The Active Side of Infinity (41 page)

I had an emotional outburst and kissed his hand.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" he said. "Next thing you're going to
make a shrine for my guaraches!"
The anguish that gripped me
turned from self-pity to a feeling of unequaled loss. "You are
leaving!" I muttered. "My god! Leaving forever!"

At that moment don Juan did something to me that he had done repeatedly
since the first day I
had met him. His face puffed up as if
the deep breath he was taking inflated him. He tapped my
back
forcefully with the palm of his left hand and said, "Get up from your
toes! Lift yourself up!"

In the next instant, I was once again coherent, complete, in control. I
knew what was expected
of me. There was no longer any
hesitation on my part, or any concern about myself. I didn't care
what
was going to happen to me when don Juan left. 1 knew that his departure was
imminent. He
looked at me, and in that look his eyes said it all.

"We will never be together again," he said softly. "You
don't need my help anymore; and I
don't want to offer it to you,
because if you are worth your salt as a warrior-traveler, you'll spit in
my
eye for offering it to you. Beyond a certain point, the only joy of a
warrior-traveler is his
aloneness. I wouldn't like you to try
to help me, either. Once I leave, I am gone. Don't think about me, for I won't
think about you. If you are a worthy warrior-traveler, be impeccable! Take care
of
your world. Honor it; guard it with your life!"

He moved away from me. The moment was beyond self-pity or tears or
happiness. He shook
his head as if to say good-bye, or as if he were
acknowledging what I felt.

“Forget the self and you will fear nothing, in whatever level of
awareness you find yourself to
be," he said.

He had an outburst of levity. He teased me for the last time on this
Earth.

"I hope you find love!" he said.

He raised his palm toward me and stretched his fingers like a child,
then contracted them
against the palm.

."Ciao," he said
I knew that it was futile to
feel sorry or to regret anything, and that it was as difficult for me to
stay
behind as it was for don Juan to leave. Both of us were caught in an
irreversible energetic
maneuver that neither of us could stop.
Nevertheless, I wanted to join don Juan, follow him wherever he went. The
thought crossed my mind that perhaps if I died, he would take me with
him.

I
saw
then how don Juan Matus, the nagual, led the fifteen other
seers who were his
companions, his wards, his delight, one by one to
disappear in the haze of that mesa, toward the north. I
saw
how every
one of them turned into a blob of luminosity, and together they ascended
and
floated above the mountaintop like phantom lights in the sky. They circled
above the
mountain once, as don Juan had said they would do: their
last survey, the one for their eyes only;
their last look
at this marvelous Earth. And then they vanished.

I knew what I had to do. 1 had run out of time. I took off at my top speed
toward the precipice and leaped into the abyss. I felt the wind on my face for
a moment, and then the most merciful
blackness swallowed me like a
peaceful subterranean river.

I was vaguely aware of the loud noise of a motor that seemed to be
racing in a stationary position. I thought that the attendants were fixing a
car in the parking lot at the back of the building where I had my
office/apartment. The noise became so intense that it finally caused me to wake
up. I
silently cursed the boys who ran the parking lot for
fixing their car right under my bedroom
window. I was
hot, sweaty, and tired. I sat up on the edge of my bed, then had the most
painful
cramps in my calves. I rubbed them for a moment. They
seemed to have contracted so tightly that
I was afraid
that 1 would have horrendous bruises. I automatically headed for the bathroom
to
look for some liniment. I couldn't walk. I was dizzy. I
fell down, something that had never
happened to me before. When I had regained a minimum
of control, I noticed that I wasn't worried at all about the cramps in my
calves. I had always been a near hypochondriac. An
unusual pain in my calves such as the one 1 was having now would
ordinarily have thrown me
into a
chaotic state of anxiety.

I went then to the window to close it, although I couldn't hear the
noise anymore. I realized that the window was locked and that it was dark
outside. It was night! The room was stuffy. I opened the windows. I couldn't
understand why I had closed them. The night air was cool and
fresh.
The parking lot was empty. It occurred to me that the noise must have been made
by a car
accelerating in the alley between the parking lot and my
building. I thought nothing of it
anymore, and went to my bed to
go back to sleep, I lay across it with my feet on the floor. I
wanted
to sleep in this fashion to help the circulation in my calves, which were very
sore, but I
wasn't sure whether it would have been better to keep
them down or perhaps lift them up on a
pillow.

As I was beginning to rest comfortably and fall asleep again, a thought
came to my mind with such ferocious force that it made me stand up in one
single reflex. I had jumped into an abyss in
Mexico
!
The next thought that I had was a quasi-logical deduction: Since I had jumped
into the
abyss deliberately in order to die, I must now be a
ghost. How strange, I thought, that I should
return, in
ghostlike form, to my office/apartment on the corner of Westwood and Wilshire
in Los
Angeles
after I had died. No wonder my feelings were not the same. But if I
were a ghost, I
reasoned, why would I have felt the
blast of fresh air on my face, or the pain in my calves?

I touched the sheets of my bed; they felt real to me. So did its metal
frame. I went to the
bathroom. I looked at myself in the
mirror. By the looks of me, I could easily have been a ghost. I
looked
like hell. My eyes were sunken, with huge black circles under them. I was
dehydrated, or dead. In an automatic reaction, I drank water straight from the
tap. I could actually swallow it. I
drank gulp after gulp, as if I
hadn't drunk water for days. I felt my deep inhalations. I was alive!
By
god, I was alive! I knew it beyond the shadow of a doubt, but I wasn't elated,
as I should have
been.

A most unusual thought crossed my mind then: I had died and revived
before. I was
accustomed to it; it meant nothing to me. The vividness
of the thought, however, made it into a
quasi-memory.
It was a quasi-memory that didn't stem from situations in which my life had
been
endangered. It was something quite different from that.
It was, rather, a vague knowledge of something that had never happened and had
no reason whatsoever to be in my thoughts.

There was no doubt in my mind that I had jumped into an abyss in Mexico. I was now in my
apartment in Los Angeles, over three thousand miles from
where I had jumped, with no
recollection whatsoever of having made
the return trip. In an automatic fashion, I ran the water in
the
tub and sat in it. I didn't feel the warmth of the water; I was chilled to the
bone. Don Juan had
taught me that at moments of crisis, such as this
one, one must use running water as a cleansing factor. I remembered this and
got under the shower. I let the warm water run over my body for perhaps over an
hour.

I wanted to think calmly and rationally about what was happening to me
but I couldn't.
Thoughts seemed to have been erased from my mind. I was thoughtless yet
I was filled to
capacity with sensations
that came to my whole body in barrages that I was incapable of
examining. All I was able to do was to feel their
onslaughts and let them go through me. The only
conscious choice I made was to get dressed and leave. I went to eat
breakfast, something I always did at any time of the day or night, at Ship's
Restaurant on Wilshire, a block away from my office/apartment.

I had walked from my office to Ship's so many times that I knew every
step of the way. The same walk this time was a novelty for me. I didn't feel my
steps. It was as if I had a cushion under
my feet, or as
if the sidewalk were carpeted. I practically glided. I was suddenly at the door
of the
restaurant after what I thought might have been only two
or three steps. I knew that I could
swallow food because I had drunk
water in my apartment. I also knew that I could talk because I
had
cleared my throat and cursed while the water ran on me. I walked into the
restaurant as I had
always done. I sat at the counter and a waitress
who knew me came to me.

"You don't look too good today, dear," she said. "Do you
have the flu?"

"No," I replied, trying to sound cheerful. "I've been
working too hard. I've been up for twenty-
four hours
straight writing a paper for a class. By the way, what day is today?"

She looked at her watch and gave me the date, explaining that she had a
special watch that
was a calendar, too, a gift from her daughter. She
also gave me the time: 3:15 A.M.

I ordered steak and eggs, hash browned potatoes, and buttered white
toast. When she went
away to fill my order, another wave of
horror flooded my mind: Had it been only an illusion that I
had
jumped into that abyss in Mexico, at twilight the previous day? But even if the
jump had been
only an illusion, how could I have returned to L.A. from such a remote place only ten hours later?
Had I slept
for ten hours? Or was it that it had taken ten hours for me to fly, slide,
float, or
whatever to Los Angeles? To have traveled by
conventional means to Los Angeles from the place
where I had
jumped into the abyss was out of the question, since it would have taken two
days
just to travel to Mexico City from the place where 1 had
jumped.

Another strange thought emerged in my mind. It had the same clarity of
my quasi-memory of
having died and revived before, and the same
quality of being totally foreign to me: My
continuity was
now broken beyond repair. I had really died, one way or another, at the bottom
of
that gully. It was impossible to comprehend my being
alive, having breakfast at Ship's. It was
impossible for
me to look back into my past and see the uninterrupted line of continuous
events
that all of us see when we look into the past.

The only explanation available to me was that I had followed don Juan's
directives; I had
moved my
assemblage point
to a position
that prevented my death, and from my
inner silence
I
had
made the return journey to L.A. There was no other rationale for me to hold on
to. For the
first time ever, this line of thought was thoroughly
acceptable to me, and thoroughly satisfactory. It didn't really explain
anything, but it certainly pointed out a pragmatic
procedure that
I had tested before in a mild form when I met don Juan in that town of our
choice,
and this thought seemed to put all my being at ease.

Vivid thoughts began to emerge in my mind. They had the unique quality
of clarifying issues.
The first one that erupted had to do
with something that had plagued me all along. Don Juan had
described
it as a common occurrence among male sorcerers: my incapacity to remember
events
that had transpired while I was in states of heightened
awareness.

Don Juan had explained heightened awareness as a minute displacement of
my
assemblage
point,
which he
achieved, every time I saw him, by actually pushing forcefully on my back. He
helped
me, with such displacements, to engage energy fields that were ordinarily
peripheral to my
awareness. In other words, the energy fields that
were usually on the edge of my
assemblage
point
became
central to it during that displacement. A displacement of this nature had two
consequences
for me: an extraordinary keenness of thought and perception, and the incapacity
to
remember, once I was back in my normal state of
awareness, what had transpired while I had
been in that
other state.

My relationship with my cohorts had been an example of both of these
consequences. I had
cohorts, don Juan's other apprentices, companions
for my
definitive journey.
I interacted with
them only in
heightened awareness. The clarity and scope of our interaction was supreme. The
drawback for me was that in my daily life they were only poignant
quasi-memories that drove me
to desperation with anxiety and
expectations. I could say that I lived my normal life on the
perennial
lookout for somebody who was going to appear all of a sudden in front of me,
perhaps
emerging from an office building, perhaps turning a
corner and bumping into me. Wherever I went, my eyes darted everywhere,
ceaselessly and involuntarily, looking for people who didn't
exist
and yet existed like no one else.