One afternoon about five years ago, I noticed what seemed to be a liver spot on my wrist. But in an hour or so the thing began to change. Where the spot had been, two letters were beginning to form: "Dk" with a rather artistic form, as if a logo. I suppose that normally I would have been frightened by this, but I was, though unaware of the fact, drifting into a state which was anything but normal.
I puzzled a bit about the letters. "Could it be someone's initials?" I asked myself. My landlady has a friend, I reflected, and I think his name is "Danny Kamacho."
About midnight, I went to bed. Here I must tell you that I was living in a rooming house in Ensenada, Mexico, and that all of the other residents -- about five of them -- and the landlady, were Mexicans. I had just lain down when my heart began beating rapidly and patterns began appearing on the walls and ceilings, patterns which quickly morphed into pictures of places where I had spent much time during my life, most of it periods of my early youth. After a few minutes, a voice, which called itself Leach, began to tell a version of my life story. It was quite accurate and contained events which I had forgotten. One of the scenes which appeared in shadow form on the wall was of a place in a wood where I would often go to fish. The picture on the wall was an astoundingly accurate image of the most noticeable features of the place, features which until that moment I had completely forgotten. For a minute or so, I was reliving an afternoon there.
As scene after scene of my past life formed themselves on the walls and ceiling, the voice narrated events which had occurred in them and in so doing depicted me as someone who had, until his mid-thirties, always sought a great purpose for his life.
After perhaps twenty minutes of this summoning up of my past, the voice began to order me to do things. The first was to pee on the floor of the room. (Yes, you heard right, the voice ordered me to pee on my landlady's spotless floor. Worse yet, I actually did it, fool that I was.) The voice said that the pee would smell like lemongrass and that Mexicans were particularly sensitive to the smell of lemongrass and that it would wake them up and cause them to come running to my room. And indeed when I urinated on my bedroom floor that night, the odor of lemongrass filled the room. The voice said that the purpose of the odor was to attract the landlady, whom the voice called the Witch of Endor. When she appeared, I was to get hold of her left tit, jam the nipple of it into her mouth, and give her an uppercut to the jaw in order to force her to bite off the nipple. The voice claimed that by doing this I would destroy her Satanic power.
At that point, I told the voice that I would not do anything which would harm another person, or do anything which was against the Ten Commandments or against civil law. (This Leach character, by the way, is still in my head, although I am barely on speaking terms with it because of the grudge I still bear towards it for what happened on that night back in Mexico.)
The voice then responded, "Oh, alright," in peevish tones.
The voice then ordered me to dress in a certain way. I was to put on a pair of walking shorts, a certain tee-shirt, my leather sandals, and on my head a small plastic wastebasket for a hat. I did as I was told. Then the voice told me to look at my wrist in the area of the "Dk" writing. Next to it had now appeared several tiny drawings. One was of a battery and a light bulb. The voice said that these were drawings of what I was to take with me. I got a flashlight from my chest of drawers and a spare battery and a few other items indicated by some other drawings on my wrist. One of them I couldn't decipher and told the voice so. It yelled, "Well that's too damn bad. You're going to have to figure it out for yourself or go without it. And believe me, you will at some point regret mightily that you do not have the item. You have five minutes to figure it out, then you have to leave." After the five minutes were up -- without my understanding the drawing -- the voice ordered me to leave the house and go the few blocks up to the main highway in the area, where it would then tell me what I was to do next.
I then left the building and headed to the highway. As I did, the voice began giving me orders like, "Go forward. Stop. Go back." When I got to the highway, the voice told me that I was to start hitchhiking to "Wacko, Texas."
"You mean, 'Waco', don't you?"
"Well, have it your way, you little fart. Just get moving. I'm running out of patience. In Wacko someone will meet you and give you your next instructions."
The voice then began again to give me the "Go forward. Stop. Go back" orders. I put up with the micro-management for a couple of hours and then became convinced that the voice was something which I should not be listening to, much less obeying. I was coming to my senses. I also realized that my landlady would be worrying about me, especially since I had left my bedroom door open. She would have discovered the urine all over the floor. I became very concerned about her and so headed back to my rooming house. When I reversed course, the voice became furious and began threatening a vengeance. I ignored it and continued my walk back home.
Over the next twenty four hours, many things happened to me as a result of what I've just related.