***

        Over the next few weeks, I ran into Orlando around town several times.  Casual, chance meetings.  Or so it seemed.  At first, I fought the sense of destiny that had begun to haunt both sleeping and waking hours.  Without my knowledge or permission, he had already hooked me with his will, and though I might have howled with righteous indignation had I realized this at the time, in hindsight it is very clear that no other course of action was possible on his part or mine.  We were both acting in accordance with our destiny – the Nagual man and Nagual woman  – though he had the advantage of knowing that, whereas I had begun to feel as if I were on a roller coaster that was running headlong without a track.

        It wasn’t what he said, because sometimes he said very little.  It was him.  It was an indefinable something that I could not figure out – something which would not yield to any attempts on my part to either seduce him or abandon him.  I tried both.  And both failed utterly.  And all the while, he just kept being there with that quiet but dangerous smile that seemed to conceal some incredible mystery.

        My ordinary, day-to-day life had been turned on its head.  I couldn’t eat, sleep or work.  It wasn’t love.  It wasn’t lust.  He had possessed me, yet it wasn’t the typical manner of obsession a woman might have for a man.  I didn’t particularly want to bed him.

        I wanted to be him.

        And that was a strange realization, since I have always liked who I am just fine.

        Whenever I met Orlando, it was like looking into some warped funhouse mirror – seeing myself as I might have been had I been born in another place and time, another gender and another identity.

        I had told Wendy of my initial encounter with Orlando at the post office, but she never met him until several weeks later.  I had hoped she would take one look at him and pronounce that I was merely a foolish woman infatuated with a handsome man.  But instead, without so much as a polite introduction, he hooked her with his will on their first encounter, just as he had done with me.  And then, instead of being my anchor to the real world, she became as hopelessly ensnared into the sorcerer’s world as I had become.

        Over the course of the next few weeks, he invited us to his home, where we began to first discover that this “man” was far more than we had first believed.   He knew things about life.  About the way the world is.  About us.  Sometimes, from one day to the next, he didn’t even appear to be the same person.  We joked that there were two of him.  We speculated as to which one was the evil twin.  We decided he could be an assassin, a fallen angel, a poet’s muse, or even an immortal vampyre.  He was a contradiction and a mystery, a living enigma – and in hindsight, it is very clear to me that this was no accident.

        This was the lure, the energetic hook.  This was the Nagual man.

        His name was not really Orlando, of course.  I had toyed with the idea of calling him David or Marcus or even Bob – but in the long run, he chose the name Orlando for reasons he has never stated, though my suspicion is that it is a reference to a somewhat obscure movie by the same name – a Virginia Woolf novel about an immortal’s journey through time, space, gender and identity.

        The first time we visited Orlando at his home, he was wearing only a pair of shorts and a loose-fitting tank top when we arrived. The view was distracting. He had not known we were coming (at least not to our perceptions), as this had all been very casual.  He let us in, offered us a drink.  I accepted; Wendy declined.  I've always suspected there was something in that drink – not some bogus mickey, but something of magic.  Sorcery.

        When he handed me the glass and our eyes met, his expression was one of amusement.  “Jack Daniels and water, on the rocks,” he said with a wicked smile.  “A suicide.”

        I took the glass with as much bravado as I could muster.  “The end of my world?” I asked, playing with him the way a child might unknowingly tease a coiled serpent.

        He never hesitated.  “Exactly.”

        I never realized at the time what an appropriate analogy my mind was drawing – not in some quasi-religious sense, but far more literally than any priest or parishioner might imagine.

        It was his Intent that we would eventually commit to the sorcerer’s journey, and because he wasn’t entirely human – because he had an agenda we would not understand for years to come, based on an energetic connection of Spirit that would take even longer to comprehend – it is clear in hindsight that he chose the form and the demeanor he knew would reel us in as surely as if the hook were sunk into flesh and bone.  Looking back on it now, I have no doubt that he could just as easily have chosen the form of an old brujo in Mexico, a homeless urchin on the streets of Athens, or an immortal plucked from the pages of Anne Rice.

As we sat there talking, he began asking the kinds of questions normally reserved for midnight meanderings between old friends.  He pulled no punches, played no polite games, and showed no mercy.

"Who are you?" he wanted to know, looking at me with an intensity I could not recall ever having seen in another living being.

I started to respond with some pat rhetoric about how I was a professional writer, a martial artist, and so on, my self-importance running rampant at a time when I believed all of those things mattered. But he shook his head as if not even listening, and held up one hand in a polite gesture meant to silence my inane prattle.

"That's not what I mean,” he said very quietly.  “I mean who are you?  Who are you apart from what you do?  Who is Della?  Who is Wendy?  Why are you here on Earth at this particular moment in time?  What difference do you think it will make that you ever lived?”

I just sat there, dumfounded, for it suddenly hit me that I had no answers to his questions, no defenses against his psychic probe.  In a matter of minutes, he had cut through the shielding I had spent a lifetime building.  This was not how it was supposed to go, for I was used to being in control of any situation.  I had bullshitted my way into high-paying jobs with no qualifications; I had left home at 17 and made my way in the world because I had to; I had seduced virgins and concubines alike, and was used to having men eating out of my hand.

And yet, none of it mattered one iota – for Orlando had shown me in a matter of a few moments that my entire life had been an illusion, just a series of dramas played out by a series of actresses.  All of them had been me, yet none of them were me.  I could not have imagined how he accomplished such a drastic re-alignment of my perceptions in such a short span of time – and, indeed, to someone who has never experienced something of this magnitude, it may seem as if I’m rushing the story, omitting details, or simply making it up as I go along.

In matters of sorcery at this level, it must be noted that certain events appear to actually happen outside of time – in between tick and tock.  At the time all of this was happening, it appeared to my ordinary awareness that perhaps only a few minutes or an hour had passed.  And yet, even then, I could not deny the sense of déjà vu that seemed to follow Orlando like some mysterious vapor.  I could not know at that time that there was a reason for this which defies traditional rationality, and delves straight into the realms of quantum ubiquitousness – where the self exists as a singularity of consciousness spanning the all of the space-time continuum and beyond.

Later, when I began reading the books of Carlos Castaneda and other texts on Toltec shamanism, and encountered the concept of heightened awareness, there was a sense of understanding exactly how Orlando had accomplished the task of cutting so quickly through my defenses, but at the time it was happening, all I can say is that it felt as if I had been picked up out of one life and instantaneously set down in the middle of a different one.

For the first time, I was speechless.

This mysterious man was asking us to define the meaning of our human lives.  And even though I was well educated in many aspects of metaphysics, I'd never really given a lot of thought to those meaning-of-life questions from a personal standpoint – only from a detached, academic perspective – words shoved inside the mouths of fictional characters who appeared at my beck and call on a monochrome green monitor, and could be silenced into oblivion with nothing more than a keystroke.

I fumbled.  I squirmed.  I tried to focus.

He didn’t argue.  He just sighed softly.  “It’s too late to save the world,” he stated with a matter-of-factness that raised gooseflesh on my arms, for he spoke as if from personal knowledge rather than any ill-formed belief.  “The world will fall – whether in a year or ten thousand years.”  He had stood up and begun to pace in front of the living room window – a sleek, dangerous silhouette backlit by a lamp in the corner. “Besides – the world as you’re referring to it is an illusion anyway.  The only thing you might be able to save is yourself.”

Wendy caught my eye with a look that told me what I already knew.  We were in over our heads.  Indeed, what is so obvious to me now was so alien to me at the time that I could barely even fathom what Orlando was saying.  The result was that I found myself becoming defensive – typical, pre-programmed response of my own self-importance, my own attachment to the programs I thought were real.

“Then what’s the point of any of it?” I quipped, struggling to keep the sharp edge out of my voice.

Orlando stopped his pacing, and turned to regard me with a cobra’s hypnotic gaze.  “You have to see beyond the illusions before you can be beyond the illusions.”

It was one of those enigmatic responses that made me want to avail myself of a dramatic and angry exit, yet something in the way he spoke those words told me that if I did, it would be over.  He was trying to tell us something without coming out and saying it directly – and whatever it was inside of me that recognized Truth told me in no uncertain terms this was no game.

His statement echoed in my ears, and again I caught Wendy’s eye from across the room.

For a few minutes, we fumbled around in a miasma of words.  We even tried double-teaming him in our efforts to convince him that there was meaning in life, purpose in creativity, and identity in what we did.  But in the end, it was all just a bunch of self-indulgent clap-trap – and the mere act of attempting to verbalize those lies we all tell ourselves brought into an ever-increasing awareness the fact that they were lies.  The illusion was right there in front of us and had been all along.  But we kept right on preaching it, as if singing it into being would somehow make it real.

We were pathetic phantoms.

Orlando continued drinking his Jack Daniels, and watching us to see if we were capable of thinking or just babbling the rhetoric we thought we should say because it sounded good rolling off the tongue.  Having run out of inventories of what I did, who I knew, what I wrote, or my favorite restaurants, in desperation I decided to try a different tact.

His eyes narrowed a bit.  He leaned forward in his chair, and I had the feeling he was studying me the way a serpent studies his prey.  "I don't believe in all that psychic mumbo jumbo,” he said after a thoughtful silence, surprising me as always with his directness that wasn’t rude or inconsiderate, just brutally honest.  “In fact, I went to see a psychic once – her name was Sonya Grey – but I didn't like what she was telling me, so I just threw the money on the table and left." 

He held my gaze with that same unwavering intensity as he said this; and even at the time, I had a reaction I could not quite put my finger on.  A distant memory stirred – something I should remember, but couldn’t quite grasp, like a dream from years in the past struggling to the surface, only to dart back into the shadows before it could be retrieved.   For a single instant, everything stopped, and as I sat there sunken down deep into that plush white chair, the very fabric of time did a cartwheel that went into a backbend, then finally moved forward again like some deranged tumbling exercise.  I had almost remembered… something.  But… what?

The sensation was baffling, and sent another shiver racing down my back.  Who was this man?

“So what was she telling you that you didn’t want to hear?” Wendy asked boldly.

Orlando chuckled, then turned his intensity on her, leaving me to feel almost relieved.  “That the world is made of illusions.”

My head spun.  I tried to blame it on the liquor.  The internal dialogue had reverted to running inventories of the clothes in my closet, the items I needed at the store, what I had to do tomorrow.

It was fear.  A sense of impending destiny.

I said nothing.

The conversation moved on, though I was in an almost trance-like state.  By the end of the evening, we'd discussed everything from the fallacies of religion to the potential end of the world to the possible existence of an immortal soul.  It was a blur of words, a cyclone of energy – and yet I found myself oddly detached from it all, like an observer lost in the balcony, a washed-up actress who had forgotten her lines.

In some secret, selfish little way, I had hoped Orlando would disappoint me.  I had hoped he would open his mouth when we first came through the door that night, and say something stupid.  I had fantasized that he might even revert to some crude posturing and suggest a ménage a trois – at which point I would have been validated in self-righteously pronouncing that he was just another typical male.

Instead, he was not only a gentleman, but a sage.

I was in serious trouble.

***

It was only when we got back home that I began to get unbidden images of an event which had occurred almost a year in the past.  Just a glimpse at first.  A few fleeting snippets of memory, cut at random from the scrapbook of my life.

And then, quite suddenly, it was all right there, tumbling out of the past like an avalanche that threatened to bury me under the implications.

In June of 1987 – almost exactly nine months before – Wendy and I had gone to the county fair with a good friend, Ellen.  Throughout the day, we had been in high spirits; and, independently, each of us had noticed that there was “something in the air,” though none of us spoke of it until later in the afternoon.  We referred to it at the time as a feeling that something was going to happen – something mysterious and wonderful and potentially life-altering.

And yet, even at the time, I couldn’t help secretly believing I was just engaging in wishful thinking.  Though I had experienced the mysterious many times in my life, I was at a crossroads where that excitement had begun to give way to a sense of sameness, perhaps even the onset of a frustration for which I had no explanation.  Even in my satisfaction with life, I was restless, and so the feeling that overcame the three of us that day was one to which I was almost afraid to surrender.

        Not a philosophy I would choose to live by, yet I wondered fleetingly if I had begun to live in fear, refusing to open myself to the mysterious and magical unknown because of some pre-conceived conclusion that it would always remain one step out of reach.  I focused again on the memory that was struggling to surface, something about that day at the fair almost a year in the past.

        That evening, just before we were going to leave the fairgrounds, we scouted out something to eat.  Fried something-or-other, with enough cholesterol to block every major artery on the spot.  The sun had finally set, leaving the western horizon an abstract watercolor of purples, pinks and sea-grey.  Somewhere in the distance, steel drums clattered an eerie rendition of Stairway to Heaven while screams from the midway echoed off of aging cinder-block buildings badly in need of paint.

    Sitting at a wooden picnic table, we ate in silence, each of us lost in thought.  Even though the day was almost done, the feeling that there was something magical in the air lingered.  I wanted to hold my breath, to make the day go on just a little longer. 

    Only after a few minutes did I realize I had been staring fixedly at a colorful tent at the perimeter of the outdoor dining area at the fairgrounds. Though there were other vendor displays, this one seemed to stand out, to the point that I was silently, unknowingly mesmerized.  My dinner was gone, though I had no memory of eating.  The evening air had turned cold.  I shivered.

    I had been staring absent-mindedly at three people in the crowd – a young couple in their late 20s, and the man accompanying them.  Without my conscious awareness, this man had held my attention for a full minute before I ever realized I was watching him.  At least 6’4”; raven black hair a couple of inches over the collar; 5 o’clock shadow that gave him the outward appearance of a dangerous rogue; and dark glasses even though the sun was only a fading memory in the west.

    At this time in my life, even though Wendy and I had been together as a couple for almost nine years, I still enjoyed looking at handsome men.  So did she, for that matter.  So I nudged her with my foot and nodded toward the man standing in front of the pretty tent.  Catching my eye, she grinned, and I realized that she had been watching him, too, even before I pointed him out.  That was his nature – to command the attention of a room just by virtue of his existence.

    The couple became preoccupied at a jewelry display, at which point the enigmatic man walked inside the colorful tent and appeared to be talking to someone seated behind a desk.  As it was almost night, I could see candles burning inside.  The setting was alluring.  Unexpectedly magical.  His face was a study in angles and shadows, flame-glow and curiosity.  He stood there for only a few moments.  Then, reaching for his wallet, he pulled out a couple of bills, tossed them onto the desk, and hastily left.

        I thought very little of it at the time.

        He caught up to the young couple, the three of them disappeared into an exhibit hall, and that was the end of that...

        ...until, nine months later, after that evening in Orlando’s house, when I abruptly knew what it was I had been struggling to remember.

        The inscription on the side of that tent had read:

            When that memory came flooding back, when I realized Orlando must have been intentionally baiting me with a forgotten incident nearly a year in the past – an incident that had taken place at one isolated moment in the course of an event that hosts well over a million people during its 2+ week run at the fairgrounds – I literally sat on the edge of the bed in a state of bewilderment and shock.

        To the casual observer, it could be easily explained away. 

        And yet, on a level of  pure intuition, I knew it was no mere happenso.  Tumblers clicked. There was a reason I had had such a strong reaction to Orlando at the post office the day I first met him.

        That was the night my life changed forever.

        Any rational being can easily explain away the events I am attempting to describe.  To anyone else, perhaps the anecdote of my initial encounters with Orlando is nothing more than a report of an ordinary event blown out of proportion.

        And yet, that is the preferred defense system of the consensual agreement.  Literally anything can be explained away if that is the intent of the perceiver – and it is no coincidence that the agreement itself is set up in such a fashion as a means to maintain its own status quo.  It is designed to protect itself from change through a complex system of denial, stasis, and the ongoing spiritual bankruptcy of its inhabitants.

        Shamans, mystics and sorcerers have known this for centuries, so it stands to reason they have been among the most persecuted individuals in a long and bloody human history.  That which does not support the status quo threatens it.

        You will sleep better if you close this book right now and tell yourself that the author is clearly mad and the tales she is telling are only fabrications or exaggerations of otherwise ordinary events.

        The other amusing thing is that the nagual itself occasionally aids and abets the very consensual reality to which it exists as antithesis.  It stands to reason, therefore, that Carlos Castaneda was never able to produce the mysterious don Juan; no UFO has ever landed on the White House lawn to be photographed by zealous paparazzi; and I can no more prove my story in a court of law than I could sprout wings and fly.

        And yet…

        This isn’t a tale of faith. To those who have taken this journey for themselves, the bizarre machinations of the sorcerer’s double are legendary, and perhaps even obvious.  To the uninformed – even those who may be yearning to embark on a spiritual path – those machinations will appear bizarre, frightening, and perhaps even cause the seeker to question her own sanity.

        This is the first test.