I sit crosslegged with my back to the couch and throw myself into a mild trance, savoring each inflation and reduction of my chest, slowing time, until I reach that place between breaths. Emptying my mind, balancing
precariously on the crack of the Yin-Yang, the pinnacle of not-doing where striving momentarily ceases, and the body and soul are free from the interminable struggle to either engage the rich nourishment of air, the most fundamental good, or to extirpate the poisonous waste, the anti-air that embodies our most basic conception of evil.

Both are fiction; good is that which benefits us and evil that which is to our detriment. Plants have the opposite perspective on gases, water creatures still a different one. And hardly any ever consider the symmetrical duality of this seminal interaction with nature: ingesting life, expelling death.

In,

-Eternity-

Out.

Somewhere an angel is softly chanting mantras. “ ‘…either on the Bus or off the Bus…’” Llewellyn, reading key phrases from her notes.

No good. If I can consciously hear her, I’m not deeply enough under. The suggestions are intended for the subconscious. I’m thinking too much, and the problem will only compound as my lysergic-charged internal
monologue obsessively echoes every tangent. Meditation on acid is a superior achievement. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. I open my eyes.

Llewellyn stops reading. “Here, let’s try something else. Lay down.” I hear the rustling of her clothes as she rises and walks to the stereo, replacing the quiet ocean sounds I’d been barely hearing with something
like ambient trance.

“Focus on the music,” she advises. “It’s special.”

I know what she means-it’s spiked with subliminals-but try not to be aware of them, lest my attention undermine the suggestions. Relax.

Innnnn

–

ooooout.

darkness. the world is soft, wet, and free of discomfort. Life enters and death departs though the connection at the Center.

Between breaths.

alone in the universe but I don’t mind. It has always been thus.

there is only One.

the firmament quakes, and I am thrust into a new dimension: cold, and glaring. Pain; something assaulting my backside. I wail. What nightmare is this?

Rough surfaces abrade my untouched flesh. This new world, along with its other evils, is a desert.

I spit and gibber the fluid from my mouth. A new ether flows in.

With that first hit I am hooked.

Then, a disruption at the Center of things. The happy stuff is no longer flowing in. Omigod, they cut the Cord!

They-the Others. The inhabitants of this mad realm, who as part of some sinister design have forced me from paradise into what I can already see is a pretty shitty place.

Slappers of asses, clippers of cords. What other tortures do these beasts have in store?

I take my first step on all the lands of the Earth.

I utter my first word in all the languages of man.

I am educated in the fashion of every culture.

I lose my virginity to the entire world.

My hand is quivering, my eyesight poor. A hazy page before me.

Destiny. Best goddamned sentence I’ve written my whole life. I squint, to lovingly stare again at my handiwork.

The inelocutable modality of the visible…

“Holy shit!” I exclaim. “That explains a lot.”

We had determined, by cross-referencing my recovered memories, that my most recent life had be that of Norman Hartweg, a no-name playwright from California, who was best known as Tom Wolfe’s snitch for
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. This act of questionable loyalty turned out to be a massive break in my past-life recollection efforts, as it documented an otherwise mediocre, unmemorable turn at the Wheel. I like to think my soul knew it would be so.

“Norman” is the only of the six files marked by a proper name; the others are labeled, “Asian Field Officer (Mongol?) c. 800-1200”, “Eskimo Fisherman (undated)”, “Flutist, (Middle East?)”, “Rabbi, c.14?? (Europe,
poss. Spain), “Anasazi Corn Grinder (Female) c. 100-1300,” and “Miscellaneous”, which naturally contains random scattered impressions that could not be otherwise cataloged.

The problem is that, at least using Llewellyn’s technique, memories emerge much like stray recollections from a distant past during the current life-sudden moods, flashing images, fragments of conversation. Unlike recall within the present incarnation, however, there is no context. It’s a bit like trying to place a familiar stranger-but without the knowledge of which hangouts you’d frequented, jobs held, or schools attended.

Perhaps a computer analogy is in order. After all, man has created the machines in his own image. Every so often, it becomes necessary to completely replace the hardware. Naturally, you want keep all the information from your old hard drive, but to accumulate files from several generations of upgrades will quickly monopolize the memory availability on the new computer.

So a compromise is reached: compressed archiving, which preserves the essence of the data while making it inaccessible without a special application. You never use most of that stuff, anyway.

Unfortunately, the file names were converted to an unintelligible dialect of Sumerian by a malicious virus. The only way to see what’s there is to randomly decompress and hope for the best.