Both the dead Jane Doe and the ringer at Sportsman's had short blond hair. The original Jane's hair was extremely short, since it had only six weeks' growth after being shaved bald for brain surgery. Minnehaha came with jet-black hair in long braids. But what the hell, you can buy a head of hair like that anywhere.
The shakier part of the logic came via little Vicky Victoria, but a focus was developing there also. One of these two women—and I was already thinking of them as sisters—simply had to be Vicky's natural mother. Was it sheer coincidence that Vicky's adoptive father was the policeman assigned to the Jane Doe case? Or was a deeper story there, somewhere? Why had Jim been killed? Alison characterized him as a womanizer. Was he?—and was he, then, coincidence of all coincidences, actually Vicky's natural father?
So who was Hiawatha? What was his stake in any of this? And who was the saintly lady with the serene smile who invaded my head in pure mind-to-mind contact but who, in Oom's words, "says nothing"?
See, I had something going. Just did not know exactly what, needed time to develop it fully, but did not know just where to touch it without breaking the whole thing into indecipherable pieces. I did not want to blunder in hastily, send everything scurrying back into formless chaos. Wanted to keep the focus developing in a controlled manner so I could grab it all in a single piece and hand it to Captain Valdiva in exchange for my own head.
Meanwhile the town was developing a noticeable police presence. Two cars were prowling constantly, slowly, evidently determined to find that head and turn it over to Valdiva themselves. My only saving grace, as I saw it, were the hordes of tourists so common to the area at this time of year.
So Alison and I tried out best to blend with the others. We window-shopped, had coffee and pie at a sidewalk café, visited a gallery and then a museum where I learned something about the so-called Oak Grove People who predated the Chumash in the area by some seven or eight thousand years.
In trying to deal with time out of hand I usually try to relate prehistoric new-world peoples with the generally better-known contemporaries elsewhere. So these Oak Grove People appear to have had a thriving culture coexistent with the early pyramid builders of Egypt. It helps to get a perspective on time. This nation, the U.S., counts its history in centennials; we just had our second. We think of our pilgrims and pioneers as going way, way back in time, but we are still dealing with time in mere hundreds of years. Even Columbus and the "discovery" of this continent was like yesterday compared with these other blocks of time. The days of Jesus are only a couple thousand years back. The Oak Grove People were a thousand years vanished by that time. And in this little museum in Ojai there are artifacts revealing their presence on the land for many thousands of years before the abrupt disappearance. We're talking thousands of years, back to a time before Troy and Sparta, before Minos and Crete, many thousands of years before Moses and Abraham, before Noah, before anything that any of us really know anything about.
Gives you a bit of a rush to stand before a little glass case and gaze at a stone ax that was held by a living man—one basically just like any of us today—ten thousand years before Valley Forge.
And they called this "the New World."
Well...I was just trying to kill time and avoid the cops, but I found myself gaining a somewhat different perspective on my "fortune-tellers." A man at the museum told me that the mountains of the area were recently formed, as geological time goes. Called them "block mountains"—pointed out that they were aligned east-west, whereas most ranges run generally north-south—said these were formed during the present geological age and were very "young" mountains.
Same guy told me there was quite a mystery surrounding the Oak Grove People. Nobody really knows who they were or where they came from. But recent excavations in the Channel Islands, which lie about twenty-five miles offshore from Ventura at their closest point, reveal ancient traces of the same people. Problem there is the fact that those islands are rooted in the continental shelf; they are mountain peaks that once were contiguous with the continental land mass, which suggests that the Oak Grove People's beautiful Ojai Valley probably stretched all the way from Topa Topa to the outermost islands—an area now covered by the Pacific in depths down to six-thousand feet. The only reason that is a problem is that evolutionary development of unique flora and fauna on the islands suggest a separation from the land mass at a time when living men and women were on the scene. Block mountains are a result of crustal upthrusts, which in turn are associated with fault lines such as the great San Andreas that devastated San Francisco early in the century and threatens to send half the state toppling into the Pacific at just any time it may decide to do so. The geology of the Channel Islands is identical to that of the local onshore mountains.
So maybe I was too quick to criticize Oom's assertion that her soul-walkers had witnessed the rise of the "sacred" mountains.
That would give you a buzz, wouldn't it?—even us twentieth-century sophisticates—to stand witness to the sudden birth of a mountain range? Think you'd ever forget it? I know I wouldn't. And sure, if I'd been a natural man of the land thousands of years ago and saw something like that...why, I guess I'd attach religious significance to it.
I was gaining a new perspective, yes, and growing more and more impatient for the evening event. Time is always relative, I know, and you would think that a few hours would seem a finger snap in contrast to Oak Grove time, but I thought the day would never pass.
Along about five o'clock we bought another change of clothes—evening casual—and found a quiet place for a leisurely dinner. By coincidence, this was just up the street from Oomville, and I met a man in there who knew the people over there. Turns out that Hiawatha's name is really Gordon Campbell, that the place had been his family home and he had grown up there, inherited it when his father died some fifteen years back.
Interesting part is that Campbell had lived there alone until a little over ten years ago when he "brought the women in." My informant knew very little about "the women" except that they seemed entirely reclusive and had "started some kind of cult" immediately upon joining Campbell.
"Strange goings-on over there sometimes," the man told me, shaking his head and terminating the conversation. I considered myself fortunate to get that much out of him. Ojai is an area of diverse cultures, and they all seem to try to accommodate one another in a truly democratic way.
If this guy says that "something strange" was happening in Ojai, then you just have to know that he was referring to something very strange indeed.
None of that helped the early evening to pass any quicker.
We camped in that restaurant until it was simply too embarrassing to remain longer, then we took to the streets again with still an hour and a half to go.
And I had to wonder—without television or radio or movies or books or even newspapers—how the people of the Oak Grove era coped with time on their hands.
I decided that maybe it was no problem at all for them. Time is a left-brain problem. Maybe they were a right-brain people.
Chapter Twenty-Three: Ceremonial
Picture a secluded meadow with sweet-smelling, luxurious grass, about two acres of it, surrounded by ancient oaks and lit by burning torches. A raised grassy mound is at the very center. It is about two feet higher than the surrounding meadow, a perfect circle about twenty feet across. The mound is strewn with cut flowers. One particular area with a diameter of maybe three feet is blood red with a thick layer of rose petals.
Oom-ray-key-too stands in the rose-petal circle. She is facing the sacred mountain. She wears a necklace of rose petals that almost, but not quite, reaches to her breasts. The lustrous black hair is unbraided and falls to the small of her back. It is adorned with oak leaves. Delicate bracelets of woven flowers encircle both wrists and both ankles. She is otherwise unadorned, the strikingly beautiful body glistening in the torchlight and as still as a statue.
Twelve couples stand inside a circle of fire at the edge of th
e mound—arranged boy-girl, boy-girl, all the way around, a blazing torch behind each—facing Oom in the center, and these people are all totally naked. Yours truly is one of these; Alison is another. We, of course, are beautiful in our nakedness. Matter of fact, everyone looks beautiful. Maybe it is the torchlight. Or maybe it is the herbal tea we were required to drink before the ceremony began.
At any rate, it is a beautiful spectacle. I find myself barely breathing. Oom's eyes are closed. Her hands are outstretched in supplication to the sacred mountain. I wonder how she can stand so still for so long. I am experiencing a touch of vertigo myself. I smile at Alison and she smiles back. I wonder where Hiawatha is. A great-looking woman with thunder thighs at the other side of the circle is looking me over. I am wondering why she is looking at me like that when the thought is interrupted by the distant howling of a coyote.
I don't know, maybe that was Hiawatha providing sound effects because the sliver of new moon has just edged into view, and I know that Oom cannot know that because her eyes are closed until the coyote howls, then they flip open and she has an immediate dead bead on the moon without even having to redirect the focus. Her upraised arms undulate gracefully, hands beckoning the moon like in a Hawaiian hula, and she emits a low, keening cry that is a pretty fair imitation of the coyote we just heard.
I sneak a peek at Alison at about this point, and what I see disturbs me. Her lips are parted and her eyes look funny; her pelvis is thrust slightly forward; she is looking at the moon, too, and summoning it the same as Oom. I am thinking wait a minute, this was not in the orientation, but then my attention is diverted by some sort of phenomenon with the torches: every second one is fluttering, dying out; I notice, too, that it is the torch behind each man that is dying away; the women's torches not only remain lit but each one seems to be brightening as well.
I become aware now that Oom also has thrust her pelvis sharply forward. She undulates and gyrates; she is screwing the moon standing up and both feet flat on the rose petals; it is a beautiful, graceful movement, something like a hula in slow-mo.
Alison is doing this.
All the women are doing this.
I am getting a fantastic erection. I guess all the guys are, but I am not curious enough to check that out; the ones directly across from me are definitely ready for anything. I somehow get the feeling it's going to be a dry run, though; the women are getting off on the man in the moon. The idle thought crosses my mind that it would be a terrible time to get raided; the Ventura County cops would get more than my head.
I really do not have time to appreciate the erotic charm of the moment because the torches are doing things again. They are sputtering and sending off sparks like Fourth of July sparklers. These are raining onto the women. The guy across from me has a scared face; maybe I do, too, because I am worried for Alison: she is bathed in these sparks to the extent that I can barely see her, yet she is an arm's length away. It does not seem to be bothering the women, though. They are like in trance—an ecstatic trance.
I am looking at Oom and wondering why she is not getting the sparkler treatment, but of course she does not have a torch. But while I am staring at her something seems to shoot up from the ground—it's like a flame encased in steam, it shoots up right at her feet and engulfs her. I think, oh, shit, she's bought it! But then the steam or fog or whatever dissipates, the flame is gone, Oom is gone, and in her place is the saintly lady—except that now this lady ain't no saint, this lady is sex unleashed, she is four on the floor and all the stops removed, and I am stunned to find myself moving toward her, yet I am not really moving at all, I am standing still, exactly where I was, but I see myself moving toward her, I see myself from the rear, I am still here but also I am there, and she is leaping upon me, her legs girding my waist, arms about my neck. I am standing back here watching all this, but I am also feeling all this, and it is freaking me out, but I don't give a shit, I just stand and serve.
A tiny corner of sanity is left to observer-me; I peer through it to see if Alison sees, but she is still hung up on the moon.
I sink to my knees while over there that other me sinks to his knees also and bears the ex-saintly lady to the rose- petal ground on her back. Then all the children begin to frolic—or their self-doubles do—doubles in three-dimensional reality rushing together inside the circle while their other selves maintain the integrity of the circle; all but Alison. I shiver as her eyes turn to mine. The sparkle shower has ended, and she seems okay except for little firebrandlike marks circling her breasts and tummy. I shiver again and watch her double run to join the other-me and Jane Doe Senior in the center ring, and I feel her invade our embrace.
I am hoping it is the damned tea.
I just know damned well that it is not a wet dream. I do not have that good an imagination, not even asleep.
If it is not the tea, and not a dream, then I decide that we must have found that favor of which Oom spoke earlier. If so, I guess I know how the Oak Grove People spent their free time. They were not soul-walkers. They were soul- fuckers.
Chapter Twenty-Four: Dimensioned
Did any of that really happen? There was a happening, all right, I was sure of that—but did it happen the way I experienced it? Hell, I didn't know.
Just remember I warned you a while back that we are subjects of the Kingdom of Nonsense. So don't get bent out of shape with me for leading you a bit deeper into it. I'm giving it to you just as I experienced it, as straight as I know how to give it. And if you think about it for a moment, you will realize that the experience at Ojai is of roughly the same order as the experience at Malibu. Just a few more actors, that's all, and gussied up a bit.
The problem for me, at the time, lay not in accepting the reality of the experience but in attempting to understand it, reality or not—and to understand it in terms that would help unravel the perplexing mysteries of this case. Among the first things to fall under my intellectual purview had to do with the mild disorientation effects I'd experienced earlier, they were present, also, during and immediately following the experience in the sacred grove. Something about that was definitely strange, as though my edge on awareness was slightly tipped or skewed. I have never tried mind-altering drugs so cannot directly compare the effects, but I would guess that they are somewhat similar. Something was definitely altered with regard to perceptual awareness. Possibly the "tea" was a factor in this—but please note that I had experienced virtually the same effects before ever being introduced to the tea. Maybe the tea helped set it up, amplified it somehow.
Do you remember the earlier discussion on quantum physics? I quoted Planck, one of our most revered physicists and a father of modern field theory, regarding the "simultaneous existence" of the same particle everywhere within the influence of a guiding field system. Planck was speaking of atomic structures—but then, that is all the hell we are—and he is saying that mass, charge, and the entire field of force accompanying the particle exists simultaneously throughout the space occupied by a particular system. A "field of force," or force field, is that which moves and does; it is the active agent; and Planck is then saying that the active agent is everywhere present in the given system of action.
This could be a little hard to grasp with our linear, cause-effect thinking apparatus—but if you picture a single orange in a large basket, then try to imagine the orange existing everywhere within the interior of that basket at the same time, you get an idea of what Dr. Planck is trying to tell us about the nature of nature. He is saying that the solid, physical reality perceived by our senses in the space-time world is an illusion produced by our senses. Dr. Rhine—a parapsychologist, not a physicist—told us precisely the same thing. The physical reality does not exist, except as a convenience to our sense perceptions as we attempt to orient our own peculiar form of consciousness—and therefore existence, itself—to that dimension of the universe in which we express that existence.
What does all of that mean to me as I grapple with my experience i
n the sacred grove, an experience in which I was both here and there at the one time, engaged in one activity there while simultaneously engaged in quite a different activity here, though all the while conscious of and fully experiencing both activities at once?
It means, I choose to think, that maybe briefly I expanded beyond the confines of my ordinary sense perceptions; I was given a larger view.
Try to follow this imaginary dialogue with someone like Dr. Planck:
"Is the orange in the basket?"
"Yes."
"Is it resting at the bottom of the basket?"
"Yes and no."
"Then is it hovering at the top of the basket?"
"It is, yes, if that is where you happen to be looking for it."
"But it is actually resting on the bottom?"
"If that is where you are looking, yes."
"Wait a minute! I did not put it there. You put it there. So where did you put it?"
"I merely placed it in the basket."
"Where in the basket?"
"Everywhere in the basket, dummy. Wherever you want it to be, simply look for it there, and there it will be."
Does this sound a bit like one of the old Abbott and Costello routines? Never mind what it might sound like—this is the reality revealed to us by quantum physics. Einstein saw the entire, magnificent universe as a field of activity in which processes produce "continuous functions in space— and he did not mean "outer space" per se, but space itself as a continuum within space-time. All the atoms of the universe, including yours and mine, are participants in these "processes"; we are embedded in the process, you and I, and it is embedded in us. In other words, it is all a single fabric, but it is a fabric woven not of cloth but of fields of energy. Einstein died still trying to hypothesize mathematically the direct inter- relationships of all these fields, big and little, which produce you and me and the universe. Others are carrying on the work, called unified field theory. Perhaps one day soon another Einstein will come up with something as simple yet as powerful as E=mc2, but having to do with the consciousness equation.
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