Mind to Mind: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (6 page)

Well, like I said, I got
home a little after one o'clock and went straight into the office
and fired up the computer. A computer is a wondrous device. It
extends the mind, redimensions it, formats it, gives it reach and
expression not really found in any other way. Mostly left-brained
stuff, but a good graphics program can give wonderful right-brain
expression also. And in this application I was working primarily
through my right cortex.

So I loaded in the graphics software and
used my left hand on a touch pad, which is like an electronic
paintbrush, to try some free association with my paintings from
Jane Doe. This is similar to automatic writing, if you know what
that is.

Remember that the right
brain is largely nonverbal. But it is really quite superior to the
left side in most applications of nonverbal mental activity. That's
where intuition comes from. It is where we get our spatial
concepts. Most of our emotions live over there. Virtually all
creative movements originate on that side. Such mental constructs
do not originate as language. Normally we have to involve the left
brain's language capabilities before we can express the right
brain's creations, and sometimes, as we do that, the left brain
overrides the nonverbal right and presents us with something quite
different.

Have you ever been in love and felt so
damned tongue-tied trying to express the feeling? Ever wondered why
the really deeply emotional ideas are so hard to put into words? It
is because the left brain is trying to translate via language a
purely right-brain movement of psyche, and something is always lost
in any translation.

Okay. I was trying to
outwit the left brain. To use my right hand on the touch pad would
be to involve the left brain (which controls the right side of the
body, remember) in a purely right-brain exercise. I wanted no
translator. I wanted to hook up my right cerebral cortex to the
computer as directly as possible. That is what I did. I sat there
for twenty minutes or so with my left hand on the touch pad and my
left brain occupied with the front page of the
Los Angeles Times
. I was
concentrating very hard on that newspaper, and I guess I read
every word on the page several times around. I was only vaguely
aware all this time that my left hand was on the touch pad;
occasionally I would be aware of movement over there, but I tried
to keep the left brain aloof from all that.

And I got some good stuff.

I got some remarkable stuff.

I saved the designs to the
disk and ran off a couple of copies on the printer. I still was not
sure what I had there, exactly, but at least it was a place to
start—like putting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle; it helps
if you have the actual pieces in your hands to work
with.

I give you all this here,
mainly, I guess, to show that I was wide awake and rational,
despite the late hour and trying day. Remember also that I had come
straight into the office upon arrival home. I was in there for
about thirty minutes. I stopped off in the kitchen and stood at the
open refrigerator to drink a glass of milk.

I then walked through the
dark bedroom and into my bathroom where I took care of the usual
bedtime business, brushed my teeth, took a vitamin, the usual
routine.

It is now right around two o'clock. I am
still thinking that the mind is too alert to go to sleep, but I am
resolved to give it a try. I have removed my clothes and left them
in the bathroom. I turn out that light and proceed in the dark to
my bed. It is still rumble-tumble from the visit of Alison
Saunders. I turn on the bedside light to see what sort of repairs
are necessary.

Suspend disbelief, please, at this
point.

Jane Doe is lying naked
upon my rumble-tumble bed. She is a three-dimensional object. I can
even see the depression in the mattress from her weight. I have not
seen Jane naked before this, but I recognize the cruel marks upon
that otherwise flawless body from Alison's description. But this
is not exactly the same Jane Doe. This Jane has no paralysis. She
giggles softly and reaches for me with both hands. These are real
hands, soft and warm loving hands. I am not dreaming. I am wide
awake.

As God is my witness, I made love to an
"alive" and ardent woman more than twelve hours after she had been
murdered.

Chapter Eight: Zoned

You think I'm nuts. That's okay. I had to
wonder about that myself. I was also considering various scenarios
that would validate the experience as a sane one. My mind leapt to
dozens of those, tumbling one after the other.

I even called Alison Saunders, asked her to
verify Jane's death, asked her to locate the body and to verify
that indeed it was there where it belonged. I guess she thought I
was nuts, too, and I was not about to tell her the reason for my
request.

I woke up Jim Cochran again also. He was not
so hospitable this time. I heard Georgia's voice in the
background, informing him in no uncertain terms that he was not to
leave the bed unless the Russians were invading. I asked him if he
had actually seen Jane Doe's corpse. He assured me that he had, and
he confirmed Alison's story that Jane's throat had been slashed
following cardiac arrest. I insisted that he look in on Vicky
Victoria, but don't ask why I did that, and don't ask why I felt
better when he reported that she was safe and snug in her bed.

Jim did not question my
sanity. He quit doing that several cases back. He'd become
conditioned to my "murky" investigative processes, and I like to
think that he respected them. He asked no questions at all, in
fact, and evinced no curiosity whatever as to why I rang his phone
at three
a.m
.
There was a tension in the voice, however, when he agreed to check
on his ten-year-old.

I apologized for the early-morning wake-up
and told him good-bye while taking a mental note to send Georgia
some flowers or something. Cops' wives lead lousy lives. I was not
unmindful of my trespass into hers, and I wanted her to know that
at least I was aware of the trespass.

Trespasses notwithstanding, I was left with
the same puzzle. Maybe I should explain that despite my earlier
statement, I also long ago stopped wondering about my own sanity.
If this case is the first time you've encountered me, I probably
also need to explain that this was not my first bout with the
seemingly inexplicable. I was telling you earlier about my views on
life and the freedom to exercise options thereof. What I did not
tell you, but I guess now I should, is that the free exercise of
those "options" has led me into a pursuit of decidedly offbeat
experiences. I have long held the conviction that we live in a
truly magical universe—magical, that is, from the viewpoint
rendered by our human sensory apparatus—so magical that the
apperception of it tends to offend the rational (left-brained)
interpretations of what we like to call "reality."

A "reality," we tend to believe, is
something solid, textured, colored—something "real" that can be
touched, held, beheld, or otherwise grasped and factually analyzed
by the mind.

Trouble is, there is much
of "reality" that is neither solid, textured, or colored but
remains as "real" as electromagnetism and other undisputed physical
properties—and I doubt that there is a scientist or philosopher
alive today who would assert that the human mind has already
"grasped" and/or analyzed all there is to know about this reality
we inhabit. Most, in fact, would probably tell you that we are just
beginning to get a handle on this fabulous thing we call
existence.

One of the problems with
apprehending "reality" goes to what we have experienced before, and
a lot of it has to do with just plain common sense. Of course, the
common sense of a few years ago told us that the earth was flat,
that what goes up must come down, and that the moon was made of
green cheese.

So we need to keep upgrading the common
sense.

That is what I try to do.

And that is why, I guess,
I've never hung out a shingle proclaiming myself an expert at
anything. I don't want to be an expert. Experts are dumb. They are
telling you and me that they have it all snockered. That, in
itself, is an admission of dumb. It's one of the verities that you
can trust: a smart ass is a dumb ass. But that is not necessarily
true the other way around. A dumb ass could be and often is a
highly intelligent person who does not recognize his own smarts, or
does not trust his own smarts, or is afraid to assert his own
smarts. He also could be a guy who is smart enough to realize that
we are all dumb asses, in the final analysis. A smart ass has never
tumbled to that truth, so he is the dumbest of all.

I don't like to be dumb, not consciously
dumb. I hate a snow job too. And I despise being told that my
particular apprehension of reality is false merely because it goes
against someone's common sense.

So, as you might
imagine—given the freedom I have, the willingness to exercise it,
and the way I feel about this thing called reality—I often find
myself groping through that state of being that Rod Serling dubbed
"the twilight zone." But I have found it generally to be a nicer
place than Serling saw it. Wondrous, sure, awesome, and often a
little scary, but I have to tell you that all the "evil" I have
encountered has been outside that zone, not within it. Evil seems
to be a peculiarly human construct.

Of course, though, I am not a smart ass.
Just because I have not encountered something does not mean that I
never will. So be assured that I exercise a healthy respect for our
reality. Be assured, also, that I shiver and shake like any other
normal human being in the presence of the inexplicable.

I was doing both on that morning in
Malibu.

Not just because of what had gone
before.

I was shivering and shaking, even after the
telephone conversations with Alison and Jim, because Jane Doe was
still in my bed.

Chapter Nine: Places

Try to put yourself in my
place, please. It is disconcerting enough to think that you have
probably experienced something totally outside the normal range of
human expectation and belief. It can be more than disconcerting if
the experience appears to violate every principle of natural law,
and this is especially true if you have been rather extensively
schooled in those principles. You have an open mind, sure, and
you're willing to consider the possibility that none of our
so-called natural laws are absolute—but you have been schooled,
after all, to look at your world and to interpret it via the common
logic. So anytime you are confronted by the irrational, you are
probably going to be looking for a rational explanation. You are
trying to rationalize the irrational. That is sort of a
contradiction in terms, isn't it? So okay. You can play the mental
games, and you can even go along with contradictions—to a
point.

So maybe you have
succeeded in rationalizing ESP—to a point. You don't understand the
vehicle or the medium of such expression because it really does not
fit the natural model, but you have had an ESP experience from time
to time or you know someone who has. You know that there is now
even a quasi-scientific acceptance of ESP. You can study
parapsychology at most colleges these days. So even if you don't
really understand how it works (as no one does), you've sort of
been going along with the idea; and even if you've never
experienced ESP yourself (or think you haven't), you probably have
widened your window on reality to admit some sort of ESP experience
as valid.

I have to warn you, now,
that you are in dangerous waters. Dangerous, that is, to your peace
of mind if you are one who prefers a tidy reality. Because
if
any
of the
extrasensory experiences are valid—if any
one
is valid—then you've thrown the
door open to them all. Give validity to one exception and that
exception can rightfully claim the rule.

Dr. Louisa E. Rhine, one
of the academic pioneers in parapsychological research with her
husband, Dr. J. B. Rhine, put it this way in her treatise
Hidden Channels of the Mind
: "Scholars trying to comprehend the universe have
recognized that back of the world as we perceive it must lie a
reality quite different from the psychological concept of it with
which we are familiar."

What this respected
parapsychologist is telling us, there, is that common reality is a
construct of the mind. Think I'm overstating? Check this out, from
the same book: "It seems to mean that basically the different
dimensions of reality are not divided as our senses show them. It
seems as if perception by the senses has superimposed these
distinctions on reality, and that in some ultimate way these
differences of thought and thing, near and far, present and future,
are only superficial, the creations of the human mind."

So where does that leave us, you and me, in
our attempts to rationalize the irrational?

Yeah, right, it leaves us in my beach pad at
Malibu with a dead woman who does not seem to realize that she is
dead and insists on inhabiting space and time with those of us who
are not really prepared to acknowledge her ability to do that.

I have had a few bundles of psychical
experiences. I have even, I believe, had fleeting communications
and "visitations" from the dead. That's okay. I handle that okay.
Because except for a couple of small exceptions, that could all be
rationalized as occurring entirely within my own mind. I have never
had to reach too far outside my paradigm to explain to my
satisfaction how such things can fit my tidy concept of
reality.