Some doing, is all it takes. A little dying, a diet of lying, and wordless abandon to the strands of thin light playing against the glass. Medicine to begin and end another one night sanguine stand in the sunkissed sand. Manual time, borrowed from a terribly broken watch. A certain number of steps and the grand secret of seductive grief.
Then the process complexifies and tends to vary, night-to-night. Last night, it was a sort of retrocausally prophetic stage play, my own shadow portraying young death himself. The day prior had been deliberately drenched in whiskey, too much, but enough to mine a well-founded fear and its accompanying abject terror. I was still in the late-stage dry blitz, slightly dizzy, and made much worse with my newly minted nightmare laid bare. Then the light ceased dancing and the room ceased to be.
The basis of the current application is adaptation.
I first made note of Dali’s method in 2017, but it never appeared to be practically useful until I came home and started digging through websites instead of books.
In a windowless room yesterday, a nearly pristine green notebook opened for the first time in seven years.
We’d gone back to the apartment in the morning to crash until afternoon – or rather, for you to crash. You had been drinking for most of the previous two days and sensed sloppiness on the horizon.
A spare.
My back was turned when the collision occurred, but I was looking at you, and the way your eyes didn’t move told me what mine missed. You weren’t looking down the lane, you were looking at me, grinning, holding out the large Coke I hadn’t wanted.
In the pocket of my jacket on the seat beside you was an unopened pint. In the bin beneath our scoring table was an empty one.
“My turn,” you said; tipsy, cocky.
I had won the coin toss when we arrived, so you were bowling with my left hand. I handed the cup back to you, frosty acid washing down my throat and into my chest, and picked up the fuchsia ball you’d chosen.
“Watch this,” you whispered, “motherfucker.”
I released the ball as awkwardly as expected, but the instant it touched the gleaming hardwood, I spun around, horrified, unable to watch what I knew I’d just done.
Your eyes went wide.
crash.
You laughed so hard that you squeezed the lid off the cup, and half its contents into your lap.
—
On the beach six hours later, the moon was nearly bright enough to write by. It had been quiet all night. You were sitting on the drier side of your folded jeans. I noticed something and turned – your eyes were already on mine and I barely caught the fleeting, struck flash behind them. Then you smiled, and broke into laughter again.
Remember anything.
What does it make you feel? What are the images which comprise the memory? What are the sounds? Is there a flavor? A scent? What is the dominant color? Is the light artificial? Is the scene in motion? Does the memory proceed by your narration to yourself? Is there any ambient sound? Does any part threaten to pull you away to some other memory? Any that you want to forget? Are there recognizable textures? Can you reach out, into your memory, to touch and feel anything?
Does any part of your body flashback with you? Do you resist it? Does it work?
Is there any noticeable weather? Is it relevant?
Do you remember the date? The time?
Were you hungry? Thirsty? Longing? Inebriated? In love? In pain?
What were you doing with your hands?
Was your pulse quick? Was your breath short?
Were you alone?
Who were you?
The waiting room was practically empty, not that you would have noticed anyone you didn’t trip over. You told me that you walked in slowly and made your way to the reception desk.
“Very slowly. It was hard to focus on where I was going and what I was doing. I did not want to look like I was fucking crazy in the ER.”
“Wow-” I began.
“Shut the fuck up,” you cut back in.
“Oh, you finished my sentence.”
You gave me that look. fuck
“I told the receptionist everything, she was cool about it.”
She tried to give you a clipboard and pen, to which you held up your late left hand. She apologized and gestured to the masses of empty chairs, desperate for company without typhus. A half-dead drunk was their only hope.
“Have a seat, they will call for you.”
You carefully found a chair against the wall, beneath a very large painting.
“I thought maybe I had come there to be crushed by that painting,” you told me. Fucking lunatic.
“It moves” had been the best you could come up with in the moment for what your left eye was apparently watching. “Static” was your attempt at describing what you only became aware of once you were alone with it. You told me that you initially thought the sound was a television “or something” to your left, but you looked and there was nothing. Covering your right ear, you realized that your left was hearing something else.
“Like they were on different frequencies. I do not know for sure when it started, but I did not notice it at all until then.”
You listened for a moment.
“It was not static. It was water. Or some kind of liquid, but it sounded like the ocean to me.”
You told me you turned your head to check whether the sound changed when you moved. Instead, you noticed another new twist.
“The smoke was still moving, but for a few seconds it looked like I was moving through it. Then it stopped. Or I stopped, it kept moving.”
You stood, trying to go in the direction you appeared to have been going before, but it didn’t work. The “smoke” kept twirling around, but not past you. You sat back down.
“How did you feel?”
“Curious, fascinated. But when I moved through it like that..”
You finished your sentence with your eyes accenting the loss at which you’d arrived.
You told me that it felt like you must have sat there for a long time, waiting. At some point you remembered your arm. You looked at your lifeless hand, turning it by the wrist when, to your left, came the sound of a wave.
“An ocean wave,” you specified, insisted.
“I got it,” I assured.
You remained still for another long moment out of time, trying to work this out. The “wave” had seemed to be approaching you, but the sound dissolved before it arrived. Trying simultaneously to listen, see, and feel, you found that you couldn’t think. You began breathing hard, you told me, and you suddenly realized that you could feel your heart beating, and things rapidly got out of hand.
“Every beat, the smoke moved, all of it at once. Almost like ink in water, in reverse. It was moving away from me, but was not, um, thinning. There was no empty space it was leaving behind.”
If you were capable of panic, this was the time. But not the place.
“I stood up and started towards the door. But after a couple steps, I felt pressure on my left hand, which I had just dropped when I got up. I took maybe five steps, and the pressure got unbearable. I stopped, and immediately I could hear another wave, louder and closer than before, like it was crashing into my eardrum. The smoke started moving too fast to make it out. And the pain in my hand put me on the floor. I guess I closed my eyes. When I opened them, I was already getting back to my feet and the pain was gone. And so was the smoke, and the sound.”
You got your legs under you again. Your left arm hummed. Your left eye was a little blurry. Your left ear was ringing very slightly – but they had all come back.
“How did you feel?”
“Pretty. Blitzed.”
“When did it begin?” I asked.
You told me you weren’t sure how many days it had gone on, but a protracted affair with Absolut finally reached its conclusion on the carpet of your living room, lying beneath your stereo. You were on your left side at the threshold of consciousness and could hear the music playing clearly. Then you heard your name. Then again, and a hand on your shoulder pulled you suddenly back to the waking world.