Smoke, Mirrors and Deep Space Read online

  “You wish what? That it was all different somehow? That you could have it all: the honor and glory of being an astronaut, as well as the PR advantage of a doting wife and son, proud just to stand in the shadow of your refracted light, to be the fucking ‘wind beneath your wings’?!”

  “I know I don’t give you enough time…” he apologized.

  “Or credit,” Gena finished for him.

  “…but I will,” he said. “I promise I—”

  “No. Don’t, don’t say it. It’s fine, it’s perfect, Alex,” she said, setting down the bottle. She licked her lips, swallowed, then went on in careful, measured tones—a speech she had rehearsed in her head too many times, too many nights. “Just, just try to understand this. That all those hours and days and weeks when you’re away from us, doing your thing, living your dreams, we….” She sighed, swallowed again. “We don’t just sit here, Alex, like props in your play, waiting for you to come back and reanimate us.”

  Andy looked back and forth between his mother and father, intrigued by the drama. Alex directed his gaze at the boy as he responded, “I know that.”

  “Do you, Alex?” Gena said, looking at him looking at their boy. “Do you really? Somehow I don’t think you do, quite. None of you Type A fly boys do.”

  “Oh, tell it to your support system!” Alex yelled, suddenly losing it. He stormed out of the house, slamming the door behind him.

  * * *

  27. Whatever Happened to Ray?

  “You fucking asshole!” Marna screamed, throwing the half empty bottle of Merlot against the wall.

  The wine splattered onto the white stucco surface like a Rorschach test blot. But what was it? A Bird? A Butterfly? A Cunt?

  Yes, a cunt, Ray thought, and it made him smile.

  “Don’t smile! How can you smile at my pain, you bastard! What kind of a man are you?!”

  “You’re an alcoholic, Marna,” he said levelly. “Get help. Get God… Get something!”

  “You womanizing piece of shit, how dare you tell me to get God!? If you could keep your goddam dick in your pants, maybe I wouldn’t have to drink…”

  She was throwing clothes in an oversized suitcase as she ranted. Ray Junior’s bag was already packed, and the toddler was already strapped into his car seat, sound asleep on the floor nearby despite the commotion around him.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Ray challenged, grabbing her arm.

  She yanked it away. “Mom’s. I’m done sitting home waiting for you to get finished with your whores.”

  “Well you’re not taking the car…!”

  “The hell I’m not!”

  “…you’re drunk! And you’re not taking the baby.”

  “The hell I’m not!!”

  She whirled on him, fury making her momentarily sober…and almost pretty again.

  She’d been a beautiful woman once: long red hair, green eyes, big breasts. But she’d put on sixty-five pounds in four years, stopped taking care of her hair and complexion, and no longer applied any makeup except to go out. She could, he thought, use some about now.

  He sighed. If he were to be painfully honest, he’d have to confess his cheating on her had started before she’d changed appearance; the first time just six months after their wedding day. So, the question was, was her physical disintegration into sloppy housewife the cause of his infidelity, or was it the effect? Who knew…and by now, who cared?

  “I only had a couple of small glasses of wine, Raymond,” she said in that whiny, defensive tone he hated, “and I ate.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Just enough to take the edge off the pain.”

  “Right.”

  “I can drive just fine.”

  “So you’re going to your mom’s…for how long?”

  “I’m leaving you, Ray. It’s for good, this time.”

  “You’re serious?” He saw that she was. “But, but what about my career? Do you know what this will do to it?!”

  She stopped her packing to stare at him in open-mouthed amazement, then began to laugh hysterically. “What about my career!?” she mimicked, laughing so hard it brought tears to her eyes. “Frankly, Scarlett my dear, I don’t give a damn,” she gasped between snorts and chortles.

  * * *

  He got the phone call about three hours later. He’d been debating whether to go ahead and give Elena a call, maybe have her come over, spend the night, since Marna would be gone anyway. But what if the woman snuck back later just to catch him in the act? Better to wait until he got the call from Marna’s mother up in Dallas, telling him she’d made it there okay, Ray’d decided.

  He answered the phone on the second ring. “That you, Mrs. Pickett?”

  The man on the other end asked if he was Raymond Petersen. The voice was professionally polite, and Ray knew, he just knew, without another word.

  The funeral had two closed coffins to look upon, two to bury. A large white one, and its duplicate in miniature. But the second coffin was empty, and only he and the funeral director knew the truth.

  You see, he couldn’t bear the thought of his baby boy being all alone in that dark box, all alone for all eternity. Truth be told, he couldn’t bear the idea of Marna being all alone either…she’d had enough of that in life. So he’d had Ray Junior’s remains put into the coffin with his mother, had the funeral director wrap her burned and shattered arms around his crushed little chest, tuck his tiny head up under her chin, her red hair drawn down around his shoulders like a shawl. They were put in the ground together like that, to comfort him, if no one else.

  Ray’s solution to grief, to guilt, his self-imposed penance, was to fuck every woman he wanted whenever he wanted, and to love none of them. Nor to allow any to love him. It had worked pretty well for almost twenty-five years; until Gena McCormick entered his life.

  * * *

  28. The Name of the Game

  ALEX REMAINED SEATED in the auditorium staring at the darkened stage. His head hung down, his depression now palpable. Uriel waited, as silent as he was patient. After several minutes Alex looked up at him.

  “So why are you showing me all this? Is this, like, hell or purgatory or something?”

  “You want another shot at it?” Uriel asked quietly.

  “At what? What are you talking about?”

  “Your life. That’s what we do here, Alex. Play games; life games. No Heaven, no Hell…unless of course you choose that game, but trust me, it gets boring real fast.”

  Alex stared at him, the light not quite willing to dawn this early in the night. Again, it was a minute or two before he spoke.

  “I don’t understand. You mean, like, reincarnation?”

  “Sort of,” Uriel said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully, choosing his words well ahead of speech, “sort of. But there’s no working your way up from cockroach to saint stuff. Unless of course you choose to…but most likely you wouldn’t, being a cockroach is only fun once. And the only karmic burden you carry is whatever you decide to impose on yourself to help you learn.”

  “So what is it like, then?” Alex demanded, sitting forward with growing interest.

  “You can play the same role over and over if you wish,” Uriel explained, “doing it a little bit better each time until you finally get it right. Or you—”

  “You mean I could go back into my old body, my old identity?” Alex interrupted excitedly.

  Uriel nodded. “At the moment of conception. All entries into new life roles are made at the moment of conception. You’d start your present life over, but with the freedom to make completely different choices along the way,” he shrugged, “or the same ones over again.”

  “Will I remember any of this?” Alex asked, outstretching his arms to indicate Uriel, the compound, his experiences here.

  Uriel shook his head.

  “Then will I at least remember having lived this life before?”

  “Not really, not consciously anyway…except in those rare moments of what you ca
ll ‘déjà vus.’”

  There was another long pause while Alex mulled this over.

  Uriel stood up to straighten his robe, which had bunched uncomfortably under his thighs.

  “What if I don’t want to?” Alex said.

  “Don’t want to what?” Uriel turned, frowning.

  “Relive this life.”

  “Then you don’t have to. You can choose any role, any identity, past, present or future.”

  “What do you mean, any identity?”

  “I mean you could choose to be born Napoleon or Mozart, Cleopatra or Anthony, Hitler, Gandhi, or Joan of Arc…You could be born to a beggar or a millionaire, a preacher or a whore. You could be American, Israeli, Iraqi or god-save-em a Brit. Anyone at all, anywhere at all, any time at all.”

  “But how?” Alex asked, amazed at the concept. “How is this possible?”

  Uriel smiled. “It’s all done with smoke and mirrors, son.”

  Alex raised a skeptical brow.

  “You want the mechanics? Okay, it’s…like entering a multisensory hologram. You simply take on the identity of the particular holographic image you choose, feeling what the sensory input of the hologram tells you to feel, hearing what it tells you to hear.”

  Alex looked confused, dubious.

  “Come,” Uriel said. “I’ll show you.”

  He flipped some switches on the control box, picked up a small hand-held device, then walked down to the stage. Alex followed, continuing to question him.

  “Multisensory? So, not just laser light, 3D images but…”

  The lights came back on the stage. Alex saw they were surrounded by the virtual props from the last scene. Gena sat on the sofa, silently crying into her hands. Andy stood next to her, a hand on his mother’s shaking shoulder, watching her sorrow helplessly. Alex walked over to where they were, then all around the pair, but they seemed unaware of his presence.

  “Watch,” Uriel instructed.

  The robed man pressed one of the glowing colored buttons on his hand-held device and the sofa disappeared, yet Gena remained seated on its invisible surface in the same position as before, oblivious to its disappearance. He touched another button, and she began to shiver.

  “Close the window, Andy. There’s a draft.”

  As Andy walked over to the non-existent window to comply, Uriel flicked another switch, and the boy vanished as well. Yet Gena seemed still to see him.

  “Thanks, sweetie. Now, you better go back to bed.” There was a pause, where Gena seemed to be listening to a reply that only she could hear. “No, really, I’ll be fine. You go on to bed.”

  She lifted her chin and kissed the air.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Alex said, turning toward Uriel.

  On the stage around them, the entire scene including Gena winked out and disappeared.

  “Think about it, what is the world you’ve always considered reality, Alex? How do you perceive that world? Through your senses, right?”

  “Yeah…but,” Alex began.

  “No but,” Uriel corrected him. “Everything you knowabout, everything you believe to be real, is known only through your senses; the reception of various energies which your mind then interprets as sight, sound, heat…”

  “…taste, smell, gravity…” Alex interjected. “I got it. So?”

  “But these are only real in your mind, don’t you see? You are programmed to accept and interpret these sensory stimuli as evidence of external reality, when in actual fact you never leave this room,” Uriel concluded.

  “What do you mean, never leave this room?”

  “You are always right here, Alex: the time is always right now.”

  “You mean, now that I’ve died and gone here, if I choose to play your little game….”

  “No, Alex. This is all it’s ever been. Your last life, all the lives you’ve ever played: they’ve always been right here, right now. It’s always been a hologram.”

  “No, huh-uh. I don’t believe you, man!” Alex disclaimed, beginning to pace in agitation. “That was real, my life was real!”

  “Close your eyes.”

  “No!”

  “Close your eyes, Alex… It’s okay, I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to demonstrate something, okay? Your eyes?”

  Alex slowly, reluctantly closed his eyes.

  Uriel pressed a button, and a sparkle of energy appeared in front of Alex’s nose.

  “Okay,” he said to the astronaut, “what do you smell?”

  Alex inhaled, thought. “A peach. Or, it smells like a peach.”

  “Okay, now I’m going to hand it to you,” Uriel said. “Hold up your palm.”

  The little electrical sparkle moved to Alex’s hand, just the faintest outline of energy. Alex’s hand moved down noticeably, as if an object of definite mass had been placed in it.

  “Describe it to me, Alex; weight, size, texture…”

  Alex made motions with his hands as if hefting the invisible peach, running his fingers across its skin and pinching it.

  “It, it probably weighs about a half a pound; it’s fuzzy, cool, firm—but with a little give, as if it’s at perfect ripeness.”

  “Go ahead, take a bite—but keep your eyes closed,” Uriel told him.

  Alex lifted the invisible peach to his mouth and took a bite, wiping the invisible juice from his chin with a fingertip.

  “Mmm, juicy.”

  “Open your eyes, Alex.”

  Alex did as told, looked down at his hand, and was shocked to see no peach there. He looked up at Uriel, astonished.

  “How did you…?”

  “It’s all just energy fields…virtual reality. Smoke and mirrors, that’s all there is.”

  Alex wagged his head slowly back and forth, having a hard time taking this all in. He began to pace again, thinking out loud.

  “Okay, let’s say I buy this idea that you can live in—no, that you can experience—a world that isn’t really there, a world of pure energy that’s being input into your mind while you sit in a movie theater somewhere in space.”

  He laughed, shaking his head again at the absurdity, the wonder of it.

  “But even if I can accept that, I still don’t get the other thing you said, the thing about my playing any life from any time period. You mean the real life, the actual Hitler or Gandhi or whoever?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “I don’t see how that’s possible,” Alex disagreed. “How can you manipulate time? Past is…past. It’s over and done with.”

  “What does the concept of ‘eternity’ mean to you?” Uriel inquired softly.

  “I don’t know. Forever? But that’s just another word for something impossible to imagine. I guess it’s simply endlessness, time going on and on and on without ever stopping.”

  “And without ever starting either,” Uriel nodded. “No beginning, no end. Well, you’re a space scientist. Do you believe that term applies to the span of our universe, does it go on and on as well, or does it have finite boundaries?”

  “The paradigms keep changing on that. The big bang theory would give it a starting point at least, but it’s impossible to conceptualize a beginning without an end…or time without space for that matter: they’re interwoven, interdependent.”

  “Okay,” Uriel nodded, “so you have the space-time continuum, wormholes, superstrings and entanglement, infinite expansion versus ultimate contraction… What does your science conclude from all this? Is the Universe infinite?”

  As Uriel said this, the stage around them darkened, and night undressed the sky. Stars and galaxies appeared, making it look as if the two men were floating in the midst of the universe itself. Alex looked around at the cosmic splendor in awe, as he contemplated Uriel’s last question. Close behind him materialized the image of a tremendous explosion.

  “The big bang theory,” he said, staring at its manifestation, “states that the present universe began about 15 billion years ago, when all matter in the universe condens
ed to a single mathematical point in space and then expanded outward in a huge explosion, hurtling the primordial matter of galaxies in all directions. This,” he turned to Uriel; “seemingly gives the universe a starting point…”

  “Seemingly a beginning,” Uriel reiterated. “However?”

  “However that theory never approaches the question of where the pre big bang matter came from, what it was like, or how long it had existed before it collapsed into that single point.”

  “Or even why it collapsed? Or how it would be actually possible to get all the matter in the universe down to a single point of virtually no volume or mass, other than in the mind of a mathematician?”

  “Right.”

  “So, no clear beginning after all,” Uriel summarized. “And an end?”