What Lies Beyond the Stars

by Micael Goorjian

  Adam took a sip. It was the strongest, most bitter coffee he’d ever tasted.

  CHAPTER 22

  THE CONVERSATION

  Adam sat down on the wooden bench facing the fire pit behind the cabin. The fire, which must have been well underway when he and Beatrice had arrived, was mostly glowing embers now. With a few pokes with a stick and a couple of well-placed logs, Coates expertly brought it back to life.

  “Are you warm enough?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I’m fine, thanks.” Adam actually wasn’t fine. Even with Coates nearby, he found the woods unnerving. It’s so damn quiet out here, Adam thought. Lurking just beneath the little noises—his breath, the creaks of the wooden bench, the crunching sound his shoes made on the frosty earth—was a weighty silence that felt almost like a living thing. Why does silence frighten me so much?

  “So.” Coates settled into a nearby camping chair and was looking at Adam. His face was relaxed and open, with an avuncular look that seemed to say that everything was going to be okay. But everything isn’t okay, Adam thought. That awful silence was really goading him now, inviting a sticky dread to well in his gut. Adam racked his brain for appropriate things to say, just to fill the void, but then, to his surprise, Coates set his cup on the ground next to him, took a deep breath, bowed his head slightly, and closed his eyes.

  Okay . . . Adam waited. Am I supposed to say something? Or do something? He readjusted his hands on his lap—making scratchy fabric sounds. His hands felt awkward now, so he shifted them again—more scratchy sounds. His breathing was halting, and his thoughts were racing like a swarm of wasps. Is he taking a nap? Did he have a heart attack? I thought we came out here to talk.

  After a time Adam found himself imitating Coates. He closed his eyes and tried to sit still and quiet. But before long his body began to rebel, itching and twitching in every conceivable manner. Why is this so damn difficult? He suddenly had an overwhelming urge to check his cell phone, which was in a gully somewhere on the road to Mendocino. Adam’s eyes popped open, and he saw that Coates still had not moved.

  The fire made a loud hiss, and then, to Adam’s horror, another sound began to fill his head. It was the maddening ring of his tinnitus, rising up as if to fill that unbearable silence. Fearing a panic attack, Adam quickly pressed a finger to his ear.

  “That.”

  Adam looked across the fire. Coates was still sitting with his eyes closed. Did he say something? Adam wasn’t sure. But then Coates continued to speak in a low voice. “That . . . is not your enemy. Don’t pull away from it. Welcome it, like you would an old friend.”

  As Coates spoke Adam felt something inside him slowly relax, creating a small space detached enough for him to step into. The dread was still there, rising from his gut to his chest, the tinnitus was still there ringing violently in his head, but a small part of Adam seemed to separate from it all.

  “Focus on the fire.” Coates’s voice was soft.

  Adam did as he was told. There was a spot low in the coals that Adam found himself drawn to, a small cave deep within the logs, glowing orange and white. As Adam kept his eyes focused on this one spot, he felt himself falling in toward it. The crackling of the fire grew louder, displacing the ringing sound; the warmth was now filling his chest, burning away the dread. Adam heard a hollow pop, possibly from a log, and then everything fell silent. It was like being inside a bubble. The stillness of the woods, which had seemed so threatening, had given way to something altogether different. This new silence seemed to accept Adam, to invite him into it. And he began to feel a subtle vibration fill his body, replacing the panic that had been about to overwhelm him. Blinking several times, he looked around. He was sitting in front of the same fire pit in the same woods behind Virgil Coates’s cabin. But something had changed. Everything he looked at seemed clearer, more vibrant. The towering redwoods around them weren’t just trees anymore. They seemed to have come to life—shifting, breathing, reaching proudly into the night sky.

  The stars also appeared brighter. Closer. Adam had the uncanny feeling of no longer being outside, but of somehow being inside the world around him. He was part of it all, and it was part of him.

  Across the fire Virgil Coates was watching Adam intently. Panther eyes, yes, but they also conveyed a sense of infinite compassion. Adam suddenly understood he was no longer sitting with a sitcom grandpa in a Rain Man jacket. He was in the presence of a truly remarkable human being. Not just a charismatic personality like Adiklein, but a man of an immense inner strength. If an asteroid were to hit the earth right now, Adam thought, and blow everything to smithereens, the man in front of me would not be shaken by it. Not in the least.

  “Here you can speak from your heart,” Coates finally said. “You know how to do that. It’s not something you ever forget.”

  Adam wasn’t sure he was capable of speaking at all. His entire body had begun to feel heavy and sedated.

  “I’m not sure . . . I can.” It took a moment before Adam realized the voice was his own. It didn’t sound like his voice, even though he had felt it resonate in his chest.

  Coates didn’t respond. He seemed to be listening to what came after Adam’s words. Then he said, “What is it that you want to know?”

  What came next from Adam spilled out unbidden. “I want to know who I am. I want to know why I’m here. I want to know . . . what I’m supposed to do, really supposed to do.” Adam’s head began to flood with judgments railing against the clumsy things coming out of his mouth. There were so many intelligent questions he had dreamed of putting to Coates, but here he was babbling on like a five-year-old.

  Coates’s eyes held Adam’s, giving his full attention to every word. After a long silence he asked gently, “Are you afraid of death?”

  The question cut right through Adam’s mental clamor, hitting on an underlying truth he had not seen was there. “Yes.” Adam took a deep breath, and tears appeared in his eyes. There was no emotion with them; it was simply a release. “Yes, I am . . . I can remember now, as a boy back in Little River, there was this kitten. And I remember watching it play . . . in a dirt driveway, next to this old truck. It had some fishing wire and it was all tangled up in it, wriggling around. Then someone started up the truck and was backing up, and the kitten wasn’t able to move in time and . . . and I watched as the tire slowly backed over it.” Adam looked down at his open palms. “I heard it mew for a few seconds, and then it was over. The kitten’s little body was crushed and limp, when just moments before it had been so . . . full of life.

  “That night I remember for the first time understanding that one day I’d be dead too. And I wondered what that would feel like. What does it feel like not to be anymore? The thought terrified me so much that I couldn’t sleep. I had asthma pretty bad as a kid, so I already worried that if I fell asleep I might not wake up again. And so I promised myself that I wouldn’t go to sleep ever again. It sounds silly now, but I remember being so serious about it. I just didn’t want to let go of the urgency I felt to . . . be. As if giving in to sleep was somehow accepting the prospect of someday not being. Like the kitten.”

  Adam smiled. “I think I lasted a day, maybe two, struggling to keep my eyes open.” Adam looked at Coates. “Since then, I guess you could say I’ve slept quite a lot. And lately it feels like I’ve been sleeping through most of my adult life.”

  “Would you say that the fear you experienced as a child might be related to the panic you struggle with now?”

  Adam nodded. Years of psychotherapy with Dr. M. hadn’t taken him as far as Virgil Coates had gone in just a few minutes.

  Coates picked up a stick and poked the fire. A swirl of sparks burst into the air, and Adam watched them float up into the night sky.

  “What if I told you that what you’re after is not necessarily answers to your questions, although they are important. What if what you’re looking for is, in truth, that intimate connection to the world you once had as a child . . . that sense of everything being
woven together, and you were not separate from all this, but part of it.”

  Coates looked at Adam to make sure he was following. Adam nodded. “But as you grew older,” Coates continued, “the part of you that could see that aspect of the world fell asleep, and the world as it truly is disappeared from you. The pain you feel of loss is your growing awareness that this other world still exists—another life you’re meant to be living.”

  “Yes, like the man in your book, searching for the Hidden Domain . . . but I thought that was just a metaphor? Some unobtainable utopia, something not real.”

  “I assure you, it’s quite real. You’ve just been taught to no longer see it.” Coates took a moment before continuing. “And now you are too busy, like everyone, not just in our culture, but throughout the modern world. We are all too busy in the pursuit of what we’ve been brought up believing we need to focus on.”

  Coates picked up his coffee mug and took a sip.

  “We need to get things to give us comfort, we need achievements to give us a sense of self-respect, we need money to give us a sense of value, we need to appear a certain way—in other words, happiness has become synonymous with the satisfaction of desire. And so, to satisfy desires, systems have been put in place, not only to satisfy our desires but also to create new ones in order to keep it all moving. More and more products must be invented, more and more things must be bought. Part of the very nature of desire is that it can’t be satisfied for long, so once we’re hooked by something, breaking free becomes a terrifying prospect.

  “But there is another part of who we are, a side that, you could say, we have lost touch with almost entirely. Sometimes we experience it in moments of great crisis, or in the presence of extraordinary beauty or great love. Maybe there is an earthquake, or maybe it’s the moment your child is born, or sometimes for no apparent reason at all—you simply step off a plane in a new country and look around and realize—‘I’m here . . . I’m me . . .’ And in that moment, it’s as if this other self appears. For a moment you are alive in a completely different way . . . and then it’s gone.”

  Adam knew the feeling, at least he had since returning to Mendocino. “But why can’t I feel like that all the time? Why does that ‘me’ have to go away?”

  “Because it hasn’t been fully born yet; it’s been covered over. The thing we call ourselves is largely cultural conditioning. We take the product of our outside influences to be who we are. I am my name, my career, my complicated past, my ambitious future, my social security number, my credit card debt. And if I ever have doubts about who I am, I’ve got plenty of relatives and friends with endless pictures to prove it.” Coates gave a hint of a smile.

  “This patina of information covers this other self like a cocoon until this other, true self becomes too weak to appear on its own. And so, a kind of inner struggle is needed to help that self to break free. That small voice inside you is longing to be heard, but first we need to learn how to nurture it.”

  “Nurture it how? With what?”

  Coates leaned forward in his chair, the light from the fire catching in his pupils.

  “With attention.”

  The word hung in the air between them. Attention. The same word at the heart of Adiklein’s TED Talk. But the way Virgil Coates invoked it was as if intoning the name of an ancient god. “Your own attention, that is what you are starved for. Your attention, which today serves the dreams of other men.”

  Coates’s eyes glowed. “This thing we call attention is the most uniquely human characteristic we have. Your attention is the one thing you can truly call your own. Everything else belongs to those outside currents existing through you, regardless of you, pulling you this way and that. But what you choose to give your attention to is truly unique. Your attention is who you really are.” Coates allowed Adam a moment to consider this.

  “And yet, almost every moment of every hour of every day, it is taken away from you—stolen by the endless distractions of our busy outer world: getting, doing, needing, buying, worrying, craving, and a hundred thousand other attachments that have hooked into your being and are quite literally feeding on you.”

  Adam couldn’t help but think of Lust 4 Blood.

  “Constantly bleeding attention, we are too weakened to make any meaningful contact with our inner world. We never come to know that what we call attention has the capacity to develop in ways quite unknown to the ordinary mind.

  “And yet, to become aware of this hidden domain is not only our birthright, it’s our duty. If humankind doesn’t begin to evolve inwardly, soon I’m afraid we’ll see life on the planet change in other, less fortunate ways.”

  This last sentence gave Adam a chill. “You mean we’ll self-destruct?”

  “Our existence is not the only thing at stake. Human beings are part of a much larger system, and like the other life forms that came before us, we arose on this planet to serve a very definite purpose. One we’ve lost touch with.

  “And now, unfortunately,” Coates continued gravely, “there are powerful forces out there working to keep humanity the way it is, holding us on our current course. Certain kinds of men, some of whom you and I both know, who feed on the sleep of others.”

  Adam nodded, understanding whom Coates must be referring to.

  “Like parasites. It has worked this way throughout history,” Coates went on. “Charismatic individuals come to possess an incomplete understanding of this inner domain, and then use it to manipulate the masses. An invisible slavery, woven so deftly into our cultural fabric that we don’t even notice it’s there.”

  Coates took a deep breath before setting his mug back down beside him. His fierce eyes focused back on Adam. “Despite what appear to be impossible odds, Adam, there is still hope. I’ve seen proof. It doesn’t take many people, working together in the right way, to make a crack in our prison walls.”

  Coates looked into the fire, as if looking into the past. “There’s a phrase that an old student of mine always liked to say. ‘In times of change, a single, conscious man can equal a million sleeping.’”

  Adam quietly repeated the words to himself. The embers of the fire had dimmed considerably, and Coates made no move to add more wood. Adam felt a sense of relief. There was still so much he wanted to know, but he realized that he had been given more than enough to digest in one night.

  As if sensing this, Coates once again bowed his head and closed his eyes; the conversation was apparently over. Adam became aware of the deep silence all around them, and for the second time, it gave him a profound sense of well-being. He relaxed into it and noticed the return of those subtle vibrations, warm and tingly inside his body. A stronger sensation centered in his solar plexus seemed to rise and fall like his breath, but in its own rhythm. Relaxing further, Adam felt his eyes begin to flutter.

  He heard a voice. Someone or something was speaking to him. And it was coming from inside his own chest. He had to be imagining this, he thought, or inventing it. But the voice felt so real, so familiar. It seemed to be speaking a language that was not English, not even words really. Adam was able to understand only fragments; it was trying to tell him something about the earth, about the deeper nature of things. The earth is not what you think it is.

  Adam began to wonder if Virgil Coates was somehow doing this. It wasn’t his voice, but at the same time, Adam sensed he might in some way be facilitating the experience. Adam tried to relax into his chest again, allow his thoughts to recede. The voice was still there, and this time Adam had a vague memory of having come in contact with it before. In dreams, in some distant garden. A strained, wheezing voice telling him something about his roots and branches being inverted. And now it was communicating with him again, trying to tell him something about humanity and a requirement that Adam himself must fulfill, an unmet personal obligation of some kind. But what could Adam possibly do to help? He was just one person among billions crawling on the planet’s surface, a speck of stardust in an infinite cosmos.

>   Adam had drifted into his head again. But then as if to overcome his doubts, the voice pulled him back with unmistakable force and clarity. “One human is capable of making all the difference. One life may be all it takes to tip the balance.”

  When Adam came back to his surroundings, the redwoods had returned to the shadows, the stars had receded into an inky sky, and the man in the chair by the fire was once again a grandfatherly figure, preoccupied with picking something out of his coffee mug.

  “My daughter should be back soon,” Coates said. After a beat he looked up at Adam seriously. “She’s smoking again, isn’t she?” Before Adam could respond, Coates added, “No, no, that’s all right, you don’t have to answer that.” Coates smiled. “She’s her own woman. I think meeting you has made her happy. I thank you for that.”

  Adam shrugged. “I only wish I had met her sooner. You as well.”

  “Ships in the night, as they say.” Coates stretched his legs and stood up. “Well, my ship apparently isn’t big enough for my damn books, so I’d better go sort that out.” He looked over at Adam. “Coming?”

  “I think I’ll stay out here a bit longer.”

  Coates gave a nod then walked toward the cabin. When he got to the porch, he stopped and looked back. “Have you ever read Dante? The Divine Comedy?”

  “Just the comic book version,” Adam said apologetically. “And to be honest, I just skimmed it for a video game I was working on.”

  “I see.” Coates smiled before his face became serious. “To drastically alter the course of one’s life midway through the journey, that is no small feat. It’s one thing to get lost in a dark wood, but in order to descend like Dante, to go all the way down, a great deal is required. A sacrifice that you may or may not survive.”

  “What kind of sacrifice?” Adam asked warily.