The most thrilling part of doing tesla, hands down, is the throttle. That’s what made it famous. The sudden jolt it gives your body, the drug smacking you into motion like a pool cue. It’s electric.

But your favorite part is the dissociation. Your body buzzing around Earth while you float above, weightless, laughing ecstatically. It’s like you become an electrified kite, attached to your physical self only by a thin, invisible string. They call this ‘autopilot.’

On autopilot you’re released from the chain of boring, intrusive thoughts we call shame. Once, you flew so far from shame that when you looked down at it you saw just how ludicrous it was. But you can get that from any drug. What makes tesla unique is that it doesn’t dull your senses. It sharpens them. No other dissociative does this. On autopilot you feel every sensation your wild kite-flying body encounters, amplified. A warm breeze is a bath. A cool breeze is an acupuncture session, the chilled needles of air pricking your skin to the blood. But here’s the kicker, you, the real you, do not identify with the body’s sensations. On tesla, you are two things at once, hyperaware and non-attached. Which is, incidentally, the exact state of mind to which Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Stoicism aspire.

It’s your favorite drug by far. Acid and shrooms are too digressive. Ketamine’s too slow. And xanax, too sloppy. Two drinks on a xan and it’s tomorrow. Compared to downers like that, tesla’s an upper, but compared to uppers, it’s a downer. Limitless energy combined with a lucid, unselfconscious state of peace, what’s not to like?

Well, the voices. But we’ll get to them later.

“Cheers,” says Dave, the friend in whose overly professional apartment you’re about to trip. The mail-order plants look fresh out the box; a circle of chairs makes a black grove of West Elm. He taps your light blue pill with his. They’re pressed into sleek T’s. They were named after the car company because their design suggested something futuristic, but it’s just another pill.

“Cheers,” you say, swallowing the pill with a swig of canned yerba mate.

Dave breaks his in two and swallows half. He stows the other half in an Altoids case. “I love how bad they taste,” he says.

Dave says this every time he takes one. As if you were new to the drug, and without his encouragement, the rusted metal flavor might disturb you. The thing about Dave is, he has to be in control. Even on tesla. When you were taking it regularly, he always took a smaller dose so he could steer your trip. You never objected. It made things simpler. For a while, tesla, and by extension Dave, assisted you with the most burdensome parts of living, like thinking. But things ended up more complicated than before, as things do. And that was a while ago. Now, once again, after popping a full tez in his chic, vibeless apartment, you listen for Dave’s plan.

He pours ice, gin, and vermouth into a cocktail shaker. The ice makes a satisfying clink with the metal.

“After we finish these martinis,” Dave says. “We’re going to the beach.”

“This is my first trip in two years,” you say.

“Beach trip?”

You give him a look.

“Right,” Dave says.

It’s a grey January afternoon. Fog presses against the edges of the valley like it has someplace to go, but can’t remember where. Dave seems disappointed that you’re out of practice. But he could have asked. Instead he invited you over for the first time in months then surprised you with a pill. The one route to connection he knew.

“What about you?” you ask.

“I still dabble,” he says.

It was Dave who brought you into tesla. That was six years ago, when you lived together. Two bored, single men working remote in a field you hated talking to strangers about: tech sales. The false cheery din of Zoom calls echoing back and forth across your two-bedroom apartment. The situation invited distraction. And in the tech world at the time, tesla was it.

“What do you mean why?” Dave had said. “We have to try it because we can. Aren’t you curious?”

You were. But it seemed too late in life to pick up a new drug. You were 28. Too young to quit doing the old drugs but too old to start new ones. And besides, the bad trip stories were already coming out. The main danger with tesla, other than the voices, is the spike in risk-tolerance. It’s also the main draw. The cautionary tale going around Silicon Valley told of a man who took so much tez he bought a Fortune 500 company on autopilot. When he came down and tried to cancel the purchase, the sellers sued. A fantasy drug with real world consequences.

Or in this case, not. Because a man that rich doesn’t live in the real world. All he really lost was his mind.

“That won’t happen to us,” Dave had said. “We’re not moguls.”

Appealing to your curiosity eventually worked, just as Dave anticipated. He was surprisingly perceptive for a guy with a mullet. But your first time was a disaster. When Dave finally found you, you were on your hands and knees in the grocery store eyeing a bottle of Drano like it was lemonade. You learned then not to wander off on tez. Better to have a copilot.

“Cheers,” he says again.

You clink glasses. The cold gin shocks the back of your mouth; you hold it there until your palette numbs, then swallow.

Dave was your copilot for four years. You learned to ride the surge from a perfectly-proportioned dose exactly as far as you wanted, then crash into his arms, stopping your momentum before it carried you somewhere bad. Dave called this ‘ejecting.’ He was your ‘crash pad.’ It was quite intimate. More intimate than you and Dave ever got without drugs, anyways. Is it your fault you clam up around fellow men’s hearts? Easier to take a dose of tez and crash into the fold under Dave’s shoulder than lean on it sober.

Tesla’s effects start just a few minutes after ingestion. The first sensation is a feeling of oneness, but not the oneness of conventional psychedelics, where the subject’s ego melts into a puddle of bliss, so much as the oneness of the Internet. Rapid fire communication. A seance with the hive mind. The voices tesla users hear are hallucinations, products of each user’s private subjectivity, yet on the drug, the subject believes they’re external. That the world’s tesla users are speaking to them.

Which means taking it with someone, you feel telepathic.

“Why the beach?” you wonder silently.

Dave thinks up a response: “To see the seals.” But of course he’s lying. He can even lie in his thoughts, that’s how carefully his mind has been tuned.

The last time you and Dave took tez at the beach, you floated languidly over the waves. When you came back into your bodies, they were kissing.

You never brought it up, not out loud.

Now, driving to the beach, your ego burns off like the fog over the bay, unwanted. You think it’s a wonder Dave can steer the car. Dave thinks something else is driving him. The world thinks: hunger, incessant hunger. The world thinks in urges, something you never quite achieved.

Around 30 minutes in comes the throttle. As soon as the car parks, it launches you out the passenger door and you barrel headlong down the beach. At top speed, you rise up out of your body, leaving the earth in a silent and glorious flourish. You drift and drift. You can see for miles over the ocean, the vanishing point on the horizon flattened yet rendering depth with its variation in blues. Just like you, you think. Your desires, your identity, a trick of optics. And isn’t it wonderful to be reminded you’re weightless?

The sun sets and you are still adrift, too far to see the shore. A humpback whale jumps out of the water, twisting over itself in the moonlight to break the surface with its silvery head.

“Where are you?” you wonder. You can’t hear Dave’s thoughts. Back on the beach, he must be waiting to catch you, arms spread wide like a fisherman’s net. Or he left. Yes, he let you disappear. He planned it all along, to abandon your mind to the sirens’ song, while your body ambled off on its own, his charge. He was always the possessive one. And you, you were trying to fill a void, but where it came from, impossible to pinpoint. One last catch, you pray for it over the unthinking ocean, but your mind is out of reach.

“Goodbye,” you think.

“Welcome,” thinks the world.

This will all dissolve in the quicksand. Lost thoughts, lost hopes, and lost minds with which to dream them.

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