Factoring Humanity, Page 22

  Was this really the path toward healing?

  No—no, that wasn’t the answer.

  And, anyway, there was a better way.

  Let Becky see into the mind of her therapist, see the manipulation, the lies.

  On its own, that might not absolutely eliminate Becky’s doubts. As Heather herself had mused, even if the therapist’s methods were leading and inappropriate, that didn’t necessarily prove that no abuse had occurred. But in conjunction with a demonstration that Becky’s own memories were false, shared by no one else, she should be completely convinced.

  It was time—time to start healing.

  Heather picked up her phone and called Becky.

  The Fashion District, where Becky lived and worked, was only a few blocks west of the university, so Heather asked Becky to meet her at The Water Hole for lunch. During the days she’d spent probing Kyle’s mind, she’d learned many hitherto unknown things about her husband, not the least of which was that he had developed a fondness for this place that Heather herself had walked by a million times without ever entering.

  Heather knew that Kyle was teaching right now; there was no possibility of an accidental reunion.

  She’d seen the interior of The Water Hole already through Kyle’s mind—in searching for Kyle’s memories of Becky, she’d found the time Kyle had unburdened himself here to Stone Bailey.

  It was startling to see the real Water Hole, though. First, of course, the colors looked different to Heather than what she’d seen in Kyle’s mind.

  But there was more than that. Kyle had stored only some of the details. Much of what made up his memory had been interpretation or extrapolation. Oh yes, he’d remembered the Molson’s holoposter with the stunning blonde ski-bunny—but he’d had no recollection of the other framed posters on the walls. And he’d remembered the tablecloths as a uniform red, when in fact they were covered with tiny red-and-white checks.

  It was Monday, August 14; Becky worked at the clothing store all day Saturday and Sunday this week, but got Monday and Tuesday off. Still, she was late, and when she finally did enter, she did not look happy.

  “Thank you for coming,” said Heather as Becky took a seat opposite her, a small round table between them.

  Becky’s face was grim. “I only agreed because you said he wouldn’t be present.” There was no doubt as to whom the pronoun referred.

  Heather had hoped for some pleasantries, for some news of her daughter’s life. But apparently there was to be none of that. She nodded grimly and said, “We need to resolve this issue with your father.”

  “If you’re proposing an out-of-court settlement, I want to have a lawyer present.”

  Heather felt as if she’d been hit in the face. She gulped air, then at last managed to get out the words, “There will be no lawsuit.”

  “I don’t want that any more than you do,” said Becky, softening a bit. She’d never been good at putting on a tough face. “But he ruined my life.”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “I didn’t come here to hear you defend him. Making excuses is just as bad as—

  “Shut up!” Heather shocked herself with how sharp her voice was. Becky’s eyes went wide.

  “Just shut up,” said Heather again. “You’re making a fool of yourself. Shut up before you say anything else you’ll regret.”

  “I don’t have to take this,” said Becky. She began to rise.

  “Sit down,” snapped Heather. The few other patrons were now looking at them. Heather locked eyes with the one nearest them, staring him down. He went back to his soup.

  “I can prove that your father didn’t molest you,” said Heather. “I can prove it absolutely, beyond any shadow of a doubt, to whatever degree of certainty you require.”

  Becky’s mouth hung open. She was staring at her mother, an expression of shock on her face.

  The server picked that moment to arrive. “Hello, ladies. Can I get—”

  “Not now,” snapped Heather. The server looked stung, but he quickly disappeared.

  Becky blinked. “I’ve never heard you like this.”

  “It’s because I’m fed the fuck up.” Becky looked more shocked; something else she’d never heard before was her mother saying “fuck.” “No family should have to go through what ours has.” Heather paused, took a deep breath. “Look, I’m sorry. But this has to end—it has to. I can’t take any more of it, and neither can your father. You have to come back to my office with me.”

  “What are you going to do? Hypnotize me into not believing what I know to be true?”

  “Nothing like that.” She signaled the server, and as he somewhat timidly approached, Heather said to her daughter, “Don’t order too much to drink—you’re not going to have an opportunity to easily pee for a few hours after lunch.”

  “What in God’s name is that?”

  Becky’s expression was one of pure surprise as she entered her mother’s office. Heather couldn’t help grinning at her.

  “That, my dear, is what the Centaurs were trying to tell us how to make. See the little tiles making up the bigger panels? Each one of the tiles is a pictorial representation of one of the alien messages.”

  Becky loomed in to look at the construct. “So they are,” she said. She straightened up and stared at Heather. “Mom, I know all this has been very hard on you . . .”

  Heather couldn’t help laughing. “You think the pressure’s gotten too much for me? That I couldn’t figure out how to read the messages, so I spent my time just shuffling them around and building things out of them?”

  “Well,” said Becky, and she gestured at the construct, as if its very existence made everything plain.

  “It’s nothing like that, honey. This really is what the Centaurs intended us to do with their messages. The shape—that’s an unfolded hypercube.”

  “A what?”

  “The four-dimensional counterpart of a cube. The arms fold up and the ends touch, and the thing becomes a regular geometrical solid in four dimensions.”

  “And that accomplishes precisely what?” asked Becky, sounding very dubious.

  “It transports you to a four-dimensional realm. It lets you see the four-dimensional reality that surrounds us.”

  Becky was silent.

  “Look,” said Heather, “all you have to do is get inside it.”

  “In there?”

  Heather frowned. “I know I should have made it bigger.”

  “So you’re saying—you’re saying this is some sort of time machine, and—what?—it’ll let me travel back to see what Daddy did?”

  “Time isn’t the fourth dimension,” said Heather. “The fourth dimension is a spatial direction, precisely perpendicular to the other three.”

  “Ah,” said Becky.

  “And although we all appear to be individuals when viewed in three dimensions, we’re actually all part of a greater whole when viewed in four.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about how I know—know to a moral certainty—that your father didn’t molest you. And how you can know, too.”

  Becky was silent.

  “Look, everything I’m saying is true,” said Heather. “I’ll be announcing it publicly soon . . . probably, anyway. But I wanted you to know first, before anyone else. I want you to go look inside another human mind.”

  “Inside Daddy’s, you mean?”

  “No. No, that wouldn’t be right. I want you to go see your therapist. I’ll tell you how to find her mind; I don’t think you should enter your father’s mind, not without his permission. But that damned therapist—we don’t owe that bitch a thing.”

  “You don’t even know her, Mom.”

  “Oh, yes I do—I went to see her.”

  “What? How? Look, you don’t even know her name.”

  “Lydia Gurdjieff. Her office is on Lawrence West.”

  Becky was visibly stunned.

  “You know what she tried to do to me?” asked He
ather. “She tried to get me to explore the abuse I had at the hands of my own father.”

  “But . . . but your father . . . your father . . .”

  “Died before I was born. Exactly. Even though it was categorically impossible for me to have been abused by my father, she said I showed all the classic signs. She talks a good game, believe me. She had me half-believing that someone had abused me, too. Not my father, of course, but some other relative.”

  “I—I don’t believe this. You’re making it up.” Becky gestured at the construct. “You’re making it all up.”

  “No, I’m not. You can prove it to yourself. You’ll see Gurdjieff implanting the memories in you from her point of view, and I’ll show you how you can demonstrate that the memories you have are false. Come on, get inside the construct and—”

  Becky sounded half-wary, half-desperate. “ ‘The construct’? Is that what you call it? Not the ‘Centaurimobile’?”

  Heather managed a neutral tone. “I should introduce you to Cheetah—a friend of your father. You’ve got similar senses of humor.” She took a deep breath. “Look, I’m your mother, and I’d never hurt you. Trust me; try what I say. We won’t be able to communicate when you’ve got your eyes open in there, but when you close them, after a few seconds the interior of the construct will reappear in your mind’s eye. If you need further help, press the stop button.” She pointed to it. “The hypercube will unfold, you can open the door, and I’ll be able to tell you what to do next. Don’t worry—when you press the start button again, you’ll end up exactly where you left off.” She paused. “Now, please, get inside. It gets pretty warm in there, by the way. I won’t ask you to do it in your bra and panties like I do, but—”

  “Your bra and panties?” said Becky, stunned.

  Heather smiled again. “Trust me, dear. Now get inside.”

  Four hours later, Heather assisted Becky in removing the cubic door, and Becky got out of the construct, accepting a helping hand from her mother.

  Becky stood quiet for a moment, tears running down her cheeks, clearly utterly at a loss for words; then she collapsed into her mother’s waiting arms.

  Heather stroked her daughter’s hair. “It’s all right, honey. It’s all right now.”

  Becky’s whole body was shaking. “It was incredible,” she said. “It was like nothing I’ve ever experienced.”

  Heather smiled. “Isn’t it, though?”

  Becky’s voice was growing hard. “She used me,” she said. “She manipulated me.”

  Heather said nothing, and although it tore her up to see her daughter distraught, her heart soared.

  “She used me,” Becky said again. “How could I have been so stupid? How could I have been so wrong?”

  “It’s okay,” said Heather. “It’s over.”

  “No,” said Becky. “It isn’t.” She was still shaking, and Heather’s shoulder was now moist with Becky’s tears. “There’s still Daddy. What am I going to say to Daddy?”

  “The only thing you can say. The only thing there is to say. That you’re sorry.”

  Becky’s voice was incredibly tiny. “But he’ll never love me again.”

  Heather gently lifted Becky’s head with a hand under her daughter’s chin. “I know for a fact, sweetheart, that he never stopped.”

  32

  Heather invited Kyle over to dinner the next night.

  There was so much she wanted to say to him, so much that had to be cleared up. But after he arrived, she didn’t know where to begin—and so she began at a distance, with the theoretical: one academic to another.

  “Do you think it’s possible,” she asked, “that things that seem to be discrete in three dimensions might all be part of the same bigger object in four dimensions?”

  “Oh, sure,” said Kyle. “I tell my students that all the time. You just have to extrapolate, based on how two-dimensional views of three-dimensional objects work. A two-dimensional world would be a plane, like a piece of paperite. If a donut were passing vertically through a horizontal plane, an inhabitant of the two-dimensional world would see two separate circles—or the lines that represent them—instead of the donut.”

  “Exactly,” said Heather. “Exactly. Now, consider this. What if humanity—that collective noun we so often employ—really is, at a higher level, a singular noun? What if what we perceive in three dimensions as seven billion individual human beings are really all just aspects of one giant being?”

  “That’s a little harder to visualize than a donut, but—”

  “Don’t think of it as a donut, then. Think of—I don’t know, think of a sea urchin: a ball with countless spikes sticking out of it. And think of our frame of reference not as a flat sheet of paper, but as a piece of nylon—you know, like stockings are made of. If the nylon was wrapped around the sea urchin, you’d see all those spikes sticking through and you’d think each one was a discrete thing; you wouldn’t necessarily realize that they were all attached, all just extensions of something bigger.”

  “Well, it’s an interesting notion,” said Kyle. “But it doesn’t strike me as something you could test.”

  “But what if it’s already been tested?” asked Heather. She paused, thinking about how to go on. “Sure, almost all reports of psychic experiences are bunk. Almost all of them can be explained. But there are, occasionally, few and far between, cases that can’t easily be explained. Indeed, they defy scientific explanation because they’re not reproducible—if it happens only once, then how do you study it? But what if, under rare, special circumstances, normally isolated spines on our sea urchin fold over and touch each other, however briefly? It could explain telepathy, and—”

  Kyle was frowning. “Oh, come on, Heather. You don’t believe in mind reading any more than I do.”

  “I don’t believe people can do it at will, no. But it’s been reported as an occasional phenomenon since the dawn of time; perhaps there is some validity to it. Jung himself argued in his later years that the unconscious functions independently of the laws of causality and normal physics, making such things as clairvoyance and precognition possible.”

  “He was just a confused old man by that point.”

  “Maybe, but my department head did his Ph.D. at Duke; they’ve done lots of interesting work there about ESP, and he—”

  “Work that doesn’t stand up under scrutiny.”

  “Well, sure, it’s clear that there’s no such thing as reliably reading minds—but there are a number of pretty solid studies suggesting that under sensory-deprivation conditions, certain people can guess with somewhat enhanced accuracy which of four possibilities someone else is looking at; you’d expect a twenty-five-percent success rate based on random guessing, but there were studies done by Honorton in New Jersey that show a thirty-three- or thirty-seven-percent success rate, and even one test group of twenty subjects that had a fifty-percent success rate. And the four-dimensional overmind—”

  “Ah,” said Kyle, amused. “The coveted FDO.”

  “The four-dimensional overmind,” repeated Heather firmly, “provides a theoretical model that can account for occasional telepathic linkages.”

  Kyle was still grinning. “You looking to get a new research grant?”

  Heather internalized a smile of her own. One thing she’d never be lacking again was grant money. “This model could also explain flashes of brilliance,” she said, “especially those that come while sleeping. Remember Kekule, trying to work out the chemical structure of benzene? He dreamed of a snake-ring of atoms—which turned out to be exactly right. But maybe he didn’t come up with that breakthrough on his own.” She paused, reflecting. “And maybe I didn’t come up with this notion on my own. Maybe the reason we sleep so much is that that’s when we interact most closely with the overmind. Maybe dreams occur while our daily individual experiences are being uploaded to the overmind. It can kill you, you know—not dreaming. You can get all the rest in the world, but if you take chemicals that prevent you from dreaming
, you’ll die; that contact is essential. And perhaps when a problem is being worked on, maybe sometimes you’re not the only one doing it. It’s like the way your quantum computer is supposed to work—the computer you see will be solving only the smallest part of the problem, but it’ll be working in tandem with all the others. Maybe sometimes during sleep, we touch the overmind and get the benefit of all the nodes.”

  “Politely, that sounds like New Age gibberish to me,” said Kyle.

  Heather shrugged a little. “Your quantum mechanics sounds like gibberish to most people. But it’s the way the universe works.” She paused. “This is going to excite Noam Chomsky’s followers. In Syntactic Structures, Chomsky proposed that language is innate. That is, we don’t learn to talk the way we learn to tie our shoes or ride a bicycle. Instead, humans have a built-in linguistic ability—special circuits in the brain that allow people to acquire and process language without any conscious awareness of the complex rules. I’ve heard you say it yourself when marking student papers: ‘I know that sentence is grammatically incorrect; I can’t tell you exactly why, but I’m sure it’s not right.’ ”

  Kyle nodded. “Yeah, I’ve said that.”

  “So you—and just about everyone else—clearly has a sense of language. But Chomsky’s theory is that the sense is something you’re born with. And if you’re born with it, presumably it has to be coded in your DNA.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” said Heather earnestly. “Philip Lieberman pointed out a big problem with Chomsky’s theory. Chomsky is essentially saying that there’s a language ‘organ’ in the brain that’s identical in every human being. But it can’t be. No genetically determined trait is the same in all people; there’s always variation. The language organ would have to show the same sort of variability we see in skin and eye color, height, susceptibility to heart disease, and more.”

  “Why on earth would that be true?”

  “It would have to be that way; genetics demands it. You know, there are people who digest foods in different ways—a diabetic does it one way, someone who is lactose intolerant does it another way. Even people we consider perfectly healthy may have different approaches, using different enzymes. But on a societal level, that doesn’t matter; digestion is utterly personal—the way you do it has no effect on the way I do it. But language has to be shared—that’s the whole point of language. If there were any variation in the way you and I processed language mentally, we wouldn’t be able to communicate.”