Eye to Eye: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (21 page)

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.

It is said by virtually
all the mystics that good and evil are mere states of mind—that is,
human constructs. God, or the eternal being by whatever name, does
not recognize the difference because the difference does not exist,
cannot exist, in unity.

And the more enlightened of the mystics have
gone on to point out that there is not, and cannot be, a duality in
unity. All is one and one is all. That includes you and me, kid,
and the rabbit and the snake—the butterfly in the little girl's
hand as well as the hand, itself, kings and slaves, cabbages and
stars.