The Dangerous Art Of Mind Trading

“Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.”- Hassan I Sabbah

I have witnessed many things. A few come to mind: the passing of listless seasons, the erosion of urban walls, the flickering of fluorescent lights, the scuttling of myriad bugs, the day vanquishing the night and the night vanquishing the day in an eternal cycle of mutual triumph and defeat, and the death of evanescent things, forms, facts, ideas, lusts, hates, and loves. In a dream, I once saw a man spontaneously combust, turn into a pile of mottled and sulfurous dust, and then rise out of the dust as an iridescent butterfly. I think that man was probably me, and the butterfly was a possible form I could have taken eons ago or eons from now. I have witnessed the rise and fall of political leaders and political upheavals, the rise and fall of subversive ideas in my very own subversive mind, and the rise and fall of bread once (I don’t know how it deflated like a punctured tire). I once witnessed a clock go backwards for a day. I once witnessed a woman giving birth on a remote, rustic trail. I once saw a small child pop a cornucopia of soporifics by a river. The child ended up going into a coma. She never returned. I witnessed that just a couple months ago. Lastly, I have witnessed the dangerous art of mind trading firsthand.

The first time I witnessed the trading of a few minds was outside a music venue called “Din’s Dungeon,” a place for wastrels, scoundrels, punks, eccentrics, and other people who love living on the fringe. It was a Friday night. The moon was languidly roaming the sky, and the clouds were coming together for some unknown procession only the clouds knew about. I was hanging out with Raymond and Schultz, two of my best friends since the good old days of high school. We went to Din’s Dungeon to bare witness to the uber-heavy and plodding riff-magick of “Sonic Melee,” a hairy and burly band composed of wannabe lumberjacks. The gimmick was appealing, and the tortured riffs appeased our souls. When they triumphantly broke into the song, “Cleaning Out The Cobwebs In The Haunted Cabin,” the three of us banged our heads submissively to the entrancing power of their mighty, four-chord doom-n’-gloom. After the all-encompassing auditory onslaught, I went to the washroom to release the fluids of the night from my beer-battered body.

In the dirty and fetid washroom, two guys sporting cliché flaming skull tattoos were doing some drugs. The thin white lines contained all the magic of narcotic ecstasy and all the sorcery of addiction. They were reveling in the stuff like stupefied cattle on a field made of glowing grass. I knew them from somewhere. I had a deja-vu right there and then, but I didn’t want to think about it too much. The alcohol had deadened the quicksilver-quality of my philosophical musings. I just wanted to take a piss and leave. Such a washroom was no place to loiter in. It reeked of something supremely foul.

As I was vigorously releasing into the defaced urine-receptacle, two other men came into the sordid washroom and struck up a conversation with the cokeheads. Initially, these two men wanted to know if these guys were holding a little extra junk. When the cokeheads with ugly, garish tattoos said they didn’t, the two men changed the direction of the conversation. “Do you guys want to swap the cerebral goods then?” asked one of the men. There was an awkward silence, and then one of the cokeheads sheepishly told the two men they didn’t. “We’re afraid to do that,” responded the sinewy cokehead with a large tongue piercing. “We like narcotic thrills, but we aren’t willing to go to that extreme. Sorry. We will just stick with the white trails of bliss.” I could then hear one of the other men scouring into his pockets, ravenously, skittishly, like a groundhog burrowing into the soft flesh of the earth at the first sign of a predator. The man then pulled out a thick wad of cash, or at least it sure sounded like one. “We don’t expect a trade for free, gents,” said the confidant proprietor of the Herculean wad of cash. “We’re willing to pay you quite well for, oh, I don’t know…a one-week trade. We are willing to pay you two-thousand bucks each.” Another awkward silence ensued while the stoned men wrapped their heads around the warped proposal. Because they were both broke and living like junkie nomads in a terrain made up of ominous buildings and winding streets that never reached a definitive surcease, the two men agreed to take the cash and, as the mysterious mind traders say, “swap”. Now just one obstacle stood in the way of the consummation of this puzzling business deal: me. I sensed they wanted me to leave. I was obviously ok with this. Quickly, I zipped up my fly and left the washroom without making eye contact with the men.

When I made it back to Raymond and Schultz by the stage, I felt compelled to tell them about what I had heard in the washroom—the notorious washroom that is allegedly occupied by a dozen or so dead, enraged, and drunk souls. Raymond and Schultz listened carefully to my slightly slurred words. After my recap of the events that transpired in the washroom, Schultz said, “More people seem to be initiated nowadays into the art. I hear it is imperative that you trust the person you want to trade minds with. Without some kind of mutual trust set in place, the whole thing can probably get really ugly. I am talking about schizophrenia, paranoia, and psychic disease on a massive, unprecedented scale here. I don’t want to take part. No thank you.” Raymond agreed with Schultz by nodding his head and offering him a beer for his words of wisdom.

Around this time, we all decided to call it a night. My mind was swimming in the black sea of inebriation, and the distance between the coastline of sobriety and myself seemed to be ever widening. We each had one last beer and said our goodbyes. Raymond and Schultz split a cab. I opted to stumble home.

As I stumbled down a street that ran parallel to the street Din’s Dungeon was on, I happened to glance down a back alley that was populated with the two narco-addicts and the two mind traders. A sobering voice in my head—the voice of reason—told me to keep stumbling towards the cushy and comfy bed that awaited my arrival. But another voice was at odds with this sobering voice. This was the voice of curiosity. “You heard the conversation in the washroom, you now see these folks in an alley, and you’re genuinely curious about this mind trading business,” said the infinitely stronger voice. “Go and see what is going on. But don’t let them see you. Be surreptitious. Consider this an instance of investigative journalism. Go get the dirt.” Without question or regret, I obviously yielded to the infinitely stronger voice of curiosity.

I moved a block past the alley, moved down a windswept alley that smelled like damp shoe leather and rotten feta cheese, found a ladder leading to an old fire escape, stealthily and drunkenly made my way to the fourth level of the fire escape, and then tiptoed my way around to the western side of the building where, from a heightened vantage point, I could see the four gents discussing the imminent swapping of cerebral goods. I pulled my black hood over my head just to ensure I wouldn’t be seen by anyone. I looked like a jaguar up there. Urban jaguar of the squalid city, I decided. I was perched there for curiosity’s sake. Was it investigative journalism or investigative foolishness? Who the fuck knows.

After a few moments of what seemed like casual and meandering chitchat, one of the men who wanted to trade minds pulled out a small, compact, black box with two wires attached to it. The wires had little suction cups at the end of them. “Let’s get down to it,” he said. “All you guys need to do is attach this suction cup to your third eye, that spot between your brows where the Hindu bindi is placed, and I will do the rest.” One of the narco-addicts grabbed the wire, placed the suction cup where he was told, and looked at his friend as though he was about to go on a roller-coaster ride through hyperspace, or rappel down the side of a cosmic mountain. “So I place the suction cup here, and then what? Where does my mind go? Or what becomes of my mind?” The other trader idly standing by answered the question, but I couldn’t pick up the words. He was talking in a low, guttural voice. “That’s right,” said the other trader. “Everything my psychic compatriot says to you is true. Are you ready?” The anxious narco-addict shook his head. He was ready, or at least as ready as he ever was going to be. Then I saw a radiant, bluish light briefly emanate from the box, a transient surge, a short-lived electronic convulsion. Then the other two men did the same thing. A few words were exchanged after that, but nothing more. The four men left the dark alley just like businessmen leaving a boardroom. An eerie silence hovered around the spot of the exchange. A few cats came out of the darkness to feed. The wind picked up. The dim lights of the alley became dimmer for a second. More cats came out to feed. Nothing more happened.

In hindsight, I guess I expected more. The “swap” seemed totally run-of-the-mill, commonplace, predictable. An anticlimax sealed the whole deal. It was almost like the exchange was a trial run for the real deal. It was almost like it was staged, or acted out for an invisible camera crew. If mind trading looked like that on the surface all the time, who would actually be interested in trying it? A small box…lame suction cups…a bluish light…business as usual…no one would want to be apart of that, ever. There is nothing revolutionary about it. Might as well go for electroshock therapy even though you may not need it. Even that would potentially be more exciting. More dangerous.

But my curiosity wasn’t sated after that letdown in the alley. I wanted to know more about the art, who invented it, why it was so risqué, and why it was known as the “ultimate kick”. I went into cyberspace. First google. Then I typed in “mind trading”. I was lead to a Wikipedia page. The page didn’t contain that much information, but there were a couple blurbs about it. This is what Wikipedia had to say:

“Mind Trading involves the swapping of personalities for either a short or extended duration of time. It takes place with the help of a little black box. Allegedly the Hasbro toy company developed this little black box to help children with speech impediments. Right before it was destined to go onto the toy shelves, a black market entrepreneur pilfered it. This mysterious entrepreneur, a studious man well educated in arcane and occult matters, then turned the black box into a new-fangled device for the drug-crazed counterculture. The man is dead now. Some say it was suicide, some say it was a homicide.

Some reputable psychonauts say ‘mind trading’ or ‘psychic swapping’ is a kick that surpasses the most sublime of highs, but they also say it can be highly dangerous. Some say it’s sometimes hard to get back into the body one is given at birth. Others say they feel dissociated from the body given to them at birth after participating in swaps that last for months. Some have committed suicide over their mind trading addictions. Other ‘hardcore swappers’ have never returned to the body they acquired at birth.

It is recommended that no one gets involved in this art without proper guidance from an experienced swapper.”

After finding these small blurbs, I found other websites and blogs that completely derided the comments made on Wikipedia. These other websites and blogs said the connections made between the Hasbro toy company and a mysterious entrepreneur could be nothing but false, tasteless, and nonsensical at best. One bold blogger even unabashedly said, “Wikipedia is becoming a haven for disinformation and lies. The writers are probably CIA agents and capitalistic lobbyists who want to control the information flow. They’re definitely diluting the binary pool. If you know what’s good for you, don’t go there anymore for your information needs.” On another site called, “The Genesis of Absurdity,” I found countless blogs that deftly made connections between the mind traders’ black box and the black monolith found in Stanley Kubrick’s visionary movie, “2001: A Space Odyssey”. Another website said that the Sumerians designed the black box using the principles of sacred geometry, and that the Sumerians themselves received the principles of sacred geometry from the Hyperboreans (a wacky, left-field theory indeed). Another website advertised strange accessories for the black box, and even offered training in the art for a ludicrous amount of money. Another website was simply filled with useless information, spam, jetsam and flotsam, and other things only the resident deity of cyberspace could possibly make sense of.

After scouring these websites for days looking for a shard of information that wasn’t unfounded, useless, or just plain asinine, I simply gave up and decided to pursue other things. I went to the kitchen one morning, got myself a cup of coffee, sat down with the paper, and randomly opened the paper to a section. The headline on the page said, “Two Venture Capitalists Die Under Mysterious Circumstances”. This obviously piqued my interest, but I shouldn’t have read on. Pandora’s box is hard to close once it is opened.

Turns out that the two men who came into the washroom after me—the men who proposed the trade—were found face down in a muddy bank alongside the Red River. Nothing appeared to be wrong or out-of-sorts with their bodies, but the authorities did find strange markings on the palms of their hands. “Cryptic symbols seem to be etched onto the skin,” reported officer John Volar, the first officer at the scene. The authorities were also ambivalent as to whether this was a case of foul play or a drug overdose, so they were going to leave it up to the forensics team and the autopsy specialists to solve the rest. “This is an odd incident,” commented the police chief at the end of the article. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this one.”

After reading the article, I felt extremely dizzy. I had to lie down right away before the world started to spin too fast. Vertigo and anxiety. Anxiety and vertigo. Thoughts bounced around in my head like particles in the Large Hadron Collider. I knew too much. I saw too much that night. I knew about the trade and the swap, the black box, the suction cups, the money, everything. I was the pitch-black jaguar perched on the fire escape. I saw it all. I knew that the two bodies the authorities had found by that filthy river were not occupied by venture capitalists anymore. They were junkies! They were just poor junkies with poor vexing habits who took the bait and ended up dead. I threw a blanket over my eyes. I didn’t want to face the spinning world, or even the mind that imparted to me the perception of a spinning world…my mind! I wanted to use psychic white-out on my thoughts, experiences, and memories. I asked the inner voice of reason, “Should I go to the police with what I know, or should I remain in the shadows?” I didn’t know. I certainly didn’t want a secret society of mind traders finding out that I leaked some crucial information to the police. I didn’t want them on my ass. But at the same time, I questioned their very existence. Paranoia, vertigo and anxiety. Anxiety, vertigo and paranoia. I had to get someone else’s opinion on all of this.

Schultz answered the phone and coughed. I could tell someone else was in the room with him. It must have been a woman. “Schultz,” I said with a panic-stricken inflection. “I got some things to tell you about.” I proceeded to tell him about my spying escapade, my research on mind trading, the article in the newspaper, and the dizzy feeling which had invaded my skull. There was silence on the other end. Schultz coughed for the second time. I could tell he was mulling over my story. He was collating all the information I had madly thrown in his direction at 8:35am. “Well,” he finally said. “Maybe it is best to go to the authorities with what you know. It could bring you some solace in the long run. Besides, maybe the authorities are now conducting a murder investigation. All the information they could procure from witnesses would be helpful in solving the case. I say go to the closest precinct and spill your guts. Maybe you could get a free doughnut at the end of it all.” As always, I agreed with Schultz and his wise and timely advice. It was like he channeled the ancient Taoist master, Lao Tzu, when he talked. “Thanks, Schultz,” I said with a calmer inflection. “I think I am going to head down to that precinct and spill my guts.”

I left later that morning for the police station. It was partly cloudy. The nimbus clouds looked ornery up there in the eternal sky of inimitable blue. It was also garbage day. Everyone had their garbage neatly pilled by the front of their driveways. Someone was even throwing out a dilapidated pinball machine called, “Mind Invaders”. As I made my way around a bend in the road, I noticed two people having an argument about the value of their house. These two people were trying to get their point across while they sipped black coffee and took their garbage to the front. No one was destined to win such an argument. No one wins an argument when there are petty distractions around. When I walked past the both of them, they briefly stopped yelling at each other, nodded at me, and then carried on with their completely specious argument about value where there was clearly none (the house looked like it had survived a couple civil wars). Eventually I made it to an intersection. Very few people were around at that time. I noticed the nimbus clouds again. A car zoomed past. The little, luminous man trapped in the black box then beckoned me to cross. I walked on. I wondered about that little, luminous man as I passed underneath him. In the near distance, I could see the boring police station I was destined to set foot in. Right across the street from the police station, I could see the church an unknown mason made who knows how long ago. It had a colossal spire on it. Many people had probably confessed their sins there. Conversely, many sins probably attached themselves to people there.

“I believe I have some information pertaining to a possible murder investigation,” I said to a blond-haired receptionist with droopy blue eyes. She looked at me, then over my shoulder, and then she looked at me again. “Which one?” she lazily asked. I told her about the two dead cokeheads down by the Red River, and the cryptic symbols on their lifeless hands. “Just a minute,” she said. “I will call the detective who is now working on this case.” She picked up the phone as though it was a meaningless weight she refused to bear. She said a few words to the disembodied voice on the other end, looked at me, looked over my shoulder, and then looked at me again. When she put the phone back on the receiver, she looked like she was finally free of a thousand burdens. “Have a seat, sir,” she lazily said. “The detective will be right with you.” I thanked her and took a seat.

As I meticulously looked around the room, I noticed a few strange things that were not too subtle. In fact, these “strange things” were incontestably apparent once the eyes had latched onto them. I first noticed all the crooked pictures in the waiting area. None of them were straight. It was almost as if the building had experienced a slight tremor a few years ago and everyone had forgotten to straighten the pictures afterwards. I also noticed that none of the pictures had anything to do whatsoever with law enforcement. One picture contained a Dada-esque collection of puzzling and contradictory imagery; another picture was reminiscent of Frida Kahlo’s pioneering work in portraitures; another picture just contained pointless lines that were of various lengths; and another picture showed a baby being swaddled by a clown. As I veered my head downwards and looked at the carpet, I noticed its filthiness: grime was attached to every thread, a few scattered cigarette butts were hanging around like corpses on a minefield, and little pieces of paper were strewn about. I thought to myself: “Where am I? This can’t be a respectable police station. Who runs this place? Do my tax dollars pay for this?” Suddenly, out of nowhere, a shadow appeared on the carpet I was unequivocally revolted by. It grew larger as it moved towards me. When I looked up, my eyes were welcomed to a gnarled hand that looked about as ancient as a large, coniferous tree.

“Hi. My name is Detective Peter Sellers. What’s your name?”
“David Neufeld.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Neufeld. Please, Dave, come to my office.”

I was escorted down a hallway that had at least five mirrors in it. As I walked past open offices that were all homogenous and drab, I noticed that the inhabitants of these offices were also homogenous and drab. Everyone wore beige suits with black ties. The haircuts were all identical and typical. I wondered if they were all working on the same case. They probably were. Eventually I reached the detective’s office at the end of the hallway. “Please come in,” he said jovially. “Have a seat.” When I stepped inside the clean office, the detective locked two locks and pulled out a key for a third lock on the door. “Please don’t be alarmed. I like privacy. I am also kind of paranoid. You never know who wants access, you know what I am saying?” Oddly enough, I did.

Once in my seat, I perused the room and found it to be at odds with the rest of the precinct. This room was clean and the furniture was positioned in a harmonious fashion. The pictures hung on the walls made sense vis-à-vis the nature of the business being conducted there. On the detective’s dustless mahogany table, there was a little picture frame with these words contained inside:

“I asked the boy beneath the pines.
He said, ‘The master’s gone alone
Herb picking somewhere on the mount,
Cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown.’”- Chia Tao (777- 841)

I asked the detective about the words in the frame, and, more importantly, the meaning behind them. After the detective finished locking the third lock, he sat down and said, “The master has left us. The master of justice has left us. We’re now left with the hypocrites, thieves, scoundrels, and backstabbers. They’re running amok like rabid werewolves looking for fresh, virginal meat. You see, the master can no longer control things from the mount. The master can only watch if he wants to. Now we have to make the best of a crappy situation.” I thought about the philosophical thrust of the detective’s words for a moment, and then said, “If the words inevitably remind you of the crappy situation you face day in and day out, why do you keep them in front of you on a daily basis?” Smoothly, the detective pulled out a cigarette from his jacket pocket and sparked it up. “You see, young lad,” he calmly responded. “I still have dreams about the master returning from the mount with medicine between his toes and in his hands. I haven’t given up hope. I have a feeling he will one day descend from the mist and bring back justice, peace, and altruism to Mankind. I truly feel this will happen, but maybe not for a long time. In the interim, we’re going to have to deal with large swaths of bullshit coming at us from countless angles. We have fallen into the Dark Age, the Kali Yuga. We just have to wait it out.” The detective took another hearty drag. Then he leaned forward and asked me, “So, what do you know about those junkies found dead by the river?”

I told him everything. I told him about the bathroom conversation between the four men. I told him about the drunken spying. I told him about the black box, the suction cups which attached to their third eyes, the anticlimax that ended the business transaction, the research I did, the Sumerians, the black monolith in the Kubrick film, the disinformation being disseminated on Wikipedia. I told him about the dizzy feeling and the paranoia. I told him about my sneaking suspicions and inklings regarding the existence of a secret society that controlled the mind trading black market. I even told him about Schultz, the wise friend who told me to come to the precinct. For some reason or another, I think I even told him about the couple who argued about the value of their house.

Detective Peter Sellers—an inquisitive man who stood above his peers in every single way— patiently took in my story. I could tell he was really allowing my words to sink in. He was analyzing them as they came out of my mouth, but he didn’t jump to any hasty conclusions. He allowed everything to find its rightful place within his shrewd detective’s mind. When I finished explicating everything to him, he walked to the door and pulled out a fourth key for the door. He locked that one as well.

“Your story is very interesting, young lad,” the detective proclaimed. “It told me a lot about you, even though you didn’t tell me that much about yourself in a direct manner. It told me that you have the jaguar’s mind. You have the unassuming, stealth eye of the ninja sleuth. It told me that you have what it takes to become a really royal detective. I will tell you something I don’t tell many people: I know a lot about this mind trading business. You’re right too. You’re more than right. A secret society is definitely involved in the art. I think they may have even invented the art centuries ago. They are probably using it for occult and egregious purposes. This means people like us have to be careful. We see past the lies in cyberspace. We’re like conscientious jaguars who can see the truth. This means we have to stick together. Here…I want to show you something.”

The detective pulled out yet another key from his pocket. This time he opened a secret compartment in his mahogany table. Slowly, carefully, with the precision of a scientist handling a volatile substance in a vial, the detective pulled out a black box with two wires and two suction cups attached to it. “Here it is,” he said quietly enough just so no eavesdropper could possibly hear. “This is the infamous mind swapper used by the psychics, psychonauts, and psychotics out there. This is the real deal. There are cheap knock-offs on the market, but this is the real unit. This thing can give you access to another person’s most intimate psychological recesses for years on end, if need be. But that’s absolutely dangerous. You never come back from such a vacation from yourself. Your personality disintegrates into nothing or shrivels into something resembling a water-starved pea. This is why I lock this puppy up. Nikola Tesla probably did that to some of his mind-bending inventions too. This is just too dangerous for this reality. Remember, this is the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age.”

Before I could investigate the baroque piece of psychic technology like an adolescent would a dead ladybug, there was a stern knock at detective Sellers’ door. “It’s John Volar,” said the squeaky voice on the other side. “It’s time to go visit the forensics team.” Quickly and without hesitation, the detective put the mind-swapping device back in the secret compartment. He couldn’t possibly have let anyone see him with it. That would’ve been downright scandalous. “I will be right there,” the detective said to Mr. Volar. Before unlocking the excessive amount of locks, the detective turned to me and whispered, “Mr. Neufeld, you’re a stand-up gentlemen of the highest order. You’re one of God’s best and brightest. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Before our paths diverge like forks in the road, I want you to take this.” Detective Peter Sellers reached into his left sock and pulled out a Bersa Thunder .380. “Take this gun without any questions asked. Don’t worry, Mr. Neufeld. This is not as illegal as you think. You may need this down the road.” I trusted the detective, so I put the gun in my right sock. It felt cool against my skin. Really cool. “If you ever need anything Dave, and I mean anything, just come by this precinct and ask for me,” the amiable detective said right before he opened the door. He even gave me a subtle wink before I passed by the droopy-eyed receptionist and exited the building.

On the way home to my apartment, I crossed through a field littered with styrofoam cups, obliterated trinkets and toys, and the prophylactic remnants of young lust. There were birds there; many winged ones. They seemed to be squawking about the lack of fodder, but in reality I didn’t know what the fuss was all about. I didn’t know the “collective bird mind” any more than I knew the “collective mind of humanity”. I was just as lost as anyone else roaming the world at 2:17pm. Seeing as I had a gun nestled between my skin and my sock, I figured I was more lost than ever. What was I doing in a field filled with hungry birds? What was I doing on a planet filled with hungry people, pestilence, war, anger, love, rain, strange psychic devices, newspapers, dreams, bathrooms, drugs, and more hungry people? I simply did not know.

Instead of catching up with Raymond and Schultz to see a mid-afternoon show at Din’s Dungeon (I believe an operatic klezmer band called, “The Viscounts of Vagaries,” were playing at 3:00pm), I opted to go home in order to have a nap. I was incredibly tired, and I thought some rest would have done me some good. I lethargically climbed the stairs to my third floor apartment, fumbled with my keys until I found the right one, found the soft pillow, and fell immediately into a dream. In the dream, I was a man who spontaneously combusted in a strange bazaar near the outskirts of a nonexistent town. The merchants collected my sulfurous ashes in a beautiful glass jar, and placed this jar at a shrine near the center of the bazaar. They sang to my ashes through the night. Their songs were enchanting, haunting, and mystical. Everyone took turns singing. Even the animals had their chance to intone their obscure songs of primitive longing and wonder. In the morning, when all the animals and merchants had fallen into a deep slumber, I arose out of the mottled ash as an iridescent butterfly. All their songs were magically harnessed in my wings. I flew to a distant shore where all the butterflies went to flutter. I went there to go into a different dream.

I woke up slowly. It was dark. There was movement. Two forms. One form was about as tall as my bookcase, and the other was slightly shorter. Initially, I thought they were maybe in my apartment looking for some pharmaceuticals and cash, but I was wrong. One of them vehemently approached me with a long, metallic wire of some kind and attempted to put it around my neck. Man, I kind of wished it was just a nightmare, but it wasn’t. “Shit,” I said to myself. “This is the real deal.” I tried to defend myself by kicking at the shadowy assailant with my legs. It didn’t work. The attacker had me pinned, and he was quite a bit stronger than I. He really wanted that metallic wire to asphyxiate me. I thought for sure I was done for. I thought for sure I was going to travel to that distant shore really soon. Just as the assailant had the bloodstained wire around my neck, I managed to knee the shadowy figure right in the testicles. When he fell back off the bed in anguish, his partner in crime attempted to pulverize my skull with a sculpture from my living room. He just missed, and I mean that. I felt the force of his swing brush past my ear. Close call.

Miraculously, just seconds before the first assailant got off the floor and the second assailant took a second swing, I managed to swiftly rise out of my bed, grab the gun from my sock, and take a shot at the guy wielding my sculpture. I heard the bullet move right through his cephalic region. I am not sure where in the cephalic region. I just heard it. It was around there. He fell to the ground immediately. He was dead. Before the other guy got up for some vengeance, I put one bullet in his chest and the other in his right cheek. I felt some of his blood splatter on me. I felt the adrenaline pumping. The reality of it all was electric. I had done what I had to. I had stepped out of a dream into a murder scene, and I was the murderer.

When I turned on my bedside lamp, I investigated the two slain men in my apartment. The first bullet had managed to go directly through the bridge of the nose of the sculpture-wielding man. A thick, viscous blood poured from the back of his head onto the ventilation grate. The second bullet had entered the diaphragm of the first assailant and come out the other side. The third bullet entered through his cheek and must have ricocheted off his jaw. It looked really ugly. The bullet eventually managed to exit the top of his skull. His blood was equally as thick, viscous, and real.

With rubber gloves and a big gulp of air, I investigated the rest of their bodies. I noticed that cryptic symbols were etched onto their palms. In the right jacket pocket of the second assailant, I found the mind trading device and a missive from an anonymous person. The note said, “Kill this man. He is a threat to us. He is a jaguar.” On the other side of note was my address. I quickly crumbled up the note and tossed it into the corner of my room.

I had to leave, but I had nowhere to go. I had to disappear from the world and turn into a shadow. I had to be a silent witness to the events that surrounded me. I couldn’t draw that much attention to myself. I had to dissolve into nothingness, and yet remain a form that could witness everything. I had to be a paradox. I had to survive. I had to learn from the choices I had made. The bathrooms I have entered and the triggers I’ve pulled have taught me more than all textbooks in the world. I had to leave. I had to dissolve. I had to witness.

A couple days after the authorities found the two dead men in my apartment, the authorities also found detective Peter Sellers face down in a pool of his very own blood. He was holding the black box. The suction cups had been severed off. The wires were punctured.

I have witnessed many things. A few come to mind: the passing of listless seasons, the erosion of urban walls, the flickering of fluorescent lights, the scuttling of myriad bugs, the day vanquishing the night and the night vanquishing the day in an eternal cycle of mutual triumph and defeat, and the death of evanescent things, forms, facts, ideas, lusts, hates, and loves. I have even witnessed the death of my inner voices. I am silent now. I am like a jaguar. The best shadow in town.