“Didn’t you see that beam of light?” I said. Rachel had set down her book and was on her feet.
Nicholas removed his hand from his forehead, opened his eyes, and blinked. “I’m blind,” he said.
Silence. The three of us stood there, unmoving.
“I can see phosphene activity now,” he said presently. “An after-light. No, I didn’t see any beam of light. But I see a phosphene circle. It’s pink. Now I can make outla few things.”
Rachel moved toward him, took him by the shoulder. “You better sit down.”
In an odd, even voice, almost mechanical in quality, Nicholas intoned, “Rachel, Johnny has a birth defect.”
“The doctor said nothing at all is -”
“He has a right inguinal strangulated hernia. It’s already gone down into the scrota! sac. The hydroseal is broken, Johnny needs immediate surgery; go to the phone, pick it up, and dial Dr Evenston. Tell him you’re bringing Johnny into the emergency room at St Jude Hospital in Fullerton. Tell him to be there.”
“Tonight?” Rachel said, appalled.
Nicholas intoned, “He is in imminent danger of death.” With his eyes shut he then repeated it, word for word, exactly as he had said it; watching him, I got the impression, suddenly, that even though his eyes were shut he was seeing the words. He spoke as if reading them off a cue card, like a performer. It was not his tone of voice, his cadence; he was following words written out for him.
I accompanied them to the hospital. Rachel drove; Nicholas was still having trouble with his eyes, so he sat beside her holding the little boy. Their physician, Dr Evenston, very irritable, met them at the emergency room. First he told them that he had examined Johnny several times for possible herniation and found nothing; then he took Johnny off; time passed; Dr Evenston eventually returned and said noncommittally that there was indeed a right inguinal hernia, reducible but needing immediate surgery, since there was always the possibility of strangulation.
On the way back to the Placentia apartment, I said, “Who are these people?”
“Friends,” Nicholas said.
“They certainly are interested in your welfare,” I said.
“And your baby’s.”
“Nothing wrong can happen,” Nicholas said.
I said, “But such powers!”
“They transferred information to my head,” Nicholas said, “but they didn’t heal Johnny. They just – “
“They healed him,” I said. Getting him to the doctor and calling the doctor’s attention to the birth defect was healing him. Why exert supernatural powers when natural curative means lay at hand? I remembered something the Buddha said after he witnessed a supposed saint walk on water: “For a penny,” the Buddha said, “I can board a ferry and do that.” It was more practical, even for the Buddha, to cross the water normally. The normal and the supranormal were not antagonistic realms, after all.
Nicholas had missed the point. But he seemed dazed; as Rachel drove through the darkness he continued to massage his forehead and eyes.
The information was transferred simultaneously,” Nicholas said. “Not sequentially. It’s always that way. It’s what’s called analog, in computer science, in contrast to digital.”
“You’re sure they’re friends?” Rachel said sharply.
“Anyone who saves my boy’s life,” Nicholas said, “is a friend.”
I said, “If they could convey all that exact information directly to your head like that, in one burst of colored light, they could let you know any time they want who they are, where they are from, and what they intend. Any confusion on your part regarding any of those issues is deliberate withholding of knowledge on their part. They don’t want you to know.”
“If I knew, I’d tell people,” Nicholas said. “They don’t want to see – “
“Why not?” I said.
“It would defeat their purpose,” Nicholas said, after a pause. “They’re working against – “ He ceased talking, then.
“There’s a great deal you haven’t told me,” I said, “that you know about them.”
“It’s all in the written pages.” He was silent for a few blocks and then said, “They’re working against great odds. So it follows that they have to operate with great caution. Or it will fail.” He did not elaborate. He probably didn’t know any more. Most of what he believed probably consisted of shrewd guesses, hatched out over long months of pondering.
I had worked up a little speech to give; now I gave it. There is a slight chance,” I said, “admittedly a very slight one, that what you’re dealing with is religious, that in fact you are being informed by the Holy Spirit, which is a manifestation of God. We’re all from Berkeley, raised there and limited by the secular viewpoint of a college town; we’re not inclined to theological speculation. But healing is a typical miracle of the Holy Spirit, or so I understand. You ought to know about that, Nicholas, from having been a Quaker.”
“Yes.” He nodded. “When the Holy Spirit takes you over it does heal.”
“Heard any non-English languages in your head?” I asked him. “That you don’t know?”
Presently he nodded. “Yes. In my dreams.”
“Glossolalia,” I said.
“Koine Greek. I wrote down a few words phonetically, what I could, when I woke up. Rachel took a year of Greek; she recognized them. We both looked them up in her dictionary: Koine Greek.”
“Is that still – “
“It qualifies. In the book of Acts in the Bible, other races recognized what the apostles were saying, in their own tongues, at Pentecost, when the Spirit first descended on them. Glossolalia isn’t nonsense; it’s foreign tongues you never knew. The Spirit brings them to your head so you can preach the gospel to every nation. It’s generally misunderstood. I thought it was gibberish until I researched it.”
“You’ve been reading the Bible?” I asked. “During your research?”
“The New Testament. And the Prophetic Books.” Rachel said, “Nick never knew any Greek. He was sure they weren’t real words.” The cruel biting quality had left her voice; worry about Johnny, and shock, had done it.
“Nick very cautiously told a couple of people interested in the occult about dreaming in Greek, and they said, „It’s a past life. You’re the reincarnation of a Greek-speaking person.“ But I don’t think that’s it.”
“What do you think it is?” I asked her.
“I don’t know. The Greek words were the first thing that signified anything to me, that I ever took seriously about this. And now tonight, his diagnosing Johnny . . . and I saw that pinkish-purple spark of light beamed up at him for an instant. I just don’t know, Phil; it doesn’t fit anything I’ve ever heard of. Nick seems to be catching glimpses of benign supernatural manipulators of some kind we don’t know about – just cryptic glimpses, what they want him to see. Not enough to extrapolate on. I get the impression they’re very old – from the Koine Greek, which is two thousand years out of the past. If they lapse into that, maybe there’s your one inadvertent clue.”
In a hoarse voice Nicholas said abruptly, “Someone is waking up in me. After two thousand years, or almost that long. He’s not awake yet, but his time is coming. He’s been promised it … a long time ago, when he was alive like us.”
“Is he human?” I said.
“Oh, yes.” Nicholas nodded. “Or he was once. The programming they’re giving me – it’s to wake him. They’re having trouble, or anyhow it’s very difficult; it takes a lot of things to do it. This man, this person, is important to them. I don’t know why. I don’t know who the man is. I don’t know what he’ll do.” He lapsed into brooding silence for a time and then said, mostly to himself, as if he had said it or thought it many times before, “I don’t know what’s going to become of me when it happens. Maybe there are no plans for me at all.”
“Are you sure you’re not throwing six different theories up into the air to see which lands first?” I said. “I can tell theories when I hear them – speculation. You don’t know, do you?”
“No,” Nicholas admitted.
“How long have you had this one?”
“I don’t know. They’re all written down.”
“In order of descending merit?”
“In the order they came to me.”
“And each one,” I said to him, “seemed equally true to you at the time.”
Nicholas said, “One of them has to be true. Finally I’ll find it. I have to.”
“You could go to your grave not knowing,” Rachel said. Til understand it eventually,” Nicholas said doggedly. Maybe not, I thought; maybe she is right. Nicholas could flounder around forever, his stack of typed papers constantly growing with theory after theory, each one more lurid than the last, more comprehensive, more daring. Finally the man slumbering within him whom they were attempting to arouse back into wakeful life could appear, take charge, and finish Nicholas’s thesis for him. Nicholas could write, I wonder if it’s … it may be that … I’m sure that … it has to be; and then the ancient man could rise into life and write down, He was correct; it is. I am.