by Alex Shakar
• A sense of well-being and connectedness in the world.
• A sense of “being in the moment.”
• A sense of union with a “higher” force.
• A sense of calm detachment from everyday difficulties.
• A decrease in negative emotions such as anger and fear.
• An increase in positive emotions such as compassion and love.
By reproducing the “peak” experiences commonly associated with spiritual awakening, this study hopes to help participants change their long-term cognitive patterns, leading to enhanced self-efficacy and quality of life. It should be stressed that these sessions will not involve religious indoctrination of any kind.
The treatment, the site went on to state, involved visualization exercises as well as subjecting the brain to mild but complex electromagnetic impulses, the effects of which were not thought to be harmful or permanent. Possible short-term side effects included nausea, dizziness, and disorientation. No known long-term side effects, but as with any new area of research, risks could not be ruled out. Those selected would be paid fifty dollars for each of four weekly hour-long appointments, and some follow-up interviews over the ensuing months. At the bottom of the page were links to articles about other studies: one finding that church attendees had stronger immune systems, while those without a spiritual practice suffered the stress equivalent of forty years of smoking; another concluding that people of faith exercised more.
I’m not really thinking about this, am I?
I believe you are, Freddo.
He closed the browser window, determined not to be. But staring into the blue light of his screen, he began reconstructing the woman’s face. And that doppelganger briefcase sailing out of the room. Fifty bucks for an hour’s work, he thought. He was here at the hospital all the time anyway. If the study were here, too …
Even with these reflections, he’d never have returned to that website were it not for those other reasons, harder to explain, even to himself: Because if George were the one sitting here, he—George—would have done it in a heartbeat. And because a sizeable part of Fred wished it were George here instead of him, felt it should have been. And because, clicking on the link and filling out the questionnaire, Fred was able to feel what George would have felt—a peculiar, tense electricity in his chest and limbs, as though the study’s purported electromagnetic signals were already coursing up through the keyboard. Like the onset of panic but without the nausea. Like the opening hole of despair but more like hunger. A sensation so long unfelt he couldn’t straightaway place it as hope.
Ten minutes had passed, and if there was one thing Fred was now sure of, it was that this fright wig of a helmet didn’t do a damned thing. It felt just like any other helmet—padded, close, and hot. He couldn’t feel anything resembling a current, couldn’t hear anything but, possibly, the slightest hum, coming from somewhere behind the chair. From beyond the room came other faint noises: footfall on the floor above; a distant siren’s wail, trailing off so gradually it seemed never to fully end. The shade was still down, the observation window black. What was the use of having an observation window, if all they did was drop a shade over it when the experiment began?
The experiment.
That word had never been used, of course. “Study” had so much more reassuring a resonance, to the studied and studiers alike. But what was it they were really studying here? The whole deal must be a sham of some kind, he decided, one of those power-of-suggestion-type experiments, an elaborate sugar pill administered to see whether the patient might be suggestible enough to effect his own spiritual transformation. He berated himself for not trusting his instincts and bolting the moment he’d seen the suite’s tiny reception area, little more than a widened hallway beyond a door off the elevator bank, into which a coat rack and a couple of classroom chairs and a metal desk had been crammed. The desk had nothing on it—not even a phone—and no one had been sitting behind it. But he hadn’t been able to face the obvious. Sure. The quirkily hot science nerd chick with the vaguely erotic gel rubdown, the bespectacled wizard in the control room, the seven-page questionnaire and three-page liability waiver—all verisimilitude enhancers, avenues of suggestion-delivery. This gaudy piece of junk on his head—nothing but a stage prop. Fifteen minutes now, it must be, and nothing. Who knew, maybe they didn’t even expect him to imagine any experience here; maybe they were testing something else altogether, like how long a person might submit to sitting here like some mental defective in a Burger King crown, waiting for his divine purpose to be revealed.
How dare they.
How dare they take advantage of desperate, unhappy people like this. He was a second away from ripping the piece of crap off his head, leaping out the chair.
Then what?
How about picking up the trolley and driving it through the goddamned window?
Then what?
Where to then? The coma ward? The office of his ex-company? His parents’ apartment?
The lava cooled in the pit of his chest. Expanding his lungs around that congealed lump seemed more effort than it was worth. What was the point? So sad it was funny, even, imagining he could shuffle in here slope-shouldered, head under a cloud, and stride back out transfigured, head poking above said cloud, bathed in epiphany. Funny/sad/ maddening. The combination was exhausting, and before he knew it he was drowsy, drifting off, half in pain, half in pleasure, to a sound in the room he hadn’t noticed before: a faint and, now that he was attuned to it, almost painfully high-pitched tone. Sometimes, lying in bed late at night, he’d hear small, insistent noises like this burrowing into his ear. This tone, though, wasn’t a single note but an interval, possibly a major seventh. There was a smell in the air, too, like wet earth and ozone, and the sound was broadening and flattening out, sounding first like applause. Then like escaping steam.
Then like a shearing of machine parts—a hot little saw burning from the front to the back of his skull.
And here he goes, seeping out into the room.
No difference between his sweating palms and the sweating vinyl of the chair. Between the compacted springs within the chair and the tensing and relaxing of his muscles.
The helmet pulsating within him like a second scalp. The charge of its net of wires his own hair tousling in a breeze. The chair beneath him an internal pressure, the frame and stuffing the weight of his own bones and innards. Air and time alike circulating within him. The high electric whine: within him. Like a voice. Like a pulse. Like a single, continuous thought, a focused point of attention expanding, carrying him outward in all directions. The galaxy approaching, as if he might contain it all, every last thing everywhere, but for the fear, rising up like an arm to pull him back.
Maybe he moans, or maybe it’s the electric sound, sliding down again to a low hum and ratcheting like the sealing of a vault, as, with a nauseating snap, the world presses in:
Hot vinyl crawling beneath his palms.
Helmet crimping his skull.
Reddened galaxy glaring down at him—blindly—like the muscled socket of an eye.
“So,” Mira said. “How did it feel in there?”
She sat nearby in an office chair, a notebook computer balanced on her stockinged knees. Fred was noticing, in the light from the standing lamp beside him, the faint outlines of contact lenses in those dark eyes of hers.
She was examining him as well.
“Fred?”
“Yes. It felt …” He laughed. He shook his head.
“Why did you just laugh?”
“It’s just hard to find the words. I’m feeling a little …”
“Disoriented?”
“Spacey, yeah.”
“That will go away soon.”
He felt along his collarbones, the walls of his chest. “It felt like a jailbreak.” “Oh? How so?”
As he attempted to describe the sensations he’d felt—the expansion, the freedom, the envelopment of the chair and the air around him—s
he began to type without breaking eye contact. Her typing was beyond fast, more words, he was pretty sure, than he was managing to speak. She seemed at once excited and intent on hiding her excitement behind a veneer of objective inscrutability. It was hard to stay focused on what he was saying. The soft clatter of keys made him hyperaware of being a test subject. Yet, too, in a tactile kind of way, there was something delightful about the sound. He could almost feel the little concave buttons springing beneath his own fingertips, the electrical impulses zapping through the circuitboard and the nerves of her arms. helmet. To the contrary, there was a subtle pressure he was now sensing, exerted by all that wasn’t him—Mira, the keytaps, the four walls of her tiny office, the second recliner of the day she’d sat him down in (olderlooking than the last, though in better repair), a cloth-covered artifact from about the same era as that gold helmet, its course fabric woven from several shades of unnatural blue.
She kept typing after he’d finished. Adding her own commentary, maybe. As she did so, she bridged the awkward silence with a drawn-out nod. There was a hardness to the set of her features he hadn’t noticed in the low light of the helmet room.
“So if it was like a jailbreak,” she said when the typing stopped, “what would you say was the jail?”
There wasn’t a simple answer to this. The bars had been neither within nor without. He hadn’t even known they’d been there until they were down. He felt a need, a cell-deep hunger, to try the session again, see if he could go farther, contain the whole room, contain other people completely. What would that feel like? How much could he hold? How big could he get?
“What happened to me in there, anyway?” His question tumbled out with a sudden force, almost accusing.
“What do you feel happened to you?”
“But what really happened to me?” To the extent he’d been able to imagine what would happen here at all, he’d anticipated some kind of drugged-out, blissful high. What he’d just experienced seemed of another order.
“You’d like to know the technical aspects of the process?”
“Right,” he said. “Yes.”
She looked pleased, like he’d just bested a maze and won a piece of cheese.
“That’s good. Because I intend to explain it to you. It’s very important, for our purposes here, that you understand it. But let’s talk about what brought you here first. Is that all right?”
She didn’t wait for an answer, just started clicking around on her computer, calling up the relevant data. Now that his disorientation was on the wane, he was starting to decide that, actually, he didn’t much like this woman, didn’t much care for her condescension, her impeccable posture, the overall feeling she gave him that he was sitting slouched in a petri dish, looking up through a tube of microscope lenses into her giant, peeled eye. A few minutes ago, when he’d grabbed her forearm to steady himself upon getting up from the helmet chair, her eyes had popped like his hand was electrified, like he was some experimental slime monster that had breached the containment barriers. Or maybe his grip had just been too strong. As they ticked across what he assumed was his file on her screen, he noticed her contact lenses again. And still that squint. He contemplated telling her she needed a new prescription. It wasn’t a particularly confidence-instilling detail.
“From the application it sounds like it’s a pretty hard time for you right now.” She nodded again, giving him permission to be having a pretty hard time right now. “Can you tell me a little more about George? Is he still in a coma?”
“As of this morning,” he said, steeling himself.
“You wrote that he had lymphoma, and then lapsed into the coma. So the one caused the other?”
In the gunmetal bookcase on the wall opposite him, at the corner of a shelf with some stereo equipment and a stack of recordable CDs, a snow globe caught his eye, one of the few decorations in the room, a New York skyline of maybe twenty years ago submerged in brackish water.
“They said the cancer cells probably produced a hormone that caused his sodium levels to drop too low. Apparently it’s not uncommon. The coma resulted from that.”
“Are they still trying to treat the cancer?”
The room closed around him like a fist.
“They can’t. Or won’t, so long as he doesn’t wake up. He went through chemo and radiation when he was first diagnosed. Then it spread to his lungs. Then they told him he only had two or three months to live and he gave up treatment. That was seven months ago. The last six of which, he’s been in the coma.”
He knew what was coming next. He was resenting her before she even asked.
“Was there ever a discussion about just”—her voice was quieter now—“stopping treatment?”
“Early on, they didn’t want to put him on life support. My parents probably would have caved. But I insisted. After a couple weeks, he didn’t need the life support anymore. He’s been on his own power ever since.” He said it like a boast, like he felt no guilt whatsoever about what he’d committed to putting everyone, including George, through. On Fred’s first and last visit to a therapist a couple months back, when he’d made the mistake of relating these details in a less self-assured manner, the woman had assumed he was remorseful about his decision, and proceeded to offer her cloying reassurances that it was a mistake any loving relative could make. Mira’s reaction was in its own way worse: a look of sympathy stopping just short of approval. Before she could say anything, he went on:
“The doctors don’t know why he hasn’t died. They see no point in doing more tests, but the cancer must be in remission, seeing as he’s still … around.”
She closed her eyes, opened them. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Fred, I’m merely asking. This isn’t quite my area of expertise.” The way she deployed that quite emphasized that in fact it was, broadly speaking, within her expertise. “But six months is a long time to be in a coma. Are there any signs of brain activity?”
“Some. Especially in the brain stem. People have come back from that. Not often, I know. But it’s happened.”
He couldn’t blame her, this time, for busying herself with half a minute’s typing. He looked around the little office some more. His guess was she hadn’t been here long. A few large textbooks—neuroethology, neurotheology (he wondered briefly if one of these was a typo, and if so, which), neuropsychology—on the bookshelf. Van Gogh’s starry night above her bulky metal desk.
“Does George have a wife, children?” she asked, before looking up.
“No children. He got divorced two years ago.”
“Before the lymphoma was diagnosed?”
Fred nodded.
“And you?” Mira checked her screen. “You broke off a wedding engagement recently?”
The same terrain, along just about the same route, had been traversed with the therapist. Was Mira Egghart a therapist? Or was she simply here to observe?
“We split up a few months ago.”
With the therapist, he’d gone on to describe breaking up with his fiancé as the second biggest mistake of his life. He didn’t bother elaborating this time. Mira was giving him another of her discerning looks, or maybe he was just imagining it. The parallel between George’s love life and his own was a sore spot.
“After George got sick?”
“Yes. That probably played a part.”
“Are you seeing anyone now?”
He entertained the idea of turning her question into a joke, or a proposition, but then—imagining her hearing the same jokes from every bestubbled emotional charity case from every hospital cafeteria across the city—thought better of it. He shook his head.
“I suppose you don’t have much energy for dating at this point,” she said.
He gave her points for the wry tone, the warmth in her eyes.
“Being broke and living with my parents doesn’t help much either,” he said.
Looking down at her typing fingers, she almost smiled, with him or at him, he couldn’t say.
; “So let’s talk about your parents for a second. Are they religious?”
“My mother’s started doing Reiki. It’s a … Japanese … energy … healing kind of thing.”
“Yes, I’ve heard of it. Have you ever tried doing it?”
“No. Not for her lack of offering.”
“So why haven’t you?”
“I don’t know if I should be encouraging her.”
Mira didn’t betray a judgment, about his mother or about him. “Did you grow up with any religious training or spiritual practices?”
“None.”
“Any kind of transformative life experiences you’d classify as spiritual?” “You mean like visions?”
“Like anything.”
“I’ve never seen the Virgin in my cornflakes, if that’s what you’re asking.”
The answer seemed to satisfy her. “Last subject, occupation. You wrote that you and George started a company together. Some kind of computer company, was it?”
“Software design and consulting.”
“And you wrote that you lost it? I’m afraid I know even less about business than I do about computers. How does one lose a company?”
The biggest mistake. He grinned miserably, glanced at the ceiling.
Go ahead. Inner George. I didn’t patent it.
“It’s like losing a sock,” Fred said. “Only more lawyers are involved.”
She didn’t smile, not even out of politeness. Instead, to his surprise, her face went sad.
“George’s joke?” she asked.
Stunned, he blinked. “How’d you know?”
“I’m psychic.”
They stared at each other.
Finally, she smiled.
“That was a joke, too, Fred.”
And then it was happening again—the expansion—happening right here: he and Mira afloat in the same balloon, one organism with two bodies, two goofy grins. Merging with a La-Z-Boy had not come close to preparing him for this. It was like he’d known her forever, or twice that long. Like everything he’d ever felt a lack of was here, right in front of him. Yet almost before he’d realized it was happening, it was gone, gone so fast he might have concluded it had never happened at all, but for the confusion and the longing in its wake. The atmospheric pressure in the room had suddenly doubled, and gravity had done the same, pressing him into the chair. He wanted to tell her about the experience. He wanted it back. It seemed impossible to him that she hadn’t felt it too. But she was already closing her laptop, moving on.