Intervention

by Rob Mclean

  Angela saw him as a thin, bearded man in his late fifties with a rim of greying hair around a shiny dome. Reading glasses hung around his neck. He had a quiet, calm voice that had to be amplified for his sermons but serious, intense eyes that intently held your gaze. There was also a weariness that reflected the many demands on his time.

  “Marilyn’s not home at the moment,” he said with a hint of apology. She’s just stepped out to get a few things.”

  “That’s okay,” she gave him a warm smile. Angela appreciated his concern, but she had always felt comfortable around the Pastor, almost as if he was part of her family.

  “Thanks for seeing me,” Angela said as she stepped inside. “I know how busy you are.” She had changed into a floral summer dress since getting home from the doctor’s. She felt decidedly better after a late breakfast, coffee, painkillers and a long hot shower, but the shame and embarrassment had not washed off.

  A small hallway with an overly large bookcase opened into an inviting L-shaped living and dining room with several comfy lounges. On the dining table were boxes of pamphlets and envelopes.

  “Are you doing a mail out?” Angela asked.

  “Yes, for the Somali crisis,” Pastor Greg said. “It’s such a mess over there. I’m almost certain that if the good Lord were to return, even He would have a job to fix things there.”

  “Can I help?” Angela asked, and then added, “with the pamphlets.”

  “Always glad to have help,” Pastor Greg smiled. “Would you like a coffee or tea? I‘m just putting the kettle on,” he asked.

  Angela had known the Pastor for as long as she could remember. He was like a second father, but nowhere near as stern as her own. She also knew that the Pastor had more than enough people skills to sense that she wanted to talk, but was patient enough to wait until she was ready. “A coffee would be great, if it’s no trouble.”

  Pastor Greg padded his way through to the kitchen. Angela followed behind. “Did you hear about this alien thing?” she asked.

  “Yes, a rather lot of people have been telling me how worried they are.” He said it lightly, but Angela realized that he must have been up most the night ministering to his worried parishioners. “But I don’t think it is likely that it will turn out to be real.”

  “Oh, okay. You think it‘s a fake?”

  “Probably, we’ll wait and see.” Then changing the subject, he asked, “How are your parents?”

  Angela smiled as she understood that he was probably wondering why she had come to see him and that this was his discreet was of approaching the subject.

  “Dad’s no better,” she replied. “He’s having a lot of trouble walking and mom’s getting thinner.”

  “It’s a difficult time for all of you. You know you’re in our prayers.”

  Angela nodded. She had always found it easy to talk with Pastor Greg. He never got too stressed about things, unlike her parents. Probably because she wasn’t his only child. Now however, she was having second thoughts about telling him what had happened last night. She would have preferred to forget the whole thing and hope it all would go away, but she knew it wouldn’t and she just had to talk to somebody. Certainly couldn’t talk to her parents and she needed a different opinion than Zeke’s. ‘Looks like the poor old Pastor gets stuck listening to me again.’

  She gave him a brittle smile and followed him into the kitchen. He hummed softly as he filled the kettle and plugged it in. Angela’s watched him as he got the milk from the fridge, which she noticed was mostly covered with messages and notes. She then saw that the calendar, hanging nearby on the wall, had virtually every day filled in with appointments and scribblings. Despite all the commitments, Pastor Greg gave no indication that time was pressing as he calmly made the coffee. This only made Angela feel more pressured.

  “Sugar?” he asked, holding up a small ceramic bowl.

  She shook her head. The way he was treating her with such polite civility made her feel that she was imposing too much, asking him to listen to her woes. It only made it more difficult to bring up what she wanted to talk about.

  They waited wordlessly as the water boiled. Pastor Greg rummaged in the cupboard before putting two mismatched mugs on the bench. Angela looked out the window at the rambling herb and vegetable garden. ‘He’s got so many better things to do than to listen to me,’ she thought.

  “You didn’t come to admire my weed patch, did you?” He gave her a kind smile.

  “No.” Angela couldn’t help but to respond with a small nervous smile, but at the same time, a hot, salty tear seared its way down her cheek.

  “Last night I was drugged,” she said. She hung her head and pinched her fingertips repeatedly. “I know I shouldn’t have been out at a nightclub. I was given a drink that was spiked and…” she faltered. She expected to be lectured about what a good Christian woman should do.

  “Have you been…hurt?” he asked gently.

  With his concern, she felt her earlier fears about talking to him disappear. His compassion reminded her why she had sought him out today. She gave him a smile that she hoped would convey all the gratitude and love she could muster.

  “No, I have been to a doctor and she didn’t think so, but that’s only part of the problem. You see, I can’t remember what happened last night. Anything could have been done to me. I dread seeing myself on some internet video, or worse, my parents seeing it.”

  “Yes, Geoff and Clarice would be mortified,” he agreed.

  “They went right off when I got in this morning.”

  “Do they know what happened to you?”

  “No, I thought it best not to worry them. They have a right to know, I guess, but they would stress out, and I don‘t think dad could take it.”

  He poured the coffees and carried them over to the worktable. He waited while Angela cleared a space on the cluttered dining table before setting them down.

  “So what did you tell them?” Angela thought his tone was curious rather than reproachful. He put on his glasses and busied himself with folding pamphlets while waiting for her reply.

  “I lied,” she stated bluntly. He didn’t react, so she continued, “They knew I had gone to Zeke’s. I just didn’t tell them about going from there to the nightclub. I let them think I had fallen asleep watching movies with Zeke and his sister.”

  “Chelsea,” Pastor Greg added. “Did she go to this nightclub too?”

  “No, she said she was too tired.”

  “Hmm yes,” he said as if it fitted in with an image he already had of Chelsea being a ‘good’ girl. His busy fingers stopped folding pamphlets and his gaze peered over the top of his half rim glasses, “but what I don’t understand is why you would want to go to a nightclub? You should know that they are not the nicest of places.”

  He let the question hang for a few moments, and when no reply came, he continued, “I know you’re young and naturally would be inquisitive about a lot of worldly things, but…”

  “It was Zeke’s idea,” Angela said.

  “Oh,” was all that the Pastor said. He held his coffee up to his lips and blew on it before taking a tentative sip. He stared at the swirls of partially dissolved granules as they made eddying trails around the surface. Angela felt the silence between them hanging. She picked up a pamphlet and started folding them. They were about missionaries working in Somalia. She remembered from sermons he had given many Sundays ago that it had been one of the many things her church was involved with. She felt her problems seem to diminish somewhat when she compared them to what went on in the third world.

  “You and Zeke are still keeping company?” Pastor Greg asked abruptly. To her he sounded more like a detective. “How do you say it these days? An item?”

  “We have been for a few years now,” she replied, not wanting to tell the Pastor that it was now over six years. She had always admired Zeke since they were little kids at Sunday school, but it wasn’t until a summer youth camp, when she was sixteen that she had finall
y gotten him to notice her. She had been ‘his’ ever since.

  “Now Zeke is a fine young Christian man and would make a good husband one day,” Pastor Greg said, choosing to ignore the discomfort Angela showed by shifting around on her seat. “He is, however, just a fallible man, and as a fellow Christian, you must be always ready to help him on his path, to look out for him, spiritually.”

  Angela nodded, but kept folding pamphlets.

  “Especially if you are to be as one…” he paused, but when he got no response, he elaborated, “to be married.”

  Angela looked up briefly, her cheeks flushed red.

  “I take it that he hasn’t mentioned the ‘M’ word yet?”

  “Not really.” She could feel her cheeks burning.

  “Don’t worry about it. You’re both still young. You have plenty of time.” When he could see that Angela appeared to be still worrying about it, he patted his hand on her arm and added, “You’re a beautiful young woman. He’d be mad not to snap you up.”

  She forced a smile so he would stop embarrassing her and went back to the pamphlets.

  “So can you tell me more of what happened to you last night?” he started to put the pamphlets into bundles and put rubber bands around them.

  “I had gone to the club to meet up with Zeke,” she began.

  “You drove there by yourself?”

  “No, I drove to Zeke’s and took a taxi. He was going to meet me at the club. Said he had stuff to do before,” she continued. “I met up with him at the club. He was there with some sleazy, chubby guy. Zeke asked him if he’d like to ‘do’ me! I mean, what a nerve. I ranted at him, but he said it was just his way of saying that I looked good and that I should chill out. He gave me a drink and I remember thinking that it must have been a strong one, but I don’t remember anything else after that.”

  She stopped folding pamphlets, lifted her head up and took a deep breath to fight back a wave of misery.

  Pastor Greg reached over and laid his hand on her forearm in support. “Go on,” he urged.

  “I woke up in a stranger’s apartment over near the coast. He said his name was John and that he had ‘saved’ me when he saw that I was drugged. But he had a bag of the Rhoie pills, you know the date-rape drug?”

  The pastor nodded, his eyes closed.

  He said he took them from whoever drugged me, but I didn’t believe him and I went right off at him and ran out of there.”

  Pastor Greg winced.

  “What?” Angela asked.

  “I think this John fellow probably did save you,” he said as gently as he could.

  “No way, he had a whole bag of pills.”

  “Yes, but normally in that sort of situation, the victim wakes up in their own house or else is dumped somewhere before they wake. The real offenders would never let you know where they live. That alone makes me believe him, besides the doctor’s report.”

  Angela’s eyes widened as the truth of the situation dawned on her. “Oh…”

  Pastor Greg nodded in agreement. “Above and beyond the call of duty, I’d say.”

  “Now I feel terrible.” She hung her head. “I wish I didn’t have such a temper.”

  “We all have our crosses to bear,” he said lightly.

  “But what should I do about him? I should at least say sorry.”

  “I wouldn’t worry too much about him,” said Pastor Greg. “The more important point is that you were helped in a moment of need.”

  “Yeah, so I should at least thank him,” she replied.

  Pastor Greg’s pitying expression made him look even more tired than before. He obviously found it wearying to have to point out the Lord‘s ways to the more worldly so often.

  “The thanks,” he said as he peered over his glasses, “you would be giving should be going to God.”

  “God?” Angela queried. The Pastor said nothing but just nodded and went back to folding pamphlets.

  “Are you saying that God sent this John guy to save me?”

  “That’s the way I see it,” he stated flatly. It was Angela’s turn to be speechless, so he continued, “When you chose to give your life to Christ and asked to walk with Him, as you have when you were baptized, you have Him by your side at all times.”

  He stacked a pile of pamphlets into boxes and gave her time to think about what he had said. After a minute or so, he looked up from the pamphlets to see that she was weeping again.

  “Child! Don’t be so sad. You are blessed!” he said.

  “I know,” she smiled raggedly through her tears. “Now I know.”

  Chapter 10

  “Shouldn’t you be doing some more studying?” John asked his little brother when he saw him sprawled in front of the TV. Actually, Jarred was his younger half brother, but John didn’t hold that against him.

  “Nah man, I’ve been at it all afternoon. I need a break” His pallid face and slightly glazed eyes confirmed this.

  “Good, because I’m about to watch the game and I didn’t want to disturb you.”

  “Yeah, good idea. I need to veg out for a while more.” Jarred sat up and took his feet off the leather lounge.

  John switched from the news channel and got a couple of light beers from the fridge. He had to search to find them amid all the emergency rations. He marvelled again at how Jarred had known beforehand that something was going to happen.

  “Can you try to explain that random number stuff to me again?” John asked.

  Jarred grinned. “It’s really quite simple…”

  “For you maybe.”

  “Well, I’m not really sure I even get it,” Jarred confessed. “We’re trying to see if thoughts can directly affect physical reality. Like, supposing you were to try to move this beer can just by willing it…”

  “You can’t,” said John emphatically.

  “That’s right, but is it because it’s totally impossible? Or is it because the forces involved are far too weak to have an effect?” Jarred paused. John didn’t think he expected an answer. He just wanted him to think about it for a bit.

  “If we could find something that was easier to move, it might be easier to prove the mind force or will power or whatever you want to call it exists.”

  “But you’re sure it exists?” John asked.

  “There is lots of evidence in the form of effects, but we’re still working on the cause.”

  “The mind force?”

  “We have an unknown force or energy of some sort, so to test for it we need to increase its effect so it becomes demonstrable.”

  “Okay, so…”

  “So the way we’d normally do it is to turn up the power, but since it’s a mind power thing, we don’t know how to do that. So…”

  “You’re telling the story,” John said, sipping his beer.

  “So we can increase the duration that the force is applied for, or we increase the number of generators, in this, case human minds.”

  “So if I concentrate long enough on moving the beer can, it will move?” John raised a dubious eyebrow.

  “In theory, it should. The trouble is that most people have such a short attention span, five to ten seconds max. Too short to have an accumulative effect, so our best bet is to use lots of minds working together.”

  “How do you organise that?”

  “We don’t.”

  “But…”

  “We set up the experiment and just wait until some major event happens which captures the attention of a lot of people.”

  “Like the arrival of the alien spaceship,” John said.

  “Yeah, that was a perfect focus. It grabbed everyone’s attention all over the world. No temporal, regional, religious or political variation there. Couldn’t have engineered it better if we tried.”

  “So what was the experiment?”

  “Well, moving beer cans was out. Historically, the first experiments were done in the 1930’s with the rolling of dice. The idea is that as a dice bounces, the way it interacts with the sur
face is determined at a sub-atomic, quantum level. Each bounce of the die is in effect a quantum mechanical uncertainty. It is there that we think the mind power has its effect.

  Now a die has a certain bias and that if you rolled one die millions of time you could work out the probability of any of the six numbers coming up. The more you rolled the die, the more accurate a picture you’d get of its bias, and what that particular die’s outcomes should be.

  You then take the same die, and this time when it is thrown, you wish or pray or hope for a particular outcome. You use your mind power or intention to alter the outcome. In theory, while the dice is in flight, the outcome is undetermined, and it is then that the mind force acts.”

  “But…” John began, but Jarred cut him off.

  “I know, the flaws are many. Not the least of which is the reproducibly of the die throw, but also the surface of the table. Not to mention the thousands of throws needed to mathematically show any change. But lucky for us we now have computers to do the counting and the maths and random number generators to do the millions of ‘throws,’ except now we use the computers to generate a random output of ones and zeros, sort of like tossing a coin a few million times.”

  “But all those people don’t have the same wishes, do they? They are all just concentrating on the same thing at the same time,” John protested.

  “That’s right, but still it has an interesting effect. They started out with just one RNG and some people focussing or concentrating on it. They got some modest but repeatable results. Then they tried it with a group of trained meditators and got better results.”

  “Did it matter who the people were?” John asked.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Like, if they were religious or not, for example?” John said, thinking of Angela and her crucifix hanging around her slender neck, nestled between her soft breasts.

  “Not that I know of. I think they were just random people who were good at meditating. The theory was that they could maintain their concentration for longer, in a more ‘pure’ state and there were more of them.”