It felt like my lungs had suddenly filled with cellophane. All the unwrapped, crumpled up, mayo-smeared, mustard-smeared, meringue-cream-pie-smeared cellophane of the world crammed into my lungs.
An army of purple spots gathered at the periphery of my vision and marched in toward my pupils. I didn’t really need the wristwatch. The spots always appeared 10 or 20 seconds before I lost consciousness. I called it the purple fizz. I looked at my watch anyway and saw the second hand ticking. The numbers turned purple.
Around that time dad got interested in holistic medicine. “The holistic people would never be listed on the New York Stock Exchange,” he said. “It’s artificial.”
“What about you?” I nodded to him.
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“Not a chance,” he said. “Let’s see you eat ’em.”
“Uh-oh,” dad said. “He’s getting serious.”
The next sensation was a kind of quiet. It was as if all my senses shut down. I could not taste, I could not feel. As I swallowed and bit off the fourth and final pepper, not feeling a thing, I thought I was on the verge of my biggest attack ever. Yet I knew that I was breathing fine. In fact, the heat of the peppers even seemed to be opening my nose and throat wider than normal. Dad jumped off his stool and bent toward me, hands on his knees. “That’s it, attack those peppers!” I swallowed the fourth and closed my eyes. I could still see. I could see straight through my eyelids, as if the heat had melted them off.
