End to Ordinary History

by Michael Murphy

  He looked around his study. Two of the walls were lined with books from floor to ceiling, and on a table near his desk were arranged some twenty volumes that contained his reports to the KGB on the esoteric matters his new assignment would investigate. This room would be more useful than all the libraries in Moscow, for it contained the largest collection of material on the paranormal outside of his friend Umarov’s library in Tashkent.

  Kirov opened a study of UFOs sponsored by the Scientific and Technical Directorate of the KGB. It was the most elaborate and sophisticated study of its kind, including several hundred interviews with Soviets who claimed they had encountered entities from outer space. He reviewed its contents, looking for sections that would strengthen his report. In the clumsy language of parapsychology, several passages described the ancient teaching of his school about the ways of “crossing over.” The subtle language of Ali Shirazi had been translated into engineering terms and phrases from Soviet psychology in a manner that made Kirov smile.

  There is a belief [one read] among certain Sufi, Zoroastrian, and Iranian mystery schools that the body of the believer may transport itself through space, change its shape and size, pass through solid objects, and enter a larger sphere of life around our planet. This superstitious belief can be seen as a prefiguration of certain psychotronic effects in which mental contents are attached to the microwave portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. The belief of certain Sufis that one can cross a boundary (barzakh) into other planes of life anticipates modern research with “virtual-state engineering” . . .

  Kirov marked the page, then turned to another:

  Soviet citizens Boris Ivanovich Silver and Mikhail Georgivich Lumm, in the city of Bratsk, reported their sudden “lifting off” from the oil drum on which they worked and their hurtling through two “emerald cities.” The two unfortunates claim that the Chinese people are secretly held in thrall by emanations from these enormous green structures, one of which “hovers some thousand meters from the ground like a giant spaceship!”

  He thought of his grandfather’s stories about Jabarsa and Jabalqa, the emerald cities of Persian mysticism that appeared to initiates in their ecstatic transports. Similar visions had appeared to these ignorant workers, as they had to Marichuk. This study revealed other accounts of glowing green cities embedded in UFO stories. The similarities between ancient and contemporary visions were sometimes amazing. He turned on the Marichuk tape. “The sky is all green,” cried the cosmonaut. “But look! A giant ship! Coming down to take us on it!” For a moment there were cries from the ground, then Marichuk again, his voice more distant. “My head is going through it, Doroshenko! I am being swallowed!”

  Kirov turned off the tape. There was no doubt about it: Marichuk had seen a labyrinth like the mystic Jabarsa. The cosmonaut’s tortured vision was almost identical to traditional accounts. In an emerald city from the larger Earth you were swallowed up. Kirov shook his head with wonder . . .

  On the day of the Tashkent earthquake in 1966, some of the survivors had seen the same kind of thing. A green light the size of a transport plane had hovered in the sky, and he had watched while some tried to explain it. It was a meteor, they said, or a Russian space device, or an angel from Allah Himself. Kirov had moved through the ruined streets, grateful for the fantastic luck that placed him in the neighborhood where the entity was most apparent. Despite the chaos and excitement, he knew that this might be the chance of his life to observe the responses of ordinary people to an encounter with supraphysical forces.

  Some decided in the hours that followed that it had been a reflection of the sun. Many persisted in calling it a spaceship, and others a messenger from God. A few claimed it had spoken to them, telling them a new ship was coming soon to lift them from the city.

  He remembered the light’s disappearance. Like the folding of space in certain ecstasies the thing made a tunnel in the sky. If you fastened your attention on it you felt yourself sucked into its wake. Then the cry had gone up: “The sky is turning green. Look at the emerald city!”

  The event left its marks on some. Two Uzbek farmers and their wives had shown him bruises on their faces, and a child had welts on his chest that resembled the Star and Crescent. He had been amazed to see how quickly bodies translated such a contact. It would be marvelous, he thought, if some Party worker had been imprinted with the Hammer and Sickle.

  But for all its confusing effects, the visitation had prompted one coherent move toward understanding. This famous incident following the Tashkent earthquake had helped trigger the massive report before him. He slowly leafed through its pages, looking for other visions that resembled Marichuk’s. Then he copied the items he had marked into a special folder.

  When he was done, he turned to the file describing Alexander Rozhnov. Rozhnov was seventy-two and had suffered from stomach ulcers. He looked haggard in recent photographs, and Kirov guessed he had problems holding his own among the power brokers on the Committee for Science and Technology. Though he had turned to self-suggestion for help with his failing health, there was no evidence that he was interested in religious matters. According to the official biographical sketch that Baranov had placed in the folder, Rozhnov had not studied shamanism while working with the mountain people of Georgia.

  According to Rozhnov’s own account, the apparition had appeared in his dacha at Zukovka during a moment of deep fatigue as “a point of light dancing through the room.” The thing had seemed enchanting in the twilight of an early autumn day, a diversion from his weariness, until it vanished. But two days later it had reappeared in his apartment on Alexei Tolstoi Street. Alarmed, he had drunk a glass of vodka—only to see it grow larger. For ten minutes he had watched “a humanoid shape made of pale fire” move around the room. Then, to Rozhnov’s dismay, it appeared on the following day, lasting more than an hour, until a doctor came to his place with a bottle of tranquilizers. The episode had shaken him badly.

  Kirov took two books from his shelves. One was a history of Islamic esotericism, with a section on the forms and powers of angels. The second was an unpublished study of his own, in which he had compared Islamic, Buddhist, and Christian angelic lore with UFO sightings, the hallucinations of psychotics, the visions of artists and prisoners, and a fantastic collection of other visitations. The Soviet Union ws a treasure trove of such experience. Most peoples of the USSR had mysticism in their blood, and religious suppression had not destroyed it. What was repressed would return, he had seen, even to cosmonauts and prominent bureaucrats. When he found passages that described visions like Rozhnov’s, he copied them for his report. The ease with which he could find these correspondences showed how fertile this subject was, he planned to argue. The richness of these documents—some of which were sponsored by the KGB—showed that more research was needed. He and Baranov would try to convince Strelnikov that the Soviet Union led the world in its openness to the powers these visions suggested.

  By four o’clock that afternoon, Kirov had finished his preliminary report. But his growing excitement needed tempering. It would be wise to review his course of action from another perspective.

  Crossing to his bedroom, he found the Bukhara prayer rug his grandfather had given him. He unrolled it on his study floor and placed his meditation pillow on it. Sitting cross-legged, he gathered his attention in a long-practiced focus. A moment later he entered a trance. His physical surroundings disappeared. His excitement broadened to a peace that was filled with energy. Like his surroundings, his boundaries vanished . . .

  Kirov didn’t return to normal consciousness until it was six o’clock. In the depths of his trance, a year of anguished conflict had been lifted into healing perspective. When he opened his eyes his apartment shone as if he had been on a long retreat.

  The esoteric adage said it best: all momentous programs had to seem right when you were both sober and drunk. His trance had been a form of drunkenness by this tested wisdom, and in it his new assignment seemed given by God. All his l
ife had prepared him for these next few weeks.

  Suddenly he felt an urge to see the Kremlin. He needed a walk after these seven hours of study and meditation, and it was a brilliant evening. Taking a jacket from his closet, he locked the apartment and went out to the street. Ten minutes later, he walked the tree-lined paths of the Alexander Garden below the Kremlin’s high brick walls. A small crowd had gathered around the stone memorial that marked the tomb of the unknown soldier, and he hurried past it to the Troitsky Gate. Showing his KGB pass to the militia men on duty, he turned onto a walk that passed the modernistic façade of the Palace of Congresses. Down a path he could see tiny figures coming in for a Bolshoi performance. There was gaiety in the laughter of the crowd, a buoyancy in the air all around him. Lights sparkled in the buildings above, as if from a fairy castle. Suddenly he realized how much he loved this place.

  For a moment it seemed that the world’s physical and spiritual centers fused. The magic circle of the Kremlin mirrored the boundless center in his trance. The two centers were timelessly fixed, yet they reached everywhere. Did the men who lived and worked here ever sense it?

  For half an hour he walked through the courts and gardens of the Kremlin, showing his pass to the occasional militiaman who questioned him. Gradually his exaltation gave way to a painful melancholy. For along with the promise here, there came a sense of cruelties beyond comprehension. This ancient monument was the receptacle of murderous dreams, of brutality and heroism, of a curse and an invincible blessing. Its stillness grew deeper as the sounds of nighttime traffic died, and he thought of the immensities in his nation’s future. Its chances for spiritual adventure were as vast as its reach across the continents. He looked up to the sky and asked for strength to help it in the difficult days that were coming.

  At 8:30 that night, Baranov called Kirov to his office in the headquarters of the Committee for Science and Technology. “Rozhnov is happy for this talk,” he said. “I think he will tell us things that no one else has heard.” His dimpled face aglow, Baranov looked like an oversized troll from a book of Russian fairy tales. Rarely had he been so excited.

  They walked up a staircase to the bureaucrat’s suite on the fifth floor, Baranov adjusting his necktie and smoothing his silver hair. Rozhnov was alone in his sparsely furnished office. He shook their hands gravely, poured them each a cognac, and offered them seats around a tiny fireplace. “I hear you are the leading expert,” he said, smiling with a charm that Kirov had not expected. “I am glad we can counsel in private.”

  Sensing the old man’s dignity, Kirov waited for him to lead the conversation. After a silence, Rozhnov gave a deep sigh. “I have heard the cosmonaut tape,” he said. “At least I am in good company.” He shook his head sadly at the tragic incident, then turned to Kirov with a crooked, engaging smile. His slender hands and face suggested an ascetic nature. He might have been a priest, Kirov thought.

  “I have heard them, too,” Kirov said. “It appears we are exploring a terra incognita.”

  “My doctors have proven that,” Rozhnov said, looking into the fire. “Every one has a different diagnosis. One says it’s fatigue. Another, that an ulcer has depleted my red-cell count, making me prone to visual illusions. Another says it’s epilepsy. I think they all want to call the psychiatrists!”

  In spite of his frail health, Rozhnov was a sturdy character, Kirov saw. None of the doctors had shaken his certainty.

  “The thing I saw was like poor Marichuk’s angel. It had an identity, a personality, more than some people I know. Does that make sense? It had substance. It had density. It had shape. And it was present on three separate occasions. The lady who cleans my apartment was there the third time and will tell you I was perfectly normal. She has told the doctors I had no fever, that I wasn’t drunk, that I wasn’t drugged. And yet they won’t believe us!”

  “Their business is sickness,” Kirov ventured. “I’ve read your account and believe it is something outside the province of the doctors.”

  Rozhnov’s watery eyes reflected the firelight. “Let me tell you what I saw,” he said. “Each time the thing appeared, I felt that it wanted to communicate something. And each time it was more distinct. The last time, in my apartment on Alexei Tolstoi Street, it was as big as a man, burning with a pale fire as it moved around the room. I felt hypnotized by it, but had enough self-control to ask my cleaning lady if she saw it. She didn’t, but said she felt something alien in the room. Then she broke down and sobbed. The incident frightened her so badly, poor woman, that she almost quit working for me.”

  “Was she upset by your reaction,” Kirov asked, “or by the thing she felt?”

  “Oh, the thing itself. She’s grown used to my complaints! She kept crossing herself and asking it to leave the room, and yet she couldn’t see it! If it happens again, I will lose her. Now she thinks my apartment is haunted!”

  Rozhnov turned back to the fire, and the three men sat in silence. A presence had grown in the room, a concentrated stillness that made Kirov wonder if the old bureaucrat practiced meditation. “Yes,” Rozhnov murmured, “the thing had personality and wanted to communicate. I would swear it was alive.”

  “Did you feel known by it?” Kirov asked. “Were you recognized?”

  “Why, yes!” the old man exclaimed. “I sensed it was calling my name.”

  “And afterward, when the horror was gone, did the feeling of recognition persist?”

  “Did it persist? I wouldn’t put it quite that way. You see, I felt as if I recognized myself more deeply afterwards. The experience left me with a sense of something—of something more pervasive. Something deeper. As if there were more stuff here. More being. Do you see what I mean?”

  Kirov nodded.

  “Yes—more dukh or dushe or bytiyo. But those are poor words for it. There was more being here.” Rozhnov gestured to suggest it pervaded the room. “It helped show me that. But why do you ask such a question?”

  “Two old sayings from my grandfather. ‘Angels are mirrors.’ And ‘What we are looking for is the thing that is looking.’ ”

  “Where did your grandfather come from?” Rozhnov asked, gazing into his glass.

  “From a village in Azerbaijan. He learned the first saying from his grandfather, who came from Persia. These things are very old.”

  “My family comes from country in Georgia near Iran. But I never heard those sayings.”

  “People only whisper them now. They are afraid of the doctors!”

  Rozhnov glanced at Baranov, then looked back at Kirov as if they were suddenly old friends. “What else is there to know about these visitations?” he asked.

  “There are Christian sects,” Kirov said, “that speak in tongues, imitating the Pentecost, and Islamic saints who ‘find the tongues of angels.’ There are Siberian shamans who speak to the gods. Many of these people say that a world outside our normal understanding is trying to contact us, trying to communicate. And now all sorts of people who have seen apparitions are saying the same kind of thing. I have studied this for many years. It happened to Marichuk and it happened to you. Was there anything tangible that the apparition was trying to say?”

  “There was something, but I will have to think about it. There was a sense of words, of language, but also of something deeper. Something did arise . . .” Rozhnov paused. “Something difficult. There were upsetting things, some too personal to tell you. I will try to sort them out.”

  “All three of us know how difficult it is to decipher jargons,” Baranov interrupted. “I have that problem every day reading our scientific papers!”

  “Ah, yes.” Rozhnov smiled crookedly, his ascetic face relaxing. “How I know! We spend so much energy protecting ourselves from the unexpected.”

  The idea seemed to strike a vein of humor. He and Baranov laughed out loud.

  “I am willing to talk whenever you want,” Kirov said. “There is nothing more fascinating to me, yet few people of intelligence are willing to explore these things. You
must sense that in our academics.”

  “That is why the investigation you will head is important,” Rozhnov said. “I am sure you realize that. No man in the Soviet Union influences scientific opinion more than Ivan Strelnikov. He will review every word of your report. He will study every incident, every argument. And everyone in the Praesidium of the Academy of Sciences will study his reaction. This is the most controversial commission to be formed in years. You have a delicate mission, my friends. If you make a convincing case, the Academy will have to study these mysteries in depth.”

  For an instant, Baranov’s eyes grew larger behind their heavy lenses. “But one commission’s report will not change many minds,” he protested. “Strelnikov will not be enthusiastic about our proposals.”

  “Even his mild approval will sway the Academy,” Rozhnov said quietly. “The questions the capsule crash raises are already burning in our people. Our nation, I think, has come to a turning point. People everywhere are asking the kinds of questions the Committee for Science and Technology put to the Academy. We did not make our request on a whim.”

  “How many members of the Committee are concerned?” Kirov asked.

  “I cannot give you the exact count.” The old man closed his eyes. “But many of them wonder about the military’s flirtation with psychotronics and suggestion at a distance. They know about Project Elefant. They see the spread of spiritual healing to clinics everywhere, the yoga training for athletes and cosmonauts, the esoteric groups that practice meditation. Certain members of the Committee want to know whether these things are healthy or dangerous, whether they indicate social breakdown or an advance our people are making.” He paused. “Let me put it this way. There are enough government people concerned to warrant this call for a full investigation of the crash and its implications for our nation. More ministers than you think are involved. But perhaps that’s enough for tonight. You have to see the formidable doctor Strelnikov tomorrow.”