Daniel wiped his lips. ‘I don’t know about how easy wisdom is, but the mind being difficult, he got that right.’
‘Indeed. But I mention it because I’m experiencing some of that difficulty. I have reservations about your attempting to vanish. Gut reservations, nothing I can explain – except to assure you that they reflect uncertainties regarding my judgment, not yours.’
Daniel, surprised by the turn of the discussion, said, ‘I want to try it. That’s my judgment, my call. You’re relieved of the responsibility of the decision.’
Volta said, ‘I don’t accept responsibilities that can be absolved. Clearly, since your approval is necessary to the attempt, and my instruction may be critical to your success and safety, it is a mutual decision. I’ll be responsible for my part; you take care of yours.’
‘That’s all I was trying to indicate – that I intend to.’
Volta leaned back in his chair and looked at Daniel closely. ‘All right. From this moment onward, Daniel, don’t speak to me. Don’t speak at all. If you do, or if you violate any subsequent instructions, our work will end there, and along with it, my responsibility. Now please, finish your tea.’
When they’d cleared the dishes, Volta took a six-volt flashlight from a shelf and told Daniel to follow. He led him out the back door and along a wide trail toward the cedar-shingled barn. Stars still glittered overhead, but the sky had begun to pale in the east. Volta followed the trail around the barn, then down a gradual slope to a small shack. Volta opened the door and entered, shining the light back for Daniel. When Daniel was standing beside him, Volta shined the light around the room. Along the far wall was a narrow bed. Three thick quilts were folded and stacked on the foot of the bed, a small white pillow on top. The only other furnishing was a straight-backed wooden chair.
Volta held the light on the chair and told Daniel, ‘Sit down.’
When Daniel was seated, Volta held the light on a door in the wall Daniel was facing. ‘The door opens on a small compost toilet. If you’ll remember to sprinkle a small can of wood ashes when you use it and replace the seat cover, there shouldn’t be any odor.’
The light flicked back to the bed. ‘Against the wall at the foot of the bed are three one-gallon jugs of local spring water. I advise you to use it sparingly.’
Volta snapped off the light. ‘I want you to shut your eyes, Daniel, and I want you to listen well, listen as if your life depended on it. This is where I make my speech.’
Volta began pacing around Daniel in the chair. Daniel shut his eyes and sat up straighter, concentrating. He felt fatigue evaporate as his attention sharpened. But as Volta continued his silent circling, an image of a jackal formed in Daniel’s mind, then a vulture. Circling, waiting for his flesh. His heart started pounding so hard he couldn’t breathe, so hard he thought it would explode, and he felt himself lifted to another plane, a plane of glassy power, smooth, translucent, solid. It wasn’t a mystical experience. From his days with Mott Stocker, he recognized the feeling as the first rush of excellent amphetamine. He shook his head – not to clear it, but in mild disbelief. Volta had dosed him with crank! It made sense – Volta wanted him exhausted but alert. But Volta could have asked, or suggested.
Daniel was approaching righteous anger when Volta stopped in front of him and said, with an irony not lost on Daniel, ‘I know you trust me, but I can feel you don’t trust me deeply. That’s fair enough. You don’t know me well, and you may think I’ve withheld information on your mother’s death, or that I may have brainwashed you while you were in your coma, or that I have otherwise controlled your behavior and limited your expression. You’re wrong, but I understand your caution. However, do trust me in this: What you’re about to attempt is extremely dangerous – more so if you succeed than if you fail. Banish frivolity, boredom, self-pity. They can only compound the peril. The states of mind you may enter are almost impossible to imagine. They make drugs look silly.’
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 con
stellation 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.”
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.
&nbs
p; ‘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.’