Epiphany

Missing Persons Case #42384620 June 15, 2017 Distribute to all agencies >Transcript Selward/Dogwood interview #2 >Letter, Dr. Robert McNamara, Five Oaks Psychiatric Hospital

Jasper —

Five Oaks released Dr. Dogwood’s January 6 interview with Timothy Selward. The January 5 interview is still missing. Brief me as soon as you have reviewed.

Lt. Sheila Hunt Assistant Director RCMP Ottawa, Ontario

P.S. — You assistant referred to Selward as the “Monster of Mississauga.” Not acceptable.

Interview 2 January 6, 2017

— As I told you, I tried temples, ferries, boats of all description. I tried floating temples. I tried souvenir shops on every continent. I tried toilets, the more unusual the better. I searched for odd toilets in temples where birds flew free. I even tried apiaries. I got very excited about a bird’s nest above the lintel of a toilet in a Taoist temple in Singapore.

— Um, hold up a minute please. I appreciate you jumping in but we have to set up the waivers first.

— Waivers?

— The legal stuff.

— Ah. Always.

— Commencing second interview with Timothy . . .

— Alvin.

— Alvin?

— Yes, call me Alvin.

— Why? Your name is Tim, Timothy Selward.

— Yesterday my name was Timothy. Today it is Alvin.

— Um, OK. Thank you for agreeing to talk with me again. As you know, this interview is being recorded. Would you please repeat for the record that you are meeting with me voluntarily?

— OK

— No, I mean I need you to repeat it, repeat what was covered in our email exchange and in yesterday’s interview.

— What part?

— That you are agreeing to meet with me voluntarily and that you understand that none of our conversation is privileged.

— Privilege. Interesting word.

— So will you say that please?

— Yes. I, Alvin Merriweather, am speaking with Dr. Althea Dogwood voluntarily. I am participating without coercion or favour in this research project.

— And I am not a physician or psychiatrist and you are not my patient.

— And I am not a patient of Dr. Dogwood.

— This interview is being conducted for a study of childhood experiences of ecstatic rapture as a potential factor in adult psychosis. Lead researcher is Althea Dogwood, doctoral candidate at Tennessee Methodist University. For the record, the subject who identifies as Alvin Merriweather is the man known to the courts as Timothy Selward. Also, for the record, I have not completed my doctoral thesis and should not be referred to as doctor. So, Tim.

— Alvin.

— OK. Alvin. Thanks again for agreeing to speak with me about your event and its impact on your life. Again, you understand that the contents of this interview may be used in future court proceedings?

— Yes.

— But you are not currently involved in any court proceedings, correct?

— No. I am.

— You are?

— The state is appealing my successful motion on in-place treatment and, of course, the lawsuits.

— Yes, I was referring to criminal matters. Your trials have concluded and you are not currently facing any unresolved criminal charges, so the risk of speaking with me is let’s see, moderate or low. Correct? The warning is not completely relevant but it is required by my ethics committee.

— Ethics committee?

— Yes. The people at the university who approve my research and its methods. They want to ensure that interview subjects understand the risk, if any, of participating.

— The risk of talking about God.

— Well, in your case, I suppose.

— Sure. I understand.

— As you know, I am studying both the precipitating conditions of ecstatic rapture events and also long-term effects. We discussed both yesterday, but we didn’t explore the actual event. I hope today we can get to the rapture itself.

— What I hope every day.

— What?

— My joke.

— Oh. Right. Yesterday you were telling me how you have attempted to duplicate the original precipitating conditions in the hope of triggering a repeat event.

— Yes. You and I are the same in that way. We are both trying to figure out how to open the door to heaven.

— That isn’t how I would describe my research, but I see your point. Yesterday you were also telling me how much anguish that has caused you. Sorry to have interrupted you just now. I think you had jumped right back to where we left off yesterday. Um, you were in Singapore? I think you called it your lowest point?

— Yes. The temple wasn’t on a barge (that one was in Thailand) but it was beside the water, which I guess isn’t all that unusual. Funny how many temples are near water and how few churches are. I don’t know why I was so excited about this one lead, this one spot. I was edging toward 40? I’m not sure of the exact year, but I’m pretty sure I had almost exhausted my 30s. I had tried hundreds of doors and boats and stairs and every flavour of sacred space by then — and nothing. No whiff of the magic, not a sliver or a shadow of the mystery. Then I spotted a nest over the toilet door. It wasn’t even a Buddhist temple, but I had by then decided that didn’t matter. I was so sure.

I don’t know what kind of bird had nested there. The babies were scrawny and wrinkled, all beaks and screaming need. They bobbed and cried at a rim of sticks knitted above the toilet door. The mother or father bird or whatever had built the nest was gone. Out getting food, I imagined. Of course, maybe the mother had been hit by a truck or landed on a live wire in the busy city outside. Or maybe it had been walloped with a shovel by a monk. That would never have occurred to me then. The monks probably didn’t like birds crapping on their polished floors and burnished Gods. No doubt they had some way to keep the bird population down. But as I said, I didn’t see those things then. There were three birds in the nest — maybe more — but I could only see three. Two looked like tiny old men: bald but for a few wisps of feathers-to-be on their heads, little eyes sunk into wizened skin. The third was just a squeaking shadow behind its siblings. I took it as a sign. Of course I did. No one else noticed the birds, the nest. Tourists packed the temple, most shielding themselves from the great mysteries with a camera or a phone. The river of blindness that wanders through the world’s sacred spaces was in full flow that day, meandering through the temple grounds in curves, with eddies and currents and ripples of varying depths. The toilet was tucked into a wall between the back courtyard and a dark hall that ran behind the main altar. It was a holiday of some sort and tourists were urged to buy incense to burn in trough-like bins in the courtyards and at each of the many altars. It was a very smoky day.

The latrine was just steps away from the river of foreigners in a darkened space as, I said, squeezed between the main altar and the outer wall. And I knew, I just knew that when I opened that bathroom door I would find it, find, maybe not him, but his magic and majesty, that the mystery would reclaim me. I even had to pee! Just like that morning when I was nine. And there were steps up to the temple just as there had been steps up to the hall of mystery. I was so sure. I was lifted up in anticipation. It was a plain wooden door — just like on the ferry. It was not latched. I might even have been holding my breath as I pushed it open. Maybe? I don’t remember. But nothing happened. It was a small room with dirty yellow walls. The sink was old, the porcelain worn down to metal in spots, an iron stain of rust streaked across the bowl. The scratched metal plate hanging over the sink reflected a grown man with a stringy beard, not the tidy, blue-eyed boy who once witnessed a miracle. A fluorescent light flickered. Cobwebs darkened the corners where the walls met the ceiling. A fly as big as a baby turtle buzzed in slow figure eights. The room smelled of those waxy cakes they drop in urinals. The scent of incense was gone.

I couldn’t believe it. I had been so sure. I had known this was it. This was the place, the moment. Then I remembered that the magic had claimed me when I exited the bathroom, not when I entered (though its presence was clear even before the Buddha smiled). And I got excited all over again. I was right. I was! This was the place. This was the moment and it would happen as I left this dreary stall, just as it had before. I was so excited that I almost forgot to urinate. I really did have to pee, but I was so eager to be reunited that at first I wanted to rush right through the door back into the temple. He was waiting. I decided to pee not because of the imperative of my body, but because vacating my bladder might be part of the ritual that unlocked the magic. I had peed that first time. So I peed and I ran my hands under the cold spigot on the washbasin. The pipes knocked when I turned the water on. There was no soap — not even a dispenser. A dirty towel hung on a hook but I wiped my hands on my jeans as I had when I was nine. In retrospect, I wonder if some part of me knew what was coming. I didn’t rush to leave the latrine after all, even though I believed God was waiting for me on the other side of the door. Was that because I wanted to savour this delicious anticipation? I thought so. I thought that was it. But maybe I didn’t rush because some tiny part of me sensed the emptiness ahead. The door opened inward into the small bathroom, which was awkward; you had to back up and edge around it to exit. I did that and stepped into the dark hall of the temple, expecting magic to greet me once again.

“Irene!”

A pale man in Bermuda shorts, trainers, and white socks pulled halfway up his calves was blocking the hall. The flesh of his throat hung into the open neck of his green polo shirt and trembled like a wattle as he bellowed again: “Irene!” He held a crumpled map of the temple grounds. A woman drifted toward him. Her hair was the texture of cotton candy. Irene took the man’s elbow and steered him back into the river of tourists.

I looked up. The baby birds were still there, still pleading to be fed. And I felt just like them — abandoned, utterly abandoned and hungry, so hungry for the sacred mystery that took me to itself for a time. I was broken hearted. I was broken.

— And that was your lowest point?

— Yes. It occurred to me then for the very first time that the mystery might never return. I might never again feel my fingers clasp the hand of God. That morning in California might be all I would ever have of my beloved Buddha. It was a shock, a full-body shock like the first spring dive into a lake just cleared of winter ice.

— And did it . . .

— No. I know what you’re going to ask. It did not change anything. It did not make me question what happened when I was nine — not at all, not for an instant. Nor did it change the nature or intensity of my quest. I would keep looking. Of course I would keep looking. I would always keep looking. It’s just that I realized I might not find what I was looking for. Maybe God took my hand one day and led me through the hills and showed me how to play and that was it. Maybe I was gifted that, but only that. Maybe there was no more.

But now I’ve been thinking. I’ve been thinking a lot in here. Now you stopped the drugs, it’s a pretty good place to think. I realize that I was trying to recreate the material conditions of awakening. Silly. I better than most know the unstable nature of reality. That was, well, a big error. I should have been looking at the symbolic essence of that morning: the veil, the need, the ascent and so on. None of those elements relate directly to the tangible.

— Can you tell me more about your life before the event? I’d like to know particularly what had changed in your life in the six months before the event.

— I was nine years old. My family was spending a year in San Francisco. My father was on sabbatical, doing research on something to do with international tax law with a colleague at San Francisco State University. The colleague was a female professor and that had caused some stir back in England and in our home. I had a hard time adjusting to America. My problem wasn’t school. That was dead easy. It wasn’t the odd, sharp edges of the language, the slang that I didn’t know, the intonations I couldn’t catch. That was a little confusing, but it was fine. The kids, well, I didn’t skateboard. I couldn’t name a baseball player to save my life and I’d joined the class three-quarters of the way through the year. My clothes were two shades wrong — my mother insisted my school shirt have a collar. Could have been worse. I was only ignored. The buildings in California — all of them — felt a little off; the bathrooms were never where I expected them to be. The windows in some rooms were so high that you couldn’t see out of them even if you were a grown up. In some homes, the windows didn’t open at all. Weird, but that was not what bothered me. My problem was the weather.

— Weather?

— My father rented us a place in the Sunset district. He had never been to San Francisco before. I suspect he imagined bikinis, the smell of suntan lotion, and oiled up surfer dudes when he looked at the map and saw that wide beige beach just a block from our rental. It wasn’t like that. The Sunset is the foggiest place in the city. It is a cold, dim, windy place most of the time. The cypress trees on the Great Ocean Highway are bent over like women hunched against a gale, their branches streaming away from the sea like long hair in the wind. The day we arrived, when we drove past those trees on the way to our new place, I assumed they were a new species found only in America. It was months before I understood that the trees were sculpted by the weather. I lived most of that year inside a cloud. It was a kind of wet, perpetual dusk. Our neighbourhood was called the Sunset, but there were no displays of orange and purple as the sun sank into the sea. Every day ended with a gradual fading of the gray.

— And that made you sad?

— No! You misunderstand me. I liked the fog. I greatly preferred the fog. It was soft and, well, kind. The fog felt familiar. It was comfortable. The sun was not. There was something aggressive about the sun in San Francisco. It wasn’t very hot — I don’t remember a single sunburn — but it had no shadows. I know that can’t be possible, but that’s how it felt. When the sun came out, when the fog and rain fled, it was penetrating, relentless. It sparkled. It felt as if the air itself sparkled, like an advertisement on TV: air that was better than air, cleaner than air, an impossible doctored version of air. I could never live up to that sparkle. It made me feel, what? Well, certainly not sparkly. It made me feel I had been scrubbed raw in the bath, bristles roughing the skin of my armpits, digging between my toes, like a boy standing naked, red and dripping, arms outstretched, waiting to dry, waiting for the chance to put on some clothes.

I had never seen anyone in England wear sunglasses. I had seen pictures of people in sunglasses, but I had never seen a real person hide their eyes in public. I asked my mother for a pair. I shouldn’t have asked her on a very foggy morning, but I was afraid of the fog burning off and the invasion of sunshine. I was just trying to cope. Anyway, she didn’t understand and I didn’t explain. I don’t think I could have, then. She laughed at me.

“Little Lord Fauntleroy, is it?” she said.

My mother thought I had inappropriately elevated tastes, something she blamed on my father’s lineage. She believed allegiance to class was a serious handicap that would cripple me as an adult, if she let it take hold. Gentle mockery was her medicine of choice against the disease of snobbery.

“No, my lord, there will be no sunglasses for you when you are nine.”

So I learned to suffer the San Francisco sunshine. My father’s research partner gave me a Giants’ baseball cap. Its brim cut the glare and made the light a little less fierce. My parents thought it an American affectation, but they approved. They saw my allegiance to the cap as a sign of compromise in my up-to-then steadfast refusal to embrace our family’s American adventure. My sister, my brother, my parents treated this massive change of everything as a lark and were carefully curating a collection of California memories to display on our return to Cumbria. Even the dog seemed more joyous than he had in England: puppyish, digging in the sand, the muddy backyard, barking at nothing at all. Not me. I just wanted to go home. And if I couldn’t go home, I wanted to wander only in the fog, preferably alone.

— So new location, new school, new geography, new weather, change of language, culture. Would you say that left you disoriented?

— Disoriented? No. Not really. Just, hm, lonely?

— And what about the day of the event itself, I’d like as much detail as you can provide about the hour before your rapture experience.

— It was a Saturday morning. My father had announced we were going to Sausalito. It was the first time we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and I felt the history of it in spite of myself, that whole sweep of the bay below us. White caps danced across ridges of water. Dozens of creamy triangular sails marched in packs across the blue. Seagulls glided on invisible air columns rising from the water. I had never looked down on a bird before, never seen a feathered, outstretched wing from above.

Sometimes our parents told us we could “drive.” That meant we took turns saying, “Right” and “Left” and my father would steer the car in the corresponding direction. Linda always went first. My father was happy that morning. He wasn’t often happy. He wasn’t a sad man, but he was very dignified and it is hard to maintain dignity in mirth. His right hand tapped a beat on the wheel as he drove our little blue Chevy into the unknown.

“You drive!” he called out. My mother reached over and squeezed his shoulder. I could tell, even from the back seat, that she was smiling.

“Left!” Linda called out. We veered onto a road that ran parallel to the highway.

“Right!” called Geoffrey. The road sloped down into darkness. I waited to call out the next turn. One street passed, two. Trees crowded us, blocking the scratchy sunlight. It was dim and wet and cool. I rolled down my window. The smell was divine: deep, rich, everlasting. England is a green place and I had smelled many kinds of green, but all were shifting, changing kaleidoscopes of smells that faded and rose with the season, the weather, even the time of day. The emerald scent of this forest was eternal. I reached my head out the window to look up. I couldn’t even see the sky. We were under a ceiling of swaying, rocking green held up by massive columns of furrowed red bark.

“Right!”

I called it without thinking. I knew I would lose my turn if I didn’t say something soon. I hadn’t looked ahead at the road before calling out my direction, hadn’t considered where I wanted to go or how I wanted to get there.

“Here?” My father sounded dubious.

It was more a lane than a road, barely one car-width of crumbling black asphalt that cut upward through a battalion of redwood trees. It was steeper than any of the steep roads in San Francisco and our little Chevy shuddered with effort. Gravity pinned me to the backseat. I had been reading aviation books — an interest sparked by the subscription to Popular Mechanics that my grandmother had given me as a Christmas gift. It occurred to me that if we were in a plane, the engine would stall; the angle of ascent was just too extreme.

“Left!”

I hadn’t noticed the road Linda called out. It was just below a massive house of wood and glass that hovered in the trees like a spaceship trying to hide. My father eased the car left. The street was blessedly flat, at first, and wide. And then it disappeared.

Some of the streets in San Francisco are so steep that you can’t see any pavement beyond the hood of your car. You drive through an intersection and it feels as if you are going to plunge down a cliff. It’s beautiful — the bay spread out before you, that scrubbed clean patina of the city — but terrifying. Your brain knows that your car is not going to tumble into space, but still, your eyes are telling your brain, “Danger!” And you have to ignore that grip of fear. Driving becomes a deliberate act of faith, a choice to believe that when the nose of your car tips into the void, there will still be earth beneath your wheels.

Linda’s road was like the slopes in San Francisco, but worse: steeper and dark as twilight in the forest. The road narrowed again. A hidden stream rumbled just beyond the pavement on my side of the car. My father inched us down the hill. No one spoke. We knew the driving game was over. He wound through the labyrinth of trees and hills seeking the flat, the town, the shore, the light.

— So you were afraid? You felt fear?

— Was I? I’m not sure. I know everyone else was. I don’t remember what I was feeling other than awe at my first taste of redwood trees.

We emerged into a low neighborhood of small, shingled homes and quickly found the main boulevard. I expected my mother to frame the experience for us, to say something like, “Well, that was an adventure, wasn’t it?” But she didn’t. My father’s face was gray as we escaped the car. I examine that memory as an adult and think my father looked like he needed a drink. My mother looped her arm through his elbow, something she rarely did. I had the impression she was doing it not for assistance, which is always how it looks when a woman takes a man’s arm, but to steady my father. They were silent. Geoffrey and Linda and I ran ahead. We had made up a game of tag that involved running back and forth between light posts as we waited for our parents to catch up. Geoffrey and I still weren’t allowed to cross the street alone. I was running back along the sidewalk when my father finally spoke.

“Bloody Americans.”

It was a sunny day and I had forgotten my ball cap. We ran past a marina where hundreds of halyards clanged and clunked and thumped in the wind like an otherworldly orchestra tuning up for a performance. Drums pounded from a small park up ahead, but I couldn’t see the drummers. My father had chosen Sausalito because he wanted us to see a model of the bay built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Our family excursions had a specific structure: travel, explore, lunch and then the featured destination. We were usually home by supper. The model didn’t open until 2 p.m. , but no one felt like exploring after the treacherous journey through the hills. We arrived at a wide wooden wharf. A gray ramp led down to an old ferry resting beside a floating dock. A big sign hung over the ramp’s entrance: Sausalito Souvenirs.

— Um, can you halt just a moment? I need to reset the recorder.

— Ready. So, was this the boat in Sausalito where . . .

— Yes. I, I couldn’t believe my parents said yes, that they let us go in the souvenir shop but they did.

— Why wouldn’t they say yes?

— My parents did not believe in ephemera. Even the plates in our family picnic basket were made of good china. They did not believe in knick knacks, TV dinners, travelling carnivals, sun hats that couldn’t survive the rain, game shows, comic books. These were some of the ways they differed from American parents. They also did not believe in hitting children and they did not believe in making a fuss.

Sausalito Souvenirs was a shrine to ephemera. It’s hard to imagine a time when cheap plastic crap seemed new and wonderful. But this was that time. Whirligigs and animal menageries and spin tops and sippy cups and sets of toy soldiers that cost less than a Coke and gag straws and barking mechanical dogs and cheap dominos and beads and hair clips and bangles and miniature plastic copies of Coit Tower and Alcatraz Island and snow globes that rained pink petals instead of white flakes. I had never seen — never imagined — anything like it.

So, sometimes I think the first miracle of that miraculous day was that our parents let us board the Beverley at all. But they did. And gave us money. I want to say that they gave us each a five-pound note; that’s the memory, but it’s clearly wrong. They must have given us American dollars, and surely it wasn’t as much as five pounds, not nearly that. The souvenir shop was on the main deck of an old wooden ferry, its name painted on the bow: Beverley. We raced down the wharf and over the gangplank. I had never been surrounded by so much stuff and choice: hundreds and hundreds — no thousands, maybe tens of thousands — of things, most of them small, most of them with no use other than to make one smile — whoopee cushions! — or help you remember a moment of time after you had slipped into the future. I wandered, dazed by sheer abundance. The main aisle wound around displays stacked on displays stacked on displays. Sun poured through glass windows onto tongue-and-groove bulkheads painted the purest white.

Geoffrey was a saver. You wouldn’t think it. He was the most distracted of us all, but he had extra bills in his pocket that morning. First he dragged me to a display of toy fire trucks. They were very fine. The ladder clipped on and off the side of the truck and the steering wheel actually turned the tires. It was, I thought, the best thing in the whole wonderful store. I had a twinge of wanting to make fun of the truck and spoil it for Geoffrey because I didn’t have enough money to buy it for myself. But I squelched that urge. The truck even had firemen and a dalmation that stood on the bumper. But Geoffrey decided to keep looking. Linda, meanwhile, was approaching the store methodically, bow to stern, assessing all her options. No one was surprised when Linda became an accountant. I narrowed my choices to two items: a plastic pigeon designed by Leonardo da Vinci and something called salt water taffy, a kind of candy that was new to me. The pigeon was powered by a single rubber band and I was skeptical it would actually fly, as the packaging promised. After all, they didn’t have rubber bands in da Vinci’s time, so how could he design a flying toy based on a power source that didn’t then exist? I was still holding the display pigeon as Geoffrey pulled me through the maze of stuff to an alcove in the very back of the boat where a piñata covered in dusty slips of pink and green paper hung in shadow. I think it was also supposed to be a bird of some kind, but that wasn’t clear. Or I don’t remember.

“It’s filled with candy!” Geoffrey said.

I couldn’t believe Geoffrey was considering a big ugly bag of candy instead of the beautiful fire truck. He didn’t even know what kind of candy was inside. What if it was filled with licorice? Or peppermints? Or sour balls? Or licorice and sour balls? And it would be gone — poof! — in minutes, an hour at the most. The fire truck, it could last, well, for generations. I left Geoffrey in the piñata section. I had to pee. Sometimes the urge came on suddenly. I had asked a clerk about the saltwater taffy, how candy could be made with salt water, but she hadn’t been helpful at all. She said that if I wanted to know what it tasted like, I should buy a box. That same clerk was now behind the counter at the cash register. She said the store didn’t have a bathroom.

“But?” I didn’t know what to say. I knew I had to find a bathroom quickly. I had never considered there might be a public place that didn’t have public toilets. I had the horrible thought that I might start to cry, and the thought itself triggered water to well in my eyes. I looked around for my parents, but I didn’t see them. Suddenly Linda was at my side. She took the bird out of my hands.

“Tell my brother where the bathroom is.”

“There is a bathroom in the Village Fair,” the clerk said, ignoring me and addressing Linda directly. “The Village Fair is that way.” She waved her hand toward the wharf and the shore.

“My brother is nine years old. He has to go now.”

“We don’t…”

“Stop the crap.”

I had never heard Linda use that word or tone before. In my memory, her dialogue rings with the authority of a grown woman, perhaps a 30-something elementary school teacher who knows exactly how to bring a class of second-graders under control. Linda was twelve.

“Of course you have a bathroom. You don’t go to the Village Fair when you have to pee, do you? Of course not. Yeah, yeah.” She cut the clerk off again. “Employees only. Right. But this is a nine-year-old boy. You make exceptions for children.” She paused, briefly. “And I can tell you that if you don’t, Davey here is going to whizz all over your floor and your saltwater taffy. So give him the key.”

I startled when she called me Davey. That was my nickname in one of our pretend games, the one where Linda was captain of a pirate ship. I didn’t know why she had called me Davey to the clerk. Perhaps it was some atavistic understanding that you don’t reveal your real name to the enemy. I don’t know why she did that, but it worked.

“No key. Through there.” The clerk nodded and Linda and I moved toward a pair of velvet drapes.

“No!” The clerk shouted at Linda. “Just the boy. Not you. You can wait for him here.” She looked at me for the first time. “Top of the stairs, on the upper deck. To your left.”

Linda shoved me toward the drapes.

I had a bad habit of always looking down as I walked. A few months before, I had wandered into a herd of wild buffalo without noticing. Without noticing! I was kicking a rock along a dusty path on the back side of Catalina Island on a family vacation when I looked up and found myself eye level with the wet nose of a buffalo. The beast exhaled a spray of snot across my face, then shook its massive head, raising a cloud of fine dust from the matted brown fur ringing its neck. I slowly looked around and discovered I was encircled by bison.

So I had been trying. I had been trying really, really hard to pay attention, to keep my head up, to not let my eyes drift down or my mind wander. But it was hard, very hard. Constant attention was exhausting and unpleasant. It was like being in the sunshine all the time and I couldn’t manage it for long. Besides, I really, really had to pee. I don’t beat myself up for looking down as I climbed the stairs to the second deck of the Beverley. After all, I was only nine.

— Can you tell me what time of day this was?

— Maybe noon? A little before? I’m not sure.

The drapes were heavier than I expected, and musty. The stairwell was dark, the walls thick with old varnish, the treads coated with peeling strips of worn black rubber. Seven steps? Ten? Twelve? I don’t know. The memory is in slow motion, but I’m sure I wasn’t dawdling; I really had to pee. I didn’t look up until I reached the very top step and then. Oh, then.

An explosion of feathers and dust. White pigeons flapped all around me; one wing brushed against my cheek as the flock rushed to the bow. The light was diffuse, like a cathedral. I think the windows were smeared with bird gunk. Or maybe they were whitewashed so that no one could see inside. Thin shafts of grubby, dust-choked sunlight pierced the dusk here and there. I couldn’t see, at first, through the storm of duff swirling in the wake of the doves’ sudden flight. Slowly, as it settled, a phalanx of golden Buddhas emerged from the gloom. Wide wooden benches stretched in rows to the stern. A Buddha sat cross-legged in every seat, one palm resting in his lap, one palm open on a knee. Hundreds of them. The Buddhas glowed, despite the dark. The hall settled into a heavy silence. None of the raucous world penetrated that chamber: not the music from the store below, not the clanging halyards, not the seagulls screeching to be fed on the wharf outside. One pigeon cooed behind me and was still. A rustle of wings rearranged. I looked down. The floor was painted in bird excrement and small white feathers. The rails and benches were splattered too. Even the wire bins overhead, still stuffed with boxy life jackets, were smeared with bird gunk. But not the Buddhas. They were pristine.

See? Just smells, just sights, just sounds. Unusual, but I can’t make you feel it, can I? If I’d been looking up as I ascended the stairs, if the scene had unfurled slowly, then I don’t think it would have, I don’t know, it would not have been the shock that it was. Not if it had been incremental. I would have missed it if I had been following my father’s instructions to always be aware. The quality of that deep silence, the murky smell of feathers and bird dander and excrement and all those Buddhas shimmering in the dark, shimmering without any movement at all; it was overwhelming. But I still had to pee. I found the little water closet. It was on the harbour-side of the ferry. I could see my parents on the wharf. My mother was smoking a cigarette. My father was staring at the water. And that could have been enough. I would have cherished that memory, that glimpse into the heart of mystery. But that wasn’t all, was it? That moment in the bathroom, washing my hands, peering out at my parents on the wharf through a round spot cleared in the window dirt, that was the last moment of my first life, really. That was the very end.

— Why would that have been enough?

— That moment revealed the presence of magic in the world. Or that’s how I would have described it then, though now I know it was more. I discovered a magical door existed. Walking through it was something else completely.

— And walking through it was?

— God. It was God.

— And how would your life be different if you hadn’t?

— You’re kidding? I didn’t think doctors kidded.

— I’m not a doctor. I’m a researcher and I’m not kidding.

— Well, I wouldn’t be confined here, for one. I’d probably be an IT manager in Shropshire or an actuarial scientist in Birmingham: kids, wife, maybe a divorce. Drinking habit? Golf? No, probably not golf.

— You’ve thought about this, what your path would have been?

— No, not at all.

— Do you wish for those things, for family, for freedom?

— Oh, you’re just pretending not to understand aren’t you doctor?

— Pretending?

— To your earlier question, I have no regrets about walking through that door. That possibility is inconceivable. I would not trade the locked doors of this forensic unit for a family and quotidian cares. In fact, the thought of that fills me with terror.

— Actual terror?

— Yes.

— Fear is one of the markers we are studying in this research project. I hope to explore further if you had the capacity for fear before the event. Your file suggests you don’t experience fear at all now.

— Yes, yes. I know. Part of my diagnosis, the inability — or refusal — to display appropriate emotional responses to specific stimula.

— But you do still feel fear?

— Yes, but I am only afraid of one thing — of having never met — of not having had the experience I’m about to tell you about: the one you and all the others refer to as the event.

— I still don’t understand. You are afraid of it not having happened as in you discover it was an hallucination? You are afraid it will be revealed as an early symptom of mental illness?

— No, no, no, no, no. I know it happened. But what if you and your colleagues have a way to wipe my memories? Or do you already? Electro-shock? If you think the event caused what you see as anti-social behavior, would you just wipe out that memory to restore me? Re-boot me like a computer after removing the memory virus? Make me just like you? I think you would.

— And this is part of your resistance to psychiatric therapy? That is why you are afraid of pharmaceutical and other psychiatric interventions?

— Partly.

— Partly?

— Yes, partly.

— What else do you fear?

— I am not afraid that my encounter with God was an hallucination. I know it was not. But I am afraid the universe could bend or shake or squeeze in a way that means it never happened. I could lose the experience many ways. It could be stolen by you all, or it could be wiped out by God himself.

— So, you are afraid of, of time travel?

— I can see I’m pushing the limits of your current experiential frame of reality. Do you really want to spend our time on this particular debate?

— I do.

— OK. Let me try to explain it another way.

Doctor, do you remember fishing for crawdads the morning your sister died? You were barefoot in the creek. The silt was squishing up between your toes and the rocks were slippery with algae. The crawdads, they are just about invisible when they are alive, in the water, less than a shadow of a shadow. But you had spotted one; it was hunkered up under that very round rock by the willow roots. You were excited, but afraid too. You’d never gone for crawdads on your own before. You were going to just pick it up in your bare hands and you were afraid it was going to get you, pinch you with its claws. It was almost, not quite spring. The mountain was brushed with a fuzz of green and the creek was cold. And those were the last moments of before for you, then your mom called out, the crawdad winked away, you clambered up the bank and discovered your sister was gone.

— This isn’t . . .

— But that moment your mother appeared on the bank, before she called out. The light was different, the scent of iron and honeysuckle hung in the breeze and there was something else at the edge of the wood, something only you could see.

— . . . Relevant

— What would you do to go back to that moment, to hang on to that feeling of before? Those last few moments of your carefree childhood, before what you might describe as your own precipitating event?

— I don’t . . .

— You have told yourself that that memory isn’t real, that it is a delusion you created to comfort yourself in grief, but what if you are wrong? What if that instant of bliss was reality itself? Can you even let yourself imagine that the moment, the light, the shadow, might have been real?

— That paper was published in a very obscure journal when I was still an undergraduate student. You don’t have Internet access here. How did you get access to that essay?

— Would you believe me if I told you that I haven’t read that essay? That I plucked the memory from your mind?

— No. I wouldn’t.

— Ah, well then. I saw the journal in the holding pen at one of my trials.

— And that is why you agreed to participate in this research project, because of my precipitating event, the death . . .

— Murder

— . . . of my sister?

— No.

— Why did you agree to my interview request? Thirty-two others have made similar requests, all of which were denied. Why have you agreed to talk to me?

— You know, you remind me a little bit of God.

— What?

— It’s your cuticles, the shape of your fingernails. Also your nostrils. Just a little similar.

— You didn’t know the shape of my fingernails when you agreed to my interview request.

— No.

— So why did you agree?

— Do you want to hear about the rapture, or did you just want to find out what I fear? That’s more than anyone else got out of me. It is an enormous weapon, to understand what someone truly fears. And I gave that to you freely. Quite a coup for your thesis. Should make a stir when you publish your research.

— Understanding someone’s emotional landscape is a weapon?

— Of course it is.

— The attendant will come in shortly — in three minutes — to remove you for lunch. Let’s break now and resume after your meal.

Interview 2 continued January 6, 2017

— Ready to resume?

— No chit chat this time? How was your lunch? Did they serve chicken again today? I like that about you. Very little bullshit. Some, but not much.

— Resuming interview with Timothy Selward . . .

— Alvin Merriweather.

— . . . currently calling himself Alvin Merriweather, at 2:10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, Five Oaks Psychiatric Hospital. When we broke, you were talking about a magical door, or your childhood awareness of a supernatural being.

— (Laughter) Supernatural being! You can’t even bring yourself to say it, can you: God. And no, we weren’t talking about my childhood. We were talking about yours, and about the nature and power of fear. What, nothing to add there?

— I do want to get back to the topic of fear, but first I would like you to tell me about the event — what you described this morning as walking through a door. We only have two hours left. I want to hear about the event itself before we conclude.

— Even though you’ve read all the notes of everyone else who has poked at this memory, you still think it’s a metaphor.

— Metaphor?

— The door.

— Well.

— I stepped out of the bathroom, wiping my hands on my jeans. A Buddha seated on the third row of benches unfolded his legs, stood up, stretched tall and smiled. I don’t just mean he twisted his body and reached out his arms to revive his muscles, as we all do. He did that, but he also, literally, stretched his form. Each of the painted wooden Buddha statues was roughly three-quarters the size of an adult human. As the statue animated, he stretched his arms high above his head and grew until he was roughly the same size as most — or many — adult humans. I would guess he stretched to about five-foot eleven, but I don’t know. I was nine. And in parts of my memory he is much, much taller. So I can’t give you an accurate measurement. I know that he became taller, that he opened his eyes — they were dark and grained — and that he smiled. His teeth looked completely human: even and white. But his gums were pale blue. The rest of him, except his eyes, remained golden.

I say “him,” but that isn’t right. There was nothing pronouncedly masculine about him, or feminine. His hair was coiled on his head. His shoulders were broad but his limbs were soft and curved, not muscular. He was barefoot and the arches of his feet were high. What a thing to remember, arches! He wore an ornate ankle bracelet and also bracelets halfway up one arm. His fingers were long, elegant, fine. His clothes draped in a way that he might have had breasts, or might not. He was slender. I didn’t think about any of that then. I didn’t think about his gender for many years. If that happened to me today, if I were nine and God took me by the hand, I think I would automatically think of the divinity as “they.” But I didn’t then. I thought, assumed, he was a boy. Like me. That is how he is fixed in my mind.

I wasn’t afraid. I was never afraid. He reached out his right hand. He didn’t move toward me. It was my choice. It was always my choice. I walked toward him and lifted my arm. He took my left hand and smiled again. I know that blue gums don’t sound very attractive, but really they were. We walked to the stern. He gave my hand a little squeeze and stepped up into the air. I stepped with him. It was as if he were climbing a staircase, but of course there was nothing there. Three steps up, then he leaned his neck out of the boat and so did I. The wind was strong in my face. And then we were sailing. I don’t know what verb to use. Flying? That doesn’t feel right. There was no effort at all, not from him and not from me. I don’t really know why I use sailing. Sailing isn’t right either, but it is less wrong.

We sailed straight out over the bay. A salt barge was sucking water from the shallows near Tiburon and a herring seiner was working nets farther along the shore. I waved to a man on the aft deck of the fishboat. He waved back. We sailed further over the bay and higher, staying roughly the same altitude as the seagulls I had gazed down on less than an hour before. No one on any of the sailboats looked up. The Buddha pulled us under the Bay Bridge, around Treasure Island and along the Oakland mud flats. A patch of brilliant orange poppies on the back side of Treasure Island waved softly in a ground breeze, hundreds of them all crowded together, all open and yearning together towards the sun. They were the only spot of color in a gravel parking lot littered with rusting metal shipping containers. It was low tide. Three sculptors were working the mud flats, turning gathered flotsam into art that would be washed away by the sea. One wore a floppy sailor’s hat like the guy on that TV show about tourists marooned on an island. His sculpture pulsed and shined from within. I said I wasn’t afraid, not for a second, but that is not completely true. We were sailing pretty low near the East Bay when suddenly we did a sort of aerial cartwheel and then I was sailing through the air — flying, hovering, whatever — on my back. I was below the seagulls and they were eyeing me uneasily. There were clouds in the sky: high, white, tufty things. I could no longer see where we were going, couldn’t see any bit of land, couldn’t see anything but sky and birds. I had a moment of discomfort, a moment of vertigo, but it vanished in an instant and then that too — sailing on my back through the sunshine, holding the hand of God — then that too was sublime.

— Sublime?

— Yes. Sublime about does it. But you know that, don’t you?

When he first took my hand, I felt warm, protected, special, loved. And then we took the three steps and sailed out into the air and it was something else entirely. Something beyond love, beyond my earthly emotions. It seeped over me like a tide coming in; it wasn’t abrupt, but from the first moment, the first touch of that cosmic tide, I knew what was coming. I began to see not just through my own eyes, but through his. It was like looking at the world for the first time under black light and seeing fluorescence you never even knew was there. Or suddenly recognizing red and green after a lifetime of being color blind. When we approached Treasure Island, I saw the trees had personalities. Each was so distinct with its own history, emotions and song. The poppies — they were yelling and laughing. The sense deepened as we flew over the mud flats of Oakland. It wasn’t just that I could feel everything. I could see all the bits and pieces of each thing and then — just as we flipped onto our backs in the air — how they fit together. It sounds overwhelming but it wasn’t. We sailed for quite a while just looking up at the sky. I could feel the air on my skin but also feel inside the molecules of the air itself, feel it as the molecules tumbled out of the way when I passed by. I could feel the layers inside the clouds. And then — I knew it was coming, it didn’t hurt at all — everything was all one, including me. A seagull was flying in my wake and then I was the seagull and the seagull was me. We were indistinguishable. And I was the air and the clouds and it was all me. We flew like that for a long time. We could have flown to Timbuktu and back for all I knew. We could have flown to Mars and back, except the sky stayed blue and we were always in atmosphere, so maybe not. For some reason, I have always told myself that we flew to Vallejo and back along the northern estuaries of the bay before God did another cartwheely thing and we were sailing face down again over browning hills. San Francisco was in the distance, across the water. We came to rest on the ridge of a hill overlooking a walled compound at the edge of the bay: San Quentin State Prison. The roof of the watch tower shielded my vision of the guards, but I could see the tips of their guns. The grass was brown and stiff, but with a few green shoots hidden at the base. He let go of my hand. I thought this new way of being, or new way of seeing the world, would vanish when he took away his hand but it did not. He dug down into the grass, pulled up two slender green stalks and gave one to me. He squeezed the pale root of the blade between his teeth, sucking out the flavor like a child milking the last of a freezie-pop on a hot afternoon. I copied him. The drop of grass juice landed on my tongue like fireworks in a clear night sky. I could taste the sweet sugar of the carbohydrate, but I could also taste the sunshine, the rain, the earth that had made that single blade of grass. We sat on the hill for a while chewing on our one blade of grass, looking down at the silent prison and at the bay.

We sailed back through Raccoon Strait, between Tiburon and Angel Island. The current was very strong there: sharp and fierce. It pulled the seaweed taut and fed the hungry rock-rooted barnacles clamoring for the water’s rushing bounty. A deer trembled on Angel Island as hikers unexpectedly stumbled toward it through the bush and the hikers halted in surprise at the fleeting glimpse of tawny hide. And I was all of it: the water, the seaweed, the barnacles, the deer, the people. And they were me. We circled around the Beverley, approaching Sausalito from farther up the shore and sailed over the drummers in the park. A pregnant woman, her belly heavy and round, danced up and down a shallow flight of steps beside the drummers, flinging her long hair wildly to their beat. She raised her arms to us and swayed and swiveled and swayed and then we were past her. We gently descended to the parking lot and walked to a bench where the wharf met the street. God nodded. I sat. He stepped around the back of the bench. His bracelets chimed as he put both hands on my shoulders. He may have kissed the top of my head.

— Just to clarify, as you know, I am trying to identify precipitating conditions for childhood rapture experiences. It sounds to me as if you had three strong emotional states in the hour before.

— I did?

— Fear, when you family got lost on the steep hills in Sausalito. Confusion caused by the abundance of the souvenir shop and humiliation.

— Humiliation?

— As you imagined losing control of your bladder on the ferry.

— I suppose. But you are confusing correlation with causation. All of that is irrelevant.

— Thanks for helping me clarify. I assure you, we were extremely careful in the study design to avoid that problem. Sorry for the interruption. So, what happened after the event?

— Thank goodness I had a little while to myself before my parents saw me. By the time my mother found me, I could no longer feel myself as the bench or the wharf, though I could still feel myself inside the wind. She was verging on hysterical. Such a surprise, this woman who never made a fuss. I had been missing for an hour. Only an hour? I tried to explain, but that didn’t work. The story finally settled in family lore that I had been abducted from a bathroom in California by a strange man and that something had happened to me while I was kidnapped that changed me. Which is true. Except it wasn’t a man; it was a God. And I wasn’t kidnapped; I went willingly, though I’m sure my parents would argue that a nine-year-old didn’t have the capacity for consent. Something did happen to me; but it was wonderful. And I was changed.

— How were you changed?

— Well, for starters, I didn’t mind the sun anymore. I liked the feel of it on my skin. I actually liked the glare. I remember my astonishment at that, walking back to the car after the police finished with us, how the air was sparkling in a way that used to frighten me and that now I found delightful.

— What else?

— Everything, really. When I came back, I loved the world and I felt like part of the world, which I never had before.

— And when did that change?

— It didn’t.

— Your crimes suggest that at least sometimes you don’t love the world.

— That’s not true. I still love the world, even now, even here. I have since the moment I met God.

— And you still have the sense of omniscience?

— No, no, no. Unity faded and never came back. I have a memory of it. I remember the feeling of it but I can’t actually feel it. I can’t conjure it. I’m hoping you will help me with that. Or yourself.

— What?

— I can’t fly either.

— What happened after that?

— What do you mean?

— After your experience, what did you do next?

— Next?

— In your life?

— Well, you have all that in your file, don’t you?

— I’d like to hear it in your own words.

— I guess.

My life went on. We went back to England. I finished grammar school, did rather well too. Could have read philosophy at Cambridge which was, at some point, someone’s plan for me. I kept waiting for God to show up again. When I finished my A-levels, I realized I might have to go search for him. My life was my own now, I wasn’t obliged to do anything — not go to university, not buy a car, not start a career, fall in love, have kids, none of it. And, frankly, I couldn’t imagine anything — any life — that would compare to a single second of sailing through the air hand-in-hand with God. So I began my quest.

— So you sacrificed your life in hopes of duplicating your rapture experience?

— Sacrifice? No, well yes, but not then.

— What do you mean?

— I came to the concept of sacrifice later, after I exhausted the possibilities of mere prayer. It was many years before I began to experiment with the potential of offerings.

— Offerings?

— Chickens, beads, blood, you know, sacrifice. It’s a common human impulse — trying to bribe God.

— Blood?

— Prayer is a kind of sacrifice too, you know, of time, of attention. I’m still working on that alchemy, the right measure of sacrifice, of knowledge, attention and offering.

— I think we’re a little off track? You were talking about Cambridge?

— Was I?

— What did you do instead of going to Cambridge?

— I traveled and I researched and I tried all the modalities of approaching God that I could find. I even spent seven years in a monastery. Then I realized the abbot had never met God and neither had any of my fellow monks so I left. I researched all sorts of close encounters, even angel encounters, though that really isn’t the same thing at all.

— Why is that not the same thing?

— Why? Well, angels are one removed. That’s clear in the accounts. I do believe them, or some of them anyway, but their angel encounters are God-adjacent, God-light. They aren’t the real thing.

— So not related, not connected to what happened to you at all?

— Maybe? I don’t know. I’ve never seen an angel. It might be a matter of courage.

— Courage?

— Perhaps people seek out angels because they believe the experience of God is too intense. Isn’t that why so many religions cover their head in worship? They say it’s a sign of respect, but I think it’s fear. I think they are afraid that God will fry their brains. Yarmulkes, prayer shawls, the black lace veil my aunt wore to mass; they are all shields. People armor themselves against God.

— Could we work on a full list of the ways you tried to duplicate the experience?

— Long list. I’ve tried many things, looked many places, though, as I said earlier, I think maybe I missed the cues. I should be dwelling on the metaphors, not the material circumstances of my epiphany. And I still haven’t given up hope that God will just come to me and take me away again. So I prepare. The lowest point was in that temple in Singapore when I considered for the first time that I might never meet God again. But, as I said, that realization didn’t dim my drive. Nothing has. Well, maybe some of your pharmaceuticals, but the court isn’t going to let you do that anymore is it? No, nothing has dimmed my drive to regain unity.

— Did you try to duplicate the experience through psychedelic drug experimentation?

— Of course. The closest was peyote. It just about broke my heart. There was a tiny, tiny, tiny seed of the divine present that night but it was an echo of a shadow of a memory of the real thing. That trip was like holding a spluttering match when you are seeking a burning star. It just made me long for him all the more.

The Buddhists are wrong, you know, about attachment. Bold statement to say a whole religion got it wrong, but I have more credentials than most in this department and my God was dressed up like Buddha: Akshobhya of the Mahayana tradition, to be exact. The Buddhists are all about the error and danger of attachment; the end of suffering is letting go. Yada, yada, yada. Buddhist priests do not approve of my quest. But they don’t know what it’s like to walk hand-in-hand with God, or to soar over sparkling waters with him as you dissolve into unity. It is not possible to turn away from that. There is no reason, no earthly reason to do anything but pursue unity once you know it exists, once you have felt it, once you have blended with the very unreality of reality. Anyway, take it from me: the Buddhists are wrong.

— What would you do to return to your Buddha?

— Bravo! A new question. I have been asked what I did, what I have done, but never what I would consider or what I would do. And this is one of the ways you are different, Dr. Dogwood. You know.

— Know what?

— The answer.

— Tell me. Tell me what would you do.

— Anything.

— Can you elaborate?

— Elaborate? I think I already have.

— Would you hurt yourself?

— Yes.

— Would you hurt someone else?

— Yes.

— Would you kill someone?

— Of course I would kill someone, kill many people if necessary. I would kill a man. I would kill a mother. I would kill children. I would kill you. Oh, don’t look so disgusted. You knew what I would say before you asked. You knew because you are the same. You have been yearning for that light since the crawdad winked away from you forever in Two-Mile Creek. All this research. It’s just your excuse. You would do anything to find that light again.

— And you would?

— I would hop on one leg while singing Amazing Grace, bury myself underground in wet clothing, eat only pigs’ feet for 14 years, walk backward for the rest of my life. Never speak again. I would do anything. Anything. As for killing, there is no you and there is no me. We are one. I can’t kill anyone who is separate from me because that is, well, just not reality. Oh yes, I know you don’t accept that now, yet. So let me put this in blunter terms: Tell me honestly, really honestly, what would you do — you’re Christian, right? — what would you do to live in the house of your Lord? Didn’t your God endorse this very thing in that story about Abraham? OK, the Bible is complicated and open to interpretation. Let me simplify. If you had to choose between God and man, which would you pick? Be honest now, what would you decide? Whom would you choose?

(Sound of door unlocking)

— Doctor, your access permit has expired. Your time is up.

— But can’t I?

— No.

— We are supposed to have another hour and a half.

— No. Your access is terminated.

— I will file an objection with the board.

— Mr. Selward come with me.

— But . . .

— I am returning the patient back to his ward.

— Interview concluded at 2:48 p.m.

To: Lt. Sheila Hunt, Assistant Director, RCMP From: Dr. Robert McNamara, Five Oaks Psychiatric Hospital June 9, 2017 Dear Lieutenant, I hope that your request for this transcript means your investigators are finally willing to consider that Timothy Selward may have had a role in the April 17 disappearance of Althea Dogwood. I know they initially rejected that possibility because Dogwood last communicated with Selward on January 6; however, as you know, Selward escaped from our institution on April 5 and was gone until April 19, when he reappeared inside the forensic unit without explanation. Timothy Selward is extraordinarily adept at manipulating people and circumstances. We still don’t know how he escaped, where he went, what he did, or how he re-entered hospital grounds. He has not spoken a word since his return.

Althea Dogwood’s research shows a strong correlation between childhood rapture experiences and adult psychosis. Her preliminary findings on precipitating factors and markers of illness had the potential to revolutionize the field. I hope you find her not just for her own wellbeing, but for all of ours. Please let me know if I can do anything further. Dr. Robert McNamara Midland, Ontario