I recalled a scene from The Last Wave, a movie Rama once took me to see, in which a sorcerer kills a man by pointing a "death bone" at him.
I now saw Rama as both friend and foe, mentor and tormentor, Christ and anti-Christ. I was frightened and confused. Estranged, yet held by his seductively androgynous, authoritative face, I lapsed into a meditative stupor...
A glint of light caught my eye and snapped me out of the trance.
Rama was chanting something in a low, monotonous tone.
I seized the string with the bicycle lock key. I pictured bright purple sparks and blue lightning bolts radiating in all directions from the key. The light shielded me from attack and lit the path to the door.
"Gotta go," I said and slowly walked away.
"I've got your number," Rama replied, still pointing his crooked finger.
"You're full of it," I returned and stepped outside. Here the light was soft and grey. A morning dove cooed. The bicycle was there for me. It was 1985, and I was twenty-five.
In the months that followed, I occasionally bicycled to Walden Pond, where I read about Thoreau's experiment with self-reliance. Distracted by haunting memories, I gazed at the water in search of calm, but the wind spawned new waves and the surface swelled with complexity. "There's plenty of time to sort it out," I reassured myself. "Maybe I'll take myself for a ride across America and do some thinking."