January was a terrible month for Daniel. It rained or snowed nearly every day. He stayed in his tent as much as he could. He discovered, as many others had before him, that the mountains impose you on yourself. He came to some realizations he didn’t like. The first was that he hadn’t recovered from his mother’s death. The raging, wrenching grief, once so palpably present, had faded into a haunting emptiness.
Daniel’s second unpleasant realization was that he hadn’t dreamed since the bomb explosion. Worried that this might indicate brain damage, he became so aware of his dreamlessness he could hardly sleep. He woke exhausted and eye-sore, as if he were a pilot who’d spent the night fruitlessly searching the ocean for a raft or signs of wreckage. He didn’t mention his dreamlessness to Wild Bill. If it meant something was wrong, he didn’t want to go back to the hospital, and if it didn’t mean anything other than that he wasn’t dreaming or couldn’t remember them, then it didn’t matter.
His third realization was that obsessive carnal desire and almost daily masturbation was preferable to gloomy contemplations of his heartache and dreamlessness. He remembered Brigit Bardo’s face a hundred times a day, and her mouth a thousand, each accompanied by a pure genital urge for release. An early spring poured fuel on his fires. He couldn’t meditate for five minutes without an image of breasts or tautly curved buttocks or silken thighs affecting his concentration much like a boulder hitting a mud puddle.
Wild Bill noticed. One mid-February morning, clear and warm, right in the middle of their meditation, Wild Bill jumped to his feet and glared down at Daniel, demanding, ‘Just what in the holy-fucking-hell is bothering you?’
Daniel wanted to run for his tent. ‘I don’t know if I know,’ he stammered, ‘except I haven’t been dreaming, not since I was hurt.’
‘Goddammit, worry about your dreams when you’re asleep. Worry about getting wet when it’s raining. When you’re sitting, just sit. Don’t wiggle. Don’t wobble.’ Wild Bill started to resume sitting when he thought better of it. ‘Actually, I’m tired of fighting your hormones for attention, and I’m tired of looking at you. Go.’
‘What?’ Daniel said, both crushed and strangely relieved.
Wild Bill pointed north. ‘Go. That old fir snag there – go dead uphill from that and about a hundred yards over the crest you’ll find a little spring, and if you follow it down beneath the rock outcrop, there’s a cave. You can stay in the cave or wander around – I don’t care. But if you get lost and I have to find you, you’ll wish you’d stayed lost.’
‘Is this personal, or some sort of teaching?’
‘Both.’
‘So what am I supposed to do?’
‘First,’ Wild Bill said with exaggerated patience, ‘you go. Then you have dreams and visions. If you can’t dream, just have visions. Explore the visions for value. Examine yourself for value. Try to figure out what’s valuable and what ain’t. In seventeen days you can come back.’
‘Fine,’ Daniel said with a touch of petulance, ‘but I’m taking half of everything. Since you’re staying by the lake, it makes the most sense that I take the gun and leave you the pole.’
‘Nope,’ Wild Bill said with finality. ‘I’m over sixty and you’re pushing sixteen. You take a knife and your sleeping bag; I keep everything else.’
Daniel yelped, ‘Forget it! That’s not fair.’
‘Bye.’ Wild Bill fluttered his fingers in farewell.
‘Fuck you,’ Daniel muttered.
‘Way your hormones are flooding, that’s kinda what I’m afraid of.’
‘It’d probably be better than getting beat up.’ Daniel immediately regretted saying it.
But Wild Bill laughed, and waved again. ‘Adios.’
Daniel stalked to his tent, stuffed his sleeping bag in its sack, and left without another word.
He spent the first week at the cave, eating from the thin smorgasbord of early spring plants. When he wasn’t foraging, sleeping, or meditating – he continued to sit, but half-heartedly – Daniel was absorbed in erotic fantasies of such sensual detail and endless possibility that he lay on his sleeping bag and masturbated till his forearm cramped.
To break the siege of desire, he decided to walk north to the headwaters of Cottonwood Creek. The weather was clear but cold. He ate whatever was available, mainly wild onions and some early miner’s lettuce, supplemented occasionally with frog legs. The nourishment kept him going, but wasn’t enough to fuel his usual pace. He tired easily and had difficulty concentrating for more than a few minutes. However, he experienced a lightness that wasn’t confined to his head, a sort of metabolic austerity, and with it came a profound sense of objectivity – uncluttered by judgments or combustible desires. He quit meditating and masturbating. He didn’t have any dreams or visions. After eight days of wandering in a slow loop, he reached the cave just hours before a storm.
The storm proved the last gasp of winter, but winter died hard that year: blinding lightning strikes; thunder so loud it raised dust on the cave floor; winds that sent widow-makers spinning out of the lashing firs, snapped off snags that splintered as they crashed; and then torrential rain. As he sat snug in the cave, a good fire with plenty of dry limbs stacked against the walls, watching the wind suck smoke out the cave mouth in a ropy braid, Daniel decided he would fast and meditate for his last three days. He wanted dreams and visions.
As Wild Bill would later rule, Daniel had two near-visions and one for sure, but Wild Bill was a hanging judge.
One near-vision began with the color pink. At first Daniel felt it was some sort of overture to an erotic fantasy, but as he watched, the color constricted slowly into the terror-brightened pink of a lab rat’s eye. And then he was inside the rat, running a maze, turning left, right, right again, running until he caught the scent of his own fear still hanging on the air and realized he’d tried that passage before. Daniel rose out of the rat’s body like mist lifting from a field. He could see the maze below him, a perfect square, infinitely intricate, no entrance or exit. The maze exploded when he screamed.
The other near-vision began with him floating just under the surface of Nameless Lake. He wasn’t dead, but had barely enough strength to lift his left hand out of the water. He knew no one would see, but it was all he could do. He floated, gathering the energy and will to lift his hand again. When he did, his hand was seized by another, powerful and sure. As it lifted him from the water, he saw a woman he didn’t know, tall and lovely and smiling, and he wanted her to lift him into her arms and hold him tightly, but in the same motion of pulling him free of the lake, she hurled him into the heavens. He fell through the galaxy, his hand still outstretched, but it didn’t matter – he would fall forever. He might as well have been waving good-bye. When he laughed, the wind-lashed rain was hurtling past the cave.
The real vision occurred on his last night. The storm had passed, trailing a thin fog in its wake. Feeling faint and dislocated, Daniel was sitting at the cave mouth watching the wisps of fog tatter and swirl in the moonlight when he heard his mother clearly call in the distance ‘Alie-alie-outs-in-free,’ just as she had so many evenings playing Hide-and-Seek at the Four Deuces when he was a child. ‘Alie-alie-outs-in-free,’ she called again, her voice more distant; and then once more, barely audible. She didn’t call again. Rocking back and forth, arms around himself, Daniel wept.