Coronado Dreaming (The Silver Strand Series) (10 page)

Giddeon seemed pleased. “Correctomundo. So, you can see that the universe is just billions and billions of points. Actually, an infinite number of points.”

“Sure.”

“Here comes the kicker. Let’s just take your geometrical center and call it a point, okay? Now, take the geometrical center of the closest star, Alpha Centuri. How far apart are these two points?”

“4 light years, more or less, if I remember correctly from high school.”

“That’s right… sort of. As long as you have an infinite number of points to measure from, that would definitely appear to be the case. Now, dissolve every other place in the universe except those two points. You’re back to your two options… they can be in the same place or ‘point’, or they can be separate.”

I thought that over for a bit. “And, if they’re separate, there really is no distance between them… they’re just separate?”

“Just like every other potential point in the universe would be to you,” he said, beaming like a proud teacher. “Remove all of the points except the one you’re interested in at the time, and it’s always the same… everything is right next to you.”

“So distance…”

We left the diner as I mulled over the metaphysical aspects of the universe, and together, we walked down the sidewalk bordering
Orange Avenue
. Giddeon was uncharacteristically silent as we crossed a side street and continued on. In front of Bayside Books, he paused and looked in the store from underneath the green canvas awning.

“Let’s go in here for a minute,” he said.

The door was open since the outside temperature and the inside temperature were identical… that happens a lot on
Coronado
. The smell of books was strong; I never really noticed it, before. I had been in there dozens of times in my old life, but I was only using 5.6 percent of my capabilities back then.

I followed Giddeon back to the far end of the bookstore to the section that contained ‘Philosophy and Religion’. He seemed to know exactly where he was going.

“Here you go.” He handed me a small, hardback book. There were birds on the front cover. ‘
Johnathan Livingston Seagull
’.

“I read this a long time ago… good book,” I said.

“Time to read it, again. It’ll only take a couple of hours.”

Shrugging my shoulders, I said, “Okay. I don’t really feel like playing more golf this afternoon, anyway.” I took the book from him.

“You go on back to the boat. I’m gonna hang here for a while,”
Gid
said as he turned his attention back to the wooden ledge where, of course, ‘
Johathan Livingston Seagull
’ was still shelved in the other reality. I saw him reach for a copy of ‘
Illusions, The Tale of a Reluctant Messiah
’, which was written by the same author. He then walked over and sat down in one of the two chairs beside a little round table nearby, and began flipping through the book. I made my way to the front of the store and past the pretty desk clerk without paying.

Just another advantage of coma surfing.

__________

Boris was waiting on the bed since Giddeon had left the door open a crack. He looked up, stretched, and then laid his head back down on his right paw, while gazing at me through sleepy eyes. His nictitating membranes halfway obscured the yellow-gold of his irises.

If there’s one thing cats know, it’s how to get comfortable… they seem to have perfected it compared to all of the other creatures on Earth. Nothing flows into soft surroundings and becomes one with the contours of a good spot quite like a cat. Then, when they’ve achieved absolute success in their endeavors, they announce it to the world and the rest of us stiff jointed beasts with such a look of satisfaction and relaxation that, if it wasn’t so comical, would induce envy enough to kick them straight away out of their bliss.

Of course, those beasts would have to actually be able to interact with them on a physical plane.

Since I was in a coma miles away from there, I didn’t even depress the mattress when I lay down next to him and opened my book. Boris yawned and flipped over on his back with all four feet in the air.

__________

I found myself enjoying the novella just as I did when I read it several years ago. The second time, however, it was a bit surreal… especially towards the middle and latter parts of the writing. Since I had recently gained a new appreciation for the fluidity of reality, the way that Jonathan and his mentors moved from place to place seemed eerily similar to the way me and my subconscious alter ego sampled fields of probabilities. I was so engrossed in the tale that I read it straight through. True to Gid’s prediction, I wrapped up my reading in two hours (I took quite a bit of time looking at the pictures) and closed the book. Boris hadn’t moved.

“No need for travel when you’re in a good spot, hey buddy?” I reached out for the cat. He rolled over, expecting to be ‘scratched’.

“That’s right,” replied Giddeon. I hadn’t heard or felt him come in, but, there he was, at the foot of my bed. “What did you think of the book?”

“Sounds like Richard Bach had his own Giddeon putting ideas into his head.”

“That’s kind of what I think, too. Maybe a breakdown in the firewall. Still don’t feel up to golf?”

“Nah… not really. We played this morning.”

“Even at
Pebble
Beach
?”

I looked at him quizzically, “For real?”

“As real as it gets, over here.”

I noticed he had on a golf glove. “That’s quite a drive… it’ll be dark when we get there.”

He took on a Chinese accent.
“Young grasshopper… did you not read the book?”

“I’m not a seagull.”

“That’s right… but, you are getting a little bored with playing the same course, aren’t you?” He was back to his normal Southern voice.

“Maybe a little, but there’s always ‘Sea and Air’ (the Navy course on the island). We haven’t played there, lately. I just don’t know how I feel about getting too far from my comatose body.”

Giddeon held up a hand and then imitated Yoda, as best I could tell. “
Everything’s here, it is. There is no far away
.” His voice was crackly, and he grunted afterwards, for emphasis.

“So am I Kwai Chang Caine or Luke Skywalker?”

He laughed. “You’re anyone you want to be.” He morphed into Obe Wan Kenobi, and then, back, again. “And, anywhere.”

I had seen the first tee on
Pebble
Beach
quite a few times on television, so I recognized it, instantly. The clean, cool ocean air came at us from the direction of the water, and the greens and blues all around were spectacular. I knew the scenery would only improve as we made our way along the holes bordering the Pacific. Of course, there wasn’t a soul on the course.

Not for the first time, I considered the possibility that I had indeed died and was in heaven, or at least an upper level of Purgatory. I wasn’t even Catholic like Father McCreeley, but, I supposed there could be such a place situated in the space between postulated reward and punishment.

Giddeon had his left hand up close to his nose and imitated the inflections from an old movie, “
I love the smell of glove-palm in the morning
.”

“You really should work on your jokes, dude… and, it’s after noon.”

“I thought that was pretty good… and
does anybody really know what time it is
?” Giddeon smiled as he teed up his ball. He took a couple of practice swings and promptly hit it 320 down the middle. “Nice change of scenery, eh?”

“Played here, before?”

“Oh, sure… I’ve got to do something with all of the spare time you give me. I don’t care much for reading message boards and watching re-runs of ‘
Two and a Half Men
’.

“Sorry. I’ll tune into ‘
Masterpiece Theater
’ more often if I ever make it back.”

Giddeon grinned as I then teed up. “I’ll settle for ‘
The Beverly Hillbillies
’… now,
that
was a show,” he said.

I hit a bit more of a fade than I wanted, but stayed in the first cut of rough about 285 yards away. A red-tailed hawk soared above us, and his shadow hugged the terrain of the course. “Are we really here?” I questioned my playing partner. “I mean, I’ve seen
Pebble
Beach
many times on T.V., but not in this kind of detail.”

Giddeon reached down, plucked a few blades of grass from the tee, and then let them loose in the breeze. “Feels real to me.”

“Looks real, too,” I observed. “Have you been to other courses?”

“Heavens, yes. Oak Tree, The Black,
St. Andrews
… the Nicklaus course in Cabo… I highly recommend that one, by the way.” We began walking off the tee, and then down the perfectly manicured links.

“So even if I’ve never seen them or read about them…?”

“Oh, I see what you’re getting at. You think that this is like virtual reality, and I have to have had exposure, through you, to the layouts in order to ‘reconstruct’ the settings.” Again, as he was prone to do, he put quotation marks in the air with his fingers as we strolled down the fairway. Maybe there’s a gene that’s responsible for that quirk, because me and my brother have been known to use our digits in that way, also.

“Something along those lines…”

“At first, yeah. Years ago. As I became more and more aware of the nature of reality, though, the parameters changed. I was no longer constrained by your experiences. Have you ever heard the term ‘
collective consciousness
’?”

“On that late-night talk station, ‘
Coast to Coast
’.”

He spun his driver into the air, where it glinted in the sunlight high above our heads and vanished. “There seems to be something to that… although ‘
collective sub-consciousness
’ might be a better description.”

“So… every place anyone has experienced…?”

“Is at your disposal,” Giddeon finished for me. “Reality requires observers, and we have plenty of those.”

“Any place on Earth man has been?” I inquired.

“And, some I don’t think we have. I suspect maybe bugs and birds and even things as small as protozoa contribute to the collective.”

“Wow… I never really thought about that.” We were silent for the next 20 paces, or so. Then, something occurred to me, “The moon?”

“Been there, done that. No t-shirt, though.”

“Bet you can’t wait for a manned mission to Mars.”

“We’ve already sent rovers… good enough.”

“For real?”

“Oh, yes… beats the heck out of ‘
Two and a Half Men
’, by the way. Don’t forget about Voyager 1 and 2.”

“Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune…?”

“Not only have I seen what’s inside your head, I’ve seen Uranus.”

He let out a guffaw at that one. I even smiled.

Giddeon continued, “Not much to Pluto, though. Poor little guy… so far away from everything… basically a lump of dirt and ice. It does have a couple of rock satellites to keep it company, though.”

We had come to my ball in the rough. I set my bag down and chose a 7 iron.

“So, the way Jonathan Livingston got around later in the book is not so far-fetched, after all?” I asked.

“Pretty close. It really has nothing to do with speed, though.”

I lined up my shot and hit a nice high approach to the middle of the green. The thick grass in the low rough had taken the spin off of the Callaway, however, and it rolled onto the frog-hair off the back.

“Not bad… you can par from there.” We continued on towards his ball and he continued on with his tutoring, “There’s no such thing as distance… or time, for that matter.”

“Oh, yeah…” I made a note to myself about time, and decided I would save that one for later. “What about everything the Hubble has seen… that’s observation… does that count?”

“I haven’t fully checked it out, yet, but I’m thinking it does. As a matter of a fact, I’m thinking consciousness may be universal… just like they talk about in quantum mechanics. Particles of matter may actually be making choices and ‘sentient’ in their own fashion.”

He removed a nine-iron from an invisible bag. I watched the shaft appear and grow as he ‘pulled’ it out… showing off a bit, I suspected. After a couple of practice swings, he hit it a few feet past the hole; the back-spin, however, brought it back to within inches… just below the cup and to the right. “Aw, heck…misread the break off of the backstop.”

He smiled, and I knew he was just ‘keeping it real’. The nine-iron disappeared from his hands.

“So, you can go anywhere?

“Looking that way… couldn’t before you showed up. Like I said, I seem to have a lot more horsepower with you around.”

“5.7 percent kind of put you over the top, huh?”

“Not much difference between escape velocity and crash and burn, if you want a rocket analogy.”

“Humph,” I grunted, and then thought everything over. Finally, I conjectured, “Maybe there’s intelligent life out there.”

“I hope so, ‘cause there isn’t much here.” He tilted one corner of his mouth upwards and scratched at his Brad Pitt stubble. “But, you’re right… it could be that ‘
collective consciousness
’ isn’t Geo-Centric… little green men and all of that.”

We walked towards the putting surface. I marveled again at the scenery around us. The temperature, of course, was perfect. After a hundred and forty yards of silence, we approached the green.

“So, what’s the best place you’ve ever been?” I questioned.

He walked up to the pin and removed it with his left hand. He tapped his Pro-V-1 into the hole with the Scotty Cameron putter in his right hand.

“The table where you met Melody at
Seaport
Village
.”

Our eyes met. A sad smile played with his lips. I turned my head and looked again at the views surrounding us. A formation of Brown Pelicans winged their way overhead, south, towards
San Diego
.

“Me, too.”