Today, I walk through the sunny streets, past a tattoo shop, a taqueria, a terrarium store, a head shop named Vapelandia. I go through a blue door and wait for my isolation tank to be readied.
An elderly, white-haired lady tells me she’s waiting for her son. We sit together, on a bright yellow couch; a few minutes later, her son arrives: about my age, heavyset, with gray hair cut close to his scalp; his thick eyeglasses are almost like goggles, heavily bound—with duct and electrical tape—at the bridge and temples.
“What is this supposed to do for me, again?” the mother asks.
“What it does for me.” He mumbles huskily when he speaks, seeming unable to control his volume; he is not easy to understand.
I listen in, taking off my watch, taking out my contact lenses, preparing myself. I pick up the notebook on the table, pretend to read the entries that previous, fellow travelers have left behind.
“Sleep,” the son says to his mother. “It helped me. Remember when I didn’t sleep for two years?”
I am led to my room, my tank. I take off my clothes, shower, slip into the tank that is lit by blue lights under the water; they cast my black, shadowy silhouette directly above me, as if I have left my body or it has left me. I stare up at it, so familiar and so foreign, suspended and exposed, and then I reach out, switch off the lights and slip into the darkness, the deep silence. The density of the water, it counteracts gravity; the temperature of the water, neither hot nor cold, blurs the edge of my body—there is no sight nor sound, no gravity or proprioception, no tactile stimulation, no speech. All these areas of my brain are inactive, gone dark, and beneath and beyond them, what is left?
What is taken away is the moment, the apprehension of the present. My brain settles somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. What remains is the past, the future, the hypothetical, and all the impressions that have been hidden beneath the surface.
I come here, I spend these hours trying to recollect, to see what will find me as I float in the black silence, a space that is not a space, where I am both naked and have no body. What I am, there and then, I don’t think there’s a word for it. A receptor, a traveler, a magnet. I drift back, I try to find a way forward. I listen to my breathing, I follow it, I try to clear that space and once I feel alone again, less crowded, I cannot escape my heart. The sound of it, and the reverberations it sends through my body, through that thick water. The sound of my heart doesn’t stop, all around me.
What else I hear: the sound of water, and then I see the stream, slipping beneath the narrow bridge I’m crossing. A pail of blackberries swings heavy, hot in one hand. I look up and see the loose black strands of my wife’s hair, wet against her pale neck. Her legs are bare, scratched by thorns and brambles, walking ahead of me. On the other side of the bridge, we come to a tree whose thick trunk is surrounded by white slices of bread, and cinnamon rolls; dog food is scattered everywhere, and plastic pails of dark grease hang from low branches. Someone is baiting a bear, luring it here to shoot it. As we stand there, considering the tree, endangered by the whole situation, rain begins to fall in scattered, heavy drops around us. It thickens, it slaps the top of my head as I run after my wife, up the gravel road, toward the house. No one sits in the two rocking chairs on the porch, but they are sawing furiously back and forth under the weight of the rain.
And then, blackness everywhere. Silence. My heartbeat becomes so relentless; I feel waves, turbulence; salt kicks up on my face. I lose any sense of the edges of my body. I am at the bottom of the lake, resting on my back on the lakebed, so deep that there is only blackness above me. I fold my body away; my legs first, then my arms and finally my torso, the whole thing like a thin blanket that fits there, just beneath the thin plate of my face. And then the music seeps up through that thick water, sounding, feeling like a huge creature is awakening, far beneath me, unfolding itself, beginning to surface.
I shower, put on my clothes, stumble out through the hallway with the colors so bright around me. I see the mother and son again, their hair wet, sitting beside each other on the yellow couch. I linger near the kombucha tap so I can overhear their conversation.
“I wear earplugs all the time, now, everywhere,” he is saying. “It’s all too much for me, everything coming at me all at once.”