End to Ordinary History

by Michael Murphy

  They went in single file now, the two caretakers walking in front.

  “I’ll go first,” Kirov whispered when they reached the precipice. “There is a ledge about four feet below us.” He went down nimbly, as if he knew each edge of rock, then Fall inched down behind him. Kirov knelt on a rock outcropping and waited for Fall to sit. Then he blew out the lamp and whistled loudly. It was an eerie sound, high-pitched and wavering, like a muezzin’s call to prayer. A long echo came from the well. “We will sit in silence,” Kirov said. “Our friends will come back in three hours. Try to sense how deep this cavern drops.”

  A grotto like this might drop a thousand feet, Fall thought, but there was a smell of fresh air and water. It occurred to him that this abyss might open to a sky below. Were there stars in all directions? As he had the thought, he felt himself floating . . .

  Without effort, without fear, he was suspended.

  There was no sense of weight, no pressure from the rock—only emptiness. His sense of boundaries vanished. Then, like the first light of dawn, a subtle land appeared. A shimmering latticework, small dancing forms like crystals.

  Floating in zero gravity, cohering gently, glowing filaments stretched in every direction. This was a body in the making, he could see, a dazzling net of light and music. He let it float around him. There was no telling now how far it reached, for through the glowing fibers a million stars were shining.

  It all pulsed to a secret beat, and though it was completely stable, Fall knew it could explode. A long, still moment passed. Then the thing transformed itself into a pattern more intricate than before.

  A presence was entering step by step to bring him strength and courage. For in this dazzling net there were faces too radiant to look at. Faces and a power that could kill. Fall repeated his name for support, seeing that every change like this came from a place inside him. It would be his task to befriend this power and that would take him the rest of his life.

  “We must go now.” Kirov’s blue eyes were sparkling in the lamplight. “They are waiting.”

  Two bearded faces looked down from the ledge above.

  “Was that three hours?” Fall whispered in amazement. “We just sat down!”

  “I’ve been trying to rouse you for over ten minutes,” Kirov said. “You’re sure you weren’t asleep?”

  The two bearded figures smiled as they helped him off the ledge. Their kindness was a tangible energy, it seemed, a part of the presence in this grotto. And it occurred to Fall that Kirov was an angel. But as they started up the incline from the well, he sensed the Russian’s dark complexity. He had an image of him being tortured, then one of him hiding in an alley sobbing. The man’s life, Fall realized, was filled with splendors and horrors he could only guess at.

  “Are your legs all right?” Kirov asked. “You sat there without moving.”

  “Like rubber springs,” Fall answered. “I think my cells got changed!” His body seemed light as air, and with the slightest shift of focus he could sink again into that brilliant latticework his heavy frame was made of. Walking slowly up the slippery rock, he held back tears of joy. His early intuitions about the body’s secret, his years of scholarship, his meeting Atabet, his trips to Russia—all led to the vision he had just been granted.

  Kirov led him to the grotto. With one glance at the mosaic, Fall recognized Atabet’s intent. The latticework of shimmering stone was like his vision in the Well of Light. It showed a version of our human flesh in its coming splendor: the city might be subtle cells, the hills a body’s contour. The rising sun, however, showed a fatal turn the earth might take. The X across it spelled disaster.

  Two cities burned like running sores. As he stood transfixed, Fall saw that this backward sun would have to find a better birth than Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

  18

  AS DARWIN FALL SAT in the Well of Light, Jacob Atabet hurried across the hill above Olema on his way to the Vedanta retreat three miles from the farm house. It was five o’clock, and the sun was setting. It would be a half-hour’s hike from here, he thought, and allowing time to visit with students at the retreat, it might be 6:30 before he got back to the farm. Tomorrow would be soon enough to get the painting.

  But as he hesitated, an image of Russian Hill appeared in the shadows at his feet. He knew that if he did not see the painting soon, the hallucination would torment him. Buttoning his jacket against the cold, he jogged through the grass toward the highway.

  The two thousand acres of the Vedanta retreat stretched from Highway 1 near Olema to the ocean at Point Reyes. As Atabet crossed its grounds through a stand of redwoods, an image of his painting danced in the shadows before him. At a turn in the trail, he stopped. In the woods ahead stood a snow-white deer, part of a herd imported from Asia. Motionless, the animal sniffed the air for danger, then bounded ahead through the trees. Thankful for this distraction, Atabet jogged behind the deer to the big frame house that served as the retreat’s guest quarters. One of the Vedanta students had driven a tractor from the fields. He got off, leaving the motor running, and came up to Atabet. They went inside together.

  In the meditation hall, another student was drawing blinds against the setting sun. In the darkened room the painting glowed with preternatural brightness. “Has anyone touched it?” Atabet asked with displeasure. “It looks like someone tried to clean it.”

  Only the regulars had seen it, they protested, and none of them would do something like that. Atabet checked both their faces, then sat on the floor to study the odd effect. Obediently, the young men knelt beside him.

  Later, this meeting would seem strange to them all: after a few words of greeting, they had fallen into sudden concentration. The student’s tractor would run out of gas before the spell was broken.

  Atabet’s concentration deepened, and the aura that preceded his trances appeared. It felt as if he were entering a long, dark well . . .

  Living things were moving in the dark. Urchins and anemones, octopi and squid slithered past. Then tiny sacs like plankton swarmed in a warm, rocking sea. With a shift of attention, Atabet knew he could turn these glistening beads to human cells, and if he focused deliberately, they would coalesce to living tissue.

  But the tunnel drew him on. Passing through the sea, he fell into a starry night. All around him dazzling lace was spun to the beat of his heart. A new body formed while he watched, a body of shimmering patterns that rose from his own insight. From this deeper station of his consciousness, he could spin this suit of lights at will . . .

  “Hey! One of you guys left the tractor running.” A red-faced man in overalls stood above them, frowning. “Now it’s out of gas!”

  One of the students jumped up. “What time is it?” he asked.

  “It’s after six,” the frowning figure answered. “You’ve been here almost an hour. Get that tractor in the barn, damnit!”

  The two students went to the door, then stopped for Atabet. He had always been an enigma, a disconcerting combination of generosity and unspiritual manners. Now he sat before the painting, giving no sign that he heard them. “Should we leave him here?” one whispered. “I don’t think the Swami would like it.”

  “Jacob?” he ventured. “We’re leaving.”

  “Then leave,” the answer came back. “And tell the foreman I’m taking the painting with me.”

  “Come on, leave him!” said the man in overalls. “And get that goddamn tractor in the barn before it’s dark. Tell the Swami he’s gone into trance.”

  The three men left, slamming doors behind them. Alone in the house, Atabet focused on the painting. It might be possible, he thought, to drop through the floor, descending ghostlike into the room below. Holding back an impulse to laugh, he shifted from his cross-legged position. Suddenly and without effort, he was standing.

  Had his earthly body died?

  He looked around the room to see. Now he felt like rising. He might sail up into the Swami’s bedroom or reach through the wall at his side. Yet empty spac
e had a subtle density. He walked back and forth to test it. His body had changed and objects seemed transparent.

  But would this state collapse, even as he glimpsed it? He moved to the window with care, balancing carefully. He touched the wall and felt his hand bounce back. The repulsion felt as if it came from something magnetic. He reached toward the windowpane. Like the wall, it seemed to develop an opposite charge as he tried to penetrate it. He turned and walked toward the door, his sense of lightness growing. Were these changes here to stay?

  It had happened invisibly through this year of recuperation. His cells had altered while his ordinary will relaxed. He went to a lamp and lit it. Like the window, it gently repelled him as he pressed its metal stalk. Though forms retained integrity, their edges were less resistant. It was as if he could play with shapes at will, sharpening or softening their textures. He looked at his wristwatch and laughed. This change of atomic relations had persisted for three minutes. He walked back and forth like a child, swinging his arms in circles. What would running be like? Or working with a brush?

  Turning left, he saw the picture glowing: and there was Hiroshima in the sun. Agonized faces were melting, while a cry of horror filled the room. The whole vista was throbbing to tell him that the new body he wore was an alternative to this devastated world.

  He stood for several minutes, letting the meaning sink in. Could he maintain this state in light of the horror he saw? He shuddered and tested his steps. The freedom and joy remained, even in this shadow, but it was inextricably joined to the potential disaster his painting revealed.

  Walking back to the farm that night, he felt pleasure streaming through him. Looking up, he saw Polaris in the northern sky. And the shadows of the blue wood were rolling, billowing gently into an abyss he would soon explore. His form changed constantly. Even now, hurrying down the path through rocks and branches, he could sense the nets of light around him, weaving incessantly, spinning a new nervous system. This body was inexhaustible, a meeting place of quicksilver and music . . .

  19

  THE PRAESIDIUM OF THE Soviet Union’s Academy of Sciences is housed in a former palace of Catherine the Great facing Leninskii Prospekt and the Moscow River. Inside its entranceway, two stairways curve up the sides of a large foyer. On a Monday morning, six days after his meeting with Kirov, Ivan Strelnikov slowly climbed the left-hand stairway to his second-floor office.

  Strelnikov had spent the weekend reading materials submitted to Kirov’s commission, and the issues they raised preoccupied him. Dismissing the State Committee’s mandate to study these esoteric matters would be more difficult than he had thought. The issues surrounding the capsule crash had begun to bother him deeply.

  The KGB parapsychology studies that Kirov had given him were carefully organized, each of them drawing on the judgment of physicists and social scientists who did not believe in ESP. To his surprise, every study concluded that parapsychology had little military or intelligence value. Strelnikov was glad for that, yet he felt sympathy for the dissenting opinions attached to each report. For all his prejudice against the field, each of these studies contained more compelling evidence than he had ever seen. Over the weekend he had felt his contempt for the subject decreasing.

  In one study that especially impressed him, two prominent engineers had studied telekinesis. With several colleagues, they had observed people move objects by an invisible power, working in laboratories where fraud was impossible. Strelnikov knew and trusted both experimenters, and had decided to question them about their observations. He was also surprised to learn from the file that an American weapon maker named Lester Boone was trying to use psychokinesis against Soviet satellites. Though he concealed the fact from the U.S. government, Boone spent a million dollars a year on experiments that resembled those of Project Elefant. The Committee for Science and Technology had cited the fact in calling for the Academy investigation of the capsule crash.

  But what preoccupied Strelnikov most was not in these KGB studies. He was obsessed instead with Rozhnov’s book. All morning he had thought about two of its passages, occasionally rereading the chapters in which they appeared. The mind was a torch, one read, emitting images like particles of light. Meditation ordered the mind’s emanation into a coherent stream, a pure beam of inner fire free from turbulence. Strelnikov was struck by the image because he had often felt a remarkable clarity while thinking about coherent light, and he had sometimes felt states of unity like the one the passage described.

  Another section of the book contained a second startling image: when the inner fire produced by meditation was turned toward a human body, the seer could perceive its living elements in “their prismatic splendor.” The phrase astonished Strelnikov, for in a reverie years before, an image of coherent light forming rainbows as it passed through human tissue had led him to see the potential of lasers for the spectroscopic analysis of living cells. These striking parallels between his own insights and the passages in Rozhnov’s book had made him curious about mystical illumination for the first time in his life.

  Lost in thought, Strelnikov ignored the greetings of two colleagues. Only his secretary’s announcement broke into his reverie. “Yakov Kozin will be here to see you at nine o’clock,” she said.

  Thanking her, he went into his office and hid Rozhnov’s book. It was good, he thought, that Kozin was coming The surveillance man’s critical judgment would balance his unexpected fascination with Kirov’s project.

  Yakov Kozin had built and adapted the instruments in Strelnikov’s physics lab until 1955, when the Secret Police recruited him for surveillance work. Since then, he had designed cameras and listening devices for almost every branch of Soviet intelligence, and during the last few years, he had supervised the KGB’s best surveillance people.

  In the course of his police career, Kozin had developed a lasting suspicion of Kirov and his friends. An admirer of Stalin, he knew that Sergei Kirov, the dictator’s rival in the 1930s, was Kirov’s second cousin. He also knew about Ali Shirazi and his secret school. Sensing Kirov’s revisionist dreams for the Soviet State, he resented his good standing in the intelligence apparat, his Order of Lenin, and the glamour that surrounded his name. To Kozin, Kirov promised the deviation from authority that his cousin had been famous for. Entering Strelnikov’s office, Kozin did not hide his feelings.

  “I am sorry to bring bad news,” he said, “but there are things you should know about this Kirov commission. People in Directorate T have asked me to warn you.”

  Kozin was dark and wiry, brimming with intensity. As if to contain himself, he gripped the arms of his chair.

  Strelnikov sighed at Kozin’s impatience. “Yakov, we have plenty of time,” he said. “What is bothering Directorate T?”

  “Two problems,” Kozin said with a glance toward the door. “The first is Kirov, and the second is the commission itself. You know that if this project gains prominence, the Academy will be ridiculed everywhere. It will be the joke of scientists around the world.”

  “But it will not be given prominence.” Strelnikov raised his hand as if taking an oath. “Do you think we are fools?”

  “You will not give it prominence, but Kirov might.”

  “He can’t. We will not let him.”

  “But this space-capsule crash is causing rumors. You know how people talk—there are stories now about unidentified flying objects!”

  “Don’t be silly.” Kozin’s alarm amused the Scientific Secretary. “Yakov, I hope your superiors aren’t concerned about that!”

  “I’m afraid they are.” Kozin leaned toward the desk. “They are worried that the subject was discussed by the State Committee for Science and Technology.”

  “But the West has its UFO craze. Eisenhower had to set up a committee like ours to reassure the American public, and chose a man more prominent than Kirov to lead it. I think he was the head of their Bureau of Standards.”

  “Yes,” Kozin whispered. “But they never sounded an alarm like thi
s. No president would make an inquiry of this scope. The newspapers would ridicule it. Can you imagine the headlines? ‘American government to investigate angels!’ It could never happen.”

  “Then what should we do? Merely humor the Committee for Science and Technology?”

  “No,” Kozin said. “But their concerns will disappear in two weeks if no one stirs them up. You must put a timetable on the project. If you don’t, Kirov will find something to embarrass you. An Uzbek woman who saw a spaceship in her melon patch, or a mullah who heard angels singing, or a Moscow student who deciphered the Cabala through quantum theory. You know—the sort of thing he has made a career of.”

  There was a stilted silence, then Strelnikov laughed. “What else might he turn up? There is evidence for clairvoyance, after all. Your KGB research shows that.”

  “How much evidence?” Kozin held a thumb and index finger half an inch apart. “About that much. It is one of our embarrassing projects, this psychoenergetics, or whatever they call it now. Few academicians like it. Most Western intelligence people think it’s absurd. Our Washington Residency says the CIA thinks we do it as disinformation. Sadly, it is part of our superstitious heritage, along with our Cabalists and mullahs and shamans. Of course, Kirov believes it points the way toward the future. Poor Kirov. His report will show that an Uzbek lady was taken aboard a spaceship and sexually examined. She will say her examiners wore silver suits, had pointed ears and penetrating eyes, except for one who looked like her neighbor’s handsome son! It is an embarrassment, I tell you! Kirov is a poor version of Rasputin.”

  Strelnikov’s feelings were mixed. It was reassuring to hear his own doubts stated so forcefully, but there was an extra charge in Kozin’s manner that he did not trust. “You must admit,” he said, “that Kirov is qualified for this investigation. The Committee for State Security has sponsored his work for years. He is your leading expert in these fields.”