I didn’t say anything because I didn’t know what to say.
“We’d like for you to go see him, in the hospital. We’re thinking that seeing you might jog his memory some. I’d like to take you there now.”
I left Sue a note and walked out the door with Driscoll. I mean, what else could I do?
“We never did figure out that glass, the piece we found at Drake’s. Unlike anything ever seen anywhere. We sent it to D.C. It was checked by forensics, chemists, physicists…archeologists. It can only be cut by a laser…and a strong one at that. The laser can vaporize it, but it won’t melt. Won’t even soften. It’s being held in a very secure place now. It could be valuable.”
I was wondering if it had been part of the glass cave under my cornfield. There ought to be more of it under there if that was the case. How in the world did Drake cut off a piece of it if it’s that hard to handle? Then I remembered the walls of the partitions in the cave. They were bolted in place. Drake had to be able to cut it someway. To Driscoll I just looked and listened.
We arrived at the hospital without much more conversation. I didn’t know Crupp, and he didn’t know me. He looked worse for wear though for such a young man.
“I remember being called to check out a dark something that made a noise at your place, Mr. Henson. I had my searchlights shinning across your front yard. I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary there. I took my flashlight and walked toward the left side of your house.”
His memory was pretty darn good for an amnesiac. He described it like it had just happened.
“I don’t remember a thing after that. I found myself walking along the road into Grover. I felt like I’d been hit by a truck. Somebody called 911 and an ambulance brought me here. They’ve been great. I feel a lot better now.”
From Driscoll: “And you don’t remember seeing anything at all? Or hearing anything?”
“I didn’t even see Mr. Henson. I was checking out the perimeter. I was going to wake up the Chief if anything looked out of place.”
Driscoll looked disappointed. “OK…thank you. I hope you’ll be up and at ‘em very soon.” Looking at me, “I’ll give you a lift back to your place, Don. I don’t know what else we can do here. But if either of you recalls anything else….” He gave both of us his card.
The ride back was pretty silent. I was glad to be back home.
Chapter 15 - KNOWING IT ALL
Not long after meeting with Officer Krupp and Agent Driscoll, Sue and I were watching TV. I put the DVR on hold and for some reason asked Sue if she’d seen any sign of Drake lately.
“What? When? I haven’t seen him. Have you been seeing him again? I thought he was long gone after his place burned.”
“Oh he probably is. I just wondered.”
“I don’t know if I’d recognize him if I did see him. I haven’t seen him in ages. Come to think of it, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen him. I’ve seen pictures…well, maybe not…I’ve heard you talk about him plenty.”
I was dumbfounded. “You…you’re telling me you don’t remember ever seeing Drake?”
“I thought I’d seen pictures, but maybe not. I guess that would explain why I don’t remember what he looks like.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“I’m not sure anybody has actually seen Drake but you. We’ve all heard about him, mostly through you though, I think.”
I called Rob. “What…buddy…how are you…no, come to think of it I’ve never met the guy. He wasn’t exactly friendly, was he, living back at the end of that washboard road.”
The next day I drove into town. There was the usual town crank, but nobody I knew there admitted to having met, or seen, Drake.
“But you know he was an Air Force Colonel, retired, right?” I was asking Sam Mason who ran the Grover newspaper.
“You told me that, I think. We ought to be able to look that up.”
He starting searching. He was handy at it because he knew what sources to go to.
After awhile. “There seems to be no record of a Colonel James Drake, not from around here anyway. But one inquiry activated a security alert.”
“Why would it do that?”
“We were searching for something supposed to be kept secret, maybe. I don’t know. Anyway, according to all my sources, and I’ve tried a few, there is not now nor has there been a James or Jim Drake who is or was a Colonel.”
“OK, then, who owned his shack, his land?”
“Well, I guess…well, OK, let me check on the deed.”
He did some more calling around.
“There’s no name on the deed. Everyone just assumed it was Drake or his family. Actually, the land is in limbo. Title searches are turning up nothing. Have we got another missing man on our hands here?”
“Drake? But you know Drake! Everybody knows he was the eccentric UFO guy with his Un-Alien-Able Rights group.”
“Everybody thinks he was. Nobody knows how they knew it though. Most of them say they heard it from you.”
What I get for living in a small town, I thought. Everybody knows everything…except that nobody knows nothin’!
I was disgusted with everybody and everything now. I couldn’t find Driscoll. I wanted to ask him about Drake being an Air Force Colonel. Just great, I thought, Driscoll kept pestering me when I didn’t want to see him, but now that I wanted to find him, he seemed to have disappeared too. Then I thought, well, maybe he doesn’t exist either. Everybody else was disappearing, or no good at remembering. No Drake, no Southby, no Pickering, no Driscoll, no tips of the three fingers on my left hand. And no explanation for it, or anything else.
The weather was getting warmer. I needed to get to work on the farm. But I had no motivation. I tried working on my book. Typing was a lot harder with missing fingertips.
Finally, one day Driscoll called.
“About time,” I said, “I’ve been trying to reach you for weeks now.”
“Sorry. I’ve been occupied elsewhere. We closed the Crupp case. He’s fine and we’ve had no leads, so why waste any more effort…or money?”
“I wanted to ask you about Drake. You said he was a retired Air Force Colonel?”
“I never said that. You told me.”
“Well, did you ever check into that? I mean while you were looking for him?”
“I can’t say. I’m sure somebody did. Say, how are you doing now? No more strange things in your yard?”
“The only thing that’s strange is that I’m not the only one who doesn’t remember stuff. I think everybody in town has lost his or her memory. Nobody seems to remember Drake, for one thing.”
“Well, you said he kept to himself. Nobody’s ever claimed his shack, what’s left of it? His land?”
“Everybody has forgotten that most of all. I don’t even see reporters anymore. Nobody but the one crank, and no one can seem to remember where he came from or where he lives.”
“That’s not really my concern. But if I head back that way, I’ll check into him. Maybe he knows something that’s making him so interested in you.”
“Yeah, maybe he’s a hunter.”
“Lots of hunters around Grover, I would think. Maybe one of them knows him.”
“Everybody’s a hunter…well, all the men. But nobody knows the crank. And the police aren’t interested as long as he’s not bothering them.”
“Well, good talking to you, Don. Let me know if I can be of any further help.”
When were you any help, I thought to myself. He knew less than I did about anything, or so it seemed anyway.
I kept trying to find out more about the Antarctic volcano and only learned there wasn’t one, not in the dry place I was launched from. I couldn’t find anything about the earlier discovery there and the expedition that had to be called off. It was gone, the place, the story. Even the internet couldn’t remember.
Then, I found out about Prof. Schofeld who was going to be guest lecturer at a relatively nearby university. The notice said
he was going to be talking about quantum computing, among other things. I told Sue I was going to go see him. She seemed pleased that I was interested in a real professor this time.
So there he was behind his podium as his lecture began. He had all the goodies at his disposal for creating tons of equations on a giant screen behind him. Since it was way over my head, I was disappointed and bored as he elaborately illustrated the mathematical principles that theoretically described the behavior of photons and subatomic particles as they influenced the behavior of others over some distance…entanglement, he said, what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”. Then he mentioned the idea of quantum computers.
I nervously waved my hand. “Professor, has anybody ever seen a quantum gate?”
“I’ll be taking questions after my lecture, but no, a quantum gate is a theoretical concept. We will be talking about photons and subatomic particles within the context of developing quantum computers here.”
“But,” I continued to yell out, making everyone uncomfortable, including me, “if someone could get in a big spaceship and travel, say, past the orbit of Pluto, could they find a big, like really big, quantum gate that would have been made by aliens? And inside it could there be visions, or views, of past, present, and future possi…probabilities…that could take place in…multiverses?” I was proud of my use of multiverse.
“Really, I must ask you not to interrupt further. I will be glad to talk with you after this day’s presentation.”
He immediately returned to his lecture, without pause, as if nothing had happened.
At the end, Schofeld took only a few questions, and he certainly refused to call on me. In fact, I got the impression he was eager to leave, although I didn’t know if it was because of me or not. I felt like he probably thought of me the same way I thought of the town crank in Grover.
Still, the experience seemed to open me up to some other possibilities (probabilities?). I decided that I was going to attend more lectures as opportunities became available and signed myself up for notices. I told myself that this could help me in writing my book. Secretly, I was hoping to find someone who would listen, and, in a perfect world, someone who would believe me.
Speaking of perfect worlds, one of the next lectures was to be on Voltaire and Candide.
Chapter 16 - BETTER ANGELS, OR WORSE
I didn’t remember much that I’d read in high school, but of the classics that were required, Candide was one of my favorites. I thought Voltaire was easy to read, and funny, and I loved the stories, and especially the preposterous character Pangloss and his talk of this being the best of all worlds. I thought that the best of all worlds wouldn’t have Pangloss in it, and in my mind, I started eliminating others who wouldn’t be there too. I also liked the idea of work taking care of “boredom, vice, and need”. That seemed like my farm to me. I was working in my own “garden”.
I couldn’t really share such ideas with anybody else. Nobody in Grover ever talked about Voltaire. I had to keep it to myself, the way I did everything else.
I was polite this time. I didn’t want the lecturer trying to run me off…or running away from me. But I did ask him if he thought that, if all worlds were possible, that one of them would surely be perfect.
“It would, of course, depend on your definition of perfection,” he replied. “What’s perfect to one, would not necessarily be perfect to another.”
“But with infinite possibilities, could there be one that would be perfect to everybody?”
“With infinite possibilities, everyone could want the same thing. It occurs to me that even in the imperfect world that we have, everyone wants very nearly the same things. At least when it comes to necessities they do, but some want more of those things that everybody wants, and they see themselves as having them, safely, only if others are deprived of them.”
“A perfect world would have no shortages,” declared I.
“A perfect world would need not only to have no shortages, but it would need no shortage of safety, or the perception of safety. A lack of the perception of safety, along with observed, or imagined, inequality, results in conflict, even if all things in the perfect world are in abundance. Given that, a perfect world could be very similar to the world we have.”
“If that’s so, then Pangloss would be right after all.”
“I see your point. But as long as we think it’s imperfect, which evidently most of us do, it’s not going to be perfect, perfect or not.”
I did enjoy hearing this lecturer, and I appreciated that he didn’t mock my kinds of weird ideas, the way everybody else usually did.
Another voice from the audience: “But The Bible says the world was made in perfect love and perfect trust. We should listen to our better angels.”
This confusing mix of philosophies threw me off my train of thought. But I thought, if you had seen the angels that I did, would you think them better, or worse? Or much worse, before they comfort us with kindness and beautiful scenes.
One lecturer was a sci-fi author. He mostly talked about the books he had written, and his movie deals. I thought, I don’t know how believable he is but his perfect world is a pretty good one. Not much scarcity in it at least.
I told him afterward that I was writing a sci-fi book. He asked me its title and I replied “Angels of the Quantum Gate”. He said he liked the sound of it. I told him I would try to make it as believable as possible.
“It can still be quite fanciful, but if you’re taking a hard approach, then you need to stick with scientific accuracy.”
“I’m making it as accurate as I can. Well, kinda. It’s intended to be fiction but kind of nonfiction, if that makes sense.”
“If it makes sense to you, then maybe it will make sense to others.”
“I need to tell a story. It’s a totally implausible story. But I need to tell it. I need to tell what really happened.” I guess I was fishing for some kind of response that I didn’t really expect.
“It’s okay if your story is implausible. But you need to make it believable to the reader. Your words need to take the reader with you.”
“I don’t know if my words can do that. I’m just telling it like it is.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“It has to be fiction for anyone to believe it.”
“You seem to be telling me that you’re wanting to tell a true story, but in your book you are telling it as fiction, because if you tell it as true it won’t be believed.”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m telling you.”
“I see. Well, I wish you good luck with it.”
“Who should I send it to?”
“I can’t help you with that. But I guess you can self-publish. There seems to be a lot of that nowadays. Don’t expect much though. Give it away. See how it’s rated.”
“That’s what I thought I’d do.”
“But don’t make it too, uh, factual. You need a hero. Readers want Buck Rogers. Not Bambi Rogers.”
He seemed pleased with his joke. I thought, Bambi was a buck.
“You sound like Drake.”
“Who’s Drake?”
“A friend who got abducted by aliens. Or maybe he is an alien.”
“Funny. Hey, I’ve got to go. Thanks for coming by and buying my book. I hope you enjoy it.”
And that was the result of pushing my truth. It was truth to nobody else. It wasn’t fiction either. It was imagined probabilities once again. That’s what I was writing, after all. “What dreams may come” when we shuffle off a mortal coil they’ll give us pause all right. The mortal coil of a quantum gate, complete with angels, of mercy, of mortalities. Infinite mortalities. How many ways we can die. Or live. Or write.
Once again, I was aware of where my imagination could go. Off the cliff entirely. How deep is the abyss, and how many?
I got a room this time. I didn’t want to drive home.
****
“Well, I’ll be…Air Force Colonel J
ames Drake, right here in my room. Don’t you know I want to go to sleep? Which one are you, anyway? Did you know that nobody has ever met you but me?”
“You’re a lucky guy, Don.”
“I’d be luckier if you weren’t here.”
“Now, Don. You used not to talk to me like that. I thought we were friends.”
“That’s back when I thought you were real…and a human being.”
“I’m still real, Don. Just as real as your story at least. You said that it’s true fiction.”
“I wanna know…was the cornfield real? The oval, the cave, the rocket ship to...to…”
“The Mysts of Venus? The Red Deaths of Mars? The Witches of Neptune?”
“The Puppies of Pluto? Those are old stories. How do you even know about them? You with your UFO books and Un-Alienable-Rights Brothers. Your self-evidence apparently is nowhere but in my head. And I want to know who put it there.”
“Don...Don…you are testy tonight. Who do you think put me there…in your head? The aliens? The Grays? Enlightened Ones? Maybe all those old stories you used to read. The Moons of Jupiter and Moon Walks and Mr. Moonlight.”
“You are speaking nonsense. But then you are nonsense, Jim. You’re the ghosts of Christmases past, present, and future, which are all the same, imagined and not, this pixel or that, leading me down the quantum brick road, to the abyss, alive here, dead there, red tie, blue tie. You’re dead, Jim. Dead to me. Dead to everybody. Go away. Leave me alone. There’s more of grave than of gravy about you.”
And then he was gone. Vanished. I got up, put on my robe. Took a pill. Wanted a strong one, but didn’t have anything but water. I walked over to the table, looked at the book, flowers and plants of somewhere. The book was open. A picture. Green with blue or purple flowers. A root that looked like a man. Damn it, Jim! A goddamn mandrake!
I got dressed. Left the plastic key in the room. Got the hell out of there. Drove home. I shouldn’t have. I was in no condition to drive. Sue ran out when she saw my headlights.
Angels of the Quantum Gate Page 8
