I came back hard.
Since all this happened, I’ve learned a little about near-death experiences. One of the things people say is that returning to the body after an NDE can be a raw physical shock, painful and alarming. That’s how this was. One moment I was suspended, weightless, in the rarefied air of a higher reality, and the next moment I was slammed back into coarse physical existence.
The impact jerked a gasp out of me. Suddenly I was conscious of countless small sensations I hadn’t noticed before–the ache in the soles of my feet, the rough texture of the tree trunk against my back, the slow crawl of hunger in my belly. More than that, I was conscious of being an animal, a grossly physical thing, slow and blinkered and all but helpless.
I didn’t like it. I reached blindly for the power switch on the visor. Claire batted my hand away.
“Playtime’s over,” she said. “We have to move.”
I was about to protest, and then my field of awareness expanded like a widening circle, and in some nonvisual, nonsensory way, I was in touch with information from distant places. It reached me in a series of impressions percolating through my subconscious and flickering into the spotlight of my attention. Somehow I understood that the subconscious was the bridge to the higher self, which in turn could access the source code, bypassing the physical senses.
I zeroed in on one of those impressions. Pursuers, three of them, intent on our trail. Not yet close enough to be seen or heard, but narrowing the distance with every step.
“You’re right.” I got to my feet. “We need to go.”
“What changed your mind?”
I handed her the visor, which she stuffed back into her satchel. “They’re coming. They’re not far.”
“How do you know that?”
“I just do. Come on.”
I took her by the hand–the first time I’d done that–and led her away from the tree, down the slope. When I looked back, I saw the solitary mesquite in silhouette against the moon. Fragments of ideas swam through my mind–the bodhi tree, where Siddhartha became the Buddha; Yggdrasil, the great ash tree at the center of the world; the tree in Eden whose fruit made men gods.
“You sure you’re all right?” Claire asked, watching me.
“Never better.”
This was true.
We reached the base of the hill. Along the ridge, three dim globes of white appeared. A trio of flashlights. Strain and his men were closer than I’d thought.
Claire saw them, too. “Can we outrun them?”
“We can try.”
The flat desert afforded no cover. We were exposed in a lustrous whitewash of moonlight as we crossed the blistered soil.
“We shouldn’t have stopped,” Claire said, almost accusingly.
I didn’t answer. But I knew she was wrong. What I’d seen and learned was worth any cost. A string of words skipped lightly through my mind–the pearl of great price. “The kingdom of heaven is within you,” I muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
I loped easily in a long rhythmic stride, my strength boundless, my energy recharged. The air was warm and dry, the stars clear, the moon huge. I was at peace and feeling somehow expanded, bigger than life, as if I filled the universe.
Alone, I could have outdistanced the pursuit without effort. But Claire was growing tired, slowing me down. The flashlights were well down the hillside now, and gaining.
The terrain ahead dipped into an arroyo, one of many dry gullies that crisscrossed the desert. The soil would be firmer there, and the embankments would provide concealment.
“Into the wash,” I said. “It’ll take us west, toward town.”
Together we scrambled down the loose soil of the bank, then ran along the wash. In monsoon season, the arroyo would be flooded intermittently, and so vegetation thrived here, surprisingly lush. There were mesquite and palo verde trees, clusters of cacti and weeds. The spines of a cholla cactus punched holes in my trouser leg as I brushed past. I ignored the pain. Nothing could reach me. Nothing could touch me. I had descended from the heights, but part of me was still there, reliving the experience, processing it, trying to shape it into words.
I remembered a book I’d read years ago. Maybe you’ve read it, too. Flatland, it’s called. It’s set in a two-dimensional world populated by circles, triangles, squares. The Flatlanders know only two physical dimensions: length and width. Then one day the hero, who’s a square–whose name, in fact, is A. Square–is lifted up out of Flatland into three-dimensional space. Suddenly he sees everything from a new perspective. He can look down and see his fellow Flatlanders inside their houses, because the houses, being two-dimensional, have no roofs. He can drop straight into a house, and it appears to the occupant that he’s materialized out of nowhere. He can pass through walls, or so it looks, by simply hopping over them. It all seems miraculous and impossible to the other Flatlanders, but it’s perfectly logical if you can visualize a third dimension.
And it occurred to me that I myself was A. Square. All my life I’d lived in Flatland, mistaking my limited perspective for the whole of reality, rejecting anything that spoke of higher dimensions because it didn’t make sense according to the narrow terms of my small, familiar world.
Until, in activating the visor, I’d left Flatland. And like A. Square, I could never be the same.
At a bend in the arroyo, I looked behind us, and there they were, three globules of light closing on the wash. Our pursuers were catching up, and Claire was losing strength. To keep going would buy us only a few more minutes.
So I didn’t keep going. I stopped, standing dead still, my boots planted wide apart.
Beside me, Claire stopped also, blinking in bewilderment. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”
I didn’t answer. It was as if I had no power to speak. Distantly it occurred to me that the left hemisphere of the brain was the center of speech, and it was the right hemisphere that was active now. The intuitive side of the brain, the part that saw patterns and heard strange music.
I closed my eyes. Claire was still talking, but her voice receded into an outer darkness. I was alone, yet not really alone, because somehow I was part of the desert around me and all the wild, restless things that prowled the night. I called on those things. Not in words, not even in coherent thoughts, but by projecting the arrow of my identity outward, seeking the spirits I needed and drawing them in.
I have no idea how long I stood there, how long Claire tugged at the sleeve of my windbreaker and shouted in my face. It couldn’t have been more than a minute or two.
And then I came out of it, returning to myself, and Claire wasn’t shouting anymore. She was motionless, as I was, but for a different reason. Her eyes were wide as she gazed around us, her vision tracking the rim of the arroyo.
Other eyes gazed back at her, at us. Lambent eyes, eyes the color of flame. Coyotes’ eyes.
There were a dozen of them, a whole pack, and they stood along the northern edge of the arroyo, peering down at us, making no sound.
I heard Claire gasp and knew she was afraid. I wasn’t. The coyotes had come in response to my summons. They were my friends. I knew them, and they knew me.
I turned slowly in a half circle, making contact with each pair of eyes in turn, eyes that hung unblinking in the dark. Wordlessly I let them know what I needed, what had to be done.
They lingered another moment, then turned as one and loped off toward the east. I watched their rail-thin bodies shrink into the shadows.
“What did you do?” Claire breathed. “What did you make them do?”
“I’m not sure. But I think now we’ll be all right.”
We stood watching. The three flashlights drifted to the rim of the arroyo. Strain and his men, following our footprints, had reached the spot where we’d descended into the gully.
Then the flashlights wavered, swirling like agitated fireflies. I heard distant shouts. The lights flickered and receded, tracing chaotic lines against the black sky.
The men had scattered and fled. I didn’t have to wonder why.
“Will they be killed?” Claire asked, her voice hushed.
“No.” Somehow I was certain of it. “Scared, that’s all. Delayed.”
“But … how did you …?”
“I don’t know.”
“You must have some idea.”
“How do you connect with the dead?” I asked her.
She accepted this. “Fair enough. Except–you said you weren’t psychic.”
“I wasn’t … before.” I shrugged. “Maybe these abilities are latent in everyone, and it took the visor to activate them. Anyway, we’d better not stand around discussing it. Our friends may regroup sooner than we think.”
We headed along the arroyo again. Claire seemed to be moving more easily now. Either she’d caught her second wind, or she was too distracted to notice how tired she was.
I felt her watching me as we jogged along. The expression on her face was different than before. She was studying me with new curiosity. Almost–I hate to say it–with awe.
Okay, maybe I don’t hate to say it.
“Tell me more about what happened when you were under,” she said.
“Well, first of all, I wasn’t under. I was sort of … over. Lifted up out of myself, but still in myself. Kind of a dual awareness. I can’t explain it. Can’t even really understand it, now that I’m back. It’s like my mind had to be squeezed back into the confines of a three-dimensional brain, and a lot of the information just wouldn’t fit.”
“But some of it did. You remember certain things.”
“What I remember most is that everything we think of as physical reality is projected out of pure information.”
“Yeah, you were babbling a lot about that.”
“I wasn’t babbling,” I said, a little testily. “Think of subatomic particles, like electrons. They don’t behave like physical objects. They behave like factors in an equation. And their specific behavior depends on which equation you plug them into–what calculation you’re trying to make. Calculate one way, and the electron acts like a particle. Calculate differently, and it behaves like a probability wave. If you request information on the particle’s position, you’ll get it. If you request information on the particle’s momentum, you’ll get that instead. The results of each calculation displace the previous results, so testing for position cancels out the information on momentum, and vice versa. You can never know both–that’s Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. ”
“What do electrons have to do with anything?”
“They have to do with everything. The whole physical world is made of electrons, protons, neutrons–and what are they all, really?”
“Let me guess. Information.”
“Now you’re getting it.”
“No. I don’t think I am. What was it you said about, um, Zeno’s paradox?”
“Zeno was a Greek philosopher who said there’s no such thing as movement, because every motion can be broken down into an infinite number of static positions. He was right, and also wrong. Right as far as space-time is concerned, but wrong because he didn’t know about the source code. That’s where change takes place. At that level. If Zeno’d had a computer, he would have understood.”
“So it’s like that movie, The Matrix? We’re all living on somebody’s hard drive?”
“No, because the matrix was a physical system–an actual computer that was plugged into people’s brains. What I’m talking about is something nonphysical, something that’s not part of our space-time reality at all. It’s the basis for our reality, the same way a holographic plate is the basis for the hologram projected through it. Holograms, computers–they’re only a way of getting at the truth. They’re metaphors for something we don’t have words for, something we can’t fully wrap our heads around.”
“Reducing everything to numbers and formulas–it sounds so cold and mechanistic.”
“No, just the opposite. It’s alive, Claire. It’s pure thought, pure intention. And we participate in it. We complete the process by providing a field of awareness that allows the algorithms to take on shape and form. We render the images. We close the circuit of Creation. Do you see how incredible that is? And yet we get bogged down in paying the mortgage and worrying about a promotion–when all along, we’re goddamn gods, Claire. Or parts of God, extensions of God … What are you laughing at?”
“Just wishing Oprah was here. She’d book you in a minute. You really think we create the world?”
“The world–we shouldn’t even talk about the world. Each of us is the focal point of our own world, our private reality bubble, rendered by our own consciousness. But the source is the same for all of us. At the source we’re all connected. At the source we’re all one. That’s how psychic phenomena are possible. ESP makes sense because all information is stored in the source code, and our minds can access it under the right conditions. Life after death–the physical body is only a construct of the information processing system, and its death has no effect on that system, or on consciousness itself. Dying just means adjusting our consciousness to a different level of the virtual-reality environment–like moving to a higher level of a computer game. A mental shift to a higher frequency. A change of perspective, that’s all.”
“Did you have any interest in this stuff before? Heisenberg, Zeno, holograms?”
“Not really. And you know I didn’t have a clue about the paranormal.”
“So where did it all come from?”
“The visor let me tap into the information field. The field has all the answers.”
“So you were omniscient?” The question had a vaguely accusatory tone.
“No, but I potentially had access to all knowledge–if I could ask the right questions. Knowing what questions to ask is the hard part. That, and just dealing with how overwhelming and disorienting it all is.”
“You don’t seem disoriented.”
“I don’t, do I? I’m thinking more clearly than ever.” I saw a frown cross her face and added, “I guess it wasn’t like this for you.”
“Hardly. I came out of it confused and groggy, and I’d lost my abilities.”
“Nothing is ever lost. Nothing that matters.”
“Damn, you’ve turned into the friggin’ Dalai Lama.”
“You sound peeved.”
She chuffed a ragged breath. “Can you blame me? When I wore the thing, it virtually put me in a coma and canceled out my psychic talents. When you wore it, it made you a bona fide New Age prophet.”
I spread my hands. “I don’t know why it worked out that way.”
“So there are some things you don’t know? Refreshing.”
She jogged in front of me, cutting off discussion. I fell in behind her, smiling.
I might have achieved enlightenment, but I still enjoyed knowing how much I’d pissed her off.