Pacing, she would ask, What is real? How can we know what is real? Is a dream reality? Does reality require physicality? Does love have physical reality? Can it be identified by heartbeat, respiration, brainwaves, chemical reactions? Can it be detected by an electrocardiogram? A CAT Scan? A brain scan or any other physical measurement? If not, can it be real?
What are we able to know? What we sense? Dogs have an exceptionally acute sense of smell. Does that mean that dogs can know truths that we cannot? And do people who can sense things others cannot know truths that others cannot?
To comprehend reality, must we ask what is its opposite? When Franz Kafka wrote in The Trial, “The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other,” was he being facetious? Insightful?
Physics describes reality as vastly different from what we experience. From the point of view of physics, this volume of the writings of Thomas Aquinas – and she would hold the book aloft as if it were the ten commandments – is mostly empty space, yet we don’t experience it that way. Since we rely on science and technology every day, can we deny that physics is correct and what we perceive is not?
Is Stephen Hawking correct when he proclaims that philos-ophy is dead and that understanding and explaining reality is now solely within the purview of science? If Dr. Hawking is correct, then – as he says – all cause and effect is predetermined; free will is an illusion. Without free will, can there be moral responsibility? And is the answer to this question solely within the purview of science?
Quantum mechanics explains that what we can know about sub-atomic particles is based on probabilities. If we want to know the location of a particle at a particular time, we can know only where it probably will be. Quantum mechanics also teaches that when we observe subatomic particles interacting, we change them. So how would a determinist explain this? Describe it as deterministic unpredictability?
And what of the mystery of consciousness? Can it be explained in terms of a chemical reciprocal action of particles? Or the transfer of energy between particles? Of molecules? Of any physical substance?
It was no use; she couldn’t concentrate on her upcoming class discussion because she couldn’t set aside her fear that Karl, who’d been asleep when she and Estella had fled from his trailer, was likely awake by now, angry, and chasing them in his Corvette.
Under more serene circumstances, at this time of night Betty Mae would likely have been deep in the Everglades, far from urban light pollution, positioning her powerful telescope so that she could analyze the starlight it collected, hoping to detect the effects of a severe warping of spacetime or evidence of dark matter expanding the universe at speeds greater than the speed of light, believing that these celestial phenomena, among others, would provide answers to questions that had been asked since the incipience of human cognition and succinctly written in paint on canvas by Paul Gauguin: D’où Venons Nous/ Que Sommes Nous/ Où Allons Nous— Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
It was Betty Mae’s father, Marcus Kayalu, a professor of theoretical physics at Florida A&M, who’d instilled in Betty Mae the belief that knowing the universe is essential to understanding life on earth because, he’d said, far too much of what we believe about consciousness is based upon superstitions, cultural myths, and misconceptions about reality that stem from what we think we’ve perceived. For example – and this was one of his favorites – until the seventeenth century, it was heresy to question the Church’s geocentric model of the solar system. For proposing that the earth circled the sun, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake. But when the Roman Catholic Church reversed its position and allowed studies of the solar system based upon Copernicus’s heliocentric model, the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution were spawned. Had the Church maintained its insistence that all celestial objects rotate around the earth, humanity would have been deprived of the discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton.
Her poppa’s reasoning was all to the good. And Betty Mae was quick to repeat it to anyone who questioned the relevance of space exploration. But despite that, she was simply hooked on astronomy. Her sister, Charlotte Crow, had said that astronomy was Betty Mae’s drug of choice.
Near Ochopee, the Pontiac careening onto Highway 41, the Tamiami Trail, and with no warning the hypnotic sensation of the car swaying and bumping along to the cadence of Dylan’s song— its beat, its whistles, its chant-like lyrics—impelled Betty Mae involuntarily into hidden reality, a place where Dante Alighieri – poet, pilgrim, shaman – had traveled. Betty Mae didn’t take issue with the barebones architecture of hidden reality as Dante described it in his Divina Commedia—the Underworld, the cosmic or magic mountain, and the Upperworld, the interstellar medium referred to at least since the dawn of history by the devotees of a multitude of religions as the heavens. Like Dante, while travelling in hidden reality, Betty Mae had experienced the significance of death, though they would have disagreed about what that was.
Unlike Dante, in hidden reality, Betty Mae had not encountered the living dead.
Though it seemed she’d been detained for hours in hidden reality, quick as light, as the Pontiac veered onto the Tamiami Trail, a ribbon of asphalt crossing the state over its wetlands, her awareness returned to panicked wildlife – deer, minks, foxes, panthers, and boars – stampeding and birds – snail kites, storks, eagles, and buzzards – flying toward and past them from east to west over the marshes.
The road, slick in the liquescent air, running before them like life accelerating across its span, vanished beyond a veil of gray mist descending from the firmament, a bulwark against the onslaught of on-rushing time, a horizon beyond which lay either hope or its abandonment. But in Betty Mae’s mind’s eye, the horizon toward which the Pontiac sped was merely a mirage that would, as mirages reliably do, lift as the car thundered through it.
Lightning streaked through the last light of day, plump raindrops fell, the wipers squeaked.
Estella moaned. “Oh. My. God.”
Betty Mae, reaching for her daughter’s hand, felt amniotic fluid soaking the car seat. Then, suddenly, the veil lifted, and the headlights illuminated— what? Dante’s Leopard of Malice? his Lion of Violence? the She-Wolf of Incontinence? No. It was merely an alligator lumbering across the road – ten feet long, five hundred pounds – the car hurtling toward it at ninety feet per second.
Betty Mae jerked the steering wheel; the Pontiac swerved. The gator must have heard the brakes screech, the tires skid, seen its imminent death. With astonishing agility, the reptile, naturally sluggish on land, swiveled on its hind legs, reversing direction, skirling as the car slammed into it, a flash of its scaly-olive hide on a blue-green fender, bright red splattering in every direction, the carcass tumbling head over tail onto the hood, cracking the windshield with an earsplitting bam, rending gristle and gore into the stench of freshly splayed intestines.
The Pontiac fishtailed. Betty Mae swung the steering wheel into the spin, pumped the brakes, and would have controlled the car, but a rear tire blew, spiraling them over the shoulder of the highway, snapping the bindings fastening the zippered nylon bags, flinging them forward, crushing Wind, who vocalized a yelp of death, against the metal-plated back of the rear seat.
With a twang of twisting steel, the airbags deployed in a ferocious blast, deflating an instant later to quiescence save for the grunts of frogs, the buzzing of dragonflies, and the whirring of cicadas in an otherwise eerie stillness, lightning but no thunder, Estella pantomiming screams, the lyrics, shrieks, and thumps of Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited turning against her will over and over again in her mind, a nightmare of fury and anguish she couldn’t shake as she gasped for breath, as if staving off drowning in the moisture-laden, pressure-falling air.
They hadn’t seen another car since leaving Karl’s fungal-infested singlewide rusting under its canopy of strangler vines. The drizzle became a shower. God wanted a killing done down on Highway 61. And the nearest cli
nic was in Naples, forty miles west on Highway 41.
Within that scant moment in Ochopee, milliseconds in ordinary reality, when the Pontiac quickly turned, as if tossed, to the east onto Highway 41, Betty Mae was surprised to be in hidden reality in a distant outreach of the Milky Way.
In the Paradiso, searching for the beauty of eternity, the pilgrim Dante ascended to the Circle of Jupiter, the afterlife dwelling of the rulers who had been just during their lives on earth. But Dante could ascend no farther, could not continue his transit to Saturn, until those souls presented him with a dazzling semiotic display of his power animal, Eagle. In hidden reality, Betty Mae traveled with her power animal, White Bear, as she searched for remedies for the mental, physical, and spiritual afflictions that beset women and men suffering a single illness: a diminution, if not the deprivation, of free will.
For the sangoma, like most other shamans, hidden reality was a domain attained not by using hallucinogens or by sheer religious fervor but by using the sonic pulses of drumbeats, whistles, chants, and rattles. And so, in retrospect, it wasn’t surprising that for Betty Mae the sonic pulses of Dylan’s song momentarily parted the curtains shielding the hidden reality of stars on the outskirts of the Milky Way from the ordinary reality of Ochopee, Florida, the place the Pontiac was speeding away from as it hastened toward the embrace of the onrushing hurricane.
Shamans entered hidden reality with specific intentionality, prepared, fully alert, accompanied by their power animal. That’s how it was done. That’s how it had been done for millennia. Yet in that instant too brief to permit premeditation, as the Pontiac blindly raced on to Highway 41, without her power animal, White Bear, without a sense of purpose, and without regard for Estella, Fate – taking the reins from Betty Mae, mocking her denial of determinism, vanquishing her free will – transported her into a region of the Upperworld so remote that it was understood only theoretically by humans.
Immanuel Kant had described galaxies as island universes, an image that did justice to Betty Mae’s intergalactic observations in hidden reality. As a python would devour one of its young, one hundred sixty thousand light years from earth, the Milky Way was cannibalizing a dwarf galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. And amid the trillion stars rotating around the black hole at the center of that cluster of celestial energy and mass, a strange duo, two stars in a binary system, an odd couple if you will, in a decaying orbit of inevitable destruction, circled each other as dance partners would in a do-si-do.
From hidden reality, Betty Mae could see that the smaller star, the hotter of the two, was a spinning neutron star, making five hundred revolutions per second, pulsing beams of radio waves from its poles. It had a diameter of twenty kilometers, approximately the width of the San Francisco Peninsula, but a density of two-and-a-half solar masses: two-and-a-half times greater than the mass of the sun. Its surface was a crust of iron and its inner core was a liquid sea of neutrons four-hundred trillion times denser than water. A particle of this star the size of a small grain of sand would on earth weigh more than a locomotive.
Spinning and turning in its dance of death with the neutron star, a cooling supergiant red star, having more than ten times the mass of the sun, pulsed in the throes of its own imminent solar mortality. Stellar winds raging in the photosphere of the colossal star ejected plumes of hydrogen, helium, and heavier elements like gold and platinum into circumstellar rings of metallic oranges, brilliant reds, and vibrant violets, some of which, in a swirling colorful flow, like a rainbow of solar gasses, accreted to the neutron star, dangerously increasing its mass. In its interior, the supergiant star was exhausting the elements that fueled the nuclear fusion necessary to create the outward thermal pressure that counteracted the crushing forces of gravity.
When the elements fueling its nuclear fusion were exhausted, in a reality ordinarily unrevealed, through its plasma – its burning layers of gases – Betty Mae observed the massive star’s dense-superheated nickel-iron core – an island of stability more than five thousand kilometers in diameter – together with its outer layers instantly implode in the absence of any force to counteract gravity.
Within the span of a breath, when the diameter of the collapsing core had condensed to thirty kilometers, the implosion was abruptly halted by the near-unstoppable nuclear force, pressure exerted by neutrons squeezed so closely together that they counteracted the star’s gravity.
When the implosion suddenly ceased, the mass and energy that had been in the outer layers of the super-giant red star that had been collapsing toward the core rebounded, providing enormous heat that sent powerful shockwaves back through the star, out from its core, radiating neutrinos that would bathe the earth, and producing flashes of light more brilliant than the light of all the other stars in its galaxy and energy so vast that the star’s plasma was blown into the interstellar medium in the prismatic conflagration of a supernova, a celestial cloud of sparkling hot-white synapses suffusing to electric greens and gold and stardust composed of the heavy elements that make possible the chemistry of life on earth, a display of light more spectacular in appearance yet more subtle in meaning than the message spelled out in the lights illuminated by the souls that had in the Paradiso welcomed Dante to the Circle of Jupiter.
The denuded-collapsed core of the colossal red star had also evolved, like the sister star it orbited, into a neutron star, pebble size in comparison to the supergiant star that had spawned it but with a mass a half-million times that of earth’s. The binary-star system Betty Mae observed now had two neutron stars circling each other in an accelerating, decaying orbit.
An aquamarine stone the size and shape of an egg, composed in part of exceedingly heavy elements that didn’t exist on earth, glowing from within in darker and lighter shades of blue-greens rotating in zonal bands in opposite directions like cyclones and anticyclones, whizzed by. Betty Mae had never taken an object from hidden reality back to ordinary reality. But this object, this philosopher’s egg, was something she would have to study, and so before it could escape her reach, she plucked it from its trajectory.
Gas and stardust that had been elements of the supergiant star’s mantle, failed to escape the gravitational pull of the orbiting neutron stars and hastened their collision. The neutron stars, collectively, were now too heavy to be supported by the nuclear force. Gravity plunged the stars into another violent implosion that warped, wrenched, and twisted spacetime so that it folded back upon itself, forming a whirling, tumbling black hole that was masked by a cloak of invisibility to those in ordinary reality, but not to Betty Mae, witnessing the cataclysm with absolute delight in hidden reality.
Everything, every remnant of the neutron stars and all other energy and mass that lay within the mangled region of spacetime that was encompassed by the black hole was obliterated as it funneled into a singularity of infinite density at a terminus of space, in an absence of time, in a portal between the universe of human perception and other universes, in a hologram of infinite destinies.
Infinite destinies at the singularity were problematic for Betty Mae as they imperiled her conviction of absolute mortality, which heretofore could only have been negated by an observation of life after death.
Near sunrise, near the Tree Snail Hammock in the Big Cypress National Preserve, at first light on the day that the Pontiac would later spiral off Highway 41, barred owls, nighthawks, and bats faded back into the big cypress groves as red-shouldered hawks and northern harriers took their place hunting for fish, smaller birds, and small rodents. Among the seas of sawgrass, strangler figs, and Lysiloma trees – with fern-like leaves and pods, like legumes, of seeds – crows hunted brightly arboreal-colored ligus tree snails spiraled with green, brown, yellow and pink stripes, while Betty Mae searched for and then found a smooth two-fisted, five-sided stone.
On the surfaces of the stone she saw the Everglades, for centuries the home of her mother’s family, a theater of evolution endlessly spawning creatures like no others and plants with yet-to-be-dis
covered healing powers, but among these myriad scenes there was no sign of Estella.
In the afternoon, back in her home on Osceola Island in the Intracoastal Waterway flowing between Miami and Miami Beach, Betty Mae spoke to her sister, Charlotte Crow, who had called to say that Karl and Estella were hiding out in a trailer parked on the beach of an estuary near Fakahatchee on Florida’s Gulf coast. The police were focused solely on the threat to public safety posed by the category 5 hurricane that would soon thunder ashore. Motivated rather than deterred by reports of 175-mile-per-hour winds, Betty Mae and her wolf-dog hastily left, driving to a backwater, even by Everglades standards, between Wilderness Waterway and Florida Bay.
In the embers of twilight, the Pontiac rolled by a cluster of palmettos, through a field of sword ferns and dandelions, toward white sands. A sun-bleached yellow canoe straddled the beach and the scrubland near Karl’s red Corvette. In a grove of banyan trees, a dilapidated rusting hulk of a mobile home blighted the grandeur.
The trailer was dark and silent. If anyone were home, they would have heard the Pontiac driving toward them. Steer horns were mounted over the front door. Wind and Betty Mae climbed five splintered pine steps and knocked. No one answered. The door was locked but it was easy to turn the plug without a key, allowing Betty Mae and Wind to slip inside.
A rancid odor permeated a living room furnished with a worn sofa and a painting of a cattle roundup hanging above it. There was an empty Scotch whiskey bottle on a sideboard, a TV with rabbit ears, and a dining table. An enormous cockroach patrolled the kitchen.
A rat scurried zigzag toward a hole in the kitchen floor. Wind leapt, the rodent turned, snapping its razor teeth, but was no match for the wolf-dog. She snatched its neck, shook once, then dropped the dead rat and snarled at a man half obscured by shadow, his back slouched against a hallway wall, his arms crossed, wearing a cowboy hat and buckaroo boots, looking like the Marlboro Man save for the gun he held.
The Speed of Life Page 5