Flip

The source of the disturbance was a pearl rushing toward them, causing the lightless background to pile up in front of it like the bow wave off an enormous ship. The pearl stopped right on top of them, and the wave dissipated as it rolled away. Natalia moved straight toward the new pearl, coming so close that they almost touched. The two of them were so similar yet different, Aida observed; their identical vibration indicated the link.

  Oh, thank God! Greg’s here!

  Both Greg and Natalia orbited her. As they did, she felt herself resonate in the common familial vibration they shared, and the sharing gave her strength.

  “Aida,” Max said, “there are some things I have to go do. You’ll be safe with your family. I’ll be back soon, and one of us will always be watching.”

  “Have you heard anything from Matthew yet? He left to go speak to my husband.”

  “That’s one of the things I want to check on. I know he’s on his way to you. It’s more likely you’ll see him before he contacts us.”

  “Thank you, Max. Thank you for being so helpful.”

  “It’s all right. I’m glad to do it, and it was a pleasure to meet you. I’ll be right back,” he said as she watched his pearl turn hard opaque.

  Aida gave an inward smile and looked at her husband and daughter as their two beautiful pearls orbited her, their trails extending and twisting out behind them in a graceful illustration of DNA’s double helix. Her thoughts had slowed down from their agitated racing, and she was calm now. The medic had left—at least he wasn’t visible to her anymore. In any case, she was grateful for the privacy she knew Greg and Natalia would need right now. Families need time to be alone together and to just be, especially when the times are trying. As the three of them paced out some measure of time together, their individual coronas grew brighter and larger until the intervening space seemed to glow itself.

  This is new. But we’ve always drawn strength from being together. It makes sense.

  The stabilizing and nurturing effects of loving relationships was something that everyone knew about on some level and could experience every day in their lives if they would just see them. The presence of larger clusters of pearls and how they came together and stayed together made sense now. It wasn’t just that they interacted with one another; it was their personal relationships with one another that strengthened and supported them and bound them together.

  It must be terrible when someone turns in on themselves and away from relationships, Aida thought.

  Natalia’s orbit expanded like a spring uncoiling, then straightened out.

  She’s going to go do something now that Greg’s here.

  Her daughter made soft, gentle turns and settled on the path that took her a short distance away from her and her husband. Aida looked ahead of Natalia’s pearl to see where her daughter’s path was heading; however, there was nothing but empty space in front of her. A little farther out from Natalia, but basically in the same neighborhood, someone was tracing out a twisted, misshapen path full of jagged angles and tight corkscrews. As crooked as the path was, the person was heading in Natalia’s general direction. Then a third pearl appeared, its path relatively straight and heading in Natalia’s direction.

  The three of them are going to meet up pretty soon. This is getting to be a habit, she thought as she tried to see who was making the crooked path.

  When her focus touched the pearl, a painful numbing sensation shot through her, like a shock from an electrical socket. Two separate sets of vibrations clashed against each other in shearing disharmony in the pearl. Aida recoiled from the shock, revolted by the man’s inner experience.

  That’s Bill Fahy! How can he live with himself? As she felt the uneasiness from their contact fade, it was replaced with pity and apprehension. Bill’s truly unstable, and he was the last one I was with.

  It was Bill! He sent me here; he did something in the setup of the calibration run. I remember hearing the capacitors charge right before the run would have started, and he’s heading right toward Natalia.

  The third pearl, the one on the relatively straight path, met up with Natalia first. She couldn’t tell what they were doing, nor could she reach her daughter, but Natalia wasn’t alone. Bill joined up with the two of them, and he interacted with the third pearl.

  Aida saw his vibrations shift. He’s getting angry, defensive.

  Natalia was quiet, intently focused on something, not really noticing the other two. Her pearl gave a deep shudder, and then Aida felt suspicion and anger rise in her daughter. Pulsating with anger, Natalia’s pearl moved closer to the other two, and Bill responded in kind.

  They’re arguing. Nat found out something; she’s confronting Bill.

  The third pearl wedged the two of them apart, and they both separated like boxers at the end of a round. Natalia became preoccupied again but was still clearly agitated. Bill’s pearl started to move off, having cut a hard angle away from Natalia and the third pearl, the distance increasing with every passing moment. Black waves lumbered across Aida’s view of Bill, and soon he was lost into the background.

  Meanwhile, Natalia practically had exploded. She was interacting with the third pearl, and Aida felt her daughter’s desperation, then frustration. Natalia and the third pearl remained together, and the third pearl became agitated as well. Soon, three other pearls joined them. Aida reached out and saw one was University City police and the other two were university security. She focused on her daughter, hoping to hear something of what her daughter heard, but Natalia was too closed off, too focused on the Particle World. Aida could only guess what they were talking about.

  Bill…that son of a bitch. What did he do? He put me in the hospital, my family through hell, and he used the new QUESAMs to do it—that’s what he did. But why?

  The small group broke up, and Natalia returned to the hospital room to resume her patient orbit around Aida with Greg. It was easy enough to picture what was going on in the room, and it made Aida’s heart ache for her family.

  Heaven help Bill Fahey if I ever see him again.

  “It’s never good to wish harm to another,” Max called to her, announcing his presence. “It diminishes you.” Control and caution laced his voice. Aida was so angry with Bill for putting her and her family in this situation that she missed Max’s return.

  “Turning the other cheek can be difficult,” Aida said. “Look at what he’s done. It’s really hard to feel loving-kindness toward him.”

  “I know,” Max replied. “I wrestle with my own issues too, but wishing someone else harm puts you out of tune with the background harmonies of the universe. When you do that, you’re thinking about yourself and the harm you’ve received. It’s the opposite of compassion.”

  “I can’t be compassionate toward Bill right now!” Aida’s voice hardened.

  “When someone thinks about themselves too much,” Max said, “when they get wrapped up in their pain or ruminate on how they think they’ve been harmed by the world, they send themselves down a path like the one Mr. Fahy is on—crooked, jagged, and warped. It’s one of the paths to misery,” he added, then hesitated. “Look at what you know about him. Look at him now. I’m sorry to say he’s going to come to an early end.”

  That caught Aida’s attention.

  Bill’s pearl surfaced from the inky background; it was now moving in a tight spiral, like Natalia’s and Greg’s were around Aida. Bill, however, was orbiting no one. He was on a downward trajectory, turning faster and faster, like water circling the drain. Aida saw nothing ahead of him except a narrow furrow between two hills. At its bottom, the two sides of the furrow folded together in a curved line, as though they were two parts of a piece of cloth.

  “Are you saying he’s dying? I saw him just a little bit ago, and he looked perfectly healthy,” Aida said.

  “You’re not perceiving the passage of time normally right now,” Max replied. “The regular markers you use to judge the passing of time are missing. You’ve been here a day and a half. It’s now e
vening, the day after you collapsed in the lab.”

  His statement stunned her. How could so much time have passed? It would only have taken Greg a few hours to get back to University City, and he only just got here.

  “But Bill’s still healthy; he’s a young man,” she insisted.

  “The pattern he’s in now, that downward spiral…that’s the pattern of a person who’s doing something destructive to themselves. It could be some sort of addiction or abusive relationship that they’re in, or they’re focusing only on themselves and they have no real relationships in their lives—no one to care for or to care for them. People can go on in those types of patterns for years and years, unhealthy as they are. I would guess Bill has been doing this for very long time. But yes, unless something drastic happens right now to change his path, he’s going to enter that fold that’s straight ahead of him.”

  “I don’t understand. I’ve seen people disappear behind these waves of blackness, and they come back out just fine,” Aida protested. She didn’t want Bill to die; she only wanted him to face justice, and Max was so complacent about what he had said. The subconscious emotions that remained from watching her mother die, the ones that never truly stopped weighing on Aida and had changed her as a person, stirred again.

  “You’re a medical doctor, Aida. You’ve seen people die; you’ve just never seen it from this point of view. When a pearl enters a fold, when it goes through it, that’s what death looks like here. The light of the pearl disappears from our view, never to reappear.”

  “You can see everything else,” she questioned. “Can’t you see what happens beyond the fold?”

  “No, I can’t. No one can—at least that we know of. Sometimes I see people who approach a fold and run even with it, and then they dip in and come back out. I think those people are having near-death experiences. Remember, we’re still alive and viewing the exact same world. Just as you can’t see what happens after someone in the—what did you to call it?—the Particle World, the normal world, dies, you can’t see it here.”

  Bill’s pearl continued on and had passed the peaks on either side as he descended straight into the valley between them.

  “You’ve got to do something! You can’t just let him die like this,” the doctor in her railed.

  Unmoved, Max replied, “One of the ways we protect this view of the world is by never taking action on what we see and learn here. Besides, he’s in Nebraska with you, more than a thousand miles away from me—there’s nothing we can do. He chose his path, Aida. He made his own pattern of life.”

  Aida tried to reach out to Bill, to warn him, but he was beyond her grasp. Her mind raced, searching for some way to turn him away from the inevitable. He was close now, almost in the fold. All she could do was wait and watch. She was just as helpless here as she was lying in the hospital bed. She hated it; she would have cried if she could, but here in the Wave World, even that comfort was denied her.

  “I know that, to your way of thinking, death is something to fight against,” Max said. “I also know you believe in eternity and you have faith. Do you believe Bill’s death is the end of his consciousness?”

  Bill’s pearl flared as it made a final turn, slipped between the edges of the fold, then vanished.

  The practical, grounded, evidence-demanding scientist in Aida struggled against a faith that had been ingrained in her childhood. All she could choke out was a fragile and painful “I don’t know.”

  15 Untangling the Knot

  “I t’s practically impossible to rescue someone from themselves. There’s nothing you could’ve done,” Max said tenderly.

  “I think I could’ve done something!” Aida protested. “I worked with him every day. I could’ve recognized the path he was on; I could’ve found out more about him. I should’ve talked to him more. If he was fighting some kind of addiction, I could’ve ordered drug tests through the university. I was his supervisor, you know.”

  Compassion for oneself is difficult to learn, Max thought.

  “Maybe you could have, and maybe those things would’ve helped, but it’s just as likely they would’ve driven him away and he would have died sooner.” Max let those words hang in the silence before he continued. “I think you suspected he was a troubled soul, yet you kept him employed, handling things that are very sensitive and important to you. You did help him, Aida; you certainly gave him the opportunity to get on a different path.”

  That struck a chord in her, quieting her inner judge.

  “How’d it happen? How’d he die?”

  “I don’t know for certain. I think it was an act of violence. It was fast…I can say that.”

  Aida watched the fold that Bill had disappeared into, hoping he would reappear. The distinctness of the dark crease that had swallowed him was starting to soften and would soon be lost as the furrow undulated and morphed into a shallow depression. Only Bill’s trail remained. It stopped at the fold, a ghoulish pale finger pointing to his end. It would be the only reminder of the person and a poor tombstone here in the Wave World. The trail, which earlier had been bright and strong, was diminishing, fading until it was the finest strand, barely visible against the background. It didn’t disappear, though, and Aida realized the evidence of where Bill had been was still there. The idea crowded out her reaction to his death.

  “Max, what can you tell me about those lines, those trails everyone leaves behind them? They come off the front of a pearl, then flow back over it and weave into a thread.”

  “That’s the path we’ve taken in life,” he answered, stating the obvious, because he hadn’t quite understood what she was asking.

  “Yes, I know that, but what are they? They don’t start off as a thread.”

  “Oh, I see. Look out just in front of a pearl. Is anything there?” The teacher was speaking again.

  “No, there’s nothing there.” Just answer the question.

  “There’s a common misconception that people follow a predefined path in their lives,” Max said, “and while they might emulate behaviors they’ve seen before or think they should emulate, in actuality there’s no path in front of them. It’s much more accurate to say that people imagine a path and then choose to follow it. At least that’s true for anyone who isn’t dependent on another for his or her care.

  “Those white wispy things you see coming out of the front of the pearl, those are our decisions, our choices, our expression of free will. Matthew calls them decision fibers. They’re the decisions we make, and they determine the way we go and create our path. They come out from the front of a pearl because decisions start as thoughts, and it takes a moment for us to turn them into actions. As we turn our decisions into actions, the decision fibers weave themselves together into the thread, the trail we leave behind.”

  “How far back can you follow one? I want to see what Bill was doing and who he was talking to. Maybe I can figure out why this happened,” Aida reasoned.

  “As far as you can see, really, but you’ll only see the effects that his actions and passing events had on his path. You can’t see what he was doing or hear what was said. It’s not like rewinding a movie to watch a part you missed.”

  Aida focused tightly on the remains of Bill’s life and traced backward. The pale, thin line was now indistinct against the background, and she had to take her time so as not to lose it.

  This is like tracing a single vein in a leaf from the tip back to the branch, she thought.

  From the spiral immediately above the fold, the trail meandered, sometimes straight, sometimes curving, up away from the dark background waves. “What’s the time scale? I mean, how much distance of the thread equals a certain amount of time, like an hour or day?”

  “It doesn’t work like that here,” Max said. “There’s no way to tell how much time has passed.”

  Aida kept walking Bill’s path backward. “Why not?”

  “Like I said earlier, you don’t have any of the standard markers that are used to judge the passing o
f time. I think it’s cruel in a way. There are no clocks, no sunrise or sunset; your body doesn’t tell you you’re hungry or tired. You don’t even have the most basic things to rely on—no breath, no heartbeat, no eyes to blink. When you think about it, you don’t even have the urge to go to the bathroom.”

  “But that’s for me—that’s my own personal perception of time,” Aida said. “I’m looking at how long his path is.”

  “That’s the other half of it and exactly my point! Everyone’s perception of time is relative to them. When you look at someone’s thread, you see the effects of the decisions they’ve made and how other outside events have influenced them. You can’t tell how much time might have passed between those things for someone else.”

  “I get your point.” Aida heaved a mental sigh and wished she could feel it, needing the release it brought. I never thought I would miss a simple thing like that. “But I can see when Bill interacted with others. Maybe they’re still around and I can learn something from them.”

  “We can do that,” Max agreed. “I’ll help you. I’ve got a different angle on his thread than you do.”

  Aida hadn’t thought of that yet, and it made sense for them to work together. Two observers, each at different angles, would make better progress tracing the one thread. She followed the lab technician’s thread back to the point where she and Max had started talking. Just ahead, it disappeared behind a hill.

  “Okay, I lose his thread as it goes behind this lump here. Can you see it?” she asked.

  “Yes, I have it. It keeps going; I have it about halfway behind that environment wave. It’s still twisting and turning and…there it crosses and interacts with another line. Then he keeps going and comes out from behind the wave, right by that sharp corner. Do you see it?”

  “Yes, I see him there. Before that is the tangle when he and Natalia and the security guard got into it. I have a good idea what happened at that point. Go behind the wave and follow the path that crossed his,” Aida said, determined to find out who it was.