I Lost Myself in the Dark

Francisco appeared in my dream that night just as he said he would. He came to me in the black robes of the ferryman and led me by foot across the surface of holy water, silent yet demanding as he ever was in his lectures. Gently, he pried open my mouth and pressed his forefinger to the back of my tongue. A terrifying pleasure took over me as my limbs multiplied and my neck looped incessantly. I awoke feeling as if my blood had turned into a separate creature writhing inside of me. I awoke knowing I couldn’t turn him down.

To tell the truth, I didn’t understand his draw at first, the magic that drew in so many mute-toned philosophy majors and otherwise quick-witted young women. His face, though aged, was not worn down by the struggles of life, it is true, but his natural flirtation and easy arrogance made him all too familiar to me. Child of the 60s, free love baby. Please. As if I hadn’t seen enough old hippies who took too much LSD and thought they saw Heaven. Or Hell. Or whatever great blinding light of the Universe we all want so desperately to believe in. Sex and faith in a couple of lowbrow scrawlings, that’s what Francisco Infante was selling. I despised him, despised him even as he sought me out away from his sea of admirers, approached me with manicured eyebrows so pointedly arched.

He told me, “You’ve got what it takes to leave this life behind.”

I am the bastard daughter of a bastard father who did a dying woman wrong. I have spent my life surrounded by conmen and thieves, ununiformed businessmen who will sell just about any bullshit to a woman in order for her to center her life around them. Francisco was lazy, I thought, with his life-altering promises. As if every dipshit with a driver’s license and a superiority complex doesn’t ask you to run away with him, doesn’t promise you milk and honey, and leave you with some deteriorating apartment and a surly toddler bound for a life of neglect. I abhorred his familiar charm, the banality of his mystical claims and whispers that I would understand by the time the morning came. I have no time for false idols and I would lose no sleep over a man such as this one.

I awoke knowing I couldn’t turn him down.

Francisco’s classes, the ones he offered to the general public at an otherwise abandoned building in a rather undesirable part of town, were large and unruly. Desperate unshaven men sat on the sidelines with a blunt pencil and paper torn out of a notebook, while women I was sure I had seen smoking grass as I walked to my lectures sat close to the front, staring at Francisco with unbreaking concentration. I felt like a fool the first time I went and continued feeling a fool until the day Francisco, who had not spoken to me since that first fateful day he promised me my world would change, met my gaze with his sharp green eyes. 

He pulled me aside after class. “My dear,” he said in a low voice, “I see your distress in such a field of low energy. There’s no reason to suffer in silence, not when I can see your progress far exceeds that of anyone else here. I can tell you are ready for ascension. I hope you’ll consider something more suitable for your potential.” With this last magnificent declaration, he forced into my hand a piece of stationery with a hastily-written address upon it. The location, I inferred, of his more intimate sessions. 

You must understand that at this point I fully believed I had not been charmed by Francisco—I thought him as hackneyed as ever. His explanations were full of cliches I had heard from countless men before him and, more often than not, I found him as useless as I originally thought him to be. Moreover, I am not one to be easily swayed by something as simple as a dream, no matter how strange. I am not a fan of Freud and find Jung equally tiresome. Even so, ever since that night I had felt something alien yet familiar growing inside me, crawling urgently up my throat and threatening to envelop my tongue. More and more, I felt my skin was sheddable, and I knew that if I did not seek an answer to my newfound state I would slip away from myself completely. It was not, as I was to find out, an uncommon sensation after talking to Francisco.

The first thing we did in our private sessions—a group of about eight students, six of whom were women and the other two of which were insufferable—was change our names. To travel outside of this world and into the next, Francisco told us, we needed to make ourselves transparent. Transient. Anonymous. Drily, I asked him if I should give up all my worldly possessions while I was at it, and thus, with only a quiet huff from our own sacred carpenter, earned the name Magdalena. It was fitting, I felt. I had, I believed, become a mother of something undefined in that small and musty room.

I cannot tell you the names of my other companions, although their names have undoubtedly been changed again by now. To say their names would be a betrayal of our mutual understanding; the people of those names are long gone, replaced by new unknown figures dancing across the realms. To mention any names other than my own would be to invoke the dead, to call back spirits that cannot, for my own sake, exist anywhere but where they currently are. I can only tell you that all of our names were extravagant and individual and they belonged to us. They were our roots, our grounding points, for my earlier remark about giving up worldly possessions was not far from Francisco’s true demands—which were, of course, to abandon our former lives and dedicate our time to his practices. 

What made us do it? I cannot explain why any more than I can explain the particular being that was growing inside of me. I could speculate that it was the importance he gave us, the sense of meaning in the world, but there are many people who have tried to convince me of some great importance, and all but Francisco have failed. I could say he reminded me of my father, but the only similarity between the two came from the rages Francisco flew into, not unlike my father’s drunken tirades, after one of us became, in his eyes, too involved with our physical forms. Poison, he’d call us, killing him quickly with our insolence. Yet how, once he moved past these moments, did he love his killer. In truth, Francisco was more of a mother to us all; we clamored at his breast. 

There was one game Francisco made us play that I remember above all else, one that he claimed would activate our dreaming energy in the daylight. One by one, he would call us into a room with no windows and the lights off. As an added layer of protection, he would tie a bandana around our eyes. We covered our ears with our hands and, with our senses properly restricted, Francisco would throw a silver button somewhere on the ground. He would leave the room for two to three hours. If we had found the button by then, he would declare us on the pathway to energetic health and let us resume our other daily practices. If not, he would silently shut the door on us once more and leave us for four hours more. If, after that, we still had not found the button, we were not to talk or interact with Francisco or any other students for a week—a painful endeavor, as we had at this point no other forms of contact in our lives. 

“The key,” Francisco said to us again and again, “is to search for the button using your dreaming eye. How do you view things in dreams? Everything is constantly changing, so you cannot possibly look for your desired object as you would in such a sedentary plane as the waking world. Try harder and you will find colors in the dark you are so reticent to see in the daylight. Look for the colors, damn it!”

I was an excellent learner; I knew exactly what Francisco meant. There were not only colors in the dark, but spirits too—small beings with almost cartoon-like faces that led me outside the room and into unexplored territories. More often than not I would pretend not to find the button so that I could spend more time in the dark room, escaping the limits of my body and putting that aggravating, floundering creature inside of me at temporary rest. Francisco was my savior. Francisco was my liberator. How foolish I was to doubt him all that time ago when, thanks to his help, I could now surpass the silly little world of my father and all the men like him. I began to think highly of my mother, whom I supposed must have seen a glimpse of the magnificence I was discovering as she wheezed on her deathbed. Death, Francisco had told me, was just another way of transcending this astral plane. 

The days blurred together with my newfound family, though it is true I thought less and less of my companions as time flew by. Truly, I was far more advanced than they were, or else they too would be spending as much time as possible in the dark. Why should I rely on my inferiors to help me with a task I was perfectly capable of performing alone? More and more I found myself slipping away from my daily tasks and locking myself once more in the dark. I expected, of course, some punishment from Francisco for this transgression, but to my surprise the one time Francisco caught me away from my peers he only smiled approvingly. I felt joy rise up in my chest. I had forgotten he too understood what I was experiencing. 

That is how they found me, sometime later. Locked in the dark, my corporeal form freeingly neglected.  How long had it been since I last saw Francisco, they asked me. It was impossible to tell. He was dead, anyhow. I grinned at the pig-nosed social worker who told me, excited for him. Died meditating in some secret rented apartment with the internal heat cranked up to 90 degrees, and didn’t he know better? I laughed. Yes, Francisco knew better, far better than even I had thought he had. I saw the social worker furrow his brows with concern, resulting in an absurd expression that made me laugh even harder.  

I asked for my companions. They were gone, the social worker said, and I wouldn’t be seeing them any time soon, but he was going to drop me off somewhere safe and warm with people who would take care of me. It wasn’t necessary, I assured him, I was happier here. The social worker didn’t say anything, just guided me to a truck full of medical supplies. It was ridiculous. It was bizarre when I was far from unwell. I humored him, let him lead me to the backseat like a child, cackling all the while. How very stupid. How very normal.

The monsters in the hospital took everything with me. Pumped me up full of drugs I can’t stop taking, watched me every moment to ensure I stayed put. They dragged me around with expressions of disdain—no one hates patients more than doctors and nurses. Is this health? My body plagues me. My fingertips burn and turn to talons. My head weighs down my neck. One month I was there, three years I have been suffering. Francisco, where are you? I have been tapping the walls, hoping your spirit will come through and teach me how to see again. The dark is just the dark now, a chilled and joyless place. Bring me back to the glory I once held.

I know it is possible. It must be possible. The way I am, I am not living, but being possessed. Yes, I feel my blood turn against me again, no medicine can cure it. I am a part of another creature, one I cannot seem to escape. It’s scraping me away, it’s sucking me out. I need a way to return to that place I once loved, it is the only way. I cannot handle where I am now, I want to leave it behind.