In 1967 I lived in a small city nestled in a verdant valley between a high piney plateau and a vast empty desert. I would get high with my friend David Lake and other high-school hippies around a campfire in an aspen grove or at the foot of a red-rock cliff. The Beatles would blast from the eight-track mounted under the dash of someone’s car. Amid fits of laughter and clouds of pot smoke, Dave and I would debate: Do thoughts have density? What is the weight of sadness, the volume of anger? Does an idea’s expression somehow make it intrinsically substantial, even valuable? Or does a thought unexpressed have its own form of gravity, gravity that might warp the fabric of spacetime in some tiny way like a marble dimpling a sheet? Is this conversation being recorded in the ether? Or is everything entirely fleeting and inconsequential? Does anything intangible matter?
 
As our junior and senior years progressed, Dave became more and more of a cynic and materialist. Pragmatic action based on empirical evidence: that’s all that mattered. I went the opposite direction, toward idealism, peace and love, belief that our good intentions could end the war and make the world a better place. When I told him that, like it or not, the esoteric conversations we had shared would live inside him forever, he scoffed that my “fantasy life” would take me nowhere but to dumpster-diving for dinner. He called me a “fuckin’ pussy.” When he joined the ROTC in our last months of high school, I gave up on our friendship. We went to different colleges; film for me, math for him. We lost contact. A few years later I heard that Dave had been recruited by some shady military agency. Rumor had it that he was traveling the world doing top-secret black-ops work. I had no idea what that meant, but it sounded very very bad.
 
Nearly forty years passed. In the middle of that time I went to a high school reunion and was told by several of my graying compatriots that David Lake had disappeared. Or at least no one there had heard from him. Time had swallowed him up; he was a mystery. By then he was mostly gone from my memory as well, and the fade-out continued. The past went on being relentlessly obliterated by the present. But then it changed.
 
The date was December 9, 2010. I was producing a series of training videos for a client, a chain of women’s clothing stores, and they had sent me to Florida to shoot in one of their new stores. The town was Groveland, a suburb of Orlando, a place I’d never heard of. I knew I wouldn’t want to live in such a mall-and-condo flatland, but I was glad to escape the frigid gloom of upstate New York for a few days.
 
We were required to shoot while the store was closed, so I was feeling raw and exhausted after three nights of no sleep, made worse by insomnia in the daylight between. I had tossed and turned a few hours that final morning, then got up and decided to explore the town in my rental car before heading to the airport for my flight home.
 
The sun beat down from an impossibly blue sky. Everything was clean and new but empty of people. I had just turned onto a nondescript residential street called Magnolia Avenue when suddenly my intestines gurgled and twisted. Too much coffee, bad food, no sleep? I had to find a toilet as quickly as possible. Knock on a door? No way. The road seemed to lead straight into a park, so I followed it until I saw a squarish yellow building with a restroom sign. I made it to a stall just in time.
 
As I sat there in sweating turmoil emptying my guts into the bowl, I stared at the green metal wall. Amongst the usual raunchy gibberish I saw these lines in a fine cursive script:
 
There's nothing you can know that isn't known
Nothing you can see that isn't shown
Nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be
It's easy
 
And then I remembered: thirty years ago on this very day I was living near Seattle and was driving back to my office after running some errands at lunchtime. I had switched on the car radio just in time to hear the announcement that John Lennon had been murdered the night before. Seconds later, in a fog of shock and sadness, I ran a red light, straight into the path of a pickup truck. Right through the screech and crash, the chaotic aftermath, the haze of pain from a broken collar bone and various cuts and bruises, my disordered mind held an image of Lennon and a scream of “No!” seemed to pierce through everything.
 
After a long spell of sitting, it seemed my innards had finally expelled whatever was troubling them. My body felt immensely better as I walked back out into the Florida sunshine. Now I saw that I was in a dusty little park on the shore of a large pond ringed by palms and the occasional banyan draped with Spanish moss. I strolled along the paved walkway a short distance until I saw a sign. I hadn’t thought of my old friend in months or even years, but now I had to. Lake David, the sign said.
 
My flight home was without incident, full of reminiscence about high school and David Lake: his deadpan jokes, his sometimes infuriating inscrutability. One time he told me he had sneaked out at midnight on a school night, walked the neighborhood, climbed a fence into the yard of the high school baseball coach, and peeked through the window of his beautiful daughter’s bedroom. Saw her naked.
 
“Bullshit,” I said. “You didn’t do that.”
 
“Yes, I did.”
 
“No way. You did not.”
 
“Well… okay, you got me. I didn’t.”
 
“That’s what I thought.”
 
A long pause, and then, “Actually, I did.”
 
“Asshole!” I said. “Which is it?”
 
He shrugged and grinned. “Ha. You’ll never know, will you?”
 
It was near midnight when I walked in the door of my little house two hours north of New York City. My wife greeted me with a kiss and pointed to the mail on the dining room table. A big manila envelope showed a Virginia return address: “Crosetti & Morris, Estate and Probate Law.” Inside, I found an inch-thick document with a drab gray cover and a plastic comb binding. Clipped to the front of it was a tearsheet from a magazine I’d never heard of: The Journal of Noetic Sciences. The page showed a standard corporate headshot of a man in a suit, a man who was a thicker, balding version of the old friend I hadn’t seen in forty years. The article was both a tribute to him, and an obituary.
 
Apparently David R. Lake, Ph.D., had died of a heart attack a month ago. It seemed he was well-respected in the field of parapsychology research: an open-minded skeptic, a meticulous creator of tightly controlled studies investigating remote viewing, telekinesis, ESP, even near-death experiences. His career had included the CIA as well as several obscure private agencies with acronyms for names. The article quoted from an earlier interview with him, in which he recalled an event that was the birth of his interest in this field. It was 1980, the day after John Lennon was killed. He had undergone a sudden, brief crisis of physical, mental, and emotional stress that he knew immediately was not really his own. He did not believe such things were possible, but he couldn’t deny his experience: he had been the receiver of a transmission. He said he recognized the transmitter. The signal had come from an old high school friend of his who was clearly in great pain. After only a few minutes the experience faded away, but it changed the course of his life. He said that, in between his other projects, he had been investigating that event for all the years since.
 
Of course I was stunned. But immediately, I thought: “That cynical bastard. Is this all a fiction?”
 
Despite being desperate for sleep, I read the whole article standing at my dining room table. Then I picked up the bound document and leafed through it, page after page of dry numerical tables and bar charts, followed by many more pages of narrative. Apparently hundreds of people were telling about their personal experiences of something, I wasn’t sure what.
 
I flipped back to the beginning. The title page contained only a generic-looking logo for a firm called “PRI International” and the following text: “The December Ninth Study, by Dr. David R. Lake, Ph.D.” The next page said this:
 
A Tripartite Abstract of Sample Events Typifying a Recent Widespread Occurrence of Synchronous Subtle Phenomena, Currently Undergoing Statistical Validation by a Team of Independent Researchers
 
I
 
On December 9, 2006, at 1:59 p.m., Michael Dougherty, an adjunct professor of English at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York, added the final line to his latest poem, a surrealistic language experiment on which he’d been working for weeks, laboring over the words during his few free minutes between classes. The line was a question: “Is need all you love?” He felt the familiar wave of satisfaction that told him the poem was complete, closed his notebook, and dashed for the faculty lounge to grab a cup of coffee before the students of his Freshman Comp class could get restless wondering where he was.
 
II
 
Meanwhile, on the shoulder of Interstate 81 near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Mario Covello dialed his cell phone to call Lisa Peck, who was sitting at a restaurant table waiting for him. It was their first date, and Mario had just been seriously delayed by a speeding ticket written by a cop who wasn’t the least bit concerned about his romantic life. When she answered, Mario apologized immediately. He aimed at sincerity with a light touch, but Lisa responded petulantly. “I’m pissed,” she said. As he sped up to merge into traffic, several car lengths behind the departing state trooper, he put on a flirtatious tone. “You need love is all,” he said. She warmed up eventually, and their late lunch was a success; but months later, Mario felt certain that the undercurrent of tension born from that first fumbled rendezvous was the beginning of the end.
 
III
 
In those same minutes on that same December 9th, Rose Ortega of Jackson Heights, Queens, lay down for a nap with her two-year-old, singing a soothing lullaby despite a near-hysterical stab of worry about what might happen to their little family. Her husband Ramon had been laid off from his factory job and was now out hitting the streets looking for some kind of work, any kind of work. As little Gabriella relaxed into sleep, Rose drifted off as well. She dreamed. In her dream, she still lay on the bed with her daughter, but the room was different—bigger, brighter. She was looking toward the faraway ceiling when an old man appeared, standing next to the bed, looking down at her with an inscrutable expression. He wore a plain dark suit, white shirt, dark tie, and he carried a book, a large old leather-bound volume, but he didn’t open it. Somehow, she knew he was Jorge Luis Borges, the long-dead Argentine writer, whose work she had never read. Without moving his lips, he spoke to her: “All you need is love. Love is all you need.”
 
 

© Brent Robison 2016