Ghost, page 12
“How did you get interested in the Society?” David inquires.
“Oh, that is a story,” says Mr. Chee. “If you really want to know.” It involves his mother. Ever since childhood, he says, his mother was enthralled with butterflies. She painted butterflies on paper and canvas for years, she collected butterflies, she knew every species and color. Butterflies were her passion. She was also a seamstress, and she once made a dress for a queen, but he won’t go into all of that.
“Madame Chee was highly artistic,” says Mrs. Chee. “Unfortunately, her talents were not passed down.”
“Our daughters, Wan and Yen, did inherit their grandmother’s beauty,” says Mr. Chee. “Beauty is artistry enough.”
“Just what a man would say,” says Mrs. Chee. “A woman needs more than beauty.”
Mr. Chee looks at his wife, perplexed, and continues with the story. A week after his mother died, he says, he was walking through a field and suddenly had an overpowering sensation that she was near. A moment later, a Monarch butterfly alighted on his shoulder and remained there for ten minutes, its wings gently rising and falling like the beating of a heart. Finally, the butterfly flew away. “What do you make of that, Mr. Kurzweil? I think it was my mother, that’s what I think.”
“It’s a lovely story,” says David.
“Maybe it is a lovely story,” says Mr. Chee. “But there are many lovely stories. I believe it was my mother. I keep thinking about that day. I’d like to know if it was her.”
“It was her,” says Mrs. Chee.
“That’s the thing of it,” says a woman nearby who has been listening. “Even though we’re in the first world, things in the second world can communicate with us. And vice versa.” Her name is Maggie Hoppsfield, and she’s wearing black leggings and a black sweater with a diamond pin on her shoulder. Her boyfriend comes with her to “these things,” she says, but he just goes straight to the bar and gets smashed.
“What did it feel like when the butterfly was sitting on your shoulder?” asks David.
“It felt like my mother’s hand touching me,” says Mr. Chee. “It was strange, like my blood was rising up in me. I felt a peace come over me. I had been suffering so much since my mother died. We were very close. I hadn’t been eating much, and I was weak. Every night, I was dreaming about her. I think that my consciousness was higher than usual. Then I was walking through this field, just wandering around to get some exercise, and I had this weird feeling, like when you know somebody is standing behind you. I felt my mother there. When the butterfly landed on me, it was the touch of my mother. The butterfly came from nowhere, and I felt that my mother had come back to me from wherever she had been. A warmth came over me, as if the sun were shining right on me. I had walked into the light. I was given a good-luck chance, Mr. Kurzweil, a chance to be with my mother again. I thought of all the things that I wanted to say to her but never had. I knew that she wouldn’t stay long. It was just a good-luck chance to spend a few moments with her. She touched me like she did when I was a child, that feeling of someone older and wiser who loves you very much. Just imagine the warm sun shining on your body. There was a certainty to it. I had no doubt at the time. Now I’m not sure.” He shrugs his shoulders.
“It was her,” says Mrs. Chee.
Listening to Mr. Chee describe the tender relationship with his mother, David cannot help thinking about his own mother, dreading again her reaction to recent events, to the terrible articles in the newspapers. What did she mean when she wrote that she was “not in a good state of mind” for him to visit? Is she so horrified and embarrassed that she cannot bear to see him?
The session is about to begin. A tall middle-aged man goes to the microphone, introduces himself as the president of the Society, and welcomes everyone. People take their seats. The president waves quickly to a few friends who have just arrived. He has an affable, confident manner, an SSW pin on his lapel. “We are all truth seekers,” he says. There is a modest round of applause. “The Society for the Second World seeks a comprehensive view of existence.” Exactly the same words that Ms. Gaignard used, as David remembers. “I’d like to welcome members of our sister societies,” says the president. “We have representatives here from the Paranormal Society, Mind over Matter, Spirits and Auras, Origins, Advocates of Modern-Day Miracles (AMDM), and the Sixth Dimension.” The president grins. “At SSW, we have a big tent.”
The first speaker is a philosopher. “How do we know what we know?” he begins, without waiting for an introduction. Even though we live in the first world, he says, we should be able to prove the existence of the second world, just as Descartes proved the existence of God. Descartes began with the one thing he was certain of: that he was a thinking being. What we are certain of, says the philosopher, are two things: first, that we are thinking beings, and second, that we have intense feelings and sensations of a reality beyond our understanding—an acausal and immaterial world lying side by side with a causal and material one. A world that does not necessarily obey traditional logic. In other words, the second world. Suppose we accept only our own thoughts, which we know exist because how could we be thinking at this moment if it were otherwise? We can conceive of a four-dimensional world even though we cannot visualize it. We can conceive of invisible forces even though we do not see them. Indeed the physicists have proved the existence of such forces. We can conceive of a soul. We can conceive of a world in which solid matter passes through solid matter. In these mental constructions, there is no distinction between causal and acausal worlds, material and nonmaterial. There are no hard and fast boundaries. These are equal mental conceptions taking place in the only realm that we know to be true, our own thoughts.
The philosopher looks up from his notes and takes a sip of water. Evidently, he is just getting his engines warmed up, but someone seems to be signaling that his time has expired. Already? A look of dismay crosses his face. Reluctantly, he sits down, a victim of the relentless march of time in the first world.
David frowns, trying to unravel the philosopher’s argument. It is compelling. But there seems to be some missing logical step, which he can’t put his finger on. Then again, the philosopher was talking about the nonlogical world. Perhaps one shouldn’t require logic when thinking about illogical and acausal concepts. But how can convincing ideas be presented in an illogical framework? David is puzzled. Others in the audience are not so concerned. The philosopher’s remarks, even if interrupted, have struck a chord, and there is an appreciative applause.
“Did you understand that?” David whispers to Mr. Chee, who is sitting next to him.
“Hocus-pocus to me,” Mr. Chee whispers back. “It seems to me that what he’s really talking about is the imagination. Don’t you think? The imagination is connected to the metaphysical, and the metaphysical is connected to the second world. That would be my argument. My imagination is like one of my children. I’d never give up my imagination.”
“Hold on there,” whispers David. “Aren’t we talking about what’s real and what’s not real? There’s a difference between what we can imagine and what’s real.”
“What do you mean by ‘real’?” says Mr. Chee.
“Will you guys be quiet,” a man says in an annoyed voice.
“It seems to me,” whispers Mr. Chee, “that there’s just got to be a lot more out there than what we can understand. Our brains are so limited. I know mine is.”
“And it gets more limited every year,” says Mrs. Chee. She swivels her lanky neck to see if she’s disturbing the man behind them. “Here’s what I have to say,” she whispers to David. “There has to be another world because there has to be something after we die. Death can’t be the end. All of this beautiful life. To have it end would be such a waste. And so sad. There’s got to be something else. That’s what I think.”
But Mrs. Chee has evidently spoken too loudly. The irritated man behind them stands up and rattles his chair. Scowling, he pushes his way to the end of the row and moves four rows away to reseat himself.
Strange images are appearing and dissolving on the stage. With a PowerPoint presentation, a physicist is explaining something he calls the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is apparently supported by some leading lights in the field. Unlike the stereotype, the physicist looks like a prosperous banker, with a crisp white shirt and gold cuff links. As he explains in his prefatory remarks, for the last ten years he has worked “independently, without formal institutional affiliation, because the universities and government laboratories are not nearly as open to new ideas as one would like.” At each moment of time, the physicist says, an infinity of universes exist parallel to one another. These parallel universes branch off from one another with each conscious measurement, no matter how small. A glance will do. The second world, in fact, may be only one of an infinity of parallel worlds.
The audience is totally silent, trying to absorb these ideas.
The physicist moves briskly to gravitation and cosmology. He explains that some scientists currently believe that everything we experience in our physical world is simply a lower-dimensional space trapped within a larger space of six dimensions or more, as if we were all water bugs skating on the surface of a lake, spending our entire lives on that ruthlessly flat surface while oblivious to the third dimension. “There’s a lot of extra space out there,” says the physicist, with a smile on his lips. “It gives one room for thought.”
“Yes!” shouts a woman in front of David.
“The soul, the spirit, the sacred, all reside in the immaterial world,” says a theologian who has taken the stage, “whether we are talking Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, or Hinduism. Surely, these intangible phenomena don’t exist in the corporeal world of earth and flesh.” For that matter, continues the theologian, what about the abstract but beautiful Platonic concepts such as love, goodness, truth, beauty? These too have an existence on some other, nonearthly plane. And history, unfortunately, has shown that human beings could not have originated these concepts. Where did they come from? From God, says the theologian, the prime being of the immaterial world. “In many ways, the immaterial world has more substance than the material.”
“What did you think of that?” whispers Mr. Chee.
“It’s hard to believe that the immaterial world, or whatever you call it, came along just to take care of goodness and love,” says David. “As far as God is concerned, I’ve always been an agnostic.” David hesitates, not wanting to offend Mr. and Mrs. Chee. “It seems to me equally impossible to know for sure that God exists or that God doesn’t exist.”
“I agree,” says Mr. Chee. “I don’t think we can ever know any of that with certainty, as you say. And exactly for that reason, Mrs. Chee and I are not buying into the first world one hundred percent. That’s why we’re here. To us, there are just too many uncertainties. And strange connections between people and things. When you go outside at night, why do the stars appear beautiful instead of frightening? Why do people feel connected to one another over long distances? Why did I feel that my mother landed on my shoulder? There are too many connections like that. I don’t think they can all be accidents, do you?”
David sighs. “I don’t know. How do you tell when something is accidental or not?” Mr. Chee takes off his polished glasses and shakes his head in frustration, unable to answer David’s questions. David stares at the red blotches on Mr. Chee’s forehead, and the shapes move and shift on the screen. The investigators are projecting their images. These men and women, many with good credentials, have gone to sites where unusual or unexplained phenomena have occurred. There, they have measured and documented with infrared thermometers, cameras, gauss meters, and other scientific instruments. Some of their photographs show faint, gauzy images of humanlike forms beside normal, solid images. Others have wisps and cloudlike shapes floating in the middle of rooms, or shining filaments winding through space against familiar landscapes like mountains and trees. The strange shapes appear and dissolve. An audio device plays “electronic voice phenomena” that have been recorded at some of the sites, none with any visible sources. Strange sounds fill the auditorium, more disturbing and evocative than the visual images. Invisible doors open and close. A person whispers, repeating a nonsensical phrase over and over: “Kinley spakle leedlemake, kinley spakle leedlemake, kinley spakle leedlemake.” A child cries for her mother, the voice hollow and echoing as if coming from a deep well. There is a silence, then the child cries again, this time more softly but more desperately. The cry hovers in the room, penetrates the bodies of the men and women gathered there. Who is it? Another recording produces strange hums and whines that David has never heard before. Afterward, he’s left with an unsettled feeling in his stomach. The president is talking. He says that the following testimonials have not been confirmed independently by the Society, but there has been a screening process and, of course, all of these people are members. A Mr. Francis Robb, who speaks so loudly and boldly that he has no need of the microphone, says that when he plays card games, especially with people he doesn’t know, he sometimes hears a voice telling him what particular cards the other players hold. This mysterious voice, which is always a woman’s voice with a slight stutter, has been amazingly accurate. He wants to know if others in the Society have ever had a similar experience.
“I could use that voice with my poker game,” whispers Mrs. Chee.
“She’s a good bluffer,” Mr. Chee whispers to David.
Mrs. Chee smiles proudly. “That’s because I don’t take off my glasses,” she whispers. “I don’t let anybody see my eyes. It’s in the eyes you can tell if somebody is bluffing or not.”
“Shoosh.” A woman on the stage is describing her discovery that the formation of ice crystals responds to words. In her investigations, she says, she writes a word on an index card and attaches it to a container of water. Next, she freezes the container. Then she examines it with a magnifying glass to see the shapes of the ice crystals formed. The words “love” and “harmony” cause beautiful patterns with rounded edges, while “fear” and “hate” cause chaotic and ugly shapes. She shows a few slides, which bring forth an approving murmur in the audience.
“What do you make of that?” whispers Mr. Chee.
“I don’t believe it,” says David. “It’s ice. It’s not alive. It’s inanimate matter.”
“Maybe there’s some kind of vibration from the words,” says Mr. Chee.
“Vibrations?” whispers David. “But the words are in English. The vibrations wouldn’t know any language.”
“That’s a good point. Maybe the vibrations come from her mind and not from the words on the index cards.”
“I don’t believe it either,” says Mrs. Chee. “But I’m going to try it when I get home. We’ll see.”
A Dorothy Ann Farrar, who describes herself as an amateur biologist “but not all that amateur,” tells the audience that one day she was looking through a microscope at a living bacterial colony when she was astonished to see a word spelled out by the microscopic cellular organelles. The letters of the word were a little misshapen, and they jiggled as the microorganisms throbbed and pulsed, but there was no mistaking it. The word was HELP. All capital letters. Unfortunately, she didn’t get a photograph at the time. For years, she’s been haunted by the experience. “I believe there is an entire microscopic civilization,” she says. “And they are intelligent, possibly more intelligent than us. But they need our help. What should we do?” Someone in the audience suggests that she report her findings to a government agency. Or maybe the Society should launch its own investigation.
David feels a tap on his shoulder. He turns around and is surprised to see Theresa Gaignard, who has apparently been sitting behind him for hours. “I hope you’re feeling more at home with your experiences,” whispers Ms. Gaignard. “You see, the Society can provide a context. I’ve been watching you, and it seems as if you’ve been enjoying yourself. Not that you have to believe all of this.” She smiles. “It’s like getting reports from the first trips of Columbus, or Magellan. Some of it is true, some of it is exaggerated, some probably downright false.” David nods, thinking that most of what he’s heard may fall in the last category. “Sam’s up next,” she says.
Before David can prepare himself, Dr. Tettlebeim moves toward the stage. Unlike some of the previous presenters, he doesn’t clamber up like an excited teenager but climbs the steps slowly and with dignity. Evidently, Dr. Tettlebeim is one of the more distinguished investigators and is held in high regard. Speaking softly into the microphone, he announces that he has some “interesting” new results to report. He explains the R box, at which point some of the audience nod their heads knowingly. Then, putting on his spectacles, he gives a brief introduction of David. “Mr. Kurzweil, will you please rise.” David stands uncomfortably. People are waiting to see the results. Then Dr. Tettlebeim projects on the screen the cumulative graph of the ones and the zeroes, comparing David’s results against those expected by random chance. The column of David’s zeroes rises gigantically above the other columns, like a skyscraper in a small town. “Ladies and gentlemen,” says Dr. Tettlebeim quietly, “here is stark evidence of the force of the mind.” The crowd breaks out in applause.
“That was something,” says Mr. Chee, applauding with the others. “You should have told us.”
“What do you think it means?” asks David.
“It could mean that you are connected,” says Mr. Chee. “You are in touch. Who knows? You should be careful.”
The session has ended. “Congratulations,” says Ms. Gaignard, standing. Immediately, a dozen people come up to David wanting to speak to him, leaving their cards and addresses. People who an hour ago regarded him with a friendly disinterest are now fascinated by him. “I can tell that you aren’t used to this attention,” says Ms. Gaignard afterward. “I’m sorry.”
