The Active Side of Infinity (17 page)

"Not that I'm going to do it, don Juan," I said, "but
what would be the criteria to know that I'm
dead?-unless
you want me to actually die physically."

"No," he said, "I don't want your body to die physically.
I want your person to die. The two
are very different affairs. In
essence, your person has very little to do with your body. Your
person
is your mind, and believe you me, your mind is not yours."

"What is this nonsense, don Juan, that my mind is not mine?"
I heard myself asking with a
nervous twang in my voice.

"I'll tell you about that subject someday," he said,
"but not while you're cushioned by your
friends.

"The
criteria that indicates that a sorcerer is dead," he went on, "is
when it makes no
difference to him whether
he has company or whether he is alone. The day you don't covet the company of
your friends, whom you use as shields, that's the day that your person has
died. What do you say? Are you game?"

"I can't do it, don Juan," I said. "It's useless that I
try to lie to you. I can't leave my friends."

"It's perfectly all right," he said, unperturbed. My statement
didn't seem to affect him in the
least. "I won't be able to talk to
you anymore, but let's say that during our time together you have
learned
a great deal. You have learned things that will make you very strong,
regardless of
whether you come back or you stray away."

He patted me on the back and said good-bye to me. He turned around and
simply disappeared
among the people in the plaza, as if he had merged
with them. For an instant, I had the strange
sensation that
the people in the plaza were like a curtain that he had opened and then
disappeared
behind. The end had come, as did everything else in don
Juan's world: swiftly and unpredictably.
Suddenly, it
was on me, I was in the throes of it, and I didn't even know how I had gotten
into it.

I should have been crushed. Yet I wasn't. I don't know why I was elated.
I marveled at the
facility with which everything had ended. Don Juan
was indeed an elegant being. There were no
recriminations
or anger or anything of that sort, at all. I got in my car and drove, as happy
as a
lark. I was ebullient. How extraordinary that everything
had ended so swiftly, I thought, so painlessly.

My trip home was uneventful. In Los Angeles, being in my familiar
surroundings, I noticed that I had derived an enormous amount of energy from my
last exchange with don Juan. I was actually very happy, very relaxed, and I
resumed what I considered to be my normal life with
renewed zest.
All my tribulations with my friends, and my realizations about them, everything
that I had said to don Juan in reference to this, were thoroughly
forgotten. It was as if something
had erased all that from my
mind. I marveled a couple of times at the facility I had in forgetting
something
that had been so meaningful, and in forgetting it so thoroughly.

Everything was as expected. There was one single inconsistency in the
otherwise neat
paradigm of my new old life: I distinctly
remembered don Juan saying to me that my departing
from the
sorcerers' world was purely academic, and that I would be back. I had
remembered and
written down every word of our exchange. According
to my normal linear reasoning and
memory, don Juan had never made
those statements. How could I remember things that had never
taken
place? I pondered uselessly. My pseudorecollection was strange enough to make a
case for
it, but then I decided that there was no point to it. As
far as I was concerned, I was out of don
Juan's milieu.

Following don Juan's suggestions in reference to my behavior with those
who had favored me
in any way, I had come to an earthshaking decision
for me: that of honoring and saying thank you to my friends before it was too
late. One case in point was my friend Rodrigo Cummings. One incident involving
my friend Rodrigo, however, toppled my new paradigm and sent it tumbling
down
to its total destruction.

My attitude toward him changed radically when I vanquished any competitiveness
with him. I
found out that it was the easiest thing in the world for
me to project 100 percent into whatever
Rodrigo did.
In fact, I was exactly like him, but I didn't know it until I stopped competing
with
him. Then the truth emerged for me with maddening
vividness. One of Rodrigo's foremost wishes was to finish college. Every
semester, he registered for school and took as many courses as was permitted.
Then, as the semester progressed, he dropped them one by one. Sometimes he
would withdraw from school altogether. At other times he would keep one
three-unit course all the way
through to the bitter end.

During his last semester, he kept a course in sociology because he
liked it. The final exam was
approaching. He told me that he had
three weeks to study, to read the textbook for the course. He
thought that that was an
exorbitant amount of time to read merely six hundred pages. He
considered himself something of a speed reader,
with a high level of retention; in his opinion, he had a nearly 100 percent
photographic memory.

He thought he had a great deal of time before the exam, so he asked me
if I would help him
recondition his car for his paper route. He wanted
to take the right door off in order to throw the
paper through
that opening with his right hand instead of over the roof with his left. I
pointed out
to him that he was left-handed, to which he retorted that
among his many abilities, which none of
his friends
noticed, was that of being ambidextrous. He was right about that; I had never
noticed
it myself. After 1 helped him to take the door off, he
decided to rip out the roof lining, which was
badly torn. He
said that his car was in optimum mechanical condition, and he would take it to
Tijuana
, Mexico
,
which, as a good Angeleno of the day, he called "TJ," to have it
relined for a
few
bucks.

"We could use
a
trip," he said with glee. He even
selected the friends he would like to take. "In TJ, I'm sure that you'll
go to look for used books, because you're an asshole. The rest of us will go to
a bordello. I know quite a few."

It took us a week to rip out all the lining and sand the metal surface
to prepare it for its new lining. Rodrigo had two weeks left to study then, and
he still considered that to be too much time-
He engaged me
then in helping him paint his apartment and redo the floors. It took us over a
week
to paint it and sand the hardwood floors. He didn't want to paint over the
wallpaper in one
room. We had to rent a machine that removed
wallpaper by applying steam to it. Naturally,
neither Rodrigo nor I knew how to
use the machine properly, and we botched the job
horrendously. We ended up having to use Topping, a very fine mixture of
plaster of paris and
other substances
that gives a wall a smooth surface.

After all these endeavors, Rodrigo ended up having only two days left
to cram six hundred pages into his head. He went frantically into an all-day
and all-night reading marathon, with the
help of
amphetamines. Rodrigo did go to school the day of the exam, and did sit down at
his
desk, and did get the multiple-choice exam sheet.

What he didn't do was stay awake to take the exam. His body slumped
forward, and his head
hit the desk with a terrifying thud.
The exam had to be suspended for a while. The sociology
teacher
became hysterical, and so did the students sitting around Rodrigo. His body was
stiff and
icy cold. The whole class suspected the worst; they
thought he had died of a heart attack.
Paramedics were
summoned to remove him. After a cursory examination, they pronounced
Rodrigo
profoundly asleep and took him to a hospital to sleep the effect of the
amphetamines off.

My projection into Rodrigo Cummings was so total that it frightened me.
I was exactly like
him. The similarity became untenable to me. In an
act of what I considered to be total, suicidal
nihilism, I
rented a room in a dilapidated hotel in Hollywood.

The carpets were green and had terrible cigarette burns that had
obviously been snuffed out
before they turned into full-fledged
fires. It had green drapes and drab green walls. The blinking
sign
of the hotel shone all night through the window.

I ended up doing exactly what don Juan had requested, but in a
roundabout way. I didn't do it
to fulfill any of don Juan's
requirements or with the intention of patching up our differences. I did
stay
in that hotel room for months on end, until my person, like don Juan had
proposed, died,
until it truthfully made no difference to me
whether I had company or I was alone.

After leaving the hotel, I went to live alone, closer to school. I continued
my studies of anthropology, which had never been interrupted, and I started a
very profitable business with a
lady partner. Everything seemed
perfectly in order until one day when the realization hit me like a
kick
in the head that I was going to spend the rest of my life worrying about my
business, or worrying about the phantom choice between being an academic or a
businessman, or worrying
about my partner's foibles and
shenanigans. True desperation pierced the depths of my being. For
the
first time in my life, despite all the things that I had done and seen, I had
no way out. I was
completely lost. I seriously began to toy with the
idea of the most pragmatic and painless way to
end my days.

One morning, a loud and insistent knocking woke me up. I thought it was
the landlady, and I
was sure that if I didn't answer, she would enter
with her passkey. I opened the door, and there
was don Juan!
I was so surprised that I was numb. I stammered and stuttered, incapable of
saying a word. I wanted to kiss his hand, to kneel in front of him. Don Juan
came in and sat down with
great ease on the edge of my bed.

"I made the trip to Los Angeles," he said, "just to see
you."

I wanted to take him to breakfast, but he said that he had other things
to attend to, and that he
had only a moment to talk to me. 1
hurriedly told him about my experience in the hotel. His
presence
had created such havoc that not for a second did it occur to me to ask him how
he had found out where I lived. I told don Juan how intensely I regretted
having said what I had in
Hermosillo
.

"You don't have to apologize," he assured me. "Every one
of us does the same thing. Once, I ran away from the sorcerers' world myself,
and I had to nearly die to realize my stupidity. The
important issue
is to arrive at a
breaking point,
in whatever way, and that's exactly
what you have
done.
Inner silence
is becoming real
for
you. This is the reason I am here in front of you, talking to you. Do you see
what I mean?"
I thought I understood what he meant. I thought
that he had intuited or read, the way he read
things in the
air, that I was at my wits' end and that he had come to bail me out.

"You have no time to lose," he said. "You must dissolve
your business enterprise within an hour, because one hour is all I can afford
to wait-not because I don't want to wait, but because
infinity
is pressing me mercilessly. Let's say that
infinity
is
giving you one hour to cancel yourself
out. For
infinity,
the only worthwhile enterprise of a warrior is freedom. Any other
enterprise is
fraudulent. Can you dissolve everything in one
hour?"

I didn't have to assure him that I could. I knew that I had to do it.
Don Juan told me then that
once I had succeeded in dissolving
everything, he was going to wait for me at the marketplace in
a town
in Mexico. In my effort to think about the dissolution of my business, I
overlooked what he was saying. He repeated it and, of course, I thought he was
joking.

"How can I reach that town, don Juan? Do you want me to drive, to
take a plane?" I asked.
"Dissolve your business
first," he commanded. "Then the solution will come. But remember,
I'll
be waiting for you only for an hour."

He left the apartment, and I feverishly endeavored to dissolve
everything I had. Naturally, it
took me more than an hour, but I didn't
stop to consider this because once I had set the dissolution
of
the business in motion, its momentum carried me. It was only when I was through
that the real
dilemma faced me. I knew then that I had failed
hopelessly. I was left with no business, and no
possibilities
of ever reaching don Juan.