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Better Angels

Page 36

by Howard V. Hendrix


  Charming phrase, that—warm and dead. Even if his plan, his “memory of the future,” did not work out, the worst that would happen would be his death of instant hypothermia inside a liquid nitrogen cloud. Such an instantaneous freeze-out sounded like a very peaceful way to go. Jiro could think of far worse.

  He could hear in his head what Seiji might think of his plans. Even if everything worked, it was suicide transcendence, transcendental suicide, at best. Seiji would be sure to warn his poor, misguided little brother that suicide was no guarantee of transcendence. And if everything went awry? Accidental suicide, suicidal accident. A magic trick gone wrong.

  Jiro pushed such thoughts out of his head as he finished powering up his systems. If a magician was a secular mystic the power of whose illusions came from how carefully he had practiced to make his practice invisible, then Jiro had practiced enough. The thought occurred to him that the same criteria might also be applied to a mortician, but he drove that idea from his head. He reminded himself that he had done enough of the physics research to satisfy almost anyone, even an engineer like his brother. He knew what he was getting himself into, at least as well as anyone could know that. The greatest illusionists, after all, were those for whom their practice had become invisible even to themselves.

  In some ways, he thought, his disagreement with Seiji was older than they were. It was the same disagreement Einstein had with Bohr. Einstein said no signal could travel faster than the speed of light, so it was impossible that the measurement performed on one member of a particle pair would instantly determine the direction of the other, which might be light years away. Bohr, though, contended that the two-particle system was actually an indivisible whole and could not be analyzed as though it were made up of independent parts—no matter what the distance separating the particles. Regardless of distance, the two particles were always linked by instantaneous nonlocal connections, “influencing” one another rather than communicating with each other.

  Einstein’s view of reality—that there were things-in-themselves, independent, spatially separated and determined elements and events—was incompatible with Bohr’s interconnected and interdependent universe of quantum theory—that full, bright, busy emptiness where no thing exists as the thing-in-itself but only in relation to everything else, including the mind of the observer.

  Seiji was a lot like Einstein in that way. He didn’t like “spooky action at a distance.” Too magical. That the traditional scientific approach—of breaking the “problem of the universe” up into bits and creating numerous partial theories—might not work anymore was anathema to him. But, Jiro thought, if everything in the universe depended on everything else in some fundamental/transcendental way, it might be impossible to achieve a solution by investigating parts of the problem in isolation—especially if you wanted to understand the underlying order of the world, the connectedness of events. A holistic physics, one emphasizing that the behavior of any part is determined by that part’s connection to an ultimately universal whole, had to discard the classical notion of cause and effect because those connections could never be known precisely.

  That was where things got too weird for Seiji. Chaotic quantum fluctuations in energy spawning infinite universes. An eternally self-reproducing cosmos, functioning as a self-organizing dynamical system. Black holes as universe bifurcation points. The black hole itself fractal, existing at the borderline between two orders, a gateway between those orders. All points in the universe potentially gateways, because the whole thing is holographically self-similar across all scales. The possibility of a correlation between quantum interconnectedness and the strangest of parapsychological phenomena. No, Seiji could never accept the dreaming universes implied by the quantum theorists, by the artists, by the ancient shamans, by all the magicians—but Jiro had. He believed in it enough to stake his life, death, and future on those ideas. And in that order.

  On one timeline in one twentieth century on one Earth, one Marcel Proust had written, “When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host.” Shakespeare had written, “In that sleep of death, what dreams may come?” Eliot had written of “death’s dream kingdom.” Shamans from Lao-Hmong txiv neeb to Siberian utagan to Australian aboriginal “clever fellas” to Guajiro dream-priests had all seen the connection between the dream world and the waking, two masks of the one dream.

  Jiro knew the shaman’s dragon-guarded paradoxical passageway to the dream world, the death world—the path which the shaman as psychopomp could use and yet live. He knew the Desana shamans’ drawings, showing their twin river pythons or anaconda/rainbow boa pairs dwelling in the fissure between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. He knew the Rainbow Serpent of the Australian Aborigines with the quartz crystal before its head. He knew the great snake at Serpent Mound in Ohio, with the magick cosmic egg at its head. He knew the axis mundi, the world birch or fir-tree, the tree of knowledge with the snake round its trunk and its mycorrhizal associate, the red or golden “apples” of the Amanita muscaria mushroom, growing at its base.

  He knew the Sufis of the Isfahan metaphysical schools with their alam al-mithal. He knew the work of Suhravardi, Dilthey, Damad, Sadra, Corbin. He knew Jung and synchronicity. Tibetan tulpas. The psychologists and psychophysiologists with their discussions of rapid eye movement and the dream state, which took place during what they had originally called “paradoxical sleep”—a term Jiro loved. The quantum physicists with their idea that the event horizon and lightspeed limit might be breachable if the connections between particles were not signals in the causal-event Einsteinian sense but acausal influences. All those and so much more in what he had researched pointed to the dreamland underlying the waking world, the latent beneath the blatant.

  Jiro pushed open the big, heavily insulated flip-top of the coldbox and climbed in. Before he shut the top again, he stood in the coldbox, taking one last long look around. Was he really willing to bet his life on the chance that he could wake up inside the dream of death? The grave too is a black hole. What if Proust’s ring was just the coronal circle of light surrounding an eclipse? What if that bright dumbshow was only what the doomed space traveler sees all about him or herself at the event horizon of a black hole? The ring of light in which all times can be seen at one space and all spaces can be seen at one time—was that really only the physicist’s way of talking about your life passing before your eyes at the instant of death? What if, to the world outside the black hole, the image of the space traveler just went on forever toward death, getting fainter and fainter forever as it went? Who was he trying to save by the “lucid witness dying” he had planned?

  Unbidden, the thought came to him how each member of a virtual particle/antiparticle pair must seek out its partner and annihilate with it. At the Schwarzschild radius of a black hole, however, one virtual particle might fall into the black hole and become a real particle, in which case it no longer had to annihilate with its partner. The remaining virtual particle might then become real as well, escaping from the vicinity of the black hole into infinity, in the form of Hawking radiation. Why did he think of Seiji when he thought of that scenario? Too metaphorical again. They were brothers, not particles. They were not Einstein and Bohr. They were not Cain and Abel. They were not Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Was it just plain crazy to believe that something larger echoed and reverberated in their relationship?

  The transformation he planned—was it really worth it? He thought of other long-sought and much hoped-for transformations.

  Through the use of nuclear fissile materials, physicists had added fundamental particles to lead, thereby transforming it into gold, achieving the old dream of the alchemists. The process itself, however, was far more expensive than the value of the gold it produced.

  Dark lead transmuted to bright gold, Jiro thought. Transformation brought about through interaction with the deeper darkness of plutonium, metal of the god of the dead and ru
ler of the underworld. The alchemists too had dreamed of gleaming islands in the universal soul...

  Jiro thought of his brother and his parents. He had said he would rather die than hurt anybody. Had “anybody” not included himself? Wouldn’t he also hurt others by dying? He wondered: What is the half-life of grief? How much time will have to pass before the glowing, Geiger-crackling pain of loss decays to a leaden mass in the soul, dark and dumb and inert?

  Jiro cut off his questions before they weakened his resolve any further. No, he thought as he stared about the trashscape and beyond, toward Cherry Valley, where he had once lived. He had to believe that death’s gleaming pain would transmute his own leaden soul into something bright and shining.

  Jiro knelt down and closed the roof-lid to his coldbox home. The lights inside came on automatically. In one corner of his deep draped coffin he saw the beaded leather pouch of his medicine bundle, with its trefoil Biohazard symbol. Knee-walking to it, he opened it up and, one by one, took out the talismanic objects he had collected.

  A yellowish beaked skull of a small bird. A glinting computer macrochip. A fragile, nearly translucent piece of snakeskin. A tiny mechanical umbrella. The shoulder blade of a turtle. A desiccated, dark-brown morel mushroom, pitted and convoluted like a dried and shrunken brain. A bent metal asterisk of age-blackened barbed wire. A pair of smudged white feathers, looped together. A red, rust-pitted toy gyroscope. A stub of dark green candle. A silk cocoon, dirt-smudged. A crucifix. A plastic-laminated scapular “medal”. The story behind each of the objects flashed through his mind, but the one associated with the morel particularly lingered. It was an act of illegal trespass, he supposed. The road to Crystal Cave in Sequoia Park had been blocked off during the winter and throughout the spring while a construction crew demolished the old bridge across the Marble Fork of the Kaweah River and began work on the new bridge.

  To the west of the river the forest had burned, late in the previous summer. Jiro knew a section of the woods where he was sure the much sought-after morels would, that late spring, be present in incredible abundance, especially after the fire and then the unusually cold winter and wet spring. Morel mushrooms had a freeze/flush trigger for their fruiting in all years, and the previous year’s fires would only intensify the triggering effect. The only problem would be getting across the Marble Fork at morelling time, when the river would be in full spring thaw and uncrossable with the bridge still out.

  He had convinced Seiji to go on a mushroom foray with him in the Crystal Cave area. Despite the ROAD CLOSED signs and his misgivings about trespassing, Seiji followed him one Sunday afternoon in late spring, collecting bag folded in his back pocket. Down from the sequoias beside the main highway they walked, along the road to Crystal Cave, past the blooming dogwood, past the heavy equipment parked along the road, past the wrecking and building machines, past the rubble and debris of the demolished bridge, to where the road ended and the river gorge gaped, once again unspanned but for a pair of surprisingly thin I-beam girders, set like uneven parallel bars deep in the throat of the canyon that the bridge had formerly spanned from above.

  Twenty five or thirty feet below the uneven parallel I-beams, the river roared with all the happy killing savagery of spring in its throat. Seiji balked, yelling over the river’s roar that crossing would be taking a “crazy risk” and that no mushroom was worth risking your life for, no matter how tasty morels might be. Jiro, however, secretly mind-altered on KL, laughed and pointed out the hand-over-hand cable lying down the gorgeside to the nearer end of the I-beam footbridge. The two-girder footbridge must be safe, since the boot prints on the steep path down to the footbridge’s nearer end showed that construction workers were using the girders to cross over the river.

  While Seiji dithered, Jiro let himself down the drag cable backwards, hand over hand down the side of the gorge, to the near end of the girders. Unsteadily he stepped onto the uneven girders, immediately wishing that the cable had continued across the bridge—that there might be any kind of railing, some place to put his hands. There was nothing—just his hands teetering in the empty air, his boot-clad careful feet on steel sweaty with the damp and cold of the river mist, and always the river itself, the deafening wet white noise ceaselessly roaring from its granite and marble maw a couple dozen feet below his boots.

  Step by teetering step he made his way across the uneven pair of girders, his concentration narrowing down so tightly that at times he thought he would not so much fall off the girders as fall through the six-inch gap between them. At other moments the KL would reverse his sense of figure and ground so that the girders seemed actually slits cut into the surface of a white-noise, wave-interference world.

  Just past the midway point, he was paralyzed by the idea that, with his next step, the girder would become a slit indeed and, if he stepped onto the girder, his foot would fall through that shining steel slit and he would be trapped. He was sorely tempted to step off the girder and onto the solid-seeming white noise of the river.

  Jiro blinked. Figure and ground reversed again to a more classically accurate relationship. With great relief he made it across the twin-girder bridge at last and onto the solid stone of the other side. Looking back, he watched as Seiji, having walked upright about a third of the distance across the footbridge, gave up and crossed the rest of the way on his hands and knees.

  Beyond the far side of the bridge they pulled out the big paper shopping bags that they had kept folded in their pockets and began to look for mushrooms. They found so many morels in the burned-over ground that the morel foray—usually a happy Easter egg hunt for adults—eventually became tedious. The mushrooms, shaped like little hybrids of brains and pine cones and sponges, could be seen everywhere, an embarrassment of riches. He and Seiji grew tired of picking them even before they had filled their collecting bags.

  At one point they moved down from the hill they had been harvesting and across the road, to eat lunch beside a small creek. As they ate, Seiji, without a word, pointed from spot to spot about them on the burned-over hummocky bottomland. There were morels everywhere. The two brothers were so completely surrounded by them that it was almost claustrophobic. Jiro had never seen anything like it.

  On the way back across the girder footbridge, Jiro too crossed on hands and knees. Too harrowing, trying to balance himself and the bag of mushrooms. Once he and Seiji were both on the other side, however, they felt exalted—even if they had had to cross humbly.

  Back at camp, Jiro was so anxious to enjoy some of their harvest that he had boiled up some pasta and then tossed in a couple handfuls of morels—not letting them cook nearly long enough, as it turned out. He and Seiji spent the rest of the evening experiencing what the mushroom foray books euphemistically referred to as “gastro-intestinal distress.”

  Jiro laughed to himself, remembering it. On the floor of the coldbox he put the morel directly above his head, then spread out the rest of his talismans around it. When he had them spread out in the pattern he most preferred, Jiro geared up, putting on trodes and feedgloves, circlets and eyewalkers, a full connection suit, wondering if Seiji would consider what he was about to do now a “crazy risk” too.

  He had had his share of good and bad times since then After the debacle with Lydia and her fiancé, Jiro began to go underground. The next night in L.A. he had gone to bars he had heard of—Decade de Sade, the Sex Factory—until he found a prostitute. He had done so much KL by the time he found her that no sooner did he get back to her place than she turned into a giant cockroach before his eyes, rippling mandibles and spurred bronze legs and shining bugeyes and flickering antenna bursting out of the carapace of her clothing—a horrible hybrid of Kafkaesque nightmare and deeply buried racism. He fled, screaming wildly, before she’d even completely removed her clothes.

  Within the week he was picked up by the police, who hospitalized him and shaved his head and interrogated him simply because he’d been found in the street, muttering and shouting and drunk out of hi
s mind. After he’d been released—and after he’d gotten better, with the old shaman’s help—he had hacked back into Los Angeles Police Department records and found his grainy interrogation video.

  He sat back cross-legged on the padded floor of the coldbox, thinking of how he had played it again from time to time. He switched on his eyescreens to watch it once more, to remind himself how far he had come—and how far he still had to go. He watched his earlier head-shaved self rant about secret “headplug” implants getting police signals “to hyperactivate Wernicke’s area in the right side of the brain,” causing “the micromachines to swarm” and “reinforce bicameral walling” until others controlled him and he became a “stranger” in his own head.

  Yes, Jiro thought. He had definitely been a stranger in his own head, at that time. Before he met the old Indian. Before he learned to fast deeply and purify himself. Before he learned how to get clean. Scanning on through the video records, he watched his head-shaved self theorize about how “the military and security apparatuses, deprived of adequate external enemies,” had to “turn inward and become an internal superpolice...colonizing not only the hearts and minds but also the brains and bloodstreams of the population”.

  Jiro fast forwarded, uncomfortable with seeing too much of any one scene of himself in that shave-headed and darting-eyed condition again. He scanned onto a recording of himself talking about a police conspiracy to “lock everybody’s lobes into the same Big Picture.” Then he came to the strangest part of all, his recounting a vision of waking from one coldbox coffin into a trashheap world covered by billions of coldbox coffins—one for every person on Earth, all living in a dream of suspended animation, all sharing the same virtuality construct, the same mass hallucination of active lives in a human universe of haborbs and metroplexes and terraformed planets, when in fact they were all frozen supernumerary sleepers in a single blown-out trashworld ruled by machine soldiers.

 

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