“No,” Nick agreed. “That was the most important experience I ever had, like a glimpse of—” He was silent for a time. “You don’t know what it’s like to wait year after year, wondering if it, if she, is ever going to show up, and at the same time knowing she is. Eventually. And then when you least expect it, but when you need it most—” He smiled up at me.
Most of his stress had departed, but, he told me, he still saw colors at night. Not the jagged pinwheels but rather vague patches, simply drifting. The colors seemed to change according to his thoughts; there was a direct connection. When he thought, in the long hypnagogic states preceding sleep, about erotic topics, the patches of foglike color turned red. Once he thought he saw Aphrodite, naked and lovely and huge-breasted. When he thought about holy topics, the colored patches turned pure pale white.
It reminded me of what I’d read in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Bardo Thodol existence after death occurs. The soul moves along encountering different-colored lights; each color represents a different kind of womb, a different type of rebirth. It is the job of the departed soul to avoid all bad wombs and come at last to the clear white light, I decided not to tell Nicholas this; he was screwed-up enough already.
“Phil,” he said to me, “as I move along through these different-colored patches of light, I feel—it’s very strange. I feel as if I’m dying. Maybe the oral surgery did something fatal to me. But I’m not scared. It seems . . . you know: natural.”
It was anything but that.
“You are on strange trips, Nick,” I said.
He nodded. “But something is happening. Something good. I think I’m past the worst part. The radio voice mocking me and insulting me in that gross way, and the whirling jagged buzz saws that were nearly blinding me—that was the worst part. I feel better with this candle.” He pointed to the small narrow candle flame beside his bed. “It’s strange . . . I wasn’t even sure what the word ‘votive’ meant; I don’t remember ever using it before. It just came to me, as the proper word. This was the kind of holy candle I wanted, and I knew how to ask for it.”
“When are you going back to work?” I said.
“Monday. Officially I’m on leave, on my own time. Not on sick leave any longer. It was awful to be nearly blind, and so goddamn dizzy. I was afraid it would last forever. But when I saw the girl standing there, and the golden fish sign—you know, Phil, the Greek Orphic religion, around 600 B.C., they used to show the initiate a golden sign and they’d tell him, ‘You are a son of earth and of starry heaven. Remember your birth.’ It’s interesting: ‘Of starry heaven.’ ”
“And the person would remember?”
“He was supposed to. I don’t know if it really worked. He was supposed to lose his amnesia and then start to recall his sacred origins. That was the purpose of the whole mystery ceremonies, as I understand it. Anamnesis, it was called: abolishment of amnesia, the block that keeps us from remembering. We all have that block. There’s a Christian anamnesis, too: memory of Christ, of the Last Supper and the Crucifixion; in Christian anamnesis those events are remembered in the same way, as a real memory. It’s the sacred inner miracle of Christian worship; it’s what the bread and wine cause. ‘Do this in remembrance of me,’ and you do it, and you remember Jesus all at once. As if you had known him but had forgotten. The bread and wine, partaking of them, bring it back.”
“Well,” I said, “the girl told you the fish, the golden necklace sign, was an ancient Christian sign, so if you experience what you said—anamnesis, whatever—you’ll remember Christ.”
“Guess so.”
“I have a feeling,” I said, “a theory, actually, that you have seen that dark-haired girl with the fish necklace before. She was delivering medication from the pharmacy; don’t you sometimes have them deliver? Couldn’t she have come by before? Or you could have seen her at the pharmacy. Delivery people hang around a pharmacy when they aren’t delivering; sometimes they even double as clerks. That would explain the shock of recognition, with you still half stoned from the Sodium Pentothal; déjà vu, I mean, occurring during great pain and under the lingering haze of the—”
“The pharmacy he called,” Nicholas broke in, “is near his office, which is in Anaheim. I’ve never been there before; I never got anything from that pharmacy in my life. My pharmacy is in Fullerton, by my doctor’s office.”
Silence.
“Guess that shoots that,” I said. “But you did fixate on what she wore because of the pain and stress and the residual haze of the Pentothal. It acted as a hypnotically fixating object, like a moving watch. Or like this candle flame.” I pointed at the votive candle. “And the mention of ‘early Christians’ suggested to you to get a votive candle. You’ve been highly suggestive, almost in a hypnotic trance, since your surgery. It always happens.”
“Are you sure?”
“Well, it seems logical.”
Nicholas said, “I had the uncanny feeling, God help me—I had the incredible experience, Phil, for a few minutes after I saw her necklace, that I was back in early Rome, in the first century A.D. So help me. She said that, and all at once it was real, completely real. The present world—Placentia, Orange County, the U.S.A.—it was all gone. But then it returned.”
“Hypnotic suggestion,” I said.
After a pause, Nicholas said, “If I’m dying—”
“You’re not dying,” I said.
“If I die,” Nicholas continued, “who or what is going to run my body for the next forty years? It’s my mind that’s dying, Phil, not my body. I’m leaving. Something has got to take my place. Something will; I’m sure of it.”
Into the bedroom walked Nicholas’s sheeplike cat, Pinky. The big tomcat
