Chapter Twenty-Five

There’s no trace of toxic material in either of the two pharmaceuticals recently passed along to Bellamy’s splendid forensic brother. Or so Bellamy tells me. I received this report by phone sometime yesterday—either that or I imagined it. It actually occurred, I believe, as I recall an announcement that a cleaning lady has just gone through my dumpster’s hiney apartment so it’s especially splendid now for go return that place at once please thank you. I told him to go suck on a mop. Actually I’m not sure what I told Bellamy. I’ve other things to grouse about just now, chief among them the spirited rapping now occurring at the American Teacher’s Door. I don’t like the sound of it this early in the day. Nothing good ever happens before eight a.m.

“That would be Mr. Xu,” says Tree, setting down Lil’s smiley mug and rising from the settee chair.

“You didn’t tell me that somebody’s coming over,” I complain from my sister’s pillows.

Tree turns to fix me with her golden-browns. “It’s time, Jules, and you know it. That’s why your whole body just tensed up when you heard that knock. Now I am going to go answer the door, and you are going to breathe, okay?”

I avoid the golden-browns. It’s not breathing that has me worried. It’s being double-teamed by fanatical millennialists while lying helpless in my underpants. That last morphine shot was an awful long time ago.

Tree shows Xu into the apartment. After the whole hugging thing, he approaches Lil’s bed. “Julian! How’s the arm?”

“Great,” I reply. “How’s the leg?”

Xu titters. “About the same.”

“You’ll get used to Julian’s sense of humor, Mr. Xu,” says Tree. “May I get you some tea?”

“Please,” he says, pulling the computer chair nearer the bed and taking a seat.

“So, Mr. Xu,” I say, eyes narrowing, “I’m told that you have delved into Fibonacci. I can’t wait to learn what treasures you have unearthed.”

“Easy, Jules,” calls Tree from the kitchen.

“Actually, I haven’t found much of anything,” replies Xu, surprising me once more with the flippant Aussie/Chinese accent. “But I’m enjoying the chase.”

“Are you now?”

He nods happily. “That’s all it is, really. A chase. An open inquiry. I don’t think you ever get closure with the Sequence. But people have always studied the patterns of nature, right? The cycles of the moon and the turning of the seasons. Eventually every civilization evolves a system of math and encounters this same strange sequence of numbers: zero, one, one, two, three, five… , each number the sum of the previous two. The Mayans were working with the Sequence two thousand years ago. What fascinates me about the Sequence is that it never cycles back, making it evolutional rather than cyclical. How amazing that you can have something in motion along a vector completely beyond its own parameters. It wasn’t until Descartes’s number grid that we had a lens to even see that through.”

“Ah,” I say, adjusting the position of my right arm, “little René.”

“Don’t you get me started on that man,” calls Tree from the kitchen.

“Descartes was not the devil incarnate, Mrs. Carter,” Xu calls to her. “His first big breakthrough was given to him by an angel, you know.”

“Which angel?” replies Tree’s voice.

Xu leans forward. “As soon as we charted the Sequence on Descartes’s grid, we could see sunflowers, seashells, pine cones, everything in nature.”

“Then came your own lovely breakthrough,” I say, straining to remember what Tree has told me. “You overlaid the spiral with the arc of human history. I’m very curious as to how you arrived at that notion.”

“I love this part,” says Tree, arriving with a teapot.

“My Taiji showed me,” says Xu with a giggle. “I didn’t use a rational process at all. To understand how nature expresses through time—to understand, let’s say, the currents of a river—we can stand on the bank and observe, or we can throw ourselves in and become one with those currents. Not swimming forward, not holding back, just letting every part of the body be arranged and shaped by the river. If the body can be that supple, the mind that supple—”

“You drown,” I say.

“But,” says Xu, raising a finger, “before you die, you know a lot about that river. I think that’s one description of Taiji. Allowing the body and mind to be shaped by the currents of the moment. I find that can lead to certain understandings.”

Xu cools his tea by blowing across the top of the cup, and I notice a bit of grey where the black-framed glasses meet his temples. That would make him the only middle-aged Chinese on the planet who does not color his hair.

“What certain understandings?” I ask, remaining on the offensive.

“Nonverbal ones, usually. But sometimes an idea just appears fully formed in my mind.”

With a sudden burst of enthusiasm, Xu springs from his chair, adjusts his glasses, and begins to move slowly as though conducting an unheard adagio. I watch with unexpected interest, noting how his body seems to swell and deflate moment by moment, his face relaxed and listening, the glistening eyes seemingly turned inward, or perhaps reading the code of the moment. Xu’s attention seems focused yet diffuse enough at the edges to allow the moment to surprise him, to evade its own comprehension, and I’m surprised to see all that at a glance. For a moment it seems that his body and its tempo are not overlaid upon the air but have somehow slipped beneath it, to describe its inner architecture, its nuances and micro-currents, from within their midst. One arrives at certain understandings, Xu has said. What he hasn’t said is that just watching can deliver one to certain understandings.

Maybe that last shot hasn’t quite worn off.

As though hearing the thought, Xu is suddenly stone-still, seemingly spellbound by his own one-pointed attention. A moment later, he is animated and grinning, returning to the computer chair. “I’ve found Taiji to be very instructional,” he says, slurping his tea. “Each moment tells you something. Each posture tells you something. That’s been the function of these postures for generations. Carrying forward nonverbal information.”

Tree says, “Mr. Xu tells me the communists banned Taiji when they took over the country. It was too spiritual for them.”

“Mmm,” says Xu, “yes. They later brought Taiji back but in a very simplified form. Now it’s just a way to keep the body healthy. When the government ordered the old masters to teach Taiji this way, they refused but the government was very firm. They said, ‘Okay, we’ll kill everyone in your family.’ So the masters had no choice. To this day, you cannot teach real Taiji or Qigong anywhere in China. Have you heard about Falun Gong?”

I nod. There’s been an international hue and cry about Beijing’s ongoing oppression of practitioners of this popular form of Qigong. Thousands have been imprisoned and tortured, executed, all the usual.

“They took their practice too far,” says Xu. “They were discovering powers within themselves that no government wants its people to know about. Those people will never be seen again.”

“You’re saying today’s Taiji isn’t authentic?” asks Tree.

“Oh, it’s very authentic!” he says after another loud slurp of tea. “The truth of Taiji can never be obscured because it’s encoded in the postures. Anyone who performs the postures with an open mind and an open body will absorb their meaning. The postures tell you what they are and what they are for, and that is the truth. I’m not saying that the postures themselves are magical. They accentuate certain—”

“I think it’s we who are magical,” says Tree.

Xu practically falls out of his chair in agreement. “Yes! We bring the magic! Truly, everything a human being does is magical. It’s just a matter of bringing all that potential into focus, arraying our awareness so that the information around us becomes an absorbable field. Taiji does that, and I don’t think anyone can say how it does that, but it’s the basis of everything I think I know.”

I gaze at Xu’s suddenly sober face. I’m unexpectedly struck by the near-perfect symmetry and the bright controlled glitter of the dark eyes. Here is a face easily overlooked in a crowd, yet there comes a moment when you realize he has drawn you in.

“And all this relates somehow to Fibonacci?” I say.

Xu and Tree look at each other and blink.

“Yes, actually,” says Xu.

Unselfconsciously he begins to perform Taiji in his chair, shoulders rolling unhurriedly, his tempo comfortable and unforced. One of his hands makes a broad sweeping gesture along a horizontal plane while the other describes a tightening spiral. “I was doing this movement one day and I noticed how it feels to be an object moving through space and time, and I thought wow, we always think of time as moving but maybe it’s we who are moving. Remember Einstein’s analogy of a train? If we are passengers on Einstein’s train, watching the countryside move past the windows, it seems that the landscape occurs sequentially. We see it as a narrative because of our method of observation. But all we’d have to do is step off the train to see that all the scenery was there the whole time. What if time is that way? We see it as sequential, but is it? Quantum physicists say that every possible event is stored end-to-end on long spirals coiled up in space/time points, waiting to be experienced. None of those events actually occurs until consciousness touches it. So there’s this huge field of possibilities out there, like an endless field of wildflowers, each flower containing within itself other huge fields of wildflowers, and then others beneath that, level after level, out to infinity, no end to it—and we’re like this big swarm of bees going from one experience to another, opening up reality one packet at a time.”

“Whew,” says Tree.

Xu thinks for a moment. “It’s like when we read a book. We’re seeing one word at a time, right? One page at a time, but the whole book is there all the while. We experience things this way, all strung out in a line, because that’s the kind of creatures we are. Or, I don’t know, maybe that’s just how it comes off the coils.”

Tree says, “I think I’m starting to get it.”

I hope it isn’t contagious. The last time I visited this particular packet of ideas, I think I was seated at a Boy Scout campfire. And my arm is really beginning to hurt.

“Then,” says Xu, “I asked myself, what if Einstein’s train tracks were riding those unwinding coils, riding the curve of a Fibonacci spiral? What would that look like? I think it would look a lot like this.” Xu looks around the apartment. “That got me wondering how the timeline of history might describe a Fibonacci spiral, and whether we could chart that and find out where we are right now. That would be interesting to know because we’d know what’s coming next.”

Xu finishes his tea, and Tree pours more from the teacup.

Xu continues eagerly, “I started reading everything I could find and writing computer programs that laid the Sequence over various historical spreads, just to see if things would line up. The whole time, I’m thinking why shouldn’t it? If the Sequence can predict the way a plant or a nautilus develops, why wouldn’t it predict the development of human civilization? It absolutely should.”

“So everything lined up?” I ask.

“Nope,” he says.

“Mr. Xu is being modest,” says Tree. “I think his work is absolutely crucial to our understanding of the human adventure, especially as it relates to evolutionary timing. Like that movie, A Room of Eyes. Seriously, Julian, you should see that movie. It shows how everything is relative except consciousness. That’s the one thing that doesn’t reduce to something else. Everything else is experiential, and its structure shows us that.”

Xu smiles. “I’m learning a great deal from Mrs. Carter. The Three-three-three, for example. That’s something I never would have considered because it has no basis in classical numerology. Yet I see the obvious correlations. The third day of the third month of the third year of the millennium. Certainly there could be some kind of penetration on such a day.”

“Ah,” I say. “We’re finally talking dirty.”

Tree says, “In the sense of a new idea pressing in from the outside.”

Xu nods. “Sometimes an idea just appears from nowhere. Like when Newton saw that apple fall. How many people had seen an apple fall before that moment? Think about it. How many times had Newton himself seen things fall to the ground? But suddenly, at that precise moment, it was obvious that there’s a force pulling things toward the center of the planet. People have been talking about gravity ever since, but before that day nobody saw gravity. That’s what I call a penetration, and my work is about discovering the patterns—if there are patterns—of the penetrations that move across human consciousness and pull us forward along our evolutionary course.”

Xu smiles at me timidly. “Actually I was hoping you might be able to help me with the math, Julian. I feel that math is very bound up in this whole process, either as the engine or its reflection.”

“Math has no meaning beyond its own music,” I argue comfortably, closing my eyes. “It’s a closed system. Our interpretations have absolutely nothing to do with it. Nor,” I add, opening my eyes and turning to Tree, “does the day of the week, the month of the year, nor where we are in our personal moon cycle. You want me to spare you both a lot of unnecessary suspense? The world’s going to be exactly the same after March third—about half a quart low.”

“Thanks, Julian,” says Tree.

“No, thank you.”

“Actually,” says Xu, “I can appreciate what you’re saying, Julian. What science most essentially is, is a system of eliminating faulty theories, and every scientist should be reminded of that from time to time. Science is supposed to hold no beliefs whatsoever. There are no truths but only theories yet to be disproven. The assumption has to be that all of them will eventually be disproven.”

“We have to believe in something,” says Tree.

I groan. “That’s a psychological need having nothing to do with truth.”

Tree says to Xu, “You see what I have to deal with? It’s like dragging around an anvil.”

“I just believe in the integrity of the system,” I say.

At this, Xu practically jumps out of the computer chair. “Yes! The integrity of the system! Julian is more of a purist than either of us, Mrs. Carter. The only difference between your view and mine, Julian, is very simple. Permeability. You seem to recognize no creative interplay between the world of ideas and that of physicality. You really should read mythology.”

I give Xu an unhappy glance.

“Mythology,” says Xu, “is all about the interplay between the gods and mortals. Until that interplay begins, nothing of interest happens. After that interplay, you have everything.”

“Lots of penetration,” I say.

“Let me tell you about penetration,” he continues. “I have a random number generator, and it’s always turned on. You’ve seen it, Tree. I wrote software that combs the numbers looking for patterns. An alarm sounds every time an anomalous pattern comes up. I call it my Serendipitometer. Every time the alarm goes off, I pay careful attention to whatever I’m thinking or seeing at that moment, or to what someone is saying to me. Just whatever’s happening. I know that at that instant there’s a penetration of order into randomness—or randomness into order, which can be just as significant. Either way, something new is coming in. Maybe it’s a mental construct like the theory of gravitation. Maybe it’s a new organizing principle. Maybe it’s a re-crystallization of what’s actually possible on this planet.”

“Ding!” says Tree. “That was the alarm going off.”

The two love-birds giggle, and Tree turns to me. “Julian, this is exactly why I wanted you to sit down with this man—and how I wish Lillian were here. Mr. Xu has his finger on the pulse of what’s happening on this planet, and he senses, just as we all do, that we are at the tipping point of something absolutely incredible. We have to be. Either we all grow out of our childish ways in a hurry or we’re history.”

“Ding, ding!” says Xu.

I think our Mr. Xu may have his finger elsewhere, anatomically speaking, but I let it pass. I’m experiencing some serious pain over here. I loose a theatrical groan, and Xu stands abruptly.

“I should go. It was a pleasure to talk to you at last, Julian. I really admire your work on Lindenmayer grammars. Maybe someday you can explain the subject to me in language a novice can understand.”

“Next time,” I say.

“I’ll walk you out,” offers Tree.

“No, no, I’ll be fine. Goodbye, Julian.”

“Have a pleasant day,” I reply.

Careful of termites.