The Glint of the Luopan

Chapter 7

For the next few weeks, Suresh and I met every other day. Once a week, he would come by and supervise my LSD trip experience. Starting out, he would turn on some Indian sitar music whose repetitive patterns facilitated my gliding over into the land where space and time were interchangeable, where space was replaced by the time my neocortex took to get to the other side of the ocean, and time was replaced by the space between me and my environment that was contracted every time I took a breath. It felt like growing into a new skin – or out of an old one?

After that, we would watch some cartoons. Watching something was a good way to monitor how 'far' gone I was already. As soon as the cartoon figures started to fray out around the edges, the colors adopted that toxic neon glow, and I started to perceive every scene as highly symbolic, it was time for me to retreat into myself. Then, I went into the bedroom and meditated while Suresh continued watching.

Sometimes, I simply felt like being a child again, and that was okay too. Often, it seemed silly to go to sleep afterwards because I felt like I had just been in a dream anyway. Then, I read something, profiting from that special clarity of the mind that remained once the LSD had cleansed my brain and was about to leave my body.

Sometimes, after or during a trip, I had these flashes of insight that kept my head floating in the air for days. Then again, there were days when I felt depressed as soon as the melody of infinite promises changed back into the static of reality. I sometimes skipped Chinese classes or therapy sessions because I couldn't get out of bed.

Suresh gave me books to read. They spoke of overcoming, of solubilizing the ego. I learned to perceive the ego – myself – as something that was always in the way, keeping me from realizing what had really happened to me during the accident. I tried special breathing techniques to breathe it out and my breath formed into some sort of dragon that I wrestled with.

Every other time or so, I uncovered a few details from my past. Most times, I hovered above the taxi, watching the scene from every angle in a kind of retrograde out-of-body experience. I was able to zoom in on every single face, be it that of an emergency doctor or a passerby, but whenever I focused on myself lying in front of the taxi, all I could see was my messy black shock of hair.

What I did remember during one session was the first minutes after I woke up from my coma. In front of me, the meadow of my flowery hospital gown had spread out. Next to me, the machines were chirping like artificial birds. All the curtains were drawn to uncover a new, strange day for whoever was lying in that bed and opening their eyes for the first time after weeks.

Could it be that the hospital had more concrete information on what had happened to me during that accident? Back then, I hadn't asked for any details. If I had, my amnesia had washed that away too, sloshing backward and forward into my present and future like water that had penetrated the insides of a notebook, making not only the already filled-in pages unreadable, but also leaving the empty pages in a state that made every word you tried to write on them frizz out beyond recognition.

☯︎☯︎☯︎

During one of my LSD trips, I had finally been able to follow the ambulance all the way to the hospital. The hospital sign, however, appeared blurry to me. I tried to zoom in, and finally, the pixels arranged themselvesintoo four Chinese characters.

As soon as my consciousness became clearer, I pulled out a notepad and tried to write down the characters as precisely as I could remember them. 迈蒙尼德. Mai-mo-ni-de. The other day, I typed the characters into the search engine, and a picture of a man with a turban came up. Maimonides, a Jewish philosopher. I typed in 'Maimonides' and 'New York'. A map with two place markers popped up. Maimonides Children's Hospital. Maimonides Medical. Bingo.