The Field

by Tracy Richardson

  I don’t want her to think that I’m not open to new ideas, but I also want to be authentic with her that this is a bit weird for me, so I say, “It is a little ‘out-there,’ but it’s not the first time I’ve heard about something like it. I’ve read some sports psychology and my mom’s an archaeologist and anthropologist. She’s told us about how some of the aboriginal people she studies seem to have a sort of group consciousness and can even predict future events. I just never thought about it in terms of something that relates to me personally. What do you mean exactly that ‘thoughts are things,’ and what is the Akashic Record?”

  She sighs. “I didn’t really want to get into this right away, but here goes. Just remember that you asked me. Thoughts are things means that our thoughts are energy; both creative energy and electrical energy. So when someone says that thoughts have power, they mean that your thoughts have the power to turn what you are thinking into reality, and also that thoughts literally have power in that they are a source of energy that can be measured.”

  “But everyone knows that thoughts can turn into something real. First you have an idea, then you act on the idea and then it’s real.” I know this isn’t what she really means, but I just can’t help playing devil’s advocate.

  “That’s true, but the theory is that if a person is able to harness their thoughts and access the Collective Consciousness to focus on a goal or objective, then the step where action is required is skipped. The thought itself is what makes it happen.”

  “As in ‘mind over matter?’”

  “Pretty much, yes.”

  “I guess I already know that on some level, because of what happens sometimes to me in the goal and what I’ve read about studies done with athletes. So much of sports is mental. There was one study where they used three groups of athletes training for the same event.” I drum my fingers on the table, trying to recall the article. “Two of the groups used visualization and one just trained. The groups that visualized winning both performed better than the one that only trained—even the group that only visualized and didn’t train at all. They concluded that visualizing success was as important as training, if not more so. Still, the Collective Consciousness? What is that?”

  I’m sitting with my backpack unopened on the floor, but Renee has her U.S. History book out and a spiral notebook open on the table in front of her. I get the impression that she would rather move on to studying. “If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s okay,” I say, and start unzipping my backpack.

  “It’s not so much that I don’t want to talk about it, but I don’t want to put you off. Not everyone is comfortable with these ideas.” Her green eyes gaze at me questioningly. She’s basically asking if I think she and her dad are nuts or something, so I reach for her hand resting on the table. “Whenever something seems too different or too wild to believe, I think about when my dad takes us out to the country with his telescope. Once you get away from the city lights you can see an amazing number of stars even with your naked eye.”

  I turn her hand over and lightly trace a line on her palm starting at her wrist and ending between her thumb and index finger. “It makes me realize that the Universe is unbelievably huge and filled with things we can’t even begin to know or understand.” She smiles and gives my hand a little squeeze. It travels through my fingers, up my arm and lodges in my chest, making me catch my breath. I’d say almost anything for that feeling.

  “Okay,” she says softly and her face relaxes. “The Collective Consciousness is all of the thought energy from everything in the Universe, like an underlying current of energy connecting everything together, and the Akashic record is like a vast library of all the thoughts and information that ever existed or ever will exist.” She stops and looks at me for my reaction. I look down at her hand still clasped in both of my mine. Her nails are perfect ovals and the skin covering the tiny bones and muscle and sinew that make up her hand is smooth and unblemished. I am reminded of how amazing even the things we take for granted really are. The human hand is at once beautiful and miraculous. It’s miraculous that we even exist at all, really. That the world exists. How different is it to consider that there could be truth to what she’s saying?

  Thoughts are things. Currents of thought energy. A library of thoughts.

  We’re both quiet for a moment as I process what she’s said, and then a thought occurs to me. “So does this have anything to do with the Universal Energy Field?”

  “Yes,” she says, “they’re related, maybe the same, but I don’t think I could explain how. I’m sure my father would love to tell you his theories about it. He’d do a better job of explaining it.” She abruptly pushes herself back from the table and says, “I’m going to get a soda—do you want one?”

  “Sure.” She’s ready to move on to homework and I actually feel relieved. U.S. History seems pretty tame after talking about a cosmic library of thoughts. I finish unzipping my backpack and pull out my textbook.

  We keep the conversation light while we study. I’m enjoying helping her learn about the history of the United States, which she makes sure to point out is a mere couple hundred years old compared to the some European countries, which are over a thousand years old, and I remind her that the Native Americans were here long before this land became the United States. I also like just watching her and being near her. The silver bracelets she wears make a musical sound when she moves her hands to gesture or to push her dark, sleek hair back behind her ear. I like the way her smile lights up her face and makes the corners of her eyes crinkle. I can’t tell exactly what color her eyes are. At first I thought they were green, but now they seem more hazel in the soft light from the chandelier. Eventually, it gets late and I have to go. I hoist my backpack onto my shoulder and get up from my chair.

  “Thanks for having me over,” I say. Which is so lame.

  “I’ll walk you out.” I’m glad we don’t have to say good-bye in the dining room or the front hall where someone could interrupt us.

  No one else is around when we go out the front door. Darkness has fallen and the air is cooler than during the day. We walk across the lawn, now wet with dew, to my van parked at the curb and I stop at the passenger side door to toss my backpack into the open window. When I turn around, Renee is standing a few feet away, so I reach out to take her hands and pull her towards me. Now there’s only a few inches between us.

  “Thanks for having me over,” I say again.

  “You’re welcome,” she says, a smile lifting the corners of her mouth.

  “Goodnight … ” I lean down to kiss her. It starts off softly at first, just my lips touching hers, but when she lets go of my hands and puts her hands on my hips to pull me closer, the kiss deepens and becomes more intense. I encircle her with one arm and put my hand on the small of her back to pull her even closer. My other hand slides up her back to get tangled in her hair at the nape of her neck. Her lips part and her tongue darts into my mouth as she lightly traces my lips.

  Our bodies are pressed closely together and I feel a slow burning start to erupt in my chest. But I know I have to leave, so I regretfully release her and pull my head away to look down at her. Her lips are slightly parted, but it’s her eyes that mesmerize me. It’s like I can see into her soul, and I know her. Like she knows me. A recognition.

  Out of the corner of my eye I see a flash in the night sky. I look up and see a shooting star blazing across the heavens. I quickly turn her in my arms and point.

  “Look. Over there. A shooting star.”

  “Oh!” she says and I know she’s seen it. A brilliant trail of light streaks low across the horizon through the blue-black night in the eastern sky. I lean back against the van and wrap my arms around her waist to pull her toward me. Her head fits neatly under my chin.

  “Did you know that the light we see from the stars is actually millions of years old because of the time it takes for it to travel across the Universe? And they’ve just discovered a black hole that is 800 billi
on times the size of the sun. Eight hundred billion times bigger. It’s hard to conceive.”

  “I like that you’re the kind of person who takes time to look at the sky and wonder what it all means. Most of the time we’re focused on small things, and miss the bigger picture.”

  “You mean there’s more to life than what happens at Monroe High School?” I softly kiss the top of her head, and she turns around in the circle of my arms to face me. She rests her hands on my chest and the tips of her fingers lightly trace the bare skin along the line of my collar bone. My skin feels electrified beneath her fingertips.

  We kiss again and this time it’s deeper and more passionate. I crush her to me and move my hands down her back along her spine, feeling its gentle curve into the small of her back. Renee makes a small noise and presses her body closer to mine. She pulls her mouth away and gently pushes her hands against my chest.

  “I think I’d better go inside now,” she says breathlessly. I’m glad she seems as affected by the kiss as I do.

  “Yeah, I should go. I’ll see you in class tomorrow. We have that field trip,” I say, but I don’t make any move to leave. I’m breathing heavily too. I brush a stray strand of her hair back from her face. Now, in the light of the moon, her eyes are an almost golden color, giving her a cat-like appearance. “You have beautiful eyes. What color are they?”

  “Thank you.” She smiles and the crinkles appear again. “I guess you could call them hazel.” She pushes away from me a little harder and I reluctantly let her go. She takes a step backwards and then turns toward the house, “See you tomorrow.” She gives me a little wave over her shoulder.

  “Bye,” I say and wave back. I watch her walk up to the house, admiring the way her hips sway gently back and forth, before I get back into the van. The drive home isn’t long, but I might have floated the whole way for all that I was aware of it.

  9

  THE BUS HITS a pothole and throws me into the air. I land painfully on my tailbone on the unyielding ‘pleather’ seat. Renee rebounds from her sharp connection with the seat and slumps against me. A nice side effect to the crappy shocks on the bus. I reach my arm around her and pull her in closer.

  “Man, I can’t believe they make the grade school kids ride in these things every day without seat belts. Highly hazardous,” Cole says, deadpan. “I think one of my fillings is loose.” He wiggles his jaw with his right hand. The fingers of his left hand are white from gripping the back of the seat in front of us. We’ve been riding in the bus for what seems like forever and we’re still about twenty minutes away from the Eagle River Coal Gasification plant. Will and Cole are in the seat in front of us and they’ve turned around to talk to us. That is, Cole is talking to us. Will hasn’t said much.

  “So, Will, is your dad doing the ‘tour guide’ thing for us today since he’s the plant foreman?” Cole asks in a neutral tone. He’s trying to come off oh-so-innocent, but I know Cole and he likes to stir things up. He goes straight for the soft under-belly just to see what will happen.

  “You know what? I have no idea what my dad is doing and I don’t give a damn.” Will turns to Cole and continues in a low, controlled voice. “But since you’re so curious, I’ll tell you. He moved out a week ago. Said he wanted to ‘have a good time’ and that he’d grown apart from my mom. Said ‘these things happen.’ He just walked out on us. He doesn’t give a damn about us, so why should I give a damn about him?”

  “Hey, man, I’m sorry,” Cole says, visibly shaken from the force of Will’s reply. He might even feel bad for provoking Will.

  “Just shut the hell up for once, why don’t you?” Will turns angrily to face the window, his back to Cole, effectively ending the conversation. Cole looks at us with a pained expression. Renee squeezes my hand.

  I’m not sure what to do, but I reach over the seat in front of me and put my hand on Will’s shoulder and say, “Dude, that sucks.” Because I don’t know what else to say. Will knocks my hand away and spits out, “Just leave me alone, will you?” so I guess that wasn’t the right thing to do. I’m also pretty sure that now wouldn’t be a good time to bring up seeing Will’s dad with the younger woman. Maybe I can try talking to Will later one-on-one. Not that I’m looking forward to that conversation, but he is my best friend and all.

  Mr. Ogle stands up in the front of the bus to give us lastminute instructions.

  “Remember, class, we are guests of the Eagle River Power company while on this tour. Please be on your best behavior and don’t touch anything! General questions are fine, but there is no need to try to advance your own environmental or political agenda by posing inflammatory questions or making any derogatory statements. We will have plenty of time for discussion on the ride home and in class tomorrow. Any deviation from this will be dealt with severely.” A low murmur erupts from the students in response.

  “Coal gasification does represent an improvement over traditional coal-fired power plants,” Cole is directing his comments to me and Renee, since Will is still sitting with his back to us, his posture rigid, inviting no conversation. “But it still has issues.”

  “Right. Haven’t we been going over this in class for the past two days?” I ask, annoyed. I’m not ready to let him off the hook for what happened with Will.

  “Well, yes, we have.” Cole is unperturbed. “But the whole process of trying to move away from burning fossil fuels to clean energy sources is really interesting from an economic standpoint. I mean, coal gasification does produce lower CO2 emissions, but the fact remains that carbon dioxide contributes to global warming. And it’s still pollution. The problem is that there is such a huge infrastructure of industry dedicated to coal mining, production and burning. It’s just easier to call coal gasification ‘clean coal,’ than to focus on truly clean, renewable energy sources.”

  “What are you, like a spokesman for clean energy or something? You sound like a freaking commercial.”

  Renee hurriedly intervenes to head off an argument between us. “In some European countries, I think they are capturing the CO2 emissions from coal gasification and pumping it into deep underground caverns, so no CO2 is released into the atmosphere.”

  I take a deep breath to calm down. Sometimes Cole is just too much. “Yeah, I’ve heard about that. The problem is we don’t really know what happens when we bury CO2 emissions. Remember that village in Africa where the entire community was suffocated by CO2 gas that escaped from underground into the air? It pushed out all the oxygen and the town suffocated before they even knew what was happening. We don’t even know if the CO2 pumped underground will stay there,” I say emphatically. I’m trying to keep my voice dispassionate, but I find this all so frustrating. We should be focused on clean, renewable energy, not ‘clean coal.’

  Audrey, a girl sitting across the aisle from us, chimes in. “But, the emissions from coal gasification are way cleaner than in regular coal plants. Less acid rain and smog, too. At least it’s a step in the right direction.”

  “Yeah, wasn’t that in the chapter we read last night?” I say sarcastically. Renee elbows me in the ribs. She’s right, I don’t need to be a jerk about this. I just don’t get why we would settle for something that is almost right when there are other options that are totally right.

  “What about coal mining? I mean, we’ve all seen the coal miners on TV who’ve been trapped in underground mines, and mountain-top mining has a really negative environmental impact,” the girl sitting next to Audrey says.

  “Yeah, that’s totally true,” Audrey says. “Just like the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the one in Alaska back in the’80s. It’s a huge price to pay for energy.”

  I can’t really comment on the benefits of coal gasification, because it feels to me like that saying my Mamaw sometimes uses: ‘putting lipstick on a pig.’ It doesn’t change the fact that it still creates pollution and global warming. So I look out the window at the passing corn and soybean fields. The cornstalks are standing over six feet high in the fie
lds, waiting to be harvested. Every now and then there’s a farm house surrounded with trees and the ubiquitous barn, sometimes red, more often white. Away from the city, on the flat farmland, the sky is an overarching dome, stretching from one horizon to the other. Today there are big, cottony cumulus clouds moving ponderously toward the east and rising like mountains high into the sky. In the seat in front of me, Will is glowering out the window, but I don’t imagine he’s appreciating the pastoral scene.

  What does he think about his dad working at the Eagle River plant? The foreman position is pretty prestigious, and when Will’s dad got the job, his family was really psyched about it. But what about now? Now that we’ve learned that ‘clean coal’ is just a clever marketing name? And how is Will going to act around his Dad while the class is at the plant? Even Mr. Ogle knows that Will’s dad is the foreman.

  In the distance, I see white smoke billowing into the sky. The smokestacks of the plant loom over the horizon above the cornfields. The white clouds spewing out of the stacks don’t look much different than the innocuous clouds floating through the sky, but I know they are.

  The school bus pulls into the parking lot of the plant and comes to a stop by the front entrance. Will still hasn’t said anything since blowing up at Cole, and he has a thunderous look on his face. I just hope he can keep it together enough around his dad so he doesn’t lose it again. I have an uneasy feeling about this, so when we all start filing off the bus, I let Cole and Renee go ahead and motion for Will to get in line in front of me. At first he doesn’t get up, but then he just shrugs and moves into the aisle between me and Renee.

  When we’re all standing on the blazing hot asphalt parking lot, a woman with a clipboard and a high chirpy voice—not Will’s dad, thankfully—calls us over to her and says that she will be our guide on the tour through the plant.

  For the next hour we weave through the maze of the plant following the path of the coal gasification process. It’s pretty interesting from an engineering and scientific standpoint, I guess, but I can’t really concentrate. I’ve got this weird feeling of foreboding, and the longer we’re in the plant, the more distracting it gets. I keep looking at Will and expecting his dad to appear at any minute, but Will is acting pretty cool and his dad is nowhere in sight. Still, I feel like I need to stick close to him in case there’s a confrontation or something.