He raised his eyebrows. “Did you, now? Did she talk to you?”
“No… she just handed it to me and went about her business.”
“I see.”
“Why would she do that? She can’t see me, can she?”
Giddeon smiled. “No, she can’t. She didn’t hand you the pizza, either.”
I answered with my mouth full, “What do you mean… it’s right here? Well, most of it, that is.”
He nodded. “That’s what you remember. Are you sure you can trust your memories?”
I swallowed my bite. “Well, yeah… I think so. You didn’t fabricate another memory for me, did you?”
“Not me,” said Giddeon. “You did this one all by yourself… I just kicked up your hunger a notch.”
“That’s why I was starving. Anyway, I was just standing there and she handed it to me. I saw her do it as plain as day.”
Giddeon took a bite of his sandwich. When it had transited down his esophagus, he licked some bar-b-que sauce from his finger. “Your brain likes to keep things rational. It’s easier to accept that someone handed you some food rather than acknowledging that it just appeared in your hands.”
“You make food appear for me all the time. It’s no big deal.”
He held up his newly cleaned phalanx. “That’s different. It’s ‘me’ doing it. You’ve come to terms with that. It all has to do with what and where. You wanted the pizza… that’s the ‘what’… but, it was in the glass case… that’s the ‘where’. It was in the wrong ‘where’.”
I knew it was just a matter of time before he used his air quotes in our conversation… sure enough, he had gotten them out.
He continued, “You know you can’t interact with people over there in ‘reality’, but that didn’t stop your brain from thinking you did. It makes a lot more sense to your senses than pizza just materializing in your hands… hence, the memory.”
I pondered for a moment. Then, I said, “Maybe we did interact, but it was in another frame of reference… I just didn’t crash her normal system.”
“Possible… that’s what I used to think, too. I used to have ‘help’ getting the things I wanted. People would hand me smoothies and fish tacos. A caddie carried my bag and gave me the correct club when I asked for it. Eventually, I realized they just weren’t needed. They weren’t really ‘real’.”
I took that in. Finally, I conjectured, “Well, maybe they are real, and you’re just erasing your memories.”
“Good, young grasshopper… good! Of course, anything’s possible. But, when I hear hooves, I think horses. Not zebras, not gazelles. I go with the most likely probability. Do you really think that there are people just handing over pizza, golf clubs or fish tacos in alternate realities, or, do you think it more likely that we just think they are?”
“So… you’re asking me to believe in magic?”
Giddeon grinned and took another bite of his sandwich. After swallowing it, he replied, “Science just allows you to incrementally believe in magic. Remember our talk about matter and distance? The ‘points’?”
“Yeah…”
“Everything’s in the same place. There is no distance. There are only two ‘wheres’. ‘There’ and ‘here’… if it’s not ‘there’, then it’s ‘here’.”
“So, I already had the pizza in my hands?”
“Not at first,” Gid replied. “Google something called Quantum Tunneling… old televisions depend on it, by the way. That’s where electrons ‘tunnel’ through the impenetrable barrier of a diode and create a current. They shouldn’t be able to get through, but their fields of probabilities helps them jump across… like pizza through glass,” he smiled. “Sort of like magic… Ask, and you shall receive.”
“Seems like I’ve heard that one, before.”
“That’s how it works… especially, over ‘here’.” More air quotes graced his conversation… apparently there were a lot of those stored up in the other ‘place’.
“How about over ‘there’?” It was my turn to use atmospheric punctuation.
“It’s a little more complicated over there. A lot more inertia involved… tons of overlapping, living, breathing fields.”
“I’m not sure what you’re saying…”
He thought for a moment, the sunlight in his eyes. A pair of designer shades appeared, covering them. Then, he said, “Let’s say you’re in California, but, you want to go visit your brother in Alabama. You picture yourself in his house, talking to him and his wife. That’s where you want to be, so, you leave your boat, get into your car and start driving. You stop at several gas stations and fast food joints along the way. You stay at a hotel. You have a fender-bender in Texas. Eventually, you make it to his house, and there you are, sitting in their living room, munching on chips and dip, drinking beer, watching television and catching up… just like you pictured.”
“Okay… so far, so good.”
“You remember driving. You remember eating. You remember bumping into another guy’s car in a parking lot in Texas. All of the people you interacted with along the way remember you, too. They can verify that you came through on your way to Alabama. Lots of witnesses.”
“Alright…”
“Now, suppose you erased all of the memories of your trip. Every single one. Then, one moment you would be on your boat, and the next… Viola! You’re at Jeremy’s house. It would be like you were teleported there. Like on Star Trek.”
I furled my brow and mulled it over for a while. Then, I responded, “Well, what about all of the people I interacted with on the trip… they would remember me, wouldn’t they?”
“Exactamundo! That’s where the inertia is.”
“Memories have inertia?”
“Everything has inertia.”
I thought about that for a moment. Then, I asked, “What about inertia? Does inertia have inertia?”
Giddeon burst out laughing. “I think you just went to 5.8 percent!”
“I was just trying to be funny,” I said while shrugging my shoulders.
“Ever heard the term, comedic genius? It is a form of genius, you know? Comedians are masters of irony. They go right to the linchpin of truth. The thing holding a particular reality in balance… and, then, they wiggle it. That’s what makes you see how precarious it all is.”
“If you say so.” I wanted to get back to our teleportation conversation. “So, if I wiped out my memories, I would have to wipe out the memories of everyone else I encountered on the trip in order to really ‘magically’ appear?”
“And, the memories of everyone they interacted with, and the memories of the ones they interacted with, and, so on,” explained Giddeon.
“Hmmm… so reality is sort of like multi-level marketing? Everyone contributes?”
“We all strut and fret our hour on stage… and, the whole world is that stage. We’re all in the audience, too.”
“Humph,” I grunted. “What about if there were no other people? No audience? Would it be easier to erase the memories, then?”
“Good question! ‘If a tree falls in the forest’ kind of thing. I think over there, there’s always an audience. I think maybe the world itself is kind of an audience. Matter and energy, particles and sub-particles. Over here… not so much. Maybe the pieces are too busy on that side to give us much attention over here. More layers and layers of observation going on,” he said.
“Back to quantum physics?”
“You can’t go back to something you never left.”
“So, I would be still on my boat, having never really left it, when I’m at Jeremy’s?”
“Nice segue…that’s basically right.” Giddeon seemed very pleased.
I nodded and mulled. “But, if there’s no such thing as distance, there’s no such thing as matter, and particles of matter make up my boat and me, not to mention other people and pizza.”
“Oh, what a wicked web we weave.”
“Is this the beginning of a Shakespeare kick, now?”
“Thank God they made you read him in high school… that one isn’t Shakespeare, by the way.”
I shrugged, again. “My mistake. I preferred ‘The Fantastic Four’, ‘Batman’ and ‘Superman’.”
“How well I remember,” said the obviously more jam-packed portion of my brain.
I finished the last of my pizza and had a drink of Coke. “So, if there are no particles, over there and especially over here… exactly where is my audience?”
“Confusing, isn’t it? Have you ever used a dictionary?”
“Of course. Just because I’m slow-witted, compared to you, doesn’t mean I’m not witted.” I’m sure I sounded somewhat offended.
He grinned. “Okay, when you look up a definition of a word, what do you find?”
“A description of what the word means.”
“And, how is that description relayed to you?”
“It’s written down in a nice, concise sentence.”
“I see. And what is that sentence composed of?”
“Words?”
“That’s right. Words. Words are defined by using other words… and, those words are defined by using yet more words… on and on, in an endless quest for substance.”
I took that in, and finally, replied, “Kind of odd, when you think about it too hard. But, words are used to describe things. When you say ‘tree’, I see an image of a tree… I don’t always think in words.”
He nodded enthusiastically. “Yes! Words are used to describe the material world, which is made of particles. Particles make up your brain, which pictures the tree. The question is, can you have particles without description, or description without particles?”
“Chicken and the egg?” I questioned.
“Pretty much. You know, lots of religions and cultures talk about the importance of words… the Toltecs, for example… summarized quite nicely in that book, ‘The Four Agreements’.”
“Never read it.”
“You need to get in, more.”
I assumed he had made a weak pun on an old saying and let it pass. He was a bit lacking in the humor department, sometimes… actually, most times… in my humble opinion.
Giddeon went on. “Why, just look at what the Bible says about the subject… ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ ”
I scratched my chin. “I remember that verse from Sunday school… I thought the Word was referring to Jesus.”
He smiled, “That’s probably what John was trying to point out, because in the Old Testament, the ‘Word’ of God has to do with the personification of God’s revelation. But, there’s more. The Greeks of that time translated the Jewish word for ‘Word’, as ‘Logos’… and Logos was thought of as sort of a bridge between God and the material universe. John may have cleverly been speaking to both Jewish and Greek cultures by choosing his opening sentence to introduce Jesus; he probably knew how it would be translated… God in the flesh. The bridge between the transcendental and the material. The flesh is made of particles, by the way, so I think, maybe, there’s another meaning, too… or, a supposition to the meaning, if you will.”
“What’s that?” I asked, tentatively, not sure I would be prepared for the answer.
“Words… are alive.”
Of course, my intuition had been right on the money. “Words are alive?”
“Words, thoughts, feelings… apparently, God was the first to have them. He was and is them.”
“So you believe in God?”
“I believe in lots of things. The question is, does anything believe in me?”
I grunted, again, doing my best to keep up with his thought process. It struck me as odd that, apparently, it was also my thought process… the 90 plus percent I normally had no access to.
Giddeon continued, “Words have no real meaning without other words, and you need particles to picture words… at least we do… I can’t speak for God. Words and particles are like two sides of the same coin. They depend on each other for sustenance.”
“So, let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re saying that if words are ‘alive’, then particles, being a kissing cousin to words, are also alive?”
He pushed his sunglasses up to the top of his head.
“Not the way I would have put it, but, yeah… pretty much. Also, one word does you no good. Neither does one particle. You need lots and lots of each to build upon.”
I looked around and listened to the daily, Coronado sounds in the perfectly temperate air. Tourists were chatting with each other as they passed by all of the shops.
“Seems like there’s plenty of both,” I finally said.
“Yep… no shortage of either,” he confirmed. “It helps if you just think of the universe as a novel. It has a plethora of words, because without words you would have no story. And, what good is a story without someone to read it? Not only do words have no meaning without other words, they have no meaning without someone to understand that meaning… and, that someone is made of particles.” He paused, to make sure I was following. “Words need particles, and particles need words. Someone has to write the words, and, someone has to read the words. Someone… or something if you’re not religious… has to make the particles, and, someone has to be the particles.” He held his hands out, palms upwards and then turned them over to use his fingers in the next sentence. “Particles, like words, in my opinion, are ‘alive’… kind of like in quantum physics where they seem to actually be making choices on atomic and sub-atomic levels.”
Once again, air quotations had punctuated a remark. I thought of The Double Slit Experiment, and, also, one called The Quantum Eraser that he had explained to me.
“In the end,” said Giddeon, “someone has to read, or there really is no novel. Someone has to be, or there is no place to be.”
He relayed that last bit of information just before he finished off his sandwich.
“To be, or not to be?” I said.
“Now, look who’s quoting old Spear-shaker,” Giddeon said after downing his last bite and taking a drink of cola. He took the other cookie from out of his front shirt pocket and carefully unwrapped it.
“It’s about the only other one I remember,” I confessed. We stood up to leave. I looked around at all of the people, places and things in my vicinity. “So… tell me this… how can particles be alive if there are no particles? You know, if there’s no distance, there are no particles… nothing is alive to observe me.”
Giddeon grinned. “I think you may have just answered your own question.”
“How so?” I queried.
He smiled. “Nothing… is alive.”
I grunted, once again, as I digested his newest bit of information. I seemed to be doing that a lot back then… grunting, that is. I’m not sure if a grunt counts as a word, but it does seem to stand nicely on its own. It was all a little too much, and I understand that phrase, ‘Bitten off more than you can chew.’ a little better, now. Giddeon munched on his dessert as we walked. Another question occurred to me as we made our way back onto the sidewalk bordering First Street where The Sandman was still working on his creations… glistening particles of reality were being arranged just precisely so by his diligent efforts.
“How long is the novel?”
Giddeon took a slurp of his drink that he had carried with him, and then deposited his paper cup into a trash can that I’m pretty sure wasn’t there on our trip in. ‘It’s a work in progress… it’s a work in progress.”
We headed back to the car. It sure felt like a long walk.
Chapter 33
Back on the boat, after the sun had set, Gid and I picked up the guitars and jammed. After seeing the nuclear devastation that afternoon, a chord progression had been playing in my head. It was hard, and rocking. Discordant, with a driving beat. As we worked it out, the words just seemed to come. Within thirty minutes, it was complete:
New Mexico White sands, turned into glass.
I think I see m
y reflection there, what a pain in the ass.
The devil took a holiday, and, left it all up to us…
said we do it better anyway, turning dust into dust.
Look what's out of the bottle…
it's in all of us.
Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynmann… surely, you jest.
And, Einstein, your equations, are such a human mess.
Coronado Dreaming (The Silver Strand Series) Page 12
