Wandering Star

FICTION / DETECTIVE / SCIFI





Wandering
Star





A Loli & Jeffers Mystery








John E. Darling





For

SageAnn von Kaesborg

aka Ann Barton

A wily psychologist who helped me dream it up.






Copyright 2011
Oregon Darlings Press
Ashland















This is a work of fiction and any resemblance of characters or events
 to anyone, living or dead, is purely coincidental











1  ::   A Goon Shadowing Me

She said she had to see me immediately or close to it.  Rosie made the appointment for 10 that same morning.  Rosie always tries to get an outline of the case for me but this lady would tell her nothing.

   “How did she sound?”

   “High-strung, smart, a controlling bitch, but freaked out.”

   “How freaked out?”

   “About medium well, I’d say.”

   “But still under control?”

   “Yes, a woman who’s freaked out and still able to think, well, that’s kind of rare, and I call that a controlling bitch.”

   There was a knock in the outer office and I nodded to Rosie. 

   “It’s Loli Medina.”

   I raised my eyebrows.  The name sounded both tartish and menacingly international.  Rosie smiled and fetched her in.  She stood before me.

   Normally, I meet them with me sitting down, if possible on the phone, seeming to finish up a converation, so I can take them in -- and also have the upper hand.  But I stood, involuntarily.  I clicked off the iPhone and slipped it into my pocket.

   “Hamilton Jeffers,” I said.  I thought about extending my hand but something told me to be old-fashioned.   Women didn’t used to shake hands.  I’d seen it in movies.  I waited to see if she would practice what used to be a sole male prerogative and extend hers.  She didn’t.  It made sense, suddenly.  Why should they?  It’s kind of a dog thing, shaking hands - and women are cats.  I nodded to the chair and waited for her to speak.

   “Mind if I smoke?” she said.  She was already lighting it up.  It was a brown cigarette.

   I laughed out loud.

   “That’s practically a first, at least for this decade. I don’t even have an ashtray.  I haven’t even said the word ashtray in decades.”

   “I’ll just use the box.”  She crossed her legs and tapped her ash into her cigarette box, which opened on a hinge and lay flat.  She was a controlling...I was going to say bitch.  But when I use that word, I feel it takes energy away from me and lessens my powers of observation.  But I did observe that whatever she was, she was a nice-looking one. 

   “You might as well have a shot with that,” I said sardonically, never expecting her to go the full distance, but she did.

   “Love one,” she said, blowing her smoke.  So I pulled open the bottom drawer and poured her a shot of Stoly.  No one I know drinks a shot of anything before 5 and usually not before 7, after they’ve worked out for a few hours.  Her body looked like she worked out -- and she caught me noticing it, though I only swept my eyes across her legs for the most fleeting of moments.  I pride myself on not being caught noticing.  I felt she had me at a disadvantage now.  She seemed to hike her skirt up another inch as she settled into the chair.

   She nodded at me and at the bottle in one sweeping glance, raising her brows to invite me to join her.  I decided what the fuck.  It would be rude not to.  I tossed it.  She sipped it, puffing appreciately between sips.

   “You,” I said with exaggerated slowness, feeling the Stoli hit my frontal lobe, “are here because you...”

   “I’m being followed.  I want to know who it is and what he wants...or they.”

   “Ok.  Shouldn’t be too hard.  You didn’t say you wanted it stopped.”

   “You do that?”

   “We can.  It’s extra.  Excuse me.”  I texted Wayne.  He’d seen her enter the building and usually doesn’t have much trouble tracking back on the muni, parking lots, taxis and finding who’s tailing whom.  He texted me back in about three minutes that he had someone.  He texted the description along with a pic.  He said the guy was a thug, an ape - no pro.

   “How do you know you’re being stalked?  It IS what you’d call stalking?”

   “Yes, definitely.”

   I waited. 

   “He’s good at it.  A lot of people wouldn’t even notice a tail.”

   I zoomed the pic and held it up to her.  She nodded.

   “Your partner is very good.”

   “Should he keep on the tail of the man who’s keeping on yours?”

   She pulled out a stack of 100s and, again, raised her brows to ask how many.

   “The guy in the pic.  Ever see him before?”

   “Never.” 

   “He looks like a professional,” I said, scratching my chin.  It was a gesture she instantly understood and she started peeling off bills.

   “You can stop at 50 of those, if you have them.  You shouldn’t carry around that kind of money in San Francisco, you know.  There’s a lot of bums out there who’d smoke you for just one of those.  We do take plastic, you know.  Like everyone these days.  Cash is kind of quaint.”

   “But it’s impressive, don’t you think?  I can hear you hyperventilating from here.  And there’s no paper trail, that is, no digital trail.”

   “That’s mighty nice to have - no trail,” I said.  I was about to ask her why it was nice but it’s always best to let clients live their lives as they please -- or think they are -- and stick with the case.

   “Can you tell me about yourself - things I should know, having to do with why someone would shadow you?  Such as, what do you do?  Why are you in the City?  Marital stuff, including any misadventures, divorces?”

   “I’m a therapist.  A psychotherapist.  High end.”  She handed me a card.  It said PhD and a flock of initials after her name, which no one could understand. It named a couple books she had written.  They were about past life regression.  She gave seminars in past lives. 

   I was surprised.  Therapists?  Who cares about therapists enough to put a dick after one?  I just sat there looking at her, nodding slightly.  New Age stuff?  Reincarnation? 

   “Ms. Medina, does anyone have a grudge or reason to harm you?  Or kidnap you?”

   She paused a long time, dicking around with getting another cigarette going.  She pointed at the bottle.  I poured her another shot.  She tossed it.  What the fuck.  So did I.

   “No.  Well, they shouldn’t.”  She paused.  I waited, after that last enigmatic comment.

   “There was a guy at a workshop last year, a big intensive, a week long. $8,000 a pop, very crowded.  Let’s say he freaked everyone out with where he went.”

   “Are we talking past lives here?”

   She nodded and poured herself another shot.  We were getting drunk here.  Should I keep up with her?  She lit up another ciggie.

   “My smoke alarms are set really low.  You should know.”

   “Like I give a fuck?  Do you know how to pull a 9-volt battery?”

   I laughed and asked for a ciggie.  It had been years, but I’d promised myself I would have another episode in later life.  Like now.  She pretended to stretch, sticking her considerable breasts in my face.  I prided myself in not looking, but peripherally, it was a show.

   “Yes, past lives,” I said.  “Do you know anything about...”  I was going to name-drop.

   “I do.”  She clearly thought me a hick detective.

   “Sutphen was my favorite,” I said.

   “Gee, you’re dating yourself, Mr. Jeffers.  That was the 70s and he was pretty much a show biz flash.”

   “Seen any better?  He got at the real stuff, Loli.”

   She laughed and slapped her thigh, rearranging the thin, red cloth on it.

   “Very good.  You passed the audition and you’re hired, Jeffers.  Yes, he has not been surpassed, show biz or no.”

   “The name is Hamilton.”

   “Well, I don’t like it.  Too stuffy.  I like Jeffers.  Just Jeffers.”

   She was bombed on her ass at 10:45 in the morning.  Well, I guess I was too.  It was like I’d known her a long time.  We just clicked.  Laughing - that was it.  If you can really laugh with someone -- and if there were some level of verbal-intellectual sympatico -- then there is some kind of bond that persists.  Am I right?  Of course, I’m right.  It’s never let me down.

   “Actually,” she said, “I’ve never liked Hamilton or worse, Ham, either.”

   She screamed and slapped her thigh.  I could hear Rosie clear her throat.  I coughed in return and that meant everything is fine.  Three coughs meant call the cops.

   We got over our laughing thing.  I let the silence hang in the air for a moment. 

   “The guy in the workshop.”

   “We call them playshops, actually,” she said.

   I let the tiniest of smiles cross my face. 

   “This is what gives the New Age a bad name, you know.”

   I waited.

   “Ok, a very handsome guy, intelligent, well-dressed, obviously had money.”

   “Had to.  Eight thousand bucks?”

   She laughed.  “It’s worth it.  People uncover amazing keys to the dynamics of their...”

   “I know.  That’s not the issue.”

   “He saw something in a past life he didn’t like.”

   “Someone he loved in an earlier life.  Didn’t turn out well.”

   “That’s right.  Of course.  That’s what you’re supposed to find - and he did.”

   “He was deeply in love with...”  I slowly swung my index finger around until it started to point at her.  She nodded, reckoning with how smart I was and thankful for it, I could see.  But I didn’t want to look too smart.  I shut up and let her talk.  She knew I could track her thoughts.  I could stop trying.  It would come out now.

   “From that moment on...”  She put her fingers to her eyes.  Sobs started coming up.  I’d learned to keep my distance at times like these.  I just breathed and let her do it.  I just said mm-hm and things like that -- and let out a sigh.  I’d been to enough seminars over the years.  If you sighed, it gave the other person “space” to sigh and feel whatever.

   “From that moment on,” she said finally, “I’ve never felt really alone, like there was someone looking over my shoulder, always there.”

   Her eyes, filled with tears, cut into me pleadingly.  I nodded and pressed my lips together as if I understood and was born to hear and support her.  She was attractive, doing this.  Why are women so hot when they’re crying and screaming about shit?  I don’t know.  Must be something associated genetically with mating ritual, something we’ve forgotten.

   “He’s not the bastard in this pic?”  I held up my iPhone.  She shook her head. 

   “No, he’s hot, not like that stalking shitass.”

   I couldn’t help but smile.  Tried not to.  She saw the corners of my mouth curve upward, though.  Fuck.  I was “getting” her.  And she knew it.  Fuck.  I hated this.  It’s one thing to get someone, but to also have them be sane?  Now, that was quite another thing.

   “But,” the question was obvioius, “is this stalking shitass connected to this nut at your seminar? And how long has this ape been tracking you?”

   She tossed the roll of bills on my desk. 

   “Obviously, I don’t know.  That’s why I’m here.  Take what you need.  The goon tracking me is obviously a cheap...”  She paused and checked herself.

   “A cheap detective?”

   She burst out laughing.  I went around and sat on the edge of my desk, a few feet from her. 

   “God, you are so freaking....funny.  And here.  I haven’t laughed like this in a year.”  She stood up and looked me in the eye with a level gaze, no games.  She even looked at my mouth.  It even seemed she looked at my hair, around my ears and the way it hung down on my forehead.  That’s the kind of look a dame gives you when she’s deciding if she can love you.  Or at least adore you for a few rolls in the hay.

   “I didn’t expect to be laughing today,” she said. She looked around the room, trying, it seemed to gain some composure.  It would have been so easy to have hugged her, with one fucking thing leading to another, but that was so cheap, the easy way out.  I liked her.  What a nice thing to say.  Liked her.  Fuck.  It was like some depth charge going off way down in me, too deep to hear but you could feel it, just off the bass range. 

   Let it be, said that little wise voice in me.  Let it the fuck be.  Let it be what it is - and you do not know what it is. 

   She let her fingers trail across my lapel, then my cheek.  And I let her do it.  Don’t move, said that little wise voice.  Just let her be, have and do this moment. 

   “Call me when you know something,” she said and walked out.  The entire roll of 100s was still on my desk.  When I sobered up in about an hour and a half, after watching Netflix for a while, I counted it.  There was $17,000 there.  She obviously expected this case to go for a while.  I called Rosie in. 

   “Count this and deposit it, Rosie, ay-sap.  The interim account.”

   “Ah, the interim. That’s the one we use when we don’t know where things are going and there’s cash and it might have to come out quickly.”

   “That’s right.  When we don’t know.”   ~






2  ::   We Don’t Do Messy Early On

Wayne came back late that evening with lots of pics on his iPhone.  The ape stalker guy obviously wasn’t as pro as we thought.  He didn’t pick up Wayne at all.  He even traipsed back to his master in the hills of Mill Valley and reported that she’d gone to see a private dick in the City.  Well, good.  Who cares if he knows that?  Wayne could have stopped him but that would have been messy and we don’t do messy early on.  So we had the weirdo’s address, which Wayne had already run on the best tracking sites -- and already had a full, written report for me on the guy.  I realized I wasn’t going home that night.  Wouldn’t be the first time.  I would crash on the couch.  It had happened often enough that I’d made sure to stock fresh clothes and have a couch that popped out into an elegant bed.

   I brushed my teeth with the aggressive, vibrating, battery-charged dental thing that kept my teeth clean enough that I could almost stand to run my tongue across them.  Why had God created teeth?  I didn’t know.  What a bother they were.  And you had to think about them last thing in the evening, often when you were drunk on your ass or needed to do post-play or whatever they call it afterward.  You’re supposed to get up and floss and torture rotting food from between each two teeth?  But what a relief when done.  Then I could concentrate on Wayne’s report. I signalled him to wait, in other words, to help himself to my Stoli.

   I skimmed the report, which Wayne had penned with his Dragon Dictation app, which had finally gotten mostly readable.  Hm, just another rich, sensitive guy with too much education and too many feelings and past marriages and cruel parents who didn’t love him, right?  The Bay Area!  We didn’t bother with these things in Michigan.  That’s where I’m from, though I’m certainly not proud of it or anything.  It’s just a vast, humid plain of overly-practical, well-meaning people, nothing to crow about. I read about this suspect, Alexander something.  Of course he would have a four-syllable name.  And a middle name with it.  Corporations, buy-ins, ex-wives, all getting payments, all payments up to date and the guy was involved with import-export.  Right.  That was always what the spooks called it.  So he was a spy.  Maybe.  Or maybe he did import something.  He certainly didn’t export anything, since we Americans didn’t make anything anymore.  Import.  That meant drugs, as often as not.  But who knows?  Wayne had gotten us safely through squares one and two.

   “Did the ape see you?”

   “No, boss, he didn’t.  Of course he didn’t.”  He slammed another shot of Stoli.

   “You want a Sherman with that?” 

   He laughed.  “I could smell them.  I know you wouldn’t do it.  It had to be a babe.  Am I right?  And you let her smoke in here?  Rosie let you do that?  Must’ve been hot.”

   I laughed.  “Nice report, Wayne.  Glad to see Dragon can make out your accents and slurred speech now.  The main thing is, what did YOU think of this chap, this Alexander?”

   “I don’t think, boss.  I bring in the data.  You do the thinking.  Lots of money.  Single.  Smart.  He’s got those big connections all over the world.  He can do what he wants.”

   I skimmed the report some more on my iPhone, googled a few things. 

   “Wayne, do you think we’ve lived before?”

   “Before now?  Not much.  I would like to, though.”

   “I mean different lives, reincarnation, being born again, over and over.”

    “Oh, that.  Boss, I have no idea.  It would be nice if we didn’t die forever.  Or have to chose between heaven and hell, which both seem kind of awful.”

   I smiled.  He was a good guy, Wayne was, and I trusted him implicitly.  He came from Wisconsin and had actually taken detective work in college and treated it as a profession, something you had to do right or you would get a bum reputation and no one would hire you. I knew I would never let him go and would give him any raise he asked for, though he would never ask.  That’s how Wisconsin people were.  So I just gave him a raise on his birthday every year. 

   “Well, this case has something to do with past lives.  We have past lives, many lives.  That’s what a lot of people think -- and there seems to be more and more information that validates it, know what I mean?”

   “Glad to hear it, boss.  Not looking forward to the end.  Glad there isn’t an end.” 

   “Follow the dame tomorrow, from the gitgo -- and watch out.  She’s good at detecting it.”

   “I got shots of her.  Not bad looking, boss.” 

   To put it mildly.  “Send them to me.”  He popped them onto my phone.  I couldn’t help but emit a low whistle.  “Y’know, you could have been a fashion photographer.  Have you worked these?”

   “Did a little adjusting on PS Express. Couldn’t resist.  She is hot, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

   “The hottest,” I said, before catching myself.  “She’s very nice looking.  And she pays her bills.”

   Wayne left.  I knew he wasn’t going home to crash, but within an hour had already set up a perimeter around the woman’s house and workplace, read all her monographs and news stories, knew her childrens’ names and all her past husbands, her bankruptcies, gossip in the Chron’s columns, all of it.  If Wayne rested, I didn’t know when.

   Myself, I couldn’t sleep.  I kept seeing her face before me.  I knew rudimentary self-hypnosis from a seminar in the late seventies and I tried it, finding myself readily swept down the stairs to the beach -- such a stereotype -- and back into “the past life that has the most information waiting for you” and there she was, standing before me, just as she did this morning.

   Odd, how certain things are the same -- the moisture on the lips, the glint in the eye, hell, it’s the soul.  That’s what shows through.  The smile.  That’s what time and lifetimes can’t change.  It was her.  She wasn’t wearing what we wear today.  She was walking with me, talking, laughing and what did I know for sure about her?  I knew I loved her.  And had loved her before.

   I snapped myself out of it, tossed a shot, maybe two, splashed my face and said this could not be real.  It’s the stress and pressure of the week.  But it was only Tuesday.   ~






3  ::   I Know What You Did Last Night

My phone rang about 530 in the morning.  Only two people -- Rosie and Wayne -- would do that or even knew the number.  But it was a strange number on the screen.  I memorize numbers by the last two digits, handy enough and here she was, 68.  So, yesterday, when I’d handed her the phone to ID the stalker dick, she’d clicked it to systems info and memorized my number!  Smart too!  I took a deep breath and tried to sound awake.  She spoke before I had a chance.

   “You know, Jeffers, in addition to being a therapist, I am a psychic, a prophet, a shaman.  All those words mean the same thing, that I have powers beyond listening to people’s problems and you know what I know?”

   “No, what?  That I’m still in bed, very sleepy and scratching myself in places I won’t name?”

   She laughed heartily.

   “God, you can make me laugh and at this hour in the morning!  Ok, I know that you went to our past life, or one of them, last night.”

   I don’t think I ever sat up so fast out of nearly sound sleep in my life. Instinctively, I scanned all the corners of the room for webcams and mics, even rummaged under lamps, looked under end tables. 

   “Find anything?” she said, rather sexily.

   “Who is this?” I said. 

   “It’s me, really me.  Loli.”

   I ransacked my brain.  “Ashtray.  What, yesterday, was yours?”  No one should be able to answer that question but her.

   “Ciggie box.  Shermans.”

   It was she.  “God, I need some coffee,” I said, trying to postpone the obvious question, but soon asked, “how in the fuck could you possibly know that?”

   “I’m a medium.  No, I’m a heavy.”

   “No tricks? No lies?”

   “I swear.”

   I knew she was telling the truth, but how she did it violated everything I knew about physics and everything else. 

   “When did you get this, about me past life tripping, what time?”

   “A little after midnight.  You were in your office crashing.  Where you are now.  You regressed.  Not well, but well enough to see me.  When you started, so did I.”

   I’m not usually one to tip my cards.  Why give anyone an advantage -- client, employee, colleague, cop, spouse, anyone? 

   “I also know what you’re thinking now -- that you should keep your secrets, no matter how obvious they are to me.  I really am sorry, sincerely, for ripping your veil.  I didn’t mean to, but it somehow seems important to...to what’s happening now, whatever that is, and I don’t know what it is.”

   I told her I need some time.  I needed strong coffee and a good, solid omelet with ham and some nice, grounding American fries.  Which I went and got on Post Street, a favorite little cafe, unknown to tourists and most locals.  I was able to read the now-diminutive Chron, full of its incessant, meaningless neighborhood slaughters.  But the Chron was somehow comforting.  Those nasty things always happened to someone else and, year after year, you felt sorry for them and somehow safe that it wasn’t you.

   I’d cleaned my plate and took my last sip of coffee.  As if she could see me, she texted at that moment, “breathe, it’s ok.”

   I realized that, indeed, I wasn’t breathing at all.  I was practically holding my breath.  She said she lived near Washington Square and to come over and shower.  She said I needed it.  She was right.  I showered.  She had more coffee waiting when I got out and she had even washed and somehow magically dried my underwear.

   “Um, how did you get my underwear dry already?” 

   “Hair dryer.  Not that hard.”

   I told her we’d been able to track the IP, which meant ‘identified patient,’ the person who’s the problem.  I sketched an outline of him.  She seemed interested but not a lot.

   “It’s what I picked up also.  Nice to have it real-world verified.”

   “That’s me, the real world. What are you, then?”

   “I’m real world, too.  But I also have trained myself to live in the adjacent worlds near us.  They aren’t all that distant or mysterious.  You just have to believe in them and let yourself focus on them long enough and they materialize and drop their veils.”

   “Did I do that last night?”

   “Well, did you?”

   Just like a psychologist, making you answer your own question.

   “Yes.  It was real.  I saw your face, really saw it.”

   “I know.”

   “Did you see mine?  I mean back then in the other life?”

   “Yes.  The same play of the smile about your lips, the same glint in your eye.” 

   She used almost exactly the same words I had. 

   “It’s the soul, Jeffers. That’s what we recognize in the smile, the eye.  I know you of old.  There is no way around it.  But I am saying too much, aren’t I?  I don’t want you to...”

   “To freak? To run?”

   She nodded and touched me, my hair.  She did it with absolute confidence, no flirting.

   “Jeffers, you are a natural at going in.  I mean ‘going in’ to the state, you know, opening and locking the mind into it and demanding the gates open.  Shit, I know how bizarre this sounds, but you have been pointed out to me and I want to teach you how to get it down, to go into those past lives.  It’s not hard.  They’re all there, just beyond the veil.”

   She held her breath, hoping I wouldn’t write her off as a nut.  I wavered.  I could leave now and go back to my shoot-em-up domestic violence and divorce cases, which paid handsomely and which I could do with one hand tied behind my back. I was a master at them.  The cops all knew and respected me and I was the word-of-mouth Sam Spade of the genre.  Just get on your feet, man, and get in your car!  Do it!  You’ve met plenty of these energy-worker kind of babes and nuts and you know where this goes!  Leave!

   Then she said it.  “Sam Spade indeed.  He was a genius and we both know it.  That’s what you’re being called on to do now -- and neither of us knows why you have to do this, but I can teach you how to get there.  To the why.”

   She’d literally read my mind.  I took her face in my gaze and let myself study her lashes, the moisture of her eyes, the rise and fall of her breath and asked myself, from the depth of my considerable soul and experience in this game, is this chick a nut or real?  That wise little voice, how it shows up for me!  It said go ahead and I reached out and stroked her cheek and said, “Ok, teach me.”   ~







4   ::  The Trouble With Alexander

   The obvious question is: did we kiss?  Should we kiss?  Oughtn’t we kiss, I mean, since we were attracted and attractive and could laugh -- and, above all, had already been in love, though in different lives and bodies but with the same light shining through and the answer is no we didn’t kiss or do any of the other good and amazing things for which that throws open the door.

   I didn’t want to.  Well, that’s clearly a lie.  Of course I wanted to, more than anything.  So did she.  I knew that.  But there would be time.  Don’t barge in and eat the banquet.  That had always been my motto.  If something’s good, it will be better tomorrow.  Let it force itself on you; don’t you force yourself on it.  She, of course, read my mind and easily went there too.  I could just look her in the eye and see her getting it and thinking it and agreeing to it.  We smiled.  I was reading her mind now!

   “Tell me what happened with this Alexander person.  At the seminar.  When he seemed to go a little out of his box.”

   “Alexander Borodin Modjeski.  Not related to the composer.  He decided or saw that he had ‘known me of old’, she said, using finger quotes, “as we say in the business.  Being a therapist, I, of course, encouraged him to explore it, learn from it, apply it to issues of this present life, thus becoming a more aware and healthy person, not run by the subconscious.”

   “I know how psychology works,” I said.

   “Good. That will save us a lot of time.”

   “He hugged me, a long hug.  It got embarrassing.  He couldn’t take his eyes off me for the rest of the seminar.  It was like stalking.”

   “Well, in the past life, he must have revived the memories and walked through them while in hypnotic regression, right?”

   She studied her hands and wasn’t speaking.  She was clearly upset, recalling it.  I tried to comfort her in my clumsy, insincere way.  I wanted the information.

   “It’s ok, Loli.  Maybe later you can...”

   “No.  I don’t avoid feelings just because they’re hard, you know.”

   “I know.  It’s what psychology does.  You face things.”

   She smiled.  “That’s right.  It’s how you get a life and feel - by facing it all.  Does it work?  If only we knew.  We just know that avoiding it makes you crazy and makes you different from who you authentically are.  Sorry to speak in mission statements here but sometimes even we have to state why we go through all this...shit.  And pain.”

   “Got it.  So it sounds like he was a jackass and took over the workshop.”

   “He regressed to this life in Renaissance France.  He was a courtier, a troubadour, very romantic, and I was some kind of aristocracy in the court.  He was always singing and writing poetry to me and trying to win my heart, which today would be just trying to get in my pants bigtime.  He was starting to succeed, but I resisted.  Finally my father forbade it.  Alexander wasn’t high enough for our family, I mean, just a poet with access to the court.  He felt inferior and was stung by it.  He lost me.  I was like a duchess and soon was to marry a duke, an equal, so my family was very happy.”

   “Did you love him?”

   She paused again.  Then she told me that, against all professional judgment, she decided to do a joint regression with him, right there in front of hundreds of people, with microphones and video cameras going -- and they went back to that same life.

   “So it was real for you too.”

   She tapped up the file on her screen in a matter of seconds and went right to the chapter.  They were talking back and forth to each other, going over the life they had lived long ago and explaining why they did everything and what they learned from it.  An assistant of Loli’s, named Pam, had regressed them and was giving them occasional suggestions.  He was quite handsome and articulate.

   “Now, Jules (his name in the past life), tell Antionette what you have been trying to say in your poems and songs,” said Pam, but speaking with the wisdom you know now.”

   “It should be obvious.  I’d never known love like this was possible.  My heart opened like a dove spreading its wings to the rising sun after infinite long, dark winters,” he said. 

   He even had an accent.  He wasn’t making this up.  She began weeping.  People in the crowd gasped in disbelief.  Were we all really good storytellers or is this stuff real?  I stole a look at her.  Tears brimmed in her eyes even now.  I hit pause.

   “Loli, how does this work?  Do you still love this guy?  I mean the guy who’s alive today, Alexander?”  I was glad I hadn’t kissed her.  Things get delicious when you kiss but also they get incredibly messy.  I’d seen it too many times.

   “Let’s just say there are feelings.  Once you have feelings with someone, they never fully go away.  You must know that.”  She hit play.

   Pam was asking her to describe her feelings.

   “Dear man, my soul opens to you.  I’ve never known love could be like this either.”

   She clearly was young and had no experience in love.  She seemed to talk in that semi-childish way of a 15-year old, complete with titters of embarrassment and wanting to look cool.  It was incredibly convincing.  No one could put on an act and be so completely another person.  I was stunned that this could be Loli, a sophisticated, mid-30s American professional.

   “I will die if I can’t have you,” she told the swain.  He agreed he would die also.  Well, they’d just made a suicide pact. 

   Pam moved them forward in time, asking them to go to the moment when they last saw each other in that life.  It was not pretty.  She told him about her family forbidding to see him again.

   “And you will obey them?  You swore to me you would die instead!  Did you tell them that?”

   “I couldn’t.  It would break their hearts.  They love me so and have raised me with such love.  It would destroy them and the family.”

   “But now you destroy me, Antionette -- and I must help you keep your promise, the promise to my soul.”

   In one swoop, he rose out of his chair and took her by the throat, knocking her chair over backwards.  The crowd rose as one and pulled him off, while Pam shrieked and clapped her hands three times, the signal for return to full waking consciousness.  Soon, they were all rationally trying to “process” it, without much luck.

   “What did you learn from this past life, Alexander?” asked Pam, with a tremble in her voice.

   “Betrayal is still a biggie for me, I guess.  It’s still with me.  It was the main theme of both my marriages.  Promises.”  He seemed to spit out the word.  “I’ve tried to be a good and loving man and what do I get?  They take all my money or try to.  Fortunately, I have good lawyers and have been able to keep most of it.”

   “Ah, but have you been able to keep most of your heart?” said Pam.  Loli thought that was a bit cocky of Pam, though it was a zinger of an insight.  Money as symbol of love -- and power.

   “Screw you, bitch!”  He stood up suddenly and threw his chair over backwards.  “And you too, Ms. Know-It-All, Hot Shit Psychologist.  Your life’s a mess too -- and you still can’t love!”  He walked out.  She hit stop.

   I looked at her, dumbfounded.  I checked to see if my jaw was hanging open.  I was now ten times gladder that I hadn’t kissed her. She looked right back at me, waiting for the question, which I thought was an obvious one.

   “Ok, Loli, was he saying that you, Loli can’t love or you, Antionette?” 

   She nodded and smiled.  “He’s stalking me, isn’t he?  I guess he meant both of us.  Or he was -- and still is -- unable to differentiate between us?”

   “Which brings up a big metaphysical question,” I said. “If it’s the same soul in both lovely ladies, and in Alexander and Jules, then why differentiate?”

   “The game plays on,” she said.

   “He loves you?”

   “Well, he’s betrayed by me.  I won’t marry him now, either.”

   “The energy is still there.”

   “For him.”

   “And for you?”

   “Well, yes, the energy of shame and remorse that I said no to him -- but that’s the way it had to be.”

   I held out two empty hands.  “Can’t you...”

   “I tried having a meeting with him and somehow resolving the energy, but can’t you imagine how ridiculous that sounded?  Like, let’s get together and resolve these bad feelings from seven centuries ago cuz I think it’s time we moved on.” 

   I smiled.  “He said no?”  She nodded, a bit embarrassed and went to get more coffee.  She was in her sweat pants and a thin, lacy top.  I noticed and studied my desire for her, as if it were a specimen under glass.  I wouldn’t let it move and reach for this woman, who -- funny how you can read these things in your bones, muscles, blood vessels -- wanted to be taken into my lap and held.  And kissed.  I actually had to speak, silently, to myself and said no, not now, you can’t do that or have that.

   “What do you want me, the private eye, to do, Loli?”

   “I want to be safe.  I don’t want him in my life.  I want you to hack the shit out of his computers and get things on him, so he can’t do anything to me.  Your secretary said you know computers.”

   I nodded. 

   “And I want this to be over.  All over.  I want to be free of...this past.  If I can be.”

   “What do you mean ‘if you can be?’  This stuff isn’t that powerful, is it?  I mean, it’s barely even real.”

   She shook her head, as if pitying me.  “It’s real, Jeffers.  I’ve seen and done enough of it to know it’s very real.  Time moves in a big unending cycle, from life to life, with the same souls, yours and theirs, until you work out your shit with them.”

   “Shit means karma, right?” 

   “Right.  It’s the inelegant Celtic word for karma.”

   “So you accept you have karma with this man.”

   “That’s right -- and also with you, though we have no idea what it is yet.”   ~






5  ::   The Problem With Past Lives

Wayne walked in and flashed his iPhone, making a hand gesture that looked like he was trying to shake water off his fingers.  That meant salacious stuff.  We weren’t working any big cases, so it meant it was about Loli.  He, of course, knew I’d been at her flat for hours.  Too long to be strictly professional, but it was professional.

   He mailed the files to my MacBook and pointed out a couple to read first.  He had everything here -- phone records, credit card statements, tax returns, even security camera hits on her, around her office.  Some were even from state parks.  These got picked up from those constant police scans of license plates.  There was also a digest of everything, written by Wayne, as usual.  What a thorough dick.

   “This looks expensive, Wayne.”

   “Got it for only a thou or two over our retainer with all these guys,” he crowed.  “Cash.  Rosie laid it on me, a big wad and thanks.  Makes life a lot easier.  The guys in the field love cash.”  He pointed at the video menu. “That one.  Take a gander.”

   I was afraid of this.  There she was leaning against her car and they guy, Alexander, was in her arms.  They weren’t exactly holding their hips apart.  It was near dark, but Wayne had upped the infrared and it was getting pretty gymnastic.  So, she had kept her promise, the one made 700 years ago and had “given her charms,” as the poets used to call it, to her long-past beloved.  But obviously, things had soured. 

   She hadn’t exactly told me the whole story.  Now I was 100 times gladder that I hadn’t kissed her.

   I explained the past life stuff to Wayne, in a nutshell and told him to shadow the guy now.  He shook his head in disbelief.

   “These Californians are really wacky as shit, you know.  They keep surprising ya,” he said, with his charming Wisconsin lilt.  “Nothing personal, boss.”

   I’d lived in California 20 years but still couldn’t think of myself as actually a Californian.

   “Wayne, I’m not from this fucking crazy state.  I lived in and went to college in sensible, rainy Oregon, that is, after I escaped Michigan, and as you know.  Now get outta here.  I gotta read this shit.”
  
   It was all there - opera, plays, dinners in Big Sur, trips to some minor South Pacific island.  At least it wasn’t Hawaii.  All this in the three years since the seminar incident.  I tried to get inside her head.  Did she actually feel guilty for dumping this troubador, many lives ago?  I thought back over my Dick Sutphen books and pulled his stuff up on the net.  His research said we had not just one past life with significant others, but many lives and in many roles - parent, child, spouse, enemy, pal.  It was very fluid, he said, and we would reincarnate not just as one person, but several.  Which made things a lot more complex and crazy. 

   But I’d found that hard to believe.  I felt that if there were a really powerful attachment to work out, then you would stay in that one person till it was worked out.  Just a hunch.  I mean, look at the charge between these two people.  It was huge.  Not diffused over time.

   I went to Sutphen’s website.  He was still at it. It said, “A 2-day webinar to teach you how to successfully hypnotize and past-life regress other people...most problems are rooted in a past-life cause, even when they appear to be resulting from current-life issues such as abuse, neglect or conflicts. With past-life regression, you will always find the cause. Only when you know what really set the situation into motion can you generate a full release using past-life therapy techniques.”

   Wow.  Full release.  Always wanted that.  But, my good ole Oregon cynicism aside, he makes an interesting statement here, even if shit appears to be from current-life issues such as abuse, neglect, etc, that shit/karma is from past lives.  Well, isn’t that convenient.  It gets us off the hook for all the “shit” we did in this life and allows us to be grand, forgiving people about the shit others did to us in this life.  We process past dukes, pirates, sadists and crazy fuckers and things start working a lot better here and now!  If only! 

   But I hadn’t tried it.  So maybe I should shut the fuck up.  I’d dabbled though.  Enough to know that maybe there was something there.  Maybe there was a lot there.  I decided to take the webinar.  It would be on my laptop.  I would need a guinea pig to hypnotize.  Rosie might do it.  Or maybe Wayne.  One of them.  I would pay them overtime, of course.   ~






6  ::   Big, Black, Pregnant and In Chains

Wayne tracked both of them, Alexander and Loli, all week.  I had no use for Loli after seeing the videos.  Here she was hitting on me and putting me on the tail of a stalker and she had been doing it with the stalker.  Clearly she wanted something else; she wanted information about Alexander.  She didn’t want to bust or blackmail him.  She didn’t want him out of her life.  She wanted to know about him.  In other words, she was swept away by him.

   Must be nice to be swept away.  Never felt it.  But I was a million times glad I hadn’t kissed this nutty dame.  She was hot, yes.  Lots of them are.  And smart, which appeals to guys with a brain, such as your correspondent.  But watch out: anyone can get brains and a glib tongue.  Not that hard.  It doesn’t mean you have substance or soul or whatever you want to call it.  But now I was hooked, not by her, but by the whole idea of past lives - and I was set up to take the weekend webinar. 

   Both Rosie and Wayne had agreed to be my subjects and I would take them down, that is, hypnotize them and regress them and they would learn about their past lives. They both insisted that would be their pay.  Well, they were single and didn’t have anything else to do. It’s better than sitting at home with a pint, watching Netflix. 

   Friday came and they were at my flat, as I call it.  Actually, it’s a rather grand floor on the 7th or 8th floor of a moderate high-rise, with views of both bridges and Alcatraz.  Sutphen came on and my take on him was  - oily, immediately.  Oh, well, maybe he still had something.  Who cares if he’s oily; how many people teach past life regression?  None.  He was the man. 

   I had food catered in.  We needed to immerse in this stuff.  I needed to watch Sutphen and not miss anything.  I asked them to choose who would be my first victim.  Wayne volunteered.  It was elementary stuff, inductions, deepeners, visualizations to disorient the subject, then suggestions that access to past lives was easy, something we already knew and had.  They liked it.  I soon got the patter, the way you “rolled” your voice, which essentially meant you just put on this bedside voice and repeated it till they got tired of it, trusted it and let it get in their head.

   I knew Wayne liked fast cars.  He was heavy and earthy, so my suggestions would keep him in touch with the earth and his feet.  You picked up on cues like that.  You “utilize” things that are going on now.  His breathing, for example.  It’s always going on, so you use that.  I told him hypnosis is a pleasant experience with fun learning and he would be aware all the time and remember everything and he would be able to talk, no matter how deeply hypnotized he was and he would get better and better at it each time and when it was over, he would feel relaxed and happier than he’s felt in a long, long time. 

   This is the stuff I was learning from Sutphen on his webinar and, as anyone can see, it’s just a lot of postitive, repetitive suggestions that make you feel good.  Plus, a huge element, someone is paying attention to you!  How often does that happen in life?  That really makes you want to go with the program and accept the suggestions.  That’s a cute word, suggestion.  Hell, they’re commands but you’re consenting to them and making them like your own.  But so what, if they work?  You love it!  Like quitting smoking or pigging out.  That’s what it’s mostly used for and it freakin works.  Change your mind, change your life.  Very simple.  Very core fact of reality.

   Immediately, of course, you think, gee, what would I like to change about my life?  And you find yourself suddenly whispering thoughts to yourself, and you realize, fuck!  I am where I am now, money, women, happiness, health, all of it, because of the thoughts that I kept “suggesting” to myself over and over, using the principle of repetition, right?  Then you suddenly realize that, with that one idea, if you take it in and make it your own, you are a freakin New Ager.  Then I remembered that Wayne was slouched in my easy chair and deeply in a trance.

   “With each breath you take,” I spoke softly, “you are letting yourself go deeper and deeper, down, down, down into a very relaxing and comfortable state of highly focused but relaxed awareness.  You are not going to sleep, just very relaxed and limp, like a wet, warm dish rag.  And any and all worries or anxieties whatsoever are now falling away, like dead leaves falling off a tree and landing on the earth and being damped by rain and becoming part of the mud and earth and they are gone.  If at any time you want to return to the present and be wide awake, all you have to do is lift your left arm and you will be wide awake in this room.”

   You can see how you dwell on things and affix the attention on the idea of suggestion, getting them to accept simple, obvious things, then moving on to more complex and far-fetched things.  Like past lives.  It’s called “patter.”  You give them an exit strategy, a sense of control.  You say a lot of stuff they can accept.  You say it over and over.  They accept it.  They get in an “agreement set.”  You prevent them from thinking the usual negative crap they are always thinking.  Then you take them deeper.

   “You are letting go of this present time and place -- and the life you have been living, your identity, your home, car, clothes, body, appearance.  They are all lifting off you and can be set aside, like a nice suit of clothes you can get back into later.  We are going now on a fun and pleasant journey to other lives you may have lived and you will select one, the most interesting and significant one for you to learn from now. 

   “We keep these past lives out of our mind but they are really still there.  We really forget nothing.  We have done so much and traveled so far.  There is no death - only changing our form and energies and lessons from life to life and it’s a very pleasant and interesting path of soul development and we do evolve and learn and grow wiser from life to life and it’s interesting and safe and ok to go back and learn about our past incarnations and that’s what we’re doing now and you are, at this moment, moving back in time to a significant life that will inform you about important things you may need to know now.  Back, baaaack, baaaaack, with each breath you take, the years are peeling away, falling away and you do have this rather magic ability of time travel, an ability as a seer, a visionary, a being of wisdom and new powers who can do this.  It is in fact not magic, but a normal ability we all have - and we have the right to know our past lives and you’re going back further and further in time and your higher self will pick this life and this time for you to settle on and you’re almost arriving there and the words and pictures and understandings are coming in and you are letting them come in and as I count backwards from 10, you will be there, 9, you are standing in an important past life of yours, 8, and it is becoming more and more clear, 7, you are at a remove in this past life, 6, you are safe and breathing and with each breath it is becoming more clear, 5, and in this past life, you are comfortable, able to view it as who you were then, 4, feel your feet on the ground in this past life, 3, which is now very present and real for you, 2 and now take a look at your feet on the ground, 1, fully there and what are you aware of? You can speak.  You will remember everything.  You are safe.  What is going on and who are you?  Male?  Female?  What age?  What place?”

   “Um, I’m barefoot.  I can’t stand.  There are chains on my feet.”  He started to choke up.  Rosie was horrified and had her hand over her mouth.  “I’m, well, a woman.  I have these breasts and...oh, my God, well, I guess I’m going to have a kid.  I’m black.  And it stinks in here, real bad.  I’m on a ship. It’s rolling back and forth.  I’m sick.  I wanna go home.” 

   Tears were rolling down his cheeks - and now he broke into sobs.  It was wrenching.  Rosie was waving her arms to stop it.  I waved to her firmly that she had to sit down and get a grip.  

   As per Sutphen’s teachings, when things get tough, the tough take a step back but keep going.

   “You will now take a step back and view this only from your Higher Self, without emotion.  With each breath, you are getting more and more calm and relaxed and grounded.  You no longer feel the ship rolling and you don’t smell it, but you remain aware of this life.  Move forward in time to the best moment of this life as I count to three -- one, you are out of this ship and have arrived at your destination, two, moving ahead to the best year of your life and, three, you are there.  Tell us what is going on and what is your name?”

   He was calm and spoke with an immense dignity in a patois of slaves, like you see in old movies.

   “I am Omoti.  But they changed alls our names to deys language.  Deys call me Lettie.  I’m a- cookin.  Iss a big pot.  I’m a-putting in lossa beans n’ poke, tomaters.  Iss fo’ deys fiel hans.  A’hm big, Lawdamussy, I’se a big lady.  Deys lossa kids round me.  I has bout sebben or eight m’sef and deys pullin on mah big skirt.  Lawd, I’se fat.  I ain’t skip no meals.”

   “Do you have a husband?”

   “Plenty nuff.  Gone  gone thru a passel of em.  They still round heah.  I got tired of em.  Who needs em?  I get to do what I want.  Deys respec’ me.  I’se happy.  I make the manse run.”

   “Ok, Wayne.”  I used his name for the first time, to start him coming back to the present.  “Let’s begin to let go of this life.  You’re stepping completely out of it, and I count to three, able to look at it entirely, one, from your Higher Self.  You are in your Higher Self now, two, and still completely aware of this life as Lettie, three.  Now tell us what you know from this life, what you learned and what you’ve brought into your life here in the 21st century as Wayne, that it’s your task to be learning now.”

   “Ok, um.”  He was clearly Wayne now.  “Ah, shit.  That was a hard one, that life.  No wonder I hate boats.  I hate water!  Well, frankly, it’s kind of embarrassing being a woman and always pregnant and having no choice about it.  I loved the children, though.  I still love kids.  Just don’t want to be tied down by ‘em, that’s all.”

   “Ok, Wayne, be coming back to the present life now, able to remember everything, feeling comfortable and relaxed, thankful for the understanding of the past.  Let’s bless Lettie and let her go to her highest good.  She was a good woman and you did good by all those kids, though you were a prisoner, a slave.”

   He burst into tears again.  Rosie was a mess, crying her heart out.  She was never going to look at Wayne in the same way.  Shit, neither was I.  Then it occurred to me.

   “Wayne, do you want to remember this?” 

   He thought a moment.  “Well, fuck.  I guess I do, boss.  It’s amazing.  I feel this huge love for her and what she did.  How can I forget her?  Just one thing.  No teasing me.  I don’t want you guys to say anything about this, ok?  It’s kind of embarrassing.  Me, a big, pregnant black mammy.  Lawd.”

   We all burst out laughing and crying at the same time.

   “Deal,” I said.  Rosie said the same. 

   “Wayne, still in your Higher Self, breathing fully and freely, please tell us what lessons that life carries for you in this present life.  You have access to the full, eternal records of your soul and the ability to speak and know this.”

   He said, in the most calm and wise, un-Wayne voice, “I understand the weight problem now.  The big gut.  The shoveling in of the food.  I know I’ve let go of that now.  It was my protection, my grounding.  I get the distancing from love, intimacy, marriage.  I know this past life had the most effect of any life on me in this life.  I get the drunkenness, the pain I was numbing.  I get the fear of water.  I think I’m going to go out and get some sailing lessons.  That looks like a lot of fun.  And I see why I love detective work so much.  I like to uncover secrets and get the bad guys to justice.  I’m going to keep doing that.  I’m damn good at it.”

   He stopped.  He was done.  He’d said it all and with an articulate command I’d never seen in him.  This truly was from his Higher Self. I brought him back to full, waking consciousness with countdown and three claps of my hands.

   We took a break.  Wayne smoked a ciggie rather furiously.  Then I regressed Rosie.  She was lonely, all her life, this life.  In her most significant past life, she’d been abandoned in America by parents who sent her over from Ireland on a ship, during the potato famine in the 1840s, when she was 13, giving her a shot at getting started with some farmer uncles in Ontario, who, of course, had their way with her.  I thought, how many times must I hear this story?  It seems part of everyone’s history or their parents’ history.  But she survived, gutted it out, went on and had children and they were doing good by the turn into the 20th century - and certainly the granddaughters, who helped get the vote for women. Rosie had coping devices much like Wayne’s -- the drinking, the single life, the attraction to detective work and justice.

   “So, boss, what about you?  Are you going to do this regression?” said Wayne.

   “Already have.  A little.  Loli is a therapist, you know, an authority in the field of regression.  She’s written books on it and does seminars on it.  It’s already come out that, well, I loved her in a past life.  If you believe this stuff.”  I took a deep breath.  “Which I do.”

   “Boss, aren’t you a little too close to the case then?”

   “Ham, are you getting involved with her?  I mean, we have to know,” said Rosie. “It would change everything.”

   “Haven’t laid a finger on the dame.” I involuntarily raised my right hand, as if under oath.

   They both chuckled.

   “But you could,” said Rosie.

   “Yeah,” said Wayne.  “She’s not exactly hard to look at.”   ~






7  ::   The Thing About Dames

   It was good to get a fix on past-life regression and it was hard, very hard, to write it off.  As I would have liked to do.  But that was gone, not a possibility now.  I saw Wayne and his...what do I call it?  His many lives, his issues?  It was all very clear.  Lots of people could deny it but I was no longer one of them, me a detective, a grown, savvy man who dealt with the shadow side of human nature.  But there it was, the hand you were dealt and you had to play it. 

   It was Monday and Wayne was going to update me on all our cases in the office.  Cases?  There was only one case and it was taking over my practice.  I hadn’t communicated with Loli in many days, despite her frequent texts, which said stuff like “where are you???”  I may have replied “slammed” a couple times.  But of course I didn’t want to talk to her. 

   Then came the text I always hate.  It said only “help.”  Fuck.  I txt Wayne, forwarding the message.  Where the fuck was he?  Had he been tracking this dame?  Of course he had.  He was on strict policy to return all texts within a minute, max.  I called him, actually placed a phone call to him.

   “Boss, what is it?” 

   “She texted help.” 

   “Yah, I saw that.”

   “Well?” 

   “Boss, it’s a dame. They always say that.”

   “So, I should just ignore it?”

   He laughed.  “I don’t mean to make little of her text but sometimes it’s best that you just can’t get back to her.  Let it develop, you know?  Things change.  Plus, she’s a dame.”

   “Or it might be the opposite.  She might be up shit crick.”

   “Right.  She might.”

   “Where are you?”

   “Nowhere.  Doing coffee and bagels.”

   “When did you last track her?”

   “Last night.  I mean in person.  I’ve got all kinds of tracks going.”

   “What was she doing?”

   “Um, boss, I have to be able to speak straight here.  She was fucking this guy.”

   Rosie didn’t even wince; she’s used to guy talk of the most gross order.  And God knows or cares what goes on in my office.  This is detective work and we’re among the most proficient at it.  Maybe the best in the Bay Area.  If you don’t get the darkest side of human nature, hey, you’re not going to get the dope on all these buggers.  This ain’t beanbag. 

   “It’s ok, Wayne.  You have to speak straight to me and that’s the way it is.”

   I couldn’t think of anything else to say.  I tried to get back to being the detective I really was.

   “Ok, Wayne, tell me.”

   “At that state park again, schtupping against her car.  Seems to like it standing up.”

   He was trying to give me a bitch-slap, to wake me up into the real world he lived in.

   “Same park, up by Point Reyes?”

   “Boss, just tell me what you want me to do.  Screw where it went down.”

   “I want you to be all over this guy, Alexander, like stink on shit!”

   “It’s not about the dame, right?  I mean your thing with the dame.  You can’t have that, boss and still be a dick on this.”

   I took a deep breath and let her go completely. 

   “That’s right, Wayne.  Just the facts about the guy.  Get em.”

   “Roger that, boss, can do.”   ~






8  ::   Who Is This Dame?

The text exchanges between Wayne and me are not casual.  We don’t say “having latte” or such nonsense.  Everything is strategic to the cases we’re working.  In this case, you’d read:

   “They may be boinking, but no trust Alex dude,” he texted. 

   “Cuz?”

   “Psbl serial k, my guess.”

   “Cuz?”

   “Gutfeel.  Plus, he takes her further in boonies each time.  Whacked his car.  Some nasty knives in there.  Bone saw 2.  Got dna swab off em.”

   “U bad.  Bring it in.  Let’s run it.”

   Myles ran the DNA.  He was our elf on the force.  We’d probably added a couple year’s pay to his net worth over the past couple decades.  We’d text him and Rosie would do a drop at McCully’s Cafe.  He texted back that the blood once belonged to a wealthy babe who went missing some years ago -- Mercedes Chen.  It’s hard to wash a bone saw.  Alexander should know that.  Well, we’d pass that along to a deserving dick on the force, when that day came.  Our agreement with Myles was that if we found a bogey on their want list, we’d resolve it one way or another within six months.  We wouldn’t ask him to withhold it.

   I texted Loli.  It was time for another meeting.  Late afternoon, in case she got bombed.  I let her relax in my office and carry on chit-chat for a few minutes.  She smoked.  She asked for a shot and I said let’s don’t go to the dogs yet. 

   “Need to ask you about a name.  Do you know a Mercedes Chen?”  I had to be careful about this and not let her see any connection with Alexander and her.  So I’d asked her several other random names first.

   When I got to Chen, she choked on her smoke -- or pretended to.  She bent forward in her low-cut, tightly-fitted dress, half-standing up.  I took in the view.  They were real, not that you could always tell these days.  The skin docs had gotten very good at their work. 
  
   “Sorry.  I could really use a shot.”

   “Need to get through this information first.”

   “Chen.  Something about Chen?”

   “She disappeared, didn’t she?  Rich Marin bitch?  Couple years ago?  No trace?”

   “That’s the one.”  I waited.  Was she going to say anything?

   “Lemme scan the files.”  A minute went by.  If this dame Chen had been a client or even attended a seminar and was a missing person, wouldn’t Loli know that? 

   “Oh yes.  She was in a regression seminar a couple years ago.”

   She stared at me rather blankly, still pecking around on her phone.  I stared right back at her, rather blankly.  I wasn’t going to say anymore until she, um, stopped talking to me as if she could hide shit.

   She heaved a big sigh and studied the carpet.  One presumes she was scanning each path before her and where it all might go if this dick knew A, B or C.  In other words, lying.

   “I suppose you’re about to say you can’t work with me unless I’m completely forthcoming.”

   I just raised my eyebrows, that’s all.  Funny how a lifting of the brows can say so much.  This time it said, ‘Duh, what do you expect, bitch?’

   “Like why are you, Detective Jeffers, bringing up the Chen lady unless it’s somehow connected to my case and to, um, Alexander?”

   I didn’t even nod -- just kept looking at her as if there were absolutely nothing going on in my head.  Guys, I’ve noticed, do this better than dames. 

   “It’s all coming back now.  I have a lot of students - thousands.”

   I didn’t like this.  Not a good sign.  I mean, people lie.  All people.  What I didn’t like was my reaction.  It meant I had gotten somehow involved with her.  We’re talking feelings, attraction, romance, that whole world of delight and grief.  Thank the freaking gods I hadn’t kissed her!

   “It seems to me they were in the same seminar - Chen and Alexander.”


   I didn’t move.

   “I think they did a dyad together.  A dyad is two people doing a...”

   “I know what it is.”

   “Did they or didn’t they?  You do digital video on all seminars, don’t you?”

   She nodded. 

   “Can we go back and see?”

   “I did that when she disappeared.”

   “So you know they connected.  You don’t think it might be so.”

   She nodded, increasing her smoking rate. 

   “I wonder what they discovered.  Do you know?” 

   “No.  They didn’t share.  With the class.  Nothing special showed up on the tape.”

   “And the date of this seminar?”

   She looked at her iPhone. “April 16 to 19.” 

   “How long after that till she vanished,” I asked.

   “About five weeks.”

   “So you know the date of her disappearance.”

   “Yes.”

   “And you mentioned this to the police?”  I knew she hadn’t.

   “No.”

   “Why not?”

   “I had no reason to suspect any connection.”

   “Even with his acting out of rage in public and dissing two women, including you?”

   “It happens.  People like to defend themselves - and they don’t like to be exposed to strangers in public.”

   “Do you think we should tell the police now?  This man is involved, we suspect, in stalking yet another woman, who happens to be you.”

   “I’d kinda hate to do that.”

   “It wouldn’t do a lot of good for your seminars and books, would it?”

   “No, it wouldn’t, Jeffers.”

   “A killer triggered by past life encounters -- and maybe his victim and he shared a past life and had issues with each other.  How would that look in the headlines and reality shows?”

   “It would wipe me out in every area.”

   “On the other hand, as Mencken said, ‘No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.’ “

   I could suddenly see the wheels turning in her head.  How could she not have thought how it could also make her fabulously rich and famous?

   “It might play out that way.  Notoriety.  Demand.  Bucks.  I’d rather not find out.”

   “Loli.  You’ve already told me you both processed a supposed past life together - and in public.  And he demostrated a capacity for violence.  Are you afraid of this nut?”

   I tried to sound casual.

   “Jeffers, the Stoly.  Please for fuck’s sake.”

   I poured a couple shots.  We both tossed them.  There was a lot of tension in the room.  The vodka slammed into all these loose nerves and, like magic, soothed then right out.  Good old alcohol.  What would the human race be without it?  Probably pretty happy and out hunting in animal skins, but looking for grapes rotting in little pools.

   “I feel confident.  I feel safe.  I don’t think he’s dangerous.  I just want to know everything about him that you can find out.”

   So, the dame wasn’t going to tell me about her lover or whatever he was.  I immediately switched track to -- what if this liaison were somehow involuntary?  I decided to go fishing.

   “Do you remember what kind of person he was?”

   “No.  Just dark and a bit scary.”

   “How ‘bout sexy?”

   She nodded.  “Yes, he was sexy. In a forbidding but compelling way.  You wanted to know him but you also wanted to be safe.”

   I figured this was a good place to stop.  I wasn’t going to find out anything more and I wasn’t going to confront her. 

   She smoked and tried to flirt with me some more but I just did my professional act. 

   “We’ll be in touch.  I’ll text you anything important.”   ~






9  ::  Deeper and Deeper

   Clearly, it was time for me to do past life regression.  Not just to crack this case and not just to break through with Loli, but because, after Wayne, hey, there was little doubt such a thing actually existed.  It could be another big tool in my kit.  I mean as a dick.  Or just as a human being.  We should know all the programs, right?

   Loli would have been more than tickled to do the job but I had a couple hangups with her -- the lack of candor, which is what we used to call dishonesty a generation ago.  I mean, candor?  That made it sound like an optional values choice in life, like whom did you choose to be candid with and what would it get you? 

   The other issue was that, from what I knew about past lives, this dame and I had had one, maybe more and, as they say, if it comes with baggage, then this lady and I had some real interesting past lives.  She may think she’s disinterested enough to be my hypnotherapist, but, as a detective, I can just tell you it ain’t possible and it ain’t gonna happen.  Where there’s a grey area, the grey matter stops functioning -- and that ‘gray area’ is usually caused by sex.

   If it wasn’t to be Loli regressing me, then who?  I couldn’t imagine anyone doing it, like, some stranger?  No, just too personal.  And I needed, well, I needed to be in control.  That’s another word that’s been burned down in past decades of touchie-feelie ‘me generation’ shenanigans.  If someone is in control, he’s a “control freak,” right?  Scuse me but I don’t get it.  If anything, we should be trashing the millions who are out of control and don’t have a clue for doing anything about it or even recognizing it.  Have you ever heard the term “out of control freak?”  Me neither.  But there are millions.

   I needed to control the regression.  Period.  Like when I learned to drive.  Did I let the driver’s ed people tell me how?  No way.  I took mom’s pickup out on the remote logging roads above Ashland and drove that son of a bitch all night till I could do anything with it.  I was only 13 and didn’t know a stick shift from a handsaw but by the time the sun came up, I could lay rubber in second and speed shift without even using the clutch.  I’d only heard these things talked about but from that chat, I knew I could find my way and I did.  Did I go out with any of my yahoo shitbrain pals and do it?  No.  It was personal.  I wanted to make all my mistakes on my own and sober. 

   And so it was with regression.  Of course, our culture pisses on it and ignores it but then does our culture know where we came from and where we go when we die?  No.  They know less than nothing and only use it to build ridiculous religions on.  How could anyone ignore this obvious door to immense information about who we are, both as an individual and as a society? 

   I had to do it and I knew I could.  I needed a weekend.  A four day weekend and I blocked it out on my calendar.  I was not looking forward to it.  No booze, no food, a little bit of sleep, no internet, no phone, nothing.  Starting at Friday noon, hour after hour, I just dicked around with the mechanics of it, the same way I got used to my mom’s truck, till it was totally talking to me. 

   Inductions, deepeners, visualizations to disorient from the normal mindset, suggestions that I would go deeper each time, pulling out of each induction to test that out and go deeper each time.  I realized how critical the inductions and deepers are.  Huge.  You have to have that trust with them.  I would use the scale, like 2 and 3 are light, 5 is average, 10, it totally deeply hypnotized and in a truly altered state.  That’s what I was looking for, a truly altered state -- and I found it after many dozens of runs at it. 

   Wow, I loved it.  Trance.  It was just a word till I experienced it.  In trance, hey, doors open to this immense sense of potential and power.  You realize you can do anything.  Whatever you can imagine, you can do it.  It was an immense freedom I’d never known.  It suddenly became clear to me that this is why people drink and smoke pot.  We knew this place.  I knew it.  It was familiar. 

   We have this bizarre myth that it takes years of meditation to get here, but it doesn’t.  It’s right here.  Like, hey, meditation’s mindset is about ego-death, deprivation, forsaking the world of the senses, celibacy, fasting, all that.  I got early on in the weekend that, although Buddhism doesn’t have a “god,” it’s still organized religion and they still want your whole life and soul before you get the goodies -- and that’s where all this comes from. 

   But that’s not necessary.  Once you get in the saddle with your own mind, like I was doing, you realize you can go anywhere and do anything.  It’s magic, yes, and we’ve given magic a bad name, while we give religion a good one.  It’s just politics.  What they all don’t want you to have is personal power, control over your own life and destiny.  And the program of hypnosis, which has been demonized for a couple centuries, is that you don’t need the religion -- and hypnosis is about putting the reins in your hands, if you have the balls to take them.

   I forced myself to spend hour after hour just on inductions until I began to get the feel of how the mind worked and how it loved repetition and needed to be soothed of all its worries.  Soon I began to develop shortcuts, not needing to count myself backward down any stairs but could just kinda spread my wings and fly to the place I wanted to be. 

   I realized it all came down to a question of willingness to take the powers to myself.  We’d given these powers to “God” and of course all God’s representatives on earth -- the cardinals, bishops and just average commentators who told us what society was all about.

   By Saturday night, I felt myself the master of inductions and deepeners.  I could go there rapidly and be at level 10, dressed for suggestion.  Hah, that was the next big stage and I thought I was close to the end, but what surprises awaited me.  I decided to stick with suggestions, which I saw as the third great phase.  Suggestion went hand-in-hand with visualization -- one verbal and left-brain, the other visual and right-brain.  I scanned my somewhat pitiful, drunken, violent life (I could not say I was innocent of capital crimes in pursuit of results in my work) and found I was looking at the whole system as if it were a Ford V-8 laying in pieces on a big operating table and I was free to adjust or replace whatever I wanted until the thing hummed. 

   And so I did. 

   I decided to start with the simplest thing I could find, one where results were all but assured.  Let’s see, where did energy feel most needlessly drained away from me?  I realized it was reading the Chronicle with all its murders and mayhem in this city of ours, which was clearly a lovely place, where 99.9 percent of people had a lovely day, every day. 

   It was not hard to bring that moment into view.  It happened every day.  I put in my quarters and pulled out the Chron and ordered coffee and greasy potatoes, eggs, bacon and such stuff.  It all went together.  I felt every cell in my body hungering for the daily affirmation of the cynicism of the the world.  But all I did was change one thing: I would not get the newspaper.  My hands would not reach for it.  And I would do black tea.  I loved tea.  But coffee was just so much crazier and deeper and more violent.  Great stuff.  I became the black tea.  I saw and knew the molecules of the black tea.  I loved the caffiene of the black tea, which stretched over the whole day on a more gentle arc.  It never crashed you. 

   How important is all this?  Not very.  But it was a model of what I had to do.  I tested it Sunday morning, vowing I would never for a moment sacrifice my true desire to read the paper or drink coffee.  I went out on Post Street.  The sun was shining.  I breathed the air deeply and found it full of the energy of the sea.  Walked up to McCully’s Cafe, looked at the Chron rack, felt nothing.  Didn’t want to read it at all.  Scanned the headlines of murders.  Thought about going in and having the greasy, grounding, satisfying breakfast and enjoying the meaningless chat with the waitresses who knew me so well. 

   The weird thing is, I hadn’t suggested I wouldn’t want to read the paper and drink the coffee and eat the greasy food.  I had only experienced and rehearsed each moment of my impulses and why I wanted to do these things -- and how they filled up my time and made me feel good and gave me...what?  Identity.  That’s what they gave me.  I felt slightly ashamed but much more, I felt freed.

   What I’d accomplished that weekend, already, I knew was huge.  It was consciousness itself.  I was conscious of everything I was doing and why.  I’d walked on, but I went back to the news rack and the cafe and stood there, taking it in, saying to myself, go ahead, it’s not going to hurt anything, do it.  Choice.  It’s so important.  You can’t just suggest something away.  You always have to stay free.

   Sunday was the big day.  I decided to regress myself a week, a month, a year, a decade and was amazed at all the detail I could pull up.  We either forget or never even notice most of what’s happening in front of us.  As I went back over the memories of my life, this life, I began to notice how my “fellow man” reinforced my unconsciousness -- in fact, even wished it actively, to support his.  Like - let’s be happy robots together, reacting to the crazy programs of the world by just doing the minimum and getting by.  Work, drink, screw, sleep, shower, read the paper, work, drink, screw.  If you didn’t show up for your fellow man and share his prejudices against an array of woes -- government, taxes, war, women, divorces, alimony, tiredness, aging, death, ripoffs -- then you were betraying your fellow man and thought yourself superior. 

   I realized that what I was doing by regressing to times in this life was called “recapitulation,” that is, applying consciousness to each and every relationship, job, home, city, choice, car, all of it.  You were showing up as a conscious person and prying loose the fingers of the culture and your fellow man on all the events of your life.  They weren’t random events.  You did them.  It was all there, right in front of me and I was freeing myself from them -- and doing it in preparation for the big event: doing this for scores of lifetimes.  Would it all come up for me to see and remember?  I was afraid it would.  I was almost sure it would.  Look at what happened to Wayne -- and just in that one 20-minute regression.  It changed him.  He had a new depth.  He took time to answer questions.  He wasn’t just out to solve the case.  He was aware. 

   Recapitulation brought me to the brink in this life.  It made me aware of, ok, why was I doing what I was doing and what did it really matter?  I felt the pull of Loli as a woman -- and as someone I’d known in a past life and I thought, geez, what did it matter at all if I made it with her or knew her or did anything with her or with any woman?  I felt I was waking up from a long sleep, not just in this life but perhaps all lives.  That remained to be seen.  I was moving toward regression in a past life, like Hawkeye paddling toward an increasingly loud and giant waterfall in Last of the Mohicans.

   Come Sunday evening, with the sun gone down, I was ready.  I’d hypnotized myself at least 100 times and knew it forward and backward -- and had come to love the lovely state of trance, the feeling of control over my mind and soul.  It was a feeling of power, of being “at cause,” not at effect, of all things being possible.  I felt free of the Jovian gravitational field of human sorrow, grief, resentment, blame, victimhood, routine.  It was gone.  And yet, after seeing the past lives of others, I knew it would not necessarily be pleasant to visit them.  Would I have any power there or would I have to just witness all the pain and shit?  Could I change anything?  They always said it changed via awareness, plain and simple, which was the old answer of all therapies.  And I’d read that some had you “re-frame” the painful past life.  Was that fair?  If it happened, it happened -- and changing it would be, well, a lie, wouldn’t it?  I felt I would know what to do.

   I dropped to a ’10,’ which, supposedly was the max.  But I’d been going beyond it.  You were supposed to take the number you got, the first one that popped in your head, to tell you how deep you were.  It was surprisingly accurate.  But I dropped to 15, then settled in at 18.  I was about to plunge into past life regression when something else happened.  It was like a voice spoke to me.  It said: “Hi Jeffers.  Feels great doesn’t it?  Don’t push it.  How bout if you live with it for a week or two and practice your new powers and learn to live with them.  Integrate them into everything.  Make them “be” you.  See how they withstand the lashes of your fellow man.  That’s what’s important right now.”

   So...here was that “still, small voice” you hear so much about -- except it wasn’t still or small.  It was very clear.  I suddenly could not imagine going against it.  But I had to know who this voice was.  I decided to push.  A little. 

   “Who is this?  Are you ‘me’?  Like, my subconscious?  Or a past incarnation of me?”

   I waited.  It didn’t carry on little chats, that was clear.  It just put out scenes where you could feel, if you stopped, what was happening, what was right on, what was real, what you should do.  Well, it wasn’t any of the above.  It just was.  It was here.  Was it, like, inside me?  Well, it wasn’t outside me, like God in heaven or something.  It wasn’t superior to me, bigger than me, able to access information that I couldn’t access also.  It was presence itself.  So there was a wisdom inherent, immanent in the world, probably the universe. 

   “I got the feeling you’re going to be here all the time.”

   I waited, let it paint the setting, which was a very abstract painting done by the right brain of God or something, a poem that didn’t spell things out specifically but left you no doubt about what it didn’t mean.

   It was always here.  It had been always here.  I hadn’t been ready or interested.  It wouldn’t leave if I wouldn’t.  That’s what it’s picture said.  It was like a conscience, an angel, a strong sense of what would work and what wouldn’t and shouldn’t. 

   I pulled back from my weekend ‘mission’ and just sat there in my chair, looking out at the lights of The City.  For hours.  I’d never just sat before in my whole life.  But I loved it.  I let myself adjust my light trance -- three, five, seven, back to zero.  I had attained some kind of superconsciousness.  And to think they call it “self-hypnosis” and dismiss it with a wave of the hand.  What was it?  Well, you could control smoking and overeating and fear of heights, things like that.  But the rest?  That was the realm of the seance and quacks, right?  And lonely, old ladies wanting to speak to a departed one. 

   And to think I had done this without drugs and without any wise guide with a PhD.  It was all there for anyone to master.  But they wouldn’t.  It was as if they were controlled by an external alien force that didn’t want them to know about it -- that wanted to keep them under control, like serfs, like cattle, lost in their tiny fears, resentments, shame for imagined sins. 

   But this sense of power and confidence and possibility!  It was amazing.  The voice was absolutely right: I had to take this out in the world and live it.  It would be a test to get through one week.  I promised myself if I could do that -- and learn to live with these powers, I would do the regressions next weekend.  I checked it out with The Voice.  It seemed to regard me with love and goodwill but did I detect a slightly upturned smile?   ~






10  ::   Tracking Loli

The iPhone rang before dawn Monday.  That never happens.  It could only be Wayne. 

   “Boss, get in your rig and meet me on Columbus.  We need to go into Marin.  This is not good.”  It also wasn’t good that he was calling, rather than texting. 

   “This is about M-610?”  We always used code with the client’s first initial and date of first contact, but moved them forward one digit. 

   “Roger that, boss.  Sappest.”  That word meant soon-as-possible-est.  Very cute.  We constantly made up shorthand.  I was there sappest.  It was only getting light as we crossed the Golden Gate. 

   Wayne thought of everything, haunted every website for new technology, bought anything and everything and tried it out and let us use what worked.  In this case, he’s planted a webcam in Alexander’s tailgate and it sent nice pictures, 24/7 to Wayne’s phone.  It was virtually indetectible, even to the cops.  It was the size of a very small chip and had no wires, nothing.  It was also map-trackable, with no margin of error.  Loved it.

   “She was taped up, boss, hands and mouth.  He schlepped her into his rig and off he went, toward Point Reyes.”  Everything bigger than a car was a rig.  Very Wisconsin.  “Not good, not good.”

   The phrase “not good” could mean anything from very bad to hellish murder, depending on his tone.  This sounded more toward hellish. 

   “Let’s get there, Wayne.”  I put the flasher on the dash.  It had at least half a dozen intense lights and looked like World War 7 when it went off.  We would get respect from local po-po’s if we had to.  And if they pulled us over, finally, we had the best ID.  It being 5 in the morning, we would almost certainly get pulled over.  Only drunks were out at this hour, burning up Highway 1.

   Soon, Alexander was in our sights.  We flipped on our flashers and pulled him over.  I flashed a badge at him.  Wayne had his Doberman with us.  His name was Nosey and he lived up to it.  He set about sniffing Alexander’s rig and didn’t like what he found.  He was whining before you knew what happened.

   I pretended to study Alexander’s license and papers and said, “Well, Mr. Modjeski, do you know why we stopped you?”

   Always such a ridiculous question -- the same as asking, “Would you mind telling us what we should write you up for and if you feign ignorance, we’re just going to have to write you lots of tickets, not just one.”

   “I was driving too slow?” he said.  Had to appreciate him right off. 

   I decided to go with it. 

   “That’s right, sir, too slow for conditions.  Like a driver on marijuana, which Nosey here seems to have detected in your vehicle.  Please stay inside your vehicle, sir.”  He was trying to get out.  He wanted to see if we were driving a real cop car.  Nosey lunged at him, trying to get a pant leg in his teeth.  Wayne shouted at the mutt.  Alex seemed thankful. 

   Wayne scanned his papers into his phone and was already running makes on them.  Can’t have too many documents.  They lead to other interesting intel.

   “Let’s let Nosey have a noseful of your car, all right, sir?”  The mutt picked up Loli in the rear compartment but I decided to play dumb and let Alex drive on.  She wasn’t saying anything or else she was dead, in which case there was no hurry.  We weren’t going to find out anything about him yet.  He needed to have a longer leash.

   “It looks like you’re staying away from the devil weed, sir, so have a nice morning and watch the curves on this road.  They can be dangerous.” 

   “Sure will, officer and thank you for all you do.”

   We took the high coast road, a nasty, narrow dirt trail, but, having gone to high school in Marin, I knew every inch of it and had run the cops here more than once.  With Wayne tracking his little red teardrop pointer on the maps, we kept him in sight.  I had the strange feeling that Loli knew what I was doing and kept her mouth shut when I was ‘grilling’ the suspect.  She could have squealed.  Maybe she was a psychic.

   The slow chase continued for 30-40 minutes.  He would slow down and get out, scanning the world around him and seemed eventually convinced he wasn’t being tailed and could get back to his, well, murderous schemes?  Would that describe it?  What the hell else would he be doing out here in the boonies with a trussed up dame? 

   Wayne was also shooting videos off his phone, which had a nice telephoto capability.  Whatever Alex was doing, it was all documented.  He’d have to have one hell of a lawyer, if it got to that.  How do these bums think they’re going to beat all this technology, anyway?  Too many Bogart-Cagney movies. It’s not that simple anymore.  You have to be a digital geek, bigtime, for starters -- and they aren’t.

   “Wayne, do you have the long gun?”  It was a highly accurate rifle with scope and electronic sighting that could be assembled from pieces (in a small tennis racket case) in about 20 seconds.  The bullets left no traces of rifling and were blunt-nosed, meant to deform on impact with anything, so all you had was a lump of lead to trace.  Wayne, as they used to say in cowboy flicks, could shoot the eye out of a gnat at 200 yards with it.  Had to remember to give him a big raise after this.

   “Of course, boss, always have it.  Almost always.”

   “Better rig it up, Wayne.” 

   We were only 100 yards from his SUV now and he was getting out and opening the tailgate.  She was under the floor.  She staggered out.  He removed her blindfold.  She glanced up at the hills.  Could she see us?  I found it incredible but that Inner Voice of mine seemed to say she could do that and a lot more.  She stood up straight and proud, refusing to act like a prisoner - or so it seemed.  Why did she keep seeing this creep?  What kind of power did he have over her?  It didn’t make sense.

   I grabbed the binoculars.  We worked our way through a line of eucalyptus trees until we could almost hear them.  They were at the edge of a huge, sandy beach.  He took the tape off her mouth and wrists.  They sat down.  Leaning his weapon steady against a tree, Wayne got the guy in his scope and nodded to me.  We stopped.  Wayne was whispering.  He could see them close up.

   “She doesn’t look scared, boss.  I don’t get it.  What’s he doing?” 

   He pulled out a large knife and moved it toward her.  Wayne wanted to pop him but I held up my hand to stop him.  Alex used the knife to cut restraints on her ankles.  It suddenly dawned on me: he’s not going to kill her.  This is some kind of freakin psychodrama they are playing.  At least for now.  It flashed through my mind: could this be some kind of ritual killing that goes on over months, years?  I was going to have to have a little talk with Ms. Loli, wasn’t I?  But she wasn’t just going to tell me all this in plain English.  I was going to have to play dumb and be the detective with my own client who is hiring me to be her detective.  But why was I interested?  Why didn’t I just dump the case? 

   Because, I realized, she was a fascinating woman and, seeing her ‘helpless’ on the dune, I recognized her.  I knew her from somewhere.  I have “known her of old,” as Loli has said.  There it was: past lives.  It was time for me to go back there.

   Now they were laying side-by-side in the sand.  He was talking.  They were holding hands.  Their eyes were closed.  This looked like an induction.  It looked like a regression.  They weren’t doing suggestions to cut back on drinking and smoking!  Where were they going -- and why together?  As Sherlock said, you eliminate all that’s impossible and what’s left, no matter how improbable, is the truth.   ~







11  ::   The Endless Cueing of My Fellow Man

I texted her a few days later, “Let’s confer.  Ur place?  Tonite 5?” 

   She texted, “sure.  Can’t wait.”  She put a smiley.  God, I hate those things.  Emoticons.  I scanned the menu of emoticons.  Smiley?  Sad?  Puzzled?  Angry?  Yawning?  I put all of them up.  She flashed a laughing face. 

   I was going to ask her to regress me -- as much for me to learn about myself as for me to learn about her, how she did it, what she wanted and what came up about us knowing each other in some other time.  I wanted to be absolutely honest about it with myself.  I can tell the difference between wishful thinking, fantasy and something real.  So I thought.  Who knows?  But I would give it my hard-boiled detective cynical best. 

   I had an hour to kill and wanted to use it to keep practicing my inductions and deepeners, maybe toy with a past life.  I’d read Sutphen’s work on psychic self-protection and watched his YouTubes on it, so I decided to set up a screen Loli couldn’t penetrate.  She, of course, would know I had done it.  It would be the first thing she’d say. 

   I went in.  Induction, the usual eye fixation and arm levitation.  These are real convincers.  It all sounds too simple and maybe that’s why so few people do it.  You fix your eyes on something.  They start to sting and get tired.  So you “utilize” those sensations, suggesting more and more of them.  My eyes are stinging more and more.  And the more they sting, the more they want to close and stay closed.  And when they close, well, you won’t be ablt to open them - and thus begins the acceptance of suggestions, the belief in the fairy tale that is hypnosis. 

   With the deepeners and the “body” of the session, the visualization and suggestion, it can seem like you’re making it all up.  It’s not real.  But that’s just the thinking.  If you pretend it’s real, it starts becoming real.  It’s like reading a great book; soon you’re lost in it, want to get back to it, think about it as you walk around daily life.  All of a sudden, Harry Potter is real and his world is possible.  That’s why reading is so much more powerful than movies.  Reading is a “cool medium,” as Marshall McLuhan put it, that is, it asks participation of the mind and senses on a deeper level.  Movies are a “hot medium,” meaning they do all the work for you -- and your imagination is kind of on the back burner.  Hypnosis, especially self-hypnosis is a whole level above reading a novel.  You supply it all.  It’s the coolest of media. 

   Like who would believe your arm could lift up in the air all by itself?  You have to be “making it” do it, right?  But the idea is that you are only suggesting it lift - then “it” does it all by itself.  But does it really?  There lies the crux, the whole issue of hypnosis.  Is it real or am I making it up?  So I’d been watching Sutphen vids on YouTube and he just says, hey, close your eyes and imagine your front door and all the stuff around it, the bushes, the lock, the chair, the plant.  You not only can see it, you start seeing all kinds of stuff you never noticed.  But how could you?  Then you go check out front and sure enough, what you saw is real.  It was just registered in your unconscious, in the file called “random detail - ignore till needed.”

   I couldn’t do arm levitation.  I tried and tried.  I wouldn’t LET myself do it.  I thought it was dishonest, like, hey, there’s a fine line between “letting” and “making” it happen.  But then I read that you could lift it the first inch using the other hand, so I did.  Once it got a boost, it was like I was being friendly and helpful to the process, instead of cynical and sitting off to the side saying “prove it.”  I found it fascinating.  I levitated my arm and let it back down, dozens of times, each time becoming easier and more convincing that “it” was doing it.  I gained confidence.  I “got” the process.  I realized I could go anywhere, do anything.  I started levitating my whole body.  I realized I was using muscles of my consciousness that I’d never used or even knew existed -- and they were getting stronger and having a wonderful time.  I felt a new inner freedom and power.  I’ve had my bouts of depression but they seemed to be lifting.  I encouraged them to be gone, this by simply “witnessing” them, watching how they formed and what cues triggered them. 

   Cues.  Hah!  I suddenly realized we get cues from our environment and fellow man constantly - and they signal us to shut down, feel bad, close off, think cynical thoughts and that all this put us “below the line” at a place where we are reacting and seeking shelter or pain-killing remedies.  Like booze.  Like reading the newspapers, which basically offered us an agreement set about how shitty the world was -- and the world was shitty because of the bad things we do, so humanity is the source of all problems.

   I realized it was ALL suggestion! 

   Then I realized if everything were suggestion, then I had the power to suggest it -- and to allow or reject any suggestion from the environment and my fellow human.  Through the days, I had begun practicing this, noticing that the cues from the media and other people were simply that: cues.  But only I could accept the suggestion.  Like, with the arm levitation, it was me who rejected the suggestion it could lift up.  Then I changed my mind and decided to lift it the first inch, using my other hand.  That was me accepting the suggestion.  I chose it.  I became friendly to it.  It turned itself loose in my consciousness and opened the door to the whole idea that suggestions work and if I could do that, I could suggest anything.

   Over the days, I began “flying” and would trace the streets of the City, about 100 feet off the ground, swooping down to read the street signs.  I played a game, trying to remember all the streets and what businesses and restaurants sat there.  It was fascinating.  I built a city in my mind and would check it with Google Earth, filling in the blanks, learning where I hadn’t paid attention - and I became an astute observer of everything around me, no longer ignoring 99 percent of the world.  Every detail became important in my game.  I could think of a little cafe miles away and go there, bang, just like Google Earth.  I wondered why I was playing this game and it soon came to me: it contained a giant suggestion, which was the whole idea that I belonged in this world and it was beautiful, every fragment of it, and it welcomed me and reached out to me, loving my new participation in it.  I realized I had mastered astral projection and could go anywhere, even to other worlds.

   I could see this was my training, the reshaping of my mind to become an athlete in the realm of consciousness.  You couldn’t just wander in there and say, duh, wtf is all this?  You had to go in with power -- and that demanded you let go of the world of your fellow man, a most limiting world and one that he’s built and which insists, above all, there is no magic. 

   Why do we do this?  A mystery, isn’t it?  When, after all, we’ve all heard the tales of Merlin and the seers of Delphi and the shamans of Siberia, so we know such powers are possible but then we kick in this weird mental response, let’s call it the “negativity factor,” that basically starts its song by saying that’s too hard, then it says it’s too weird and I wanna be normal and liked, not weird, then it says those magic people were cranks and fruitcakes and dopes and I’m a sensible person, who, above all, knows and practices reality, right?  Hah!  So it’s all about “reality” and who gets to decide what reality is!

   That’s the real battleground -- and Merlin the wizard didn’t get to be a wizard by accepting his fellow man’s description of what reality is.  He realized it’s malleable and optional and if you were willing to endure the disdain of your fellow man for going out of the normal box of reality, you were free to go.  And that’s why most wizards kept their ventures a secret -- to hold off the weight of one’s fellow man insisting on the majority’s take on reality.

   I was becoming a wizard then.  My embrace of self-hypnosis was like my wizard’s cave or laboratory.  This was becoming a lot more interesting than detective work -- and yet I could see how it would make detective work easier. 

   I was ready for a self-guided regression.  You rarely hear of this.  People think it’s too complex and potentially threatening, even overwhelming.  But my “muscle” was so strong now, so aware -- and I felt so in control of the depth of my state and my ability to implant suggestions or erase them, that I felt confident to go just about anywhere.

   I induced and deepened, using the arm lift then astral travel as a strong deepener.  I suggested going to a life that was pleasant, where I was secure and reasonably happy and did a lot of learning.  I let go of this present life and counted myself in, suggesting I would experience it without emotion, just as a viewer in my Higher Self.  I was in the Renaissance in Italy, apparently in a court, surrounded by books.  I knew Galileo and was among the first to see the planets and their moons in telescope.  It fascinated me.  I could see the planets wander about the heavens, in violation of the law followed by all the fixed stars.  I could see the moons wander around Jupiter, lovely little things.  What were they doing??  I thought what a curious parallel it was to human life, with millions conforming and the few souls wandering -- including wandering from life to life, seeking the same understandings at deeper levels in each life, if possible. 

   I led a privileged life, doubted the church and studied the rebirth (renaissance) of wisdom from the ancient Greeks, which included Parmenides, the so-called father of philosophy and a noted practitioner of something that looked an awful lot like hypnotic trance but induced for long periods -- days -- for healing.  This wisdom was suppressed by the Church, but was being revived by Gnostics of the time. 

   I looked around and took in the details, as I’d taught myself to do.  The books, the buttons on my clothes, the coins in my pocket.  I especially memorized the details on the coins, as I intended to check and see if they really existed.  That would put the regression to the acid test.  And where was I?  In Elea, in the south of Italy.  I looked out the window, memorizing the architecture of the church.  Perhaps it still stood.  I would give anything to take my iPhone camera back here!  But I could remember enough.  I memorized a book title and would check out records of that, too.

   I let this old life go and pulled back into my Higher Self, asking what I had learned from this life.  It came quickly.  Not to trust much of any received wisdom, from any direction, but to mainly trust only my own perception, wit and knowledge.  And to seek to out the truth, no matter how uncomfortable or unlikely it might seem.  I chuckled.  Sounds like the makings of a detective. 

   It was time to go see Loli.   ~










12  ::   Loli in Blue

Loli tried to make drinks first thing I walked in.  I said, no, wait.  I didn’t ask her who Alexander was to her.  I wanted to.  But why should I?  You learn more by just observing people and pretty soon you’re eliminating what’s not possible and narrowing it down to what is possible, no matter how outlandish, which it usually is. 

   She strode across the room and sat on the couch, looking stunning as ever in a well-cut electric blue dress.  Then it hit me, in my heightened awareness, how very much our cueing and suggestion to each other took place around...sex.  Of course.  It’s everywhere you look.  They can’t even put an ad for dog food on the side of a bus without some dame, built like a brick shithouse bending over in her low-cut dress to shovel it in the mutt’s face -- and why?  Because it gives you a warm fuzzy, whether you are male or female.  We were all fed by those things (lovely breasts) and they were the happiest years of our lives, though primordial and without awareness of the I-thou schism.  I got how they pulled my attention, cueing me to be drawn to them, summoned in by their warmth, hope and promise of intimacy, belonging, inclusion in the web of life.  How powerful they were -- and as she walked away from me I could see a similar echo of the paired globular flesh in her lovely butt.  Then I noticed the same effect in her bared shoulders, her cheeks when she smile. 

   It was everywhere.  Then I recalled what some guy put on my FaceBook that morning, from Buddha: “Of all the worldly passions, lust is the most intense. All other worldly passions seem to follow in its train.”  Hah!  Not to be a prude, but it was true!  Cueing, cueing, cueing!  I couldn’t help but notice and calculate the amount of my energy budget was devoted to following these cues and their suggestions of...happiness.  We think it’s innocuous because it’s “just happening in our own mind and body and no one knows.”  But I know!

   And how much energy does it return?  It depends on how much energy you’re investing, but it’s a lot.  You still hoped, longed, imagined.  I was suddenly appalled.  I, a conditioned male, had done it all my life, without thinking.  In fact, I’d done it while thinking I was pretty cool and that there were certain odds I would get a return on my investment of energy - which investment was welcomed to some extent and in certain modes and fashion, by the dames, I mean, everyone likes attention.  But for your boobs and your butt?  Not for your mind?  Your spirit?  But, hey, whatever does it.  Even though, after investing thousands of hours and dollars into making these biological protuberances irresistable, the dames will express disgust that all you want is their body.  It’s just the mating game, that’s all, and no one was to be wronged or blamed for it.  The main thing, by far, at least to me -- and to me, NOW, on the edge of some serious understanding and personal power -- was the question: did it give me power or drain me of it? 

   And the answer, of course, was that it drained power away -- and even if it rewared you with a thousand virgins (as some benighted Medieval religions promise), it wouldn’t matter.  As I gaped at her outfit and her beautifully worked-on hair, shoes, lips, all of it, I found myself scrambing for a handhold (not that I wouldn’t make love to her by the hour) about how I could approach it with honor, vision and wisdom for myself -- and then I got it. 

   Intimacy.

   That’s the only word I could think of.  In my first and only marriage, before she was blown away by the crack dealers (who knew she was my wife), we had that.  Intimacy.  When you have real trust and are a pal with a woman and you actually like and trust her and can pal around with her in sweatshirts and joke (humor is so important!), then you have a foundation for intimacy and when you make love, hey, it’s not “sex” at all.  It’s friendly, loving souls touching and knowing each other at the deepest level and if you think you can sell dog food with that, my friend, be prepared to lose money.

   So I cued myself.  I looked at her and flashed on one thing: Sharon opening her body to me with a joke and smile and it so wasn’t sex or fucking or hot babes or T&A, none of the above.  It was just these two trusting pals doing something biological that felt really close and crazy at the same time and which seemed to take us along -- kind of religious thing, a divine thing (religious is not the right word), a freekin holy thing and when it was over, you just knew it was so much bigger than you or her and you almost wanted to cry in your humility and thanks for it.

   All that came to me in a flash -- and for just one moment I let myself imagine that kind of merging and surrender with Loli.  I mean, kinky is great but when I imagined Loli in that place of holy love and surrender of flesh merging, her dress and lipstick and all that, it suddenly was neutralized and had no meaning and I just saw her as a person, one, like me, with all kinds of vulnerabilities and fears, even.  I wanted to hold her and tell her it was all going to be ok.  It?  What’s “it?”  I laughed at myself.  But from that moment on, I never saw Loli as the sexy dame she was putting out to the world. 

   I suddenly realized I’d done self-hypnosis and implanted new suggestion and done it in a few moments and without trance!  I decided to implant an affirmation, that when I saw a gorgeous woman, I would suggest to myself, “Thank you Great Mother for the life giving breasts and womb, for the children and for the happy intimacy you give in love.”  Wow!  That did it.  I looked at Loli in a very different way.

   And -- so amazing -- I felt my power returning to me!  I knew I would never be a fuck-stud who would be pulled in, imagining banging, fucking, screwing these dames.  It was quite freeing.  It was a huge new step on this progression of myself as...what?  An observer, an objective person, someone with the same compassion for Loli and with the next homeless wretch I would see on the street. 

   I didn’t share any of this.  At the same time, I reminded myself I was in the presence of a superior psychic, prophet and clairvoyant.  I studied her eyes as I joined her on the couch.  Amazingly, she showed no sign of awareness of the major reorganization that had just taken place in my psyche.  Yippee!  This said to me that I’d moved into and maybe beyond her level of conscousness.  I thought about it.  Yes, there seemed to be something “hampered” in her, something holding her back, binding her.  I looked in her eyes.  She didn’t see my shift at all.  But something held her.  I would just put myself in “receiving” mode for it.  That’s all I could do.  To notice and let it come. 

   I decided to play dumb.

   “I was thinkin’ I’d like you to regress me to a past life.  I think it might help me on this case, y’know what I mean?  I like to gather knowledge about stuff, all the things that might be involved with a case and a client.  I’m sure you can appreciate that, Loli.  So, like, it seems to me you get we’ve had a past life together, right?  Can you take me to that one?”

   I asked that, as a test, she plant a firm suggestion that until it was removed, I would have the suggestion that I only wanted a maximum of two drinks -- and no cigarettes ever.  She did a session.  It only took 20 minutes.  I found her techniques very similar to mine, which was a relief.  I’d done what Sutphen had said -- and smoothed out my technique on my own, practicing what worked for me best.  Her induction seemed a little hurried and she didn’t roll her voice attentively, as I had learned to do.  But it was good.  I went to level 7, I would estimate.  Her suggestions are that after two drinks, alcohol would taste like cat piss -- and a ciggie anytime would register as containing cat shit. 

   Now for the regression. 

   “Loli, you get that we’ve had a past life together.  I sense it also.  Should we be regressing to that?  Is it safe?  Is it ethical?  Are we too close to it?  Would it be accurate and real?”

   “Well, I would hesitate to do it with a therapy client.  Liability and all that,” she said.  “The need for professional distance.  But you’re different.  I know you.  We like each other.”

   I was suddenly stunned by her confession that we liked each other.  I suddenly felt washed over with that sense of intimacy -- of seeing her as a struggling, geeky waif, like we all are underneth.

   “We know each other - or are starting to,” she said, looking at her nails, then suddenly flashing me a great smile.  She could smile.  “You take what you get in regression and in life.  We will know if it’s real.  You’re an intelligent man.  You will know.  It’s a question of - do we have the balls for this.  And do we really wanna know?  Do you?  I do.”

   “Yes, very much,” I said.  “I’ve been practicing and teaching myself how to operate in the dimensions opened up by trance.  I like it.”

   “I felt you had.  You are different.  I can feel it.  Well, let’s go.”

   “Are you going down with me?  Can you do that - hypnotize both me and yourself?”

   “Yes, I’ve done it.  It’s unusual.  Both parties have to be well-trained in it and know what they’re doing, preferably.”

   I nodded and relaxed into her couch, beside her.  I told her to mellow out and go more slowly on her inductions and suggestions and she did.  She was nervous, earlier, probably trying to impress me.  She let that go and took her time telling me I am loose, limp and relaxed, breathing fully and freely, not a care in the world, would be safe and comfortable.  I went with it all and stopped my judgments.  She was doing good.  I would trust her.  I even told myself I could trust whatever she was doing -- or trying to do -- with Alexander.  It must be in her best interest. 

   She was guiding me to a life where I knew the most important lover-partner of all my many lives, the one I loved most, the one who shaped my soul most and ignited my deepest longing and possibly even fulfillment.  I was to go there and find out who I was, what I did, what year it was.

   To myself, I suggested, “the life BEFORE THIS ONE where you knew the most important lover and partner ever.  I wanted to exclude Sharon from such a list.  How could I ever know anyone like her?  I couldn’t. 

   She counted me down and suddenly I was there, looking at my feet and shoes, if I had any -- and what was on the ground? Tile, grass, carpeting?  I breathed and let it come in, suspending all judgment.  I felt a lot of pressure.  Fuck, the greatest love?  I would just focus on my shoes.  My inductions and astral travel had taught me that: don’t make too big a thing out of anything.  Just be there and see it and report it. 

   Shoes.  They were just shitty brown leather shoes.  No, they were sandals.  I was standing in the real world - grass, dirt, stones.  She’d suggested I would go to the first life, not the most significant life, where I knew her.  Good idea, I thought.  Let’s keep it as simple as we can.  This will help us understand why and where we got connected. 

   I found it’s best if you just let go and not have any hopes of seeing anything, while at the same time you are actively supporting and contributing to any visions, inputs, anything.  It’s a tricky business.  You don’t want to let just anything come in!  And at the same time you didn’t want to stand there like some negative Nellie, dissing everything.  I found it, frankly, like making love.  You couldn’t force it and rip the fruit of the tree.  You had to caress it off the tree, know it, smile with it, play with it and have no obsession with outcome.

   And so I did. 

   If ever there were a swain waiting for the damsel, sitting out in the snowstorm enduring the slings of nature, I was it.  If she didn’t come, then she didn’t.  And if she did, I would be there.  And I was.  It seemed in the depths of the Dark Ages, maybe after the time of Camelot, a time of profound loss of learning - and the growth of feudalism, where, to eat, let alone survive, you had to go along with the baron’s program, hoe and prune crops all day long and hope he would keep his word and protect you when the neighboring duke, who was probably his cousin, invaded and burned everything. 

   I was hoeing.  I knew I was screwed.  But I had children and the lord had all the weapons and lots of “knights” to back up his program.  So that’s what knights were for!  But I had this woman, Jeanne, said with a very soft J., and there she was in front of me, working her ass off, without kids about her ankles and mine. 

   “She is beautiful, but not too beautiful, so as to attract the baron,” I said. “There are lots of us, hundreds.  We get a small part of the land to work.  That’s it.  We have a few chickens.  The baron gets most of the eggs - and the meat when we kill one.  Quite a setup for him!”

   “What are you wearing?”

   I looked at it, my outfit.  “The slacks are dark, the shirt is light.  It’s all coarse weaving.  There’s a rope for a belt.  My arms are strong.  We’re young, about 30  You weaved my clothes.  You do a lot of weaving.  The lord gets most of it.  The wool comes from his sheep.  So he lets you weave it and you can have some.  It’s basically slavery, but it lets us live.”

   “Your wife.  Is she a wife?  Are you married?”

   “Yes, it’s marriage.  It’s done among us by the priest.  There are no written records.  It’s a formality and everyone recognizes it.”

   “Your wife.  Do you know her in this life?”

   I breathed and let it all go, letting it sink in.  “Yes, my wife is you. That’s the truth and what I know for sure.”

   “Let’s talk about your relationship with this soul, your wife.  What kind of person is she?”

   “She’s great.  I love her.  This life we live, looking back from who we are now, we see it’s feudalism and it’s a hard life but there is no alternative.  But we have each other and the kids and the lord will stick up for us.  So it’s good.  Good enough.”

   “But there’s no hope.”

   “What’s that?”

   “For freedom -- and to be what you want?”

   “I don’t know what you mean.  There is hope we will find salvation with our Lord and Saviour Jesus in the afterlife.  What more could anyone want?”

   I caught my breath.  Did I really just say this?  I did.  But it showed the depth of her induction and the authenticity of what I was saying.  I truly felt I had no choice or options in this.   You did what you had to do and you survived so your children could survive - and theirs. 

   “Now look Jeanne in the eyes.”  She had me nod when I’d gotten this.  “What do you want to say to her, to give her, to promise her for future generations.  Rise to your Higher Self and see the big picture and the wisdom of this lifetime.  What is it for?  What have you learned from it?”

   I breathed and let myself drop down another notch in my hypnotic state. 

   “I am speaking here from my Higher Self which is living in the 21st century and has always been living with me - and which has lived many lives with you.  You don’t always get your way. Sometimes the other guy gets his way and he has the power.  Our baron is a bad man.  He is dark and we hate him very much.  But you do it to get through.  Or you die.  So I did it.  The meaning of that life is that I loved you.  We had few minutes to enjoy that but you knew it and I knew it and we did what we had to do.  The meaning was also that I developed an enduring hatred of being told what to do.  So I have worked independently for many lives and developed my mind in every way possible and I don’t accept the program.”

   She brought me back to the present, telling me I would remember everything.  She had not gone down with me to this past life.  She sat on the couch and, after a very serious and worried moment, let herself smile. 

   “Would you like your two drinks now?”

   I nodded yes.  She put on music and, before long, asked if I’d like a third.  It was clear where this was going.  I said I had a migraine and had to work early and didn’t feel like drinking cat piss so I left.  She, of course, knew I was lying.  I, of course, didn’t care.    ~






13  ::   The Bloodhound

On his own initiative, Wayne checked around with the Chen family, starting with the husband of Mercedes Chen, who turned him onto her sister and her grown daughter.  Husbands usually aren’t much use as witnesses or testimony in the murders of their wives because they’re such traditional suspects.  The cops are always looking at them first and if they can’t find any good reason why they didn’t do the crime, hell, they get arrested, then it’s up to the husbands to defend themselves.  So, there are a lot of innocent husbands in the can, including many who actually loved and grieve their dead wives.  I think this is a projection from all the cops who aren’t too fond of their wives and assume the same for all guys. 

    Wayne knew this and had a way, which I taught him, of just hanging around and letting people talk.  Then they would gradually trust you more and more -- and they would say more and more and it would either be more fishy or more straight up.  After 10 minutes, if you can’t tell a guy is lying, you sure shouldn’t be in this business.  The sad fact is that we want to believe guys are telling the truth, especially to you, a fellow guy, but believe me, when their cock is on the block, the shit can hit the fan.  That is, if you believe the shit.  You want to encounter real people who tell it like it is but 49 out of 50 times, it ain’t gonna happen.  Wish on, but don’t bet the farm on it.  Guys lie and dames are even worse.  Guys take a beat before they lie; dames do it right out of the chute.  Just the facts.  Just how it is.

   So, dicks have this bulletproof bullshit radar, believe me -- and after a few years, and some very embarrassing setbacks, Wayne had it.  With Ken Chen - that was actually his name, thanks to a series of divorces and adoptions - Wayne decided the guy was right on, but of course you never let the stooge know you believe him.  That’s like begging him to lie when it works for him.  You just keep looking at him like you think he’s your average liar.  Bizarre enough, that makes him tell you more stuff.  And so he did.  Wayne taped a lot of it on his iPhone, a trick he picked up by pretending to light a ciggie with his iPhone in his nonsmoking hand and he’d just keep holding it, pointed at the guy - so I got to hear enough. 

   Ken Chen was telling the truth.  He slathered in a few embellishments to cover his random hosing of the dames, as all guys will do, but Wayne also got the hang, long ago, of listening through that, too.  After a few miserable episodes of “telling the truth” to dames, most guys get it through their head, as Bill Clinton did, that there are two kinds of truth: a) the truth and b) the truth about sex.  A guy who lies about the first one just has no honor.  You can’t trust him.  The other kind?  Well, if God wanted us to be straight about that, then why did he give us these overwhelming natural urges and make women so beautiful?  That doesn’t mean a guy screws everything in sight and keeps 20 lies going.  That would be too hard and would be asking to get busted and be known as a wanker, which is what the Brits call a guy who has no fucking discretion, to put it literally.

   But basta with the dame wisdom, which is all just tentative and shifting wisdom at best.  Chen was a software geek of some kind and very rich from it.  He looked the role of the pencil neck with coke bottle glasses.  He looked like someone you could kill with one punch.  I’d seen picks of his late wife and she was hot.  Clearly she married him for the dough.  No judgments there.  I’d do the same if I could find it - and she was built and half-way human.

   Standing out front of his Marin mansion, talking to Wayne, Ken Chen said his wife got to be more screwed up than anyone he’d ever seen in his life and here she was with a master’s degree in art and running a successful gallery on the coast, but then suddenly she started sliding downhill.  He got a private dick - too bad it wasn’t us - and soon had the shit on her, that she was hanging out with this Alexander, yes, the same dark, seemingly evil dude we were dealing with now, and she was disappearing for long periods with him.  The dick he got was among the best, almost as good as us, if I do say so. 

   “What was she doing with him?” said Wayne, on his iPhone vid. 

   “Hypnosis and such insane shit.  Past life regression.  Going back to her past lives.  Well, it killed her is what it did.”

   “You mean they both were doing it?”

   “Right, at the same time.  They were tripping through all these fantastical made up lives and he was leading her on, helping her confubulate whatever bullshit came into her head.”

   “Well,” said Wayne.  “Where did it all go, I mean, what did she finally believe about her past lives?  What was she?”

   “One thing she was was his concubine, his sex slave,” said Chen.  “He dominated her - in past lives and in this one?”

   “I checked up on her and it looks like no one was ever arrested,” said Wayne.  “The cops found nothing?”

   “Nada.  Never found her body or any weapons.  Nothing.”

   “Sir, if I can ask, what do you believe happened?” 

   “He did something.  You know how you can just feel these things.  He was at the center of it.  He did it - and why, I don’t know,” then Chen sort of whispered, “there’s the new data also.”

   “Did the cops try to make you a person of interest?”

   “They snooped around and tried to find something on me.  They always want to close the case asap, even if they don’t get the right person.  But there was no evidence and I passed the lie detector with no prob.  Had to get some really expensive lawyers.  Cops respect that.  Hell, they fear it.”

   “Sir, you mentioned some new data?  What are you talking about there?  Not data the cops dug up, I take it?”

   “Well, this has to be between you and me, ok?  It’s important to the case, I know, but if others in the biz heard I’d actually engineered it, they would burgle and hack the shit out of me.  You don’t look like you’re going to put it on Facebook.  Right?

   Wayne raised his arm in a Scout’s oath and said, soberly, “You have my word, Mr. Chen.”

   “Well, I’m almost there with something that can detect blood at 100 yards and also read the DNA in it at that distance, matching it with all known data banks on DNA.  Hell, it’ll even tell you your parents and distant ancestors and where they came from.  It’s going to revolutionize genealogy, I’ll tell you that.  No more hours in the library.  And, of course, crime work.  Spill blood and get ready to put the cuffs on.  Everyone’s going to have this.”

   “Holy fuck,” I said.  “He’s right.  If he has this software.  It’s gonna put paid on a lot of detective work, both us and the cops.  Can we buy stock in this now?”  I laughed.

   “Boss, I don’t think he exactly needs money.  Plus, he builds this stuff at his laptop, in his hard drive, stringing code for a few hundred hours.”

   I started the vid again.  

   “You obviously used it to find the dope on your wife,” Wayne said to him.  “Am I right?  And you obviously found something?”

   “That’s right.  Had to drive all over Marin County and San Fran County but soon, there were little specs of it.  I programmed this baby to shoot a red laser light 200 feet in the sky, as seen on the screen, from wherever it found any molecules of the target’s blood.  You had to have a DNA sample, of course.  Like they used to give to a bloodhound.  Hey, that’s a good name for the software.”

   “Can I see it in operation?”

   “Nah, you’re too smart.  Like how your video’ing this conversation right now.  Not that I mind.  But I can’t let you document my baby.  Not yet.”

   “And the murder scene?  Did you find it?”

   “Point Reyes.  At the beach not too far from the parking lot.  Just blood, no body.”

   I turned off the iPhone and handed it back to him, asking Wayne what he thought and pouring us a couple shots of Stoly.

   “Well, it stinks of Alexander all right, just like Loli does, if you don’t mind me makin an observation, boss.  Though it looks to me like maybe she’s in more danger than she knows.  Maybe.  We don’t know what they’re doing.”

   I nodded that it was fine to speak what he felt about her.  “Any time, all the time, Wayne, just say it.  I’m not into Loli.  Very gorgeous and all but...that’s all.  She regressed me, by the way.  Very interesting.  Of course we had a past life together.  We wuz peasants together in Europe somewhere, doing the drudgery of farm life and raising snot-nosed kids, with all the food goin to the massa.”

   Wayne smiled.  “What did you learn from that life?”  He was mocking me - how I asked him the same question.  He could be very funny in his Wisconsin low-to-the-ground way. 

   “I learned that I hate to take shit from assholes who think they can run me.”

   “It sticks to ya, doesn’t it?  I mean life after life.”

   “Karma.  Good and bad karma.  I’d hate not to have learned that lesson -- and still be a chump down the pecking order.  I take care of myself.”

   “We both got that, boss.  Should I stay on Alexander?”

   “Like green on grass.”

   “And you’re going to stay on Loli?”

   “Like white on rice.” We smiled guy smiles.  “But not too white.”   ~






Chapter 14

Where was I to go with all this?  I’d never had a case like this.  I knew a fair amount about the metaphysical stuff involved in this - and had schooled myself immensely, as was my wont, whenever I came across a new body of information, but I needed to get the hell out of here and have some down time.  Whatever that is.  There is no such thing as down time.  Once you open a door, hey, it stays open.  Once you want to see what’s in a box, you can’t get it back in the box.

   And so it was with, well, what do I call it?  Hypnosis is such an easy work, describing some simple, charming process that doesn’t work for most people.  It only works for the people who, strangely, believe it will work -- and who want power, aka, consciousness.  It’s free and right here in front of us but 99.9 percent of people diss and dismiss it and that’s the way it was meant to be.  It’s not for everyone, as Hesse would say.  It’s “for madmen only.”

   But, of course “mad” means you are just out of synch with the vast majority of your plodding fellow man - nothing more.  You’re not really mad.  You’re just not going to get their love and approval and so you will be more lonely, but once you get used to it, it’s pretty nice.

   I did not know what to do about Loli, to be very frank.  I knew I was falling in love with her but I was not going to be a slobbering suitor of Loli and hope she would adore and bond to me.  I couldn’t go there and be that kind of guy.  I did not seek fulfillment in romantic love.  I had guessed from past lives that I learned that doesn’t work.

   I wanted to call her.  I wanted to charm her with witty texts that showed I was thinking about her and she was amazingly dear and gorgeous, if not the most important thing that had ever happened to me.  But the truth is -- and I hate to pronounce it -- the most important thing that ever happened to me was this amazing accumulation of personal power, as Casteneda called it, that had taken place in past weeks and I knew that this and only this could...what?  Deliver me from the malaise of the masses and their mundane monkeybusiness. 

   I drove down the ridge to Santa Cruz and had lunch, thence down through Monterey to Big Sur and just needed to hang out with the ghost of Henry Miller at Nepenthe, which I did.  I just said to the bartender: get me drunk please and do it with good drinks.  She came up with an amazing array of them, then I sat out on the deck, smoking.  I overrode the suggestion.  I so wanted just one cigarette and I had it.  It seemed to last an hour, with each puff filling me with a welcomed numbness. 

   Suddenly, I realized no one knew where I was -- especially Loli and that this brought a bizarre sense of freedom.  I so welcomed it.  I walked among the ridges beside Nepenthe, underneath the stars, such a welcome peace.  I was alone finally!  I went back for a nightcap and began talking to this geeky chap next to me at the bar.  Funny how you instantly recognize strangers who’ve had an education and -- much more important -- are not insane and can carry on an interesting, possibly instructive conversation with you!  And so he was. 

   He said his name was Cantchain or something, I couldn’t catch it, being so welcomely bombed on my ass but after many minutes in my drunken recess from life, I slowwwly put two and two together and said to myself, why is this man sitting next to me way out on the Big Sur in a bar, where no one meets by chance?  Wtf was he talking about anyway?  He was talking about software and solving crimes with it, putting an end to any guesswork about who did the crime.

   I instantly ordered a triple espresso from the barkeep.  Not that it would do much good, but it helps.  It’s a suggestion.  I looked at this guy.  The fleeting flashes from Wayne’s iPhone came back to me, as did the tone of voice.  I did my best to act normal.

   “If I am not mistaken, sir, you are Ken Chen and you are not here beside me by accident.”

   “That’s right, Jeffers.  I have followed you, as anyone can tell, and I would like my wife’s murder to be outed into the sunlight and I think I have the tool to do it.”

   “So, your program, Bloodhound, is ready to go?”
 
   “I think it is.”

   “What are you drinking?”

   “I like Drambuie and soda.”

   I ordered two of them for us.

   “I thought I would get away from all this.”

   “Not gonna happen.  I scanned your assistant as he drove away and he spiked for the blood of my late wife.  Of course I know he wasn’t the killer.  But he had something and knew something.  Suppose you tell me what.”

   “I have it as my policy that I won’t stand here and shitface lie to people who have had their loved ones killed, no matter what else I do.  So, yes, he found weapons in the possession of our friend Alexander.  You know who he is, right?”

   “Yes, of course I do.  I loved Mercedes, even though, as I’m sure you’re aware, she was a using scoundel and a bit of a bitch.  She did it for me and turned me on - and believe me, when you’ve never been turned on and suspect you never will be turned on, that’s good enough.  That’s love.”

   I couldn’t help but put my hand on his shoulder.  I felt pity for him.

   “No sir, that’s good enough and I know what you’re talking about.”  I waited a minute, maybe longer.  “I have a feeling I’m working for you too.  I can find these things out.  Software won’t find out everything.  So if you’ll just...”  I told him how to transfer $50k to my account on PayPal, the only deposit that couldn’t be reversed or erased by, um, murder.  This was getting to be a big case -- and one that would hold many changes for the future of...what do you call it?  Crime.  The madness of human crime. 

   To this chap, $50k was about the same as a crisp $20 bill to us.  But he knew I was good for my word, judging only by my assistant, Wayne, who had talked to him so civilly.  He did the transaction on his phone, which I verified on mine.  Now I had two clients who had hired me to work against Alexander, though maybe both of them didn’t know it.

   I felt I should give him something for his investment.  His payment bound him to me in a bond of trust.  It wasn’t just me being bound to him. 

   “Do you have anything for listening?” I asked.

   “Yes.  I’ve worked that out too, both aural and transmitted.  There are millions of conversations flying through the air around us at this moment.  It can sort them all out and amplify them.  It will make privacy extinct.  It can also pick up conversations at a thousand yards and sort out all the environmental noise, producing a conversation like we’re having right now.  Jeffers, I really need you to keep this between us.”

   “Ok, I will.  You release it at your own rate.  But you’re telling me this because you’re going to make it available to me.”

   He wrote a url on a slip of paper then spoke a series of six numbers to me, saying they were the password and the date Mercedes disappeared. 

   “Just download what you see there.  Anything you record will be translated into your iTunes.  It has a sample of his voice I picked up several years ago.”

   “How do you do all this?  It’s amazing.”

   “Of course it is.  It’s all just energy -- and each bit of digital tek just keeps building on the ones before it.  It’s going to make everything you saw in Star Trek come true, including the holodeck, transporter and the computer that will create a big steak dinner for you. Those are 10 to 25 years off.”

   “Are you going to put me out of business?”

   “It will be impossible to lie in five years, even in emails.  All information will be cross-referenced to all information.  It can’t be stopped.  Voice tones can be analyzed for stress.  That’s already here - just not an app yet.  On any communication, verbal or written, you’ll just tap a button and get a ‘probability of truth’ scale.

   “In 10 years, Alexander wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone,” I said, “let alone speak his lies to anyone.”

   “That’s right.  Unless he’s telling the truth to them”











15  ::   No Payoff, No Do

   Wayne and I figured out how to use the voice capture analysis -- VCA app -- in a few hours, not hard, and were sitting in the Post Street Deli grabbing chat off the passing Muni, much to our delight.  We found two people having a chat, sampled their voices onto our iPhones, went 100 yards down the street and were soon listening to their fight.  It was a couple.  She was saying she couldn’t keep seeing him if he was going to “screw other bitches as you please.”  He was saying, no, he hadn’t done that in many weeks and wouldn’t.  He only wanted her.  What a piece of cake it would be to track him and bring back the goods for her - his phone calls, the sounds of him banging away on the other dames.  We could have it by this time tomorrow.  Ken Chen had changed the world of police work.  Soon, people would be buying white noise apps and finding, to their disappointment, this app could still grab the voice.

   And now I sent Wayne off to shadow Alexander, which would be a lot easier now that he could stay so far behind.

   “Just don’t lose him, ok?”  It was a joke.  Wayne would never let that happen.

   He disappeared for a couple days this time, sending occasional texts, saying I wouldn’t believe what he was getting from Alexander -- who had spent these days with Loli.

   One of his texts said, “U no gonna blv this, boss.  She no act free will.  Not totally anyhoo.  He got some kind spell on her.  Its about h, pl.”  We’d agreed on some code, h for hypnosis, pl for past lives.  We both deleted all texts immediately - also voicemails. 

   They’d spent a lot of time together - and it’s not what you would have thought.  There was no sex.  But there was a lot of hypnosis and what seemed to be past lives, though sometimes it was hard to tell.  It often sounded like random crazy soap opera.  They would go to these scenarios where both of them understood the context and characters.  He played it.  They were making love but it wasn’t them in this life.  They were both in trance, in a past life.  He was clearly in charge.

   “You are beautiful my little lamb.  I caress you with all the love and happiness God could give a man.”  It was sickening.  She cooed in return and actually thanked him.

   “I am honored, your Lordship.  It is so good that you take care of me and are concerned for the little ones -- and you invite me to your high castle and give me your fine wines and leg of hind.”  This, too was sickening and reeked of fawning before a noble who had power over you.  No wonder we were glad to rebel against England after centuries of this shit.

   He bade her take him in her mouth again, which she did -- and his sounds were those of someone actually in the climax of bliss but Wayne told me they were in his view at this time and were laying side by side, not touching.  So what in the hell was happening? 

   “Boss, it could only be one thing: they are both in a very deep trance in the same time and place and they knew and remember this place.  It’s real.  As real as this time and place.”

   The he said, “Jeanne, your lips are the lips of an angel.  It should be you who is my baroness, not this sow that I have.  But that can never be.  You are what you are, working in my fields.  God is not always fair but who can understand his wisdom?”

   I froze.  He had called her Jeanne, the name I knew her as in this feudal existence in England about 800 years ago.  Should I tell Wayne?  I had to.  He had to know everything or else the thread of things would get confused for him.  I told him.  This was the baron we hated and when I “felt” him, it was with the same energy I felt for this jerk Alexander.  Cruel, autocratic, using, a lustful beast.

   “Wayne, leave this to me now, ok?  Is there anything left for you to do on this case, at least for now?”

   “No.  You’re the boss.  But you’ve always asked me to speak up.”

   I nodded.

   “Do you think this is a really wonderful idea?  You’re going to see Loli and mess around with this Alex, so it seems to me.”

   “Well, Wayne, what are we supposed to do with these feelings?  They’re so deep.  When I heard her, Jeanne, schmoozing with our oppressor from the Dark Ages...I’ve just never felt this.  It’s crazy jealousy.”

   “Enough that you could take him out?  I mean in this life?”

   “He’s a killer, Wayne.  We’ve got the dope on him.  I could say it was self-defense.”

   “You may well be telling the truth, boss.”

   I said Alex deserved it and immediately felt like an idiot gang-banger.

   “Boss, I think you should listen to another segment.  Most of it’s rubbish, for sure but you have to ask yourself -- I mean, speaking as a detective here -- what’s the attraction?  Why would these dames cozy up to this sadist monkey?  There has to be something we’re overlooking, something big and it’s gotta have some payoff for the dames or they wouldn’t do it.  Am I right?  No payoff, no do.  Isn’t that one of our oldest mottoes?”

   He played it.  I wasn’t ready for this.  I hate that saying.  How are you supposed to get ready for that which you ain’t ready for?  This segment was off the page, not like anything I knew shit about.  I had no frame of reference for it.  It weren’t no porno soundtrack and not some sci-fi gibberish nor poetic spewing from a young swain.

   “Yes, I accept perfection,” she said. “I immerse myself in it.  Why shouldn’t I have an eternity of it?  How long does that last?”

   He laughed.  “That’s just it, dear.  It doesn’t last.  It just is.  It never stops.  The idea that perfection must be limited to an hour - that is so human and earthly.”

   I shivered.  Wtf was this?  I looked at Wayne.

   “It gets better, boss.”  He looked at me with utmost Wisconsin seriousness and adjusted some dials and wiped out noise.  I felt comforted by his competency.  He knew this exchange he’d recorded was way out of the box, yet at the same time, he was the type of dick who didn’t write anything off because it was squirrely.  You had to go there and get inside the head of the people or you wouldn’t get the story.  Then Loli said this:

   “Life on this plane is so...I don’t know.  Tiring.  Why must we slog through it for seven or eight decades and get nowhere?”  Well, who couldn’t agree with that?  She was talking sense.  But why was she talking it to this fucker? 

   “That’s the great mystery, my good one.  Why do humans do this?  Life on earth could be so much easier but do we lift a finger to make it so?  No, we lift a finger to trash our fellow man with steel and with words from beginning to end.  So much easier in paradise.”

   I signalled Wayne to halt the vid.  There were at least three statements that blew my mind a little, maybe a lot.  Humans?  Why do humans do this?  What other species could be doing this?  And it’s easier in paradise?  Where is that?  It was clearly a place he knew about and Loli also knew about -- but where and what was it?  And the last issue: it sounded like she felt she had a choice and could be here on Earth or in some paradise, so, like, how do you do that?

   Clearly, Wayne didn’t know.  I signaled him, finally, to hit forward again, though I didn’t know if I were ready for this.  I wanted a break, a week off, where I could then approach this with a level mind.  Whatever that was.

   The vid moved forward.  It was mostly audio, not vid, though occasionally pics came in, assembled by the uber-intelligence of this app. 

   “It’s beautiful to be here.  I’ve never known any happiness like this,” said Loli.  “Who has?  No one.  You don’t read about it in any literature -- and the sacred texts only hint at it, like the Vedas.  But to be in eternity, in ecstasy and to know it’s not a drug.  Who could not want this, Alexander?  You are showing me this and I have only to trust you, that you are showing me something real, a true...dimenson.  It’s another dimension than the one we humans know, isn’t it?”

   “Loli, I can’t answer that for you.  This is where you have to consult your own soul wisdom.”

   I have to admit I was surprised by his response.  He didn’t try to take advantage of her. She was clearly in the most vulnerable of states and in the deepest sort of trance, one mutually occupied by Alexander, who could have demanded whatever he wanted.  Or so I assumed.  But here he was asking her to consult her own inner wisdom.  I was shaken.  Maybe he wasn’t the base scoundrel I had assumed. 

   After a long pause, she said, “I don’t want to go back.  Who would want to go back to earthly life, living as the ego, body and name you had developed over the decades?  Such suffering and loneliness.  I can’t do it.  I would rather be dead.  Is this death?”

   “You ask a very pointed and meaningful question, my dear one.”

   A long silence ensued.  Finally, she took a breath and spoke.  “Well, Alexander, are we in the realm of the dead?  Or do I just need to take another long, hard look at earthly incarnation and what the fuck I’m doing in it?”

   “Again, dear one, you have the answer at hand.  What is it?  What you get will be the truth.”

   “You mean the real truth or the truth that I need right now, as the human I am?”

   “You are the sharp one, aren’t you?  It’s a good question.  And to get the answer, you need to go into stillness or, as the Greeks called it, hesichia  -- he pronounced it hezah-KEY-ah -- suspended animation, over an extended period.  We have worked on this before.  It is the hardest thing a human can do - to be still and silent, day after day.  No person has the answer to such questions as you ask, but silence has the answers.”

   I was blown away.  This was suddenly wisdom being spoken by this supposed arch-demon Alexander.  He was clearly seeking no temporal power, riches or seduction -- all the usual human gains scammed by scoundrels. 

   “Wayne, was there any long period where you could not hear or track them?”

   “Funny you should ask, boss.  Yes, many, many hours.  I thought they were sleeping, but then I would hear an occasionaly syllable.  I thought it was sleepwalking or dreams.  But it would be repeated and it seemed intentional. It was Loli speaking, mostly.  She wasn’t zonked or drunk or anything. She was really present.”

   “Fuck.  This tracks with everything I’m learning, but goes, well, way beyond it.  She is likely in no danger.  We can forget about that.  But this guy, Alexander, is showing people something beyond what I know -- and it’s not some bad, evil shit, like we expect, like we see in stupid Damien movies.  At least I don’t think so.  We don’t know yet.  I’ve never been here.  But I don’t think consciousness and evil can go together.  That’s the big thing people don’t get.  You can’t gain in personal power and awareness and still have the program of doing shit to people.  You just can’t!”

   “I do hope you’re right, boss. So what the fuck are you going to do?  The bigger issue is that it seems you love this woman -- and you hardly know her, really.  Is this coming from past lives together?  I mean, something deep seems to be at work.”

   “Well, Wayne, how often does this kind of passion come along?  How often do you really love someone?”

   “Not often, boss.”  He paused a long moment.  “How often does inner peace come along -- and the kind of personal awareness and power you’ve been building?  Mucking around with her is the opposite of that, if I can say so.  They are in some kind of alternate reality, I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

   “Inner peace can kiss my ass.  I have to know what they’re doing,” I said.  “I mean in those past lives or whatever they are.”

   “It could just be flaming fantasy bullshit, boss.  But it seems very real when it’s happening, I have to admit that, from my regression, but what’s the payoff for you?”

   “Loli.  That’s the payoff.”

   I got my coat on and took my iPhone off charge. 

   “I’m going in, Wayne-o.  Read your text messages!”   ~





16  ::   Ego and Time Really Hurt...or Really Heal

   I got in my car.  Instead of calling her, I decided to go to a light state of five and, well, look for her, speak to her, summon her -- see if I could find her.  I did.  There she was.  I could “see” her, though it was more a presence, occasionally filling with parts of her face or form then fading and coming back in, standing at a distance, then her cheek and eye, her smile, her long blonde hair.  Then she looked straight at me.

   “Hi, Jeffers.  You want to see me.  You have many questions.  Come on over.  I’ll put on some coffee.”

   I was stunned.  A text chimed in.  I was sure it would be Wayne but it was Loli saying to pick up some turkey-cheese croissants from the French place on the way over.  Is there a phrase “doubly stunned?”  I was that.  Okayyy, I thought.  This is the way it is.  I’d normally kept myself “zipped up,” that is, psychicly protected so no one could get in my head or do me harm, dumb me down, divert me.  I’d come to realize there are people out there with such powers.  But I’d invited her in -- and she came. 

   We chatted amiably.  We needed to.  There was some kind of connection between us in this life and we needed to explore it and see if we liked each other.  Liking.  It’s highly underrated.  Too much emphasis on ‘chemistry’ in our culture, as if that will get you by the hard spots.  It won’t.  Liking will do that, though.  I thought I could like her.  I could tell she understood liking, too.  I asked her what she liked about croissants.  The mustard, she said, then the way the coffee infuses it in your mouth and washes it all away.

   “It makes me happy, Jeffers.”

   I tried it.  I mean, I paid attention to it.  Yes, she was right, it did all that. I smiled.  I liked her. 

   “How’s the case coming?”

   “I’m not sure what you want.  We’ve learned a lot about Alexander.  The past lives you two have had.  The fact that he regresses with many people.  They pay him for this.  He is very good at it.  They seem to be women, almost exclusively.  So, I need to ask you a few questions, like, do you feel safe with him and are you acting of your own free will?”

   “Yes, yes, of course.  I know what I’m doing and can take care of myself.”

   “Well, I see that you need to think that, Loli, but is it true 100 percent of the time with him?  You are in deep trance, it seems, at times.”

   “And you know that how?”

   “Technology.  It’s advancing very rapidly.  You can say goodbye to privacy.  You and everyone else.”

   “Then you know a lot.  Yes, I’ve had past lives with him, many of them.  It hasn’t always been pretty and he...well, I know how silly this sounds, but he’s killed me in past lives and we have some shit to work out.  But I’ve also returned the favor.  And I haven’t always been the woman and under his spell.  There’s karmic debt.  I think he owes me.  But it’s an illusion, of course.  If we take responsibility for all the karma we created, no one owes anyone.

   I let this all sink in, wondering if they were lovers in this life.  She said no, that one of her big missions in this life was to come to grips with past karma and move up to a much higher plane of consciousness - a place that, if you are carrying grudges and victim stuff, you do not get to.

   “I hired you because I want protection in case something happens - and also I want to know all I can about him.  And, no, I don’t feel entirely safe 100 percent of the time.  I may be cleaning up my shit, but that’s no guarantee someone else is.  We are going beyond where anyone has gone with hypnosis, regression...”  She paused here. “...and all the rest.”

   “It’s the rest I’m interested in, I think, Loli.”

   “First, I wanna go back to the first life that you and I shared, where we found each other.  I know there were many.  I can feel it.  ‘I have known thee of old,’ as they say.”

   We were on her couch together. So we were going for it.  We lay our heads back and she talked us in.  She showed me a trick of inducing me once and suggesting I would go twice as deep, then waking me to full, normal consciousness and inducing me/us again.  It was a lot deeper and it took away the nervousness and that little doubting voice, suggesting maybe I wasn’t really hypnotized.

   We kept in verbal, real-world contact, at her prompting, at every step of the way.

   “We are going to the first life we knew together, you and I, you and I.  Breathe and let it come in as I count down from five, you know this soul of mine, this heart of me, four, we share a deep trust and caring, three, we actually like and enjoy and delight in one another, two, and are always here for each other and all the details, smells, sights, sounds are coming in more and more clearly and it is a beautiful and good life, one, the best day of this life...and we, you and I, are going to the same life, the one where we found each other and our souls recognized and loved one another...Where are you?  What do you see?  What do you know?”

   “We’re walking,” I said.  “We’re leaving bare footprints in some wet volcanic ash.  We stop and look at the volcano.  It’s smoking.  I’m happy.  I look over at you.  You’re smiling.  You make me smile.  We’re holding hands.  It looks like Africa.  It has those plane trees.  There are giraffes in the distance.  Do you see me?  Are you here?”

   “I am.  I see you.  You are beautiful, a head taller than me.  I love holding your hand.  We are young, like mid-teens, but all grown up.  I am pregnant.  It’s something we share, this expectancy of new life.  I pat my tummy and nod excitedly.”

   “Yes.  I kiss your tummy.  I dance into the air.  We are headed back to the tribe.  I have killed a rabbit.  We threw stones at it and killed it.  We will eat tonight.  You are beautiful.  We haven’t a care in the world.  There is really only one care -- the hyenas, cheetahs, all the sharp-tooth ones.  We hope they don’t take us.  We shouldn’t be off alone like this.”

   “But we wanted to be alone and know this...this thing, this feeling.  It’s love.  It’s a new thing in the world.  It feels like we created it,” she said. “We invented love.  It’s just between us.  We were the first ones ever to do that.  Look at our foreheads.  Do we have foreheads?  That will tell us who we are, if we are human beings.  No.  Your forehead sweeps straight back.  See mine?”

   “Yes, yours is the same,” I said. “We are not yet the modern humans.  It’s millions of years ago.”

   “Now, beloved, we are going to the next level with this and we can do this.  This is possible.  We are going to leave our lives and our bodies safely where they are in my flat in San Francisco in the 21st century.  The laws of physics and time are just that, some laws modern humans thought up and we now can let them go and become the larger beings we really are.  We are the soul travelers and have always been such.

   As I count us back from five, we are actually, fully and really in this so-called Paleolithic, stone age, caveman life, four, we are not just viewing it, we are in it, living it, part of it, able to live and die in it, three, able to eat, kill, fuck, have children, everything.  We will be here for only a few minutes, two, we have this power and we are taking, owning and using this power. Nod if you are stepping into this old world and life, one.  We are here.”

   I nodded.  And then I was there.  I was actually there.  Or here, as it was to me now.  I stood “here” on the veldt of this land of our origins.  I couldn’t believe it yet here it was.  She spoke to me and my ears registered it as a series of sounds, clicks, sing-song moan things, augmented by many gestures and a lot of body language.  I understood her, though.  I knew exactly what she was intending and wanting me to know and share.  And yet I was aware, though only vaguely that I was still this “Jeffers” person in some “modern” world and he was a man who was vaguely amazed at this new level of hypnosis and astral travel or whatever it was.  But it just didn’t matter.  Once you’re in this other world, you are IN it. 

   She hugged me.  I was instantly aware that we were not hairy apelike beings 3 million years ago, but had the smooth, sensuous skin of a later era.  She jabbered on and bid me run with her to the tribal place, which had huts of stick, grass and dried mud and sat by a clear-running river, with plenty of trees in which, I instantly surmised, we could leap to saftety from the dog packs.  I constantly scanned the horizon and knew I was looking for them and smelling for them, as well as using an inner, psychic sense of their habits and presence.  They were here, but not near.  Everyone knew exactly where they were.  We were safe for now. 

   The others greeted me happily, touched me, smelled everything and had the rabbit skinned in a moment, using edged bone and sharpened hardwood implements, fire-hardened -- no chipped stone tools.  I was actually here.  I could feel the breeze washing over me, the grass and stones under my bare feet.  I touched myself and I was real. 

   They could and did start a fire in a flash, with various stones and minerals.  The meat smelled wonderful and we were soon passing it around.  Other females celebrated the tummy of this woman, hooting and leaping about, banging sticks and rocks, making strange melodies on flutes and beating on drums.  The modern part of my mind was still here but way in the back of my mind.  It was present enough to get that these people were not supposed to be able to make things like flutes and drums for a couple million years yet, but why wouldn’t they?  They...we...had endless time and inventiveness and it was fun to make music!  Of course we would do it. 

   We wandered off, she and I to the edge of camp.  She took both my hands in hers and looked in my eyes.  She said something that registered as, “It’s time to leave.  Let’s let this go now.”  I nodded.  Was “she” really there, behind those amber eyes?  “I” looked for a sign of “her,” the woman I knew in modern life.  Yes, she was here.  She picked up a scrap of bone, with an edge and took my hand, cutting a gash on the outside of the web between the thumb and forefinger.  It bled.  She handed me the stone and pointed to the same spot, indicating I do the same.  I did.  She gibbered something about the cuts, which I understood.  The modern “I” vaguely sensed what she was doing but thought it ridiculous that it would endure through the ages. 

   I gibbered something to her, asking, hey, do we have intelligence here?  Are we conscious and smart as...as when?  Who was thinking this?  Was it modern me?  He was there, in the back of my mind but I also was asking it as who I was on the veldt, wasn’t I?  It was the most bizarre awareness of eternity in the present.

   But she knew what I was asking.  She just nodded yes.  We were smart and aware in all lives.

   She pulled me to her and kissed me lightly on the lips, holding it for long moments, then let go and smiled at me.  It had felt like nothing I’d ever experienced, like the souls crossing the boundaries of flesh. 

   Then I heard her familiar, rolling induction voice, the sounds of modern Loli, the master hypnotherapist and journeyer of many lives.  I looked around at the veldt and my tribe and realized the immense loving sense of participation and happiness I felt for all of it.  I took one final look at the face of this impossibly primeval woman with the impossibly familiar eyes and saw it waver and become the inner visions of the mind, what we call ‘visualizations.’

   “Now,” she said, “let’s come back to the present, where we will remember everything and let us suggest that the next time, we will go to our best life together, our happiest, the most important one for who we are in the modern world, so we can understand what’s guiding and moving us.  And so we will -- and we will go to the same one.”

   So she brought us back to the present, 21st century in her San Francisco flat and clapped her hands three times to fully bring us in.  She poured us another cup of coffee.  It was dark now. 

   We sat on her couch, looking into each other’s eyes.  This was a different person now and would never be the same.  We both knew it.  And what we had done!  I had transgressed all the laws of physics, biology -- time itself!

   “I had no idea, Loli.  This violates all our understandings of science.  It defies all reality that we know.  I have to ask you, um, where were you just now?  No, let’s write it down and compare where we believe we just were. 

   We did.  She wrote.  “Africa, 3.6 million years ago, me pregnant, not much of a forehead.”  I’d written, “Stone age Africa. We invented love.” 

   I burst into tears and pulled her to me - me the hard-boiled detective.  She nuzzled into me and we just held each other, letting it pour in, the knowledge and certainty and dearness of our bond.  She turned my hand over.  There was the faintest of scars there.  Her hand showed it also.  I didn’t know what to say at all.

   “It’s big, Jeffers.  You don’t have to know what to say.  The modern ego can’t absorb it and presume to conceptualize it, handle it, talk about it.  I can tell you a few things, which will be obvious to you soon.  Obviously, we are eternal beings and migrate from body to body, life to life -- or so it appears.  That’s how we conceptualize it.  It’s an easy way to understand it.  But I just ask you to keep your mind open.  It’s vast, without limit -- and it continues to defy all our efforts to understand it.  The infinite is just that, infinite. 

   “So breathe, old man.  You are up to this.  You have been up to it in all our lives.  I know it or I wouldn’t have sought you out.”

   “You sought me out?  Funny, I suspected that.”

   “I knew you were nearby.  I just kept journeying till I found you.”

   “Why did you let us be there in Africa such a short time?”

   She laughed.  “You know why?  Did you like it there?  Would you like to go back and stay?”

   I had to think about it.  “God, yes, I would.  I felt such, I don’t know, such intense fucking belonging, such a thorough sense of being complete and alive and knowing everything about me, my tribe, the land, the life.  Like nothing we have now.  I knew complete happiness.”

   “That’s why we stayed only a few minutes.  If you stayed an hour, I could never get you back here.”

   That’s when it all started dawning on me, what this was all about. 

   “I can do that again, can’t I?” 

   “You can and you will.  We have a little joke: Earth stands for Ego And Time Really Hurt.

   I laughed.  I said, “It could also stand for -- they really heal.”

   “Very nice, Jeffers -- and very true.  Thank the gods you have a brain to go with your old soul.”

   “Wow.”  It was all happening so fast.  And yet it was simple and all made sense.

   “Once you have the powers of soul migration on the conscious level,” she said, “you’ve cut the bonds that hold you to the illusion, as we call it.  You become free.  It takes power, though.  You’ve already started storing and using the powers and you get how to use them.  Let it sink it.  It’s rewiring your soul now.  Let it do its work.  You’ll know what to do.  Once you taste eternity, you start learning what to do.  It’s natural.”

   She walked me to the door and kissed me lightly on the lips, holding it for long moments. 

   “It’s like the souls crossing the boundaries of flesh, isn’t it, old boy?”  She smiled and giggled, as did I.  “Come back in a few days and we’ll travel some more.”   ~









17   ::  Evil Will Out

   Wayne waltzed in very early carrying major lattes from Starbucks, with carmel crap in them.  He knows I hate that stuff but after the first sip, it’s like a liquid candy bar and I can’t stop.  He gets a real kick out of it, watching me succumb.

   He also got a kick out of booting up his audio captures, also some video, but the main thing was his usual one-page written summary on text translated from voice Dragon, which gets right to the point.

   “Read it, boss.  This guy is in that heavy-duty think tank in Berkeley, Pacific Sun Futures.”

   “I can read, Wayne, if you shut the fuck up for one second and drink your girlie latte.  What a stupid name for a think tank.”

   I scanned it.  “Holy fuck.  How did you get onto this?” 

   “The old-fashioned way.  I tailed his car, then him on foot.  He walked in the damn building, which, by the way, is disguised as a ghetto shithole.  They drive in from the other side of the block into a giant underground ramp.  They bought several houess around the joint.  They house security, data hardware, but not much of it.  Mostly they operate in a very hard-to-hack cloud.  Notice I said ‘hard’ to hack?  Not impossible.”

   I stopped reading his summary.  “What are they working on, Wayne?  I bet they have several sectors of work.  Is he is the main shit?  Tell me.  I always like it racing out of your brain.  I love your adrenalin.  It’s contagious.”

   “You better buckle the fuck up, boss.  This is kinda big.  Like, it affects you.  Not personally.  I mean it kinda affects everyone.  Maybe.  Probly.”

   He paused and did his raised eyebrows thing.  Must be a Wisconsin thing, like when they’re about to tell you the cow died.

   “Like...wow, Wayne.  This is some truly heavy shit.  I’m really lookin forward to hearin it.”

   “Apparently, they think the shit is going to hit the fan, kinda bigtime.  Like, majorly -- and within a matter of months, if not weeks.  By the way, I saw Secret Service scattered around the street.  I’d know them stiffs anywheres.  That means, DoD, spooks, the company, the whole shitaree.”

   “And you’re still hacking and tracking one of them?  That’s hard to believe, Wayne.  Were you followed at all?” 

   He shook his head no.  “If they did, they ate shit. I did the double-sheepshank on em, just in case.”

   “Um, Wayne, did you look up?  Up.  The sky, Wayne.  They have drones now, y’know.”

   “Fuck my ass!”  He said it vehemently.  He only says that in extreme cases.  We have windows on both sides, with drapes -- and we went to each side of the building.

   “Use iVid, Wayne.  Don’t stick ur face out there.”  I slid my phone just barely out a crack in the drapes.

   “I know that, boss.  I’m not stupid.  Well, once in a long while.  Like driving here.”

    “Fergit it, Wayne.  We might have to blow this popstand.  Like, for good.”
  
   “I got a bogey here, boss, I think.  It’s hovering.  Not a plane.”

   “How far away, Wayne?”  I was whispering now, afraid of what technology they might have.  Did they have what WE have?

   “About 40, 50 yards.  We’re fucked.”

   I shushed him.  “How bout them fuckin Niners, man?  Did they kick ass?”

   “They weren’t bad.  Should have stuck to the ground game.”

   Wayne whipped open the floor safe and grabbed all the cash, pocketing a bunch and handing me a wad.  We would need it.  Using anything digital was out, if it had our names on it or had ever been paid on before.  There were a couple cards in the safe with high limits that were registered to safe addresses in LA.  We pocketed those, too.

   We used the stairs and the tunnel, which crosses under Post Street and ends up in the Downtowner, where we grab a lot of burgers.  I had to have an office with a tunnel, in case I were being tracked, like I was now.  I’d never been tracked with a drone -- and this meant we were on The Man’s radar, the biggest man of men, the Office of Naval Intelligence or the CIA itself.  Wayne was right: we were fucked.  But maybe we could get over it.  It depends on whether we ended up on their side or not -- or if we knew too much. 

   “Wayne, we can’t use our cars again.”  He nodded and shushed me.  They might have the voice analyzer.  In the past year, as I’d read about this sci-fi stuff crossing the line into reality, I made myself and staff take a few weeks of American Sign Language and we started using it.  We ‘d also developed a pidgin language that combined rapper, Esperanto and the early modern English of Shakespeare, which everyone on staff liked and read.  I won’t try to write that here; you wouldn’t be able to read it.  We also went to our alternate names.  I was Sam, after Sam Spade.  He was Tonto, one of the famous assistants of all cowboy lore.

  We stopped at a phone store and scored some new smart phones with all the goodies.  I asked to use the store phone and texted Rosie to take a month’s vacation and be invisible, with triple time pay, then we tossed our old phones.

   We took BART to the East Bay.  No one seemed to on the ground, eyeing us at all.  They wouldn’t have had time to connect with us in The City.  We bought a nondescript junker for $700 at a lot full of heaps.  It had to be a stick.  Wayne, raised on a farm, could do anything with a stick, including a 180 in three seconds at 70 mph. 

   We were getting some breathing room.  “Tonto, tell me what he’s doing.”  He, meaning Alexander.  “I scanned something about rapidly rising sea levels in your summary, also water crisis.  That’s regular old water, like comes out of the faucet, right?”

   “Right, Sam.  Also massive burns.  Forests very dry from heat, catching fire.  Can’t put em out.  The same stuff that’s been in scare stories in the news for years, but all finally coming down at once, like in that movie.”

   “The Day After Tomorrow.”

   “I don’t see anything unusual going on in our world, Tonto.  And nothing in the news.”

   “You wouldn’t.  That’s their plan to save us.  Do nothing.  Save the few.”

   “Alexander, of course, knows this.”

   “Oh ya -- he does, Sam.”

   “Let’s see, putting two and two together, that makes a guy wonder if he is going to be on the ark or if he has some other escape strategy, possibly involving...”

   “Let’s just call it altered states, Sam.”

   “States it is.  I think we need some sea air -- at least where we can see the sea, but from, say, 30 feet above it.  I like Stinson Beach.  Let’s rent a cottage for a month.  What’s Doctor A going to do?  Any clues?”  Alex would be “Doc” from now on.

   “I see sign that top dudes got some kind of subterranean ark in the Rockies.  It sounded like it was combined with Area 69 out there.”  He of course meant Area 51.  He whistled the Twilight Zone theme and made a flying saucer of his hand. 

   “Um, why the fuck would they care about six-niner, Tonto?  Unless, oh my god.  You don’t think there’s some saucer stuff coming to a head now, do ya?”  It was all starting to come together.  The increased sightings, always on YouTube but no one paid diddly attention to them anymore, even though there were on regular TV in Japan, India, Mexico.  But not here in the U.S.  We knew better, right? 
  
   “What does six-niner and the Big Hot got to do with each other, Samson?  You did watch X-Files, right?”

   “Of course. What self-respecting dickead didn’t study that?”  Dickhead meant dick.  Detective. 

   “And what was the bottom line of the whole thing?”

   “That the government not only knew everything but had agreements in place with the E’s.”  That meant ET’s.  We earthlings were the T’s, the terrestrials.  And what’s in it for the E’s?” I asked.

   “They get to bone all our babes?”  We howled. 

   “Well, that’s a given, Tonto.  But after they do that?  Do they just want to help?  Do they want to save us?  Or do they want to eat us?  And, by the way, where do they come from, since it would take many decades at the speed of light to get here from the nearest planet-like object?”

   “The main thing is that they can’t possibly put it on cruise control and sit there for centuries, as they journey to our little world,” I said.  “That leaves only one other possible explanation.  That they’re already here and have always been here, but they are where?”

   “It means there’s another dimension right here, maybe many of them,” he mused, “but they’re not visible to us or any instruments we have.”

   “Right.  As Sherlock said, you have to eliminate all options that are impossible and what’s left, no matter how improbable...”  I waited for him to finish the sentence we had said so many times.

   “...is the truth,” he said.

   We rode along for a few minutes, wheels turning rapidly in each of our skulls as we made our way over the hills around Mt. Tam.  Our fingers seemed to be painting pictures in the air as we went from one ensuing deduction to the next.

   “Doc knows about the fourth dimension,” I declared.

   “And if he knows about 4D, he may know about 5D and  6D,” he said.  “And all the other dimensions.  Why else would they have a hypnotist and quack author on the staff - a guy from the Ukraine who has made claims to be descended from the Czars and has understudied Velikovsky and written quack books extending his ideas about ancient myth based on planet-wide catastrophes.”

   “Holy fuck,” I observed.  “That’s right.  He wrote those as a young man, decades ago and they were laughed out of town, just like Velikovsky’s were and he had to flee the Soviet Union, so he wouldn’t get liquidated as a nut -- someone who gave people hope, no matter how screwy.”

   “And moving onto the next deduction, Senor Sammy, what does Loli know?  And where in the fuck do they go when she and the Doc do their strange little journeys?”

   “Click.  I think the last piece just fell in place, Tonto.  We’ve got to find her.  I wonder if the spooks know about her?”

   We thought, both of us -- in silence.  The beach came into sight, except there was no beach.  I pointed it out to Wayne.  He whistled.  The moon was was past full and it was getting to be late afternoon, so it should be on the other side of the world, so it should be low tide, but here it was very high tide.

   “I think Missy L (this would be Loli) knows about the dimensions,” I said, “but I don’t think the spooks know about her.  Doc wouldn’t let that happen.  I’ve got to find her.”

   We rented a cute little shack on the bluff and paid cash.  They assumed we were gay, a nice cover.  We acted a little gay to help the cover. 

   I told Wayne to load the cool spy software into our phones from his laptop and see if it could detect anyone fucking with our signal.  It took him 10 or 15 minutes. 

   I took a chance and called Ken Chen.  It would be hard to imagine him not tapped into the CIA and all those defense monkeys.  He said no, they didn’t have his software and he was still in R&D with it and had so much “resources” (money) that he sure didn’t need their “grants.”  He added that he invents stuff so fast, it just takes a matter of days, not months and years, as with usual projects.

   “Are we being zapped by the spooks, you and me, right now?  At all?”  I heard his fingers flying, finding out, then he said no.  I asked him to keep completely aware of such things and he pledged he would.  I told him he has reason to believe it might happen - then I asked him if he knew what was happening to the weather, the ocean, the planet or any unexplained phenomena in the atmosphere.  He said no.  I said you might want to check it out. 

   “I’ve been meaning to whip up some software that integrates all possible geophysical indicators and would red-flags any trends.  It should only take 24 to 36 hours.  Stay in touch.” 

   I heard him clicking around on a keyboard and texting.  He gave me a new phone number to tap in.  “That one is unhackable by anyone.  Can you memorize it?”  I assured him I already had.  

   “I’ll contact you by tomorrow evening,” he texted, “and thanks for the heads up about the planet.” 

   He took a big sigh and asked, “Any progress on Mercedes?”

   “Ken, let’s just say a lot of threads are trying to weave together and make a rope -- and we don’t know anything yet but I wouldn’t be surprised if we did before the week’s out.”

   “Thank you, my good man,” he said, “Thank you so much.”  He said it with the tone of voice that communicated we would be blood brothers for life and he would give me any amount of money without a second thought.  I’d heard that tone many times.  And sometimes, they actually did that.  But, right now, immense piles of money didn’t seem to mean much. 

   “Don’t worry, sir.  Evil will out.  It always does.”

   I left for the City.  I had no idea -- other than to find Loli and to watch my ass intensely -- what I was going to do.

   “Watch the fort, Tonto.”

   “Gotcher back, Kemosabe.’” He laughed -- a little darkly.   ~






18 ::  The Only Dimension With Time

   How wonderful it is to feel safe.  I drove along Lombard in the Marina and texted Loli, telling her to go where we got those lovely pastries with the ham and mustard.  In 20 minutes, she was standing outside the joint on Post and I scooped her up.  It took all I had not to hug and fuss over her -- and I could see it was mutual.

   I pointed to her clothes and purse and just raised my eyebrows.  She shrugged.  She wasn’t sure if they were clean or not.  But why should they be clean?  I gestured toward her car window and, after grabbing a few cards, tossed her purse.  I pointed to the cards.

   “Don’t worry,” I said.  She jettisoned them in the street.  I could see people in my rear-view, rushing to pick them up.  What a nasty surprise they were in for -- maybe. 

   “Take your clothes off, too.  Everything.”  She did.  She was as beautiful without them as with.   I whipped around to the Goodwill on Geary and said I’d be right back, which I was, with quite a number of nice looking sweats.  Let’s say I didn’t take a lot of time with fashion.  She seemed to enjoy getting into them. 

   In half an hour, we were at our gay little retreat in Stinson.  Wayne was glad to see us, in the extreme.  We all hugged like long-lost family.  He had been to the fish market, yes, on foot, and got us a mess of shrimp, scallops, shallots, yams and a couple bottles of nice syrah and had dinner about ready.  He was like a wife to us, a loving servant, a comrade on the dangerous front of a war no one knew about yet.  We toasted and joked, trying to find out what Loli knew, if anything.  I was almost positive she knew about what was happening to the planet.  It would all come. 

   We stood on the patio in the dusk, sipping an after-dinner brandy.

   “What’s wrong with the ocean?” she said bluntly.  “It’s not supposed to be this high.  It can’t be.  I’ve been at this beach all my life.”

   “The world’s hitting the wall, Loli.  Do you know anything about it?  I think you do.  Alex does.  And you know Alex rather well, if we’re not mistaken.”

   She did a long pause and sipped her brandy, looking out to sea.

   “Ok, I know the world’s going to go splat in some fairly big ways, fairly soon -- and I know Alex knows a lot about it and is trying to protect some people he cares about.”

   “Like you.”

   She nodded.  “Is that so wrong?” 

   “There’s going to be a bottleneck, environmentally, geophysically, in many ways, right?” I said.  “It’s only natural selection.  We must all bow to it, just as the dinosaurs had to.  Am I right?  But some people think they can be and should be exempt.  Does that include you?”

   She nodded.  “I guess so.  I don’t know why I should be exempt from natural selection.  But guys, you have to realize that natural selection applies only to...well, to this world in this time and place.”

   “Well, isn’t that nice of it,” said Wayne. 

   “Actually, it’s very nice of it,” she fired back.  “The fact is -- and it’s a fact I don’t expect you two to appreciate -- this is not the only dimension here.”

   We just stood there, letting that thought echo through our brains.  And hers.  Let her tell her story, if she was ready.

   “Ok, I have to trust you and I feel I can, both of you.”

   We nodded, with all the sincerity we could put on our faces.

   “All the supposed paranormal phenomena?  Well, it’s real.  The past lives, the UFOs, the parallel realities, the clairvoyance, the astral travel, the psychic healing?  It’s all just regular stuff that’s been suppressed for the past couple millennia, while the System got its act together, here on earth, as best it could.

   She explained there are dimensions, separate realities right here among us.  Wayne said everyone’s heard that and it’s been in a lot of movies. 

   “No shit, Wayne,” she retotred, a little aggravated.  “Well, why do you suppose it’s been in a lot of movies?  Because a lot of people have memories of it and have visited or lived in those dimensions.  It doesn’t invalidate it.”

   “And the past lives?” Wayne said.  “Y’know, the boss here regressed me and I remember all of it.  I was a fat mammy slave and I’m proud of it.”

   Loli looked slowly over at me.  “You can regress people?”

   “He did it to Rose, too.” 

   “And I did it with myself, many times,” I said.  “Also a lot of astral travel and just simple suggestion to alter habits and trim away behaviors that were, y’know, draining energy.”

   “I noticed the gain in energy and power with you - very clearly.  Well, good.  I’m glad.  I didn’t want to drag you along.  I do want to show you the next step up.  You remember when we went to the Stone Age in Africa?”

   I nodded.  Wayne looked a little surprised.  “We were apes together.  She was very cute.  We did it like monkeys.  Had a kid monkey.  Seriously.  And another thing, Wayne, you know what ‘real’ means.  It was as real as us standing here.  Not visualizations and guided imagery.  Real.”

   “You know why that was, Jeffers?  Here it is, the meat of the matter.  It may seem like that was a past life because we all know we were apelike bipeds in Africa with minimal to no technology, right?  Well, guess what?  That was not a past life.  You can’t make past life ‘real.’”

   This is part of why I love Loli - and I must tell her about it - because she’s smart and teaches me stuff, big stuff, and she has the energy and power to handle it and still stay completely level-headed and grounded as who she is.

   I nodded, just listening, taking it all in, welcoming her next revelation.

   “It was a...”  I waited.

   “It was a parallel reality, another dimension.  It’s happening right now.  It’s eternal, if you will.  You know why it will always be happening?”

   Wayne blurted, “Cuz their is no time.”

   We both looked at him, a bit jaw-dropped. 

   “Wayne, that’s exactly right,” she said, putting her hand on his shoulder.

   “It’s not rocket science,” he grumbled.

   “No, it isn’t,” she said.  “It’s way beyond fucking rocket science, which is actually just burning some shit and producing thrust, to which this steel tube reacts with an equal and opposite movement.”

   “Got it.  Good point,” he mumbled.

   “So,” she went on in her teacherly but charming way, “If there is no time, then all the so-called past lives we supposedly remember are really factors of the mind.  They sorta happened, but a lot of it is symbolic behaviors, feelings and attitudes from pre-conscious childhood and the womb and god knows what fucking else.  Reveries, story-telling that never got told, stuff put in our heads by aliens, whatever.

   “But if you remember a so-called past life and you can really step into it and live it, then that is a parallel dimension and it means, if you recognize anyone or anything, you have been there before.  Anything ‘in time’ is a creation of the human mind, which loves and needs time and space in which to ground its identity.”

   I asked her why she was telling us all this.  And why she found and chose me to get involved with. 

   “I don’t know.  It’s too hard to explain.  We’re connected.  You have to experience it to understand.  And you will.  Being connected to someone in other dimensions is huge.  We form teams and work with them, well, forever.  And don’t ask me why.  Maybe it’s that we’re helping God or the Creators of the Universe to evolve or some damn thing.  All I know is it’s important and it’s fun and gives a lot of meaning to existence -- and...”  She paused for a long moment. “...and we’re going there now.  Wayne, I want you to witness this and be our guardian.  I don’t feel entirely safe right now, I mean with my physical body in this dimension.”

   “Got it,” I said.  I clapped my hands as if she asked me to play touch football.  Well, why not a little humor? 

   “We’re gonna sit on the couch, Wayne.  Can you get us some water to drink before we go?  Shouldn’t dehydrate when you do this.  A lot of people forget that.” 

   “A lot of people travel between dimensions?” Wayne asked. 

   She nodded.  “More than you think.”

   “Is it hard?” he asked.

   “A lot easier than you might think.  I took Jeffers the other day.  All I had to do was remove the very last shred of doubt in his mind and convince him it was hypnosis and he was good at it.  He was very proud of all his hypnosis work so his ego surrendered to it and rode it.  You actually need a stong ego for inter-dimensional travel - and now that he’s already done it, his confidence remains.  He knows he can.”

   “I bet I can, too,” said Wayne.

   Loli burst into laughter.  “Y’know, I bet you can.  We’ll see.”

   “One last question, Loli,” I said.  “Why are we doing this?  Why is this important?  This dimension ain’t so bad and I’ve gotten pretty good at it.”

   “Good question, Jeffers.  Wayne, let’s see you answer it for the boss.” 

   He stroked his stubble and studied the ceiling.  “Well, I think it’s because, y’know, we have souls and I bet it’s the same soul no matter what dimension we’re in -- and the soul needs a body and this dimension is looking a little iffy about supporting our bodies, what with global warming, and that’s why we and others are working on this stuff.”

   “Bingo,” she said.  “This is not the first time.  Humanity has had to bail on this plane many times and migrate to other planes.  That’s why there are so many gaps in the fossil record with human bones.  It was mostly because of shit hitting the fan, like big ice ages or asteroid hits or extreme greenhouse gassing -- or aliens being a pain in the ass.  Aliens, by the way, don’t know all the dimensions we know, but we’ll get to that later.  Let’s relax and breathe on the couch.”

   She sat with her head back on the cushions and patted the spot beside her, indicating I can sit there.  “Wayne, you sit over there, facing us.”

   “How long will you be gone?”

   “To you, it will seem about 45 minutes.  For us, it could be the equivalent of months or years.  This dimension is the only one with ‘time’ but that’s because humans needed it.  We got scared.  Time helps us grab on and feel secure.  It’s like money or love that way.”  She laughed a big laugh.  I was just a little blown away, as was Wayne.  His jaw was actually hanging open.

   “It’s kind of like reform school.”

   To me, she explained she would do the same hypnotic inductions and deepeners.  Why?  Because it worked; we were used to it.  It put the defenses and vigilant mind activity to sleep.  She took us back in time and suggested we would be in the most happy life we’d ever known together.   ~








19 ::   To Give God More Cards

   “Where are you?” she asked.

   “On a beach, with you, by the ocean.”

   “What year is it?  Just take the first number you get.”

   “It’s 1952, Jackie.  We’re at Hyannis.”

   “Mm.  Love it here.  Do you see it?  Do you smell the sea?  Now you will actually and really be here in every way, fully present in this life as I count back from five.”

   She did.  I was aware of who I was and what I was doing, that is, I knew I was Jeffers in the 21st century and she was Loli, but the idea was shimmering and fading, like when you get stoned and you feel normal consciousness dropping away, four, like leaves falling off a tree and a wind comes up and blows them, three, across the lawn and they scatter into the street and are gone, two.  I realized I was ‘thinking’ her words and obeying her suggestions about the leaves, one, getting fixated on them and now she was talking about the sand at Hyannis and how good it felt, warm in the sunlight and cozy under my feet as I walked along with her and admired her brown hair and her widely-spaced eyes and am holding her hand and I am there.  Here.  Really.

   “We’re going to have children, Jack, beautiful ones.  You’re going to change the world and make it a better place.  No one will ever forget the 60s.  No one will ever forget the Kennedys and what you did to wake people up to the idea of world peace.”

   What did she know -- this sylph-voiced ingenue, so much younger than me, but I realized as I watched her lips move, lit up by the setting sun and listening to the waves whispering that I actually loved her and had known her of old.  And I knew she was wise, not the bimbo painted by the press and biographers.

   The months went by and I made love to her, I mean ‘really’ made love to her in the real world of this dimension and we married and had a daughter and I ran for president and we lived each day of it and it did take a long time, a decade and I refused to invade Cuba and pissed a lot of powerful people off and the next year I again refused to do that but I prevented the world from being blown away in a missile crisis with the Russians and I did more things to get along with them, like the nuclear test ban treaty the next year and I knew a lot of people hated me for it and I knew in the back of my mind they would kill me for it and then one day in Dallas came that moment and they blew my brains out and sent a slug through Jackie’s chest, too, and all this took years.

   “They’ve killed my husband,” she said.  Then they nailed her, a slug through the chest and one through the pelvis.

   I found myself in spirit, I guess you would call it, but it was very much like hypnosis, with the same sense of remove, yet deep involvement and the understanding you were fully in control.

   “Let’s step back into Higher Self now, reviewing this life without emotion, but only with understanding of how and why we lived it.  What did you get from it, Jack?”

   “That it was so good to have lived it with you.  It was really fun.  I think we showed people how to live with some happiness and class and use your intelligence for some good in the world, some real possibility.  We had fun.  We made a lot of good friends who love us.  That’s so important.”

   “I know.  I love that.  I loved the sailing.  I loved drinking wine with you - and brandy.  I loved coffee with you.  Funny how it’s the small things, isn’t it?  I loved being in bed with you - not so much the sex, but just being close to you.  You know why, Jack?”

   “Yes, I do.”

   “Because I loved you.  I always love you.  I love all these lives we have...well, shit, they’re dimensions, as we know.  I love being old souls together.  That’s why we live all these lives or dimensions, to learn and get to be old souls and learn to just let the chips fall as they may and, more and more, to look at life from the Higher Self as just such a damn pleasure.”

   She took a deep breath and sighed.  I was starting to feel the stirring of longing for her body.

   “They always thought I didn’t love you,” I said, “because I screwed all those babes.  But you knew I loved you.”

   “Another nice thing about being old souls together is that you can just tell the truth about life.  Such a pleasure,” she said.  “Of course it hurt when you fucked all those floozies, but I was a human and ego sticks to you like some kind of cotton candy with glue all over it.”

   I laughed.  She had a darling way with words.  I took her hand and began to realize we were sitting on a couch and I could hear the sea.

   “I have just one question: how could you be shot?  That didn’t happen.” 

   “Jack, that was in the other...that wasn’t this dimension.  No dimension can be repeated exactly the same.  It’s like you can’t play a concerto the same way twice.  It’s like a tree.  You can start on the main trunk and follow the same big limbs but you can’t follow every twig and tendril the same.  We made different choices several times and each one led to different dimensions parallel to that one, very close but different. 

   “Why?”

   “To learn, dummy, and to evolve all the possibilities.  To give God more cards for the next game.”  We laughed.

   “Are we going to go back to that other dimension, the one where the world is about to take it up the ass,” I said. 

   “I don’t know, Jack.  That’s a dimension shared by billions of people who all have a similar take on things, which adds tremendous momentum for them to happen.  We’re on the main trunk of that dimension, enacting it for the first time.  It takes a lot of courage.

   “We can go back to Hyannis, you know, when we were young and you were running for the Senate the first time and we can slow it way down.  You know how you do that, right?  You pay attention to everything.”

   “Yes, I liked doing that with you.  Believe me, none of the floozies knew how to do that.  They were much younger souls.”

   “But of course, there is no time, don’t forget.”

   “I keep forgetting that.  Being a human, hey, it’s reform school.  You told me that once, in another dimension, the one in San Francisco where the world is about to bite the big one.  It’s a dimension where I haven’t yet had the pleasure of carnal intimacy with you, by the way, and I’m starting to warm up to the idea very much.  You know why?”

   “Yes, I do.  It’s because you love me.”

   “And I feel the feeling is felt mutually.  Shall we go back there?  You are very beautiful and I want to look at you.  You...Loli.  I’ve been pretending I don’t want to look at you.  But I do.”

   “I know.  I’ve been enjoying you pretending that you don’t want to look at me and I’ve been sending out phermones and thought forms to haunt you and make you want me.”

   I laughed and held her hands.  “I think Wayne is listening to us, if he hasn’t lost interest over the last 10 years.”

   She giggled.  “Was Wayne in our Kennedy dimension?”

   “Yes, of course.  Just remember him.  Who do you see?”

   “Ah yes, Pierre.  What a good chap he was in our lives.  That was our best life of all, Jack.  I mean so far.  This one could be better.  But let’s stay out of politics this time and have a more private go at life.”

   I leaned over and nuzzled her.  “I have to bring us up first, you know.  It all has to be to code, ten, started to become aware of the sound of the sea, the feel of these lovely bodies we live in here, nine...”  And so she went.

   Wayne was quite astounded.  She asked him to just accept what was and don’t ask us about anything, ok?  He said ok.    ~







20 ::   Did You Let the Cat Out?

   Loli and I slept together in the cottage by the sea at Stinson.  Our love was glorious, which is a way of saying it was ecstasy, which means that it was about souls meeting and bodies being there to help out, instead of the other way around.  I felt I’d known her all my life and all eternity, which, in fact, was the case.  I’d never known trust with anyone like that.  We went out on the front deck in the morning.  Wayne had fetched us coffee and munchies and was quite pleased with himself, as well as what had happened with us -- Loli and me.

   “Loli, we have to talk with Alexander.  We’ve got a missing person on our hands and there’s at least one cop who knows we know.”

   “Yes, let’s talk to him, though I already know what he will say.  It’s legit.  The woman chose to leave this life, I mean this dimension.  She’s not the only one.  Many people of higher awareness and powers do this, when they learn inter-dimensional travel.  The trouble is: what do I do with my body if I leave here?”

   “Ok, why do people leave here?  It’s a pretty nice place.  We have big blue skies, oceans to sail, books to write, movies, lattes, great wine and, oh, above all, we have sex.  We can make love.  That can be pretty good, can’t it?”

   She nuzzled me and laughed.  “God!  It was a lot better than Jack, frankly!”

   “Is it suicide, essentially?  Is that what Mercedes and others did?  They actually killed themselves, right?” 

   “Jeffers, not quite.  When you kill yourself, you usually hate life -- and you don’t know if you’re headed off to hell or what.  You just can’t take it anymore.  With IDT, that’s the interdimensional travel, you know you’re going to a better place or at least one you choose and know how to get to and can even leave if you want.  You’re basically some kind of demi-god or angel or shaman.  Am I right?  Isn’t that what you felt like in our parallel dimensions?”

   “But I can choose a parallel dimension on Earth.”

   “Right.  But you accept the fact you have a body, feel pain, don’t view things from a Higher Self, at least not much.  You deal with time.  You are obsessed with how and if people like you.  You don’t know you’re a dope.  Not much.  But it can be fun.  Unless the fucking world is ending and you’re going to have crazy mobs in the street.”

   “So the world crisis is going to be driving it,” I said.

   “That’s right.  That’s what Alexander knows.  He has think-tanked it all.  With the spooks and military intel types.  He’s an authority on global systems collapse.  That’s why he’s there with them.  They know he can be a ditzy New Ager, but he’s one of the few people on Earth who have researched every catastrophe, natural disaster, famine, invasion and learned how people behaved -- and when they cooperated, which wasn’t much.”

   She texted Alex, “Did u let the cat out?”  I laughed.  “It’s our litle code for: gotta meet.”  She further texted: “Will have friend with me.”  She said he would know what that is.  Me.  They had a rendezvous point, if none were stipulated: Fort Point, under the Golden Gate. 

   We were standing at the chain railing, watching the Bay, whose lappings also covered up a lot of chat, if needed.  Alexander rolled up and came to the railing about 30 yards from us.  He set down his phone, qued to a vid, which Loli wandered over and started.  It was Mercedes Chen.  She said her name and the date, holding up a Chronicle with that date on it, which only meant she couldn’t have recorded this before that date.  She said she had achieved IDT, found a nicer place to live, could actually live there.

   “It has a big sea and I love it there.  They don’t have any war.  They are beings of higher consciousness.  I have met Merlin.  He really existed, by the way.  He is teaching me.  I want my body, that is, the old body, fed to the sea.  I have asked Alexander -- who showed me IDT -- to chop it all up and feed me to the fishes.”  She actually laughed.  “You have no idea how happy I am about this.  I really appreciate you, Alexander (he was obviously shooting the vid) for doing this and I give you my full permission.  I will die naturally after a week or so.  My body will get very dehydrated and lose interest in breathing.  It gets bored.  I have seen others do this.”  She threw Alexander a big kiss and ran up and hugged him, part of which got on the vid. 

   We wandered close to Alex, as unobtrusively as possible.  He laid a tiny chip on the railing.  “It’s all in there, if the cops need something,” he said.

   “Do you mind if we talk a minute, Alexander?”

   “I think we’re ok for now.  Make it brief.  I know who you are and what you mean to our friend here.”

   “How bad is it going to get?  I mean both with nature and our reaction to it?”

   “Very bad, the worst, with both.  The most extreme in history.  There’s never been a climate change caused by life on Earth and here it is -- and there’s never been a species on Earth who is nuts and here that is.  The perfect storm.  Also, the aliens are on the rag and we have no idea what they will do.  Humans are unpredictable and unfeeling but aliens even more so, though they are not lustful, greedy savages, I mean for sex and riches. They’re kinda dumb but kinda persistent.”

   I looked over at Loli.  Did she know about all this?  She shrugged with a whatcha-gonna-do look.  She did know all about it.  Of course.  She knew Alexander.  The shit was going to hit the fan bigtime in all the worst ways you can imagine.

   “Well, let me ask you,” I said, “are you gonna stick around for it or blow this popstand?”

   He smiled at the image.  “Not decided as yet.  I am, like you and her, an old soul and have done lots of, um, dimensions.  This one, to me, is the most fascinating, as it’s the least predicatable and offers the most vast stage for heroism, creativity, imagination.  It’s a freakin rodeo.  Would you rather go to a rodeo or a poodle dog show?”

   All of a sudden, I got it, the whole picture.  The Earth may be burdened with time.  It may be drowning in lies and ego.  But it had that one thing, freedom and, amazingly, that was the totem of America, this country we live in.  I thought of Mercedes, who had given up her life for a dimension of visionary clear light and understanding and suddenly I felt sorry for her.  I felt her act was the act of a younger soul, not a juvenile soul, but certainly one in the mid-stages, where you want certain knowledge and room to relax and think you knew something. 

   I turned to Loli.  “Why, babe, why didn’t you choose to stay in Camelot or Paleo Africa?  Why did you come back here?  Why?”

   “What he said.  I like the greatest unknown, even while I may have great knowing.  I came back here to love you.  I don’t give a fuck if the world goes down the shitter.  We certainly begged for it.  Let’s enjoy it.  Why the fuck did YOU come back here?”

   “I came back here for...”  I really had to make sure I beleived this.  “I came back here for you.  I came here to love you and do it in this, the most real of all dimensions, even if it’s strapped with time, ego and amazing greed and idiocy.  I had to fight for you where there’s a chance of losing you.”

   “He’s fast,” said Alexander to Loli.  “He’s a keeper -- and I see you’ve been keeping him for many a millennia.  Good choice.  I have to get back to my think tank and do some thinking.”  He got in his car and left.

   “Are you going to help me save the world?” I asked her.

   “No, but I’m going to enjoy pretending I care.  What I really want is to tell Wayne he can go home now and we’ll see him tomorrow at work.  Then I want a bottle of syrah-tempranillo at my place with you.”

   “We?  You’re coming to work with me tomorrow?  What do you mean?  Aren’t you a therapist?”

   “Nah.  I just quit.  I’m tired of people’s problems.  I think I like detective work.”




                         ~  ~  ~









  

About the Author...

John E. Darling, MS, is a journalist, essayist and author in Ashland, Oregon.  He is the author of many consciousness books, collections of essays on consiousness, profiles of people he has done journalistic stories on in the area of consciousness and a book of New Spirituality and Dialog with Goddess. 

He has a master’s degree in counseling and was a therapist for several years, as well as leader of seminars in past-life regression, self-hypnosis, rebirthing, Loving Relationships Training, Prosperity Consciousness and Men’s Work. He is a graduate of est, LRT, Rebirthing Training, Hypnosis Clearing House, Dick Sutphen Regression, Wings and many other seminars.

He worked in television news, teaching journalism and psychology at Southern Oregon University, worked many years in the Oregon legislature and on campaigns for Oregon governor and US Senate.  He is a native of Michigan, graduate in history and English from Michigan State University and was a journalist in the US Marine Corps.  He has been a daily journalist with The Oregonian (Portland), the Mail Tribune (Medford), the Ashland Daily Tidings and KOBI-TV News in Medford.

He has written many documentary TV programs, including “Crater Lake: Mirror of Heaven,” presented on PBS.  Hundreds of his essays have been published in Oregon.  He is the father of grown children and has lived in Oregon since 1967.