by Linda Hawley
“You’re kidding. So you go outside and scoop the poop?”
“Yep,” she proudly exclaimed.
“What do you do when it rains?”
“It’s covered, like a little playhouse.”
I laughed heartily. “Only you, Jackie, only you. Oh man it was gross when I roomed with you in your townhouse. I can’t believe you left that nasty litter box in my bathroom. It was so gross when I went to take a shower with kitty litter stuck to the bottoms of my feet,” I remembered, gagging a bit at the memory.
Jackie laughed hard and long at the memory. “Hey, you weren’t paying rent. It was the price you had to pay, Ann.”
“Maybe I should have paid you.”
We both laughed together at that.
Just then, the three guys appeared at our table.
“There you are,” Jackie said to them.
I hugged Scott and James, while Jackie hugged Bart.
“It’s good to see you guys,” I sincerely exclaimed.
Bart sat down on the other side of Jackie. Scott sat next to me, as James sat on the other side of him.
“We already ordered, so it’ll be here soon,” Jackie informed them.
Four of the five of us had known one another for many years, having met while in our late twenties while swing dancing to live big bands at Glen Echo park outside the Capital Beltway in Maryland. Once a month on Saturdays in the spring, summer, and fall, a nineteen-piece swing orchestra would assemble and blast out 1940s big band swing, while we would dance and sweat, and then sweat some more in the big restored ballroom. We bonded then–and it stuck.
With Jackie an artist, Scott a software developer, and James a reporter for the Washington Post, the four of us were a good mix of liveliness. Bart joined our group later, when he started dating Jackie. He was an attorney, arrogant and a control freak, but Jackie had been in love with him for years; that was enough for me to reluctantly accept his presence in our group.
We each talked about how work was going for us. Bart acted impressed that someone asked me to speak at a conference. He was all about the outward appearance of things. I overlooked that. Things seemed to be going par for the course for everyone, but something didn’t feel quite right about our group’s vibe. I couldn’t put a finger on it, though.
Our food came about then. My stomach grumbled when I smelled the spicy platter. We feasted, with some cross-banter here and there. Mostly, we were all in our own world of food and spice and delight.
Scott started talking about a program he was writing, but no one listened but me, since I was the only one who understood what he was talking about.
“Why is it that no one ever wants to hear about what I’m working on?” he asked, slightly stilted when he realized no one was listening.
Everyone paused from eating.
“Because no one–except Ann–understands your geek-talk. And she’s just listening to be polite, because it’s boring,” Jackie blurted out. He looked affronted, and she attempted to apologize. “I’m sorry Scott; you know I love you,” she offered, making kissing noises toward him.
Scott feigned being offended. He was used to that sort of treatment.
“Well I’ve been working on this big story at the Post. It’s probably one of the biggest I’ve ever dug up,” James interjected.
“Do tell,” I pleaded, interested in the excitement of my old life as a journalist.
“Sorry. This one’s closed for discussion,” James said.
“Then why did you say anything?” Jackie scolded.
“I’m just sayin’–I’ve got a hot iron in the fire.”
We laughed.
“Well, as long as it’s just an iron,” I joked. “Now I know what isn’t quite right,” I suddenly added. “For years and years, every time we’ve sat down at this table we’ve discussed politics and government control…but not one word of it tonight. What’s going on?”
Silence. Stern faces.
“What?” I asked, looking to everyone.
More silence.
“I’ll talk to you later, Ann,” Jackie said quietly to me.
“Do I have a booger on my face or something? ‘Cause you all are acting strange,” I teased them.
Only Scott laughed.
“Well at least you laughed,” I said, looking at him.
“Bart, why don’t you tell us what you’ve been working on?” Jackie prodded, obviously changing the subject.
Bart started talking about his legislative work for a politician on Capitol Hill, sure that it made him important. His monologue lasted fifteen minutes. Unable to restrain my sour expression for any longer, I excused myself for a leisurely trip to the ladies’ room. I took my time washing and drying my hands, but when I returned, Bart was still droning on. Everyone but Jackie was horribly bored.
We finished dinner, vowing to get together again soon, which of course was impossible, since I lived on the other coast.
As we left the Red Sea, Jackie discretely passed me a note. I quickly read it.
Someone’s asking questions about you.
Government. FBI?
They want to know about you going to China.
After reading the note, I made eye contact with Jackie.
But I didn’t go. I wanted to say. What’s going on here? I didn’t do anything.
Jackie shrugged her shoulders as a response to my silent frustration, as we all walked toward the metro station.
So that’s why no one was talking politics tonight, I thought, making the connection.
Everyone hugged their goodbyes at the station entrance; I was taking a cab back down the street to my hotel.
Jackie hugged me and whispered, “Be careful, Ann.”
I hugged her hard in response. She cast me one more worried look and headed off with the others.
As I hailed a cab and was driven back to my hotel, I reread the note. It was time to call Bob Hadley.
Chapter 20
WASHINGTON D.C.
The Year 2015
I called the clandestine switchboard, leaving my name and number for Bob, explaining that it was urgent.
I hope he’s not dead. It had been a while.
The last I heard, Bob had retired, but when you spend as many years as he had with the Agency, he couldn’t have possibly retired. The CIA owned him. Or did he own them? I wondered.
He called me an hour later.
“You interrupted my golf game, Ann,” the gruff voice scolded.
“You’re probably not any good anyway,” I bantered.
“Wanna meet?” he asked.
“Yep.”
“Secure?” he asked, wondering if I was going to talk about classified information.
“Not necessary.”
“You know where Gravelly Point is?” Bob asked.
“Yeah, by Reagan National Airport, right?”
“Yes. I’ll see you there at quarter past the hour.”
“Thanks, Bob.”
“I said my door was always open, Ann.”
“So you did. I guess there’s no expiration date on that. See you in a bit.”
Lulu and I quickly hopped in the rental car to head out to the George Washington Memorial parkway in Virginia. It was normally only a fifteen-minute drive. We pulled into the parking area a few minutes early, right as a Boeing 757 took off one hundred feet over our heads, flying at one hundred and fifty miles per hour.
What a rush.
“You picked a good spot, Bob. No one’s gonna hear us here,” I said out loud to Lulu, who howled at the plane. I laughed.
I first visited Gravelly Point when I was in my twenties. I was with a bunch of friends, and we came to the Point during airplane rush hour. Just four hundred feet from the end of runway 1/19 at Reagan National Airport, passenger jets took off every one to two minutes at rush hour, and sometimes you could hear a vibration crackle off the Potomac River when the water was calm. We would spread blankets on the roofs of our cars, then watch the jets fly overhead. The pow
er of the jet engines would make the cars vibrate. It was a cheap thrill.
In the middle of my flashback, Bob drove up.
Time to get serious.
Bob got out of his car, saw me, and kissed me on the cheek. That surprised me.
I smiled at him. He was larger around the middle, with more wrinkles, but the same kind brown eyes I had known.
“You look older,” I played.
“You look beautiful,” he countered.
“Okay, so maybe you don’t look older,” I teased.
He peered into my eyes. “I’m sorry about Armond, Ann,” he softly offered.
“Yeah. Thank you,” I said quietly.
He took my arm, and, tucking it into his, we slowly started walking out of the parking lot toward the park.
“Tell me Ann–why did you interrupt a retired old man’s morning golf game to watch planes?” he inquired, just before one roared overhead.
I paused to gather my thoughts and let the plane pass.
“I flew in from Bellingham two days ago. Tomorrow I’m supposed to speak at the annual conference for the Society for Technical Communication. Last night I had dinner with some old friends, and as we’re leaving the restaurant, one of them hands me this note,” I said, passing him Jackie’s note.
“Doesn’t it rain a lot up there?” he asked.
“Where?”
“Bellingham.”
“Yes.”
“I thought so.”
“What’s that got to do with some government dweeb poking around my friends, asking about a trip to China?” I asked, irritated.
“Nothing.”
“Bob, what’s going on?”
“Let me guess. You didn’t go to China?”
“No.”
“Did you happen to dream about it?”
“Yep. Twice. Quite remarkable, both times.”
“I think we’d better sit down at that picnic table over there, and you’d better tell me.”
I told him in detail about my Shanghai dreams, then how I’d awakened to the reality of the earthquake.
“Is there anything else about it that you intentionally didn’t tell me, Ann?”
I paused.
“Yes. It’s a doozy, too.”
“You and I have had lots of those in our years together, haven’t we?”
“Yep.”
“Why should now be any different?”
“Good point,” I said. “Okay, prepare yourself.”
“I was born prepared, sweetheart.”
“Whoa there,” I cautioned, teasing.
I reached to my neck to the Herkimer diamond there, pulled the chain off, and handed him the crystal. I then explained about how I carried it through my dream into reality. His face registered the event–very unusual for Bob.
“So it’s crossing over?” he asked.
“What is?” I asked, immediately feeling apprehensive.
“Your dreaming subconscious is crossing into your conscious reality, Ann,” he quietly explained, intently staring at me, as though he’d just delivered some very bad news.
We sat together as airplanes blasted overhead, followed by the wind. I pondered Bob’s statement.
“I saw him, you know,” I said, temporarily changing the subject.
“Saw who?” he said, then paused. “Oh, John O’Brien?” he asked, already knowing.
“Yeah. When I learned that he’d become mentally unbalanced, my heart sunk. I didn’t believe that he was really ill, so I went to see him in that horrible place.”
“St. Elizabeth’s.”
“Yeah. How can they even call it a hospital?”
The question had no answer, and we sat in silence for a moment.
“When I saw John, he told me about partial-humans hatching from eggs and how human females were being implanted with alien DNA. It was all crazy talk. He was so paranoid, that he tried to carry on our entire conversation in the Gaelic, because he said that aliens were listening. I could see for myself, then, that he was ill. I had worked side —by side with John for all those years. It was a different man I saw at St. Elizabeth’s. When I left him that day, I told him–in the Gaelic, “Tá mo chroí istigh ionat! Go dté tú slán.”
“My heart is within you. May you go safely,” Bob interpreted.
“I never saw him again, and he died from the heart attack four months later.”
“I know.”
“In all those years, I never knew that remote viewing could be dangerous. Back then no one ever said anything. It wasn’t until five years after I left your project, when Grace died young of a heart attack, without any history of heart disease in her family, that I started to consider that maybe there was a link.”
Bob nodded. “Besides you, Grace was the most gifted. But there were others, and they all–,” he paused. “They all died unexpectedly young from cancers or heart disease.”
I looked at Bob. “That’s when I started to research the affects of sensory overload.”
“Too much sensory information physically stresses the body; it’s similar to constant exposure to loud noise or bright lights,” Bob added.
Of course he already knew about it.
After pausing while another plane soared by, I added, “I’ve read some scientific reports on superstring theory, where all particles and all natural forces are explained as vibrations of tiny strings. Do you know about that too?”
“Yes. The work we were doing actually taps into a universal awareness of energy that vibrates everywhere without stopping. Perhaps when our brains tapped into that vibration, we were opening a door that is closed for a reason,” he said reluctantly.
“I can see you too have been doing your research.”
“Well, I feel responsible for some of this, Ann.”
I looked at him; he looked sad.
“For John and Grace, and all the others who died, none had any psychic experiences from childhood that they ever told me about. I, on the other hand, have been experiencing astral projection since I was a little girl, before I ever knew what it was. When you combine that with the vivid dreams I’ve been having since I was very young, I may have learned how to manage that unconscious to conscious door in my mind. Did I ever tell you that when I was trained, none of it ever seemed new to me? It was a natural extension of everything I had already been doing since I was young.”
“No, you never did.”
I continued, careful not to voice any classified information. “But Grace and John were artificially taught. Perhaps opening that door was just too much for them to manage, Bob. What we did there was altering the process of reality in our brains. I think our work became destructive for them when their bodies created a defense. I think that the challenge of old processes of the brain versus the new ones created a war within them. It became harmful inside, even though nothing harmful was actually occurring. Looking back now, I can see that John must have had some feeling that I would be in danger, when he so vehemently argued against me going live after only a year in training. At the time, I thought he was being controlling and overprotective. But now I wonder if it was something else. Maybe he had started to feel mentally unstable then. Do you remember how he started speaking more and more of the Gaelic as time wore on?”
“I remember.”
“I just didn’t know then. I was so young.”
“You were never young, Ann. You were always an old soul.”
“Did you know then that we were killing ourselves with that training?”
“Of course not,” he said, shaking his head sadly, then pausing. “But there was something. I felt that we had to be very careful. I had a feeling that we needed to find specially gifted individuals–like you. But at some point, near my retirement, I began to be overruled by others…who thought that anyone could be trained. These other directors thought that the less emotion the person had, the more successful they would be. But after years of training, it was a disaster. Then–the deaths began,” Bob confided.
“Didn’t you ever wonder if I would be one of those?”
“No. Not for a nanosecond, Ann. I knew better. It was a feeling in my gut. I knew that you could manage the doorway.”
“And now…what do you think now? After what I told you today about Shanghai and the crystal?” I asked pointedly.
“I told you.”
“You told me what?” I asked, getting frustrated by his vagueness.
“Its crossing over. Your dreaming subconscious is crossing over into your conscious reality. The door is open, Ann, swinging back and forth, opening equally in both directions,” he explained, watching me as I tried to comprehend what he was saying.
There was a foreboding look of sadness in his eyes. I could not look away.
The doorway moves in both directions.
Bob agreed to poke around to find out what the FBI wanted of me and to get back to me.
He led me to my car. When we reached it, he turned to me.
“There is something special in the way your mind works, Ann. I am an old man–my days here are numbered–but you…there is much you can accomplish,” he said with intensity.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re not dying or anything?”
“Nope.”
“Well okay then,” I said, then reached to hug him.
He hugged me hard.
I lectured at the conference the next day and schmoozed with the board members and attendees at a dinner that night, to the benefit of AlterHydro. The entire evening, though, all I could think about was remote viewing and the way it had ended my CIA friends’ lives. My own involvement in it had altered the course of my life. If the doorway in my mind really swung both ways, that meant that my dreams could now come through the door and become reality. No longer would my dreams simply be unconscious manifestations of my conscious reality–no matter how vivid they were.
I ached for the simplicity of life. I still ached for those perfect days sailing in the San Juans with Armond and Elinor.
Chapter 21
THE SAN JUAN ARCHIPELAGO
The Year 2010
We had bought her for six thousand dollars and had just finished the refit. We named her the Woohoo, after our practice of screaming the word when the sailboat would suddenly heel in unexpected wind. She was a twenty-six foot Ranger sloop built in 1972–very well cared for, but in need of updating for the current century. Armond was passionate about buying a Gary Mull designed sailboat after meeting Gary several years before. Armond called him one of the best storytellers he had ever known.