by Jack L Knapp
I directed him to the site I’d found and let him take a minute to scan through the article.
T waited while I read and thought about the article.
T understood immediately.
We broke the connection and I shut down my computer. I went out front and looked north. There was nothing to be seen, of course. But I couldn’t help feeling a chill when I thought of the article I’d read.
Chapter Seven
Shezzie had gone to Santa Fe to spend a day shopping. No longer so worried about T since the symptoms of his PTSD had subsided, she intended to catch up on what she had missed. She had become acquainted with a woman in Jemez Springs and now the two were off to do woman things.
T found himself with little to do and an unanswered question, of how Ray had been able to float in the air. The subject nagged at him…how could Ray have discovered a Talent that neither he nor Shezzie possessed? For that matter, no one in the School had been able to do anything like levitate. Finally, he decided to see if he might not find a solution.
T had developed astonishing powers of concentration as he worked to improve his Talents. The now-simple task of shifting objects around required that he go far beyond the old exercise of imagining bricks in a wall, of asking how many one could visualize using only what the mind could see. Imagine them floating in front of you, look at each rectangular shape, think about the texture, then direct sufficient force to lift bricks or whatever other object he had visualized. He no longer tried to count bricks in that exercise; he had learned to see the entire wall, to a distance of more than twenty feet to each side of the selected brick. Each brick, anywhere; whether in the middle, or one two bricks above that, or on the side, he had cultivated the ability to ‘see’ each of them. His Talent consisted of being able to apply force to the selected object and change its relationship to other objects. T thought there was no one in the world who could do what he now did.
Ray might be nearly as strong, but T had developed a degree of control that Ray didn’t have. Not yet, anyway; perhaps he might develop it in time, just as T had done. Experience made a huge difference in the ability to employ Talent.
Sitting under a tree a few feet from the cabin, one of the few still remaining, T thought about the problem. Finally, a possibility occurred to him. He had pushed pine needles out of the way to keep them from sticking him when he sat down. Perhaps it was a matter not of lifting, as he routinely did, but of pushing?
Rather than lifting a tree in order to rip it from the ground, T tried to empty his mind and just push lightly against the magnificent old ponderosa that Shezzie had insisted he save when he began clearing trees and brush from around the cabin.
His first effort tumbled him backward with no apparent effect on the tree. T smiled, and tried again.
By midafternoon he felt he had the Talent under reasonable control. There were practical problems to work through…how high might he push himself, did it make a difference if he sat in the air, or stood, or lay flat as he floated above the ground…but he had at least a working knowledge of the new Talent.
It was time to share his newfound knowledge with Ray.
With that, we broke the connection.
#
T resumed his previous activities. He amused himself by floating…in reality, pushing away from a selected section of ground until he drifted up. Finally he was sitting, legs crossed, above the giant ponderosa. He held that position for a minute before drifting slowly back to the ground. Soon he was repeating the same exercise while facing away from the tree, then slowly rotating head-over-heels as he floated over the tree, and each time he slowly descended to a crouched feather-soft landing on the opposite side. The final exercise he performed was to float up until he was level with the top of the tree, then simply stop pushing until he began to fall. He quickly formed the bubble and waited until he bounced against the ground. The final part of the exercise was to collapse the bubble, then try to catch himself by using levitation before he fell the remaining few inches to the ground.
T was well pleased with what he’d accomplished, but he decided he wasn’t yet ready to share it with Shezzie when she came back from her shopping expedition that afternoon. He helped her float her purchases into the cabin then took her to dinner. The two enjoyed a glass of wine…red for T, white for Shezzie…before retiring for the night.
He slept the night through with no recurrence of the nightmares. T’s dreams were dominated by the feeling of elation he felt while sitting on air, looking at the world from above the tallest tree in the vicinity.
#
Ray:
I arrived at the cabin on Saturday morning. I had brought a box of doughnuts and we shared a doughnut apiece with coffee, regular for T and me, half-caff for Shezzie.
Shezzie was glad to see me and decided to let us do whatever T intended. She had a number of things that she wanted to research on the internet, so when T made a token offer for her to accompany us while we ‘looked around the mountains’ she refused.
She barely heard us leave, already busy looking into certification avenues for registered nurses. If she could get her certificate back, now that T had apparently worked through his PTSD….
T directed me to one of the parking areas south of Jemez Springs. There are many such, maintained by the state for day-fishermen working the Jemez River for trout. I parked and we walked down to the river.
“OK, T. Show me what you’ve got.”
“How about this, Ray?”
T began to rise. I looked down at his feet as soon as I realized what was happening. First his heels left the ground and he appeared to be standing on his toes, then they lost contact too. He continued to rise while revolving slowly in the air, looking around to ensure that no one was in the vicinity. He paused as soon as he was hanging at an elevation that left his feet level with my head. Slowly, he rotated in position until he was hanging head down. I was left to look at his face, but now it was upside-down.
“How about this one, Ray?”
“That’s…pretty impressive, T. Can you move across the ground, too? Travel, as well as lift?”
“Sure. It’s not as easy but I’m sure I will get better with practice. I spent the afternoon just learning to control myself when I lift, or maybe I should call it levitate. That’s a better word, I guess. As soon as I’ve got an image of the ground locked in mind, it doesn’t matter what orientation I’m at. Or what height I’m at, either. There’s a practical limit to that, at least so far. If I want to go higher, the image I’m holding of the ground has to cover a wider area. Otherwise I don’t have good control.”
T drifted up until he was probably fifteen or twenty feet above the ground, then began drifting. He easily followed the one-way traffic pattern for cars through the parking lot, around the loop at the end and past the bathrooms, then back. Sinking to the ground, looking a bit smug, he told me he was ready to help me try it.
“Link with me, Ray. Just like when you learned how to form your bubble; link up, and I’ll levitate, and you try to follow what I’m doing.”
I formed the link and opened my mind to try to figure out what he was doing. I decided it wasn’t working.
I discovered I was floating some two feet above the parking area. And promptly fell, only to be caught by T before I could hit the ground.
I did as he suggested while working my way along one of the numerous paths that people had worn on their way to the river. I began discovering some of the limitations on this new, wondrous ability almost immediately. My ability to control direction was no more than fair, and trying to gain greater elevation made the problem worse. A toddler, just learning to walk, would have understood. I drifted unsteadily along the path, bobbing erratically whenever my concentration wavered. T followed behind me, rock-steady as he floated along. He might have been strolling along a well-maintained path for all the concern he showed.
Sometimes he’s an easy guy to resent!
I drifted on, and slowly my control improved. The trail was more than a mile long, possibly much longer than that, but I didn’t want to travel too far away from the parking area just yet. I left the small roadside park behind and followed the trail down to the river, then drifted along the bank for a time before turning inland to avoid a fallen tree. The trail led me back to the riverbank and I finally came to a fork, one branch of the path leading downstream to another parking area, the other leading through the cottonwoods back to the parking lot we’d left. I took that one and soon I could see the parking area ahead.
Another car had come in and parked while we followed the trail, so I drifted down, oddly reluctant to resume contact with the solid ground. But I did, and we walked the rest of the way to the Volvo.
We talked as we drove back to Jemez Springs.
“You said you’d managed to get high enough to pass over that pine tree that’s by your cabin?”
“It took a while before I could do it. I think it’s a function of how large an area you can concentrate on. You also have to know how much detail you need in the area you’re visualizing, not too much and not too little. Try to
include every tiny bit of detail and that will limit the size of the area you’re concentrating on, and you won’t be able to let your concentration slide along as you move. At the same time, if you try to visualize too little detail in a larger area, you won’t be able to lift yourself or control the direction if you do manage to get off the ground.
“There has to be a balance using this, not too much detail and not too little. It takes practice. I’ve been using Talent for a long time now so it’s probably easier for me to adapt to this new one.
“I guess it’s just something I’ll need to think about, T. And practice using.”
“Sure. You can do it in the house too, just don’t run into walls or bounce off the ceiling while you’re learning.”
“I suppose I can do that. There was something else I wanted to ask you, not about this. I ran across something while I was researching, and next time you contact Professor Goodfellow you might ask him about it. You know about fracking, right?”
T nodded, and replied, “It’s something about drilling into shale and breaking up the layers to release the oil and gas that’s trapped in the rocks. Drilling companies are doing it a lot now, pretty much all across the west. They’re working in the Dakotas, Wyoming and Colorado too, and in a few places in New Mexico.”
“That’s the part I was curious about. I read that fracking in Ohio has caused earthquakes, small ones. I wondered if that might have something to do with the quakes in Colorado and up by Raton?”
“I can give him a call. I’m not sure if he’ll know, since he’s more interested in volcanoes. But he’ll know someone who might have a better idea about this.”
I dropped T off at the cabin, decided not to accept his offer of a coffee, and headed back down highway 4. I glanced at the parking lot as we passed it. Just looking at that parking lot hadn’t made an impression on me when I drove by before, but I knew I’d never forget it now.
