A couple of days later I went back to the med school for another session. They took a blood sample, and I got a quick physical; I told them I felt fine, great in fact, even if I did lose almost ten pounds, and I had to fill out a form about how I fared the past week. Interesting the stuff they were checking on-paranoid ideation, sleepwalking, violence, convulsions, catatonia, hallucinations, uncontrollable laughter, excessive urination, no urination at all, reverse ejaculation, eating unfamiliar foods, priapism, impotence, paralysis, dyskinesia, and there’s a section for changes in creative process, where you can rate your creative functioning on scales of one to ten, and I gave myself all tens. Unless that was a hallucination. How could you tell?

Then the same little room with Harris, she said, we’re going to try a slightly lower dose, and she hooked me up to various meters, including a brain-wave device. Chewed my wad. Same as before, one second I’m in the little room, the next I smell the cologne my mother always used back when she was alive, lily of the valley, and I’m in her lap on our deck looking over the Sound, a gray day, it must be early autumn, and she has me wrapped in a brown velvet throw; Charlie is away somewhere and Mother’s lovely and I am perfectly happy.

She’s telling me a story, always the same story, about the brave little boy whose mother is kidnapped by an ogre and taken to his castle, but the brave little boy fights through many dangers and drives the ogre out of the castle, and the brave little boy and his mother live happily ever after in the ogre’s castle.

Okay, the same as before, I’m there, it’s real, and now something happened that was even more weird. I’m sitting in her lap, and then the scene darkens and the smell of the water and of her perfume fade, and they’re replaced by heavier smells, meat cooking and scorched feathers, and a sweet/sour smell like sewage and lavender fighting it out, and I’m still on a woman’s lap, but it’s not my mother, and I’m not me.

But I also know she’s my mother, and I’m also me in a strange way, as if the two little boys are the same boy, both the same age, one on a deck overlooking Long Island Sound and the other in this room. A familiar room, familiar comforting sounds and smells. My mother is wearing a black velvet dress that smells of lavender, and there are other women in the room moving about and my mother is talking to them, discussing domestic affairs, how to cook a chicken, the need for more beans. I am wearing a dress too, of some stiff fabric, bloodred, with a lace collar. The room is small, with a low beamed ceiling, and dim-the light comes through a narrow casement window made of round lenslike panes.

My mother puts me off her lap and stands, and another woman grabs me by the hand and leads me out of the room into a courtyard flooded with strong light; overhead is the hot sky of some southern region. This too is all familiar, a fountain lined with blue tiles playing in the center of the courtyard, and I am fascinated by this blue and how the water changes the color of it. I splash my hand in the water and the sensation is real, actual; I look at the blue of the tiles and the blue of the sky and I think that this has some importance but I don’t know what it is. From outside I hear the noises of the street, vendors’ cries and the snort of horses and creak of cart wheels. A dark-skinned woman comes in through the gate with baskets of flowers, red carnations. I stare at the flowers and I conceive a desire for them, I want to hold the perfect red of them.

But someone shouts, and the flower woman darts away and does not latch the gate, and I slip out into the street, although I have been warned not to, warned the Jews will steal me. I follow the flower lady through narrow streets; she knocks at doors, enters or is shouted away. While I wait I play with a stick; I poke a dead cat into the sewer that runs down the center of the street. I am careful with my shoes, I am not to get them wet with the filth.

The flower seller leaves the narrow lanes of the neighborhood and enters a broader street. She walks faster and I have to trot to keep up with her. She no longer knocks at doors. Now we are in a plaza full of carts and animals, and many people; most of them are shouting out the names of foods and other things. The flower seller has disappeared.

Some men are looking at me, talking, but I don’t understand what they are saying. They are dark men, wearing unfamiliar clothing. One reaches out to grab me, but I am suddenly afraid, and I dart away. I am lost, I run through the crowd crying. Maybe the Jews are following me, they will steal me and drink my blood, as Pilar the nurse has often assured me that they love to do.

I run blindly, tripping and bumping into people, I knock over a hen coop, and then I am swept up off my feet and held, a man in black, a broad hat and a cassock, a priest. I beg him not to let the Jews get me, and he laughs and says there are no Jews anymore, little man, and who are you, and why are you crying, and I say my name, Gito de Silva, and my father is Juan Rodríguez de Silva, of the street of Padre Luis Maria Llop, and he says he will take me home, and I am glad to be saved but also terrified that I will be beaten and so I struggle in his arms. The priest says, hey, take it easy, buddy! And I find myself struggling with a UPS man in a brown uniform.

I still had the EEG leads trailing from my head and I’d lost a sneaker. I managed to croak out the lie that I was all right, that I was fine, and the man said I had dashed out the door of Shelly’s building and run into him full tilt. Like I was blind, he said. We were at Haven Avenue and 168th Street and he’d been en route to making a delivery at the Neurological Institute. In a minute or so, Harris came running up and apologized to the guy and led me back into the building.

She had me down on the recliner and was taking the leads off my head when Shelly Zubkoff popped in, looking a little ruffled. Apparently, without warning, I had jumped off the bed, knocked Harris away when she tried to stop me, and somehow got out of the building, where I’d bounced off the delivery man. Shelly apologized and observed that I was lucky that the man hadn’t been driving his truck. I had no memory at all about this. One second I was a kid in some other age struggling with a priest, and the next I was out on the street with the UPS guy. Disorienting is barely the word.

He made me stay for an hour, for observation he said, although I felt perfectly okay, really good, calm and kind of blank, and again without the usual internal dialogue going on, the crap that constantly fills up our heads, and it turns out, you know, that without that script running, you can really focus down on the world around you, and if you do that everything is really interesting. Everything.

There’s a feeling you get on crank or cocaine where you think you have super powers: anything seems possible, and worse, sensible, which is why you get people painting six-room apartments with a one-inch brush or doing mass murders. But what I felt when I left Zubkoff’s office wasn’t like that at all. I felt perfectly myself, but more so, like there were forces behind me, encouraging me, stroking me. Again that kitten-licking sensation in my head. It was exactly like being a well-beloved child, it was that kind of omnipotence, at home in the universe (a book title I’ve always liked), and everything was just as it should be and everything was interesting.

Right, I keep saying that, “interesting” is the word, because as I rode downtown on the subway, the car crowded with the end of rush hour, ordinary people going home to supper and their lives, I couldn’t help staring at the faces and the patterns of the people in random juxtaposition, but it wasn’t random at all-everything was loaded with meaning, and you could point that out with art, I saw, you could make sense of it. I cursed the hours I’d spent being bored and pissed off and getting high because real life wasn’t quite perfect enough for me, and I was nearly crying with the desire to paint these faces and this choir of people arranged for me and paint everything so that people would look at it and say oh, yeah, that’s true, it all makes sense. This vibrating moment.