Mind to Mind: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (7 page)

But just look at this mess
we're in now! I cannot rationalize Jane Doe as a dream or as a
waking hallucination, and not even as some form of extrasensory
perception. There is nothing
extrasensory
about it. The woman
died more than twelve hours ago. Her cadaver is at rest in the
county morgue at this very moment. Yet that same body—or a damned
good copy of it—is also at rest this very moment in my bed. It has
weight and warmth, it is animated by a crackling personality, and
it seems quite content to just stay there, maybe
forever.

So. Put yourself in my place, please. I
don't care if you are male or female, pal; put yourself there and
assign Jane to the opposite sex. How do we handle this? Do we treat
her like a person or like a thing? Do we try to ignore her and hope
that she will leave the same way she came?

And—if she won't
leave—what then, old pal? What the hell
do
we do with her? She didn't bring
any clothing with her! What if someone drops in? Do we introduce
her—and if so, how? Does she need to be fed? If so, what? Should we
put down a bowl of water, like for a stray puppy, in case she gets
thirsty?

See ... this is the kind
of stupid shit the mind retreats within when it is confronted with
the inexplicable. I was not thinking sanely at all. I should have
been pondering eternal truths or something equally noble; or maybe
I should have been thinking of how sweet it would be to trot Jane
Doe down to some sacred halls of science and watch those guys try
to rationalize her away. There were any number of deep
implications, having to do with the nature of life and
death—religious implications, legal implications, scientific
implications—medical implications, for God's sake.

But I was worried about what the neighbors
might think. Like, I have a friend who teaches CPR, and she left
her dummy at my place for about a week once. Bothered hell out of
me, like having a sex doll lying about the place and what would
people think.

See, this is not sane
thinking, and I knew it at the time. I was busying the intellect
with meaningless frick-frack, avoiding the necessity for really
dealing with this situation. I got away with it for most of an
hour, too, but then Jane herself began to force the issue. I heard
her getting out of bed, and that shivered me with some nameless
dread. Like, a monster was up and moving about my house. That was
insane thinking too. It was nothing whatever like a monster but a
very lovely woman who came into my office. She was sipping a Coke
from my refrigerator. One of my bath towels was wrapped about the
very shapely body. She sat in my chair at the computer and offered
me a sip of the Coke. Her eyes were beautiful,
compelling.

But, see, I had to deal with that Coke. I
tasted it. It was the real stuff. I handed it back and watched her
take another sip. It was going somewhere, sure as hell. An
illusion—even an ectopiasmic emanation—would not, one should think,
be able to interact with time-space matter. I could hallucinate an
interaction with myself—even a sexual interaction—but unless I was
in some weird mental warp, some kind of dissociative phenomenon, I
very much doubted that I could hallucinate the biological processes
involved in the disappearance of that cola.

I asked her how she felt.

She smiled, eyes and all, assuring me that
she felt just fine.

I whistled a couple of bars of
"Summertime."

She picked up where I left off, in the same
key, humming softly for a couple more bars.

I made a verbal note that she was now in
physical control of both sides of her body. She seemed a bit
confused by the statement, suggesting that she understood what I
said but could not relate to it. So I said it flat out: "Your
paralysis is gone." She still seemed unable to relate to that, so I
dropped it.

The paralysis was gone, yes, but the aphasia
was not. She seemed quite a bit more alert and mentally responsive
when spoken to than she had shown earlier, at the hospital, but
there was not even an attempt at verbalization. Earlier, in bed,
she'd cried out passionately several times. Except for the brief
humming, she had not otherwise used her voice.

I was trying to deal with
that—trying, you know, to intellectualize the body first of all,
then this body responding normally with only half a brain, then
why the paralysis was gone but the aphasia was not—all the while
realizing that I was trying to deal with an impossibility, anyway.
I mean, if she could resurrect a perfect body like that, why the
hell couldn't she resurrect the whole brain with it—or did she? And
I was not really thinking in terms of a
resurrection
, anyway, not in the
usual sense. I mean, look, this simply was not the same body.
Pretty good copy, yeah, but the original was lying on a slab at the
morgue. And if it was not a real body, what about that
Coke?

Dammit, it was a real
body. I knew it was. The throat, now—
that
throat had never been slashed.
It was perfect. On the other hand, the cigarette tattoos had been
reproduced. Why? And if there was voice enough to cry passion and
hum a tune, then why not brain enough to formulate language for
it?

Are you in my place? Can you understand the
mental confusion I was experiencing and the psychical crisis I was
approaching? Here was a flesh-and-blood, living being, an obviously
human being, strolling about my house and raiding my refrigerator
in total contradiction to the known natural laws governing the
situation.

I fired up the computer and loaded in the
designs I'd copied from her living memory and showed them to her.
Then I did a couple of freehand designs with the touch pad, hoping
she would take a turn at it, but she showed no interest in
that.

I took her temperature. It
was within the normal range for
Homo
sapiens
.

I put her on the bathroom
scale, and everything checked out there too.

I broke out the Polaroid and took several
pictures. They came out beautifully.

I fixed her a sandwich and she ate it. She
also drank a glass of milk and polished off half an apple pie.

Then she took me back to bed and screwed my
brains out again.

I know that this probably
sounds terribly immoral or unethical or perverted or whatever, but
I am asking you to understand my ambivalence in the matter, my
mental confusions, the state of my emotions. There was certainly
no sensation of making love with a ghost or a hallucination,
absolutely not a corpse, and I was as awed as I had a right to be
while at the same time, thoroughly captivated by the sensuality and
passion of my partner in this madness. But it did not seem like
madness. It was beautiful. She was beautiful. I was beautiful. The
whole world was beautiful, and we both were tumbling through it,
locked together in a total interchange of mind and body, fused into
a single entity. For how long I simply could not say. It seemed
endless, timeless. I do not remember the end of it. I just remember
awakening in the awareness of daylight, alone in the bed. The
telephone was ringing far away. I could also hear the water running
in the shower, and I remember wondering about ghosts taking
showers. The clock beside the telephone was showing six o'clock.
The voice on the telephone was Alison's. She seemed very
disturbed.

"What's wrong?" I asked thickly, trying to
pull myself into the objective world.

"Something very strange has occurred," she
told me, somewhat breathless.

I growled, "Ditto."

"What?"

"Tell me yours first."

"I—I don't know, I—this is more your kind of
stuff than mine, I guess."

"What is?" I was waking up quickly.

"I—this will sound crazy—I believe Jane was
here."

"When?"

"Just now. I woke up and
there she was. Wrapped in a towel. Seemed to be trying to tell me
something. She kissed my cheek. It was very ... real. I was scared
to death! She removed the towel and showed me the ... the
thing
on her tummy, the
design. I thought, Oh God I'm dreaming and I wish I'd wake up. I
took my eyes away for just a second, to turn on the bedlamp, and
she was gone when I looked back. Ash ... I was not
dreaming."

"How do you know that?"

"Because the towel is
still here, on my bed. It's damp. It's ...Ash ...?"

"Yeah, I'm here."

"It's one of your towels. I recognize it.
The big blue one with the embossed—"

I growled, "Hold the
phone," and rolled off the bed, staggered into the bathroom. The
water was running in the shower, yeah, but no one was in there. One
of the towels was missing. I turned off the water, went looking for
Jane. But I was alone in that house. My computer was up. I vaguely
remembered trying to encourage Jane to use it, guessed I'd
forgotten to download it. But then I looked again. It was not as I
had left it. A totally new graphic was displayed on the monitor. I
shivered, picked up the phone in there, told Alison, "It's okay.
You had a valid experience. Don't sweat it. But if you want to talk
about it ..."

She said, "Be there in an hour." She sounded
better, relieved.

I just wished there was someone around to
relieve me. I hope you understand how I felt about all this. Are
you in my place now? And are you, then, as unglued as I was?

Chapter Ten: Kingdom of
Nonsense

If we are to finish this story together, I
guess I'd better talk a bit about my view of reality.

I actually see two basic realities, or two
ways of experiencing the one reality. Let's make no mistake about
it, there is but one overriding reality. The differences in view,
or experience, are a product of the way that you and I are screwed
into that reality, our orientation to it.

Do not consider for even a
moment any chance that the world you understand is anywhere near
the same world that your dog or cat understands, the same one
understood by the bird in the tree, or the tree itself, or the
parasites clinging to the tree. For each of us, all of us who are
caught up in this experience called
life
, the understanding is somewhat
different. There is, I think, a more or less "common experience"
that is shared to some extent by members of the various species.
Most of us in the human species view the same world, more or less,
though each of us in our unique way. I think probably birds do
that, dogs do it, snails do it, flowers of the garden do it, the
bees in the flowers do it; each group to their own common
reality.

In my formal thinking I
call this "shared experience" the Reality Quotient, or RQ. This may
be somewhat arrogant, but I assign an RQ of 100 to the human
species, as a measurement of self-conscious apprehension in the
space-time continuum. Any RQ rating below 100 would indicate an
intelligence that does not appear to have the capability of
reflective thought; that is, consciousness but not
self-consciousness, reactive awareness but not creative awareness.
This category would include a spider as he spins his web; he spins
not because he has rationalized this "creative act" (the creation
of the web) as his best means to acquire food, but he spins because
he is programmed to spin and his internal wiring provides him with
no alternative solution to the survival problem. I arbitrarily
assign the spider an RQ of about 30, considerably lower than a dog,
although the dog shows no creative designs whatever. The dog, along
with his peers the whale and the chimp, scores in the 80 to 90
range because he does frequently exhibit some sort of reflective
thought process, however rudimentary, and sometimes displays
altruistic behavior.

The man or woman who paints a picture of the
spider and his web deserves a 100 + score even though the painting
is less utilitarian than the actual web because RQ is a measure of
awareness, not survivability, and the evidence suggests that the
painter is considerably more aware of the spatial relationships of
the web than the spider is, despite the fact that the spider
depends upon the web for survival while the painter does not.

There is no evidence even
to suggest that the spider is "aware" of any objective reality
beyond his web. Like us, he creates his own world, but it is not a
world of consciousness. The spider's web is his universe; objects
that become trapped within it must seem (to the spider, if be
thought about it) to have magically appeared from some other
world.

But even the aboriginal
human receives an RQ= 100. Surprising, really, how few of us have
reached beyond that point. A genuine mystic or gifted theoretical
physicist would score closer to the 200 mark. Most of us, you and
I, fall somewhere between.

But we are discussing,
remember, the
perception
of the one reality. You may recall something I
said earlier about "the common logic" and the quotation from Dr.
Rhine concerning the superficiality of common human perception. I
must emphasize that there is but one reality, though the
superficial
distinctions of that reality that are superimposed upon it by
the way our minds work produce conflicting versions of what that
reality is.

At the aboriginal human
level two basic views, or "superimpositions," tell us that the
world is at once both physical and nonphysical, tangible and
intangible, logical and magical. This is the RQ=100 reality. It is
also a very innocent reality. As the human psyche develops, begins
rationalizing and synthesizing experience, explodes into
intellectual and utilitarian (technological) sophistication, the
one (right-brained) view goes into eclipse and the other
(left-brained) view begins to dominate in such a way that the human
world has become almost singularly physical, tangible, and
logical—
in the common reality.
This is a natural consequence of our apparently
innate fascination with the dissection and analysis of reality. To
dissect and analyze is to use the linear processes of the left
brain. Both philosophy and science have led us along this narrow
trail to the present, more or less common, worldview of a linear,
cause-effect universe,
which is validly
perceived only by the senses.
Thusly we
have seen a general evolution of "the common sense" to a point
where it no longer serves or even fuels our researches; it is a
linear, material, mechanical model of the universe—a
sensory
universe—and a
dead end for science. That dead end moved us to an RQ of about 120.
So those of us who are comfortable there have also reached the end
of our individual evolutionary trail, stuck at around
120.