Daniel tried harder to focus. He saw himself sitting in the straight-backed chair in the center of the shed, fishing through a hole cut in the floor. He didn’t remember a river under the shed, but he could hear the water and feel the current carry his line. The drift paused and his rod-tip twitched. He set the hook instinctively and moments later lifted a golden fish from the water. He had to show Volta. Holding the fish in his left hand, he headed for the door. But when he opened it, expecting to step outside, he found himself in another room, a duplicate of the one he’d just left. He crossed the room and opened the door into another empty room. And another, room after room. He held the fish tightly. When he opened the next door, a faceless man holding a small automatic pistol shot him in the head. Even though he knew he couldn’t possibly survive the wound, Daniel put his hand to his temple to see how bad it was. Pieces of his skull moved under his hand like continental plates. His shock-bloated tongue couldn’t form words. His ears roared as his sinuses filled with blood. He sagged to his knees and, in almost the same motion, toppled forward. Still clutching the golden fish, he tried once to push himself up but his body was too heavy. The last thing he felt before he died was the fish thrashing in his hand.
The fever finally broke an hour before dawn the next day. Daniel slept into the early afternoon. He woke with a raging thirst. He gathered himself and threw back the sweat-damp quilts, but when swinging his legs to the floor proved too complicated, he crabbed himself around and reached over the foot of the bed, uttering a small moan of pleasure as his hand circled the neck of one of the gallon water jugs. He had to use both hands to lift it. He leaned back against the abutting wall, legs splayed for balance, and drank greedily.
A dull headache was getting sharper, and his eyes felt like they were on stalks. Better than yesterday but worse than shit, he decided. A few moments later he burst into laughter, spraying a mouthful of water through the rectangular shaft of light from the skylight. The droplets of water hung suspended for an instant, round and molten in the swath of light, then disappeared.
Daniel tried to imagine himself as a droplet of water hurled into light, but he couldn’t come close.
He wiped a dribble from his chin and lifted the jug for more. He was light-headed, he realized, almost giddy – but not disoriented. He knew exactly where he was, why, what had happened yesterday, who was responsible, and how he might take his revenge. He considered whether he should give Volta a Mott Stocker chili enema before he skinned him alive with a dull linoleum knife, or apply the enema as the coup de grace once Volta was flayed. He’d about settled on the former when he realized that if Volta had put the double-whammy dose on his breakfast, drinking the water was probably on the dumb side of chancy. However, he was still thirsty. He drained the jug. As he set it down, he noticed the envelope shoved under the door.
It was a journey across the Sahara to get out of bed and go pick it up. He brought it back to the bed before opening it. The message was in a neat hand.
I hope you’re feeling better today, Daniel. I also trust you appreciate the force of necessity. Extraordinary undertakings require extraordinary means. Be assured, on my honor, that the water is untainted.
Your instructions today are again simple. By sevens, count to 63,000 as smoothly as possible, and then, without pause, count backwards by sevens to zero. When you finish or fail the exercise, relax or sleep as you will. Let your mind glide.
As he wondered how long it would take to count to sixty-three thousand by sevens, Daniel opened the second jug of water and enjoyed a dread-free pint. He set it back on the floor, sat up on the bed, closed his eyes, and began aloud, ‘Seven, fourteen, twenty-one …’ He started swiftly to establish momentum, and in a few furious minutes had passed a thousand, but the addition of one thousand before each number soon slowed the pace. Without missing a beat he began saying the numbers silently. That sped him up briefly, but it was still slow. At 2,401, he quit saying the numbers silently and tried to see them in his mind, a digital display progressing smoothly and quickly in increments of seven. It was like gliding on ice as the numbers flew by, and he almost skated past sixty-three thousand in no time at all.
He paused a moment, looping a circle around the figure, then headed back. But the shift to subtraction lurched him from the groove. He had to retard the rhythm to the point of slow motion before he could pick it up again, quickening it to a pulse, then speeding till it nearly blurred. He felt like he was sailing through a tunnel without walls. As he passed 490, he slowed down to savor his return, and then celebrated with a long drink of water.
Daniel was pleased. As far as he was concerned, he had completed the exercise efficiently and close to flawlessly. He acknowledged there’d been some shaky moments the day before when the poison hit – very shaky, actually – and his recent attempt to imagine himself as water in light had been a bit feeble. But such a reaction to systemic poisoning was certainly understandable, and the attempt to vanish like a water droplet was at least an attentive seizure of possibility, an error in the right direction. Alert and boldly decisive, disciplined enough to move on a flicker of instinct – that was the spirit Volta had indicated was necessary. Daniel was just about there. Very close. He could feel it.
He laid back down on the bed and watched the skylight darken. When he saw the first star’s murky glimmer in the night sky, he folded his hands across his chest and shut his eyes.
He looked down into a circular pond. A golden fish swam languidly in the shallows, the water so clear, so still, he could see the fish’s scales. Daniel plunged his arm into the pond and grabbed the fish behind the gills. He lifted it thrashing from the water and started running. He wanted Volta to see it before it died. He threw open the shed door expecting to find Volta meditating in the straight-backed chair. Instead his mother was laying in bed exactly as he was, and he sensed her nakedness under the quilt as his own. She ignored the fish in his hand and asked him, smiling, ‘How many sides does a circle have?’ It was a riddle she’d asked him one April Fools’ Day at the Four Deuces. He knew the answer but said, ‘You got me.’
‘Two,’ Annalee said, her eyes glittering. ‘An inside and an outside.’
Daniel fought an impulse to weep. He said, ‘That’s a great riddle from a great mom.’
But he couldn’t wait for her smile. He had to get the fish to Volta. He didn’t have to explain his haste; she understood. He waved and bolted out the door into a duplicate room, only his mother was in bed with a man he didn’t recognize, straddling him, her hands touching her own breasts, her back arched with pleasure. Daniel turned and ran into another room, this one empty, and then into empty room after empty room until he opened the door and a faceless man raised a pistol and shot him in the head. The last sensation Daniel felt was the fish slipping from his hand.
He read the day’s instructions back in bed, the quilts mounded over him. The instructions were brief: ‘Count your bones till they glow.’
He assumed it was the same practice he’d learned from Wild Bill. But this had a different focus: ‘till they glow.’ He had no idea what that meant. It was still early. He could sleep on it.
When the rectangle of light touched his outflung hand, Daniel woke. Except for a nagging thirst and a growing hunger, he felt exceptionally clear-headed. In his work with Wild Bill, Daniel had developed a variety of ways to do the bone-counting exercise. He started with the simplest, moving upward from his feet. He didn’t really count the bones – just touched and moved. When he ended at his skull he felt sweetly refreshed, but far short of glowing. Taking a clue from the counting exercise, he reversed direction, skull to feet, but the rhythm was sprung. He decided it was his arms; he had to move down them and then back up. He concentrated on his arms, thinking he could perhaps blur the awkwardness with speed. It was better, but needed more power behind it. He tried to bring his mind to a single point of concentration, a dense mass, holding it till he trembled with the effort, then unleashed its pent force down through his neck and shoulders into each arm, converting it to energy. And rather than turning around at his fingertips to course back up his arms, something happened Daniel didn’t expect – the energy shot through the ends of his fingers, arced through space, and returned through the soles of his feet, rushing up through his legs and pelvis more powerfully than it had started. He was afraid his brain would be obliterated, so he slowed it slightly, gathered the force, shot it back around the circuit, and then again. With each passage through his bones the power increased. When his skull could no longer contain the force, he let the surge shoot through the top of his head; it looped back through his fingers. He split it into two circuits, then four, and each new circuit clarified the power. He effortlessly added more until he felt as if he was enmeshed in a silken light. He felt his bones begin to glow. The light squeezed him out of his body. He floated above it, watching in amazement as it coalesced into a spherical diamond, the light now a spiral flame in its center. But it coalesced until it collapsed back into itself, through itself, roaring into emptiness. He felt a terrible suction pulling him down. He turned and ran. He had to warn Volta. But what had been light was now black water, a whirlpool spiraling him irresistibly downward to its vacant center.