Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (87 page)

To his astonishment (and mine), Gordon had just found out that his daimon was his Future Self, his next incarnation–Gordon 2.0–who had been administering dreams and visions and the occasional Easter Bunny ass-kicking to Gordon 1.0 throughout his life. Using those techniques, the daimon had subtly sculpted the trajectory of Gordon’s soul-experiences and lent him an astral guiding hand through a totally bizarre time-loop of paradoxical self-help.

Let me take a shot at explaining how that works…. At the end of each of Gordon’s incarnations (he had other names, obviously, but let’s not make this too complicated), Gordon’s True Self accumulates all of the soul-experiences that a spirit up in heaven finds useful (or “enlightening,” to make a crappy pun…). At some point, after a certain level of soul-experience has been accumulated, the True Self becomes capable of splitting itself off into a daimon. Like I’ve explained before, a daimon is sort of an advanced soul, or tutelary spirit, that’s wise enough and skillful enough to interact with both Gordon’s True Self in heaven and Gordon’s soul while it’s incarnated in a body on Earth. But here’s the part I didn’t know: after the body that housed Gordon’s soul has died, the daimon incarnates in the next body, in a kind of spiritual leapfrogging.

I know… it’s kind of confusing. But basically, it goes like this: when Gordon 1.0 dies, his soul-experiences are merged with his Immortal Twin, who then splits off into a more refined daimon to watch over Gordon 1.0’s daimon–who now, as Gordon 2.0, is taking Gordon 1.0’s place on Earth.

So it’s just like old Heraclitus said: “Mortals are immortals and immortals are mortals, the one living the other’s death and dying the other’s life.” And now you can see why a daimon is so concerned with a soul’s progress: if the soul hasn’t made any progress by the end of its life on Earth, it’s the daimon’s sorry ass that has to deal with all the karmic fallout in the next incarnation.

Another consequence of this set-up was that when the Men in Black sent Gordon and those guys over the cliff, Gordon’s daimon was compelled to drop by to see if it was time to switch places with him. It was up to Gordon to choose. But before he could make that choice, he had to have a Life Review.

(Gordon’s True Self: “First we’ll take you out.”)

(Gordon’s Daimon: “Then we’ll show you how to go back in.”)

Out where?
Gordon wondered. Then, in an instant, he knew. He was outside the Matrix of his own life, looking in. He’d slipped off the space-time grid. Hell, he wasn’t even anywhere in the astral-material continuum anymore. He was looking down at the entirety of his own life as holomovement-encoded crystal growing out of an information fluid suspended in five-dimensional space.

Don’t ask me to draw you a picture… there’s no way.

As Gordon’s perspective scaled back, he saw billions and billions of crystals just like his, all growing in the same information fluid. Each crystal was a sort of chrysalis for a soul’s experiences that unfolded over time. He understood then that what he was seeing was the nursery of his known universe, infinite yet somehow bounded. That cluster of crystal spires toward the center was midtown Manhattan. Over there was Tokyo, Paris, Cairo, and so on. Different layers of crystals revealed the Dark Ages, the time of the American Revolution, the Late Cretaceous, the Pre-Cambrian…. It was all there: everything that had ever been, or would ever be.

All the times and places and people merged together as Gordon shifted his focus. He saw polar bears chasing reindeer through thick snowdrifts mottled by the swimming shadows from an overhead school of hammerhead sharks. He saw a posse of cowboys lassoing a spiky-tailed stegosaurus on a Wyoming prairie. He saw a giant red octopus squirting billowy clouds of violet-black ink into the path of an oncoming steam train. He saw bristly orange-haired hyenas wearing tailored chalk-striped suits and white spats, sitting for tea in the parlor of a Victorian whorehouse.

Pulling back even further, Gordon saw the Lam and other interdimensional aliens and angels (some of them benevolent, others quite the opposite), all of them skittering around the edges of the universe nursery like persistent gnats, trying to find a way in. And then, with his back all the way up against the wall of eternity, Gordon saw everything in the known universe blending into one infinitely intelligent being–like a boatload of salt dissolving in a sentient sea.

(G.D.: “Kind of cool, huh?”)

(Gordon: “Um, yeah… but it’s a little hard to take in all at once.”)

Zooming back in on his own holomovement-encoded crystal to experiment with this new way of seeing, Gordon saw himself as a six-year-old in a scorch-marked pajama suit ascending the hokey green tractor beam of an old-fashioned-looking flying saucer.
(“Wait a second… was that real?”)
Over there, in another corner, his thirteen-year-old self was bent over one of Mal’s
Hustler
centerfolds, masturbating like a fiend. Shifting his perspective, he saw those two scenes overlap, and observed even more scenes seeping in-between them. Somewhere in there (it was kind of blurry), he was a mod werewolf on Halloween buying an armload of pineapples for Jimmy’s piña coladas. There he was falling out of Jimmy’s tree house (again and again, for all of eternity….
Ouch!
). And there he was bleeding to death on the floorboards of Lloyd’s smashed Bentley, seawater lapping at his nostrils. Was it already too late to go back?

Apparently not. His True Self was telling him: (“This is how we grow. Would you like to see your probable future?”)

(G.: “My future? Sure, that’d be a trip….”) But at the same time, Gordon was reminded of a line from Rilke:
“This is how he grows, by being defeated decisively by constantly greater beings.”

(G.D.: “We encourage you to read poetry. A good poem works on many different levels, as we do.”)

(G.T.S.: “Dylan may be more appropriate to your situation than Rilke:
‘…in the end he won the war after losing every battle.’”)

(G.: “I can’t believe my True Self just quoted Bob Dylan!”)

(G.T.S.: “Of course… ‘Idiot Wind.’ What did you expect? I’m you, after all… along with all your other selves, both past and future.”)

(G.D.: “Here’s
your
past. And your future, if you choose it.”)

A blank screen made of light about thirty feet high and more than twice as wide popped up in front of Gordon. Curved around him, actually, like the wall of a coliseum. And then it enveloped him, like the scenery of a lucid dream.

The screen started projecting a rapid-fire series of images that came and went almost too fast for Gordon to consciously register anything. But soon he realized what he was being shown: it was every single moment of his life, from birth onward, flashing before his eyes out-of-sequence.

Somehow, his life started to make more sense to him, viewing it that way. He started to see the hidden connections, how everything and everyone was interlinked. Within each passing scene, he became aware of the feelings and hidden motivations of everyone sharing the space with him. He found he could even watch the scene from their viewpoint, or slow the scene down to something like real-time and lightly re-inhabit his body, if something interested him. The screen was a direct portal to the holomovement-encoded crystal that was his life in a five-dimensional cock-eyed universe. (G.D.: “This is how you go back in….”) Making the most of those multiple viewpoints, Gordon quickly learned more than he ever thought he’d want to know about how other people saw him.

That knowledge filled him with a stunning sorrow.

He saw how he had betrayed others, and how he had been betrayed. He saw how he had misjudged, misunderstood, or just misspoken–often with appalling consequences. He saw all the times he had failed other people, and all the times he had failed himself. But perhaps the worst of it was seeing all the moments when someone needed something from him that he could have given freely, but he chose not to, for whatever the reason…. In most of those moments, what that someone had needed was love.

Gordon realized how truly crappy he’d been at loving.

(G.: “God, I really fucked up….”)

(G.D.: “You were supposed to fuck up. That’s how you learn.”)

(G.T.S.: “This is why we incarnate in the world and in time. This is how we grow–how love grows. The Kingdom of Light can’t exist without love.”)

This is getting kind of sappy…
Gordon thought to himself.

(G.T.S.: “I heard that.”)

Telepathy takes some getting used to.

The Life Review rolled along, in full-on Evil-Dipshit-Gordon-mode now. Gordon saw himself as a self-righteous child, a kicker of pigeons. He saw that, yes, his mother was a piece of work–always primed to go off on a rage-spewing tirade or a fit of bitchy self-esteem bashing. But he also saw that she could have been mollified–maybe even turned into a caring parent–if he’d been brave enough to love her as a child. He’d had it in his soul; he just hadn’t shown it to her–because, frankly, she scared the crap out of him.

With his father, the situation had been almost worse. They were always playing
“¿Quién es más macho?”
Who can be the most like James Bond? Who can show the least amount of emotion? Who can put on the best face of indifference? Of course, his father always won, but Gordon shouldn’t have even been in the game. He should have shown his father a son’s love.

Gordon was so sad he started to telepathically howl.

The light from Gordon’s daimon and his True Self grew brighter then, until he could see and feel nothing else. He was enveloped in The Light. It was All-Knowing, All-Loving, and All-Forgiving. It cleansed him of his idiocies and ugly habits. It absolved him of all sins. He was reminded that the word sin just means “missing the mark”–or failing to love the True God, who is everywhere at every moment, although often hidden. In the future (wherever
that
might be), Gordon would try to aim better.

His daimon then showed Gordon how to follow the currents in the information fluid that was swirling around and through the crystal of his life. The first thing that Gordon wanted to find out was if he had somehow caused his father’s plane crash. His daimon helped him find the airport hangar where Mal was doing his pre-flight check on the day the crash occurred. Gordon took over from there….

He saw that Mal was so self-consciously consumed with showing-off in front of Mike Shriver that he forgot to check the fuel levels in the Cessna’s wing tanks. They were almost empty. After the plane took off, it ran out of gas somewhere above Kingsburg. The prop started to stutter, but Mal tried not to show his concern (again, for Mike’s benefit). He decided to make a showy dead-stick landing on the street out in front of his house. But Mal had misjudged… the plane lost altitude too fast and its lower wing clipped the phone pole wires as he was making his approach. Gordon had seen the rest from the street below.

It wasn’t his fault. End of story.

Some currents of information brought peace and understanding, but Gordon soon found other currents in the information fluid running through his life that were every bit as strange and dark as any conspiracy theories Lloyd had ever divulged. For example, he saw that his father had played on the same high school basketball team as the future Olympic decathlon winner, Rafer Johnson. Rafer Johnson and the famous defensive linebacker, Rosey Grier, had been Robert Kennedy’s personal bodyguards at the Ambassador Hotel on the night that Kennedy was assassinated. Rafer Johnson had actually
seen
the person who fired the fatal bullet, but he couldn’t talk about it (it was just who Gordon thought). The assassin, of course, hadn’t been acting alone….

At that point Gordon let the information current run off into the branching darkness. (Oh… except for a flash upstream where he learned that Rafer Johnson would be playing a role in his not-too-distant future as a DEA agent in a James Bond movie called
Licence To Kill
. Talk about weird symmetry…. That would make him Kingsburg’s second hometown movie star, after Slim Pickens, who rode an H-bomb out of a bomber bay like it was a bucking bronco at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s
Dr. Strangelove
.)

Picking up again at an earlier branch, Gordon saw that right after his Grandpa Milt had died, sibling rivalry of an almost kill-or-be-killed nature had inspired Gordon’s Uncle Gerald to start embezzling more than his fair share of the profits from
Swannson Lumber, Inc.
Mal had retaliated by making a business deal with Arnie Andersen for a tidy share of Arnie’s lumberyard profits (with unfortunate consequences for Gordon…). That deal eventually resulted in a new profit-structure at
Swannson Lumber
,
along with a re-juggling of share ownership that seemed–on paper–to favor Mal, but in actual fact allowed Gerald to get a piece of Arnie’s action. But all that blew up in Gerald’s face after Mal died, because it looked like Cynthia would become the majority shareholder when Gordon’s grandmother passed away–which Gerald expected to happen soon. He knew Arnie Andersen would offer Cynthia a good price for the lumberyard, if she decided to sell. Gerald didn’t want to see that happen. He liked his new role as Kingsburg’s undisputed King of the 2X4’s, so he was having sex with Cynthia to keep her on his side, away from Arnie–an activity that also had curiously satisfying aftershocks on the old sibling rivalry front.

Jeez
, thought Gordon to himself.
What’s that old line about the “tangled webs we weave?”

(G.D.:
“‘
Oh! what a tangled web we weave / When first we practice to deceive!’ It’s from ‘Marmion’ by Sir Walter Scott.”)

(G.: “Yeah. Thanks. It sounds a little cheesy when you telepathically ham it up like that.”)