Stone Junction

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 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.