The Space between Atoms 66

 “It’s Wednesday!  It must be!”

Lindsey was levitating.

“No,” Calum calmed.  “There have been saints who levitate too.  This is for your benefit.”

“But it’s against the laws of physics!”

“Are scientific laws called laws because they can’t be broken or are they simply made up by human beings to describe what they see?”

“Then why haven’t scientists described this?”

“There have been many, many documented cases.  One guess how scientism responds.”

“Ridicule reaction?”

“Yes, you’re beginning to understand.  Lindsey is a focal agent in a way that we’ve never seen.”

Terah watched her hover two feet above the table.  Her eyes were closed.  She seemed perfectly relaxed, but not asleep.  Hovering might not have been the right word.  She didn’t bob and undulate on the air.  It was more like a David Copperfield magic trick, as if she sat on a flat surface.   Embarrassed at doing so, he looked to see if her jean bottoms were flattened at all, as if sitting on an invisible surface.  Unlike a Copperfield scenario she wasn’t draped in anything concealing.  Her behind was wonderfully rounded.  She rested on nothing.  He found no words.

“Levitation,” Calum began, “is difficult to explain.  Especially with our current understanding of gravity.  Physics knows gravity as one of the four basic forces, and yet a falling feather can seem to take its time following it, rather like a ship on the ocean.  The fact is we don’t understand gravity but we declare it unbreakable.  Here, she’s coming down now.”

Lindsey slowly, smoothly, came to rest in the center of the table.  Her legs crossed, she looked almost as if she was meditating.

“She’ll likely be exhausted,” Calum warned.  “Don’t be alarmed.  Levitation is very energy intensive.  I’ve only seen her do it twice before.”

Lindsey fluttered her eyes open.  “That was weird,” she said.

“You didn’t intend to do it?” Terah asked, still not quite believing.  He’d too long been accustomed to seeing only what he’d been told was possible.

“I never do.  I was just thinkin’ how all this fits together.  Our wanderin’s, the pandemic, the lightnin’.  Wednesday.  Even you, Terah.  It was beginnin’ to make the connections and I realized I was floatin’.  Man, I’m exhausted.  I’m goin’ back to bed for awhile.”

The two men watched as she shuffled toward the door.  Once she was on her way to the stairs, Calum turned to Terah.  “That was one of the more dramatic episodes, but life is actually full of events that we routinely dismiss.  We say, like Lindsey just did, ‘That was weird,’ and we go on as if it never happened.  No, I don’t have a Ph.D.  What I do have is a careful record of those who refused to ignore the strange, the unusual.”

Terah felt the weightiness of the air, as if a spooky storm were building in the library.  His shoulders tingled.  Then his spine.

“Not all of these books are of equal value,” Calum continued.  “Some were written by uneducated observers and they make far too grand assessments of what they saw.  Still, they were eyewitnesses.  Many of them were scribbled by writers with no gift or flare for composition and quickly self-published.  Others, however, are by university presses.  Yes, go ahead and look.  Chicago and Oxford are there.  Harvard, Penn and a variety of smaller presses.  They can’t be too direct since the ridicule response is firmly in place.  They are, however, beginning to publish books asking if we haven’t been too hasty in dismissing the invisible world.”

“But doesn’t that imply Christianity is ‘true’?  If there is a supernatural world, and a god and an afterlife, isn’t that the same as admitting biblical literalism?”

“Not at all.  The Bible is one—actually, it’s multiple, as I’m sure you know—way of seeing it.  The Bible has a variety of views, as does every religion.  No faith system is entirely orthodox.  America has been biblical from the beginning, so that’s our milieu, our matrix.  It doesn’t mean that spiritual beings support that one view only.  Occam’s razor, remember, isn’t the only way to shave.  And nature prefers beards.”  The two men regarded each other.  Calum’s white beard was trimmed and reasonable, while Terah’s gray was the tangle that nature dictated for a man long away from the comforts of home.

“What about Wednesday?”

“That we’ve got to figure out.  I don’t like that a demon has latched onto her.  She’s probably safe here, but she has larger plans that just being here with me.”

“Larger plans?  Like being homeless?”

“You don’t know her background.  That was an exercise in self-discipline.  Yes, I offered to let her stay here.  No strings attached.  She’s a most remarkable person.  She wasn’t in good shape when she arrived here.  I sent her to Dickinsheet when she insisted on going.  One of the men there, an artist, is an acquaintance of mine, cut from the same cloth.  He knew something about the powers.”

“You know about Dickinsheet?”

“Some of us do.  Homelessness is sometimes a matter of wanting to be off the grid.  In any case we need to figure out how to fight demons.”

“I thought The Exorcist had the answers to that.”

“Demons are known across cultures.  They respond, interestingly enough, to cultural cures.  Catholics respond well to the Roman Rite, and evangelicals response to Bible use.  Hindu demons respond to Vedic treatments.  Part of the problem is we don’t really know what demons are.”

“Fallen angels?”

“That’s only part of the story.  The idea that demons are fallen beings is only one idea about them floated in the Bible.  It doesn’t say much about them, actually.  It just assumes they are there.”  Calum began scanning his shelves.  “I’m afraid my organization here follows my own brain patterns rather than Dewey.  I’ve never been one who agreed with how others organize knowledge.  Ah, here.”  He slid out a book.  “Feel free to join in.”

“How are they organized?”

“Well, I do have all the titles on a spreadsheet,” he nodded toward an Apple desktop.  “If you don’t have a title or author in mind, here in front of me are the books on demons.  Some are more helpful than others, of course.”

The house shook, as if an atomic concussion hit it.  Calum sprinted.  Terah followed.  Up the stairs at a pace startling for a man his age, Calum dashed to Lindsey’s room.  The door had obviously been blown open.  Lindsey was gone.