6.

Each period I designate as day, I scuff along toward the twilit pink horizon, turning up nothing but grains of back glass like tiny shards of obsidian. I am grateful for the leather boots. I also find myself dressed in pantaloons and an intricately woven shirt of leather mail, although I have never been hot or cold. There’s no firmament (stars, etc.) and no atmosphere (I don’t require breath or feel wind), but I find that the sky is the best place to see the worldlines. Those of the living have a golden luminosity whereas the shadow lines of the dead are silvery fog punctuated with continuous and tiny starbursts.

I can see the worldliness from anywhere, but I most vividly if I take these walks toward the big sky. When I do, whichever worldline I focus on expands outward or falls like a curtain. On the surface of the aurora I see a glitchy, pixilated movement that resolves into moving images. At first, it’s like seeing pictures in electronic snow but soon it’s more like a movie. Before me now, a red wave dances with turquoise filaments: Maddox. I go back in his time to an event that may help me: I verify what Beddy told him, that being physical pulls particles out of the quantum foam. I turn next to a bright green aurora that undulates with pendulous formations, like a dinosaur swimming high above: Alphonso. Scanning back into his line, I confirm what I thought I saw the first time: Beddy tells him that people create their world via the microtubules.

As I walk back to the fasthold, I mull over a couple of findings and a question. Finding 1. When the brain and/or its support systems can no longer use the microtubules, consciousness is severed from matter and the worldlines can no longer pull to themselves the particles of physical. I can only conclude: this is what dead is.

I reach a place in the landscape with a series of small hills and vales. Hereabouts I have even found a small cave. Very different than living vegetation, the plants here are paper-fine or crispy to the touch. However, the land formations are no different than those on Earth.

As I walk, I note the ultra-fine worldliness of plants (furls that I open often for their lovely scent) and rocks (tessellations that can lightly crackle but carry a deep stillness). Finding 2: Since neither plants nor rocks have microtubules, yet clearly have the consciousness of worldlines, there must be another means to pull the particles out of the quantum foam besides the microtubules. Alphonso and poor Ranger showed that it could be crystals. They focused the energy of thought into the tiny crystal-like spaces of the quantum dots. This points to a power source I can use here.

I’m finding a route back with the help of my sister. Certain lives are destined to intermingle. Even though her worldline and mine, like any two, were only ever superimposed giving the illusion that we shared the same space and time, here we are joined. I look back to focus my thought on the sky. There’s my shadow line continually twining around hers, like a shawl that wants to protect and comfort her, or a banner that heralds her. The meandering river of her worldline is grey shot with diamond light. I must return to physical to foil those that would destroy that realm and help my sister too, with all she has to face.

Starr Ann’s Worldline—September 5, 2024

Into the psychic rubble field that was 16 Kyrie Lane marched Starr Ann Potalovich. She had monitored the extent of the devastation during the funeral and then in a house filled with hot dish, Jell-O mold and spiraled pink meat. Here was Ricky’s Aunt Clo and her mom’s people, down from Canada, speaking French in the corners. There were the swollen faces of a group of Temptation soccer players, fighting their sadness by looking mean.

She helped serve food, clear it away, and gave parting directions, until only she and the immediate family were left.

Starr Ann followed Ricky to her narrow old bedroom that had held so much of them—Ricky as outsider, Starr Ann as addict, Ricky as brainiac, Starr Ann as wiseass—curiosities to others and to themselves.

“Just come over for a few hours,” Starr Ann coaxed and began collecting Ricky’s purse and phone from the vestibule table.

“My dad’s depressed,” said Ricky.

Starr Ann resisted commentary on her friend’s flat demeanor.

Starr Ann drove Ricky to the white mansion where, up on the big brocade bed, she brought a plate of sugar-high foods. Then Starr Ann waited. She wanted Ricky to bring it up first.

The long silence marked Starr’s gravity of purpose, as did the slow movement of her words.

“Ricky, I think you need to talk about it.”

“I am talking about it.”

“No, I mean your experience.”

Blank stare.

“Your experience.” The last words crawled slowly from Starr Ann’s lips, hesitant insects.

“Finding Tristan.”

Blank.

“Afterward.”

Nothing.

Ricky’s Worldline—September 15, 2024

James Jameson kept to his study. When Ricky passed him on the way to the bathroom or leaving the kitchen, he looked bad. His hair was greasy and his eyes double-rimmed with red and shadow.

One time, she went to his study and, for a moment, he was the old father of her childhood, warm-eyed, gentle-speaking, long-winded. This gave her the courage to speak.

“Dad? Do you think about Tristan?”

The man looked hurt and confused, as if she had glad-handed him with a simultaneous sharp kick.

“Oh Dad, I don’t mean think thoughts of Tristan. I know you do all the time.” His study had not seen sun in weeks and smelled of unwashed man and rubber cement. “Do you think about contacting him?”

James had been mainly mute these days since Tristan was gone, so Ricky accepted sitting quietly for a while. The desk clock belittled the silence with its steady inability to take-it-back, take-it-back, take-it-back.

“Dad, can’t you find him?” Her words were soft. She would have demanded, but for the disrespect.

His features seemed to slide down his face along with sudden tears. “My son, my only son,” he wept.

She tried to contain his shuddering with an awkward hug from behind, but her father gave no sign that he noticed. There was nothing else to do but go to work.

#

New Foundation’s most active resident, Gordy, came to the Med Office door.

“Maureen is throwing stuff around the dining room.”

“What stuff?” Ricky asked, because she heard nothing unusual. She stilled herself to hear. The sole sounds were the host’s cry and the audience sigh of daytime TV.

“Thanks Gordy.” She smiled, but he got it. He was dismissed.

In twenty minutes, Ricky made her hourly rounds. To her dismay, there in the dining room were strewn big round waste cans with contents spilled: napkins, condiment packages, straws, and paper cups. The empty bus tub and its collapsible stand had made it furthest, hunkered under chair and table like escaped creatures. She recognized the delinquent here: not Maureen, for pitching a fit, but herself. She had not trusted Gordy, an eyewitness, because he saw the world differently.

Just then, Gordy came around the corner with the fast walk by which he went everywhere, as if he had just heard a bell go off. His eyes held hers for a beat. He may have been mentally ill, but he wasn’t stupid.

Maddox’s Worldline—September 24, 2024

That summer, right before Dr. Jameson broke down, his graduate students had declared a takeover of their department name. Over the old sign, “Parapsychology,” they puttied a trendier new one, reading, “Department of Noetic Sciences.” When they gathered for the re-christening, Maddox was elected to go get their grades from last semester, overdue by a month.

That day, as he took the stairs of the old Victorian hall, he was young and impatient, barely noticing the autumn warmth. The air in the building moved poorly with its modern windows that couldn’t open, but Skitch’s office was even drier; mountains of papers sucked up the humidity. Maddox felt his breath grate in his throat.

Hunched behind his big old desk, Dr. Jameson was puny, a reduced king in a paper castle. Although Maddox had attended his son’s funeral and knew his professor would be grieving, he now understood that their concerns would not be heard this day. He carried out his mission, nevertheless.

“I hate to bother you, Professor; clearly this is a difficult time. But the Band’s paper grades….”

"Hmph, papers.” Jameson’s speech was weird, muffled but intense. He rifled through desk drawers, a couple repeatedly, as if he couldn’t track his own moves.

Slumping back in his chair, he stared without blinking.

“Skitch, is there something … I can do?”

“I don’t have time for this, McGauern.” But Jameson’s tone said it didn’t matter if he ever had to do anything, ever again.

Even though parapsychologists don’t help people with their problems, Maddox was still familiar with the basics. “Sir, you need help.”

The professor’s face tried for wise owl but got angry bird.

“Isn’t there someone you trust, Sir, who you could talk to?”

That day, Maddox’s biggest worry was convincing Skitch to get grief counseling.

Resignedly, he reported back to the Band, “No papers.”

As they rearranged their office space, grunting and swearing and moving large storage cabinets in their new lease on the abnormal, Maddox described the meeting to his fellow grads. Unanimously, they all feared for Professor Jameson. However, all was not lost because that was how Maddox met Belquis.

#

His phone rang at six AM with the caller ID announcing “Professor Jameson.” A woman’s voice identified herself with a man’s name. Maddox blanked her until she said, “Professor Jameson’s daughter?” Although she had never attended any of the great greasy breakfasts with Skitch smoking up the house, burning the bacon and the toast, Maddox had seen her from afar the day of the funeral, a slim figure crushed down by sadness. Now, her voice flat, too calm for someone without a mother and a brother and with a father losing his grip, she had recognized his name in her dad’s phone and was calling to ask him to come over: her dad was not doing well.

It was just a couple of weeks after the visit to Dr. Jameson’s office, but his deterioration was shocking. Thinner and even more disheveled, he keened, rather than spoke, from a double bed a size too small for two people except old-time couples. “You again!”

“How’s it going, Skitch?” Maddox had the impression that his professor’s persona weirdly alternated, as if he appeared through tearful blinks that distorted and then re-distorted. Like a polarized post-card with two images, Dr Jameson went from pitiful to disgusting and then back again.

“Peachy keen, you tremendous ass-wipe.”

“Ricky asked me to come here, Professor.”

“Perhaps you’d like to take that stinking burden from me; I’d be well rid of her.”

“She’s worried about you, sir. We just want to help.”

“Let me tell you, you gaping jizbag, the only help I need is a hand pushing aside this veil of tears. I wish to follow my pretentious son to where the sun doesn’t shine.”

“Dr. Jameson…” Maddox kept trying to bridge the stale air of the bedroom.

“Kiss off, McGauern.”

Ricky and Maddox went down to the living room to talk. The emotion that he couldn’t find in her phone voice was clear in person, but compressed, tight-lipped, shutting out everything that wouldn’t make things right, determined to handle this breakdown of her last, closest person. At the same time, there was her graceful arc of nose and vertex of chin. Maddox stayed on track with, “Has he been seen by anyone?”

Ricky shook her head, but went to a basket on the hall vestibule table and brought back a funeral sympathy card: “My boss is a psychologist and knew him in graduate school.” The note from this Belquis Veladora was definitely an invitation to reach out after the death of the son. “He said not to call her.”

Maddox told Ricky, “She should come. I’ll be here too, just in case.”

Ricky nodded. He tried to pat her arm, but his hand felt clunky, as if he’d taken a downward swipe at her.

#

Two days after his first visit to the Jameson home, Maddox met Ricky’s boss outside the house and knew, right away, that she could help even the most off-kilter person. Good thing, because when Ricky opened the door, she looked hollowed out. “He’s not having a good day.”

Ricky led them up the narrow stairs and opened the door to her father, still in the double bed. He sneered when he saw Belquis. “Well look what the catty bitch dragged in.”

“Hello James.” Maddox would learn that Belquis has a tendency to settle her weight on her hips when she prepares to dominate in an encounter. The pointing out of her little feet gives it away.

“You’ve put on some pounds,” James drawled, as if he was droll, making a slight jest.

“Well,” Belquis looked down, considering. “Yes I have.” Belquis’ prominent front teeth pushed her smile forward. “But James, I’m here to talk about something more important. You’ve been having a hard time.” She nodded emphatically, another one of her gestures that communicated strength.

“I’ll give you a hard time, Belquis. Let’s send these meek Millies out of the room.” Jameson grinned.

Belquis took a notebook and pen out of her bag and cleared a chair of rumpled clothes to scrape up to his bedside.

“I said send them out of the room!” James cast his voice at her like a weapon with only a chance of injury.

Belquis looked at Ricky and Maddox. “I’ll be OK.”

It was a long twenty minutes in the hallway. When Belquis came out, the three went to the living room.

“He’s a danger to himself and so, by law, I’m obliged to commit him for treatment,” Belquis told Ricky.

“Where?”

“You can be the adult signing him into St. Luke’s psych ward.”

Ricky suddenly looked uncertain. “I’m going to call my Aunt Clo.”

The aunt wanted James to go to a religious facility and Belquis had her hands full getting Skitch transported. Although it was unlikely he would bolt (his body seemed as gelatinous as his mouth was foul), Maddox stayed on hand, failing to think of conversation to make with Ricky as the EMTs got James strapped onto the gurney and took him, grousing obscenely, to the ambulance.

After telling Ricky to call if she needed anything, he and Belquis walked to their cars. “There’s another issue,” she said. Maddox already knew waiting would be the signal for her to talk, that this woman didn’t waste time. “He seems to think that the world is in peril.” Her smile said What are ya gonna do?

“With all due respect, Belquis, he also thinks he’s funny and sexually appealing.”

“His concerns are something I think we should talk about. It’s something I can’t dismiss.”

She had Maddox’s attention.

“James recounted every move I made today until I arrived here: my discussion with my husband about childcare before breakfast, what we bought at the farmer’s market, my kid’s swim at the neighborhood pool, my stop at the drugstore.” Her body shrugged up and down as she waited for Maddox to share her disbelief, but, being in parapsychology, his reaction was not skepticism, but a laser-focused attention, like a hunting dog that’s spotted prey.

“Then he told me,” she looked down at her notes “that Plank’s constant is now encroaching upon phenomena at macroscopic scales. Have any idea what that means?”

Now she had made a point that he could rebuff, “Constants like Planck’s number and the speed of light aren’t just placeholders in mathematical formulas. Plank’s constant is a key to how matter “localizes” in the here and now, making things as we know them.”

Belquis shook her head like he had lost her, then she handed over a yellow legal tablet covered with equations. She waited until Maddox had a chance to scan them then asked, “James is a guy who struggled through graduate statistics. Could that person have written these?”

“No. These are equations that describe quantum level phenomena.”

“What do they mean?”

Glancing at the math, He could see familiar sections. Other equations described impossibilities. “Maybe nothing, maybe Armageddon.” And, in a moment he would remember later with some embarassment, he laughed.

#

Maddox crunched the numbers of Skitch’s equations throughout one entire Saturday. It was bittersweet, using the textbooks he’d kept from his former life in physics, their volatile ink smell somehow imprinted with the kick of working high-level math. From those days, he knew that quantum effects hardly happened here in macro, usually cancelling each other out to let Newton’s laws rule. But Skitch’s equations said that, as the Plank length got longer, more quanta strayed into the macro, drifting to interact with ordinary things. He called it the Drift.

As Maddox poured over Fran’s neat transcriptions of Skitch’s ravings, his roommate, Marcus DeWhite, wandered sleepily into my room, yawning and scratching. They lived above the DeWhite body shop, owned by Marcus’s family for fifty years. Marcus looked over Maddox’s shoulder, knowing it was strange for him to be at his desk on a Saturday morning when he could be downstairs making a couple bucks banging on car parts.

“Astrology, Ox?” he snorted with disbelief. (“Ox” from Maddox). He put a large forefinger on the symbol for Neptune.

Astrology was a topic rarely treated in the noetic sciences, so Maddox snorted in mock defensiveness, “This is quantum science, Hut.” (Hut, from “ten-hut” in the Army Officer’s School, where Marcus had gotten his Masters in Psychology, and from the slabs of muscle that make him big, although not quite as big as Jabba the Hutt).

“I only mention it because there’s my planet.” At that, Maddox barely heard him say, “Hey, I’m a warm but complicated Pisces.”

Through the similar process of linked tangents by which they gave each other nicknames, it hit Maddox: Personality signs, mental qualities, mind versus matter. Ever since Beddy had him do the Zener cards and he was able to get them right eight times out of ten without direct experience, Maddox had looked for the why in science. Now he felt he had a big idea. Mind somehow influenced the cards, not the other way around.

He was still mulling this idea over on Sunday when he met Belquis at a coffee shop in her neighborhood.

“So,” she said with a slight smile and a quick squint as she pushed up her glasses. Belquis had been listening attentively but, Maddox reflected, you can never tell whether people untrained in physics are getting it. They want to. After all, it’s their reality too, but it’s tough going.

He shoved the legal pad to her side of the table. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the math supports Dr. Jameson’s claim: a shift in Plank’s constant. Traditionally, these mathematics apply only to things at very cold temperatures, very high energy levels or,” he added what he had learned from Beddy during those stimulating study sessions back at MIT and now sincerely believed, “tiny places.”

He took a deep breath as he began to speculate, “These symbols might suggest that mind plays a role in the equations, but I haven’t gotten any further.”

Fran leaned in to read Jameson’s trembled script. “Actually, I think we can learn their meaning.”

“You realize, Belquis, that we’re dealing with mere intellectual curiosity, not cataclysmic urgency.”

“Hmm, but there is still James’s uncanny knowledge about my every move that day. That’s mysterious enough to make me want to solve this puzzle.”

Maddox wholeheartedly agreed but felt unsettled. He should have been elated: here was proof of more-than-meets-the-eye, evidence that he had picked the right field of study after all. Here he had first-hand observations of events that current theories of science could not explain. But, instead of a mystery revealed, the shadows just seemed to deepen. This couldn’t be studied by Zener cards or hunting poltergeists. His thoughts refracted, split, like light bending as it enters water.

“If you’re willing Maddox, one clue to the puzzle may be in my office.”

He had never been to a mental institution before, but this was no cuckoo’s nest. It looked like a big apartment building, with bright green doors that belonged on a daycare center, not a can of nuts.

Inside, Belquis checked in at an office window and Maddox signed in as a visitor.

The few people we passed as we mounted some stairs said “Hi” to Belquis and stared at the big stranger. They weren’t as smiley as folks generally are in a school or a workplace, but Maddox wouldn’t have given them a second glance in Walmart.

In Belquis’s office, a cold wind blew through the open window. Just yesterday it had been warm, but now Belquis slammed the sash shut.

Then Maddox saw them. Along the wall facing her desk were a line of framed figures, some of them symbols in the equations.

She followed his gaze. “I didn’t realize these were the same; I hadn’t hung them yet when James wrote out the equations.” She put a finger on the corner of one gold-painted frame. “They are shorthand to represent the planets.”

She moved along the line to touch each one in turn. “Jupiter, Mercury, Neptune, and the sun.”

“Where’d they come from?”

“A patient gave them to me but Ricky Jameson drew them.”

Maddox didn’t know that Ricky would be the key to solving the mystery of the Drift but he did know he was intrigued by her self-containment.

“You think we need to talk to her again?” he asked, feeling hopeful.

“I think we need an alchemist.”