Eye to Eye Read online

  He took a long, exaggerated look about the room, then said, "Yes, I suppose I see what you mean."

  "It's a mandala," I said accusingly.

  "The universe is a mandala," he replied musingly. "Something in the subconscious, perhaps, that—Jung thought so. Tried some mandala therapy on some of his patients, I do believe. Churchmen must have divined something there, too, though probably in the wrong spirit." He laughed. "Did you catch me there?"

  I had to grin. "Caught you, yeah. You're getting downright sophisticated, Esau."

  He was very pleased with that comment. "It's true, just the same. The stained glass of cathedrals are rampant with mandala geometry."

  I said, "So are the rituals of Hindus and Buddhists. But—"

  "It's universal," he said, closing the discussion and moving away to help position another piece of equipment.

  Universal, yeah, I told myself, but how did it get into the subconscious in the first place? Who told all those geeks and gooks and priests and ordinary people who see them in their dreams that this particular geometry holds some sort of universal significance?

  Anyone in recorded times who'd ever tried a bit of black magic had tried it in a circle just such as this one. Witch priests and priestesses to this very day do their numbers in such circles, perform ritualistic sexual acts in there, invoke charms and spirits and magical feats in there. Eastern mystics meditate and levitate and oscillate in there, African witch doctors draw them in the dust with a stick and commune with the spirits in there.

  Now these guys, these space-age creation physicists, expected me to invoke the jinn in there.

  So, okay. I would try to do that.

  "It begins," Esau announced calmly, and gave a nod to the guy at the control panel.

  The computer-driven concave mirrors at the perimeter began their weird, undulating rhythm—almost a "scooping" motion into the atmosphere of the big room. Several other instruments, the function of which I had absolutely no notion, began a low, droning hum.

  I was seated in the central chair, with the metallic sheeting beneath me, both in the chair and at my feet. Laura and Jennifer sat to my right and left, respectively, their chairs positioned slightly to the rear and angled toward mine. Esau sat facing me from a low couch, about six feet away, Holden beside him. Except for the guy at the panel, the others were scattered about in what appeared to be a random pattern but which actually formed the geometric configuration noted above, all facing me and more scintillating than ever.

  The guy at the panel was softly calling out numerical values at roughly ten-second intervals. After about a minute of that, Esau asked me, "Are you getting anything, Ashton?"

  I was "getting" something, yeah. A slow-motion deja vu tingle, beginning low in the spine and spreading upward, the kind that usually gives you a sudden shiver but this one was even shivering in slow motion.

  I reported to Esau, "Something, yeah. Moving up the spine. A sort of shiver."

  He looked elated but the voice was calm and controlled as he instructed me, "It's a controlled interaction. I knew it. Try to cooperate. Don't fight it."

  And Laura's voice, at my right ear 'Try to relax and invite it in, Ashton. If you get disturbing static, try to hold through it, see if it will subside."

  I was beginning to get "static," yeah, plenty of it—except that it really did not sound like static after the first burst, more like a cacophony of discordant voices all sounding at once, like in a crowded bar during happy hour with all that shrieking and babbling...

  The guy at the panel was still announcing numbers but his voice began to sound like an anesthetist's as he's counting you down to dreamland, growing fainter and more distorted moment by moment.

  I heard Esau gasp and call my name, repeated several times, but I just did not feel like responding, and I heard him say, to someone, "He's all right, he's through it," but I didn't know what the hell I was "through" and I did not care.

  It was the quickest drunk I'd ever known—and I've tried a few of those in my time. I was soaring, feeling no pain whatever—feeling, actually, sublime or exalted or whatever it is when you're just ecstatic all over—post-orgasmic ecstasy, maybe, relieved and happy and fearless and warm and good.

  And I was light, I had no weight, I was in zero-gravity and free-floating. But I could examine that intellectually, as though it were happening to someone else, and I could marvel at it and wonder what was next.

  And the wondering seemed to produce a whole new train of phenomena. I rushed through some sort of brightly colored vortex in which was spinning with me all the things I'd ever done and dreamed of doing, all the things I'd ever seen or wanted to see—and shit I heard music, the most beautiful damned music, and I was directing the Boston Pops through Scheherazade—yet with all of this, at the same time marveling at it and trying to intellectually process it, I was aware also that I was talking a streak, in mathematical symbols and equations.

  I would hear Esau's voice: "Wait, give that again, was that E to the minus tenth?"

  I would be processing that while not really caring if I answered him or not, all the while knowing also that I did not know how to respond even while hearing my voice respond, "E to the minus tenth squared," or some such; I don't know now what the hell I was saying.

  At the same time, and in the same mental space, I was getting screwed out of my brains by forty beautiful women—no, really, precisely forty and all at the same time—while simultaneously pursuing a deeply meaningful dialogue with none other than Socrates, in his tongue, no less.

  I could even marvel at the psychedelic patterns and wonder how many of my neurons were firing all at once at a given time, and I remember trying to calculate how many could fire at once without destroying the brain.

  I had never experimented with mind-altering drugs but I have read accounts by others who have, and I would have to say that my experience with the jinn was similar. With an important difference, however. I have never known of anyone who came back from a chemical "trip" with any truly new or revolutionary idea or concept, or with any hard knowledge they had not gone in with. Apparently I had, if the reaction of these theoretical physicists is a measure.

  I was coming down, or coming out or back or whatever, and knew it—and suddenly "knew" that I knew a lot of stuff I had not known before. The talking was done and I was like stretching out across an open doorway, with one foot in one room and the other foot in another room and just sort of stuck there between the rooms. I could hear the excited voices around me and I could see—as though across a great distance—Esau leaning toward me from his couch with both hands extended, trying to quieten the reaction in there, and I could hear him more clearly than I had ever heard a human voice before as he tried to restore order.

  "Please, please! I believe there's more! Do you have more for us, Ashton?"

  I did, indeed. I had a PS. And though I did not now what it meant, I knew who it was for.

  "For Holden," I said, hearing my own voice from a great distance and peering across a great yawning void into those dancing eyes next to Esau's. "Zero, plus or minus zero, equals zero. One plus one equals infinity."

  Then I moved on through that doorway and immediately felt like death warmed over. I had an incredible headache all over my body, if you can imagine that, and I was certain that if I dared breathe I was going to begin throwing up and never, ever stop.

  But I heard the old man's, "Bully, bully!" just as I crossed another threshold and fell into merciful unconsciousness.

  I took something else across that threshold, also, and it is well that I did not dream. Because I took with me a new knowingness, a new understanding and appreciation of the dizzying events of the past few days.

  I truly "knew" Esau and Jennifer and Laura and especially Holden—and I understood the secret that bound them together with the other scientists in that room.

  I understood their studies, their anxieties, their mission.

  And I knew a deep, almost essential sadness as
I moved across that welcome threshold from pain to oblivion... because I "knew," also, where these "studies" would take them.

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Whatever

  I awoke on the same hospital bed in which I'd awakened earlier that day—though fully clothed this time, except for shoes, and covered with a light blanket. Holden sat at the foot of the bed, grinning and wiggling eyebrows at me. Laura stood beside me. Apparently she had just drawn a blood sample. A sleeve of my shirt was folded up to the elbow and a small Band-Aid was stuck to the arm. I felt okay but not superb, exactly—a bit fluttery, maybe, but no real discomfort.

  Laura showed me a sober smile and inquired, "How do you feel, Ashton?"

  I told her how I felt but the voice did not sound much like mine. Throat was raspy, dry. I sat up and drank some water. It helped. I asked, "How'd the experiment go?"

  "The experiment," Laura replied, "was smashing. Positively smashing." She laid me down again. "Stay there until I get back."

  She departed. Holden stayed, regarding me with absolute delight. "Dear, dear Ashton," he murmured.

  I said, "Went okay, huh?"

  He semaphored with the eyebrows as he replied, "Okay enough, dear Ashton, that our learned colleagues were sent scurrying back to their math models bursting with exciting new concepts. The general consensus, it would seem, is that we are at the edge of a breakthrough which is—well, I would say, at the very least, as profound as the movement from classical to quantum physics."

  "Something new under the sun, eh?" I commented tiredly.

  "Ho, yes, very good, I would say so. Yes."

  "How long have I been out?"

  "No more than—well, I would say under a half hour. Had us worried for a moment, there, my boy. Looked dead." He shuddered. "Lord, maybe you were. Do you remember any of it?"

  "Some, yeah, but not..."

  "Do you recall, dear Ashton, leaning forward and fixing me with a blazing gaze and speaking direcdy at me?"

  The blazing gaze, no, but I remembered the message for Holden, though not in total coherence. I said, "The sum of..."

  "No no, not—here, it's burned into my ears. Let me— zero, plus or minus zero, equals zero. One plus one equals infinity. Ho! Bully!"

  I felt weak, a bit disoriented. "What does it mean, Holden?"

  "Why Ashton! It's the qualifier!"

  "Fancy that," I said, and went back to sleep.

  I dreamed, this time, and Holden was clad in a wizard's robes and a conical hat. He was performing magical rites at a blackboard except that the mystical symbols were algebraic and his helpers were positioning and repositioning blocks of equations, stacking them all around the blackboard. A flying saucer with brilliantly flashing lights swooped down to hover above the blackboard, then the saucer dissolved and became a transparent holographic image in the colors of the rainbow then turned into a rainbow and Jennifer was walking down it, naked and glistening, and she was carrying my head under one arm and shouting instructions to the wizard's helpers. Then, shit, she turned into Dorothy and my head was Toto, and I knew in a brilliant rush of insight that Holden was really the Wizard of Oz and all of us were trying like crazy to send Dorothy home. I was filled with anxiety because the tornado was approaching and Aunty Em was worried about Dorothy; we had to get her back before Em discovered she was missing. Then Esau showed up, drifting across the whole scene on a magic carpet made of goatskins and I knew in another insighted flash that he really was Jacob but where the hell was father Isaac? Esau/Jacob did a swinging pivot with his goatskin carpet and cocked it at the blackboard. The wizard looked up at him and bellowed "Bully, bully" but I was looking straight up into the carpet's rocketry and I knew it was not so bully. They fired, but the firing was like neuronal bursts and the rockets themselves were flashing across synaptic gaps and diffusing rapidly. They hit the blackboard as words which replaced the wizard's equations and, as the smoke cleared, I could read the words blazing at me from the blackboard.

  unto every one that hath

  shall be given,

  and he shall have abundance;

  but from him that hath not

  shall be taken away

  even that which he hath

  I said, "What the hell does it mean, Holden?"

  "It's the qualifier," said the wizard.

  I don't know if we got Dorothy back in time or not because I woke up, then, on my side and peering crosswise into Jennifer's eyes at a distance of about two inches. She was kneeling beside the bed and resting her chin on my pillow, eyeing me with loving concern. I jerked away from that close engagement in a reflex motion. That startled her and she reacted backward, also, then recovered with a smile and said, "It's just me. Are you nice, very nice?"

  I believed I was. At any rate, I felt much better than before. I told her, "My kingdom for a cigarette."

  She wrinkled her nose and said, "Those things will kill us, Ashton."

  "Fat chance," I replied. "They'll have to stand in line."

  She laughed the good laugh and found my cigarettes on the table, lit two, handed me one, deposited an ashtray between us on the bed. "This brings warm memories," she said quietly. "Seems so long ago. So much has happened."

  I sucked greedily on the cigarette before I responded to that, released the smoke as I said, "The universe is a mandala, or so Esau told me."

  “Meaning ..?”

  "What goes around, comes around, I guess. But it has been nice, very nice, most of it. It's about over, though, isn't it."

  She dropped her eyes, sighed as she replied, "I guess it is. Curious thing about..."

  "What?" I prompted her, after a moment of silence.

  "The exclusivity of experience, I guess."

  "How is it exclusive?"

  She delicately shrugged. "It's a singularity, isn't it. We simply cannot be all things at all times."

  "Like..."

  She smiled sadly. "Like doctor, nurse, Indian chief."

  "Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief, eh?"

  "Right. We can't be all those at once, can we."

  "Not sure I'd want to be," I decided.

  "In a different time and circumstance, Ashton..."

  "Yes?"

  "I could be madly in love with you, you know."

  "Thanks," I said soberly. "But then, you're wearing that, ring, and..."

  "That's what I meant."

  "Yeah."

  "You have been, uh, rather undecided about me, haven't you."

  "Right up until the séance," I replied, "yes, I have."

  "The what?"

  "Séance. That's what it was, you know. By any other name..."

  She smiled and said, "A rose is still a rose. Yes. Maybe you're right."

  I said, "Sure I'm right. The wizard's circle, the whole bit. How did those old guys know that, Jen? Is there anything essentially incomparable between the magician's symbols and the mathematician's symbols? Isn't it all gibberish to the untrained mind?"

  She said, "Yes, you're right."

  "It is said that even Solomon had his symbols and gibberish through which he invoked magical powers."

  "I hadn't heard that."

  "Sure. But what if it wasn't gibberish, and what if the symbols carried mathematical significance?"

  "Yes, you're right." She paused. "Ashton..."

  "Still here, kid."

  "I don't...quite know...how to tell you this. You see, I..."

  "Don't have to tell me," I said. "Already know. And it's nice, very nice."

  "I've had to lie a lot. Even passively."

  I said, "It's okay."

  "You already know about... Isaac? The rollback?"

  She saw the answer in my eyes.

  "Who told you? When?"

  "No one told me," I assured her. "I got it in there."

  "In where?"

  "The magic circle."

  “You mean... ?”

  "Yeah. How long was I in there?"

  “The productive period was eight minutes and seventeen seconds. We
have it on tape, all of it, no garbles. But how did you—?”

  "All math?"

  "Yes. An entirely new model. Almost a new language. We've had to set up analogs. Ashton, you could not have gotten that from our equations, not even if you understood them. And you told me this morning that they were beyond you. Yet your new model not only provides those solutions but posits a whole train of others. Do you understand what you've done?"

  I said, "I don't even know what I've done. Anyway, I didn't do it, it did me. And it did me, also, an understanding of what this is all about. Not in math, though, in essential knowingness. Do you understand that?"

  "Not exactly."

  I tried to explain. "It's like... I know what you know, the same as if I am working from your memory pool. In that same way, I know what Esau knows and what Holden knows and—but maybe with no more understanding, but I know what you think you know."

  She replied, struggling with that, "Then it is conceivable that your new model is merely an induction from our own...feeble...a combining of all the minds into a single organism of reason—my God, the empirical data pool would be..."

  "Mind-blowing, yeah," I said, "and I think it damned near blew mine apart."

  "And that could be the explanation for—the jinn could simply be—I mean, in the fine, neuronal interaction..."

  I said, "An inductor, yeah." But it was purely a shot in the dark, almost an automatic response.

  She leapt to her feet, said, "My Gosh! I have to get this to..."

  I told her, "Include Holden."

  "Yes, I—he thinks—"

  "Give him the benefit of any doubt," I suggested. "It couldn't matter that much now, to him, anyway. He's going to get there one way or another, and soon. Give him a shot at this way."

  Her eyes were sparkling—no, scintillating—with excitement. She ran to the door, turned back to blow me a kiss and say, "Ashton...thank you."

  "For what?"

  "For not hating me."

  "How could I hate a nice kid like you?"

  How could I, indeed? I knew her like I knew myself. No, better than that. I knew her like I wished I knew myself.