by Mark Howard
At the hospital, she seemed to recall having a bit more mass, and although she didn't walk then, but glided, still — it felt a bit like walking. Now, however, she felt more freedom to move about, less tied to the imprint of how her physical body moved, and this freedom was intoxicating. Her "never again" commitment forgotten like a tequila hangover, she began to explore and play. If she imagined herself as her physical body, she found herself becoming more substantial, and sunk to the floor as gravity took hold. Likewise, if she imagined herself as a small floating ball of energy, she felt even lighter, and could travel much faster, zipping from place to place with ease. It seemed she could manage her density by focusing her thought patterns, reminding her of her graduate course on self-hypnosis, which worked on similar principles. Finding the lighter state to be much more fun, she sped through the door and into the hallway without a sound.
In the hall, she moved vertically, spiralling down through the floor to suddenly find herself in Lenora's room. She quietly watched over the little one soundly asleep in her crib, her soft breaths barely audible over the hum of a white-noise-producing fan. She hadn't realized Lenora's room, which she had been in so many times before, was just below hers. It seemed the little girl's bedroom was in a different place entirely, yet in reality it was separated from hers by only a few inches of insubstantial material. If she were embodied, she might have begun to contemplate the idea that most barriers between people were simply mental constructs, but in her state it didn't seem to merit much attention.
As she watched the girl sleep, she felt such love towards this little person that it seemed to actually flow out of her and into the child. Coincident to this, Lenora began to stir, stretching and yawning while grasping onto the side rails of the crib. Her sleepy eyes opened, and searching around, found Jess. "Ow" she murmured, and with a slight smile, drifted back to sleep. An overpowering joy coursed through Jess, as her earlier feelings of rejection, buried in her subconscious, were excavated and incinerated in the light of this happiness.
She returned to her body, relieved of a large burden, and slept soundly.
~ 11 ~
Jess began a nightly habit of visiting little Lenora, discovering that the simple act of setting the intention for a visit as she drifted off to sleep would result in her awakening outside her body around three-thirty in the morning. During most of these visits, Lenora would not awaken, but the times she did, she would again softly say "ow", or present a small loving smile, or a giggle, before slumbering off again.
Jess soon began to feel uncomfortable about these visits, as she was, in a sense, invading her friend's privacy, but rationalized it away in so much as her intentions were loving. Still, it nagged at her, and knowing Gavin — he had unabashedly confessed to experiencing spiritual visitors in the past — she thought he might be more accepting if she fessed up to her nocturnal breaking-and-enterings.
One night, after a visit, she traveled to his bedroom, only to discover Joel asleep alone in the bed. Embarrassed, she backed out into the hall where she noticed a light on in the unused third bedroom — now an office — at the front of the house. Slipping towards it, she turned the corner to discover Gavin sitting at his desk, gazing intently at his laptop.
Although she knew her approach was silent, he immediately glanced up from his work and looked in her direction. His face contorted with confusion, painfully reminding her of her visit with Jay. Frozen with fear, she stood as still as possible, not knowing in what form she appeared to him, but determined to avoid detection. After a few seconds, Gavin — unlike Jay — remained seated, and with a quizzical look on his face, called out.
"Jess?"
A cooling relief washed over her, and nodding, she replied in the affirmative, yet he didn't seem to hear her.
"I'm not sure who you are or what you want, but I'm a little busy right now, so I'd appreciate some privacy."
Jess, noticing the stress in his words, blurted out: "It's me Gavin! Jess!"
This time, there was no reply at all, and he returned to his laptop. After a few moments, however, he looked up furtively, as though checking to see if she was still there. Noticing her again, he quickly looked back down and began to type. She backed out of the room, being careful not to move through any solid material, to avoid disturbing him further. As she rose through the ceiling back into her apartment, she heard a distinct "Thank you" echo down the hall from Gavin's office.
~ 12 ~
"How did you know it was me?"
It was morning, and Jess was at Gavin's door. Gavin, wearing a white bathrobe and holding a mug of coffee, looked tired, but the question perked him up straight away.
"Oh, I could just tell," he said casually.
"But you couldn't hear me? I was screaming at you!"
"Not a word, honey. By the way, what the hell? You freaked me right out. I had a mind to go pound on your door to see if you were still with us. How did you do that?"
"Just something I picked up," she said with a half-smile. "So...what did I look like?"
"It — ah, you, I guess — were just like a swirly, smoky thing. Like someone had been there smoking a cigar or something, and had just left. That's why I was confused for a second, then I realized there was no smell, and the smoke wasn't clearing, you know, like spreading out or thinning or whatever, but it was like mixing and swirling within itself, right? Then your name just popped into my head. That's when I started to freak a little, cause I didn't know it was you, cause you're, like, alive and all, and it didn't look like how my Auntie looks. So now you got to dish: how in the hell did you learn to go astral?"
Jess had heard the term before, but Gavin's saying it made her giggle. "Oh my god that's so 70's!"
"OK, how about out-of-body. Is that better, Science?"
"Yeah. Just a tad more objective. So anyway, I have a confession. Before I visited you, I have been visiting Lenora at night for awhile now. So...sorry?"
"Really," he said squinting his eyes at her, "well, I guess that's OK, but honey, stay your behind out of our boudoir. And no more midnight office visits. Who knows what I might be looking at on my laptop next time."
"NOT A PROBLEM," she teased back. "So, let's talk later, huh? I gotta go, I think my ride's here," she called back, heading down the stairs.
In the taxi on the way to work — taking the El was still out of the question — she rebuked herself for not trusting Gavin more and telling him right away. At work, she was distracted, and couldn't even focus on a paper involving a severed corpus callosum — splitting the brain in half to control epilepsy — which had some fascinating side effects which normally would have kept her rapt attention.
It was around two — tea time — that while checking her Twitter feed, she decided on a whim to Google dissociative disorders, the clinical term for what she thought she was experiencing. The closest match she could find was Depersonalization Disorder, which she vaguely recalled from school. Symptoms included the feeling that one's consciousness has left the body and is observing themselves and their life as if it were a movie. That didn't quite fit her experience, she decided, for a couple of reasons. First, since it is classified as a mental disorder, there is obviously mental distress involved. Her experiences were somewhat distressing in parts, but not overwhelming — in general it was a positive feeling. Second, people with this disorder reported seeing the world through a thick haze, or gauze, or cloudiness. She, on the other hand, could perceive clearly, as if it were even more real than reality. And finally, one common — and strange — symptom was a powerful aversion to fluorescent lighting; and once again, she had none of this, in the body or out — and the hospital had been full of them.
Unsatisfied, she thought of Gavin and Googled astral travel. Scrolling through the Wikipedia entry, she pored over a vast history of similar experiences described throughout most religions, until a modern sounding name finally caught her eye: Raymond Adams. From this link, she learned he was a pioneer of this practice back in the seventies, who ha
d, in fact, funded and developed a center to promote the study of the experience, which continued to thrive — decades after his passing.
Reading through the materials and testimonials, she was surprised that there were people who were willing to pay thousands of dollars for "retreats" in order to learn how to do what she had accidentally stumbled onto. A few clicks later and she was sending a book to her Kindle — Adams' seminal classic Adventures in the Astral Body.
By the end of the workday, she had read through a quarter of the book, and was captivated by his experiences, which she found eerily similar to her own. What was strikingly different, however, was that his travels rarely resulted in any verifiable evidence, and it seemed his senses were somewhat dulled, while hers remained perfectly intact. Apparently, she was an accidental astral-traveling pro. Halfway through the book, in the cab ride home, Jess knew she wasn't going back to work the next day. She was going to the Adams Center.
~ 13 ~
Citing ongoing mental health issues related to the accident — true, to a certain extent — Jess took a leave of absence from work the next morning. Minutes after the confirmation email from Human Resources, she booked a nine-fifty A.M. flight to Asheville, North Carolina, the closest airport to the Adams Center. After hastily stuffing some clothes into a duffel bag, she headed down to tell Gavin. Predictably, he was fully supportive of what he called her "Journey" or "Vision Quest" or somesuch, but most importantly, he agreed to continue taking care of her cat while she was away.
In the taxi, she reflected on how she had never acted so impulsively before; she didn't even call the Adams Center to let them know she was coming, much less book the $1,800 retreat package. Somehow, she knew that her job was just to get there, and the rest of the pieces would fall into place.
Her flight arrived at eleven-twenty, and by noon she was barreling eastward down I-40 in a rented Kia, heading out of Asheville and towards Black Mountain. Twenty minutes later, her iPhone, guiding her on the dash, led her off the highway and onto a twisty two-lane road deep into the heart of the Blue Ridge mountains. Sunlight filtered through the leaves, sprinkling over the car as she sped around the curves, and darkening only as she passed under the occasional patch of wild kudzu that blanketed the trees hanging over the road.
Twenty minutes into the twisties, a gnawing feeling took hold in her stomach. Unable to entertain the idea that she was having doubts about this whole adventure, she convinced herself it was her lack of lunch, combined with the numerous switchbacks. A minute later, she emerged from the mountains, coasting downhill into an open valley as the road untangled itself. She caught a glimmer of a lonely, rusted sign as it flew by on her right: This way to the Runaway Cafe (2mi).
Fortunate to have a distraction from the nagging impulse to turn the car around, she spotted the roadhouse set upon a natural ledge embedded into the hillside up ahead. Slowing, she turned up the steep gravel drive, the Kia's tires spitting pebbles onto the undercarriage. She passed a large outdoor stage constructed of rough-hewn timbers, bereft of any live music on this weekday afternoon, and drove over to the parking area to slip between a minivan and a pickup, the only other cars around.
Jess locked the car out of habit, and steeled her nerves as she explored the outdoor seating area while looking for the entrance. It was hot, and the only company she found outside was a carpenter bee the size of a hummingbird, which greeted her by brazenly hovering within inches of her face. Ducking and weaving, she shooed it away as she spied the entrance and made a run for it. After checking to see if anyone had spotted her embarrassing dance of avoidance, which they hadn't, any attempts at further discretion were thwarted as the wooden screen door swung shut behind her with a loud thwack.
A few locals finishing their lunch glanced up, but soon went back to their meal, utterly uninterested in her dramatic entrance. Another table held a family of four, whose bickering children had distracted the parents from even noticing her. Relieved, she headed towards a large ornate bar in the back, where a friendly-looking older woman was tidying up.
"Hey honey, just one a ya?" she hollered to Jess. "Sit where you like, I'll be with y'all in a minute."
Jess made her way through the maze of tables and perched on a barstool, then turned to smile at the family of four behind her, who looked like they were out-of-towners as well. She took a chance.
"Hi, are you here for the Adams Center?" she asked, mentally kicking herself as she realized they were probably not here to teach their kids how to astral travel.
"Why no, dear, what's that?" the mother replied, wiping ketchup off her young daughters arm. The boy, who looked about six, answered for her.
"That's where the sun house is at!" he exclaimed excitedly. His mother, ignoring him, continued on.
"Is that near the lake, then?"
"Mom, that's the place just nearby," the boy continued, prompting the father to join in.
"Oh, yeah," he recalled, turning to his wife. "The place with the dome."
"Yeah — the big sun!" the boy repeated, vindicated.
"Shhh...Finish your lunch," the father whispered to him, then turned back to Jess. "So...what exactly goes on there?" he asked, with a casualness that betrayed a distinct curiosity.
"We'll it's like a retreat, I think...it's my first time, actually."
"Well you're almost there, it's just up the road," the mother interjected. "I think it's like a spa or something, probably some crystal healing too, or maybe pyramid power stuff? Well...what did you sign up for exactly?"
It was clear neither had any clue about the goings-on there, and were not-so-subtly prying for information.
"Well I haven't actually signed up, I guess I'm just a walk-in. What are you here for?" Jess replied, changing the subject.
"Oh, we're on our way to the lake, we're renting this year, but we're in the process of building a summer home here."
Apparently there was some sort of resort down the road; Jess had no idea. In any case, they were no help in calming her nerves about the center; their curiosity only increased her latent anxiety.
Returning from the kitchen, the waitress reappeared with a notepad, interrupting their awkward conversation — which was just fine with Jess.
"Specials are up on the wall, soup is New England clam chowder, and there's $2.00 Stellas all day long. Can I get you a drink?"
Jess ordered the special — blackened catfish — and a root beer, and after taking her order, the waitress hesitated for a moment.
"Adams Center, huh?"
"Yeah," Jess replied, "have you heard about it?"
"Well sure! It was a big deal back in the 70's and 80's. We used to go there every year. Decided in '88 to skip the drive from Portland and just pack it all up and move here! I'm Kal, by the way," she said, placing her pen behind her ear and offering her hand.
"Jess, thanks." Why did I just say thanks? she asked herself.
"Yeah, mostly it's a vacation for old-school new-agers from the 80's, like us, 'cept with money," Kal added with a throaty laugh. "Did pry open our minds a bit though, which is always good! You say you don't have a reservation? What's yer deal here sweetie?"
"I'm not really sure, but definitely interested in what's going on there. So...what goes on there?" Jess asked with a wry smile, as the parents behind her shushed their kids.
"Well it's different for everybody, so I guess you'll find out soon enough," she answered mysteriously. "When you get there, though, ask for Terry, tell him you talked to me, OK? Oh goodness, I'm sorry — we've been gabbing so long, I haven't even put your order in." She headed back toward the kitchen, shouting "Hal! One dirty kitty!"
Jess checked her Twitter feed on her phone — painfully slowly over the old-tyme EDGE connection she was getting — until her order arrived. She wolfed down her meal, anxious to get going and finally resolve the mystery of the Adams Center. Belly full, she settled her bill and yelled her goodbye to Kal as the screen door slammed shut behind her.
~ 14 ~
; A few minutes down the road, Jess saw something large and yellow behind the trees to her right. Coming around a bend, she spotted the massive dome rising from the ground in the distance. It seemed to be a couple hundred feet in diameter, but it was hard to tell as the far side was embedded into the slope of a small hill. A ribbon of forested hills splayed out behind it, merging with the blues and greens of the aptly named mountains that shimmered on the horizon beyond.
Glancing back at the road, she almost missed a faded white wooden sign at the edge of the partially-hidden sloping driveway. Slamming on the brakes, she made the turn even before she had time to fully read the sign, which stated, simply: Adams Center for Consciousness Studies — est. 1972. Heading down the gravel drive, an old Victorian-era mansion appeared on her left. The large house, still in relatively good condition despite her age, was skirted with a wide wraparound porch, and nestled within a shaded grove of tall pines. The driveway continued further towards a scattering of other outbuildings — and the dome itself — but as this appeared to be the main house, she parked the car in front.
A grizzled older man in overalls, his doughy, shirtless paunch peeking out from underneath the blue denim, sat reclining in a peeling white rocker on the front porch. His large, rough hands, interlaced over his belly, rose and fell with the rhythm of his breath, and a straw hat covered his face as he slept. Her arrival hadn't seemed to stir him, and after climbing the steps up to the porch, she stood before him, wondering what to do next. The buzzing of two flies wound past them and disappeared around the side of the house.
"Howdy," he rumbled, without lifting his head — or his hat for that matter.
