Coronado Dreaming

  “Want one?”

  “What is it?

  “A Blue Hawaiian. They’re pretty good.”

  I nodded and one appeared on the table. I walked over and took a taste. “Kind of sweet, but, not bad.” I set it back down.

  “Wanna go watch the sunset off Maui? We can have some coconut shrimp and Banana’s Foster.”

  I’m not sure where he got that combination, but it didn’t sound half bad. I shook my head, though.

  “No… I’m gonna stay here and wait for Boris. I don’t really feel like going anywhere.”

  He nodded. “I understand. You’ll feel better, tomorrow.”

  “Probably. It’s just… it was so real.”

  “I know.”

  I took another sip of Blue Hawaiian. Some coconut shrimp appeared on a plate next to my drink and I had a bite. Delicious, naturally.

  “The timeline outside… is it the ‘real’ one?”

  “They’re all real.”

  “So Boris is dead, somewhere else?”

  “I’m afraid, so… most probably. But, he’s very much alive, here. And, as far as your question goes, yeah, I think the one outside is the ‘real’ one.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It just feels right.”

  I grunted, because I kind of knew what he meant.

  He continued, “When you were playing golf, I felt the shift when you altered reality and changed the weather. When I do it, it’s lighter… more of a localized phenomenon. When you did it, it was stronger. Like an entire shift from one world-line to another. Something felt wrong. It just felt… sad. I was here on your boat, and when Boris went to the door, I called him back and shut it. I could swear that I saw another Boris keep on going… I’ve never seen that, before. I don’t know why I did it… shut the door, that is… it just felt… right.”

  “Thank God you did.”

  “I can’t say for certain that this Boris would have met the same fate, but, I get the feeling that maybe he would have.”

  There was that word, again. Fate.

  “So, you think this was meant to happen?”

  Giddeon shrugged. “Maybe everything’s meant to happen.”

  I took another bite of shrimp. It wasn’t quite as good as the first, but it was still extraordinary. I shook my head. “The universe is a strange place.”

  Gid nodded. “Like someone once said: ‘It’s not only stranger than you imagine, it’s stranger than you can imagine.”

  I nodded, also, and finished my shrimp in silence. I decided I wasn’t in the mood for Banana’s Foster.

  Chapter 57

  The next day, I woke up with Boris at my side. I realized that I did feel a little better. After a shower and a shave, I donned some shorts, and, also, a T-shirt that said ‘Life is Good’. It had a little stick figure and a surf board on the front. I’m not really sure why I picked that shirt.

  It just felt right.

  Giddeon appeared at the door, like a normal person, after having stepped on board from the dock. He had on a nearly identical outfit… only his stick figure was playing golf and the shirt was of a different color.

  “Doing okay?” queried Gid.

  “Yeah… I’m okay. Boris is still asleep.”

  “What do you want to do, today?”

  I stuck my hands in my pockets, unsure if what I was about to ask was possible. I figured it couldn’t hurt to try, so, I said, “I want to go see Mom and Dad.”

  Giddeon nodded. “Before they died?”

  “No… I want to see how they would be, now. If they didn’t have the car wreck.”

  He nodded, and a tunnel of light appeared.

  __________

  My mom was talking on the phone, there in her kitchen, in Alabama. She looked older; more grey was in her dark ponytail than I remembered. She was chatting about the talent on a reality show from the night before to someone on the other end. My dad was at the table, drinking a cup of coffee and perusing his morning paper. He had on reading glasses and was flipping through the sports section looking over scores… most likely baseball and golf. I went and stood beside my mother, and though I knew it would be futile, reached out to touch her. I could feel just the slightest bit of warmth from her arm as my hand went through it.

  I then went over and sat down beside my dad, gazing at the man I hadn’t seen in 8 years. It was so good to see him after all of that time. I could discern every pore in his skin, every crease in his clothing. His nails were neatly trimmed, and I watched him bring his coffee cup to his lips. He took a swallow of the cream-colored liquid… café-au-lait… and glanced over at Mom; an ordinary glance like a husband gives a wife every day after years and years of marriage. It gladdened me to see such a normal interaction, as if nothing had ever happened on that August afternoon. As if that eighteen-wheeler and their car had never met.

  I sat there for a while just soaking in the scene and smelling the smells of home…the familiar scents of my mother and my father and their coffee. I stood up just as Mom was finishing her conversation. I heard her say, “Okay, Greg… I’ll talk to you, later. I love you.”

  She had been talking to me.

  I ‘kissed’ her on the cheek and said,

  “I love you, too.”

  Chapter 58

  It took several weeks for me to totally shake the feeling that all of my waking life on that side was a dream, and that Giddeon was just implanting memories in my head in order to spare me from pain.

  I was plagued by the thought that Boris was as dead as my parents, and, even if he wasn’t, that there were no alternate realities. That I was living in a construct of my subconscious mind because I was too fragile to handle the truth.

  I was afraid that the truth was this: that I was going to live out my final days in a coma, comforted by make-believe visions of make-believe worlds as I grew progressively weaker and weaker… until one day, having no other choice, my brother did indeed consent to finally have my feeding tube removed.

  I would fade into oblivion with only three people, and, possibly, a cat, knowing I was gone.

  Despite feeling that way, I still hung out with Giddeon and Boris. I still played golf at Coronado Municipal and North Island while drinking MangoMooManias. I even still went to visit Melody and eat at new restaurants. As the saying goes, ‘The show must go on.’

  I supposed that to be true… even if the show was all in my head.

  __________

  I found that Italian wasn’t as difficult as I’d imagined… Giddeon and I practiced it while watching television broadcasts from the old country. Thanks to his help and my own extra ‘horsepower’, the words began to flow very quickly. I was amazed at how fast something like that could be learned, and, when I was fairly fluent, we moved on to German and French.

  It was the languages that eventually brought me out of my melancholy.

  As I was well on my way to mastering both French and German, I realized that there had to be truth in all that Giddeon had said about the nature of reality.

  The sentence structures, syntax and inflections I was learning seemed too varied and too distinct to be part of a ‘dream’. Fabricating memories was one thing, but fabricating entirely new knowledge and working vocabularies was something else. I decided that Boris was alive, and that when I was ‘petting’ him, it wasn’t just a ghost petting a ghost… it was real. It was my little slice of pie cut from the never-ending cosmos. I began to feel that I had a chance of eventually coming out of my coma… and walking once again amongst the land of the living.

  __________

  I came to believe that I was over there because of fate, and that fate was that timeline that stretched like a silver strand from the past to the future. It shined brighter than all the rest of the fibers around it because that was the one meant especially for you.

  I began to see destiny as a thin filament of glistening light.

  A thin filament that contained all of the people and places and things you were meant to exp
erience, and, when you were on it, it vibrated with your resonance.

  I felt like if you listened closely enough, you could almost hear its song, radiating and filling space… the space between what was, and what was to come.

  __________

  I never did get around to calculus.

  I just didn’t ever seem to find the time. I think Giddeon secretly slipped in the fundamentals of it into our conversations, but, it never really seemed like mathematics when he did.

  __________

  I grew more and more curious about the nature of matter and energy, and joined Man’s quest to understand his own existence.

  __________

  We took tours of atom smashers located around the globe, and watched as scientists attempted to peer into the subatomic world. I observed as they measured the results of energetic beams slamming into each other by the latticework of intricate particle pathways left behind.

  Phosphorescent trails from pieces of reality scattered this way and that.

  Giddeon explained, that by scientific consensus in our time, there were four fundamental forces… they were the strong and weak nuclear forces, the electromagnetic force, and gravity. The Holy Grail was a theory unifying all four… a fundamental Theory of Everything that explained how all of the forces exchanged information and interacted.

  Gravity was the odd man out.

  It didn’t seem to fit with any of the proposed models in our era. On large scales, there was a beauty and symmetry to the universe. It was elegant and smooth. It was when you went deeper into the fabric of space and time that things began to get jumbled… that things became messy, and gravity presented more of a dilemma.

  According to my subconscious, as far as the scientists knew, the constituents of matter seemed to be composed of 19 or 20 subunits, each with certain masses and ‘spins’ that didn’t really seem to make much sense. Why those particular masses? Why those particular spins? No one had figured it out. And, to make matters worse, when energy is applied to those subunits, it gets absorbed and elicits changes in those particles, sometimes converting them into other players in a type of microscopic shell game.

  I learned about quarks and neutrinos, electrons and muons. I listened to Giddeon lecture on about how, at very small scales, space was more discrete… that things seemed to be either ‘here’ or ‘there’… and, there was no ‘in between’. He related how we were limited by the wavelengths of the energy used to ‘observe’ the smallest aspects of the universe, and, also, how when one became more certain about the position of a piece of matter, the less sure one could be about its velocity. He called that the Uncertainty Principle, and the quantum weirdness of it had been confounding scientists for decades.

  My tutor relayed to me that the researchers’ latest hope of finding the unifying theory behind all four forces is called Superstring Theory. It’s a theory that postulates that the ultimate building blocks of the universe aren’t really particles, but, tiny vibratory ‘strings’… and, that nodes from the oscillations on these strings represent the different quarks and various other players in the quantum world.

  I’m not sure I buy it, although the scientists sure seemed a lot smarter than me as they poured over plates and data… all the while scribbling down their findings on notepads and chalkboards.

  The complexity and potential shapes and forms of all of the miniature constituents made my head spin. Giddeon just laughed and said not to worry about it… that it had the same effect on all of those guys in the white coats, too. He said that the scientists were perplexed because the complexity they perceived was really just a reflection.

  As above, so below.

  __________

  Giddeon’s theory is that everything is how it is simply because that’s the way we think it is. He said that all explanations are just temporary, because when viewed from another angle, everything changes… and that scientists are actually more akin to lawyers, each arguing their case in the court of reality. He believes creation wasn’t something that happened long ago, but, instead, is occurring each and every day, each and every second. And, it’s always one step ahead of discovery. Gid said that matter and energy are complicated, because we are complicated… also, he reiterated once again that science just really allows for all of us to incrementally believe in magic.

  He then said something that stuck with me.

  He said that most scientists didn’t realize that what they were doing wasn’t observing reality… they were creating it.

  The more you look, the more you get…

  ‘Seek, and ye shall find. Knock, and it will be opened.’

  __________

  Giddeon believes that as the framework of reality is being built out with each and every ‘proof’, that that’s the way things become. At least, for a while. Then, along comes another point of view… and the world shifts to accommodate. Once it was flat, and now, it’s round. Once, it orbited around the sun due to Newtonian rules of gravity, and, now, it’s because of an Einsteinian warping of space-time.

  According to Gid, things change, but there really is nothing to change. The only thing he feels is real is the desire for reality, itself… and, that the unifying force underlying all of the observable universe is an emanation of that desire. He said that asking what gravity is… is pretty much like asking what holds your reflection inside of a mirror.

  I still think of the dancers, flying in the night sky high above Eden.

  It was easier to understand things when Giddeon spoke in normal sentences rather than with formulas, although I have to admit, I think a lot of what he said went in one ear and out the other. I tried to write it all down, but I’m afraid a lot of it was lost when I came back. I do remember that he had his own equation, of which he was quite proud… he took to wearing it on a T-shirt.

  Instead of E=mc2, it was:

  S = N2

  I inquired about it, and he told me what it stood for.

  Something = Nothing Squared.

  __________

  As usual, when I was intrigued by something, a song soon emerged.

  I also noticed that Giddeon was becoming more and more a part of that process. I knew my depression had fully lifted when we came out with this novelty… a whimsical tune about a young kid trying to impress girls with an atom smasher:

  I’ve got a cyclotron…

  can’t wait to turn it on,

  Satisfaction guarantee…

  what they all gonna say about me… now?

  Saw it in a science magazine…

  one used cyclotron, it’s very clean,

  It seemed too good to be this true…

  and, it’s painted baby, baby blue… oh, yeah!

  Well, I know guys with chemistry sets, (that) think

  they’re cooler than red Corvettes,

  Cruising down the autobahn…

  they ain’t got a cyclotron.

  And, I know fellows with video-tapes…

  remote control, is all it takes,

  Big screen television, Wrath of Kahn…

  ain’t nothing like my cyclotron.

  And, I know that I’m only thirteen…

  and, I don’t look like James Dean,

  But, let me get one thing straight…

  I accelerate!

  So, baby, baby… won’t you dance with me?

  To the sub-atomic world… I’ve got the key.

  And, even though… it’s our very first date…

  Ah, come on girl,

  give it a whirl… let’s accelerate!

  My cyclotron, is up in my room…

  ain’t nobody coming home soon.

  Don’t see no reason that we should wait…

  Ah, come on girl, give it a whirl…

  Let’s accelerate!

  Top quarks, bottom quarks, color and charm…

  They’re all there on my animal farm.

  Protons, neutrons, Pi Mesons, too…

  They’re all part of my particle zoo…

  And
, girl…

  I really want to dance with you!

  So, baby, baby… won’t you dance with me?

  To the sub-atomic world… I’ve got the key.

  And, even though… it’s our very first date…

  Ah, come on girl, give it a whirl… let’s accelerate!

  Ah, come on girl, won’t you give it a whirl?

  Let’s accelerate!

  My cloud chamber’s built for two…

  We laughed and laughed at that song, and when we finally had the synthesizer parts, bongo drums and chopped cords the way we wanted, saved it using Pro Tools onto my Apple laptop.

  Chapter 59

  It had been almost two years, and I began thinking about all of the songs that we had written. I pulled them up on my computer, and there must have been forty or so. I was amazed at the amount of material. Giddeon was looking over my shoulder at the lyrics as I went through them… page after page.

  “We should have a concert,” he said.

  I looked back at him and replied, “I don’t think we’ll sell many tickets… we’re invisible, and very quiet.”

  “If a tree falls in the forest, it still makes a sound… just no one bothered to ask the trees.”

  I rolled my eyes back to the computer. “You need to work on your philosophy a little more.”

  “It was still quick… 5 seconds or less.”

  “Thank God.” I shut down the computer, toying with his idea. “Where would we play?”

  “Humphry’s?”

  “I’m not crazy about outdoor acoustics… although, I do like the idea of night air,” I said.

  Giddeon thought for a moment. Then, his face lit up. “The Greek! It’s kind of like being inside the way the backdrop comes halfway around you.”

  “L.A.?”

  “San Diego’s not the center of the universe, you know?”

  “It is to me… but, I think the Greek might be cool. Let’s do it!”

  __________

  The night was perfect for a concert. The air was brisk, and all of the stars were twinkling with maximum luminosity in the sky above because the moon had yet to make an appearance. Giddeon looked around, and several spotlights began to burn. A deck of synthesizers was behind us and our guitars were situated on holders next to two microphone stands. Everything was wireless; it was kind of odd not seeing the jumble of coaxial cables that used to be the norm at any live show. Floor mounted monitors faced us, angled up so that we would be able to hear the sound… Giddeon and I both disliked ear monitors, having noticed that so many singers came out just a shade flat or sharp when using such devices. I stepped up to the mike after strapping on my Ovation.