The visitor thought the gloom was laid on thick.
Space between the bedspring and mattress on the bed was used to store tee shirts and briefs since there was no chest of drawers. The underwear also performed double duty in padding a wafer-thin mattress.
Folders removed from this location appeared related to the brother’s Idée fixe.
The sibling inquired after these. “Haven’t you hiked up your mountain, yet? Didn’t Daphne escape the amorous clutches of Apollo by turning into a spruce up here somewhere?”
“National Parks are filled with strange disappearances,“ reported the glum brother. “If bodies are located, it is usually weeks or months later, and in areas that were searched repeatedly.”
An eyebrow rose in response. “Are you saying aliens abduct these hikers?”
“I am not claiming anything supernatural. For example, shoes of the missing may turn up in well-trafficked locations later in time. Explanation: Animal predation might scatter indigestible materials, whereupon a hiker comes on a shoe years later and, thinking it strange, carries it to a better traveled part of the trail and leaves it, perhaps hanging from a tree branch as a halfway measure since he would have no conviction about its significance.
And then there are individuals who go missing in groups. Well… Alleged witnesses claim all sorts of information where encouraged to have opinions. It may come down to placing a person in a location they never were.
Next come the seasoned hikers or hunters who disappear in areas in which they are intimately familiar. Let’s see… Perhaps the individual suffered from depression. ‘Suicide by wilderness’ comes to mind. Where better to end one’s life than in a romanticized place in which one is acquainted. Such a person might well seek to allude discovery and move away from rescuers. This would explain their bodies turning up in previously searched areas.
Any counter arguments you may raise, brother, is nothing I have not thought of myself. I have been a consumer of fringe theories my whole life, but my research into the paranormal has turned me into an armchair psychologist:
The more popular an outlier experience becomes, the more it attracts imitators; and then imitators of the imitators. It’s like making a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. It looks like crap to everyone except the last guy holding up a photocopy.
Most insufferable are those who, with gadgetry in hand, set off to find ghosts in touristy locations, just so they may produce uninspired accounts to share with others. This is a variation on the clueless party host who bores his guests with grainy snapshots from his visit to the Eiffel Tower. Overeager people who seek ghosts are the least likely to meet with them, I find.”
(Liam capitulated to his brother’s mood.)
Lucien continued, “What is exceptional in a credible ghost story are details: place names, descriptions of clothing, food, etcetera… The perceptual dimension of a transforming event gets stamped, like an eternal living moment, into something memorable. I find a reluctant storyteller, as in the form of a normally reticent family member, makes for the most credible accounts. Shorter stories, colored with a light tinge of high strangeness, are impactful. Long stories that resemble soap opera plots are the worst. It is better to have one good story than two. A second story undercuts the credibility of the first. And a third story opens one up to the accusation of being a pathological lair.
A common example of this type of individual is the morbidly obese young woman who, covered in gothic tattoos, appears to be cursed with a superabundance of ghostly encounters. She sits in a squatty rental duplex and spins tales impossible in their number and vividness. It is a version of Munchausen Syndrome where the afflicted, remarkable in no other way, gains attention by portraying herself as an empath, sensitive, or someone special in being either peculiarly unfortunate or peculiarly gifted.
It is sobering for those of us who want to believe, yet who cannot, like Arthur Conan Doyle, abandon our intellects. I do not take up this position willingly, for I find the counterarguments against the paranormal overly generalized. One compelling personal experience easily overturns sundry explanations. Be a skeptic, by all means. But do not set yourself as a high priest of clear thinking once you become infected with explain-away-everything mania.”
“Have you seen a ghost, Lue?”
“Perhaps I have seen many. Perhaps this would be the testimony of the hardened skeptic were he to revisit incongruous moments from his life. He is not primed to anticipate inexplicability, or to attach value to it.
J. E. Littlewood evoked impartial arithmetic to explain away ‘miracles.’ He claimed that extraordinary events should happen at a frequency of one in a million. Having convinced himself of this ratio, he goes on to calculate, by the measurement of one event per second in a typical wakeful life, the innumerable occasions of ordinary events we typically encounter. As you can see, they quickly pile up, and soon we arrive at that the one in a million chance of a miracle, which mathematically should occur once every thirty-five days. By this reckoning, any so-called ‘miracle’ would be nothing out of the ordinary.”
Liam screwed up his face at this calculation. “I am no mathematician, but that analogy strikes me as dodgy. How many seconds are required to complete an event? (If such a thing as an ‘event’ can even be temporally defined.) Is it a single thought or judgment? Or are you using a sharp cleaver to chop up a bathtub full of soapy water? I do not experience rare events with anything like the frequency this gentleman supposes.”
“More to the point,“ pressed Lucien, “we are not talking about one odd occurrence, or even a string of them, but an order and connectivity derived from the mind that perceives and ranks them. Chance occurrence, it is reasoned by the logician, need only appeal to impartial causality, not to meaning. Yet meaning has many more dimensions of complexity than the simple arithmetic of addition.”
“Apophenic occasions, such as pareidolia, or hearing ghosts in static—these things are ripe for abuse. You must admit,” countered the other.
“Webs of complexity may lead to misguided thinking, true…” the polemic allowed. “But the same willful intuition that lies at the bottom of every unproductive speculation has also led to manned space flight and The Theory of Relativity. If there is teleology to reality, then nothing in it can be accidental. In which case, it is not unreasonable to suppose meaning finds us as often as we find it.”
Liam assessed these statements. “And what fate hazards your doorway?”
Lucien enlarged question “Some time ago I confronted a Biblical account of Heaven, and was disappointed in its terrestrial description. It reminded me of those sickly sweet color illustrations from childhood Sunday school lessons, which I associated with small cramped, often windowless rooms, and the smell of nicotine and heavy cologne.
I asked God, where my imagination could stand it, to better comprehend this idea as an adult. It came to me in a dream that I only understood at a later time:
I dreamt I was in a large house of little light, and sat in an elaborately carved chair with bulbous armrests and a high back, which was situated next to a wall where a large formidable bureau stood. A mirror hung above the bureau, though its elevation denied me a reflection of myself from my seated position.
I was drawn into the thick, magnifying glass incrementally, by degrees of astonishment, and saw that it was, in fact, an oil painting. I can do no justice to the landscape it described beyond telling you that I gazed up a sloping hill. In the lower right hand corner of the picture, closest to me, rested a boulder made of polished milky agate. Swirls of colors within it were earth toned, though these possessed eidetic intensity. Grass ascending the incline behind it was a deep emerald green, but somehow glowing. Toward the vista, limbs of a large shadowy oak tree hung like a valance curtain over a stage. The tree was a velvety brown, like chocolate cake. The sky past it was a cross between a cathedral ceiling and the painted canvas of a carnival tent. Pillowy, brilliant clouds banked in its sea of lapis lazuli, and possessed such immediacy that I felt their moisture on my fingertips. To reach for them induced vertigo. I felt my body being tugged from the chair, should I dwell long in this aspiration.
I compare this psychedelic landscape to the French Rococo painter Fragonard, with his preference for teal and turquoise in depicting misty tree lines.”
The listener speculated, “This sounds like Stendhal Syndrome, where one is overwhelmed—incapacitated—by beautiful art.”
The storyteller was not yet finished. “The door lying along the wall that bore this descriptive mirror was ajar, though no one stood inside it; I took this as an invitation to enter. At once I saw the thick glass from the other side. Gaudily colored shards of pottery and bottles (as I can explain them no better) were arrayed in front of it, suspended from wires, or situated on shelves that were cleverly painted with scenic elements of distorted perspective. These elements would only be brought into proportion where one looked in from the other room. I was crestfallen in this discovery, because there was no place from within this second room to visually reassemble the transcended picture, or employ the looking glass to reestablish its empyrean scale.
I was prepared to leave this dream where I found it, but meaning often lags behind in placing proper emphasis:
When Mom passed away, it was less than a week shy of her birthday, and more than a week after ours. She called me on the day she died, which was a Sunday, and a day I usually called her. Her spirits were relatively good, and she spoke about subjects I cannot remember. I was just then buying her birthday card, so conducted my last conversation with her hurriedly in a busy parking lot. I told her I loved her, and then again used these words in the birthday card I signed later that afternoon. I was to mail the card the next day, but events overtook me. When her body was exhibited for viewing prior to her funeral, I placed the card in the casket with her body, sealed in its envelope.
Mom loved her morning newspaper, and it is impossible to think about her without seeing her at the breakfast table perusing obituaries. Until some hour into the afternoon, the table would be covered with piles of undigested print, especially on Sunday. That Sunday paper was on the table where she left it, and until the subscription was cancelled, more papers accumulated on top of it. These became wrapping papers for fragile objects and other belongings removed from her house in the weeks to come.”
“Such as these objects seen in your dream?”
The brother confirmed the guess.
“This imagery in your dream… This would be more in the way Mom’s vision Heaven than yours. Do you believe she wanted to enlarge your perspective? The illustrators hired to do watercolors for Sunday school pamphlets were bush league compared to, let us say, the religious vision captured in a William Holman Hunt or a Salvador Dali painting?”
“Yes,“ replied Lucien simply.
The resident did not defend his pet theories with either ador or asperity. Indeed, his defense had been more in the way of laying out a case for consultation rather than debate. Conversation for the evening, regardless, drew to a close, and the resident removed his forlorn silhouette from the perspiring window to stretch out over the floor; the visitor was given preferment of the bed.
The malcontent, for the moment, rested, and left rancorous enemies, real or imagined, sanctioned or unsanctioned, like shadows to overrun the courtyard and its expiring moose. Bedding was apportioned between the brothers, with Lucien taking the afghan. Only sleep remained.
Liam crawled onto the misshapen bed to sketch in their itinerary. “Early day tomorrow. We drive to Redding for our holiday meal. Or to Shasta.”
The other did not acknowledge the fair warning, so was presumed to be asleep.
The planner turned to face a wall; an Indian tapestry, whose fragrant dye smelled of salt, covered it.
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