
30/11/2022
Chapter 13:
THE BOOK
So there I was, dear reader, in this pristine office of mine that appeared to be in some other realm, in a dimension of existence perhaps realer than real, more real than what you and I understand as “reality”. Realer than this ordinary world. And Emerson seemed to be waiting for me to finish thinking, and I could barely begin.
What concerned me to the point of thought paralysis was the matter of all the titles that had been piled on me. “Professor of Psychonautics”, “Head Hypnotist” and “Dean of Writing” was disquieting enough, but what had me the most worried was the “Spaniard in the Works” stuff that John had told me about. Because see, that isn't a job title or a skill set or an academic qualification. That is a prophecy. A prophecy about me. And the prophet is John Lennon.
A qualification, even such an esoteric one as “Psychonaut”, seemed more or less achievable: something to grow into, to learn about, to attain. And I was clearly in the perfect place to acquire this sort of knowledge. And I AM a hypnotist already, after all. And a writer too, I guess, with a very distinctive signature style that includes starting lots of sentences with a conjunction. And I have always resonated with the Witch archetype (Esmerelda Weatherwax is one of my heroes), so I could even live with that title. Witch. OK. But the whole “A Spaniard in the Works” business had messianic connotations that I just didn’t like one bit, for several crucial reasons. Not one bit.
So I made a mental note to have a discussion with John about this, to see if we could bring it all down a notch, to a more manageable level. Something that didn’t involve “showing the way”, necessarily, but just going my own way and, if that inspired someone to do something, or to go somewhere too, so be it and good luck to them. That would be much better, I decided.
Once again, as in my previous visit, Emerson interrupted my musings.
“Ahem!”
“Yes, Emerson?”
Emerson glanced at his clipboard.
“It’s just that… You have to go to orientation. Now,” he said.
“Orientation? I thought I had that with Terry and Mitch the other day?” I said.
“Well, no, that was more of a… debrief.”
“Really? So I have to attend debrief AND orientation?”
I had a flashback to the government jobs I have held in my life and all the boring, pointless, mind-numbing meetings I have attended. But the difference was that, up until that moment, everything I had done at E.T.U. had been... pretty intense and somewhat confusing and demanding, but ultimately enlightening and fun. So there was no real basis to think that the orientation would be different, and the only reason I wasn’t looking forward to it was that, just like the previous time, I felt unprepared. So I asked Emerson to show me the book he was holding under his clipboard. He passed it on to me immediately, as if he had been expecting me to want to see it.
And in my eagerness to learn something before the impending orientation, I opened the book without looking at the cover. I leafed through it and what I saw, on every page, was swirls of silver and gold that moved and slithered over each other, spelling and dissolving words in a way that made it impossible to read anything. And this phenomenon was not new to me, because I know that in dreams writing is unstable, and in fact this is one of the ways by which you can tell that you are in a dream and not in physical reality. In a lucid dream it is usually possible to read written words, but then, when you look away and look back at the same text, it will say something different. And sometimes you get this swirling, unsettled effect that I was seeing now.
So I closed the book and looked at the cover, which was made of a silvery material, and there, in fine gold leaf lettering, was the clearest of titles.