Content with the Mysterious

Illustration by Darryl Elliott

Ken Shaw stared at the manuscript without really seeing it. The lines were gray blurs, a pattern of irregular stripes. He knew what it said, though; he’d read the march of words beneath his wife’s byline.

“You’ll love it,” she said. “It’s brilliant,” she said. And he’d had no reason not to believe her. Most of what Lissa wrote, if not brilliant, was at least very good: sharp, cogent, witty. This, however—he grimaced—this was arrogant, self-congratulatory, and sarcastic. He imagined telling her that. Not pretty. He’d critiqued her before, of course, edited her prose. That was his job. But, at the moment, he didn’t feel like editing, he felt like doing a hatchet job.

Sighing, Ken rolled his chair across the anti-static carpet and over to the office window. He was people-watching and contemplating taking a walk down the Embarcadero when he saw her charging through the manicured courtyard four stories below. She moved like a tornado with a fix on a trailer park. She always did. It was one of the things he loved about her. She researched her articles the same way, flying in, shredding, reducing the subject to matchsticks that could be easily vacuumed up—neat, tidy, and looking nothing like the original item.

Ken rolled himself back to his desk and tried to collect his thoughts. They refused to coagulate. Fear of the storm, he thought wryly, and slipped the article under the October issue cover layout. Maybe she’d grant him a reprieve. Let him bring up the article.

A moment later, she was breezing into his office, notebook computer over one shoulder, trendy but dilapidated safari jacket open over a black silk jumpsuit. “Well?” she said. “Have you read it?”

So much for a reprieve. Ken pulled the manuscript out from under the cover art and nodded.

“And?” She perched on the corner of his desk.

“It’s well-written.”

Pale brows shot up under a thatch of strawberry-blonde hair. “Well-written? Oh, Mr. Shaw, that’s editorspeak for ‘I hated every word of it.’ What’s wrong with it?” She got up, leaving her notebook on the desk, and began to pace. “I did good research. I conducted searching interviews. I collected solid evidence, evaluated it objectively—” She stopped in the middle of ticking off her processes and turned to stare at him bemusedly. “What? What’s that sour expression for, my puckered pal? You look like you just swallowed some Vilex.”

“You weren’t objective.”

The stare turned into a glare. “What do you mean, I wasn’t objective?”

He shrugged. “You weren’t objective.”

“About what?”

“About anything in here.” Her hands were on her hips, he noticed. A bad sign.

“Give me an example.”

“OK. The meditation class.”

She shrugged. What about it? her eyes asked.

He rubbed the bridge of his nose—a habit dating from when he had had to wear glasses. “Lissa, you were rude.”

“Rude? Ken, the woman was having a room full of people meditate on a crystal that didn’t exist. They took turns holding the damned thing.”

“Did that give you the right to humiliate her?”

“Oh, please.”

“Admit it, Liss. You didn’t research this article, you went on a witch hunt. You didn’t interview people, you played Inquisitor.”

“I simply asked them to produce proof of their outrageous claims. I asked a woman who said she could read auras to read me a few. And that clairvoyant character, Dreyfus—all 1 asked him to do was foretell the outcome of a simple test.”

“Did you hear yourself? ‘That clairvoyant character’? He was ‘that clairvoyant character’ before you even met him, wasn’t he?”

She glowered, arms folded.

“Well, wasn’t he?”

“So?”

He flipped the first page of the manuscript over and read, “ ‘Your job is not to debunk—leave that to the vice squad. As a scientist, you are not out to disprove or reject any claims out of hand, but to discover positive evidence in favor of them.’ ” He flipped the page back. “Despite that noble disclaimer, this article is prejudiced, Lissa. It’s arrogant. Worst of all, it’s not scientific inquiry.”

Now she was gawking at him. “I don’t believe my ears! You’re defending this crap!”

“No. I am defending objective analysis, which is absent from this article, despite your claim to the contrary.”

“Come on, Kenny. These people are fakes. They may be well-meaning, or misled, but they are fakes, nonetheless. If I can disabuse even one person of their irrational, puerile—”

“Fine, but don’t try to pass your crusading off as objective, scientific inquiry. Above all, don’t try to do it in my magazine.”

“I don’t believe this!” She turned her back on him and stalked across the room to fume in front of an Oriental print. “So, I suppose you want me to soften it, or some such nonsense.” She raised a warning finger. “I don’t believe in that. And I didn’t think you did either; call pseudo-science pseudo-science—that was the Skeptical Review’s ideal.”

“This is beyond softening, Lissa. Your methods, the tactics you espouse—”

She spun to face him. “What’s wrong with my tactics?”

He covered his face, rubbing at a headache that was trying to gain a foothold in his brain pan. He groaned.

“What do you mean, ‘they’re low?”

“I didn’t say that, I just… groaned. I’ve got a headache.”

“Which I’m responsible for, no doubt. And I heard you, clear as a bell. You accused me of using low tactics.”

“You heard what you expected to hear. I groaned. But you’re right. They were low.” He pulled his hands away from his face and tapped the manuscript. “Infiltrating their ranks, attending their meetings, even offering to give seminars or work on the newsletter, passing yourself off as a ‘true believer’—all so you can debunk them. You advocate lying—”

“Ken, everything they stand for is a lie.”

He opened his mouth.

“And don’t you dare say ‘two wrongs don’t make a right.’ ”

“I guess I don’t need to—you just took the words right out of my mouth. And you’re right. It’s tantamount to lying on behalf of the truth. I find that hypocritical. I certainly can’t advocate debunking agenda in the pages of the Skeptical Review.”

“Debunking is too strong a term. I was investigating.”

Ken picked up the manuscript, flipped to the last page. “ ‘Once you’ve gained yourself a reputation as a true believer, it may be a while before the locals tumble to the fact they’ve invited a hat pin onto the Hindenberg.’ ”

She smiled. “Clever, isn’t it?”

He shook his head. “Clever debunking, Lissa. You were intentionally setting out to explode myths—having already decided they were myths. That’s bias. It’s prejudice. It is not good scientific investigation.”

“You want me to rewrite it.”

“Are you willing to lose the smug tone? Are you willing to ask questions without supplying the answers?”

“Wait a minute. Are you telling me to re-conduct my interviews, my tests?”

“Not all of them. Several of them would stand up just fine, if you reported the results more objectively. Although…”

“Although, what?” she asked warily.

“You did seem to go out of your way to make your participants… uncomfortable.”

“I used a scientific facility.”

“You subjected a woman with a verified formaldehyde allergy to the chemicals in a lab. She was, in your words, demonstrably uncomfortable.’ You cite fear of failure. Maybe it was because her mucous membranes were swelling up and her stomach was turning over. She still did better than 50 percent on the aura readings.”

“I will not redo my research. And as for the interviews and confrontations—I can’t just throw them out. They’re what gives the article punch. I will not rewrite it.”

“Fine. Then sell it to a cult-basher. I won’t print it.” He tossed the manuscript to the edge of his desk.

“Fine. Someone else will.”

“I’ve no doubt. As I said, it’s well-written.”

She snatched up the article and her notebook and tucked both under one arm. “Sometimes I wonder if you’re suited to editing a skeptical journal. Maybe the National Tattler would be more your style. Or maybe the UFO Times.” She turned and headed for the door.

Oh, great he thought. This ought to be good for about three days of silence.

“I’ll talk to you again in about a week… if you’re lucky,” she said, and was gone.

(August 20, 1998—Interview: Dr. Petra Genoa, Ph.D., conducted by Kenneth Shaw of the Skeptical Review. Subject: precognitive experiences.)

SR: Would you call yourself a true believer?

PG: A true believer? In what?

SR: In psychic phenomena.

PG: That’s an awfully broad area. Could you be more specific?

SR: Alright. Extra-sensory perception. PG: If by that you mean do I believe there are more than five senses—yes. SR: Would you call yourself a psychic? PG: Would you call yourself a dreamer? SR: Excuse me?

PG: Sometimes you dream. Does that mean you define yourself as a dreamer? SR: I see your point; but do you believe you have psychic powers?

PG: Now there’s a loaded term: powers. I believe I have experienced extra-sensory awareness. I don’t know if I can lay claim to powers.

SR: What sort of experiences are we talking about?

PG: Knowing something was going to happen in advance, for example.

SR: Precognition?

PG: (nodding) Yes, that’s a fairly precise term.

SR: And you’ve experienced this often? PG: More often than most people I’ve interviewed, yes. I have maybe, oh, one or two episodes per month (laughing). I seem to have them most often when I’m ovulating.

SR: Seriously?

PG: Seriously.

SR: Describe a precognitive episode for me.

PG: The first one that really got my attention was the day of my high-school graduation. I was sitting there, during the ceremony, when f had this sudden conviction that the girl sitting next to me—a close friend—was going to lose her father that night.

SR: It just came out of the blue, then? You weren’t thinking about your friend?

PG: No, I wasn’t. And I felt horribly guilty. I mean, what a thought to have about a friend’s father! I almost said something, but—good God—what do you say? “Gosh, Rose, I just had the weirdest thought…”

SR: What happened?

PG: Her father was killed in a car wreck on the way to the graduation. I remember the look on her face when she realized he was late. She kept glancing out the door, while I sat there and just about peed in my pants in anguish.

SR: And that was the first time you had that awareness?

PG: No. That was when I realized… suspected I had some sort of… sensitivity. You see, before, it was always positive. I’d get the sudden feeling that I’d win a tennis match or an essay contest or receive an unexpected present or get a call from someone I hadn’t heard from for a long time. That was the first time I couldn’t explain it away as wishful thinking.

SR: The dark side of ESP.

PG: You could say that.

SR: Doesn’t your belief in ESP conflict with your position as a professor of psychology?

PG: Now, I happen to know that you’re a philosophical theist. Doesn’t your belief in a deity conflict with your position as the editor of the Skeptical Review?

SR: I’m not against belief, just ignorant belief.

PG: Can’t argue with that.

SR: To what do you attribute your precognitive experiences?

PG: I don’t know. I tend to think it’s a sense we have, or a talent, maybe, that develops or fails to develop just like any other.

SR: Why don’t I have it?

PG: Can you sing?

SR: What? Not really.

PG: Me neither. But I know many people who can. If they can sing…

SR: OK. But isn’t it more like sight or smell?

PG: I don’t know. Is it? Or is it like the ability to make music or write… or conduct interviews? What makes one person a brilliant performer and another totally graceless? People ask me to explain my awareness. But how do you explain that sort of thing? How do you explain Mozart’s musicality? The man pulled symphonies right out of his head and put them on paper—every note right the first time. You suggest it’s like sight. Fine. We can explain blindness, even if we can’t always cure it. We’ve yet to explain Mozart.

SR: Would you be willing to have your abilities tested under controlled scientific conditions?

PG: Willing, certainly. But you see, I’m a skeptic, too. I’m skeptical about my own ability to be precognitive on demand—mine or anyone else’s. I’ve never been able to sit down and meditate my way to precognition. It’s like trying to pull in my favorite radio station; sometimes it comes in clear as a bell—sometimes it’s pure static. And it’s subjective as hell. I don’t believe it when someone walks up to me and says, ‘I see auras.’ I’ve personally never seen one.

SR: But you have foretold the future.

PG: Don’t put words in my mouth. I’ve had brief, uncontrollable precognitive episodes. Like… like sneezes. Can you sneeze on command?

SR: If someone waved ragweed under my nose, maybe. So, you don’t believe ESP can be scientifically verified?

PG: I’m not sure. Maybe someday we’ll be able to set up the right conditions or ask the right questions or take the right measurements. So far, we haven’t been able to. No psychic ragweed, I guess.

SR: Some people are of the opinion that if you can’t measure something scientifically, it doesn’t exist.

PG: But doesn’t that call into question the existence of a lot of things we take for granted? Things that are critical to the functioning of our society?

SR: Such as?

PG: Well, at the risk of sounding smarmy—love, truth, trust, honor, loyalty—that sort of thing. Even musical or artistic talent.

SR: Some people might say that’s not the same thing.

PG: How do they know? If the thing’s not measurable, if it’s as subjective as love or loyalty, how can anyone say what it is or isn’t if they haven’t experienced it? I’ve experienced it and I don’t know what it is. I only know it is. I can’t convince the scientific community it is, because they can’t measure it. They can’t convince me it isn’t, because I’ve experienced it.

SR: What about evidence, though? Mozart provided evidence of his talent. He composed symphonies that orchestras worldwide are still playing. What evidence can you adduce that you really have had these experiences?

PG: Good question. I’m conducting an ongoing project wherein subjects, such as myself, record their precognitive impressions. Altogether, I’ve gathered a study sample of fifteen other people who share this, um, little affliction. We have a co-monitoring system in place. When someone in the program has an episode, they call their assigned monitor and describe it. The description is recorded and logged and we wait and see what happens. If the event occurs, the monitor signs an affidavit and we attach any corroborating evidence to the file. It’s the best we can do for now.

SR: Measuring the Mozart factor.

PG: Measuring the Mozart factor. I like that. Can I use it?

Ken flicked the notebook from play mode to record and added some voice notes, watching the words march across the flat display. “Be it noted that I did look over Dr. Genoa’s documentation and interviewed two project monitors. Neither of them had ever experienced any of the phenomena under study. In fact, they viewed themselves as being originally skeptical or, at best, neutral to the subject of ESP. One of the “sensitives” had an 82 percent accuracy rate over thirty-two recorded events; however, I must note that some of the predictions are vague enough as to be unfalsifiable. And, of course, this still amounts to hearsay evidence and necessitates trust in the perceptions and scruples of the group monitors.”

Ken pondered that. Is that what it would always come down to—having to trust the word of a go-between? And, reluctant to do that, would he only trust what he, himself, perceived or observed?

He had keyed the phone program before he thought about what he was going to say and gave the computer Dr. Genoa’s number. To his surprise, she answered her own phone, her dark face appearing immediately on his display.

“Doctor! I’m surprised to catch you in your office.”

She smiled—a flash of brilliantly white teeth. “I suppose I should say I had a feeling you’d call.”

“Did you?”

“No.”

He returned the smile. “I have an offer for you. I’d like to serve as a monitor for your project.”

“Really. Are you from Missouri, by any chance?”

“Close—Alaska. And yes, I do want to be shown. I’d like to take on a couple of your most accurate people. Victor Chin, I think, and you, if you’d be willing.”

She nodded. “Alright. You’ve got yourself a deal.”

“Great. Now, I noticed that your episodes tend to be cyclic—”

She laughed, dreadlock bells jingling against her earrings. “Cyclic psychics, huh? I sure hope the media doesn’t get hold of that.”

“I am the media, remember?”

“No. You are a respectable scientific journal. The Tattler is media.”

“Thanks.” He appreciated her making the distinction. “Now, as I was saying, I was wondering if you’d thought of setting up some sort of brain activity scan during your most susceptible periods.”

She seemed immediately open to the idea. “Brain Pattern Monitoring? I’d thought of that, actually. UC Davis has a new remote BPM that can be worn away from the hospital while it relays brain activity back to the facility. They’ve been using it to monitor seizure-prone patients, looking for an early-warning signal. Unfortunately, they’re reluctant to let it out of the house. Especially for—oh, shall we say—frivolous projects.”

“But, you’d be willing to wear a scanner?”

“You bet.”

“Fine. I’ll see if I can call in some favors.”

The expression on her face changed. “Ken, are you ready to start your job as monitor?”

“Sure… I guess. Why?”

“Your wife is going to experience some sort of trauma.”

“What?” The tone of quiet certainty at once chilled him and raised his suspicions. “Emotional or physical?”

“Emotional… art gallery. I had a sudden impression of an art gallery or museum or exhibition maybe.”

“When?”

She shook her head with a sibilant clash of bells and earrings. “I don’t know. I rarely know, exactly. Usually my range tops out at about three months. Can you save this conversation to a file?”

Ken nodded, righting himself emotionally. “Can you be any more specific about the nature of the trauma?”

“Fear. I know she’ll be frightened. I don’t know why.”

Later, when he viewed the conversation log file, Ken couldn’t help but wonder if Petra Genoa’s prediction was entirely coincidental. Could she be playing on his emotions? He went back to the case histories he’d gotten from her, in search of some sort of proximity effect. He found it; the precognitive episodes for the three subjects he studied related preponderantly to people they were in close contact with either physically or emotionally.

He had to smile at himself. His skeptic’s sensibilities told him he should welcome evidence that he was being manipulated, but he knew such evidence would only disappoint. In some peculiar way he preferred being disturbed by Dr. Genoa’s prediction to being disappointed by her duplicity.

“What did you say?”

Ken peered up at Lissa. She was gazing at him distractedly across the width of the coffee table, the display of her own notebook casting odd light-shadows across her face.

“I didn’t say anything… I don’t think. I thought I just cleared my throat.”

“You muttered something about predictions. What are you working on?”

“Oh, I interviewed Professor Genoa Tuesday.”

“Petra Genoa, the psychic psychologist? They should revoke that woman’s Ph.D.”

“She graduated at the top of her class.”

“What good is that when she ends up retiring her brain to New Age mumbo-jumbo?”

“How do you know that’s what she’s done? Have you talked to her?”

“I read an article on her in one of those true believer magazines.”

Ken failed to muzzle his laughter. “And you trusted their journalism? C’mon, Liss. Normally, you wouldn’t believe a word they printed. Why don’t you read my interview?”

“Maybe I will.” She eyed him suspiciously. “You don’t think she’s legit?”

“I’m reserving judgment until I’ve finished my own study. I’m monitoring the project she’s conducting in precognitive episodes.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Not at all. Who better to monitor alleged psychic activity than a skeptic?”

She smiled. “Right, as always. You were right about my article, too.”

He raised startled brows at that most un-Lissa-like admission. “I was?”

The smile broadened to a cat-eat-cream grin. “I did sell it somewhere else. Elaine Dehaut bought it for Aware.” She bent back to her work.

He didn’t remind her that Aware had a reputation as a forum for a fanatical extreme. Ken hated to admit the existence of that element within the skeptical community, but they were there—those who had ceased pursuing the truth in favor of pursuing agreement with their own personal world view. Of course, everyone did that to one degree or another. Everyone made assumptions, betrayed bias, and struggled with prejudice.

For some reason, that conjured the Biblical story of Jacob struggling with the angel. “Jacob,” he recalled, was Hebrew for “deceiver.” Prejudice was certainly that; it could make an unwitting fanatic of anyone.

She hated dreams like that. She’d had mercifully few of them. They disoriented her, made her feel ill-at-ease in the waking world. “Night-ponies,” she called them. Dark dreams, but not black enough to qualify as nightmares. They were usually murky, leaving nothing behind but a smudgy residue studded with tiny pockets of lucid detail.

Lissa could still vividly recall one such moment when she hung above her bed, looking down on her own sleeping form, Kenny snuggled beside her beneath the covers. She remembered thinking there should be hair in her eyes, but there wasn’t. Nor was there a hand to wipe it away with.

She had the impression that she was rising; the figures below stirred slightly, growing smaller. She had feared a collision with the ceiling, but a “glance” upward revealed only an endless, star-studded sky. She looked down again and saw her own rooftop.

Funny, she thought, I’ve never seen it from this angle before.

Bright orange fabric fluttered against the chimney. She remembered seeing the next-door neighbor’s boy flying a kite that color the weekend before.

She began to move upward again, the rooftop receding too quickly. Terror lanced through her and she fell—no, was sucked down an invisible funnel through the rooftop into bed. She woke with an electric jolt, sitting, sweating, cold and clammy, heart haring.

She bated dreams like that. Associated them with stress. She associated this one with the stress over her most recent article. She grimaced, close to admitting to herself that Ken was right about more than its salability. She hadn’t meant to assume such a cynical tone. She really had set out to be objective, but the very thought of anyone granting credibility to that supernatural twaddle set up her hackles. The thought of people like Ken and Petra Genoa—educated people, bright people—buying into it made her want to rage.

And there was no relief from that rage in her morning schedule. She had two interviews lined up—an NDE and a Chinese healer.

The Chinese healer was first; a whimsical diversion. Professor Lin Wen was a scholarly gentleman who conversed as comfortably about Tantric Buddhism as he did about chemistry—a subject in which he held one of his two doctoral degrees. He discussed how the spiritual essence, or qi, possessed by an individual could be read to predict fortune, and channeled to change it.

Lissa asked how he, a man of science, could accept and even promote something of which he had no scientific proof. He smiled and asked if she had scientific proof for everything she believed to be true.

“No,” she said, “but someone has.”

“Ah,” Wen responded. “Then you depend upon the science of others.”

“Most of us do, largely because scientific ideas are falsifiable. Qi isn’t.”

“Ah,” he said and looked inscrutably archetypal. He parted from her with avuncular concern, prompted, he claimed, by the lack of balance in her qi.

Great, she thought wryly. No more PMS. Now I can just say my qi is out of balance.

Her second interview took her to a pleasant neighborhood of neat, older homes where she expected to hear of Julie Pascale’s near-death experience. The case was particularly interesting to her because of the media coverage it had received eight years before. It was still a high-profile case—high impact, if she could break it. But when Pascale’s husband met her at the door, she knew she was going to be disappointed.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but my wife has changed her mind.”

“About the near-death experience?” The sarcasm was born of frustration.

He frowned. “No. About the interview. She’s not feeling well.”

“I can reschedule.”

“I’ll tell Julie that. I’m sure she has your number.”

And I’ll bet I have hers, Lissa thought irritably. She ought to congratulate herself, really; another true believer ducking the hard gaze of rationality. But she didn’t feel congratulatory. Julie Pascale had a particularly well-documented set of NDE experiences and Lissa had been looking forward to a one-on-one confrontation. She drove home accompanied by acute disappointment.

She was pulling into the driveway when a momentary recollection of last night’s odd dream drew her eyes to the chimney. A splash of orange caught her eye. She hit the brakes too hard and the Saab’s tires yelped in protest. Nestled against her chimney was the neighbor’s orange kite. She was fascinated. This was exactly the sort of thing that a “true believer” would take as a psychic experience, yet she knew she had merely dreamed, spinning off stress and the events of the previous day. Though she didn’t consciously recall having seen the kite on the roof, she certainly could have caught a glimpse of it, and she definitely recalled seeing it in flight.

She was in bed, asleep, before Ken got home. She half-dreamed him entering the room in a reptilian slough of textile, kissing her cheek, brushing his teeth, slipping into bed beside her. She dreamed it from above—spider’s eye view—and he was no more than settled in when she was out on the lawn watching a peculiar ritual.

A car pulled up across the street and several young men, black clad, got out. Whispering, laughing, they darted among the neighbor’s trees and shrubs, trailing gauzy webs of white. Amusement bubbled. They were teepee-ing the Rathman’s house! Feeling as if she were afloat, Lissa drew nearer to the car—a dark green Saturn Electra.

A light went on inside the house and the boys fled with a slamming of car doors. Voices distracted. Not, oddly, the shouting of irate neighbors. She had expected that. She did not expect the well-modulated tones of conversation.

A woman’s voice: “Photography has always been a passion of mine. Since I was a child, really. Now, it’s my way of observing and absorbing the world.”

Lissa’s dream faded to black in a wild sensation of sucking speed—Alice down the rabbit hole. The voice in the black changed: “Recently, you absorbed the sights of Tannu Tuva and showed Westerners what must surely be a lost world—a Shambala. What is remarkable about these photos is the contradictory senses of alienness and familiarity they evoke. 1 am looking at a photo of a group of standing stones. Near them is a circular tent—”

“That’s called a yurt.”

(Striped fabric, sheepskin, an odd wooden door.)

“A yurt. Before the yurt are a couple of young men in loincloths doing a dance that looks like, well, like the funky chicken.”

(Stocky, muscular bodies, arms akimbo, grins the sole adornment save for skillfully tied, fringed cloths. Nearby, an audience laughs and applauds, dark eyes glinting.)

“It’s called the Dance of the Eagle and it s done to honor the patron spirit. They’re preparing to wrestle. The quality of their dance will determine which opponent they’re paired with.”

“I’m out of the shower, Liss.”

She stirred. Black faded to gray.

“Describe the next one for me.”

“C’mon, Liss, up-getting time.”

(Semi-dark gallery. Black and white photo, struggling toward color. A man clad in a combination of feathers, fiber, and colorful wood clutches a painted drum.)

“Chakar O is equal parts shaman and Buddhist bhikku. The drum is used not only to accompany the dancers, but to please the spirits and call down the bounties of the spiritual realm.”

(Dancers; they are frozen in midstep, feathered headdresses in midbob. They could be Cheyenne or Sioux instead of…)

Where the hell is Tannu Tuva?

“Lissa!” The radio snicked off.

She came fully awake.

Ken smiled at her. “Welcome to the land of the living. Where were you?”

Lissa stretched and yawned. “At a photo exhibit… What? What’s that look?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. Just… nothing.” He scurried downstairs.

He left before she did and so she sat, vagrant, over breakfast, nursing a second cup of coffee. She was rinsing her cup and regretting the loss of the Pascale interview when the phone rang. She was both surprised and smug when the other woman’s new-age-gentle voice came over the line.

“Ms. Shaw, I’ve thought this over and—and I do want to talk to you.”

Lissa made an immediate appointment, hurrying to gather her notebook and scramble out the door. She had backed down the driveway and turned the car when she caught sight of the Rathman’s house. Slung between their mimosa trees, toilet paper fluttered festively in the breeze. Several rolls of the stuff littered the lawn.

Her mind did a double-take. Oh, God, I’ve started sleepwalking! She groaned. Which meant she might have wandered out into the street in nothing but an oversized T-shirt. She hoped she had only gone as far as her bedroom window.

Behind her, someone honked. She unstuck herself and drove to Tiburon.

The first thing she noticed about Julie Pascale was the vulnerable expression in her large brown eyes. The second thing she noticed was that, in crisp linen pants and a silk shirt, she did not look the least bit New Age-y. The third thing she noticed was that she walked with a cane. It was the result, Lissa learned, of the same experience that had gifted her with the NDE—in this case a near-drowning.

The story was typical in its major points: There was a great Light which the subject was drawn toward (“I was drawn to It on a—a raft of love. It was the Beloved. Just that.”), other souls who milled about between heaven and Earth (“They were so confused… so lost. They didn’t know where they were.”), deceased relatives about whom she learned volumes at a touch (“I’d never met my grandfather before, but now, I felt I’d always known him.”) It was, perhaps, atypical in the angel’s-eye view of Earth Julie described—a view that encompassed all people, in all ages, working their way toward ever-advancing levels of unity. Yet, typically, she was nearly touching the Light when she was sent back to Earth/Life in the company of what she described as “two souls.” (“They had the most amazing sense of humor.”)

According to Julie, she came upon herself in the Emergency Room at UC Davis. (“I was on a gurney, and a doctor—a heart specialist named White—had been giving me injections of adrenaline. He pronounced me dead and started to walk away when my GP—Dr. Harris—came in and asked what he was doing. He said, ‘I’ve done all I can.’ And Dr. Harris said, ‘Like hell you have.’ ”)

Dr. Harris pounded on her chest and gave her further injections. (“I wanted to shout at him to stop. But he couldn’t hear me.”)

Forty-five minutes after she had drowned, twenty minutes after the heart specialist had pronounced her dead, Julie Pascale came back to conscious life.

“It was like being sucked down a drain,” she said.

Lissa shook off the chill of a dream memory and readied her questions.

LS: I would think, after forty-five minutes of death, you’d have sustained some brain damage.

JP: I did. I had to learn to write again and speak in coherent sentences. The left side of my body is still weak. Poor Dr. Harris. When he came into my hospital room later and found me crying, I’m sure he expected some thanks or praise. Instead, I showered him with incoherent abuse. I wondered how he could dare bring me back. I almost hated him for it.

LS: What you say you saw in the ER—how close is it to what other people recall?

JP: You mean, how close is it to what really happened? Ask my psychologist. Ask Dr. Harris. There was a nurse, too—a Mrs. Yamaguchi. I have their signed statements, of course, but you might want to talk to them directly.

LS: Your psychiatrist—do you still see him?

JP: Her, and she’s a psychologist. Yes, I still see her from time to time. As a friend, not as a patient. I have copies of her statements as well, if you’d like to see them.

LS: You were very thorough.

JP: No, Dr. Genoa was.

LS: Dr. Genoa? Petra Genoa, the parapsychologist?

JP: I don’t think she considers herself that. She certainly didn’t when I met her in the hospital. I had a terrible time convincing her what happened to me really happened. I’ll never forget her parting volley the day I was released. “Take my advice,” she said, “don’t mention this NDE stuff to anyone else. Don’t talk about it; don’t even think about it. People will think you’re crazy, documentation notwithstanding.” She was right, of course.

LS: But you didn’t take her advice.

JP: No. I couldn’t not think about it. It changed my life. I had to talk about it and wonder at it and pray about it. And I had to use it to help other people.

LS: How so?

JP: I work for a Youth Hotline. We deal with drug abuse, domestic violence, suicide prevention—any and all self-destructive behavior. I try to use my experience to keep other young people from ending their lives prematurely.

LS: I find that contradictory. If you know what it’s going to be like in the next world, if you find it so wonderful, why would you want to keep others from experiencing it? In fact, why didn’t you contrive to return there yourself?

JP: I learned many things through my experience, Ms. Shaw. One of them was that the next world isn’t wonderful for everyone. Those spiritually confused souls were just that. They were unprepared for death—for life in that… realm. I also learned that life really is sacred. It’s sacred to the Beloved, and therefore, it’s sacred to me. The key word is “prematurely.” I want to go Home, but I’ll wait till I’m called.

Listening to the playback, Lissa chuckled. What marvelous furnishings decorate the houses of the true believer. A “raft of love”—she made a note to call it the “love boat”; God in the persona of the Cosmic Lover; disembodied spirits who cracked jokes. Cosmic comedy. As if the homely details could make it real.

Ken stared at the invitation in his hand as if he expected it to sprout fangs and bite him. In a sense, it had done just that; the graceful script contained a quartet of verbal teeth: Photographic Exhibition, Amsted Gallery.

“Think you two can make it?”

He looked up into the eager face of his editorial assistant, Terri Mendez.

“I hate to be pushy, but, well, Naomi is my cousin and I guess I’m proud of her. She does wonderful work.”

“I’ll, um, I’ll talk to Lissa. I’m not sure what our plans are that weekend.” Lie. He knew exactly what their plans were—nothing. He’d change that, he decided. A romantic weekend up the coast was easy enough to arrange. Lissa need never see the invitation.

Guilt poked him in the forebrain. Lissa was an adult. An adult who hated, above all things, to have decisions made for her. That, and the realization that he was granting too much credence to something he had every reason to be skeptical of, kept him from throwing the invitation away. It made him lose track of it until he got home, unloaded his briefcase, spread his papers out on the sofa and heard Lissa’s voice say, “Oh, what’s this?”

Ken made his face blank and managed to sound nonchalant. “Terri Mendez’s cousin, Naomi Whitehorse, is a photographer. That’s an invitation to her exhibit.”

Lissa’s eyes widened slightly. “Really? I’ve heard of her… I think. Sounds interesting. Do you want to go?”

He tried not to look wary. “If you do.”

“Sure. I’d hate to disappoint Terri.”

She sat down on the arm of the sofa and circled his neck with her arms. “So, what’s for dinner, O Domestic God?”

His shoulders sagged. “Oh, yeah, it’s my night, isn’t it?”

She looked at his face and laughed. “Never mind. I ll go stick a pin in the phone book.”

“Bad for the display,” he said, and she laughed again.

Bemusement tickled him. Lissa was going to an art gallery. He couldn’t imagine how that could be a traumatic experience. The more he thought about it, the more he thought Petra Genoa must have overreacted. Still, he had to allow, he was impressed. He supposed Dr. Genoa could have discovered the connection between his editorial assistant and the photographer, could have assumed he would receive an invitation to the exhibition and would include his wife, could have made her prediction as a way of manipulating a potential detractor. But Occam’s Razor cut against such Machiavellian intrigue where simple coincidence would suffice.

It was the week from hell. The weird dreams continued, leaving her tired and listless. Fatigue made her angry with herself and, habitually, she transformed her anger into zeal. She composed a sharply skeptical, tongue-in-cheek piece about the Chinese healer, but the Pascale NDE, though met with equal zeal, yielded only frustration. Her interviews with the doctors, nurses and medical attendants on duty during the eight-year-old episode corroborated Julie’s account of the scene in ER. All agreed that the girl could not have been physically aware of what was going on around her.

“How can you be so certain?” she’d asked Dr. Harris.

“She was dead, Ms. Shaw.”

“Evidently not.”

The old man had raised a mottled eyebrow. “Then perhaps we need to redefine death.”

Julie’s mother was the one to whom she had first described her experience. It was there Lissa expected to find her angle; she hoped to surprise a confession from Mrs. Joyce Delaney that she had relayed facts to her daughter rather than the other way around. She was disappointed. Arms folded across her chest, looking uncomfortable in her own living room, the older woman insisted she recalled, vividly, the day of Julie’s return to wakeful consciousness.

JD: She told me. The words that were said, the actions that were taken, the medications they gave, even the amounts.

LS: After eight years, you’re still convinced of this?

JD: Ms. Shaw, I realize people like you—people in your line of work, I mean—have a vested interest in making people like Julie look foolish and weak-minded, but I couldn’t have told her some of that stuff. I wasn’t listening to dosages and chemical compositions; my daughter was dying right before my eyes. She died right before my eyes on that boat dock.

LS: I have no desire to make Julie look foolish or weak-minded, Mrs. Delaney, and the only thing 1 have a vested interest in is the truth. Isn’t it more likely that you simply absorbed more of what you were hearing than you thought, and that Julie gleaned what she “remembered” from the ER from you and other visitors?

JD: I did not put ideas into my daughter’s head, Ms. Shaw.

LS: Yet, Julie told me she had some brain damage that necessitated her relearning how to write and speak. How could she have relayed so much information to you?

JD: She had trouble with some words, some sounds—like her tongue was uncoordinated—but she obviously knew what had happened to her, and she spoke well enough to communicate it.

LS: Were the two of you alone when she first told you her story?

JD: Yes. Does that make a difference?

The artless question made Lissa embarrassed and angry in turns—embarrassed because it did make a difference, angry because she hated embarrassment.

The ER nurse, Evelyn Yamaguchi, was Lissa’s next interview. The woman was nearly as quakingly amazed in retrospect as she had been at the time of the incident.

LS: In your estimation, how accurate was Ms. Pascale’s account of what happened in the ER while she was… unconscious?

EY: She wasn’t unconscious, dear, she was dead. Accurate—oh, my, yes—she was accurate (rubs her arms)! It still gives me chills, just to think about it. The conversation between Dr. Mead and Dr. Harris was practically word for word; the instructions to the nurses (shakes her head)… unbelievable.

LS: Yes. You were one of the trauma nurses, then.

EY: (nodding vigorously) I was with Julie from the time she came into ER until she left ICU.

LS: Think about this for a moment, Mrs. Yamaguchi. UCD is a teaching institution. Isn’t it possible Julie Pascale overheard a team of doctors going over her case history as she was regaining consciousness in ICU?

EY: Her case history—very possibly. But not the conversations and arguments that took place in the ER. No, ma’am. Doctors don’t hash over arguments on rounds. They discuss treatment, progress, prognosis.

LS: What about the nurses?

EY: I don’t know if you’ve ever been in intensive care, Ms. Shaw, but nurses don’t gossip in the patient’s rooms. That only happens in soap operas.

There was only one other person Lissa could interview who might throw some light on the Pascale story—Dr. Petra Genoa. She resisted doing that interview for the simple reason that Petra Genoa was not a reliable witness. Her credentials as a psychologist, however good they might look on paper, were contaminated by her work in parapsychology. They would still be impressive to the average reader—if someone of that stature could believe in life after death, the logic went, then might it not be true? Human beings were nothing if not enamored of possibilities.

That nagged Lissa as she attempted to compile her notes late on a Thursday evening. She knew the article wouldn’t be complete without Genoa’s input, but she couldn’t bring herself to face another immersion into the true believer mentality. It helped not at all when Ken came home puzzling over the results of his tenure as Genoa’s project monitor.

“I have to ask myself if there isn’t something here, Liss,” he said, half to himself. “Something more than can be attributed to chance and unfalsifiable predictions. With most of the subjects it’s six of one—half-dozen of the other. But this Victor Chin—his predictions have been remarkably accurate. This is fascinating. I’m hoping that when Dr. Genoa’s BPM is installed we’ll get some idea of the brain activity involved when she receives precognitive impressions.”

God, if he could only hear himself—“received precognitive impressions”! He was beginning to sound like he believed in this stuff.

“Coming to bed, Liss?”

“Huh?” She roused out of a tangle of thought and glanced at the staircase. “Uh, not just yet.”

He sat down across from her on the coffee table, scooting her papers and notebook aside. “What’s wrong, Lissa?”

“Why? Why should something be wrong?”

“Something shouldn’t. But it is. You look so worn out. You toss and turn in your sleep… Maybe you should see a doctor.”

She did not have a poker face. “I’m doing more than tossing and turning, I’m afraid. I’m sleepwalking.”

“What? I haven’t seen any evidence of it.”

“How could you? You sleep like a hibernating bear.”

“OK, but what makes you think you’re sleepwalking?”

“I’ve evidently wandered into the yard… on a number of nights and seen things going on in the neighborhood.”

“Such as?”

“I saw the Rathman’s house get tee-peed. I thought I was dreaming, but when I woke up the next morning, lo and behold, the Rathman’s house was… well, you saw it.”

“They didn’t see you—the boys who tee-peed the house?”

Lissa nearly giggled. She must’ve been standing right out in the street… wearing only an extra-large T-shirt with the 49’ers quarterback on it. “I don’t know.”

Ken looked down at his hands, folded between his knees. “Well, I have to admit, log that I am, even I’ve noticed you’ve been had some pretty restless nights. You look exhausted. You are exhausted,” he added and she realized he was afraid she might be physically ill.

She hastened to agree with him. “I’m pretty drained. I suppose I ought to see a doctor.”

By morning she was convinced of it. Another night of vivid aerial dreams left her wide awake by four A.M., waiting for sunrise. But a complete physical revealed that, except for suffering sleep deprivation, she was perfectly healthy.

“What causes sleepwalking, doctor?” she asked. “I’ve never done it before. Or, at least, I don’t remember doing it. Although, I’ve always had unusually vivid dreams.”

“Actually, not remembering is a normal function of sleepwalking.” Dr. Velasquez leaned back in his chair, looking cool, unruffled, and relaxed. “Retaining any memory of the events is highly unusual. As to what causes it—we don’t precisely know. We do know it’s a timing problem.”

“Excuse me?”

“At times during non-REM sleep a dissociation can occur between cognition and behavior. What that means in neurological terms is that the upper brain is not responding to the signals from the lower brain. The lower brain signals for REM sleep; the upper brain doesn’t respond. In the resulting confusion, the waking and sleeping worlds’ become intertwined and the body begins to act out dreams.”

Lissa shook her head. “But I’m not acting out dreams. I’m walking around seeing things that are actually happening.”

Dr. Velasquez considered that. “Alright. Could you be awake but groggy?”

“No. No, I’m not awake.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m dreaming. I don’t… walk out through the door, doctor. I fly out through the roof.”

“Which could certainly describe what it feels like as you pass from dreaming into partial awakening.”

Lissa felt suddenly foolish. “That sounds reasonable.”

Dr. Velasquez, consulting his computer screen, didn’t seem to hear her. “You mentioned insomnia. Have you been depressed lately?”

Lissa laughed. “Only about my resistance to sleep—or at least to dreaming.”

“Well, Lissa, there’s nothing physically wrong with you, that I can see. Your MRI shows no abnormalities. We could try monitoring your sleep.”

“You mean with electrodes and all that? Why bother? I think you’re right. I’m sleepwalking and as I begin to wake up, I have… interesting dreams.”

“Lissa, that’s a symptom, not a cause.”

“Alright. What might cause something like this?”

“Often sleep disorders are caused by stress, which is something for which I often prescribe meditation.”

Lissa, snatched from the verge of relief, ogled. “Meditation? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Not at all. Concentration on something other than your anxieties—whether it be a pretty scene or a pleasant memory or an actual spiritual mantra—”

“Please, doctor—this New Age stuff—”

“There’s nothing New Age about it. Meditation is as old as man’s desire for control and serenity in his life.”

“I do not believe in meditation.”

The doctor gave her a look he probably reserved for recalcitrant children who refused to take their medicine. “Fine. Then I’ll prescribe some relaxation exercises. Can you handle that?”

Can I handle that? Lissa stared at the prescription. It outlined a series of exercises (Toe-clenches, for godsake!), and recommended that she see a therapist if her insomnia and anxiety continued.

She held out against doing the exercises for two hours of what promised to be a sleepless night.

“What are you doing?” Ken asked drowsily.

“I’m meditating,” she growled and rebelliously clenched and unclenched her toes.

She held out against the idea of seeing a therapist until the following Tuesday. The therapist, a moon-faced, smiling woman who put her instantly at ease, probed her stress levels and asked about recent traumas.

Lissa couldn’t cite anything but the argument with Ken over the article. It hardly ranked as a trauma, but it still rankled.

“You’ve never argued with your husband over a piece of work before?”

Lissa shrugged. “Certainly. But he’s never condemned anything I’ve done out-of-hand before.”

“Is that what you feel he’s done—condemned you out-of-hand?”

“Me? No, he wasn’t condemning me, just the article.”

“You said he called you a fanatic.”

“He claims he didn’t. He says he yawned or hiccuped something and I heard what I expected to hear.”

“What do you think of that?”

“I think he called me a fanatic and then felt guilty about it.”

“Do you think he was right?”

“You mean, am I a fanatic? No. Of course not. No more than he is. I’m just committed to the scientific paradigm.”

The doctor made a few notes, then asked, “What about past traumas? Childhood traumas, for example?”

“Like what?”

“The death of a loved one. A terrifying personal experience.”

Lissa shrugged, trying to relax suddenly tense shoulders. “No more than anyone else. I… fell out of a tree once and broke my arm. My father died when I was twelve.”

The doctor was reading her face. “You attach no particular significance to these events?”

She did, as it happened, but shook her head. She had fallen out of the tree into the swirling waters of a rain-swollen river. She had been in the tree because the plane she was riding in crashed into the South Platte. Her father had died in that crash.

She wondered why she was withholding from Dr. Van Owen even the fact that the two events were related; but wondered only fleetingly. She was being contrary because it was her nature to be contrary. She didn’t like people digging around inside her—resented the idea that a stranger might know things about her she did not know about herself. She was not convinced, she realized, that the beads and rattles used by modern psychiatrists worked any better than the ones used by their more primitive forebears.

Dr. Van Owen veered from the discussion of PTD onto a completely unexpected tack. “Your description of floating or soaring through the ceiling of your room, the vividness of the detail you remember, none of this is consistent with sleepwalking. It is consistent with lucid dreaming or a classic out-of-body experience.”

“A—a what?”

Van Owen raised her hands. “Not that I’m advancing that as a diagnosis, but you might want to see someone who’ll at least consider it within the realm of possibility. I have a colleague—a Dr. Genoa—”

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding.”

“You’ve heard of her?”

“Only too often. I’m sorry, Dr. Van Owen. I can’t take the woman seriously.”

“She’s a brilliant therapist.”

“And a promoter of pseudo-science.”

Van Owen gave her a long, steady look. “Well, you may have a point. Obviously you’re not comfortable with that approach. That’s fine. If you’re willing, we’ll just continue on and see what we can do.”

That wasn’t much. Dr. Van Owen seemed to know Lissa was holding back and Lissa, knowing that to be true, was distracted to the point of impatience. She was relieved when the session was over, and did not make another appointment.

The weekend found Lissa high on relief. For whatever reason, after her visit to Dr. Van Owen, she ceased having the vivid dreams. After two nights of uninterrupted sleep, she was nearly giddy and ready for a night out on the town.

Saturday evening they dined at the Equinox and strolled the Embarcadero. Oddly, the visit to the Amsted Gallery took some urging on Lissa’s part. Normally, Ken was eager to share his colleagues’ moments of pride and triumph. This time he was noticeably reluctant.

They arrived at the Amsted and were met just inside by an effusive Terri Mendez. While she engaged Ken in conversation, Lissa wandered the gallery walls, gazing at her cousin’s photographs. Pastorals and portraits, alike, centered on the people. The people had engaging eyes and shy smiles. They were old and young, radiant, callused. Their faces spoke volumes about the nature of life in places far from cosmopolitan San Francisco—places Lissa had never heard of.

She entered a cubicle dedicated to the photographer’s excursion through the wilds of Mongolia and found herself face to face with a culture that was a curious mosaic of Native American and Asian. Peculiar music accompanied the exhibit; drums, voices, and eerie flutes.

Fascinated, Lissa moved from frame to frame, reading about the culture of an unknown people; women who worked from dawn, to dusk at every task imaginable, men who trained their throats to whistle dual tones.

That’s what I’m hearing, she realized, and paused to study a photograph of the choir. The only instruments were drums; all other music was performed with voice and the strange split tones the Tuvali men produced in their throats.

She shook her head in amazement and turned to view another photo. In it, a group of young men danced the funky chicken.

Lissa’s heart clenched, cold, in her chest. She knew this picture. She knew each face—the young man with the bashful smile whose loincloth was too big by half; the old woman with the gap-grin; the dignified village elder seated before his striped, multi-hued yurt. She knew each standing stone, too, and every carved design.

Her memory at once seized on a distant, waking dream, but reason denied that tenuous connection. Déjà vu.

Why then, the certainty that somewhere in this room was a photograph of a shamanist ritual—that amid the pounding of drums, feet, and hearts sat a man who was both shaman and Buddhist monk, a man whose face she knew to its last chiseled line? The image conjured, she moved her eyes along the linen-covered walls until the picture in her mind’s eyes found a match. A perfect match. Down to the last long feather in the crown of the shaman’s ornate headdress; down to the gleaming gold cap in his upper row of teeth; down to the eagle’s-head drum mallet with which he beat his painted drum. Horse, said Lissa’s insistent memory. He’d call it a horse.

Her heart steadied. “This is ridiculous.”

“There you are!” Ken’s voice sounded strained.

No, she just imagined it because she was strained.

“What’s the matter, honey? You look like you’ve seen a non-existent earthbound spirit.”

She didn’t laugh at the joke. “These photos… I’ve seen them before.”

“How could you? This is Naomi’s first exhibit since she came back from the Russias.”

“Well, I must have seen them on TV, then, or in a magazine.”

Terri Mendez entered the cubicle in the company of a taller, dark-haired woman with a tanned face. Lissa all but leapt at her.

“You’re the photographer?”

The tall woman smiled, nodding. “I’m Naomi Whitehorse, yes.”

Lissa returned the smile, dry lips sticking to her teeth. “My husband and I were just debating what magazine we’ve seen these photos in.”

Naomi glanced at her cousin. “None yet, I hope. I’m due to have a spread in Smithsonian next month, but nothing before that.”

“Oh, well I suppose it must have been on TV then.”

Naomi shook her head. “I haven’t had any television coverage… yet,” she added, crossing her fingers. “I did do a radio interview several weeks ago, though.”

Ken was nodding, “I remember that. It aired on Fresh Art—the morning show.”

Lissa remembered too, then. Really remembered. The foggy dream voices, the vivid dream images. “I’m… positive it had to be a visual medium. I’d swear I’ve seen these photos before.”

Naomi Whitehorse shrugged. “I’m sorry, but that’s impossible. I’ve only done the one radio interview since I came home. There were some newspaper stories on the opening, but no photos were shown.”

“She described the photographs though,” Terri offered.

“Yes. Yes, between the moderator and I, we described these two in some detail.” Naomi indicated the wrestlers and the shaman.

Lissa felt a surge of relief. “Oh, of course, I remember now. I was just waking up. You described them in such vivid detail—the-the images on the standing stones; the shaman with the gold tooth, drumming away on his horse.” She was gabbling and she knew it, but the passing of that horrible moment of weirdness was worth the minor embarrassment.

Naomi’s eyes lit up. “Oh, you know something about the Tannu Tuva culture, then. Most people would have called that a tom-tom.”

Lissa was confused. “I’ve never heard of Tannu Tuva. You called it a horse during the interview.”

Naomi gave her cousin another glance. What’s wrong with this woman? it whispered. “No,” she said, “I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t describe it at all. I described the dancers in great detail. But I know I never used that terminology to describe the shaman’s drum.”

“You did describe the shaman, though; his headdress, his gold tooth—”

Naomi Whitehorse was staring at her now. “Honestly, I never described him in that detail.”

“But I saw—” Lissa swallowed. She sounded so desperate. Three pairs of eyes were on her like hot little spotlights. “I realize how silly this sounds.”

Naomi shook her head. “Not at all. I’m a firm believer in the mysteries of the human spirit. You must have heard the broadcast and somehow visualized what I was seeing as I described the photos. Have you had that sort of psychic experience before?”

“Psychic experience?” Lissa tried to laugh and choked instead. “That’s absurd.”

“Is it?” countered Naomi. “Why?”

“I’m not allowed to have psychic experiences, I’m a skeptic.”

“A skeptic?” Naomi echoed. “About what, exactly?”

“About all this: psychic experiences, magic, the mystical.”

Naomi’s expression went from warm to chill. “My Tuvali friends would argue the reasonableness of that skepticism. They live their lives surrounded by the mystical—as did my ancestors.”

That observation ended the conversation. Terri Mendez swept her cousin away with nervous glances at Ken, while Lissa, hot-faced, made her way to the buffet table.

“You probably think I’m going nuts,” she murmured to Ken over hors d’oeuvres.

“No.”

“It’s just a vivid imagination coupled with exhaustion.”

“Is that what Dr. Van Owen thought it was? Her office left a message for you at home, asking if you wanted to make another appointment. What’s this all about, Lissa? Is it the sleepwalking?”

“That and some other stuff.” She told him then, about the weird bouts of déjà vu that seemed to occur with increasing regularity. “I’m thinking someone is going to say something and in the next second, the words pop out of their mouths.”

“Or not, as the case may be?” He was looking into his punch glass, not at her face.

“What?”

“You’ve always accused me of saying aloud what I was only thinking. But lately, it seems to happen all the time.” She stared at him, trying to peek beneath the veil of caution that covered his face. “Always? I’ve always done that?”

He nodded, a smile lifting the corner of his mouth. “When we met, I thought it was cute. Special, like we were on the same wavelength. I’ve always liked it. Sometimes I know what you’re thinking, too. Proximity effect, I suppose.”

“Ken, that’s absurd. It’s irrational and it’s unscientific.”

He shrugged. “So’s human attraction. I’m not going to knock it, though. It brought a balding, nerdy guy together with a hot young journalism major. I should argue?”

He was trying to jolly her. She appreciated and resented it simultaneously. “How can you joke about it? How can you… court such irrational beliefs?”

“What beliefs, Lissa? They’re not beliefs, they’re observations.”

Lissa put her glass down before her shaking hands could spill its contents. “Maybe I’m going crazy.”

“Nonsense. What did Dr. Van Owen say?”

“She was leaning toward post traumatic stress disorder, brought on by childhood trauma, I’m pretty sure.”

“Your father’s death? The plane crash?”

Bingo. “I… I didn’t tell her about that.”

“Why ever not?”

“Just being perverse, I guess. And private. She said my dreams sounded to her like a—quote: classic out-of-body experience—unquote. She wanted to refer me to—you’re not going to believe this—your friend, Dr. Genoa.”

“You could do worse. Maybe you should see her.”

“Absolutely not. The woman stands for everything I despise—irrationality, pseudo-science, mysticism.”

“Why do you despise it?”

She stared at him. “How can you ask that? I thought we were involved in the same crusade.”

He set down his punch. “Do you hear yourself, Lissa? ‘Despise,’ ‘crusade.’ Those are words from a zealot’s vocabulary. I’m not sure they should be in a skeptic’s.”

“What words do you recommend I replace them with?”

“ ‘Doubt,’ maybe. ‘Question.’ And I’ve always felt we were involved in more of a quest than a crusade. A search for reality, but a search in which we try not to indulge fond, superstitious fantasies about the outcome.”

“I don’t do that,” Lissa denied. “I’m not superstitious and I don’t indulge in fantasy.”

“You don’t? You had no foregone conclusions about what your NDE investigation would reveal? You had no prejudice about the veracity of Julie Pascale’s experience?”

She could not swear to that, and knew it, but attempted to anyway. “No. I had no preconceptions about Julie Pascale. I didn’t label her a fraud. She might have been the victim of hallucinations, or delusion; she might have experienced the perfectly explainable effects of what happens when a brain shuts down for forty-five minutes then… reboots. Or she might have been dreaming.”

“Like you’ve been doing?”

“I… I suppose.”

“But she couldn’t really have passed into the next world and returned.”

“She was on a gurney in ER.”

“Don’t be obtuse. ‘Her,’ meaning her soul or spirit or whatever you want to call it. You don’t believe a spiritual state after death is a possibility, hence you conclude, at the outset, that her story is false.”

“Yes.”

“That’s prejudice, Lissa. You don’t see her story as evidence for a possible reality that we simply haven’t plumbed yet. You see it as a lie to be debunked. Prejudice.”

“Rationality.”

“Bull shit.”

She did not sleep well. The photographs returned to haunt her and came to vivid, waking life. At some point, she began to have another of the flotation dreams, but rode it only as far as the ridgepole before forcing the dream to suck her out of the ether and back to bed.

Sunday night was no better. Monday morning she called Petra Genoa’s office.

“May I ask what this is in regard to?” asked the young man who answered her call.

“I, ah, it has to do with a case Dr. Genoa was involved in some years ago. A young woman named Julie Pascale had a near-death experience. Dr. Genoa was her therapist. Julie recommended I interview Dr. Genoa as part of my investigation.”

Genoa surprised her by seeing her that afternoon. She surprised her further by being an attractive young woman in a dashiki suit and musically trimmed dreadlocks. The suit was topped with an open white lab coat.

“Are you a medical doctor too?” Lissa asked, shaking the other woman’s strong, tapered hand. (Gold fingernails.)

“Oh, no. They just like their professors to look professorial. Since my taste in attire runs to the, ah, individual, they’ve asked that I retain the coat.” She tilted her pocket name plate up and glanced at it. “Well, at least I can’t forget my own name.”

Seated in Professor Genoa’s sunny office, Lissa was caught up in the anticipatory tingle of journalistic nerves. She lived for that sensation. It peaked as she slipped her notebook into Record Audio mode and readied her first question. If there was a heaven, Lissa thought, fleetingiy, it was this moment—perpetual interview.

LS: How clear are your memories of the events surrounding Julie Pascale’s near-drowning?

PG: Crystal clear.

LS: This was eight years ago. I have trouble recalling what happened eight days ago.

PG: This was an event that wrought major changes in my life. I’m not likely to forget it.

LS: Were you on duty when Julie Pascale was brought in?

PG: I was just coming off duty. I got waylaid in the hall and asked if I could counsel the family of a drowning victim. I was told they were still trying to revive the girl but that her chances were slim. I got to the Emergency Room just as Dr. Mead pronounced Julie dead.

LS: Then you overheard the altercation between Drs. Mead and Harris?

PG: Yes.

LS: And how close was Julie Pascale’s recollection of the confrontation?

PG: Nearly perfect. You said you interviewed Dr. Harris; I’m sure he told you as much.

LS: Why is it necessary to attribute that to a supernatural cause? Couldn’t Julie have overheard, say, a couple of nurses or interns discussing the events in ER as she was coming around in ICU?

PG: Ms. Shaw, we’ve all been party to conversations that attempted to describe other conversations. How often is the format of such a dialogue “he said-she said” interspersed with verbatim quotes? One thing Julie Pascale demonstrably possesses is an eidetic memory. I have to at least entertain the idea that she heard an actual conversation, saw facial expressions, observed actions no second-hand conversation would have detailed, even if it had been carried on within her hearing.

LS: Then she must have been conscious or semi-conscious in the ER.

PG: Well, her heart had stopped and her brain waves were nil; neither sight nor sound was getting through to her. She had, in fact, been declared dead by a highly respected cardiac specialist. Even if she had been capable of opening her eyes, she accurately described things her physical vantage point on the gurney would not have revealed.

LS: For example…

PG: The fact that the nurse attending Dr. Harris originally picked up the wrong IV, noticed it and returned it for the appropriate solution. The fact that her Brain Pattern Monitor was showing nothing but failing Beta waves.

LS: She might have overheard the nurse tell someone she almost brought the wrong solution; someone might have told her—

PG: But they didn’t tell her. I interviewed that nurse—Evelyn Yamaguchi. When I told her what Julie claimed to have seen, she was shocked and ashamed. She’d never told anyone about the mix-up. She was just thankful she caught her mistake before Julie was harmed. It wasn’t something she was proud of.

LS: Then someone else must have seen her.

PG: Someone did; Julie Pascale.

LS: That’s impossible.

PG: Is it? You’re obviously convinced it is. A moment ago you asked why it was necessary to attribute this to supernatural causes. I don’t think they are supernatural. I think, because these things happen, they must be completely natural. How can any of us—except maybe a Julie Pascale—claim to have even an inkling about what happens after death, or during sleep, or in any other altered state of consciousness? From the perspective of twins during the birth process, the firstborn is dead, gone, unreachable. Neither could realize, until they reach the outside world, that there’s more to life than the womb.

LS: So this is a womb-world and we’re all headed for Julie Pascale’s raft of love?

PG: Let me ask you a question: Why do you so adamantly refute Julie’s experience?

LS: I’m not refuting it. I’m investigating it.

PG: No, you’re trying to attribute it to something you can comprehend. Maybe it’s incomprehensible… for the time being.

LS: Oh, I see. It’s what the Catholic Church refers to as a “mystery.”

PG: I’m not Catholic, but it’s what I refer to as a mystery. I’m not saying we’ll never understand it, just that we don’t now understand it. The child in the womb doesn’t have a clue about why she needs eyes. She probably doesn’t realize she has them. She certainly couldn’t grasp the concept of seeing, let alone the reality of it.

LS: So you do believe this is a womb-world and that we’re—what—carrying eyes we don’t know we have, couldn’t know if we wanted to, and won’t use until we die?

PG: Could be. Could be that rare individuals like Julie get their eyes opened a bit. It’s an interesting mystery, don’t you think?

LS: And you’re content with that?

PG: (laughing) Do I have a choice? The science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick, said, “We should be content with the mysterious, the meaningless, the contradictory, the hostile and, most of all, the unexplainably warm and giving…”

LS: A lovely quote, but don’t you want the mystery explained? Don’t you want to be able to comprehend Julie Pascale’s experiences… and your own?

PG: Certainly. But I don’t have an agenda that demands it be explained in a particular way. I’m content with the mysterious, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to clear up the mystery. Really, the whole process fascinates me.

LS: Hence, your involvement with parapsychology.

PG: The term “parapsychology” has a decidedly negative connotation. You’ll understand if I avoid using it. I’d like to be able to coin a more accurate term, but I’m not much good at PR.

LS: But you are good, I’m told, at studying unusual phenomena. Just out of curiosity, I’d like to see what you make of… some experiences I’ve had over the last couple of months.

PG: OK. I’m game.

Lissa leaned forward to flip her notebook out of record mode. She wanted this completely off the record. “I’ve been having dreams,” she said. “Dreams wherein I seem to be floating out of my bedroom, out of my house, sometimes out of my neighborhood. Four or five times I’ve seen things happening outside my house that I later find out have actually occurred. For example, my across-the-street neighbor’s house was tee-peed by a bunch of high school kids. I saw it in my dream—right down to the faces of the kids who did it and the car they were driving. The next morning I saw the house had actually been tee-peed. What could that have been?”

Dr. Genoa’s eyebrows raised delicately. “I’d say sleepwalking, but somnambulists rarely, if ever, recall their wanderings—let alone in that detail.”

“Rarely. But not ‘never’?”

Genoa nodded. “The sensation of floating—”

“Now that sounds similar to what Julie Pascale described, doesn’t it?”

The dark brows scooted higher. “That was a near-death experience. You weren’t dying.”

“Exactly. I was merely asleep. But you don’t think I’m sleepwalking.”

Genoa shrugged. “It could be lucid dreaming.”

“Could you define lucid dreaming for me? I want to make sure we’re on the same page.”

“Lucid dreaming takes place in the middle of REM sleep—it differs from sleepwalking in that major respect. Lucid dreams usually occur in the early morning and are marked by unusual lucidity, clarity of thought, the awareness that we are dreaming, an ability to direct the action in the dream.”

Lissa considered that momentarily. “I was directing the action somewhat. I was amused that my neighbor’s house was under attack by boys armed with toilet paper and I consciously moved in for a closer look.”

“Then what happened?”

“The neighbors woke up, the boys drove off, I was sucked back… um, into another dream.”

“Sounds like lucid dreaming, except for one important detail; what you saw really happened.”

Lissa toyed with the strap of her notebook. “My… a psychiatrist I interviewed said it sounded like a classic out-of-body experience.”

“Known in the vernacular as an OBE. Uh-huh. We don’t know that OBEs and lucid dreams aren’t related phenomena. In some people, they seem to be practically interchangeable.”

“Yes, but lucid dreams are in the realm of accepted psychology. Out-of-body experiences are psychic supposition.”

“As recently as 1990 lucid dreaming was lumped in with all that New Age jazz by skeptics and true believers alike. The ‘give-me-a-break’ fantasy of last week often becomes the gee-wow’ science fiction of yesterday on its way to becoming established theory.”

“I could have sleepwalked, gone to the window—or even out onto the lawn—then experienced the floating sensation as I woke up to see the boys teepee the house.”

“I suppose. But you didn’t wake up in the street, did you?”

“No. But I could have slipped back into sleep and sleepwalked myself back to bed… couldn’t I?”

“I’ve never heard of that happening… which doesn’t mean it couldn’t or didn’t happen to you.”

“Alright. Let me describe another lucid dream. The morning radio show I wake up to was conducting an interview with a photographer who’d just come back from Tannu Tuva. She… described a couple of photos—generally, not much detail. My mind filled in the details; a gold cap on a shaman’s tooth, the images on some standing-stones. I’d all but forgotten the dream when Ken and I went to her exhibition. The photographs I saw fit the details I dreamed right down to the pattern on the head of the shaman’s drum. Needless to say, I was a little rattled.”

“Yes, I know. Ken… told me about it.

Lissa dropped the notebook strap. Hair stood up on the back of her neck. “He what? Would you mind telling me why Ken was discussing me with you?”

“When he spoke to me about becoming a monitor for my project, I had a strong impression that you were headed for some sort of disturbing experience related to a visit to an art gallery.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Genoa shrugged. “Your prerogative, certainly, but Ken did record my statement.”

“How long ago?”

“Three weeks or thereabouts… That was really what you came here for, wasn’t it? To try to understand what happened to you.” She shook her head, dreadlocks singing. “I’m sorry, Lissa. But I don’t fully understand, myself. If I did, I wouldn’t feel impelled to seek out people like Julie Pascale. I wouldn’t be up to my ears in this project. And I’d be able to give you answers. Instead, all I can do is invite you to join in asking the questions. Maybe we can work toward comprehension together.”

She rejected the invitation (out-ofhand, Ken would have said). She went for a long drive up through Sausalito and Tiburon. She sat on Stinson’s Beach and stared at the randomness of waves and thought about her father and plane crashes and endings.

Finally, she went home.

“I was worried,” Ken said.

“So was I.”

He gave her his patented over-the-ghost-glasses look.

“I saw Petra Genoa this afternoon. We talked about NDEs and lucid dreams and OBEs… and photo exhibits.”

“Oh,” he said. Just, “Oh.”

“Can I hear what she said about the art gallery?”

“Are you sure?”

“No. Can I hear it?”

He got out his notebook and set it up on the coffee table. “Are you sure?” he asked again.

She took a deep breath. “Yes,” this time.

He opened the file and fast-forwarded to a bookmark he’d set at Genoa’s prediction. On the flat screen, Petra Genoa’s attractive face wore an expression of bemused concern.

“Ken,” she said, “are you ready to start your job as monitor?”

“Sure… I guess. Why?

“Your wife is going to experience some sort of trauma.”

“What? Emotional or physical?”

“Emotional… Art gallery. I had a sudden impression of an art gallery or museum or exhibition maybe. Paintings… no, photos.”

“When?”

She shook her head, making music. “I don’t know. I rarely know, exactly. Usually my range tops out at about three months. Can you save this conversation to a file?”

“Can you be more specific about the nature of the trauma?”

“Fear. I know she’ll be frightened. I don’t know why.”

Lissa was nodding. “She does now.”

“You were frightened because you saw the photographs in a dream before you saw them in reality.”

“Yeah. I dream orange fabric on our roof; there’s a kite stuck to the chimney. I dream the neighbor’s house is tee-peed; it happens. I see a shaman with a gold tooth; Naomi Whitehorse has taken his picture. Dammit, Ken,” she complained, “these can’t be psychic experiences. I’m a skeptic.”

“Fine. Be a skeptic. Look for answers.”

“I’ve been looking. My psychiatrist doesn’t have a clue. She wants me to meditate. Dr. Genoa doesn’t have a clue either, and she wants me to help her look for one.” She fidgeted. “She quoted some science fiction writer at me: Be content with the mysterious, he said.”

“Philip K. Dick. Yeah.”

“That’s hard for me, Kenny.” She thought of Julie Pascale. “Damn, it’s even hard for me to be content with the ‘unexplainably warm and giving.’ How do you do it?”

He shrugged. “I just try to keep an open mind. Look for truth wherever it may rear its often peculiar head.”

“Even in Petra Genoa’s camp?”

“Yeah, even there.”

“OK. I’ll think about it. Right now, I’ve got an article to rewrite.”

“Oh? Which one?”

“The Pascale NDE. I’m not saying I believe she went beyond the Great Divide, but I realize I reported with bias. OK, prejudice. My approach to her interview was skewed because of it. I wasn’t looking for truth, I was trying to satisfy myself that there are no mysteries I can’t personally unravel.”

“So what approach, now?”

Lissa shrugged, trying for a grin. “It’s a mystery.”

Ken smiled, bending over to kiss her as he rose.

“Where are you going?”

“To remove the kite from our roof.” He paused, giving her a cockeyed look. “Is there anything in the rain gutters I should know about?”

“No, but there’s a chubby old guy stuck in our chimney.”

They both laughed. She felt—not lighthearted—but better. “Content with the mysterious”—she would try to be that, hard as it was.

She heard Ken’s footsteps overhead. A moment later, a wad of orange polyurethane sailed past the living room window.

Oh, Mr. Dick, you said a mouthful.