The Entropic Crystal
by Michael Mathiesen
CHAPTER THREE
Chapter Three - Eleanor Rigby
She stood at her easel with paint brush in hand, scanning the surface of the canvas as the fisherman scans the sea straining all her senses to discern the evidence of life swimming deep within. Spotting none she dabs a spot of burnt umber on to her brush and then applies it carefully to the edge of the canvas hoping to stimulate some signs of life. Slowly the image appears to her from the empty space between the brown splash of paint and the stark white of the virgin cotton duck. The memory, no more than a memory, the vision of it is flooding out of her mind onto the canvas. It's the images of a trip to Hawaii taken many years prior begins to emerge from the depths of her soul. It was so many long years ago she doesn't understand how the images of this piece of her life out of all the others floating around in her mind suddenly take shape like a Halloween goblin. Kind words of love were sung over the gentle melodic trade winds. There was love making on the warm sunset sands. Someone whispers to her from the depths of his soul. All gone now by her choosing. It vanished like a winter breeze. She looks down at her palette for a color that might reflect her mood and all she sees is the dark black dab of paint she almost never uses. She smooshes the brush into the black glob and then makes a huge 'X' on the canvas and then knocks it violently to the ground. She will not return to her art work today, or maybe ever again. The feeling is so strong, she can feel it and smell it and taste the sensation of that trip, the salt air, his skin on her lips and it's so real it's intoxicating, but so much so it's like the worst hangover of her life.
Suddenly, the room is swirling. It was so long ago, she tells herself. It was just not meant to be. The love affair, pure and honest and profound, was like a miscarriage, an abortive attempt at true love, these things often go this way. She knew other affairs that miscarried. It wasn't that unique. Though he was a good man, he was just not the right one for her. He wanted to have children with her and often she would see the little faces in the crowd of what could have been. She took a knife and set it deep into his heart one day. It was the only way, quick and clean the way that they slaughter pigs or chickens. It was the most humane way to break it off and she had to do it, but she doesn't like the memory of it even now some forty three years later. Suddenly, she feels an electric bolt of pain surging through her forehead and then all around her head.
She rips off her apron and throws it angrily on the hanger by the large double doors of her studio as she runs out into the bright yellow sunlight. The bright light refreshes her and warms her and pushes the blood back into her veins quickly. This was a sensation she hadn't felt for a long long time and she would have to reset her will to make it so that it never happened again because if it did, she might not recover the next time. The pain was so severe, it could end her life. She wonders how life could be so fragile that something as simple as a memory could be so toxic, so deadly like the deadliest poison. She notices that her breathing is hard and her hands are sweating. The sunlight is too bright and threatens to drown her. She sees the ground rising up in front of her. She can feel the fainting spell overwhelming her system and there's no way to control it, stop it, her arms are helpless strands of rubber. She feels her jaw hit the brown moist Earth and all goes very dark.
"Your day breaks. Your mind aches. You find that all her words of kindness lingers on when she no longer needs you. She wakes up. She makes up. She takes her time and doesn't feel she has to hurry. She no longer needs you. You day breaks. Your mind aches. There will be times when all the things she said will fill your head. You won't forget her. And in her eyes, you see nothing. No sign of love behind the tears. Cried for no one. A love that should have lasted years.
You want her. You need her and yet you don't believe her when she says her love is dead, you think she needs you. You stay home. She goes out. She says that long ago she knew someone, but now he's gone. She doesn't need him."
Moments later, Eleanor's husband enters their bedroom, his arms full of flowers. Just inside the door, one of her neighbors, an elderly woman with graying hair, Mrs. Healy, stands and utters a gleeful surprise to see Todd enter the room slowly. Mrs. Healy speaks quickly about how she found Eleanor on the ground as she came over bringing some fresh baked cookies. Eleanor told her that she had fainted. So, she helper her neighbor into the bedroom for a rest and Eleanor asked her to call her husband to come home from the office just in case.
Frank Rigby caresses his wife's long brown hair and smiles at her. "So, what happened, darling?" he asks, finally.
"Oh, it's nothing, Frank. I just wanted you here in case I had something serious, but it's nothing. I just fainted. That's all," she reassures him and squeezes his hand.
"Well, do you have any idea what caused it? Did you eat breakfast? Sometimes you skip it you know." Frank asked her gently caressing her hand.
"No, I had breakfast, two scrambled eggs and a bagel. It wasn't lack of eating. It was the canvass. It was suddenly very strange. I couldn't paint anything. The canvas was going to take over. I just froze. I had to paint a big 'X' in it just to shut it off. I never had to do that before. It was like it was trying to show me something, Frank. It had control of my brush, not me." Eleanor replies, her voice cracking just enough for her husband to realize there was something really bothering her.
"Trying to tell you something? But, that's what you want isn't it?" Frank asks.
"Yes, but not that way. I felt that if I tried to brush some paint on there, it would reject it. It didn't reject it. I know that sounds crazy, so it wasn't exactly like that. It was just that it was trying to reject it as if there was something else it wanted me to paint," she said, her eyes widening. He felt her squeeze his hand tightly.
"Well, that's OK, listen, I'm going to call Doctor Raines and he can prescribe something to make you rest. You've been working too hard and you just need a little rest. You've gone through a lot lately. It's not a weakness to ask for a little blue pill once in a while. You're always so strong and you have to let loose a little every once in a while," Frank tells her stroking her hair.
"Frank, please don't talk to me like I'm a child. I'll be all right. I don't need any little blue pills. I just need to take a nap, maybe and then I'll be all right. I have a splitting headache," she says, laying her head back on the pillow. She relaxes her grip on his hand and he lets go.
"OK, so you just relax and take a nap. That's a great idea, Eleanor. I'll be in the living room. I'm not going back to the office. I'll just be here with you for the rest of the day, OK?" he reassures her.
"OK, that sounds good," she says sleepily. Let me rest and I'll get up and this will all be over, I'm sure," she sighs sleepily.
Frank watches her eyes close and waits until her breathing is more relaxed and regular. She seems to have dropped off. He heads out of the bedroom and tells Mr. Healy that everything is fine, thanks her and tells her she can go home now.
"All right. You take care of her. I'll drop by tomorrow to check in on her, if you like," she says as she exits the back door.
Frank waits until she's completely outside and then he whispers to her, "Yes, that would be very kind, Mrs. Healy. I'd appreciate it if you would and then call me again if you notice anything strange, again."
He watches Mrs. Healy disappear behind the row of grape vines that divides their two properties and then he notices the double doors of the small barn that she converted to her studio. The doors are open and calling to him. He strides briskly to the doorway and walks in. He walks around the easel standing near the far wall and expects to see the signs of the large black 'X' that his wife said she had slapped on to the canvas in panic. But, instead of a large black 'X' there is a scene of a peaceful blue Pacific island. There's a large sailing ship of the seventeenth century plowing through the white-capped waves into a small bay. The canvas is more detailed than he had ever seen her paint before. Looking closer, he can make out a small band of native aboriginals standing on the beach watching as the boat sails toward them. From the expression of their faces, he can almost imagine the sense of wonder and shock at a sight of a large sailing vessel, they had never seen before and had no knowledge of, no history, no warnings of any kind that might prepare them for the danger lurking off their shores for the first time in their civilization.
Frank looks around for any signs of a canvas with a big black 'X' struck through it. But this is the only one in the room. He finds it disconcerting that his wife would lie to him about this incident as it would be the first time she had lied about anything, if indeed it was a lie. Certainly there must be an explanation somewhere. She could be more overwrought than he thought.
Frank Rigby wanders deep in thought out of the studio, across the wide yard that separated the main house from the art studio and goes inside, picks up a newspaper he had brought home with him and starts to read the news of the day, which is troubling in a way, but not as troubling as this news that he has come home to. The President of the United States was proposing a change so drastic in the world economic model that many of her critics were having a field day, calling her the devil incarnate. Most of her supporters were in a wild eyed ecstasy over the proposals. Frank was somewhere in the middle, trying, like all Americans to sort it all out in his own mind, in his own way, but here today, was a small little glitch in his personal affairs that would rob him of some of the necessary computing time to weigh all the evidence one way or the other. His wife may be having a mental breakdown and this is the most disconcerting news of all.
He puts the paper down on the floor and goes over to the small bar, walks around behind it and taking a green bottle from a shelf, finds a glass in the closet behind and then pours himself a drink.
Eleanor appears in the doorway of the hall that leads to their bedroom.
"I can't sleep," she says quietly and sits down on the sofa on the other side of the room from the bamboo bar.
"Darling, why did you lie to me about the painting," Frank asks, after taking a large sip of the gin, neat.
"Lie to you? What are you talking about, Frank?" she asks, barely aware of the question.
"You said that you put a big black 'X' on that canvass in your studio, didn't you?" he asks her very calmly.
"Yes, that's what I did. I had to. I had to stop it," she says equally calmly, but also most emphatically.
"But, you must not be talking about the one on your easel. It must be another canvas somewhere, yes?" he asks, smiling and hopefully.
"What do you mean? I only have one canvas at a time, you know that. Of course, it's the one on my easel," she says. And then, "Can I have a sip of whatever it is you're drinking?"
"Oh, yes of course." he walks across the room and offers her his glass. She takes a sip looking up at him with her large brown eyes asking the question they both know is coming. "You went into my studio?"
"Yes, and darling, I think your latest painting is wonderful. You must have been thinking of another canvas somewhere because that one out there is beautiful. It may even be the best work you've ever done," he tells her proudly.
"Frank, you're scaring me now. Is this some kind of joke? Because if it is, I'm not laughing," she says seriously.
He offers her his glass again. "Here, you better have another sip and then follow me out to the studio," he says, handing her the glass. "Come on." He goes out the back door and motions for her to follow. She looks at him disappearing and then finally gathers herself up off the couch shaking her head, going along with the gag.
She arrives at the studio to see him smiling broadly and gesturing to the easel. She walks around the easel, wondering out loud what on Earth he could be playing at and says so.
"I'm not playing at anything. There it is, right in front of you." he says as they both focus their gaze on the tall three-masted sailing ship. In very tiny lettering on the bow is the word, 'Resolution'.
The ship is glorious in detail. It appears to be the ship of the well-known British Explorer of the eighteenth century, Captain James Cook. He's the first to encounter the ancient Hawaiians who are watching so carefully because they are in the process of deifying this strange visitor from another civilization. The detailed work makes the scene appear more like a photograph than a painting and yet the gentle sweep of the brush hairs are so apparent that it can't possibly be a photograph. It seems to play tricks on the eyes. It's so well done, the ship seems to be moving as does the water and even the branches of the large palm trees swaying against the shore.
After a long moment of silence, Eleanor says, "They killed him on that trip, you know."
"They killed who?" he asks her, looking even more confused.
"That's Captain James Cook. They killed him on that voyage. It seems the first time he landed here in Hawaii, they were celebrating Lono, the God of Peace and they almost made him a God. After leaving, Hawaii, he had to return to repair that forward mast, the foremast because it broke off in a storm and by the time he got back to the island, they were celebrating Kuo, the God of War, and so they killed him. Ironic, isn't it. You create God and then you kill God as easy as 1, 2, 3." she says almost imperceptibly, Frank has to strain to hear her words.
"What the hell, Eleanor? How do you know all that? Where do you get this information? You've never spoken about this before," he says, searching for an explanation.
"I don't know," she says staring off into space. "I don't know. What I do know is that I have to go lie down again."
"You've always loved Hawaii. It's odd that you'd paint such a dire painting like this," Frank says to her as she is leaving the studio.
"That's just it. I didn't paint that. Someone else did. I told you. I put a huge 'X' through it. Someone else must have done that," she replies over her shoulder just loud enough for him to hear it.
"Well, who the hell else could have done all this in a few hours," Frank mumbles to himself.
Looking at the canvass again, it's stunning to him how he can discern even the facial expressions of everyone in the piece, from the British seamen, the Marines, and the natives, old and young, male and female, they are at this moment so connected to one another, it's astounding.
'She's really found her muse at last and she's just having some kind of denial about it'. He ponders to himself.
"Eleanor Rigby, picks up the rice un a church where a wedding has been. Lives in a dream. Waits at the window, wearing a face that she keeps in a jar by the door. Who is it for? All the lonely people, where do they all come from. All the lonely people. Where do they all belong. Ah, look at all the lonely people. Ah, look at all the lonely people. Father Mckenzie, writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear. No one comes near. Look at him working, darning the socks in the night when there's nobody there. What does he care? All the lonely people, where do they all come from. All the lonely people, where do they all belong. Eleanor Rigby, died in the church and was buried along with her name. Nobody came. Father McKenzie, wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave. No one was saved. All the lonely people, where do they all come from. All the lonely people, where do they all belong."
The next morning comes around and Frank wakes up to find the bed empty. His wife has gotten out of bed very early. He looks at the clock on the table. It tells him it's seventeen minutes past six o'clock. The sun isn't even out yet. He slips out of bed to find her and is slipping into his brown fuzzy slippers when he hears her screaming from the studio out back. He runs outside in his pajamas and finally gets to the door of the studio to see Eleanor standing in front of the easel. She's shaking from head to foot and alternately looking up in his general direction and then back down at the painting still sitting on the easel.
"What in heaven's name is wrong?" he asks, rushing around to her side.
He looks down at the painting and notices very quickly that the ship is missing. Everything else about the scene is the same, except now looking yet closer as she has already done, he notices that the natives have killed Captain Cook and are dragging his body into the jungle. He can surmise that he is dead from the amount of crimson red staining the sand and flowing out into the sea. There are six bodies of British Marines who gave their lives defending their commander and a dozen bodies of dead natives presumably killed by the guns of the marines. The dark blue back of Captain Cook's uniform is wet with blood and it is running onto the dark sweating arms of the natives who have killed him. The stark reality and detailed resolution of the scene catches Frank by surprise, but not enough to shake him to the foundation as it appears to have done with Eleanor.
"Now, come on honey. This is some kind of joke, right? You came out here and changed it last night, didn't you?" he asks cooly.
"No, I haven't been out here since yesterday afternoon. I thought at first you might have done it, but you've never shown much interest in my art work. You could never have done that." she asserts, shaking her head at him and stomping the hell out of that notion.
"Yes, that's pretty accurate," he concurs.
"So, if you didn't do it and I didn't do it. The answer is simple, Frank. It's the quantum plasma. The sales technician said that this medium could produce some pretty unpredictable results. He said it might even appear to be unexplained," she says, mainly to herself.
"Well, what do you do about it, now. I mean you're main subject has vanished. Do you wait for it to return? Or do you go ahead and make another one that maybe sticks around a bit longer?" Frank teases.
"I don't know, Frank. But, it's obvious I could use a bit more mentoring on this medium. I think it best to just stop for a while and see what happens," she admits.
She hears no reply from her husband, taking a few steps closer is tempted to touch the surface of the work that is much like a very thick gel just sitting there on the canvas like a living thing. He can almost hear it breathing.
"She was a working girl, North of England way. Now she's hit the big time, In the U.S.A. And if she could only hear me, This is what I'd say.
Honey pie you are making me crazy, I'm in love but I'm lazy, So won't you please come home.
Oh honey pie - my position is tragic, Come and show me the magic, of your Hollywood song.
You became a legend of the silver screen, And now the thought of meeting you, Makes me weak in the knee. Ch-Ch-Ch-Cha Cha,
Oh honey pie you are driving me frantic, Sail across the Atlantic, To be where you belong.
Honey pie, come back to me.
I like it like that, Oohh, I like this kinda, that kinda music. Hot kind of music, play it to me, Play it to me Hollywood blues
Will the wind that blew her boat, Across the sea, Kindly send her sailing back to me.
Honey pie you are making me crazy, I'm in love but I'm lazy. So won't you please come home.
* * * * * * *
The trip back to Washington in the MagLev Airliner, after my visit with Shobil was uneventful save for the stopover in Los Angeles with a very lovely flight attendant who had the very good sense to flirt with me as we both endured the long trip. She was quite attractive, young with long flowing auburn hair that framed her face perfectly. Very quickly, I became very flattered that she picked me out of the entire ship's complement of passengers to have some fun with. She was married. I could tell by the very tasteful little wedding band on her left hand, but she did her best to hide it while she sat next to me, never really exposing her left hand very often. Her skin was very nice and tanned as most flight attendants were wont to be. Her hair was brown, but she had given it some very subtle red shading to it, which made her look very exotic. Her teeth were very white, glisteningly clean and perfectly spaced. And she wore glasses. That was something that always intrigued me. Whenever I saw a woman wearing glasses, I would wait to see her look over her rims at me and then wait to see the next expression, her innermost thoughts about me revealed as if the glasses were some kind of disguise. If it was good, she would show me every time. If it was bad, I would know that too. When, this woman looked at me, it was very, very good.
The fact that I was generally regarded as the "Father of MagLev Flight" was not lost on the most beautiful women of the world and I loved the wonderful female attention I received everywhere I went. I have always loved, respected and craved female company, far above what has come to be known as 'male bonding'. I don't need to bond with another male. Don't get me wrong. I love my male friends, but it's not the same as the bonding one can have with a woman, the right woman, the woman that is your counterpart, your harmonic pulsations, your mental partner, your soul mate. There's nothing like that in the world, or in the universe as far as I can tell. In fact, my belief is that the universe was created for this male/female energy to unite as many times as possible. It's the old Yin and Yan thing, the two energies blending into one that makes the whole of life worth living.
We both ran out of the Cabana at the same moment, each of us swept up in the rising tide of a very mutual physical attraction. The sand was very white and warm. The water was the bluest I think I've ever seen. The waves lapping at our feet were inviting us to play. I grabbed her, threw her over my shoulders and carried her, piggy-back into the breathless sea. We swam around and then snorkeled for about an hour. My eyes were very salty so I waded back to shore and left Jennifer out in the water just offshore where we had discovered a perfect little underwater cave where we could dive into and fondle each other for a few minutes before running out of air. She had dived down alone one more time. I picked up a towel and was drying my hair, blotting the water from my nose and ears. Then, I think I heard it first with my head covered by the towel. It was a fluttering sound I had never heard before. It was not the kind of sound you hear in the age of jet planes.
We had descended on the tiny landing pad at Marina Del Rey, still the largest man-made harbor in the world and one of my favorite spots in the world from the great almost lost memories I have of living there with another woman in my youth who I had never been able to forget. Every time, I flew over this spot, I could see her face in the surf, gently singing to me, caressing me, sliding noiselessly, wordlessly next to me in the shining white linens of our bed that used to look out on the bay, where we watched the tall masts of the sail boats slicing this way and that in the warm whispering Westerlies. Those were the most glorious days of my life even though I have had so many wonderful relationships with women in my life, this one, the one that got away, sticks with me and haunts me in almost every waking moment. I think of her all the time. Mostly I wonder if she ever thinks of me. I know she does not, but it is the most wonderful tonic, the drug that keeps me alive when I imagine how things could have been if I hadn't let her slip out of my grasp as easily as I did.
After lunch, I suggested to Jenny that we go for a walk along the beach. Her conversation was pretty much the same as I had with so many girlfriends after the first time we had sex. She wanted to know immediately where she stood in my eyes, wanting me almost to rate her on a scale of one to ten. I always denied them of that knowledge because there could never be anything like even approaching the sexual union with the one that got away. It's a glitch in our genetic code, I think that makes us always look at the grass on the other side of the fence as greener than our own. We shouldn't compare unfairly and with so much desire for what we can't have in this way and it always reminds me of the lessons taught us by watching monkeys. We are primates after all, and it's readily apparent that even today, we haven't really evolved all that much differently from our hairy ancestors.
I wanted to tell her my thoughts at this time, but I kept them to myself as is my usual. I don't feel guilty in holding back this very private piece of information because I have always believed that there has to be a private little wall that no one gets to see over. It's a wall that protects the true self and separates out the true self from the self that is promulgated to the outside world. It's an enclave where the most very special people in your lives can congregate without fear of anyone else knowing our private little secrets. For some, these walls surrounding our private enclaves are very high and protected by barbed wire so that nothing can escape and no unauthorized personnel can gain entry. For others the walls are low and inviting like an old Spanish Mission where many are invited and to which many are accepted at the payment of a nominal fee for entry and after that are considered as family.
We walked on lost in our private thoughts when I noticed suddenly a private wharf where a large wooden hulk of an ancient sailing ship was berthed. I was an antique sailing ship with very tall and stately masts like the ships that discovered the world. We ambled over to the landing steps onto the wharf where there was a small bronze plaque. It read, "The Captain James Cook Museum where is berthed permanently this ship of his greatest mission - 'The HMS Resolute"
* * * * * * *
The long and winding road
That leads to your door
Will never disappear
I've seen that road before
It always leads me her
Lead me to you door
The wild and windy night
That the rain washed away
Has left a pool of tears
Crying for the day
Why leave me standing here
Let me know the way
Many times I've been alone
And many times I've cried
Any way you'll never know
The many ways I've tried
But still they lead me back
To the long winding road
You left me standing here
A long long time ago
Don't leave me waiting here
Lead me to your door
But still they lead me back
To the long winding road
You left me standing here
A long long time ago
Don't leave me waiting here
Lead me to your door
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
* * * * * * *
Eleanor waits patiently in her maglev car to receive her deposit receipt from the Automated Teller at the First Morroccan Bank's landing pad. She's trying her best to forget the events from earlier in the morning when her painting seemed to gain a life, a surrealism of its own, a new kind of watercolor technique she had never heard of before or ever even imagined. Somehow, the life in the painting that came up on its own was changing the scenes right before her eyes unless it could be explained some other way. Her husband would never pull a lousy trick like this on her. It was not in his character. It was inconceivable that he might start to change, so drastically now, but if he was going through some kind of crisis, why take it out on her in this way? It was troubling to say the least. And, if the ship that carried Captain Cook had some kind of ghost spirit to it, why would it suddenly decide to take this up with her?
Finally, the automated teller machine takes a few steps closer to her car and hands her the pink chalky-tasting cookie that she will swallow and use for her daily shopping later on. The machine looks at her and bows slightly in the obsequious fashion that had been programmed in from the beginning. She never could resist the strange thought that she should ask one of them to dinner sometime just to see what kind of conversation she might have with one of them. Someone just above and behind her in a silver BMW craft started to flash her lights impatiently. She came out of her reverie, took her cash, slipped into into her purse and rose up out the bank's landing pad fly-through cash machine and was on her way to shop for tonight's dinner and a few of her usual accessories.
As she flew silently over the city below, she turned on her music system and an old song from her past was playing. It was a jazz group that she had loved to listen to many years ago in her youth. It was a haunting melody that brought back warm memories of the charming little cottage in the hills above the city where she lived with that strange man and his nice little dog. She wondered what had happened to them. She had lost touch when she decided to run away from him and become an artist. He wanted to be a writer and she knew that this preoccupation of his would frustrate her own ambitions, so she just picked up all her worldly possessions and moved out. It was very sudden, but effective. She never looked back, never thought about him again, until just now. She wondered why now of all moments when everything was going so well for her. Her career was on full blast and with this latest piece, she was certain to win fame and fortune at last. She hadn't intended for the ship to just vanish like that, but the art-tech guy that sold her the quantum plasma for the canvas warned her that unpredictable things could happen, and so they surely did.
What worried her was the fact that it was this ship, and this memory that could be connected somehow. It was not unpleasant sensation, but it was a foreign invader into her very tidy and organized mind, like a virus, and any foreign invader thought to Eleanor was always a bit disconcerting, and something that would need attention. So, instead of returning home after her errands, she would stop by her shrink's office and go over these recent events with him. Maybe he could put it all into some kind of perspective.
* * * * * * *
"Faith from God, that's what holds the universe together. Not Faith IN God, but Faith FROM God. That's it," the words burst forth from his mouth all of a sudden.
"What are you talking about?" I asked him stirring from a long sleep. The ship's computer often let us sleep for days at a time out here when there was nothing really to record, so I was very drowsy when I heard my ship mate babbling on about something he could have left for later during the course of our normal work schedule.
"God, you idiot. God has to have faith in the system that He created to keep it all together. Thy Universe. That's how it works. I've think I've solved the problem. It's a Faith in everything that God made, that's the glue. That's the force that keeps it all going. Of course, that has to be it. Incredible and limitless Faith, projected from a source somewhere, a massive Black Hole of Faith Waves. That's how it happens that we're all connected. That's how it happens, how it works. Don't you see it? It's brilliant. It's so simple and so powerful, only God could have conceived it and made it actually work.
"What the hell are you talking about?" I wanted to go back to sleep, but he kept on mumbling. Then, he sprang out of bed and started pacing about the cabin.
"Sometimes, there must be doubts, just the slightest and tiniest little nagging doubt that crops up even in God's nearly perfect mind. Then, it all starts to unravel in a little necropolis of God's mind and we feel it in our own lives as something Earth-shattering," he said, much louder now.
"What do you mean Faith from God? Isn't it the other way around?" I asked. "Aren't we the ones that are supposed to have faith in God?"
"No, see, that's just the problem. We've had it all reversed, inside out, all these thousands of years. And, intuitively, at least intuitively to the primitive mind, it would seem like we're the ones that are supposed to have Faith in God. That's what they preach in all the churches too, of course, because there's nothing more primitive than the mind of a preacher. But, in reality, it's God that has to have Faith in us. Think about it for a minute. God is infinite in power and scope, right?" he asked.
"Of course," I responded, mechanically.
"Well, then, why in hell would God need some poor little insignificant stuff like us germs have Faith in him? He doesn't need that kind of thing. He's God, for chrissakes! But, he has to have Faith in us for the whole thing to work. He has to have Faith in the universe to keep all those Googolillions of tiny little pusticles, the quanta, the mesons, the pi's, the meson-pi's the bosons, the strap-ons, all of that stuff has to work like clockwork and a trillion, trillion times per second it all flutters on and off signaling back to God that the systems check out and everything's cool. Can you imagine what level of faith that the controller of all this clockwork mechanism has to have? No, you cannot and neither can I. No one can imagine a faith in things that big, but that's why he's God and we're not." He said, taking a breath at last.
"So, if God is supposed to have all this faith in us, then what's our role?" I asked, after watching him setting up for his next blast of words, air and process. He was pacing back and forth now, as if he was on the verge of a major breakthrough. I thought about Einstein when it came to him that the universe was simple, that everything was related to everything else by the speed of thought. I thought of Edison when he got the idea for the light bulb. I thought of Marconi, when he had the notion that we could broadcast our words, our music, our essence of thought over the airwaves.
"It's love, we're supposed to give back, love and respect. It's a kind of mafia thing. He pours out all this faith and us and in return, we're supposed to give him love and respect back. I mean, everything's clear to me right now. This drug you gave me is amazing. It clears up all the fog and lets you see into the light and hear the music, doesn't it?" He interrupted himself, stopped his pacing and just stood there with the most gaping smile I've ever seen come up from a human face.
"You're scaring me," I said, for want of saying something, anything. I picked those words to break the tension of the moment, that's all.
"Yes, it is scary, isn't it? That God would want or care about our love and respect, but there it is. It's just sitting there like the biggest Gorilla in the room. I mean think about it, man. When were the worst times in your life? When were the worst times in human history? Their almost always times when we lose our love and respect for God. It's so obvious. Look at the Roman Empire. They killed Christ and the whole Empire fell away, bashed to death by the axes and swords of barbarians who themselves had no love or respect for God. Things calmed down a bit for a few hundred years but that's because the Christian Church replaced the Roman Empire. Things were pretty peaceful for a while. Everyone was happy, well-fed, and then they had to go and ruin it by not respecting the Muslim God, so things fell apart again. You had the Crusades, where everyone was sending armies to destroy the other's cities and there was no happiness, just fear and hate and then the Plague set in. God wasn't getting any love. He was receiving the hate signal back from Earth, so he ignored us a little and let the Chaos set in and boy it set in good, that time, didn't it? Millions of poor innocent bastards, men, women children all wiped out by a tiny virus they picked up from the rats that were running around eating all the crap from the waste and disgust of the times," he stopped pacing again, looking down at the ground, took another deep breath in preparation for what I thought would have to be his grand summation.
But, he just blew air out his nose, looking quite crest-fallen and collapsed in a heap onto the deck of the ship. I turned in my bunk and gazed out the window of the Resolute. She was a great and wonderful ship, gliding past the stars with such grace and speed, she made them all look a bit faded compared to the pure white laser-gleam of her gravity wave surfer wake. It was a concept first discovered in 4041, by E. Steven Bagaddivan. You have no knowledge of this yet, but E. Steven, compiled all the evidence from the Great Five Hundred Year Radio/Grav Burst of 2515. Scientists using the Great Big Collossal Array of Radio Transcopes, or the GBCART, as it was called sent a blast of gravity waves into one section of space that was thought to be the area of the Big Bang. They were pinging the universe to see if anything, a signal, a return ping, anything at all would come back that might be even the slightest evidence of Consciousness in the Universe as had been postulated for centuries. The data would be collected for five hundred years. No decisions would be made, unless something amazing happened. But, the logic was that over five hundred years of heavy bombardment of concentrated, harmonic and focused radio and laser gravity beams on the one tiny spot in the universe thought to be the center of everything, the origin of it all, the place where the Big Bang had actually Banged, there might be a response or at least a reflection of energy of some kind that might give away some delicious inkling of the first blast of energy that created everything in the Big Bang and why it had happened. The Biggest Bang, we could produce as tiny, swarming ants on this little scrapheap of dust in Space was being used to test whether or not there might actually be a reason for it all, not just the 'Where', the 'What' and the 'When'. This time, finally, Science would be searching for the 'Why'..
Of course, as you might expect, nothing really amazing happened. The Biggest Noise we could make in our long and crazy history was absorbed by the great vacuole of Space/Time and we learned nothing, and of course the atheists had a field day with this information. For another couple thousand years, we were all locked up in the weirdest kind of society where we constantly suspected our neighbors of plotting against us and so we put up walls everywhere. The biggest construction project all over the Earth was wall-building. There were walls everywhere. Walls between houses, walls in the houses, walls around cities, walls between the states. Of course the fifty thousand nations all had to have walls around them. Even the great oceans were not immune and they actually build walls from the sea floor all the way to the surface carving up the planet like a giant pizza, everyone living and going through life with their own slice.
When the Great Big Burp hit the planet in 6575 A.D., the walls almost instantly came tumbling down. Scientists described it as a 'Burp' because it was registered as a long and low frequency that was so slow and lazy, it couldn't be seen as information like sound or light, but more like a letting off of steam, a gasp, a sigh from somewhere or something that had long been sleeping. The size and force of the return ping that emanated from the region of the Big Radio/Grav Wave that we had sent out actually made the ocean surfaces vibrate and boil in sympathetic joy. The fish all seemed to sense it too, jumping out of the water and many of them landing on the other side of the walls where they had been held captive for centuries. Some of the walls from their foundations at the sea floor actually crumbled and started to fall. For the next two centuries, the Human Race concentrated on the removal of the walls and harmony and calm came over the planet once again. It was five hundred years before everything got back to normal, however. and that's when they decided to send a ship to see what may have caused the great cascading burp felt all over this section of the universe.
I glanced over at my shipmate. He had stopped pacing and he was squatting now in the middle of the cold steel decking. I had watched him to this many times before in the journey. He had been chosen for the mission because he was one of the world's greatest egg-head philosophers. The author of over one hundred books on the subject of "Post-Nuclear Existentialism' a term he himself had coined and made famous in the 80's. It was thought that someone like him, with his almost unlimited ability to joke about the seriousness of the mind would be able to pick up on any of the signals that we were designed to detect, record and return to the home planet and our ship was probably the greatest listening device every conceived by human kind. The Resolute would listen for the evidence as we ran around inside the cloud and we two would attempt to interpret it as it was happening to us. All of our thoughts and even our physical responses would be recorded and made part of the data. The fact that we were not meant to survive the mission was inconsequential to all of us, even Glenn and me. It was all about the value and significance of the data and what it might mean to our species.
"So, you're saying that's the meaning behind all this evidence?" I asked, finally attempting to break the silence. If there was anything worse than Glenn's constant philosophizing, it was the lack of it. The silence out here was deafening, literally. There were many many moments during the mission where I thought I was losing my hearing, everything was so quiet. The ship was designed that way so that the sensors could pick up the slightest bits of data that might be intelligent coming from the Burp Cloud as it was known. It wasn't actually a cloud, but more of a region near the Big Bang where everything was distorted in the fabric of Space/Time. It was as if a big gaping hole had been torn, ripped to shreds from the inside- out when the Big Bang took place nearly fourteen billion years ago. This was the area of the return ping that we had picked up in the Big Probe an eon ago. The burp was the thing that you would expect when you closed the lid on a plastic container and pressed the air out of it to preserve your pickled ginger or whatever scrap of food leftover from dinner you were squirreling away for the winter.
I kind of chuckled to myself at my clever little analogy. It was just like that, the Science suggested, a burp, a fart, a leftover gasping from the Giant that concocted the biggest meal in history and served it up, almost without regard, with little pity for those who would be forced to eat it. And, Glenn and me, we were sent out like little waiters in our clean white frocks to pick up any of the leftover morsels from the Big Bang and bring 'em back for the rest of our kind to feast upon. It had been a famine of sorts all of these millions of years on Earth waiting for a sign, a signal like this from God and now it could be time for a feast of the most satisfying kind.
"No, no," he replied finally about five minutes after I posed the question. "No, no, so much more, so much more, but I'm not ready to divulge. Still digesting. Still processing. There are so many questions still. I don't even know what the questions are, so I have no basis to go any further. We're stuck here. We don't even know how much we don't know."
"You have to be resolute, Glenn," I suggested, taunting him. I waited a long time for his reaction. The irony was never lost on us that the name of our ship was the same as the ship that was given to Captain James Cook, of his Majesty's Royal Navy circa, 1704, when he sailed on his fateful journey to discover the islands of the South Pacific and even parts of the Arctic Ocean. The ship had lain in the museums for hundreds of years until it finally deteriorated so much that they had to encase it in a platinum cocoon and seal it away in a vault in Portsmouth to preserve what remained of it, just a few ribs from the original hull. Then, someone got the bright idea to uncork it and weave the remains of the ship into the bulkhead of our ship and name it the same as Cook's ship. It was fitting a real sense. Captain Cook went out where no European had gone before and the aborigines thinking he was sent from the God of Peace and Love worshipped him. Then, he had to come back a few days later when the God of War ruled and so they had to kill him. So it was that they would get the notion that we were seeking the God of Love and War, the one that sent out the Resolute the first time. But, this time, hopefully, we wouldn't run into any aboriginal culture. 'Or maybe we would and wouldn't that be rather smashing?' I pondered.
"That's it," he burst forth. "It's the ship. We're carrying the soul of the Captain Cook ship, aren't we? They used it in the ship's hull. The final remains. It's in us. We're like Cook and we're going to die out here like he did on his trip. They knew that and that's why they sent the relics of his journey. They're expecting something he got, a blast from the universe, another hint, a major one, maybe the final one. We're just along to witness it, be the catalyst, but the blast is coming from out there, from the God of Love and Peace and War, the Creator of everything. It's like he's summoned us here with that burp and now we're going to get it right between the eyes just like Cook got it." he rambled.
This time, I worried about him. It was always known from the beginning that we probably wouldn't make it back to Earth. We were both single chaps, no family ties. They picked us for that reason, mainly. My qualifications were certainly nothing to brag about. I wasn't a Scientist in any remote sense of the word. I wasn't famous. I wasn't known for anything, except possibly my charm and good looks. I volunteered when the word went out that they needed someone to be Cheech to Glenn's Chong, Laurel to his Hardy, Hope to his Crosby. I was hired to humor him, keep him sane, keep him from despairing too much. They reasoned that if there was an equal but opposite force on the ship it would balance his ruminations out and keep him more balanced, keep him alive really and in the right state of mind to receive the signal, take it in fully, and believe in the mission to the fullest possible extent. But, I wasn't really getting him right now. By the look in his eyes, I didn't believe he was all there, either.
"It's the ship, don't you see?" he asked, mainly to himself. "It's the ship. We're on the ship. We're supposed to be on this ship. There was always a ship. The ship was always sailing and it will always be sailing. We can get on it or off it at any time. But, the ship is always there and it's always sailing. Where it's going doesn't really matter as long as it's always somewhere new. Do you get it now?" he demanded, somehow staring at me through the huge black holes in his eyes.
"Yeah, I get it, Glenn." I said, mainly said loud and clear to calm him and myself. I didn't really get it, but I let him think that I did for the sake of the mission. We still had a long way to go if we ever were to get home. I certainly didn't need him flaking out on me now because it would be a very long and boring journey home, or wherever we were going, without him.
'Whatever gets you through the night. It's all right. It's all right,' I sang quietly to myself the old John Lennon tune I had heard long ago somewhere along the way. He had been something known as a Beatle. There were four of them, I think. They were fabulously popular to the point where Lennon had joked that they were more popular than Jesus Christ and that got him into a bit of hot water. But, they were in terms of numbers of people on the planet, more popular, that was true. He was later shot to death by an admirer as I recalled, sort of a similar fate, albeit more modern than the fate of Christ.
It was all so weird. Here we were floating around near the beginning of it all. There were remnants all around of a giant rip in the fabric of Space/Time that we had determined was the actual placenta of the birthplace of the universe. There were still bloodstains all around, bloodstains in the data of the tracks of the earliest thoughts to ever leave this place. Yet, there was no evidence of any child or any parent in the truest sense of the word, and yet, there was this unforgettable sensation that this was exactly the right analogy. Someone or something had given birth to something and that something was growing and alive. The baby had all the right number of fingers and toes. The brain seemed fine. The heart was beating loud and strong. Cognition was fine. The baby even seemed to recognize its mother, even in the early stages. Yet, there was something strangely missing, something we couldn't quite put our fingers on. We couldn't see it because we were trying to look at it with our usual senses, the eyes, the ears, the nose, the mouth, the hands, the mind. We were reaching out for it with all the talents that God gave us, but there was a talent still missing, a budding talent, to be sure, one that hadn't been provided in our early childhood and even here in our adolescence. But, in just a short period of time, we might be able to use it. It was a tiny little button that was starting to glow with recognition and awareness of the parent, but it was just so rudimentary still, we were struggling with and would still struggle for decades for the exact words.
It gave me a terrific sense of sadness and loneliness I had never known up until now.
Glenn looked up at me and started howling like a wolf, which I knew would go on for days. It was going to be a long long mission.
* * * * * * *