So that was already a kind of malign déjà vu. And then the real déjà vus came back, sucking the life out of things as they aways did. Oh a single flash of the sensation was just a jolt, of course, a fearful reminder, here then gone. But a day of it was torture; and a week, hell itself. The stereo-temporal state, Michel said the current medical journals were calling it. Others called it the “always-already sensation.” Apparently a problem for a certain percentage of the ancient ones. And nothing could be worse, in terms of her emotions. She would wake on these days and every moment of the day would be an exact repetition of some earlier identical day— this was how it felt— as if Nietzsche’s notion of eternal recurrence, the endless repetition of all possible spacetime continuums, had become somehow transparent for her, a lived experience. Horrible, horrible! And yet there was nothing to do but stagger through the always-already of the foreseen days, zombielike, until the curse lifted, sometimes in a slow fog, sometimes in a quick snap back to the nonstereotemporal state— like double vision coming back into focus, giving things back their depth. Back to the real, with its blessed sense of newness, contingency, blind becoming, where she was free to experience each moment with surprise, and feel the ordinary rise and fall of her emotional sine wave, a roller coaster which though uncomfortable was at least movement.

“Ah good,” Michel said as she came out of one of these spells, obviously wondering which of the drugs he had been giving her had done the trick.

“Maybe if I could just get to the other side of a presque vu,” Maya said weakly. “Not déjà or presque or jamais, but just the vu.”

“A kind of enlightenment,” Michel guessed. “Satori. Or epiphany. A mystical oneness with the universe. It’s usually a short-lived phenomenon, I am told. A peak experience.”

“But with a residue?”

“Yes. Afterward you feel better about things. But, well, it’s said to usually come only if one achieves a certain. . . .”

“Serenity?”

“No, well . . . yes. Stillness of mind, you might say.”

“Not my kind of thing, you mean.”

Which cracked a grin. “But it could be cultivated. Prepared for, I mean. That’s what they do in Zen Buddhism, if I understand it correctly.”

So she read some Zen texts. But they all made it clear; Zen was not information, but behavior. If your behavior was right, then the mystic clarity might descend; or might not. And even if it did, it was usually a brief thing, a vision.