Vanishing act

I had the power to make myself disappear when I was a boy. Strange how so 

many of these phenomena appear during adolescence... on the cusp of 

acquiring unimagined carnal powers, while losing others, just as extraordinary, in 

the exchange.

I haven’t thought about this for years, though it really did happen. "There are 

more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your 

philosophy." I had read about how to do it in some comic book... the go-to 

source, as every adolescent knows but has forgotten, for occult knowledge. It 

had to do with completely emptying the mind. I think what appealed to me 

about acquiring this staple of super powers was that it didn’t require muscles or 

a laboratory. I practiced emptying my mind. Soon I got so good at it, achieved a 

level of disassociation so profound, that it actually made my hair stand on end... 

and I watched myself, albeit briefly, disappear. I watched it happen in the mirror 

on my bedroom door.

It was scary. And fear was its foe. It never lasted. Only years later did I learn 

that I had achieved, during these meditations, what Zen masters call the doubt 

sensation, a rare achievement, although considered by adepts to be sophomoric 

in the long road to enlightenment, in which reflexive consciousness shifts onto a 

track in which one's existence is called into question. Its evocation of physical 

invisibility, however, appeared to be mine alone. I was unable to find any 

reference to the phenomenon in any of the books on exotic cultic practices that I 

pored over in those days.

The heroic, or criminal, imagination of a thirteen-year-old doesn’t go very far for 

its inspiration. Notions of, once invisible, disabling all the nuclear missiles in the 

Soviet Block, of emptying the city pound of its canine prisoners, or the cash 

register at the corner gas station of its cash, quickly vanished, along with my 

fugitive flesh, in the half-dozen sessions in which I watched myself flicker out of 

the visible world. Once invisible, a kind of ecstatic paralysis supervened. I 

suppose over time, and with the right tutelage, I could have stood up, passed 

through the door, descended the stairs, and entered a privileged world whose 

secrets and devices were now laid tenderly bare. But I was not a monk on a 

mountaintop. I was an adolescent in an American suburb. The sheer freakyness 

of the experience, the impulse to laugh or scream, invariably brought it to an 

end. And I was always too frightened to try again, at least for a while.

I agreed to demonstrate this to my two best friends, Larry and Joe. But try as I 

might, I couldn’t quite get there with somebody watching. The self-consciousness 

of puberty was beginning to undermine my boyhood guilelessness. I think on 

some level, I wanted to fly under the radar with this, and feared the hoopla it 

would cause. I sat, legs folded in a modified lotus position, in my upstairs 

bedroom, Larry standing and Joe sitting on the bed skeptically in front of me. 

Turning inward, my mind began to zone in on the nothingness that turned the 

world inside out. I began to feel the old sensation. My heart began to slow even 

as an unnamable dread washed over me. I felt the hair on the back of my neck 

stir. Reality began to shimmer. But as I gazed into the faintly growing surprise in 

their faces, a quickening, I felt the weight and density of reality quickly return. 

Another try went nowhere. "Sorry, I guess I need to be alone," I said as I got 

shakily to my feet. Joe said he thought he saw something. Larry chided him. Joe 

and I exchanged furtive glances. Larry tried to kid me about it, but there was a 

hint of trepidation, a slight balk, in his voice. The subject was soon dropped.

I never did it again. I think I tried once. But the skepticism of my friends, the 

enormity of the possibility that I had done what I thought I had, an instinctive 

fear of jumping head first and irrevocably into a shining abyss or insanity, and 

an adolescent’s dawning sense of community and his desire to find a place in it, 

conspired to consign the experience to its place in my closet among the tattered 

comics and dusty toys, they themselves having disappeared, long ago, in the 

usual way.