As we walked, I thought about the man who had appeared and vanished. A trick, Claire had said, but I didn’t buy it. There was no technology I knew of that could produce an illusion like that–a hologram or some damn thing, projected out of nowhere into thin air.
But if it wasn’t a high-tech gimmick, then what the hell was it? I could think of only two possibilities–a hallucination brought on by stress, or something genuinely supernatural.
I’d never hallucinated before. But the other option was unacceptable. So maybe I was going crazy. More to the point, maybe the woman at my side was making me crazy.
We hiked fast over sloping hills, past clusters of spiky vegetation. The big moon swam through tissuey wisps of cirrus. Hicksburg beckoned in the distance, a scatter of sleepy lights, unwinking in the deathly still, dust-dry desert air.
I have a touch of the poet in me. Sue me.
Whenever I looked back, I saw no bobbing flashlights, no sign of pursuit. They were coming, though. I was sure of that. Goldman and Sachs and their puppet master, Mr. Philip Strain, were on the trail. And Claire, in her white blouse and slacks, would stand out in the moonlight like a target on the range.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked as we topped another rise. It was the first time she’d spoken in twenty minutes.
“Your clothes. You’d have been better off wearing something dark.”
“This was all I had. My regular clothes were taken from me, along with my driver’s license and all my money.”
“You wouldn’t get far without money or ID. What were your plans?”
“I wasn’t sure.”
“To go to the police?”
“I couldn’t trust the police.”
“Then … what?”
“I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. I suppose I was depending on the kindness of strangers.”
“Not generally a recommended policy.”
She turned to me. “It’s worked out all right so far.”
This time I didn’t sabotage the moment with a wiseass remark.
“The truth is,” she went on, “as much as I complain about you, you’ve been quite decent, really. That is, if I overlook your initial plan to turn me in for a reward.”
“Hey, times are tough all over. Especially in Santa Cruz County. And, uh–I didn’t know you then.”
“And now that you do …?”
“Like I said before, you don’t sound crazy.”
She actually smiled. A little. “You know, if a total stranger had come to me with a story like this, I wouldn’t have believed it myself. In fact, I’d probably have been far less patient than you’ve been.”
“I like the way you talk. ‘Far less patient …’ Does everybody in Connecticut talk like that?”
“Only the snooty ones.”
“You’re not snooty. You don’t miss it by much, but … you’re not.”
“Thank you. If–and I emphasize if–that was a compliment.”
“It was.”
We walked in silence for a few minutes under the moon.
“Have you ever heard of Leonora Piper?” she asked suddenly.
“Should I have?”
“She was a famous medium in the nineteenth century. She was tested on an almost daily basis for twenty years. A lot of the information that came through her was wrong, or nonsensical. But then there were hits no one could explain. Many, many hits. Enough to convince nearly everyone who studied her that she had genuine abilities.”
“Unless she was good at faking it.”
“Cheating was ruled out. The investigators took every possible precaution. They even hired private detectives to shadow her, in case she was collecting data from accomplices. In twenty years there was never even a suspicion of fraud. Still, when she went into a trance, she could reveal things known to no one at the sitting–things that had to be verified later by third parties. Do you know that sometimes she wrote separate messages with both hands while conversing with a sitter on another topic? All while she was in trance–a real trance, not an act. Researchers tried unsuccessfully to snap her out of it by holding ammonia to her nose or applying painful pressure to her hand; they did serious nerve damage once.”
“I’m surprised she put up with it.”
“So am I. I wouldn’t have.”
“I’ll bet you wouldn’t,” I said with a grin.
“One of the personalities who communicated through Mrs. Piper was George Pellew, a young man who’d died in a fall. The investigators brought thirty-one of Pellew’s relatives and friends to various sittings. Pellew, via Mrs. Piper, identified thirty of them without prompting. The only one he missed was a woman who’d been a child when he last saw her. Pellew also spoke of private conversations he’d had with his friends, which they remembered. And that was only one case.”
“And only one medium,” I observed.
“You want more?” She was huffing a little, either from exertion or because I was pissing her off. Probably the latter. “There was Gladys Osborne Leonard, another medium who was studied for two decades. She was asked to determine the cause of death of a young boy named Bobbie Newlove, who’d lived in a distant village. She never met with any of the family members, yet she was able to establish that Bobbie and some friends had played in a pond formed by sewer runoff, and that Bobbie had swallowed contaminated water. Bobbie’s parents knew nothing about the pond until Mrs. Leonard’s information led them to it.”
I knew what she was up to, of course. She thought if she could convince me of this parapsychology stuff, she’d get me on her side. It wasn’t going to work. I’m not that easily convinced. But I had my own motives for letting her talk.
“Then there was Eileen Garrett,” she was saying, “a sophisticated woman, friend of George Bernard Shaw and William Butler Yeats. After a British dirigible crashed, she received communications from its lost crewmembers. The communications included technical details that had never been published. One communicator spoke of a secret diary; years later, it turned up. Others got into long technical discussions with an intelligence officer from the Ministry of Civil Aviation who attended the sittings. The information was so detailed that the authorities investigated Mrs. Garrett to find out if she’d obtained classified files.”
“These sound like pretty old cases,” I said, just to be a jerk. It’s something I’m good at, as you may have noticed. I believe in playing to one’s strength.
“And if they’re old , they can’t possibly be true?” Oh, yeah, she was getting hot. “Then let’s take one from 1985. A parapsychologist had the idea of staging a chess match between two grandmasters–one living, and one who was deceased and playing through a medium. The dead one was Geza Maroczy, and the living one was Viktor Korchnoi, ranked third in the world. The match lasted for forty-seven moves. Eventually Korchnoi won, but only after a seven-year struggle. The medium himself did not even know the rules of chess. Later, another researcher tried to duplicate Maroczy’s moves by using a computer, but it couldn’t be done.”
“Okay, but–”
She wouldn’t be stopped. She was on a roll. “If you don’t like mediums, how about near-death experiences? A migrant worker named Maria was admitted to the Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, where she went into cardiac arrest and was revived. She told a social worker that she’d left her body and floated up to the next floor, where she’d seen a tennis shoe on the ledge of the building. The social worker found the shoe. How did Maria know it was there?”
The question was apparently rhetorical, since she didn’t wait for an answer. I’m not sure she even paused for breath.
“Pam Reynolds was a musician who had to undergo surgery for a brain aneurysm. While she was sedated, with her eyes taped shut and special earplugs blocking her ears, she had an NDE and witnessed part of the operation. She observed the surgical saw that cut open her skull. She observed doctors inserting a needle into her groin and heard one of them complain that the arteries were too small. Then she progressed to an intense experience in the next world–movement through a tunnel toward a bright light, an encounter with her deceased grandmother, a decision to return–all very common elements in these cases.”
“Hallucinations,” I said, baiting her.
“If so, why do they fall into repetitive patterns? And how can hallucination explain verifiable observations like the shoe or the saw? How can people make any observations when their hearts have stopped and their vital signs are flatlining?”
“Speaking of flatlining, have you seen that movie with the guy from 24? You know, where the medical students stop their hearts so they can have near-death experiences?”
“What about it?” she asked, baffled.
I shrugged. “It was pretty cool.”
She shook her head and went on implacably. “There are other cases. There’s a patient who saw a nurse remove the patient’s dentures and store them in a crash cart–even though the patient was comatose and completely unresponsive at the time. Another patient specifically commented on the plaid shoelaces that an ICU nurse was wearing while she resuscitated him. ‘I was watching what was happening yesterday when I died,’ the patient said. ‘I was up above.’”
“Trivial things …”
“What they noticed is trivial. The fact that they were able to notice it–isn’t. There are cases of people blind from birth who reported visual perception during an NDE. One of them said he now knew what snow looked like. He’d never seen it, or seen anything … until he was out of his body.”
“You make leaving your body sound as easy as crossing the street.”
“Under the right circumstances, it’s even easier. Once you’re out, you can travel anywhere. Some people who’ve had NDEs have found themselves in a hospital corridor or the waiting room; others have seen their families at home and accurately described what they were doing.”
“You’d think the folks on the receiving end of those visits would see or sense something.”
“Sometimes they do. It’s a phenomenon called crisis apparitions. A dying person, or one who has just died, will appear to a friend or relative who knows nothing about it. There was a British colonel who saw a close friend appear to him in military uniform. The friend said he’d been shot through the right lung and killed. Two days later, news came from South Africa confirming it. It’s not rare. Many cases have been documented.”
“I’d think a dying person would have better things to do than pay a social call.”
“That’s generally true. People who die by violence are far more likely to be seen as apparitions. For most people, the transition isn’t painful or scary. Quite the opposite. According to some accounts, Thomas Edison’s last words were, ‘It’s very beautiful over there.’ Steve Jobs simply said, ‘Wow. Oh, wow.’”
“You’re certainly bombarding me with facts. Or what you claim are facts.”
“Yes–that’s what I claim. Perhaps I’m insane, or hopelessly gullible and self-deluded. Or just possibly there’s more to the world than you think. The afterlife is accepted by most of the population of the planet, and most of the people who’ve ever lived. Belief in the spirit world is nearly universal. Whole civilizations have been built on it. Art and culture and philosophy … and now a tiny self-satisfied clique of western intellectuals comes along and dismisses it out of hand. And claims to hold a monopoly on truth. As if the spiritual traditions of every other culture are only so much superstitious nonsense.”
“They’re just trying to be rational about it.”
“Bullshit.” The word startled me, because it seemed out of character. I was pressing her buttons pretty hard. “Reason and science are about exploring every question, every anomaly. The ones who won’t look at the data, who won’t even consider it–they’re not rational. They’re closed-minded dogmatists. They–oh, what’s the use? You’re one of them.”
“Kind of cold, talking like that about a guy who just trashed his ride for you.”
“I know. I’m sorry. It’s just that you’ll never be convinced. You simply aren’t receptive to it.”
“Should I be?”
“You could try keeping an open mind. Why condemn something when you have no personal experience of it?”
“Who says I have no experience?”
“Are you telling me you’ve been to psychics?”
“To one psychic. Actually, she called herself a medium.”
“When was this?”
“Last year.”
“Where?”
“Tucson.”
“Who were you trying to contact?”
“You mean, what dead person did I want to talk to? It wasn’t like that. I was just in the mood for some fun.”
“Uh-huh,” she said dubiously. “Was it?”
“Was it what?”
“Fun?”
“No. It was a waste of time. I was on to her in five minutes. She made vague predictions and general statements that could apply to anybody. She wasn’t bad at it. She could fool some people.”
“But not you.”
“Not me. She only messed up badly one time. She told me I was from LA.”
“Why’d she guess that?”
“Because my car, which I parked outside her shop, sported an LA Dodgers bumper sticker at the time. But the joke’s on her. I bought the car used. The Dodgers fan was the previous owner.”
Claire shrugged. “She sounds like a fake.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“So that makes me a fake, too? And everybody else?”
“I’ve got to go with the percentages.”
“Do you? If even one of us is real, doesn’t it validate the whole idea?”
“I guess so. But I’d need to find that one.”
“And you won’t look. Because you don’t really want to find anything that might challenge your safe, comfortable assumptions.”
I stopped walking and leaned against a solitary mesquite tree on the downslope of a hill. “You’re wrong there. Truth is, I’d like to believe.”
“In the spirit world?”
“In you.”
She took that in. “You’re not quite as cynical as you appear.”
“I have unexplored potential. But the thing is, Claire, I’m a realist. I can’t rely on intuition, feelings. All these alleged case histories are interesting enough in a Time-Life ‘Mysteries of the Unknown’ kind of way. But as far as your personal situation is concerned, you just haven’t given me anything concrete to go on.”
Her expression hardened. She took a breath and then, to my not very great surprise, she dug inside the satchel and produced its contents. “Is this concrete enough for you?”
Jackpot.
I’d figured if I pushed hard enough, I could get her to show me the rabbit in the hat.
“What is it?” I asked.
She was about to answer, then read my face–or my mind, maybe. “You already know.”
“I’m guessing it’s the infamous AR visor, the gizmo that shorted out all your mental circuits.”
“Not quite all of them. But yes, that’s what it is–the AR visor. Although informally they called it Omega.”
“Just Omega? So this thing right here basically is the Omega program?”
“I guess so.”
“How’d you get hold of it?”
“You know that, too.”
“I can make an educated surmise. Strain, in the guise of kindhearted orderly Phil, gave it to you. Probably with some song and dance about how you needed to show it to the world and expose the institute’s secret project.”
“I’m beginning to think you really are psychic.”
“No more so than the crystal ball gazer in Tucson. I just know people. Strain is a clever man, and a clever man is apt to come up with a clever plan. Hey, I just made a rhyme.”
“I don’t see what’s so clever about giving me a device he wants for himself.”
I had an idea about that, but I didn’t want to get into it right now. Instead I said, “It never occurred to you to wonder how an orderly could get his hands on a thing like that?”
“I didn’t have much time to think about it. He gave it to me at the loading dock and sent me on my way.”
“Let me see it.”
She handed it over. It didn’t look like much. A pair of wraparound goggles, big enough to cover the front and sides of a person’s face, with some electrical wiring that ran to a box about the size of a pack of cigarettes.
“How does it work?” I asked.
“You just wear it, and turn it on.”
“Is this the power source?” I pointed at the wired box, and she nodded. “So it would work here? Right now?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Why do you ask?”
“Because I’m going to try it.”
“No! No, that is not a good idea.”
“It’s the only way I’ll know whether to believe you–or Strain.”
“You can’t do it. It’s too dangerous.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
“But why?”
“Like I said, I want to believe in you. This is my best shot.”
Her head was shaking in desperate refusal. “We have to keep going. They’re after us.”
“A couple minutes. That’s all. Just a test drive.”
“You have no idea what you’re asking for.”
“Look, for all I know, this thing could be part of the therapy Strain talked about–sensory deprivation or transcranial whatsis. Or it could be an Xbox headset you swiped from some nurse’s locker. Unless I try it, I’m going to remain skeptical.”
“But you don’t know what it will do to you.”
“You said I should have an open mind. Maybe this thing’ll open it.”
“Or blow it wide open.”
“Yeah. Well, that’s a chance I’ll have to take.”