nearby building. Voices merge in the background, forming an operatic chorus about my life. Sign and symbol collapse upon my body. Still, I have an even bigger problem on my hands: I’m not alone.

What will I tell the other people at the bar? I can’t even see their faces clearly, but I’m sure they’re all looking at me. I had come here — to an expat bar in a rather seedy part of town — on a solo trip with the sole purpose of meeting a few drinking buddies. I glance feebly around the room; it’s not clear that they noticed, but how could they not?

I gaze out the balcony at the hellish scene below me: thousands of horrible people sucking nitrous from balloons. Sports bars, motorbikes, whores. Suddenly, I hear the voice of Krishna:

“Do you think I didn’t create all of this, every moment that led to you listening to this playlist at this moment, along with every other person listening to a playlist? Do you think I’m not exhausted?” 

All the pain and anxiety I’d experienced in life was part of a plan leading me to this moment. Losing my wallet at a gay bar, rebooking my flight, falling victim to a taxi scam; these had all been acts of divine consequence, fractional moves in a vast game of baduk whose prize was my entire consciousness, the apotheosis of the psychotic subject. My attention was being rapidly devoured. An evil and deliciously toxic switch flipped inside of me: reality is merely an extension of my mind, a holographic swallowtail with my shattered ego at the center. It has always been like this, and it always will; I had just been asleep for a while. It was the ultimate, final test of the epistemological project of my recovery. The absolute moment of dialectical congruence. The experiment had failed.

* * *

I’m almost back to normal now, but Krishna is still chattering away, reciting an addendum to the Bhagavad Gita. I try to stand up and walk up to the bar, but then return quickly to the couch. A group of backpackers behind me seems to be gossiping about me. “Watch his eyes,” they say. “They’re hilarious.”

I’ve been staring at the sky, waiting for a light to guide me yet again into the psychotic buddha-field. I always think about eyes when I’m psychotic; sometimes, mine don’t feel right, as if they’ve been replaced. Other times they open up before me in the mirror, swallowing my body whole, ingesting it. Most of the time, they’re just not eyes: frog lenses, des jumelles, fashioned objects with an artificial “corniche,” alien implants allowing me to see in whatever godforsaken nightmare dome I’ve been transplanted to this week. Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “the eye is the jewel of the body,” and I’m inclined to believe him. Eyes reveal the extent to which we’ve been replaced by body doubles, they entrance us with Reptilian magic, they are blinded by the light from nuclear explosions that keep happening, every day, although no one else can see them. And that’s why my eyes are always being replaced, but today, I’m seeing clearly, and I don’t want either of my eyes to meet another eye just yet.

I should just be honest, I think. I’ll tell them I fell because I have Psychotic Disorder NOS; could even be a funny icebreaker. “Hey there, sorry I fell down. I have psychosis. I fell down in Cambodia once too, and then I stayed up all night transcribing the teachings of an elephant god and sang Bonnie Rait songs at the top of my lungs, and everyone I had met at the hotel bar the night before was angry, and they hated me.” Then I sat my ass down. I was going nowhere and talking to no one, because Krishna was delivering a sermon.

The sermon on the balcony at Bùi Viện:

“There’s nothing wrong with you. You aren’t psychotic. Your power is activated by cannabis, and you designed it this way to teach the world a lesson. You are the incipient Buddha: the Buddha that never full arrives but remains present in the world regardless. The world does not deserve a Buddha, and that is you, and not you, and also me. For you and I are multiple.”  

For a moment, I consider doing what the voice is telling me and declaring myself the Incipient Buddha, always destined to be on the edge like this, physically overcome with waves of psychosis. Each episode, each period of decompensation, was a brush with destiny, a missed connection to nirvana. I could hop up from the couch I had collapsed on: “I’ve achieved enlightenment!” The bar would erupt in laughter, right? Or would it be sad, unsettling, or even horrific? A fail video en plein air: crazy person falls over, calls himself the Buddha.

Who can even entertain the thought, “Am I the Incipient Buddha?” in a world like this? How far removed does one need to be from psychiatric discourse to ask that question, to arise to the self-consciousness of it before giving over to it, becoming it? Is it a disease to be overcome like that?

I reconstruct myself repeatedly as a litany of excuses. Do I have low blood pressure? I’m 35, overweight, and have been vaping and eating continuously all night, so that feels like a stretch. Is it epilepsy? I’ve never had a seizure, but I was delivered via forceps; the nurses at the hospital called me “conehead” behind my back. I could also just flood the zone with medical jargon; “bullshit baffles brains,” my Granddaddy always said. I was diagnosed with vagus nerve dysfunction in high school after a string of severe fainting spells, and this could be related to what happened. “You have a weak vagus nerve,” the doctor had told me, quite seriously, and yet this Very Important Sentence had remained filed away in my brain for fifteen years.

This is getting too complicated. I’ll just tell them I had a panic attack. Or I could just not do that, because I’m clearly having another one right now.

What more is there to say? Isn’t it better to just go get another beer and ride the wave until it crashes? Why is there a voice in my head telling me that I have to explain myself?

* * *

I somehow gather the courage to walk up to the bar. It’s been hours since my collapse, but I still expect glances, stares, muffled laughter; everyone is else is just as high as I am, consumed in a private heterotopia, cut off from reality. It is truly a pathetic scene. I am the only source of motion, walking sideways through the room.

I can’t remember how to exit the bar. I know I took an elevator, then walked up a flight of stairs, but I can’t conceptualize how they connect. It seems plausible that they don’t, and that the world outside does not, should not, and cannot possibly exist. I walk in and out of the bathroom three times and then wander back into the bar. I turn around and repeat the same process. Finally, I remember that the stairs are to my right.

My right leg is going numb, which I am convinced is due to a directed energy weapon aimed at me from a rooftop across the street. The plan is simple: hit me with the zip zapper once, knocking me over; and lure me back into the chaos of Bùi Viện by planting this anxiety in my head; then, in a coup de grace, destabilize my leg just enough so that I collapse in the middle of the street, amidst an absolute shitstorm of prostitutes, club promoters, pickpockets and drunk expats doing shots of Jägermeister. “Saigon has him now,” they’ll say.

Something doesn’t feel right. I turn around. A man wearing a gray t-shirt walks up to the bar and says “A bottle of water” in a loud, serious voice. Then he looks at me. I take it as a sign that he is a CIA agent, or perhaps a Nordic alien, who has gamed out the Bùi Viện walkabout plan and inserted this sentence to buy me some time. Dripping with sweat, I repeat his sentence to the bartender, and I drink a bottle of water, too. I stumble back to the balcony, following a red blinking light on the roof of a nearby building. I listen for a pattern with my eyes. On, off, on, off: the music of the spheres, the leitmotif of a cosmic Brahms.

The rhythm sucks me out into the street. Traffic on Bùi Viện has slowed to a halt. Couches and tables fill most of the street, and a small pedestrian lane is shared with an endless line of motorbikes. There are no side streets, and the buildings form a canyon, retaining the motorbikes’ exhaust. Smoke refracts the neon light. I walk slowly and hold onto my wallet. Prostitutes grab me and won’t let go. I keep waiting for a man in a gray shirt to give me a sign. My right leg holds up, as best as can be expected under these horrid conditions.

A grayshirt smokes a cigarette on the corner, across from the park. He looks at me; I cross the street into the park. I see five more grayshirts as I retrace my steps to District One. When I reach my hotel, three of them are in front of the door. They’re talking to someone on the phone. “He made it,” they say, and scatter off. I give them a white-guy nod, the kind of shameful gesture long-term expat guys like me — lifers — give to each other when we pass on the street. It’s the kind of thing I always do when I meet these guys; my nonchalant demeanor is my calling card, and they always come back for another round.

When I make it to the elevator, I fall like Faust backwards into his coffin. The Divine Feminine calls me upwards as the elevator begins its climb. I spend a long time standing in front of my hotel room before I enter. I knock, anticipating a response. I place my ear against the door. I pace endlessly. Finally, I open the door. The room is empty.

* * *

I check my eyes. I throw open the blinds. I haven’t been off-worlded. Things remain, as they seldom do, in their proper places. My passport hasn’t changed. My feet do not feel heavy. My eyes are not glossy and bright, and they don’t feel rubbery. The street outside is green and filled with light, drawing me back into the world of proper names.

“Happy New Year” by ABBA drones on endlessly in the lobby. As I walk down Nguyen Van Binh book street, I remember the notes I’d been typing on my phone the night before. I thought I had been contacted by Krishna and had dictated everything he told me to write. When Krishna’s voice faded out, it was replaced by Anthony Bourdain, whose ghost I must have apprehended in the dark. Ridiculous, I know, but it does read somewhat like the introduction to a book. I’ve learned by now not to trust my psychotic intuition, but it can also answer deeper questions, ones not yet consciously enunciated. Why did I experience time and space intimately and painstakingly choreographed in service of grand narratives about the world for it to ultimately mean nothing? Did I incarnate into this psychotic body to suffer or was the suffering necessary to produce something? Is my psychotic mission, my proper role in a cosmic screenplay, to produce a record of my psychosis, a psychotic narrative?

If so, then, what form must this miserable document take — a mea culpa, a dry auto-analysis, or a Molotov cocktail? A love letter to psychiatry written in blood? (Fake blood, of course, perhaps ketchup or strawberry syrup; I’m no longer a “danger to myself and others,” nor am I some kind of vampire.)

I’m at the Presidential Palace, now — kids are running everywhere, screaming at the top of their lungs. Blackpink roars on the speakers so loud the walls are shaking, and a bouncy house is slowly erecting itself on the lawn. The building is presented as a perfect reconstruction of a moment, spolia representing power over time, control of history. I slink down into the bunker. I’ve existed in the subterranean, surrounded by noise, buried, communicating via psychic teletype, alone.

A psychotic narrative doesn’t have to scare you. It doesn’t have to inspire you. It doesn’t have to offer raw material for analysis. It doesn’t even have to entertain you. It simply exists as a narrative, like all of the other narratives. It is the story of a person who experienced something remarkable, and remarkably human.

* * *

The hangover: I’ve spent all afternoon drinking craft beer next to a sad, affectionate American on break from Dad duty, disgustingly eager to talk to someone, anyone. He’s wasted, and so am I, and I’m desperate to escape but unsure of where to go. We talk about airports, politics, and Vietnamese taxis. Does it look, from the outside, as if this encounter is unusual — does my plight inspire sympathy due to my relatively youthful disposition? — or am I just as pathetic as he is?

The clock hits ten and he goes, sheesh, my wife must be pulling her hair out by now. He shakes my hand vigorously and vanishes into the night, leaving me all alone with my thoughts: should I, maybe, possibly, go back to the bar from last night? Should I do it again? Once is a mistake, and three times is a pattern, but what about twice? Is it two mistakes, or a one-way ticket to the hospital?

I’m slowly inching myself closer to Bùi Viện. A cocktail bar in District One, red basement, rabbit-themed, packed with finance bros. Do they live here, or is it all a grand mirage? Is this the kind of place Saigon has become, a place for the West to wipe its collar, a city where white guys in khakis talk too loudly and throw back Rob Roys like they’re tequila shots, and then talk even louder about how much they fucking love Rob Roys?

I don’t even remember walking. Suddenly I’m there again, on the street below the bar, thinking about all of the trouble I’d gotten myself into fighting this same instinctive battle; about the days I woke up and got high again, or the nights I got high again instead of going to rehearsal or studying and working on my thesis. I’m walking up the stairs. “Every little thing is gonna be alright,” drones incessantly from the bar upstairs, followed in short order by “Stairway to Heaven.” More like the stairway to hell.

I walk up to the bar and order an IPA, then pause, and ask if they’re still selling pre-rolls. Still? You bought one yesterday, you idiot. The bartender rolls her eyes; of course she remembers, I think to myself. I’m the guy who fell over. I expect her to say no, to launch into some screed about how I have a genetic predisposition towards psychosis and should stay away from pot for the rest of my life. “You’re poisoning yourself, dude,” she would say.

But I have the joint in my hand now, and I’m sitting down again, on the balcony, and Saigon continues undisturbed as it always has. I expect another sermon from Krishna, or a mass UFO sighting, or a message on an index card from a neighboring grayshirt. I light the joint and take a hit.

* * *

Did you expect me to wake up in a Vietnamese jail cell, the kind of place where Hunter S. Thompson would somehow miraculously have a typewriter and an inside man smuggling him whiskey? Or perhaps a modern hospital, built by the Chinese, where I am subjected to cruel and unusual treatments like Haldol and Thorazine? Aint no Latuda in these parts, buster. We’re raw dogging tonight. Now, pull down your pants and let my little friend Hao tie you to the bed.

Truth be told, I’m a little disappointed in the narrative myself. Nothing happened. Well, I got very, very high, again, but beyond that? Nada. Zilch. Kaput. What does it mean to “just get high?” Should I feel lucky, elated, or ashamed? Wouldn’t it be better if I felt nothing, if I had no emotion whatsoever? I think of the countless therapists, psychiatrists, and social workers who had tried to help me over the years. The ghost of their conviction — that I would be a better person, that I would unlock my full potential, becoming a doctor, or a professor, or a CEO, because of them — haunts me from beyond the balcony ledge. There are no voices, there are no hidden codes. It’s just me here on the balcony once again, looking out on a world that I sometimes fail to signify.

The sky has turned dark and heavy. Lights flicker and buzz on the horizon, waiting to make contact. As far as I’m concerned, for at least one more night, the dance of signification is endless.