THE LAST DISCIPLE OF OFU

by: Brad M. Bucklin

"I have explained it to you numerous times." he spoke to the doctors as if they were interns fresh out of med school, instead of the most accomplished physicians the government could muster. "You only believe what you have been taught, not what actually is." They did not understand. They did not have the capacity to understand. Not that they were stupid, heavens no, they just weren't ready.

I understood, but could not explain it. People seemed to disappear around me; they always disappeared. But David was different. Perhaps as I write it out, a piece of understanding will emerge. I don't know, these pages seem so thin and the ink so futile.

I believe that it is true, anything people don't understand they tend to fear, to try and bury, to put out of their minds. I don't blame them for doing it, there is often too much to deal with in the world and our every day lives as it is, but to have to sift through vast amounts of unexplainable material as well, that just may be the last straw.

The stern men in the dark suits were just trying to protect the public from something that would only add to their confusion about life.

My confusion had long since been replaced by acceptance...and I missed it. They say that confusion is a high state of being. For over ten years I was perhaps the most transcended human on earth. Knowing David was not easy; being his friend was near impossible.

We met in college on the roof of the student union one hazy day in early September 1971. I thought I was the only one who knew how to climb over from the second story window of the Student Union to the fire ladder and up to the roof. But there he was, his long black cape and all, as if he had materialized from thin air and into existence that very second. "Hello!" his grin was ear to ear and infectious. "Nice up here, isn't it?" Once I got over my shock, I replied. "It is nice, yes. I thought I was the only one who knew..." "Good places like this should not be kept a secret." he interrupted me, which, I thought was considerably rude. But, as I got to know him, I understood that he wasn't trying to be offensive, he just wanted to get to the point. He always wanted to get to the point, unless the point was not worth getting to.

"I haven't seen you around before."

"...and I haven't seen you around before, either." He grinned again.

"I'm not hard to miss, I am the checker at the cafeteria, if you eat on campus, I check you in."

" The cafeteria? Horrible food, how can you eat that slop?"

"You get used to it. Where do you eat?"

"In my room."

Ha, I had him there; for some inexplicable reason I wanted to catch him in a lie, to have something on him, to get back at him for stealing my private, sacred spot. I wanted to wipe that impish grin from his face.

"It's against the rules, to eat in your room..."

"So? I am sure there is a rule that says you can't climb up onto the roof of the student union, isn't there?"

"Well...I uh, don't know..."

"So, then..." His smile grew. I sulked.

"What are you doing up here?" I asked curtly. His brown and shaggy hair fell into his eyes but he didn't seem to mind. "Just sitting, watching, like you." Even though the haze covered the valley he looked out as if he could see the world. He didn't even glance in my direction for the longest time. The whole incident was eerie now that I think back on it. He made me nervous, defensive and uneasy. There was certainly no way I would have guessed at the time, that our relationship would grow into what it did, that our lives would be so intertwined.

He was David Dunhill Ducet and all I initially knew about him was that he liked to smile. In the early days you couldn't knock that shit eating grin off his face with a hammer.

"Why do you grin all the time?" I asked him about six months into our friendship. "It makes you look like a...like a...clown." All he did was grin back at me. Despite his mischievous grin, he had a love of H.P. Lovecraft stories and a rather morbid sense of mortality which went with his ever present black, Dracula cape. He was as "normal" as anyone in the waning days of the hippie generation. No, he was not normal, not even then, but Windham College did seem to attract the "abnormal" people, except for me, of course. Out of all the odd people on campus the most interesting characters always seemed to find their way to David. Perhaps that is what attracted me to him as well, that is not to say I am all that interesting, but I liked being around interesting people.

There was Arden, the heir to a Cola fortune who, in order to kick his cocaine habit, got hooked on his own families product. He drank at least a case of the stuff every day and was as large around as he was tall. His scraggly curly black hair hung around an oval face filled with blackened teeth and deep set eyes. Arden rarely spoke, but was a genius with computers in a time when computers took up five rooms. His intelligence set him apart and made him a recluse, yet he and David would spend hours, days, talking about all sorts of unexplainable things. Whether it was a sugar induced hallucination or, true clarity, Arden was the first one to understand that David was going to accomplish something that no one else had ever done.

"You cannot be held in this world." Arden's soft, hoarse voice, was eerie through the haze of hashish and marijuana smoke.

Personally, I thought his mind was being eaten away like his teeth, that he was saying David was going to live a brief life. Was it death? What did David go through? Did his life cease? It did on this world, for all intents and purposes...but still. Arden did go crazy not long after that. Technically he was "no longer in touch with reality" and that was why he ended up in the Brattleboro Asylum with Tom Band.

There was no denying that Arden and Tom B belonged together. Tom B was also a genius, a creative genius, perhaps he could have been another Mozart if he had been born in a different time and had stayed away from cheap wine and drugs.

The first time I met Tom he was sitting at the piano in the student union playing...I think it was Hyden. Whatever it was it was the most beautiful piano playing I had ever heard. But minutes after he noticed that I was listening the music got weirder and weirder, until he pounded the keys making as much noise as possible. Suddenly he stopped and looked at me with this crazy grin. "Well did you like it?"

Tom had once been a promising concert pianist, a virtuoso, he dropped out to hitchhike across the United States, until he landed at Windham and found a place where he wasn't so crazy. Why he had chosen the path of self destruction, he didn’t even seem to know. Perhaps he was haunted by his talent, unable to accept the gift. He was already 35 when I first met him and crazy about being crazy. He decided he wanted to be admitted to the Brattleboro Asylum and escape the real world which seemed to have failed him. He often pounded on their large wooden reinforced doors until a white coated attendant opened them. He’d beg to be admitted but they would turn him away because he wasn't crazy enough.

In my sophomore year I became David's roommate, we lived in Frost Dorm, named for the poet Robert Frost (there was a plaque on the side of the building saying so). Our room was an average size, but seemed a lot smaller with all David’s stuff. Tom would usually hang out in our room when he wasn't working, either there or with Steve Cravitz, a Long Island Jew who knew his way around the female population like a blind man around braille. One afternoon I got a knock on my door, Tom B stood there wearing a huge grin and little else. He had fallen off the wagon and was once again Crazy Tom. He pushed his way past me and sat on David's bed.

"Want to see 'Telltale Heart?" he asked.

"What?" I replied, not in the best of moods at the time.

"Telltale Heart" by Edgar Allen Poe. I have memorized it. Let me recite it for you." His eyes were wide, blood shot and wild and I dared not refuse, it probably wouldn't have done any good anyway, because he leapt into it with such abandon that all I could do was sit and watch.

"A low, dull, quick sound--much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I gasped for breath, and yet the officers heard it not.". He began. "O God! what COULD I do? I foamed---I raved---I swore" As the story progressed he got more and more excited, more and more crazy. His eyes were manic, his whole body shook. "Villain!, I shrieked, dissemble no more! I admit the deed---tear up the planks!--here, here!--it is the beating of his hideous heart!"

The maddening climax was so real I thought he was going to lunge over, grab my throat and bury me under the floorboards. I cowered on the bed as he finally threw himself prostrate onto the floor and became deathly still. After about 30 seconds he leaped up grinning ear to ear and said; "Well, what did you think?"

I was stunned, to say the least. How he managed to learn the whole of the story word for word, put on such a chilling performance and then return to his "normal" self was a feat worthy of praise. He left beaming, to go show it off to some other unsuspecting student.

Crazy Tom claimed to have been the first person to see David shift...at least he swore up and down that he saw him and was sober at the time. The experience, whether real or imagined, had a profound effect on him. He disappeared for two months and upon his return appeared to be a changed person. He managed this new self for about six months, all the while staying as far away from David as he could. It was the only time he seemed completely lucid and his uncanny intelligence shined, a thing to behold.

"I was twelve when I had my first concert." He said as he rolled a cigarette, placing the paper and tobacco on top of the piano, rolling with one hand, playing with the other.

"They, my parents, entered me in every contest they could and I won most of them. But you see for them it was about me, for me it was about something else. When I played I went into this place, this other place, it was a world of its own where the notes became colors and the chords personalities. I can't really explain it, but you see, I have been where David goes, I have seen it through my music. It's a place that is just outside my grasp. A place I want to get to and fear that I never will."

The realization was too much for Tom, six months later on a cold and snowing day he was once again at the doors of the Brattleboro Asylum, a bottle of Thunderbird in one hand and a bottle of pills in the other. All he wore was a ratty sports jacket, a tee shirt, boxer shorts and summer sandals. When the attendants opened the door he calmly asked to be let in but when they refused he simply dove down the steps head first. After that they had to admit him because he had fractured three ribs, given himself a concussion and broken an arm.

I still think of him and his wasted life, wasted talent that went unnoticed and unredeemed.

David was amused by everything that was going on around him. He took particular delight in finding out dirty little secrets and giggling about them over a hot cup of tea. That is how I found out most of my information. He would sweep around campus in his cape, like some self appointed dignitary. Keeping his mind sharp with games of chess, philosophical discussions, and, of course, his obsession with horror stories.

David's Lovecraft readings were legendary. People would cram into our room and soak up the gothic atmosphere he had created by importing a few antiques and buying quantities of white and black candles. Sometimes I would stay and sometimes I would go to the library and listen to Stravinsky or Dvorak. I never had nightmares, I still don't, but it was the living nightmare of David and his obsessions that bothered me. After the readings he would sulk in the corner of his bed. He had been the center of attention and when the attention was gone he would go into withdrawals like Tom B withdrawing from drugs. Not many people knew just how insecure David was. He would always have people around him when he was out and about, but none of them were true friends, none cared for who David really was, they liked him because he amused them. But then again he didn't make it easy to know who he was and didn't care about them either.

"My cadre of cadavers." he would call them. He relished playing practical jokes on just about anyone, especially me. Not your typical run of the mill childhood pranks, but real elaborate gags that might take days to set up properly. I was enlisted on more than one occasion to assist with his schemes.

Halloween was one of David's most favorite times of year. One year he made an obvious show of buying an expensive and realistic looking old man mask, complete with long scraggly white hair. He would show it off to anyone without provocation so once Halloween rolled around just about everyone knew what David Ducet was going to be dressed as. What he didn't show them was an equally impressive Dracula mask he had purchased at the same time. On Halloween he had me put on the old man mask and wear one of his long capes. I was a few inches shorter than David but walked with a stoop and a crooked stick as a cane. David put on his Dracula mask and we pranced around the room making sure that we could imitate each others walk before we snuck into the night. Naturally, everyone thought I was David, but they couldn't figure out who Dracula was. We had a grand time.

David's belief in ghosts, witches and the supernatural was tempered by a real curiosity for physics and science. At first he put on his shows and talked about the rise of the living dead more for shock value than anything else. He was "theatrical" and a "character" everyone knew him because he entertained them. Tom B entertained people too, but it was through a haze of self pity which David would not put up with. Often you could hear them playing piano pieces together, whenever Crazy Tom would start going off on a tangent David would get him back on course. But David was a hack compared to Crazy Tom and yet Tom wasn't interested in art, all he was interested in was testing the boundaries of reality. Funny that ultimately David would succeed in overstepping those boundaries while Crazy Tom was the one who first introduced David to the notion that the boundaries could be overstepped in the first place.

"You don't have to be limited to this plane of existence." Crazy Tom said through the mouth of a wine jug. "I have tested all forms of travel, and I am testing them still." He grinned like a Cat, his red face a gremlins with perfect white false teeth. "I drink because I know...I drink because I don't know...I drink because there is nothing to know...and everything." He was ranting again, but David listened.

I leaned into him whispering, "How does he know he knows if he's drunk all the time?" David did one of his back handed waves to quiet me. "You can't be seriously listening to this." I shook my head.

Tom grinned. "It's all bull shit."

"Damn right." I said.

"The minute I say it, it no longer is true." Tom wobbled to a stand.

"Shhh." David pushed me away with one hand.

"I am not here." Crazy Tom waved his hand with a flourish and stood as still as he could without falling over. He made his way to the door, turned once as if to say something and was gone.

By my Senior year David had become intensely interested in meditation, he would often sit in the middle of our room, his cape draped around him, chin against his chest, chanting softly. I must admit I too got into it and often joined him. But most of the time I ended up falling asleep, waking up abruptly when I heard myself snore, or when the phone down the hall rang suddenly.

He burned incense and wore a large crystal on a leather thong around his neck. Granted, this sort of behavior was pretty much the norm at the time, for most people it was a passing phase...but for David it was just the beginning of a journey.

In 74 I had a break from David. Accepted to the study abroad program I was to spend the fall semester and most of the winter studying in Bern Switzerland. It was a great experience, because it was completely normal by all standards. I was transfixed by the charm of the old city and my Eurail pass freed me so I did very little studying that semester. I went to onion festivals, rode up mountains in vertical trains and walked in ancient caves. I didn't even think about meditation. I didn't even think, I just looked and soaked up each and every scene to store away as my private mental picture postcard collection. I carry it with me still. It is an interlude that made me realize the whole world was not a mysterious path, that there were some places that had transcended the metaphysics of life and stood as monuments to the passing of such ideas and the emergence on the other side to a simple grace and kinder intentions.

I completed my senior year in a single room that I had all to myself. No David, no Tom or Steve. I made love to...what was her name, a true exotic dark haired beauty, who made me glad to be alive, who instilled in me a confidence that resonated through my young life, making me understand my own power.

I was more self assured, freer, less afraid when I met up with David again. It was a good thing too, because things were certainly going to get a lot weirder.

"It is far simpler than you realize." David was walking across a carpet of tacks. He had me meticulously glue them, all points up, onto an old stretch of runner that he found somewhere....He had walked across broken glass, hot coals, just about anything that would do physical damage to his body. It was becoming routine for him, but good for effect, to show his devotees. The rug was easy to transport and set up, unlike digging trenches and firing up the briquettes, and since we would travel extensively from one enlightened group to the other, it was ideal.

"I'm sure it is." I replied half heartedly. I was there to catch him if by chance he lost his concentration.

"You try it now." He stepped off the tacks and offered me the chance to take his place.

"No I don't think so, I'm not as enlightened as you are."

"Oh hogwash." He came over to me and started removing my shoes.

"I've told you a thousand times, I don't want to do it. I didn't want to walk on fire, I didn't want to walk over broken glass and I don't want to do this." My resolve finally won him over.

"Alright, but you could be a more enlightened human being."

"Being around you is all the light I need."

It was the late seventies, we had finished college I had my Liberal Arts degree and David completed his course in pre-med. But instead of pursuing medicine David had decided to devote his life to transforming the world. I had become his faithful right hand man, gluing tacks to carpet remnants. In setting out to transform anything, the first thing one has to do is transform themselves. Gone was his black cape and library of horror literature. He wore loose fitting robes of muslin and grew his already thinning hair as long as he could. He incorporated all the accouterments of enlightenment...incense burned constantly, soft monosyllabic chants hovered in the air around him. All familiar trappings of Eastern religions but nothing distinctly anything in particular. He often said that all past organized religions had failed to enlighten completely, so he borrowed liberally and called what he espoused Transformentalism. Or to transform your mental ability to create your life. He actually had quite a following among the fringes of the hippies, yippies and discontented housewives.

He gathered all kinds of literature and news clippings of strange and unknown phenomenon, including one that was particularly disturbing to me. It was an article from some exploitive rag but contained rather striking pictures of a man being consumed by little blue flames. I think the headline read; "Man Spontaneously Combusts, Scientists Baffled." The article described how this man had burst into flames while sitting in his overstuffed reading chair. The scientists thought it might have something to do with the chair being so well padded that it raised the mans body temperature, but they didn't know what they were talking about. It took me years before I could sit in anything other than wooden chairs and hard sofas, even then I would sit precariously watching for any signs of blue flame. David dismissed the article, but then he was far less susceptible to sensationalism. What he was looking for were disappearances, people who vanished without a trace, or others who could move objects with their minds. Not fakes like that Uri Geller guy, but real people who no one ever heard of.

Most of his tips came from a network of people who scoured the countryside looking for the unusual. When they found someone, or something, they would let David know and we would be on our way come hell or high water.

Since we never had much money, we would hitchhike or grab a ride with one of his "disciples", usually some born again drop out or burned out flower child looking for something to do.

On this one occasion, we traveled to Canada, staying in neat, trim Canadian houses, all conservative and far from transformational. Each house with another woman, lost in her quest for self, aching for some enlightenment, or sexual fulfillment, but hiding their desperation from pragmatic husbands who were quite content "...living the lie of rural life." David gave them a taste of their own power. It was a marvelous thing to watch. Faces lit up, lives were transformed. That particular trip ended by narrowly escaping under the cover of night, from five or six enraged husbands. I was pretty shaken up, never having been driven forcibly out of a town before.

"Don't let the fear of the untransformed effect your balance. Remember you are involved in something far more important than physical or mental comfort." David always chastised me for outward displays of panic and fright. Physical comfort had been one of my most cherished possessions before hitching to David's wagon. I reminded him of his past penchant for satin and silk, he vehemently denounced such desires as those of a former, lower self.

I would never outwardly display my skepticism, but inwardly I wondered at his "transformation" and whether or not what he was doing was some kind of plan for notoriety. Every now and then I would see the glint of the old David, mostly when he was planning public relations excursions to promote his Transformentalism.

Meanwhile, I struggled with my own weaknesses. David would set aside time to work with me in private, after all, he didn't want his right hand man to fall off the transformational train. Sometimes he was deeply serious, shaking his head slowly, his whisper thin hair floating around his face every time I would say or do anything negative.

Negativity....now that really confused me for the longest time. I never thought of myself as a negative person. I always have had a pretty healthy attitude towards life. I haven't had many negative things happen to me so far, aside from the Canadian incident. When I was young I started to think about the nether side of events, the worse case scenarios more for protection than anything else. I thought that if I hedged my bets by saying that something bad is possible, then I could be let off the hook if something bad actually happened.

David would have nothing of it, even if his dog died or he came down with chicken pocks like he did the day of graduation, he saw the better side. You cannot imagine how frustrating it was to have a positive person around twenty four hours a day. Some days it was all I could do to keep from strangling him. How's that for negativity?

It was in the fall of '85, when David told me he had been to the other side. I looked up from the book I was reading, I think it was Catch 22 or something like that, and he repeated what he had said. "I completely shifted to another universe. No more of this fading in and out."

"Was Reagan President there too ?" I was sarcastic because the week before David told me that he could modulate his cellular structure and become invisible. I stood in the living room, arms crossed while he concentrated until he was blue in the face but he never became invisible. There was something about his tone in his reply this time that made the little hairs go up on the back of my neck.

"I wasn't there long enough to tell." he said nonplused. "It took a lot of effort, but I think next time it will be easier." He turned from me and went back to his meditation. Obviously he must have fallen asleep, like I did, and dreamed he had gone somewhere else, just as he had dreamed of disappearing.

That year he started an extensive tour of "Transformational" conferences and had begun channeling a being from the other Universe named Ofu or Ogu or Orunu, something like that. After doing a couple of radio shows he became sought after by celebrities and other well known figures.

David became bigger than himself. This Ofu person kept popping out at the oddest times, mostly when David was tired. Once when we were having a late lunch at some family diner near Riverdale, Ofu, or David as Ofu, whatever... decided he didn't need to eat, that he could live on the nutrients in the air around him. It took three weeks to convince him he needed some protein. By that time he was practically skin and bones. It seemed Ofu was fond of our universe because it was much more colorful and appealing than his own. He was interested in the effect he had on David, or the other way around. I was becoming more and more cynical by this point. This whole Ofu thing made me cringe. I knew deep inside that this was just another part of David trying to express something. Trying to make a statement about the world. Ofu said that we...the whole human race was at a crossroads. We were at the point of great transformation and that fifty years from now the world would look totally different than we imagine it. He/it said we had rough times ahead, great upheavals both natural and man made will wrack the Earth, but on the other side was a reality worth the struggle and hardships. I have to admit that I was worried, not because I believed what Ofu said but because David believed it. All sorts of debunkers and nay-sayers paraded through our lives, each one of them leaving a further seed of doubt in my mind. What was I doing? Why did I hang around with this obvious screwball? I couldn't answer the question within myself; it haunted me. The answer though, was simply stated by a woman I didn't even know, who had the ability to see right through me. Evoline was an extroverted and intelligent film major at NYU. We met at some party for some god-forsaken student film. We talked while her boyfriend was off in another room, drinking his brains out.

"I can see that you are a person who is attracted to weird people."

"Attracted to them?" I questioned. "I seek them out." Weirdness had been familiar to me, the normal world was strange. As she looked at me, her big doe eyes innocent and wise, I knew that if I went out into the world at that moment I would have been totally lost. I didn't know myself but through David, I had no direction, no skill. Evoline saw that and knew it as sure as I knew David's grip on me would never be released until.... I was trapped by my perceptions of myself. Evoline couldn't help me, she had her own burden and we parted after that one night like two passengers on a southbound train.

Whenever I was with David, there seemed to be this force, this energy that pulled me in, it hugged me, gave meaning to actions, gave hope to the hopeless and made me see things in a thousand new and different ways. Then when I was alone I would look back and think...what was that all about? All the stories, all the words seemed foreign and the limitless hope faded. Outside his spell he looked like a charlatan, a hoax, a user. How could he do that to me?

Now David had his own religion, his own philosophy through Ofu. He gathered followers, often sending me ahead to soften up the disciples. So many times I wanted to give warning, to tell the people that they were under his spell, but I was too, and would have sounded unconvincing.

There may have been times I hated David, but I hated myself more for becoming what I had become. After a time there was only one thing to believe, that some kind of redemption was waiting. That Ofu/David would enlighten me to myself and I would be able to transcend to the other side. Whatever that meant at the time, it had to be enough, it had to be.

When I actually saw David shift...it made me shake uncontrollably with fear and excitement. His hands slowly raised to his face. If I had blinked I might have missed it. That split second he was not there. His face becoming transparent, his smile like the Chesire Cat in Alice in Wonder Land. I was looking at a miracle....

I know it appears that you are getting more of my story than David's, well I can't help that. David is not here to tell his side and I cannot look through David's eyes. But I can tell you that my reasons for staying with David all those years, being involved in his crazy schemes and adventures, was because I thought he might, somehow, pass down to me the secret, the key; I wanted to shift too. Shifting out of this world were I have felt useless and out of place meant more to me, I didn't care what was on the other side. I knew anything had to be better. So there you have it, I was selfish and self centered. I endured the torment of my existence in the faint hope that I might escape it, as David was escaping it before my eyes.

After that initial shift David continued for days. He wrote notes and dictated his experiences into a tape recorder.

"So this is what it is like, I cannot tell the difference but for the distance I seem to be from the objects around me. It would be a cliché to say it is like a dream, but dream-like, yes. The colors couched in gauze...the light bathing the world. I cannot put into words what I have seen. The images seem only to represent what thoughts conspire for superiority. I am not afraid, but feel fear around me."

Damn right he felt fear, mine. He scolded me over and over...what had I to fear, he was the one going through this..this...transformation. I told him that at first I was afraid of being sucked in with him, (that was a lie) and that while he might have been ready I was not (that was partly the truth). Then I told him that I was afraid of being alone (That was the whole truth). I could not think about what would happen when he succeeded. All the attention that was focused on him would turn to me...I would be overwhelmed. I was overwhelmed. But David did predict that what he was doing would make me rich and infamous if not out right famous. "The last disciple of Ofu."

"Ofu does not exist here." he wrote a couple of weeks before he finally went Phhtt. "The term 'exist' does not have any meaning here. I am as all things around me."

During one particular episode, he complained that he felt weak and dizzy. It was a Monday, I was deep in some kind of funk that happened every few weeks.

"My body." He started encouragingly. "My body can no longer hold what we refer to as the soul in this world. The cells of my skin can no longer hold my being here."

I thought it very poetic, but he still came to eat dinner with me that night, so it seemed that his body was not all that useless. At the table he was jovial and hardly ill at ease, but then perhaps the realization that his body would no longer be a burden to him was what made him so cheery.

That night I asked questions.

"Why is it that our most acclaimed scientists, who have learned so much about our Universe, about space and time cannot do what you do?" His answer was frustrating as usual. "They know so very little because it isn't about what you know, it is about what you believe you know."

"Hogwash." I said, I wanted to disagree more out of my feeling ridiculous and not just because I was getting pretty fed up with his sanctimonious pontificating.

"Even If I believed with all my heart that I could move a spoon across the room it still wouldn't move."

You are right, you didn't believe it because it is part of the agreement you have with the world around you."

I was ready to use my own method of making David disappear. It would have been more messy but hugely more satisfying.

"It's not just a matter of believing it in context with the world, it is changing your belief about the world in order to have your belief be effective." Oh, god, at that point I felt a creepy sensation running down my spine. He seemed to be making sense. I had to leave the room, which seemed alright with David.

I'm sorry if I get upset, sometimes it is hard to remember, not because he is gone but because what he said often made me want to puke. Still I was hooked. Like I mentioned earlier, he was my addiction, I had nothing else, so I just had to stay near a toilet.

The big mistake was letting other people know about what he was doing like Charlotte the cleaning lady. She saw him disappear from his bedroom one Sunday morning and couldn't stop crossing herself. I can still see those big round eyes as she muttered something in Spanish, crossed herself again and ran out of the house. Before I knew it there was a story in "The World", a particularly distasteful and sleazy rag, about an alien who traveled through dimensions to take over human bodies.

Although most people take such stories with a grain of salt there is this one organization, a group of freaks who love strange stories and who quickly descended on us like vultures.

They called themselves the Conundrum Committee, but I think they were advance operatives of the CIA, because Within days of their departure feds were swarming all over the place. Men in suits with hard faces. They looked like automatons, wires sticking out of their ears. Glasses hiding any semblance of humanity in their eyes. I always thought it was a cliché, that these guys were made up movie stuff, but I got a first hand look.

It really didn't matter to the conundrum people, the feds, to any of them, that David was just this guy who had gone a little to far, meditated a little too much, and found that he could, indeed, step outside our reality. They thought in obvious answers, he was some sort of non-human, an inter-dimensional invader, sent to upset our pleasant little, neatly arranged universe.

At that point I wished, more than ever, I could do what David could. I would cross over into the other dimension and come back with some sort of inter-dimensional slime weapon that made them into balls of wiggling goo. Not just the reactionary pig-headed suits, but everybody. Everybody in our universe who thinks that they know things, that are arrogant and self righteous.

David never did have my sense of outrage. When the men in dark suits came, he greeted them as neighbors. When they shoved him into a small room, and even when the men in white lab coats gathered around with glasses pushed down their noses and fingers to their lips, prodding him with every imaginable instrument, he smiled a knowing smile.

Now I understand what the smile was about, but then, I thought he had gone over the edge, that he had finally cracked. I tried to convince him to go into hiding and never come out, but he just smiled.

They kept me around, god knows why. Maybe because I was his closest friend, a friendly face, but I doubt that. They wanted to study me as well, to see what effect David had on me. To see if I too was some interdimensional freak monster.

During this period I didn't get much chance to talk to David, but when I did he seemed in good enough spirits, although I detected a weariness in him that wasn't there before.

"They have done all they can do to me. The doctors all scratch their heads because I am so normal. I have two kidney stones that haven't bothered me, and I'm allergic to cats. Besides that I am the picture of human health. Naturally they have their own theories." David sighed a little sigh.

More than anything I think he was bored. There was little to do and still so much to explore. According to him he could walk out of there anytime. He hadn't shifted or even given them a hint that he could. So far he was just an ordinary guy who had been wrongly accused of being some sort of alien.

David could have been an alien. A clever alien, disguised as a human in every way. I mean the way we met on that roof, his odd behavior from the very beginning. Maybe his whole family were aliens like the Coneheads without the cone. He would joke, "Yeah I'm an alien, my great grandparents were from France." Then he would laugh as if the joke was the funniest thing he had heard.

The government's priority was to establish if David was alien, so it was only after their inevitable conclusion that I was allowed to visit him on a regular basis. The next time I saw him he looked pale and gaunt. They still had him hooked up to a room full of machines and the serious looking men gathered behind three inch thick glass.

He smiled a knowing smile when he opened his eyes. I had seen it before, his sense of mischief still in tact. He had fooled them, fooled everyone, he had pulled off the ultimate practical joke. First he made them think he was abnormal, then he had them thinking he was normal. Now he was at the height of his game. This would be the culmination of his plan. Ofu had nothing to do with it, Crazy Tom had nothing to do with it, I had nothing to do with it. He was going to leave us all. Of course I had known that for some time, but at that moment, with the gleam in his eye and that wry smile, I felt empty. There was nothing for me to say. I could not convince him the world needed him. "The world," he said "was going about it's own business, and would continue to do so, no matter what we did."

I felt even more depressed after that. What was the sense of it? I had lived my life for this man who was now going to disappear. I thought of finding a nice girl to settle down with, but what would I do? I hadn't the skills of a mechanic or the brains of an executive. If I had been the right hand of a pharaoh in ancient Egypt I would have been entombed with my master, having no other purpose in the real world.

They moved David to an ordinary wing of the hospital. He wasn't sick, but they wanted to make sure that none of the tests they did on him had any ill effects, mainly to protect themselves from future lawsuits no doubt. We walked the corridors talking. He told me what to do when he was gone. How to manage his "estate". That would be a job for a little while anyway. There were going to be a lot of questions, a lot of hype for a year or so, then everyone would forget. "They always forget." he smiled again, knowing before I did what I was going to say. "They can't forget what you are going to do, it will be the most spectacular thing any human being has ever done. You will leave this life, but you will not die" His arm slipped into mine, his level of seriousness deepened. "What I will do, will end up in Ripley's Believe it or Not. I will not be believed by 90% of the population because no one will know the truth. The government will try to hide their embarrassment. Scientists will try to hide their ignorance, and those that believe will be branded as cultists, fanatics, lunatics and I am afraid my dear friend, that you will be their guiding light."

A shiver ran up and down my spine. I knew what he was saying was true. I walked along with David down that long corridor, but I was already alone.

A nurse on the night shift first noticed him. She stood frozen in the doorway to David's room. All her training had not prepared her for what she saw and she had no former experience to draw on. Eventually she called the doctor, frantically trying to explain what was happening. The doctor came and within minutes gave orders to strap David down (like that would make a difference) and move him back to the special wing.

I honestly think that they thought their tests had somehow done this to him and that they were responsible for this incredible phenomenon. How egotistical could they be. David didn't care, he was doing what he was destined to do. He was shaking people up, he was putting a hammer to the known world. He was making his departure a vivid and enduring thing.

How many times had I asked him why. Why did he want to leave this world when he was healthy and he could do so much.

"My exit is my meaning, it is my achievement, my creative pinnacle. Some have books to write, deals to make, families to raise. But there are others, such as I, that make a statement with our departure, that leave a mark so deep that it bends reality in a new direction." He wavered, his mouth becoming transparent as I watched the words being formed.

As the straps started to collapse from lack of tension, and David faded from sight, I could hear a note. One note that seemed to come from all around me. The others heard it too, they all stopped and stared at the now empty Gurney and then raised their heads, looking for it's source.

Perhaps that was what has been referred to as the talking of angels, but then David hadn’t died, had he? Maybe that was his voice on the other side, the language of another dimension, and he was saying goodbye.

There was a memorial service, but no funeral. It was difficult for people to talk about him in the past tense. I mean what do you do when someone just fades out of existence to live in another place? I suppose it is the same as dying, you're not here anymore, you’re somewhere else. Most people believe that we go somewhere else when we die, so what was so different about this? He just happened to take his body with him, that’s all.

Fundamentally what makes people so nervous about the whole affair is the death issue. You see, any normal person has to deal with the inevitable. Look around you, death is a given based on our experience over the past millennium, we are born, we live life, then we die. But you see there was no category, no system of beliefs set up for what David did. How then could we accept it or even understand it? If David did not die, then what did happen to him? What will happen to all of us?

I wear this ribbon for David, he disappeared to give us a new world, to open our eyes, but we still don't see. I suppose it is important, my living to be this old man, to pass my understanding on to the children, so they will live to be old men and women trying to pass their understanding on as best they can, unless some miracle happens.

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