Perfect killer

CHAPTER 73

Rex drove us south through the night, the headlights of his truck chasing ideas for a plan that rose and vanished like wisps of road fog. I sat next to Jasmine in the backseat, holding her hand, thinking about how to rescue Talmadge, grab the documents, get them to the media.

Rex had an abundance of unconventional resources and ideas and spun one scenario after another. All of these involved rebar, ropes, breaking and entering, safety harnesses, aircraft hijacking, and numerous other criminal acts no sane person would ever consider "When the going gets insane, the insane get going," Rex kept saying.

I didn't argue because insanity had saved my life way too many times in the past. Along with outright lunacy, all our plans required the illegal appropriation of someone else's property, the fastest, most untraceable way to acquire the materials we needed. No matter what we needed, Rex seemed to know where to steal it. Thus, from one scenario to another, a plan developed, much like constructing a vase out of whatever shards were at hand.

During the lulls when the planning discussions fell silent, dark, swirling waters backed up in my head with thoughts of the quick and the dead. I thought of the recently dead-Camilla, Jay Shanker, Chris Nellis-and the incredible loss their absence would cause.

Their deaths not only gouged out holes of love and dependence in the lives of the living, but also deprived the world of the remarkable body of knowledge they had wrested from ignorance, thought by thought. Knowledge was just a different memory. Where did they go? I asked myself again. And did we go there too?

The question gnawed at me during the dark silences connecting Phillipstown, Mayday, Quofaloma, Midnight, Panther Burn, Zelleria, and a score of other lonesome settlements embedded in the Delta darkness. I could not shake my preoccupation with the intriguing theory of Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, who think our consciousness arises from a quantum mechanism that alters the very woof and weave of space-time, or that of Hameroff's colleague David Chalmers, who feels we will eventually discover consciousness as a fundamental building block of the universe.

From there, I had no trouble thinking of consciousness as an inscription in spacetime or imagining how those inscriptions could directly affect consciousness.

For me, this begged a connection to the Hindu concept of maya, which says we are a grand illusion of God, and which, to my way of thinking, squares with Genesis, which tells us the world was without form, then God created the heavens and the earth. So, if we live in a world created by God out of nothing, there's no reason we shouldn't view our lives and everything in the world as "real," just as God intended. But I don't think we should be surprised when we dig down deep enough into the fundamentals of existence to find God created it all out of the infinite everything of nothing.

I fell asleep thinking about this. I didn't dream about whether love endured, but recognized it as one of those unknowable things the soul did.