Mind to Mind: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (20 page)

"Maybe. Well... no. It would depend."

"On what?'

"You really want me to walk the thin ice,
don't you? How can I possibly? I'm just going on—"

I said, "Educated hunch.
Trust it. What is it?"

She sighed, reflected a
moment, finally said, "He would not break the law to save a friend.
But he might... bend it.. .just a little."

Even though the friend is dead wrong."

"Even then, yes."

It was my turn to sigh and reflect.

She asked me, "What's this all about?"

"It's about me," I told
her. "And my big mouth. I broke the first law of self-preservation,
a while ago, in tossing Frank Valdiva a very close friend to
crucify. You're telling me he won't do it. I believe I told him
nothing he had not already guessed—or feared—on his own. And I'm
just wondering where that leaves me."

"But he's cleared you,"
she said quietly.

"No, he's just backed away a couple of
steps. I'm still the prime patsy in this case." I sighed again.
"I'm going to need your help, Alison."

"What can I do?"

"Introduce me to the surgeon who salvaged
what was left of Jane Doe."

"I don't know him personally, but I suppose
I could—"

I said, "Sure you could. I'll want to talk
to him this afternoon. I want to thoroughly nail down this side of
the street before I venture again to the other side."

"What other side? What... ?"

"The insane side. Something is—"

"What?" she asked, with some agitation.

"Haven't you noticed? Jane seems to
have..."

"What?"

"Simmered down. Ever since Jim Cochran died.
There's been no—"

"What do you—"

"...no further phenomena
from her. She disconnected, let go of it. What could that
mean?"

“
Are you
asking
me?”

No. I was asking myself. And I felt that I
had to have the answer before Frank Valdiva found his.

Chapter Twenty-Seven: The
Trembling Question

The surgeon's name was Grewal. He was a
native of India, maybe forty-five years old, bright guy with a
piercing gaze and a reflective manner, seemed to always pull a
brief mental review of every statement before uttering it. I liked
him right away because he looked a bit like Zubin Mehta and I am
very partial to musical conductors. Grewal, though, had built quite
a reputation in medical circles as a brilliant neurosurgeon. He'd
done a lot of experimental work and was recognized as a daring
innovator of surgical techniques involving the brain.

He remembered my Jane Doe very well. Both
hands rose toward the heavens, then dropped into his lap as he
asked me, "But what can we do? Living tissue may not be infinitely
subdivided." Pause for reflection, then: "Nerve tissue in
particular. Each cell is highly specialized." Long pause. "The
brain should not be regarded as a single organ, but as many organs
working in close concert, very much as the many instruments of a
large orchestra."

Okay, Mr. Mehta, lead on.

"The same as each instrument of the
orchestra has its particular part to play, the same also you will
see within the brain the particular instruments and their
individual melodies."

I loved it.

"Remove a single flute or
violin from the orchestra at a crucial moment and still the
orchestra shall play on, and only the conductor or the trained
critic will note the loss. Remove, however, all the violins or all
the wind instruments, and note then the consternation of the entire
audience."

I nodded agreement with that and asked him,
"How much of Jane's orchestra did you remove?"

He reflected on that question for a moment
before replying, "I fear that we ended her concert forever."

I asked, "Why would you do that?"

Again the hands imploring
the heavens and then falling onto his lap in a gesture of
surrender. "What is life, Mr. Ford? We cling to it very
tenaciously. This young woman came to us clinging beyond any normal
expectation. We did what we could to assist her in that. We may not
suture a ruptured brain back together again, you know. We may not
re-create individual cells and rebuild cortices. Even if we could
do that by some technical means, we could not begin to reconnect
all the billions of electrical circuits. When an electric power
generating plant blows up, Mr. Ford, one cannot gather up all the
spilled electrons and reconnect them in any meaningful
way."

I nodded my head in sympathy with that point
of view. Then he said something that really put me in his corner:
"And, of course, in the final analysis, Mr. Ford, a neurosurgeon
is little more than an electrical engineer."

I said, "Really!"

"Of course. The more we
study the brain, the more we realize that we are dealing with
fields of electrical force localized within biochemical
structures. Our task, then, as neurosurgeons, is to attempt to
understand how these trillions upon billions of tiny structures
are orchestrated to produce the personality we perceive as a
living being, how certain orchestral sections respond to what we
term the will and how others respond reflexibly to protect the
living being. Quite fascinating when one thinks about it, and when
one realizes that the entire living structure appears to be no more
than a support structure for the maintenance of consciousness. Ah,
but ah!—do not ask me to define for you this term
consciousness,
for
therein lies the trembling question."

I smiled and asked him, "Which trembling
question is that?"

"What is it all about, my friend?"

I really liked this guy. I asked, "What was
it all about for Jane Doe?"

He frowned, ran a finger along the crease of
his trousers, pushed back in his chair, swung the feet, reflected.
Presently he replied, "For my Jane Doe the question had gone quite
beyond any literal meaning. She came to us a dead woman who refused
to remain dead."

I asked, "Exactly how do
you mean that?"

He shrugged, answered, "There was no
discernible pulse or heartbeat. She was dead by every definition
save the final determining presence of brain waves. And those brain
waves...they were quite remarkable."

"How so?"

"There seemed to be..." He
paused, took a deep breath, gave me a rather shy look, reflected a
moment, continued: "Understand, please, that the left side of her
skull was crushed. The left cerebral cortex was jellied and
escaping. Yet there was very little bleeding—very little loss of
blood throughout, actually. All of the vital systems were severely
depressed. The patient was in a physical state best understood as
dormancy, suspended animation—as though somehow, by some will, an
heroic personal effort was being made to conserve all possible
resources until repairs could be made. Does this sound to you
fanciful? Never mind, it sounds so—even to me—but it is the
inescapable conclusion. The patient was dead, yet the patient
would not accept this fact. And the waves..."

"What about them?"

"Heroic."

"Heroic?"

"Yes. Not the usual calm characteristics of
the coma or comalike state but virtual electrical storms more
characteristic of epileptic attack. But yet there seemed..."

I waited courteously for him to continue.
After about twenty seconds I prompted him. "You were saying that
there seemed—"

"... a method to the attack," he resumed.
"An organization of...The storm seemed organized, more so than the
disorganized flashes characteristic of epilepsy."

I asked him, "What did that suggest to
you?"

"Willful activity," he
replied. "
Ragingly
willful activity. Of a degree never before observed in
similar circumstances."

"But, of course, that brain was in severe
trauma."

"But of course. All the more remarkable,
then, are the noted characteristics."

I asked him, "Had you ever experienced
anything of this nature before? In any other patient?"

"But once," he replied thoughtfully. "As a
young medical student in India. One of the masters exhibited
such."

"Masters of what?"

He blinked, smiled, replied, "A holy man.
His brain waves were thus in all but the meditative state."

I asked, "Was this holy man particularly
remarkable in any..."

The surgeon showed me that shy smile,
dropped his gaze, replied, 'This holy man was reputed to be one
hundred and thirty years of age."

I said, "Yeah, okay, I guess that's
remarkable enough."

"He did not bleed when cut."

"Uh-huh."

"He had fasted forty years. Understand? No
food whatever for forty years. Or so he claimed."

"Uh-huh."

"He stood upon blazing
coals for twenty minutes but did not burn. This I saw with my own
eyes."

"Uh-huh."

"Three steel nails had been driven two
inches inside his skull. This had been such, he said, for more than
twenty years. He placed them there himself."

"Uh-huh. Why?"

The doctor spread his hands. "Why not?"

"What is it all about, eh?"

"Precisely so. This holy
man claimed to be—how would it translate?—-freed from the flesh...
a moving spirit."

"Uh-huh. Or a walking soul?"

"Perhaps, yes. A free soul, a free spirit,
not bound to the flesh."

"Did he come from another world?"

"In his understanding, but of course. As do
each of us, all of us. This was his demonstration."

"Demonstration of what?"

"The thesis that we use
the body, the body does not use us."

"Do you buy that?"

He spread the hands again. "There exist two
basic aspects, Mr. Ford, as regards the human brain. I believe
these may be stated simply as action and reaction. May we say that
action stimulates the brain from within the physical structure
while reaction is a stimulus emanating from outside the physical
structure."

After a moment I prodded with: "Yes?"

"Yes. What is the origin of action?"

I sighed and replied, "There you go. What is
it all about."

"Quite so."

"I believe we have been here before. What
was Jane all about?"

"The origin," he said, "of action."

I said, "Thank you, Dr. Grewal."

He requested, 'Tell me, please, when you
have solved the riddle."

Solve
it? I had not yet
defined
it. But I was getting a sniff of that trembling
question...and it was driving me crazy.

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Door to
Beyond

I dropped Alison at her
place and went on to Malibu for needed repairs to the self. Alison
needed the downtime, too, that was obvious. It had been a frantic
pace of events, almost from the moment we'd first met, and she was
coming apart under the strain. Matter of fact, so was I. The day
was Friday. It had begun on Tuesday, barely seventy-two hours
earlier. Not that the time factor was unusual for me. My cases do
show a tendency to explode all over me the moment I encounter them.
I should have become accustomed to that. Part of the way I work, I
guess, or the way I'm screwed into things. A catalytic effect, I
suppose. Whatever, the involvement in this case had simply become
too otherworldly in one sense—producing too damned much mystery and
bewilderment for the mind to handle—and in the other sense, too
personally threatening for a comfortable this-world
orientation.

It had become more and
more apparent to me, in fact, that the truth about this case was
not to be found in this world. The problems—yeah, the problems, as
I understood them—were very much related to this world, so any
meaningful resolution needed to be this-world-related also, if I
was to come out of it with my head intact. But there were other
worries also, beyond the self. Very probably the health and general
well-being of a ten-year-old kid were at stake. Count in also the
kid's mother and brother.

As for Jane Doe—well,
Jane, you see...Jane herself was no longer a this-world problem. I
was not sure that she had ever been; not, that is, since my entry
into the case. The little visit with Dr. Grewal tended to confirm a
growing suspicion in that direction. This is going to be hard to
handle intellectually, but...well, I had been wondering since the
experiences at Ojai if the phenomenal aspects of the case had
actually begun much earlier than the confrontation with a fleshy
ghost in my bedroom at Malibu. My sensing, in fact—or call that my
"extra-sensing"—almost from the beginning had been definitely
colored toward otherworldly phenomena. This accounts, I believe,
for my decision to get involved in the case.

Understand, please—I am
not omniscient or even nearly so. My "sensing" of things is often
as vague as anyone's. Even a strong sensing usually comes with no
particularly clear understanding of what it is or what it means. I
get a "sniff' of something, that's all, and then I have to puzzle
it out, the same as anyone else.

My initial "sniff" of Jane Doe was, I
believe, disturbing to that part of me that works within the right
brain. I know, in fact, that it was. I just did not understand the
disturbance. The message that came over to the left brain told the
intellect to stay out of it. I decided to do that; tried to do
that. But then Jane's right brain moved against mine, and in that
exchange a new sensing was born. Don't ask; I don't know what that
new sensing was. I only know that the message to the intellect was
more sympathetic to this woman's plight. At that point it would
have taken horses to pull me away. I reacted accordingly. The rest
is the case as we have experienced it to this point.