"Make an effort, nagual," a woman's voice urged me. "Don't sink. Surface, surface. Use your dream techniques!"
My mind began to work. I thought it was the voice of an English speaker, and I also thought that if I were to use dreaming techniques, I had to find a point of departure to energize myself.
"Open your eyes," the voice said. "Open them now. Use the first thing you see as a point of departure."
I made a supreme effort and opened my eyes. I saw trees and blue sky. It was daytime! A blurry face was peering at me. But I could not focus my eyes. I thought that it was the woman in the church looking at me.
"Use my face," the voice said. It was a familiar voice, but I could not identify it. "Make my face your home base; then look at everything," the voice went on.
My ears were clearing up, and so were my eyes. I gazed at the woman's face, then at the trees in the park, at the wrought-iron bench, at people walking by, and back again at her face.
In spite of the fact that her face changed every time I gazed at her, I began to experience a minimum of control. When I was more in possession of my faculties, I realized that a woman was sitting on the bench, holding my head on her lap. And she was not the woman in the church: She was Carol Tiggs.
"What are you doing here?" I gasped.
My fright and surprise were so intense that I wanted to jump up and run, but my body was not ruled at all by my mental awareness. Anguishing moments followed in which I tried desperately but uselessly to get up. The world around me was too clear for me to believe I was still dreaming, yet my impaired motor control made me suspect that this was really a dream. Besides, Carol's presence was too abrupt: There were no antecedents to justify it.
Cautiously, I attempted to will myself to get up, as I had done hundreds of times in dreaming, but nothing happened. If I ever needed to be objective, this was the time. As carefully as I could, I began to look at everything within my field of vision with one eye first. I repeated the process with the other eye. I took the consistency between the images of my two eyes as an indication that I was in the consensual reality of everyday life.
Next, I examined Carol. I noticed at that moment that I could move my arms. It was only my lower body that was veritably paralyzed. I touched Carol's face and hands: I embraced her. She was solid and, I believed, the real Carol Tiggs. My relief was enormous because for a moment, I had had the dark suspicion that she was the death defier masquerading as Carol.
With utmost care, Carol helped me to sit up on the bench. I had been sprawled on my back, half on the bench and half on the ground. I noticed then something totally out of the norm. I was wearing faded blue Levi's, and worn brown leather boots. I also had on a Levi's jacket and a denim shirt.
"Wait a minute," I said to Carol. "Look at me! Are these my clothes? Am I myself?"
Carol laughed and shook me by the shoulders, the way she always did to denote camaraderie; manliness; that she was one of the boys.
"I'm looking at your beautiful self," she said in her funny forced falsetto. "Oh massa, who else could it possibly be?"
"How in the hell can I be wearing Levi's and boots?" I insisted. "I don't own any."
"Those are my clothes you are wearing. I found you naked!"
"Where? When?"
"Around the church, about an hour ago. I came to the plaza here to look for you. The nagual sent me to see if I could find you. I brought the clothes, just in case."
I told her that I felt terribly vulnerable and embarrassed to have wandered around without my clothes.
"Strangely enough, there was no one around," she assured me, but I felt she was saying it just to ease my discomfort. Her playful smile told me so.
"I must have been with the death defier all last night, maybe even longer," I said. "What day is it today?"
"Don't worry about dates," she said, laughing. "When you are more centered, you'll count the days yourself."
"Don't humor me, Carol Tiggs. What day is it today?" My voice was a gruff, no-nonsense voice that did not seem to belong to me.
"It's the day after the big fiesta," she said and slapped me gently on my shoulder. "We all have been looking for you since last night."
"But what am I doing here?"
"I took you to the hotel across the plaza. I couldn't carry you all the way to the nagual's house: You ran out of the room a few minutes ago, and we ended up here."
"Why didn't you ask the nagual for help?"
"Because this is an affair that concerns only you and me. We must solve it together."
That shut me up. She made perfect sense to me. I asked her one more nagging question.
"What did I say when you found me?"
"You said that you had been so deeply into the second attention and for such a long time that you were not quite rational yet. All you wanted to do was to fall asleep."
"When did I lose my motor control?"
"Only a moment ago. You'll get it back. You yourself know that it is quite normal, when you enter into the second attention and receive a considerable energy jolt, to lose control of your speech or of your limbs."
"And when did you lose your lisping, Carol?" I caught her totally by surprise. She peered at me and broke into a hearty laugh.
"I've been working on it for a long time," she confessed. "I think that it's terribly annoying to hear a grown woman lisping. Besides, you hate it."
Admitting that I detested her lisping was not difficult. Don Juan and I had tried to cure her, but we had concluded she was not interested in getting cured. Her lisping made her extremely cute to everyone, and don Juan's feelings were that she loved it and was not going to give it up. Hearing her speak without lisping was tremendously rewarding and exciting to me. It proved to me that she was capable of radical changes on her own; a thing neither don Juan nor I was ever sure about.
"What else did the nagual say to you when he sent you to look for me?" I asked.
"He said you were having a bout with the death defier."
In a confidential tone, I revealed to Carol that the death defier was a woman. Nonchalantly, she said that she knew it.
"How can you know it?" I shouted. "No one has ever known this, apart from don Juan. Did he tell you that himself?"
"Of course he did," she replied, unperturbed by my shouting. "What you have overlooked is that I also met the woman in the church. I met her before you did. We amiably chatted in the church for quite a while."
I believed Carol was telling me the truth. What she was describing was very much what don Juan would do. He would in all likelihood send Carol as a scout in order to draw conclusions.
"When did you see the death defier?" I asked.
"A couple of weeks ago," she replied in a matter-of-fact tone. "It was no great event for me. I had no energy to give her, or at least not the energy that woman wants."
"Why did you see her then? Is dealing with the nagual woman also part of the death defier's and sorcerers' agreement?"
"I saw her because the nagual said that you and I are interchangeable, and for no other reason. Our energy bodies have merged many times. Don't you remember?
"The woman and I talked about the ease with which we merge. I stayed with her maybe three or four hours, until the nagual came in and got me out."
"Did you stay in the church all that time?" I asked, because I could hardly believe that they had knelt in there for three or four hours only talking about the merging of our energy bodies.
"She took me into another facet of her intent," Carol conceded after a moment's thought. "She made me see how she actually escaped her captors."
Carol related then a most intriguing story. She said that according to what the woman in the church had made her see, every sorcerer of antiquity fell, inescapably, prey to the inorganic beings. The inorganic beings, after capturing them, gave them power to be the intermediaries between our world and their realm, which people called the netherworld.
The death defier was unavoidably caught in the nets of the inorganic beings. Carol estimated that he spent perhaps thousands of years as a captive, until the moment he was capable of transforming himself into a woman. He had clearly seen this as his way out of that world the day he found out that the inorganic beings regard the female principle as imperishable. They believe that the female principle has such a pliability and its scope is so vast that its members are impervious to traps and setups and can hardly be held captive. The death defier's transformation was so complete and so detailed that she was instantly spewed out of the inorganic beings' realm.
"Did she tell you that the inorganic beings are still after her?" I asked.
"Naturally they are after her," Carol assured me. "The woman told me she has to fend off her pursuers every moment of her life."
"What can they do to her?"
"Realize she was a man and pull her back to captivity, I suppose. I think she fears them more than you can think it's possible to fear anything."
Nonchalantly, Carol told me that the woman in the church was thoroughly aware of my run-in with the inorganic beings and that she also knew about the blue scout.
"She knows everything about you and me," Carol continued. "And not because I told her anything, but because she is part of our lives and our lineage. She mentioned that she had always followed all of us, you and me in particular."
Carol related to me the instances that the woman knew in which Carol and I had acted together. As she spoke, I began to experience a unique nostalgia for the very person who was in front of me: Carol Tiggs. I wished desperately to embrace her. I reached out to her, but I lost my balance and fell off the bench.
Carol helped me up from the pavement and anxiously examined my legs and the pupils of my eyes, my neck and my lower back. She said that I was still suffering from an energetic jolt.
She propped my head on her bosom and caressed me as if I were a malingering child she was humoring.
After a while I did feel better: I even began to regain my motor control.
"How do you like the clothes I am wearing?" Carol asked me all of a sudden. "Am I overdressed for the occasion? Do I look all right to you?"
Carol was always exquisitely dressed. If there was anything certain about her, it was her impeccable taste in clothes. In fact, as long as I had known her, it had been a running joke between don Juan and the rest of us that her only virtue was her expertise at buying beautiful clothes and wearing them with grace and style.
I found her question very odd and made a comment.
"Why would you be insecure about your appearance? It has never bothered you before. Are you trying to impress someone?"
"I'm trying to impress you, of course," she said.
"But this is not the time," I protested. "What's going on with the death defier is the important matter, not your appearance."
"You'd be surprised how important my appearance is." She laughed. "My appearance is a matter of life or death for both of us."
"What are you talking about? You remind me of the nagual setting up my meeting with the death defier. He nearly drove me nuts with his mysterious talk."
"Was his mysterious talk justified?" Carol asked with a deadly serious expression.
"It most certainly was," I admitted.
"So is my appearance. Humor me. How do you find me? Appealing, unappealing, attractive, average, disgusting, overpowering, bossy?"
I thought for a moment and made my assessment. I found Carol very appealing. This was quite strange to me. I had never consciously thought about her appeal.
"I find you divinely beautiful," I said. "In fact, you're downright stunning."
"Then this must be the right appearance." She sighed.
I was trying to figure out her meanings, when she spoke again. She asked, "What was your time with the death defier like?"
I succinctly told her about my experience, mainly about the first dream. I said that I believed the death defier had made me see that town, but at another time in the past.
"But that's not possible," she blurted out. "There is no past or future in the universe. There is only the moment."
"I know that it was the past," I said. "It was the same church, but a different town."
"Think for a moment," she insisted. "In the universe there is only energy, and energy has only a here and now, an endless and ever-present here and now."
"So what do you think happened to me, Carol?"
"With the death defier's help, you crossed the fourth gate of dreaming," she said. "The woman in the church took you into her dream, into her intent. She took you into her visualization of this town. Obviously, she visualized it in the past, and that visualization is still intact in her- as her present visualization of this town must be there too."
After a long silence she asked me another question.
"What else did the woman do with you?"
I told Carol about the second dream. The dream of the town as it stands today.
"There you are," she said. "Not only did the woman take you into her past intent but she further helped you cross the fourth gate by making your energy body journey to another place that exists today, only in her intent."
Carol paused and asked me whether the woman in the church had explained to me what intending in the second attention meant.
I did remember her mentioning but not really explaining what it meant to intend in the second attention. Carol was dealing with concepts don Juan had never spoken about.
"Where did you get all these novel ideas?" I asked, truly marveling at how lucid she was.
In a noncommittal tone, Carol assured me that the woman in the church had explained to her a great deal about those intricacies.
"We are intending in the second attention now," she continued. "The woman in the church made us fall asleep; you here, and I in Tucson. And then we fell asleep again in our dream. But you don't remember that part, while I do. The secret of the twin positions. Remember what the woman told you; the second dream is intending in the second attention: the only way to cross the fourth gate of dreaming."
After a long pause, during which I could not articulate one word, she said, "I think the woman in the church really made you a gift, although you didn't want to receive one. Her gift was to add her energy to ours in order to move backward and forward on the here-and-now energy of the universe."
I got extremely excited. Carol's words were precise, apropos. She had defined for me something I considered undefinable, although I did not know what it was that she had defined. If I could have moved, I would have leapt to hug her. She smiled beatifically as I kept on ranting nervously about the sense her words made to me. I commented rhetorically that don Juan had never told me anything similar.
"Maybe he doesn't know," Carol said, not offensively but conciliatorily.
I did not argue with her. I remained quiet for a while, strangely void of thoughts. Then my thoughts and words erupted out of me like a volcano. People went around the plaza, staring at us every so often or stopping in front of us to watch us. And we must have been a sight; Carol Tiggs kissing and caressing my face while I ranted on and on about her lucidity and my encounter with the death defier.
When I was able to walk, she guided me across the plaza to the only hotel in town. She assured me that I did not yet have the energy to go to don Juan's house, but that everybody there knew our whereabouts.
"How would they know our whereabouts?" I asked.
"The nagual is a very crafty old sorcerer," she replied, laughing. "He's the one who told me that if I found you energetically mangled, I should put you in the hotel rather than risk crossing the town with you in tow."
Her words and especially her smile made me feel so relieved that I kept on walking in a state of bliss. We went around the corner to the hotel's entrance, half a block down the street, right in front of the church. We went through the bleak lobby, up the cement stairway to the second floor, directly to an unfriendly room I had never seen before. Carol said that I had been there: However, I had no recollection of the hotel or the room. I was so tired, though, that I could not think about it. I just sank into the bed, face down. All I wanted to do was sleep, yet I was too keyed up. There were too many loose ends, although everything seemed so orderly. I had a sudden surge of nervous excitation and sat up.
"I never told you that I hadn't accepted the death defier's gift," I said, facing Carol. "How did you know I didn't?"
"Oh, but you told me that yourself," she protested as she sat down next to me. "You were so proud of it. That was the first thing you blurted out when I found you."
This was the only answer, so far, that did not quite satisfy me. What she was reporting did not sound like my statement.
"I think you read me wrong," I said. "I just didn't want to get anything that would deviate me from my goal."
"Do you mean you didn't feel proud of refusing?"
"No. I didn't feel anything. I am no longer capable of feeling anything, except fear."
I stretched my legs and put my head on the pillow. I felt that if I closed my eyes or did not keep on talking I would be asleep in an instant. I told Carol how I had argued with don Juan at the beginning of my association with him about his confessed motive for staying on the warrior's path. He had said that fear kept him going in a straight line, and that what he feared the most was to lose the nagual; the abstract; the spirit.
"Compared with losing the nagual, death is nothing," he had said with a note of true passion in his voice. "My fear of losing the nagual is the only real thing I have; because without it, I would be worse than dead."
I said to Carol that I had immediately contradicted don Juan and bragged that since I was impervious to fear, if I had to stay within the confines of one path, the moving force for me had to be love.
Don Juan had retorted that when the real pull comes, fear is the only worthwhile condition for a warrior. I secretly resented him for what I thought was his covert narrow-mindedness.
"The wheel has done a full turn," I said to Carol, "and look at me now. I can swear to you that the only thing that keeps me going is the fear of losing the nagual."
Carol stared at me with a strange look I had never seen in her.
"I dare to disagree," she said softly. "Fear is nothing compared with affection. Fear makes you run wildly: Love makes you move intelligently."
"What are you saying, Carol Tiggs? Are sorcerers people in love now?"
She did not answer. She lay next to me and put her head on my shoulder. We stayed there in that strange unfriendly room for a long time; in total silence.
"I feel what you feel," Carol said abruptly. "Now, try to feel what I feel. You can do it. But let's do it in the dark."
Carol stretched her arm up and turned off the light above the bed. I sat up straight in one single motion. A jolt of fright had gone through me like electricity. As soon as Carol had turned off the light, it was nighttime inside that room. In the middle of great agitation, I asked Carol about it.
"You're not all together yet," she said reassuringly. "You had a bout of monumental proportions. Going so deeply into the second attention has left you a little mangled, so to speak. Of course, it's daytime, but your eyes can't yet adjust properly to the dim light inside this room."
More or less convinced, I lay down again. Carol kept on talking, but I was not listening. I felt the sheets. They were real sheets. I ran my hands on the bed. It was a bed! I leaned over and ran the palms of my hands on the cold tiles of the floor. I got out of bed and checked every item in the room and in the bathroom. Everything was perfectly normal, perfectly real. I told Carol that when she turned off the light, I had the clear sensation I was dreaming.
"Give yourself a break," she said. "Cut this investigatory nonsense, and come to bed and rest."
I opened the curtains of the window to the street. It was day-time outside, but the moment I closed them it was nighttime inside. Carol begged me to come back to bed. She feared that I might run away and end up in the street, as I had done before. She made sense. I went back to bed without noticing that not even for a second had it entered my mind to point at things. It was as if that knowledge had been erased from my memory.
The darkness in that hotel room was most extraordinary. It brought me a delicious sense of peace and harmony. It brought me also a profound sadness; a longing for human warmth; for companionship. I felt more than bewildered. Never had anything like this happened to me. I lay in bed, trying to remember if that longing was something I knew. It was not. The longings I knew were not for human companionship: They were abstract: They were rather a sort of sadness for not reaching something undefined.
"I am coming apart," I said to Carol. "I am about to weep for people."
I thought she would understand my statement as being funny. I intended it as a joke. But she did not say anything: She seemed to agree with me. She sighed. Being in an unstable state of mind, I became instantly swayed toward emotionality. I faced her in the darkness and muttered something that in a more lucid moment would have been quite irrational to me.
"I absolutely adore you," I said.
Talk like that among the sorcerers of don Juan's line was unthinkable. Carol Tiggs was the nagual woman. Between the two of us, there was no need for demonstrations of affection. In fact, we did not even know what we felt for each other. We had been taught by don Juan that among sorcerers there was no need or time for such feelings.
Carol smiled at me and embraced me. And I was filled with such a consuming affection for her that I began to weep involuntarily.
"Your energy body is moving forward on the universe's luminous filaments of energy," she whispered in my ear. "We are being carried by the death defier's gift of intent."
I had enough energy to understand what she was saying. I even questioned her about whether she, herself, understood what it all meant. She hushed me and whispered in my ear.
"I do understand: The death defier's gift to you was the wings of intent. And with them, you and I are dreaming ourselves in another time. In a time yet to come."
I pushed her away and sat up. The way Carol was voicing those complex sorcerers' thoughts was unsettling to me. She was not given to take conceptual thinking seriously. We had always joked among ourselves that she did not have a philosopher's mind.
"What's the matter with you?" I asked. "Yours is a new development for me: Carol the sorceress philosopher. You are talking like don Juan."
"Not yet." She laughed. "But it's coming. It's rolling, and when it finally hits me, it'll be the easiest thing in the world for me to be a sorceress philosopher. You'll see. And no one will be able to explain it because it will just happen."
An alarm bell rang in my mind.
"You're not Carol!" I shouted. "You're the death defier masquerading as Carol. I knew it."
Carol laughed, undisturbed by my accusation.
"Don't be absurd," she said. "You're going to miss the lesson. I knew that, sooner or later, you were going to give in to your indulging. Believe me, I am Carol. But we're doing something we've never done: We are intending in the second attention as the sorcerers of antiquity used to do."
I was not convinced, but I had no more energy to pursue my argument because something like the great vortexes of my dreaming was beginning to pull me in. I heard Carol's voice faintly, saying in my ear, "We are dreaming ourselves. Dream your intent of me. Intend me forward! Intend me forward!"
With great effort, I voiced my innermost thought. "Stay here with me forever," I said with the slowness of a tape recorder on the blink. She responded with something incomprehensible. I wanted to laugh at my voice, but then the vortex swallowed me.
When I woke up, I was alone in the hotel room. I had no idea how long I had slept. I felt extremely disappointed at not finding Carol by my side. I hurriedly dressed and went down to the lobby to look for her. Besides, I wanted to shake off some strange sleepiness that had clung to me.
At the desk, the manager told me that the American woman who had rented the room had just left a moment ago. I ran out to the street, hoping to catch her, but there was no sign of her. It was midday: The sun was shining in a cloudless sky. It was a bit warm.
I walked to the church. My surprise was genuine but dull at finding out that I had indeed seen the detail of its architectural structure in that dream. Uninterestedly, I played my own devil's advocate and gave myself the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps don Juan and I had examined the back of the church and I did not remember it. I thought about it. It did not matter. My validation scheme had no meaning for me anyway. I was too sleepy to care.
From there I slowly walked to don Juan's house, still looking for Carol. I was sure I was going to find her there waiting for me. Don Juan received me as if I had come back from the dead.
He and his companions were in the throes of agitation as they examined me with undisguised curiosity.
"Where have you been?" don Juan demanded. I could not comprehend the reason for all the fuss. I told him that I had spent the night with Carol in the hotel by the plaza because I had no energy to walk back from the church to their house, but that they already knew this.
"We knew nothing of the sort," he snapped.
"Didn't Carol tell you she was with me?" I asked in the midst of a dull suspicion, which, if I had not been so exhausted, would have been alarming.
No one answered. They looked at one another, searchingly. I faced don Juan and told him I was under the impression he had sent Carol to find me. Don Juan paced the room up and down without saying a word.
"Carol Tiggs hasn't been with us at all," he said. "And you've been gone for nine days."
My fatigue prevented me from being blasted by those statements. His tone of voice and the concern the others showed were ample proof that they were serious. But I was so numb that there was nothing for me to say.
Don Juan asked me to tell them, in all possible detail, what had transpired between the death defier and me. I was shocked at being able to remember so much, and at being able to convey all of it in spite of my fatigue. A moment of levity broke the tension when I told them how hard the woman had laughed at my inane yelling my intent to see in her dream.
"Pointing the little finger works better," I said to don Juan, but without any feeling of recrimination.
Don Juan asked if the woman had any other reaction to my yelling besides laughing. I had no memory of one, except her mirth and the fact that she had commented how intensely he disliked her.
"I don't dislike her," don Juan protested. "I just don't like the old sorcerers' coerciveness."
Addressing everybody, I said that I personally had liked that woman immensely and unbiasedly. And that I had loved Carol Tiggs as I never thought I could love anyone. They did not seem to appreciate what I was saying. They looked at one another as if I had suddenly gone crazy.
I wanted to say more to explain myself. But don Juan, I believed just to stop me from babbling idiocies, practically dragged me out of the house and back to the hotel; accompanied by two of his companions.
The same manager I had spoken to earlier obligingly listened to our description of Carol Tiggs, but he flatly denied ever having seen her or me before. He even called the hotel maids: They corroborated his statements.
"What can the meaning of all this be?" don Juan asked out loud. It seemed to be a question addressed to himself. He gently ushered me out of the hotel. "Let's get out of this confounded place," he said.
When we were outside, he ordered me not to turn around to look at the hotel or at the church across the street, but to keep my head down. I looked at my shoes and instantly realized I was no longer wearing Carol's clothes but my own. I could not remember, however, no matter how hard I tried, when I had changed clothes. I figured that it must have been when I woke up in the hotel room. I must have put on my own clothes then, although my memory was blank.
By then we had reached the plaza. Before we crossed it to head off to don Juan's house, I explained to him about my clothes. He shook his head rhythmically, listening to every word. Then he sat down on a bench, and, in a voice that conveyed genuine concern, he warned me that, at the moment, I had no way of knowing what had transpired in the second attention between the woman in the church and my energy body. My interaction with the Carol Tiggs of the hotel had been just the tip of the iceberg.
"It's horrendous to think that you were in the second attention for nine days," don Juan went on. "Nine days is just a second for the death defier, but an eternity for us."
Before I could protest or explain or say anything, he stopped me with a comment.
"Consider this," he said. "If you still can't remember all the things I taught you and did with you in the second attention, imagine how much more difficult it must be to remember what the death defier taught you and did with you. I only made you change levels of awareness; the death defier made you change universes."
I felt meek and defeated. Don Juan and his two companions urged me to make a titanic effort and try to remember when I changed my clothes. I could not. There was nothing in my mind: no feelings, no memories. Somehow, I was not totally there with them.
The nervous agitation of don Juan and his two companions reached a peak. Never had I seen him so discombobulated. There had always been a touch of fun, of not quite taking himself seriously in everything he did or said to me. Not this time, though.
Again, I tried to think, bring forth some memory that would shed light on all this; and again I failed, but I did not feel defeated; an improbable surge of optimism overtook me. I felt that everything was coming along as it should.
Don Juan's expressed concern was that he knew nothing about the dreaming I had done with the woman in the church. To create a dream hotel, a dream town, a dream Carol Tiggs was to him only a sample of the old sorcerers' dreaming prowess; the total scope of which defied human imagination.
Don Juan opened his arms expansively and finally smiled with his usual delight.
"We can only deduce that the woman in the church showed you how to do it," he said in a slow, deliberate tone. "It's going to be a giant task for you to make comprehensible an incomprehensible maneuver. It has been a masterful movement on the chessboard, performed by the death defier as the woman in the church. She has used Carol's energy body and yours to lift off, to break away from her moorings. She took you up on your offer of free energy."
What he was saying had no meaning to me: Apparently, it meant a great deal to his two companions. They became immensely agitated. Addressing them, don Juan explained that the death defier and the woman in the church were different expressions of the same energy; the woman in the church was the more powerful and complex of the two. Upon taking control, she made use of Carol Tiggs's energy body, in some obscure, ominous fashion congruous with the old sorcerers' machinations, and created the Carol Tiggs of the hotel, a Carol Tiggs of sheer intent. Don Juan added that Carol and the woman may have arrived at some sort of energetic agreement during their meeting.
At that instant, a thought seemed to find its way to don Juan. He stared at his two companions, unbelievingly. Their eyes darted around, going from one to the other. I was sure they were not merely looking for agreement, for they seemed to have realized something in unison.
"All our speculations are useless," don Juan said in a quiet, even tone. "I believe there is no longer any Carol Tiggs. There isn't any woman in the church either: Both have merged and flown away on the wings of intent, I believe, forward.
"The reason the Carol Tiggs of the hotel was so worried about her appearance was because she was the woman in the church, making you dream a Carol Tiggs of another kind; an infinitely more powerful Carol Tiggs. Don't you remember what she said? "Dream your intent of me. Intend me forward."
"What does this mean, don Juan?" I asked stunned.
"It means that the death defier has seen her total way out. She has caught a ride with you. Your fate is her fate."
"Meaning what, don Juan?"
"Meaning that if you reach freedom so will she."
"How is she going to do that?"
"Through Carol Tiggs. But don't worry about Carol." He said this before I voiced my apprehension. "She's capable of that maneuver and much more."
Immensities were piling up on me. I already felt their crushing weight. I had a moment of lucidity and asked don Juan, "What is going to be the outcome of all this?"
He did not answer. He gazed at me, scanning me from head to toe. Then he slowly and deliberately said, "The death defier's gift consists of endless dreaming possibilities. One of them was your dream of Carol Tiggs in another time, in another world; a more vast world; open-ended; a world where the impossible might even be feasible. The implication was not only that you will live those possibilities but that one day you will comprehend them."
He stood up, and we started to walk in silence toward his house. My thoughts began to race wildly. They were not thoughts, actually, but images; a mixture of memories of the woman in the church and of Carol Tiggs talking to me in the darkness in the dream hotel room. A couple of times I was near to condensing those images into a feeling of my usual self, but I had to give it up: I had no energy for such a task.
Before we arrived at the house, don Juan stopped walking and faced me. He again scrutinized me carefully, as if he were looking for signs in my body. I then felt obliged to set him straight on a subject I believed he was deadly wrong about.
"I was with the real Carol Tiggs at the hotel," I said. "For a moment, I myself believed she was the death defier, but after careful evaluation, I can't hold on to that belief. She was Carol. In some obscure, awesome way she was at the hotel, as I was there at the hotel myself."
"Of course she was Carol," don Juan agreed. "But not the Carol you and I know. This one was a dream Carol, I've told you, a Carol made out of pure intent. You helped the woman in the church spin that dream. Her art was to make that dream an all-inclusive reality; the art of the old sorcerers; the most frightening thing there is. I told you that you were going to get the crowning lesson in dreaming, didn't I?"
"What do you think happened to Carol Tiggs?" I asked.
"Carol Tiggs is gone," he replied. "But someday you will find the new Carol Tiggs, the one in the dream hotel room."
"What do you mean she's gone?"
"She's gone from the world," he said.
I felt a surge of nervousness cut through my solar plexus. I was awakening. The awareness of myself had started to become familiar to me, but I was not yet fully in control of it. It had begun, though, to break through the fog of the dream: It had begun as a mixture of not knowing what was going on and the foreboding sensation that the incommensurable was just around the corner.
I must have had an expression of disbelief because don Juan added in a forceful tone, "This is dreaming. You should know by now that its transactions are final. Carol Tiggs is gone."
"But where do you think she went, don Juan?"
"Wherever the sorcerers of antiquity went. I told you that the death defier's gift was endless dreaming possibilities. You didn't want anything concrete, so the woman in the church gave you an abstract gift: the possibility of flying on the wings of intent."