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By Root 887 0

his hotel room, certain there was something keeping me from coming back. He knew I hadn’t simply taken off or gotten lost; the only things he could think had happened were that I’d fallen and broken my leg, or I was stuck under a rockslide on the side of a mountain. Praying to me, “Hang in there, Aron, stick with it,” he fought back other, more distressing thoughts. My dad knew, or wanted to believe, that I was alive, but that meant I was injured. It hurt him to know I was suffering; however, that was better than the alternative. There was no way he was going to find enough peace to sleep—grief kept him up and moving—so he busied himself preparing notes for the rest of the New York tour, in case he did need to leave and hand over the reins to someone else.

Up in Boulder, my friend Leona was riding back with her aunt from a meditation session that hadn’t helped ease her anxiety over my disappearance. She closed her eyes and felt a connection, something beckoning to her, and then a fuzzy vision appeared, like a dream. She saw a spirit that was clearly me, visible from the waist up. She recognized me but couldn’t tell where I was. She could tell I was alive and mostly OK, but frightened. I was holding my arm tight to my chest, as if I had injured it, and I was standing in a tight, dark place, wearing a green shirt. She sensed that I was conscious of her presence and scared, not of her but of my surroundings. She saw her arms reach out to reassure me with a comforting touch, but she was petrified herself—she couldn’t reach me. I had a decision to make. And it seemed I would have to make that decision on my own. Her empathy strengthened the vision’s accompanying physical sensations: She felt cold chills, a parching thirst, and deep exhaustion. She came out of the trance and was spent, as if she had just run ten miles. Sitting in the passenger seat of her aunt’s car, she realized they were home, but she couldn’t remember any of the fifteen-minute trip since they’d left the group session. Leona followed her aunt into the house, drank three liters of water, and went to bed, praying with her hands clasped that she wouldn’t dream about the vision. She knew she was powerless to help me, and she didn’t want to have another dreadful episode when there was nothing she could do.

After talking with my sister at 10:20 P.M., my mom went to bed. She slept about an hour, then grew restless. After midnight, she lay in bed with her eyes open, thinking about me. At two A.M., having waited edgily for the shift change ever since she’d woken up, my mom called the Aspen police. She learned that the search was slowing down due to a lack of information from my credit-card use—apparently I hadn’t used any of my cards since Thursday, April 24, in Glenwood Springs, to buy gas. There was no indication that I’d gotten any farther than Eagle County. But the biggest sticking point was the license plate; none of the numbers had generated the correct vehicle description when the police had done a records search. My mom knew that, but apparently Eric had tried again. What he said next gave her a pleasing lift: He had looked up the number for the New Mexico state police on their twenty-four-hour DMV assistance line, but without knowing the registration address, which obviously wasn’t in Colorado, he couldn’t perform the inquiry himself. My mom told Eric she would make the call and get the correct license-plate information; she was excited and relieved to once again have something to do.

At two-forty-five A.M., she got through to an officer in Santa Fe who was able to manipulate the computer file systems and perform a rough search based on the vehicle make and the registered address, which my mom correctly deduced was my town home in Albuquerque. Within ten minutes, she had confirmed my license number was NM 846-MMY and relayed the information to Officer Ross. It was the best feeling she’d had since she successfully reset my e-mail password over sixteen hours earlier. As soon as the sheriffs’ offices opened in the morning, she would start through her call