To be yourself,
see yourself.
To see yourself,
free yourself.
To free yourself,
Simply be.’
Daniel agreed with Wild Bill’s aesthetic assessment. He almost shook his head in dismay.
‘I feared you’d share William’s antipathy for civilized wisdom, but surely you understand that clichés endure because they’re repeated, and they’re repeated because they’ve proven accurate. But I won’t pursue it.
‘Here’s what I did to escape the ecstasy and return. I imagined a mirror. I held the image of the mirror ferociously in mind until I could see my face within it. And then I smashed the mirror. The return was immediate and wrenching, and the further I’d sailed, the worse it was – almost in direct proportion.
‘When you return, you feel distant from your body, weak, witless, disoriented. It passes quickly, but you’re exceptionally vulnerable to poor judgment, physical miscues, and general fuckups while you’re reintegrating. Be careful.
‘Basically, then, vanishing first of all involves a feeling of terror as you fall, then a brief and serene lucidity, which in turn opens into a soaring ecstasy. All three states of the transformation have their dangers, and your only defense is consciousness and concentration. Nothing really changes except form into formlessness, flesh into air. If you’re thirsty when you’re visible, you’ll be thirsty when you vanish. Again: consciousness and concentration. You must work from the center of yourself. Use it to stop the fall. Sustain the clarity. Salvage yourself from ecstasy. Dilute the melancholy that invariably accompanies returning.
‘The longest I was able to sustain invisibility was sixteen minutes, and I almost didn’t make it back. Ecstasy doesn’t encourage concentration. I have no idea if it’s possible to sustain it longer, but I wouldn’t try it for over ten minutes if I were you.
‘I’ve told you what I can, but there are things I haven’t told you. Some I haven’t told you because you must discover them for yourself. There are things I haven’t told you whose omission may seem cruel as the work unfolds, but it would be wise to withhold judgment until we’re done; appearances and disappearances are equally deceptive. There are also things I haven’t told you because I don’t know them.
‘That’s not all I haven’t told you, but I will tell you this, with my honor behind it: Nothing you’ll be instructed to do is dangerous, up to the point of vanishing. Difficult, exacting, perhaps painful – yes. But not dangerous. Vanishing is dangerous.’
Volta looked in Daniel’s eyes to be sure the point was clear. ‘So, we begin. Your instructions today are simple, derived from an ancient exercise that I’m sure you’re familiar with. I want you to acknowledge, without response, every piece of sensory data, every thought, every image, every feeling. Accept and let pass; see and release. Don’t get caught up; don’t follow; don’t cling.
‘I met a Chinese magician in Tangiers years ago. His name was Fang Chu, and he was the best fire eater I’ve ever seen. He claimed the “acknowledge without response” meditation is the only one you really needed to understand magic. Fang Chu had this wonderful smile and not much English, though more than my Chinese. Whenever we talked about the meditation he would grin hugely and say, “O yes! And so easy!” Then he would turn the grin up a notch and open his hands like this’ – Volta grinned and opened his hands and then, imitating Fang Chu’s sharp nasality, said, ‘“Not’ing to it, as your cowboy say.”’
Volta held the pose a moment, still grinning. In his own voice he said, ‘So cowboy, nothing to it. Ride straight on through. There will be further instructions in the morning. Oh yes, and I almost forgot: No one knows what we’re attempting here, and I believe it should remain that way. Until I say differently, this is solely between you and me. If you succeed in vanishing and wish to teach others, you must get my permission. When I die, the judgment of transmission shifts to you. I must have your honor on this, Daniel. Agree by remaining silent; if you don’t agree, say so. We can still stop – no blame, no shame.’
Volta waited. When Daniel had remained silent for almost a minute, Volta squeezed his shoulder. ‘I wish you the three things you will definitely need: strength, grace, and luck.’ He crossed to the door, closing it softly behind him.
Daniel leapt to his feet. The room was cold enough that he could see wisps of his breath. There was no sign of a heater or fireplace, nor could he find any lamps. The murky skylight was the only source of illumination. Its bright rectangle of light was beginning to lengthen on the bare western wall. The light did little to take off the chill. Daniel paced, flapping his arms for warmth as well as to burn off the manic energy of amphetamine meeting exhaustion. He tried not to think, to let all sensation simply loop through, fly away home. He tried to imagine his mind as a hole in a net, but thousands of speed-amped fishermen repaired it faster than he could rip.
‘That motherfucker dosed me!’ It felt so good to hear his own voice aloud, to move his speed-jammed jaws, that he began babbling to drain off the flitty, jangled, ganglia-scorching rush of amphetamine.
‘I’ll hire Mott, goddammit. Mott said a guy dosed him once, STP, B-1 brain-bomber of psychedelics, twenty-seven hours of spiders crawling out his nose and his great-granddaddy – shrunk down to miniature, inch tall at most – standing out on Mott’s dick, digging his caulks in as he revved up his chainsaw. So Mott would take care of Volta for dosing me, I know he’d do it, I’m sure he would, Volta, that arrogant prick deserves it, fucking power freak, dumps crank in my tea and then tells me to empty my poor fucked mind, sure, right, so wired I can feel my pores open and shut, right, you bet, make it more amusing, mix in some mumbo-jumbo soul-and-spirit shit for the mystery/romance crowd, then tie their brains to the track.’
Daniel listened to himself with the faceless intimacy between confessor and priest, feeling both the mechanical emptiness of sin and the weary forgiveness. He listened, heard, let it go, a lake barely ruffled by the breeze until suddenly he doubled over with a pain so complete and consuming he couldn’t tell at first where it was coming from. It left him trembling in a cold sweat. He’d just started to straighten up when a grenade went off in his small intestine. He jackknifed to the floor, flopping like a clubbed fish.
When the GIFLUV X-27 1-20 PSB virus took full effect an hour later, flopping became a luxury. Gastro-Intestinal Flu Virus (GIFLUV), Experimental Lot Number 27 (X-27), had, as its code explained, an hour lapse between ingestion and full release, a twenty-hour duration (1-20), and with the general effect of making the victim puke and shit bad (PSB). Daniel’s stomach and bowels emptied their various loads in the compost toilet as he whirled helplessly. When he pulled himself up on the bed at last, shook off his pants from around his ankles and piled the quilts over his quivering body, Daniel looked up at the grimy plastic skylight and moaned to the heavens, ‘Only a monster would double-dose another human being with food poisoning and amphetamine. Making sure you’re awake for the misery. Only a monster. A fucking fiend.’
Sometime after sunset the savage bouts of vomiting and diarrhea gave way to a deep, steady, skeletal ache accompanied by flashes of fever and chills. Daniel was forced into a state of nonresponse. He felt himself shivering under the quilts, saw and released the image of himself shivering in an instant, let it pass into the parade of sensation. He began to feel calmer, almost floating. He desperately wanted to sleep, but the pain and the falling edge of speed prevented him.