ATAQUE DE EPILEPSIA

The coyotes did not come last night. Something else happened instead.

I waited for them. Exhausted, I started shivering and put the jacket back on, a little damp, but drier for the effort. I listened until I lost consciousness. My body propped in a convenient arrangement of notches. I slept and I dreamed about highways. I was in a car. I was in transit in this car. Driving on these roads that would jerk skyward into pointlessly high bridges over nothing, just a lot of grass below. The effect was like a roller coaster though. I was not enjoying it. Then the road came to another rise, and it just kept increasing in angle until I felt as though I were going to slip out the back window or the entire vehicle would up and end-over backwards falling some fathoms to a fiery fatoom. It stopped rolling forward. It began to roll back. Instead of going back the way I came, the vehicle sank backwards into an ocean. I swam to the surface and looked down through the clear blue salt water. There was my car, and my briefcase spilled open and all my papers on the ocean floor. Everything else was down there too. My bank account, my real estate portfolio, everything. I looked around and found myself standing in waist deep water. There were a lot of people playing on some kind of beach. There were strange water features everywhere and also, there were beings of a sort. They were waves, standing some three hundred feet tall. They didn't crash or move like waves at the beach. They were narrow, like columns of water with white caps at the top. I came near one of them and found myself pulled inside it. I rode up inside this wave on a shaft of light. The sun was out. It was a clear day.

#

When I wake up, the first thing I note is a scent on the air. It wakes me up actually. Like a room full of young women freshly showered and wearing clothes washed in lemon soap. I am groggy and wary of falling. My eyes are a bit unclear. Everything seems white. Like it has snowed. I blink and inhale again. It isn't snow. It's flowers. All the trees are in bloom. I look around and can find no more fruit, just flowers. My stomach feels like I have swallowed a fishhook that has caught in my intestines, and I am now being reeled in. My head swivels 180 degrees in either direction repeatedly until it makes me sick and I have to stop and breathe. At first, the syrupy thickness of the smell makes it difficult to find my breath. And I feel hungry again for the first time since vomiting up dog entrails the previous morning.

I climb down slowly from my perch. My leg is still a mess. My fingertips yet bloody and destroyed. I have not been miraculously healed. But something has happened. Bees fly about everywhere. They are smacking into me and rolling around in the grass stunned and goofy, legs covered in so much pollen they look like little flying lemons themselves. I am so taken aback by the scene at first that I fail to notice the sky. A big yellow orb burns through its arc clean across the southern edge of a sapphire blue sky.

It is warmer this morning than it has been since I first found myself in this grove. I cannot explain what is happening to me here, other than perhaps I am delusional and lying in a ditch somewhere getting my guts eaten out by a cadre of monster dogs. I close my eyes and squeeze my face, trying to feel canines ripping my flesh somewhere in time, but nothing. I open them and the sun is still shining and warm. The flowers are still white, like a blanket. The edge of the spectrum of all visible light, a vanguard against darkness, here I am. The smell is of the sweetness of fruit and fresh blossoming curiosity. It is an intoxicating thick atmosphere of nectar. There are trillions and trillions of these little white stars. There are so many of them the air resonates with them.

In my head a calliope sings a demented tune. On the ground, under the tree I find a watering can. It is heavy and made of sheet steel. Large, several gallons of water. The water in it tastes of a metallic urge to industry, but it is softened by the inescapable odor of the lemon flowers which becomes thick enough to taste in my mouth when I open up to drink from the can. Its edges are folded and softened. The metal is cool against my lips. The liquid feels silver in my throat. It tastes again of the can and the flowers, but also of something else which I don't feel qualified to describe.

I collapse into a lump under the tree. Cradling the water can I curl into a ball and cry. This can't be real, and even if it is real, what does this mean for my life? Yesterday, I was lost in an unknown location. Today, if all signs are to be believed, I am now lost in time-space, something so vast that all but the most esoteric scientists have avoided the idea of cataloging it. This is the type of vast dislocation in the hierarchy of being that prompted religion to develop. I lay on my side, clutching the can. The bees float around beneath the canopy like fairies tending gardens. The light breaks into shafts of gold among the fluttering leaves and the pixelation of the flowers. The steam organ in my mind drones on in an off-key high register and I remain floored by the impossibility of what has happened to me.

I believed it when I was abducted. It made sense to me that one day that might happen, and everything since then, up until this, has been a horror, but it's been a believable horror. A part of me knows I deserved it. I haven't been completely honest. You know I'm not a doctor. I told you I was an executive from a board of angel investors. That I bought and sold lives by the thousand. I didn't tell you everything, and I don't plan on it. What I will say is that waking up to a grim masque of death staring me in the face was something I had been used to for years. There wasn't much changed on that first day in the grove except circumstances. It was a different place, same old grim story.

People bother me. I don't like human beings. They are simple and dull and dishonest without creativity. They always expect to be taken care of, as if that's my responsibility and not theirs. Go out and work for it, I say. And if the company you are working for gets liquidated, roll up your sleeves and work harder. We can't all win. That's the capitalist way. That's the burden I bear. I'm the winner.

I get up from the grass where I have crumbled like a paper bag. I may not understand this yet, but I have to go on. Somehow this beauty is more horrible than the way things were yesterday. Like it's all a big tease. Any minute now the veil will be pulled back on the murderous glare of yellow eyes and teeth dripping with my already eviscerated guts. I'm dead and I don't know it.

That's all this is. It's so cruel. But I'm not one to hide from things. I harden up and pull myself up on my crutch.

The path between the trees is wide. The fruity ether glides down this channel. It is gentle and full of short grass. I take off my sneakers and let it touch my feet. Carefully stepping to feel out any obstacles at first. Finding none my pace becomes quicker, if not a little hobbled. The jacket begins to smell fecund in the hot sun. I look under the tree nearest me and see another watering can. Incredulous, I look around to see who is following me. There are bees. Some small songbirds. The rabbits as usual thought they were invisible until I looked at them square. Then they freeze as if accused. I lope under the tree and take my jacket off. Rinsing it as best I can, I wring it out and sling it over my shoulder. The water is cool and it pricks my hot red skin, running in tiny rivulets down my back.

There is something on the other side of this row. I can see a solid still form through the leaves. I poke my head out through the flowers and foliage. It is an empty workstation. My stomach leaps. Hanging from a hook on a pole attached to a sawhorse are a pair of overalls and also a table and several implements.

I crawl entirely out of the thick and make my way cautiously over to the setup. The overalls are dusty and warm. There is another watering can on the bench. At this point, if anyone catches me bathing with their watering can and stealing their overalls, it will be a small thing in comparison. If they are even real. If any of this is real.

I can't help but dance as much as my injuries will allow, leaning into my crutch, awkwardly back and forth from my right to my left like an idiot. I strip. I wash delicately with the watering can. There is a rag on the bench, and I use it to scrub my flesh. The stink of my open sewer cologne filters down off into the dirt and the perfume of the trees immediately clings on to me. My leg has not healed but appears to be healing. The suppuration has dried up some. Golden crystals of calcified pus lined the scratches before I washed. The pink flesh cooled in the streams from the can and looked to be a shade lighter and cleaner.

When I'm finished, I sit with my dick out in the sun. The grass on my bare ass, I wait to dry. The sun continues to march across the blue dome above without hurrying. The scented breeze caresses my legs and I feel the hairs, escaping the grasp of moisture, aloft and swaying with the games of the wind. I put on the old overalls. They are soft and substantial. They feel as though they are a hundred years old. My jacket is dry and I place it over my shoulders to protect myself from the lancing rays of the fiery light above. I feel my face. The whiskers are coming in thickly. I know there is a good amount of gray in them.

I lift my palm and stroke my fingers through my hair, what remains of it. I had had the most luxurious blonde curls as a young boy. They had faded over the years to a light silvery brown. The follicles remained strong at the temples and the neck. They had weakened appreciably over the crown and my scalp is visible, though I have not gone completely bald. The overall profile of the coiffure remained somewhat intact as though my hair were a rug that had been lit on fire and quickly put out with a glass of wine. I am nearly an old man.

I feel like a scarecrow in my new stolen field hand outfit. The overalls are a little big, the jacket is still a little small. The denims are mismatched. The jacket wears tough through the abuse it has suffered, still looks like it belongs at home in a shopping mall or at a discotheque on the back of a high seated lounge chair while its owner danced with the girls or got high in the bathroom. I look at the crutch I have been using. Something about it stands out to me as though in a new angle. There are the growth marks in a spiral around the body of the stick where a vine had wrapped itself and later died and turned to dust and come off like some scab or crust. It left behind a symbolic shaft, which I had been propping myself up with for some hours now without noticing the pattern.

As I crutch forward the sun slips lower in the sky. It feels like a waste to let it go, and truly I worry to sleep here. I worry that anything I experience in this transformation will melt away in the dark and that I will awake back in that old world. That more real place where I was once a master of my life and of the lives of many others. That I will be transported once again to that realm I know so well where I think I know how things work. I do not understand where I am but find it preferable by miles to the world I have come from. Both lives seem like a dream and the likelihood that I will wake up in either of them and not in some locked ward in a hospital, suspect.

The light grows paler and somehow the scent of the flowers changes with the light. The trees recognize the shift and put on their nighttime cologne, even more seductive than the golden breath of the daytime. This night cologne brings with it the whispers of nuance that can only be found in the dark where the feeling of touch and the odor of bodies and the sounds of sighs rule the senses. They know that as the bees become sleepy, the spaces within and among them will become a playground

—or a carnal slaughterhouse.

I hear a drum. It is faint at first. It rises slowly over the darkening horizon and is joined by a troupe of others. They work at times in unison; at others, they fill the empty spaces between each other or ramble all across each other. It is a primitive sound, but also the sound that evolution makes when it becomes aware of itself, begins to direct the flow of its own growth. I feel like I should be scared. How will these drummers take to a stranger? As hopeless as my life has become over the past four days, I have no choice but to investigate.

I follow the pounding with my feet, the clacking with my more sensitive eardrums. The sounds reverberate around the grove lost in the maze of reflective surfaces. Leaves twist upon being struck with the beat, as though dancing. The sound glances off a leaf in motion and twists in flight mimicking itself in two directions. I have to feel out the lower waves coming through the ground. My bare feet feel the tapping of thunder across the earth and I follow my feet. The waves crawl up my crutch and melt against my heart, which for the first time in a while seems to be beating with some rhythm other than the march of death.

I spill out across the grove in search of that growing sound. Every hobbled step brings me closer to a larger and larger sounding group. The timpani. The bongos. The sticks flying in whiplash strokes. The unmistakable sounds of voices calling out above this riding and rolling sound, praying to gods I've never heard of. Beseeching the future to come another day perhaps. The sounds transport me a good quarter mile before I get close enough to see what I have come so far only hearing. I stop within a hundred feet of the sound and approach with more caution, where my gut takes over and I feel apprehension like a cold brick inside.

The rhythms pull me. I creep in under a lemon tree to watch them closer. What I see is a village. There are many small cottages made from wood, grass, and mud. There are several larger buildings which appear to be built out of a mixture of wood beams and adobe walls. Lemon flowers are hanging in bunches everywhere.

The people are dressed in faded farm fashions from the early twenty first century. There is plenty of denim and innumerable patches sewn in place on knees and across buttocks. Their bare arms ripple with every strike on the tightly pulled skins. Coyote furs cover their backs and chests. Some wear fur gauntlets. Well, that explains what happened to the coyotes.

Peering past the group which includes not just drummers, but dancers and revelers of all kinds, I can make out gardens in the purple dusk light. There are pens with animals. Chickens run loose among the stomping feet, heckled back and forth by the toes of the boisterous group. Pecking at them in return when a foot comes too close, squawking and flapping when kicked by accident. Torches burn yellow and orange around the center of the action.

I think my hiding spot is pretty good and that I will have some more time to watch. Perhaps I can discern a little more about the overall temperament of the group. A casual anthropology while laying on my belly under a bush. I don't want to find out through experience if they practice any form of ritual sacrifice. They killed the coyotes, that does not mean they are my allies.

I am thinking all this when I realize they have not killed all the coyotes and that my gaze as it passes over and through the crowd has become locked in the hypnotic glare of a dog crouching at the feet of a child. How long we have been gazing longingly into each other's eyes? I don't know. As soon as I clock it, the spell is broken and that dog comes charging after me. My stomach flips.

I am too weak yet to run. Quick as my arms can pull, I go right up the tree over my head. This dog does not follow me into the branches but just stands below whining and making a sound that I suppose is meant to be a bark, though it comes off as more of a retching noise by my standards. It gathers the necessary attention from the group and several people come over to the tree. They are not shy about climbing it. I say, stay back. The dog growls up at me. I say, shut up dog! The dog gets quiet and there is a lone giggle from one of the children.

They murmur to each other while taking me in visually. It sounds a bit like Spanish. Eventually they all climb down the tree and go back to the village. A good sign. Then they set out a watering can and a bowl on a small wooden table. There is a large wooden handle sticking out of the bowl. My memory flashes back to the coyote fur between my teeth. I decide that I will come down, but that I will not eat anything until I have woken up here at least one more day.

I lead my own way down through the branches with my good foot. The dog, now silent, waits for me at the bottom. When I hit the ground he growls, but a child makes a noise at him and he stops. I can see markings of the coyote genome. It has large, pointed ears, and penetrating eyes of amber full of trapped souls. I come out of the tree and approach the group. The dog follows me from a distance of about six feet. The villagers give me space too but are more open.

I sit down and lean against a stump. several of them come and sit down near me. They offer me the stew, but my stomach once again turns, and my face gives away my condition. They pull back a little with the bowl. Look at each other and say, whisky.

Whisky? I say.

Whisky, they reply to me. A woman in overalls much like mine and a coyote fur choker turns in her seat to face behind her to a group nearest a large round building on stilts. Whisky! she shouts.

Within a couple minutes they present me with their version of whisky. It is unlike any whisky I've ever drank, but it is strong. I sip at it and their smiles are warm.

De donde vienes? asks the stocky girl in overalls.

I say, I don't know. I thought I came from Malibu, but I'm not sure exactly how far I've come. Seems so far that Malibu might be a stretch. It is a lot of words. They hear Malibu and their faces tell me what I have already surmised. There is no more Malibu.

Malibu? She says.

I nod and take a sip of the whisky, which is more like a pisco flavored with lemon blossoms.

She looks at me and her expression tells me she feels pity for me. I suppose because Malibu is a doomed word and I don't appear to know it. A few of the children have been playing with something like a frisbee. They stop and come and sit behind the adults. One of them says, you speak English?

I feel that kind of relief one feels unexpectedly over the buffet in a European hotel when amidst all the bon jour and crepes somebody vocalizes a perfunctory howdy. I turn and look at the boy. He has blonde hair and dark eyes. I say, yes, I speak English.

My grandmother speaks English, he says.

How long have your people lived here? I ask.

Grandmother came here just before the lights went out. When did you get here?

This morning, I say.

From Malibu? he asks.

No, I was in the grove for a few days before, but... I don't know how to describe to an eight-year-old what happened.

He says, but you came from the other place. Not before. Sideways.

I don't know, I say.

You did, he says. I can tell.

The whisky is doing its thing. It has a pleasant taste. Not too sweet, a little smoky but also delicate. I finish my cup and they bring me another one. The circle is composed of women and men. No one bothers to recite the tribal history for me. A man looks at me and says, you ate the coyote?

My stomach turns again. I did, I say.

This is good. You are here for a reason, he says. His clothes are different from the others.

Another voice says, did you see the Eagle?

At that point, exhausted from exposure, infection, starvation, and alienation, I succumb to what is later described to me as ataque de epilepsia. My head tips backward, my tongue shoots out like a dying fish, and I thrash so hard against the ground that a man has to hold my head while a much bigger woman holds my body still. They bring out the medicine woman of the tribe, and she spreads herbs around me where I lay. She lights beeswax candles with twine wicks and sets them around me in a seven-pointed star. She walks between worlds and around me all night long in a circle of prayer. All this I am told when I awake.