During that time, in the spring of 1967, while we kept an eye on the papers and TV to follow the trial of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and their friends, who had been caught with drugs at a country house in Sussex, I talked to Juan again, over the phone. And we started calling each other every day. At any hour. He was usually at the apartment on Libertador; when he went to Reyes, he let me know. Sometimes I heard his agitation even over the static on the line; every time I talked to him, I imagined cables under the water, along the ocean floor, bitten by blind fish with enormous teeth. Jorge had told him that his surgery would be performed in London. He was afraid of dying. Tali helped him with his night terrors, but no one could help him like I did. He was devastated because Florence had told him that when they died, mediums were claimed by the Darkness, they spent eternity there, like in the Christian myths. One night he cried until he fell asleep and he didn’t hang up until the early morning, or someone hung up for him, maybe my uncle. He didn’t talk about those things with Tali, which gave me a vague feeling of pride.

They’re all such shits, I said to Stephen. Why do they scare him like that, talking about an eternity with the gods? Because they want to keep him from leaving any way they can, Stephen replied. A professor at the Warburg had explained to me that alchemy was never a technique meant to multiply riches. It was and is a mystical exercise. The search for gold is the attempt to find the substance of immortality. Juan opened the path toward that substance. They would never leave him alone, never say, enough, his body can’t give anymore.

I still dream about the wallpaper in my room, the way it morphed into spiders and dancers; I still remember how my hand, when I reached it out toward the sun, would be wrapped up in the colors of the rainbow. Also the rituals where we danced until our bodies disintegrated into particles of light, and how Laura opened the belly of a hare over my chalk circle in Florence’s house. Juan, over the phone, talked interchangeably about Tali and my grandfather, whom it was sometimes necessary to go searching for in the jungle where he hid out, naked and drunk and terrified. In the jungle, under a tree, he finally shot himself. I was still in London, and I didn’t go to his funeral. One night, Juan talked to me about doors he could open and houses that looked one way from the outside, but inside were completely different. What are you doing? I whispered. Nothing, he replied, it just happened. I passed by the door of a house that seemed strange, and when I opened it, I found that it wasn’t a house at all. Don’t tell anyone, and don’t go in, I warned him. I told Laura about those doors: I was thinking about liminal spaces, and she suggested we not mention the doors over the phone anymore, in case someone was listening, and they almost certainly were. If there was a new path opening up, I had to protect Juan. That was a horrible morning in London, when the sky looked like wet sugar and the people, who in general were used to it, ran down the street under umbrellas to escape the freezing rain. We need to protect him, Laura told me. I have a bad feeling, she said, and I’m never wrong.