I’m the one at the wheel.
I’m the one killing my family.
We begin to sink rapidly, more rapidly than I would’ve thought.
It’s a dream.
No it’s not.
It’s—
The twins are screaming and Rachel is climbing back to free them from their car seats, but I’m sitting motionless, watching the water rise inside the van. I realize that for some reason we’re tilting backward and so the boys will drown first. I notice this in my dream — notice it, but do nothing.
The murky water outside the window swallows sunlight as we sink, but not enough to enshroud us completely in darkness. I can still see, I can still—
“Help me, Daddy!” It’s Andrew, but I don’t move, I just tell him it’s going to be alright, that everything is going to be alright. Then Rachel is beside me again in the front — I don’t know how, but she is; time and space have shifted and brought her here to my side because we are still in the dream.
The boys are strapped in the car seats, helpless and about to die.
Rachel doesn’t threaten me or question me or accuse me but holds me close and tells me that she loves me. I say nothing, just turn around and watch the water rise over the terrified faces of our two sons.
Only then do I respond.
Only after it is too late do I scramble back, grab a breath, duck beneath the water that’s pouring into the vehicle, and try to save them.
Only then.
When it is too late.
And that’s when I awaken, at the same point I so often awaken when I have the dream — staring into the open, lifeless eyes of my sons with Rachel by my side. Sometimes, like tonight, she’s holding my hand. Other times she’s already dead, drifting motionless and bloated beside me.
Some days I wish I wouldn’t wake up at all but would join my family in whatever realm of eternity they ended up in, good or bad, heaven or hell, as long as we could be together again.
But so far I haven’t been that lucky.
I take a deep breath, sit up on the couch.
Exhale slowly.
The dream is fading away, but it leaves a dark thought-trail behind as it does, one that roots around inside of me and doesn’t want to let me go.
Charlene, who’d studied religion in college, once told me that in Acts 14 Paul mentioned four things that serve as evidence of God’s existence — rain, crops, food, and joy.
Joy as evidence of God. In a world as hurting and pain-filled as ours, where death always wins in the end… what else besides a divine gift of joy divvied out to the hurting could explain how people can laugh at all?
Unfortunately, God wasn’t seeming all too real to me over the past thirteen months. Not if the evidence of his love was joy.
I hear something in the bedroom, the soft, comfortable sound of Charlene turning over in her sleep. I don’t want to wake her, so as quietly as I can I find my shoes and jacket and slip out the door to the porch.
It’s still dark, but in the porch light I can tell that the emerging day is drenched in early morning mist and a sad, drizzling rain.
From growing up in the area, I know it’s a typical Pacific Northwest morning, the kind of weather people in the rest of the country might use as an excuse to stay indoors, settle down with a cup of tea and a good book. But in Oregon and Washington, rain is a way of life and mist is welcome, and being damp means feeling at home. The sayings I grew up with:
“Oregonians don’t tan, they rust.”
“Enjoy Oregon’s favorite water sport. Running.”
“I saw an unidentified flying object today — the sun.”
In order to stretch my legs and clear my head, I start on a brisk walk along the three-mile trail that loops around the main part of the campus. The decorative streetlights beside the path glow languidly through the haze. It’s as if I’ve stepped into a nineteenth-century London novel.
What happened last night in the Faraday cage seems to have occurred in its own distant dreamworld somewhere. Time does that to memories — unfurls them at different speeds and in ways you wouldn’t expect, putting more distance between events than the hours should allow.
Or sometimes it swallows the space between experiences and time becomes compacted, seems not to have passed at all.
But now it’s as if last night’s altercation happened so far in the past that the Lawson Research Center should’ve changed dramatically since then.
However, after a few minutes I see its exterior lights through the trees and it looks like it should: rustic and rugged, sedately awaiting our visit for the test later this morning.
I think of the attacker, of the blade swiping through the air toward Charlene, meeting her arm, slicing into her. I hope she’ll let me take her to the hospital later today, or at least to a clinic in Pine Lake, but based on her response when I tried to do that last night, I’m not optimistic. In the meantime, we seemed to be on the same page as far as going on with the test.
The reason we came to the center in the first place.
A test so simple it might actually be hard to debunk.
First, find a couple who are in love with each other. That’s a prerequisite, at least for this specific line of research. Isolate one of the lovers in the Faraday cage, position the other in a room somewhere else on campus. Or, in this case, 120 feet down the hall.
The person in the chamber is the receiver, the other is the sender.
Next, set up equipment to record physiological changes in the receiver, and at random intervals show the sender the video of the person in the chamber, instructing him to think loving thoughts, give focused positive attention to her. If the receiver experiences physiological changes while he does that — and only while he does — it would be evidence of some type of nonlocal, unconscious psychic connection.
And that’s exactly what Dr. Tanbyrn and his team claimed their tests showed.
According to them, in almost every instance, within seconds of the sender thinking focused, loving, positive thoughts, the receiver’s heart rate, respiration rate, and galvanic skin response change — almost imperceptibly, yes, but enough to be measured. And when the sender stops focusing his thoughts and emotions on his partner, her physiological condition returns to a baseline state.
That was the claim.
But how was that even possible? How could that happen?
Entanglement on a quantum level? That seemed to be Tanbyrn’s take on it. But even if that were the case, why would the person in the chamber be affected by only that one person’s thoughts?
In other words, what about all the other people who care about her and might be thinking about her at the same time as the test’s sender? After all, if the connection is truly nonlocal, it wouldn’t matter where the other people were, how far away they might be.
So why would their positive (or maybe negative) thoughts fail to affect the person in the Faraday cage while just her lover’s thoughts did? Couldn’t other people love her just as much? What about a mother or a sister or a child? Couldn’t their love be just as impactful? Just as resonant?
And how could you ever hope to design a test that would account for those other people’s thoughts? Tell everyone who cares about the woman not to think about her at all during the test? But even if that were possible, how could you rule out the possibility that they hadn’t done so anyway?
After all, one of the best ways to get someone to think about something is to tell him not to.
And of course, how much of a connection, how much love, was needed for any of this to work? What measurements could you ever come up with to test the depths of true love?
Really, as inexplicable as the results were, there were so many variables and confounds that at best it would only be possible to identify a relationship that was highly correlational, not one that was causal.