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
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: ‘
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.
In the dark suction, a golden fish flashed before him. He lunged. The instant his hand closed around the fish, Daniel was running uphill toward Volta’s house. Volta had to see it. When Daniel opened the door he saw himself standing across the threshold. He didn’t realize he was looking into a mirror until a faceless man stepped from behind it, raised a pistol, and shot him in the head. Daniel collapsed to his knees. He felt the fish flop out of his hand. Even though he knew he was dead, he could still see. The pool of blood spreading from his wound was almost like the surface of a lake at water-level. The golden fish flopped into view. When it reached the edge of his blood, it righted itself and started swimming toward him. Suddenly, it disappeared into the depths. Daniel kept watching, waiting for it to come back up. The cooling blood began to congeal.
Daniel dressed quickly in the cold room. The water was running low. What he really wanted was some food. He hadn’t eaten in four days. He thought of buckwheat cakes with maple syrup and Virginia ham, and almost swooned.
Daniel walked softly across the room and knelt in front of the door. In a minute he heard Volta moving down the trail, humming cheerfully under his breath. He quit humming as he approached the shed. Daniel waited, poised. When the edge of the envelope appeared under the door, Daniel snatched it. He growled softly at first, letting it build in his gut, rise, hold, suddenly erupt into a roar, and as suddenly cut off. He listened. He could hear Volta humming as he walked back up the trail.
Under the bed, bolted to the frame between two sheets of plywood, is a mirror. Prop it up securely and position yourself comfortably in front of it. Count your bones until they glow, then relax for about ten minutes, until you’re breathing calmly and evenly. Shut your eyes and try to empty your mind. When you open your eyes again, look at yourself in the mirror. Look deeply into your own eyes. See yourself through yourself. The point of integration is the surface of the mirror. When you join yourself there, you will vanish.
These are your final instructions. Try as often and as long as you want. I maintain my faith in your success.
As Daniel slid under the bed, he would have given twenty to one that the mirror would be round. He would have lost. As he discovered when he spun off the wingnuts and pulled the plywood sheets, the mirror was rectangular, roughly two feet by four, in a slender maple frame. He propped it against the western wall and, after folding one of the quilts under him, sat down about three feet away.
He closed his eyes and imagined his skeleton. He started counting his bones, quickening the rhythm until the circuit blurred and energy looped through his hands, feet, loins, spine, and skull. His bones began to glow as if the marrow was aflame.
The glow faded into an empty tranquillity. Daniel opened his eyes and looked into his own eyes looking back. He saw his skeleton stretched out on the bottom of a lake, his bones the glossy black of ebony. He wanted to lie there forever, but a resonant drumming from the surface seemed to summon him. He felt his skeleton float upward. But it didn’t break into light. The lake surface was frozen; Daniel’s bones rattled against the ice. The drumming was almost deafening now. People were banging the ice with shovels in the hopes that the vibrations would raise his body. He could hear them calling to each other but the ice muffled their words. He tried to call out, to tell them it
