My Romance With Illusion

by Harrison Kim

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

After Ogden told me he never wanted his picture taken, I waited till I could take a good shot. I thought it would be a good joke. We’d studied at Okanagan College in Kelowna, both of us taking arts courses. I’d quit the plywood mill; six months there was enough to earn money for school.

Ogden came in from Rocky Mountain House to live with his grandmother. His mom wanted him to experience life outside of small-town Alberta. We hit it off right away. Ogden couldn’t do sports because of his bone disease, which made him feel stiff and achy much of the time. Walking loosened him up.

For me, walking was the way to relax, to try and calm my whirling mind. “I can’t slow it down,” I told Ogden. “So much to contemplate, so little time to learn.” We hiked back and forth from the college, up the Trepanier Hills, across Mission Flats and out to Bear Creek. We conversed in motion. I’d spent a lot of time studying Eckankar, the “ancient science of soul travel.”

“You’re obsessed,” said Ogden. “You need a girlfriend.”

“It’s easier to walk alone,” I said. “You told me that yourself.”

Ogden found belonging in the wilderness. We talked metaphysics as we camped up beyond the Trepanier Hills. I took the forbidden picture as he watched a bear lumber by less than fifty meters away. He thought I was snapping the bear, but I turned the lens and got him. I recall an image of a skinny neck and the side of a thin, pointy head, with black hair on top going all this way and that.

After I took the LSD, I lay down and nothing happened for a while. I concentrated on soul travel, as Lobsang Rampa taught.

Then, everything changed. I found myself floating, encased in a blue shell, the “astral body.” All around me, a white glow. I knew this to be the soul’s “aura.” I could look in all directions at once, side to side, above and below.

I saw the black outline of mighty Okanagan Lake and tiny lights from houses along the shore. A big swirl of color indicated Kelowna. I sailed higher, did not think of anything but my mission: “Look for Ogden.” I thought of the game popular at the time, Where’s Waldo?, and began to laugh uncontrollably. I knew I’d find my friend. My mission would be successful. My blue shell floated up and between high mountains, the Monashees, the Selkirks, the Rockies and, now, the White Goat Wilderness. Coming down, out of the night, into a narrow valley.

After his first encounter with the creature, Ogden suffered two long scratches on his back. All the way down, cutting through flesh.

“Pretty serious,” I said.

“I think the creature transferred something with its claws,” Ogden said. “You know, I’ve been communicating with it by extrasensory perception since I left the valley.”

“Wild,” I said. “What do you two talk about?”

“Don’t kid me.” Ogden turned away, looked out across the tops of the black spruce and fir. “With the creature, it’s not talking that we do, it’s a feeling we share.” He grinned in his lopsided way. “It’s funny that a guy who believes in soul travel doubts me. If what we perceive is illusion, the astral is the reality and there’s no space and time, then why not telepathy?”

“I’m not sure if I’ve astral-travelled,” I said. “It’s just a thing I’m into believing right now.”

“I know you want to believe it,” he said. “But to believe truly, you have to experience.”

I took the acid because I wanted a direct connection to the spiritual. No more waiting. I wanted the truth to be what I imagined: female human cat creatures, astral bodies, telepathy, teleportation, time travel. With them, the world would become so much more exciting. And I could find Ogden. No tromping through the bush. Just a gentle lift into a parallel universe.

My astral body lowered itself into the valley. The mountains glowed in the growing dawn, the peaks of snow were touched by the sun. I saw Ogden below, hiking through the valley, his dog Chief scouting ahead. The guy was up so early.

He turned and looked behind him as I floated down. A black cap covered his face. I thought of the creature and felt the green eyes right away. The more I thought about them, the stronger their hot stone power burrowed into me. Eyes ripped out of the mountain rocks, eyes of jade.

I wanted to change myself inside, Ogden wanted to change his physical outside. If he could put on my face and I could have his sense of purpose, that would be ideal. We would both find a place to belong.

“This green-eyed entity is going to take over my soul,” I thought. The sky began closing in above me. The mountains became barricades, growing taller and taller. Below, Ogden hiked on. I wanted to leave, feeling an increasing panic. I also wanted to warn him about the creature. I swooped down, despite darkening skies. I waved and shouted.

He kept walking on, head down. He seemed so light on his feet, nimbly stepping around rocks and over logs. His legs looked thick and strong, his gait sure and true. He’d always been careful, his bone disease meant that he couldn’t fall, ever. Now he loped loosely and easily. At the last minute, as he glanced up to check behind him, I saw that he now possessed the face of a lynx. In that face glowed two jade green eyes.

Maybe we’re all trying to possess one another, in order to belong. Being alone is a diminishing of the self, a vanishing. We must find who we want to be part of and who wants to be part of us. That’s the quest. Some have an easier time than others.

“You’re just using your ugliness as an excuse to cop out,” I told Ogden. Why was I so hard on him? I was as ugly inside as he was outside, in those days, ripping up his picture had been a mean, impulsive act; it might have been the deciding factor in his decision to hike back to the hidden valley. I live with that today.

It took me a week to recover from my astral trip to the Rockies. The world seemed unfocused, surreal. I checked for hallucinations while making my poached-egg breakfast, making sure I wasn’t being influenced by a bad entity. Put a fork on the egg, push it til it pops. Taste just a bit, make sure the texture’s not fake. Now, perhaps open the window. See if the world’s still there.

At night, I had to make sure my astral body didn’t escape. I lay rigid for hours, trying to hold it in, feeling it surge and chafe against my thought bonds. I was sure if I let go this time, some nightmare would invade and take over my physical essence.

I stayed awake for a few days, drinking coffee and pop to make sure I didn’t doze off and allow soul release. I walked the streets, my mind whirling: “Is this real?” After some days, I understood that I must accept what I viewed in the astral mountains or return to uncertainty and fear. I slowly relaxed, let the stress go.

“Ogden’s around somewhere,” I told his sister Gloria, as we sat having coffee on her front patio, spring of 1975. “His essence, you know.”

“He’s dead in the mountains,” She gestured out towards the West. “We searched for months up there, search and rescue, all his relatives. We found nothing.”

“I’m having trouble remembering what he looked like.” I said. “He was so distinctive, but my mind can’t focus on his face.”

“I can find you a photo.” She showed one of Ogden and Chief. He stood smiling between his sister and his mother, outside the Banff Springs Hotel, short, bony and misshapen.

“He always told me he didn’t have any photos of himself. He’d destroyed them all.”

“I kept the family shots,” Gloria said.

I didn’t think of Ogden with a family. He really did have people who cared, who loved him and searched for him.

“I never took any photos of us together,” I said. “But this will be fine. I’ll make a copy.”

In April of 1974, the last time we travelled together, Ogden and I canoed up Adams Lake. The further into the quiet we paddled, the more irritable I became.

“You like society,” he said. “I prefer it here.”

We camped by the Momich River and, in the night, a bear came poking at the bottom of the tent. I froze in my sleeping bag, but Ogden jumped up and banged on the pots and pans. The bear snuffled a bit, then loped away.

“Wow,” I said. “That took guts.”

“I belong in this place,” Ogden replied. “I know how to handle the wilderness.”

I thought that as I grew older, the world would open up. It would become more like I envisioned; a Shangri-La created for the realization of dreams. It turned out that the dreams happened mostly in my mind.

I desired spiritual awareness. I experienced illusion and nightmare, a sense of regret and a cautious attitude to reality. I think Ogden knew that by walking into his illusions he’d never come out. He made that choice.

Sometimes, even after all these years, when waking in the night, I have a sense of green eyes and the lingering of a lost voice. It’s a shout, a scream that’s half-beast, half-human. Is it some lost creature, trying to communicate through the astral, or is it my own voice crying for meaning? Either way, like everything else in dreams and in a lot of reality, these vivid, mournful expressions happen completely and absolutely at random.