Volta paused, started pacing around the chair again, but this time speaking as he moved. ‘Daniel, I want you to know I’m not speaking symbolically when I claim you can dematerialize your body and literally vanish, move unimpeded through concrete walls and steel doors. I don’t have any idea how or why it is possible to spontaneously convert – perhaps invert – mass to electromagnetic waves, not so much jumping a frequency as leaping a dimension. I liken it to a phase change, the same essential configuration in a different form. Solid to liquid to gas; ice to water to air. Perhaps invisibility is one of our possible states. I don’t truly know. I’ve ridden every metaphysical twist, and to me it remains an incomprehensible fact.
‘As I mentioned before, I vanished many times in the past, usually in connection with magical performances. I’m the only person I know who’s done it, though I have heard of another – the Jamaican shamaness – so please, Daniel, please understand that all I know is limited to my experiences. In short, what I tell you might be inapplicable to your own circumstances. You must absolutely trust your own instincts and intuitions as you approach the threshold. However, my intuition tells me that the experience is archetypal, and so I’ll tell you how it felt, hoping it will be close.
‘First, though, let’s set some ground rules. You must, as noted, remain silent. You can talk to yourself – or scream or sing – when you’re alone, but not when anyone else is present. You must fast – nothing but water. You are not allowed to leave this room. If you do, for any reason, that ends it. Finally, you must follow my instructions to the best of your ability, though actually that may be a measure of mine. Each day I will slip a set of instructions under the door.
‘As to my pedagogical method, Wild Bill claims I’m a practitioner of the Kamikaze Socratic school, with a strong influence from the Marquis de Sade, but you know how fiercely judgmental William can be. I assume what he means is that I fly at the heart of the lesson and am not afraid to make you suffer. I build the raft. You run the river. I draw the map. You make the journey. If you don’t trust me, clearly you should say so now and not waste our time and spirit.’
Volta fell silent, still slowly pacing around Daniel on the chair. After three circuits, he continued. ‘Here’s how I experienced the transformation from matter to electromagnetic energy. It begins with an empty moment. Blank. Null. To me it was exactly as if time had stopped. And I think that’s just what happens, because you escape its force, not by transcending it or obliterating it, but by finding a still point within it, like a trout finding the point of hydraulic equilibrium behind a boulder in the flow.
‘The next sensations come quickly. First, there’s a very brief feeling of wetness, then a sense of light and warmth on your skin, and then a sudden and horrible confusion of all sensory information – a synesthetic snarl, an electrical storm in the brain. It’s at that point, I think, you actually begin to vanish, or begin the neural transition. It coheres as suddenly as it started, and you’re immediately sorry, for you find yourself falling, and you experience – or at least I did – terror that is unimaginably intense. It’s a paradoxical fall – you know it is endless and you know you’re going to hit. I’m sure you’re familiar with the folklore about falling in dreams, that you always wake up before you hit because if you do hit, you’ll die. As usual, folklore is correct.
‘To vanish, you must consciously resist the terror and stop the fall. You resist the terror by recognizing it without reacting, accepting without judgment, becoming light moving through space. Again paradoxically, you cleanse the terror of falling by falling. You stop the fall by conscious imagination. What I did was form an image of myself falling, and then I concentrated on that image with every scrap of power I could summon, concentrated so deeply the image dissolved.
‘When the fall stops, you are invisible, and everything returns to “normal,” or at least one’s familiar sense of space/time coherence and one’s usual perceptual and emotional sets. Except the body is not visible. You can lift that electrical field you call a hand and scratch that whirling constellation of energy you call your head, but you are not flesh and bone, ashes or dust. You are released from the constraints of matter, and as that recognition deepens, a powerful serenity wells up and surges through you, and at the quick of that serenity is a magnificent clarity – you understand everything and know exactly what to do.
‘That is when it becomes dangerous. And not because the clarity is delusional. On the contrary, it couldn’t be more real, more true. And one thing you see most lucidly is that everything is necessarily subject to flux, and you’re about to undergo a wrenching reversal. That the powerful serenity you felt surging through you was actually you surging through it; that the clarity isn’t yours, but belongs to a center you are passing through. You can’t keep it. And because you try to sustain it, try to hang on, it’s worse. It’s ecstatic, and it’s all you want to feel forever. You are free of purpose, pain, obligation, consequence; dialectic and dynamic; life; death.
‘The ecstasy is consuming. There’s nothing you desire more than the annihilation of that last speck of concentration holding consciousness together. And though I obviously can’t know for sure, it’s my strongest intuition that if you succumb to ecstasy and fail to reclaim your concentration, your center, you’ll vanish forever. Just as the terror is experienced as falling, the ecstasy is experienced as rising, soaring – but unchecked, it’s the same as falling. So watch for that moment when clarity swerves toward the ecstatic. Catch yourself and return as soon as possible. I mean immediately. The further you soar, the further you fall.’
Volta quit speaking but continued to pace. Daniel, who had been wired to every word, opened his eyes when Volta passed behind him. The room seemed much brighter. He wondered if there was a skylight. He glanced up. There was a skylight, but it wasn’t much – a small panel of corrugated plastic, clotted with detritus from the surrounding trees. The amphetamine made his jaws ache and his mind race; he wanted to babble hundreds of questions. It took an effort to maintain his silence.
Volta stopped directly in front of him, put his hands behind his back, and continued. ‘It is impossible to overestimate the power and glory of that ecstatic leap, but if you surrender to it, I believe you’ll be consumed. I repeat: Return immediately.’
Volta smiled thinly. ‘The reason I’m repeating myself is not simply to stress its importance, but to forestall having to explain how you escape ecstasy and return to the visible. I’ll tell you how I did it, but I also must tell you that while I feel crossing into energy is roughly the same for everyone, each person’s return is unique. I don’t know why I feel that’s the case, and I trust that you don’t expect me to offer reasons for intuitions.
‘Now before I tell you how I returned, let me refresh the principle, which I’m sure you’re familiar with. The principle is contained in an ancient alchemical forge-chant, which Wild Bill refers to as “that ol’ cornball Babylonian mantra.”