While I waited for my tank to be readied, I listened to a gray-haired adept, behind me, tell a woman about a pizza entrepreneur in Kauai who had spent thirty days in complete darkness and silence, not speaking a word.
Books were for sale, in the waiting area; among them, How to Get High Without Drugs, alongside a spectrum of different colored sunglasses, for harvesting the healing powers of different wavelengths (Red denotes a strong sexuality; Yellow generates positive and optimistic qualities; Indigo combines reason with intuition, discipline with creativity) and a “True Mirror” that reflected my image without reversing it, allowing me to finally see myself as others saw me. Did I seem friendlier, more authentic and empathetic, as the sign promised? I wasn’t certain.
This was my first time, floating in an isolation tank. I’d come in hopes of being transported to the past, of experiencing a “very strange brain event” like the one my old girlfriend had described. Perhaps I would encounter her, or even Mrs. Abel, again.
The bearded young men who worked at this place spoke in soft, calm voices. One led me down a hallway, past doors with signs on them reading float in progress and to my room; he explained how to proceed, then left me to disrobe, shower, enter the water and turn out the light.
I breathed, floating on my back in that darkness, that thick salty water that held me, that crept in to fill and seal my ears. I listened to my breathing, the organs settling in my body. Was that an engine, a car out on the street? Was it still sunny out there, bright? I could not see my hands, next to my head; I could hear them bend, straighten, feel the tremble of the water, and that blackness was almost the same as swimming in the lake at night, when I also could not see my hands but only heard them, their splash and slap and my inhale, the rush of wind and night water.
Silence.
I am suspended. It is clear that I have turned, that I am now hanging over an abyss, a void, looking down into it, levitating. I feel the feathers of my lungs, the twist of my intestines. My heartbeat—I almost fall asleep and my leg twitches, my arm twitches, gently the waves wrinkle and settle around me as I hang like this. My heartbeat, and when I squinch up my eye against an itch I hear the sound of my brain flexing, winding, I feel the synapses crackling, chains and chains and chains that I move incrementally through and I am gaining momentum suddenly traveling very close to the ground, the white beach that I know, every stone, I have no body and I move down low, like the ghost of an animal, a bird, across the green grass of the Reeves’ lawn, under the weeping willow, out into the woods, beneath the cedars, the ground orange and green and brown.
But I am not staying in Wisconsin, not traveling to that summer.
I know where I am now, by the light. I am in the time between that summer of Mrs. Abel and now. A woman rises from the bed and crosses the room—strong, her body so balanced and poised, no concern for being watched, no self-consciousness. Her hair is long and dark, a snarl across her shoulders; she tucks it back and I see the side of her face. This is San Francisco, 1996, and the walls are all white. Light carpet, a mirror that doubles her now, showing the other side of her body. A white shelf, a black CD boom box; I can even read the titles of her few CDs: Neil Young, Harvest Moon; Cowboy Junkies, Lay It Down.
This woman is not yet my wife as she gets out of bed and crosses the room, stretching one bare arm, balancing on one foot. She pulls on the cord and the blind rises up, the whiteness of the fog cast in over her skin. She turns, smiling at me, and steps back toward the bed. In that glowing whiteness, there is no sound at all.