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 8. DANCING WITH DEMONSAlien consciousness was Dara’s business. He had devoted his career to searching for intelligent extraterrestrial life—at least as highly evolved as humans. If the dolphin in Hawaii was communicating as dramatically as the doctoral student had implied, then Dara could do worse than check it out. Perhaps, after all, alien intelligence was closer to home than distant stars or galaxies. “Bechtel was right, I could do with a break,” Dara mused as he cruised down Highway 1, just south of Half Moon Bay en route to Big Sur. Besides intense hours working around the clock, he was still trying to pick himself up from the ashes of a traumatic divorce. The separation had left him emotionally vulnerable. For the first time in his adult life, he had been faced with a problem he couldn’t solve with careful reasoning. Strong feelings had breached the solid structures of his intellectual defenses. A year ago, when his marriage was crumbling, long-buried ghosts from his childhood had come back to haunt him, overwhelming his usually clear rational mind with a hurricane of emotions. When Michelle had told him she was leaving, because she was “tired of living alone in relationship,” his ordered world of precise logic and mathematics began to unravel. Nothing in his science had prepared him for the emotional storm. The paradox slapped him in the face: Yes, his sharp mind had created the equations that helped him understand the universe. But there was no place in those equations for the mind that created them. Mathematics cannot capture or tame the fires of feeling. Now, as he breezed along the coast road, warm wind ruffling his hair, and music lifting his spirits, he began to feel more grounded, more at peace. The open vistas gave him a renewed sense of perspective, and he sensed a connection between his childhood emotions and his recent dreams—as if what was haunting might also help him. It was late afternoon, a hot October sun beamed in through the passenger window. The golden foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains slipped by on his left; to his right and up ahead, he could see the final fingers of the vast continent reach out into the shining blue Pacific. Beyond, and still out of sight, lay the majestic sweeping hills of the Big Sur coast—a place of beauty and mystery. Once past Santa Cruz, he shifted weight, pushed back against the padded leather seat, flipped to cruise control, and settled in for the ride. Taut muscles in his shoulders still held the weight of his recent past. He turned the radio off, rolled down all the windows, and let the sound and smell of the ocean envelop the car.
His mind drifted in a disconnected sequence of images and thoughts: from ocean waves to dolphins, to quasars, to mysterious emails, to his childhood . . . to Michelle, his ex-wife. He hadn’t wanted to see a therapist, he didn’t think they needed one. Why couldn’t they just figure things out for themselves? Seeing a therapist was tantamount to admitting you had lost control of your life, that your own mental resources were insufficient. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, accept that. But Michelle had persuaded him that the woman they would see was trained, scientifically, to deal with the dynamics of human relations, and so he agreed to go. He resisted at first, but eventually grew to like the therapist, and to trust her. He opened up, and after the marriage ended he continued seeing her on his own. She called his sessions “dancing with demons.” He learned a lot about himself, about how so much of his energy was tied up in his emotions, despite his best rational efforts to suppress them. He was determined to tame his demons, but she told him that that would happen only if he first respected and accepted them. Now, with the distance of a year, he was beginning to get a better perspective, and to understand what the therapist meant. He steered the Jeep around a line of plastic orange cones, moved into another lane, and drove past tanned workmen resurfacing the road near the Capitola exit. He thought about how, in therapy, it was possible to relive and confront his own past, to make peace with it rather than fight it. As a young child he had been very ill. Hospitalized for nearly a year, his infantile mind had conjured up the story that he was being punished for something—why else would they separate him from his family? He came to believe that he had been abandoned, that he was unlovable, that there was something wrong with him. Later, during his divorce, those childhood beliefs had sprung back to life with a vengeance: He had not fulfilled whatever purpose the long evolution of our species had expected of him. He was a misfit. Evolution is a process of trial and error, and sometimes makes mistakes. He, it turned out, was one of its dead ends. Nevertheless, the two-year-old kid had learned one important lesson: how to survive. In addition to the terror of being unwanted and unloved, he had constructed an ego strong enough to pull him through, strong enough later in life to bury the raw and incomplete emotions of a terrified and raging child beneath the rigid assurances of hard-nosed science. Strong enough to gain him two doctorates—in biology, and astrophysics. Strong enough to get him a senior role in NASA and the SETI team. But in therapy, he learned to see that unless he danced with his demons and made peace with them, he might well be doomed to repeat the emotional hell-fire over and over throughout his life. He feared he was running out of time. He felt it rushing past him, speeding up, contracting more and more with each passing year. As a child, and even as a young man, life seemed to stretch out before him endlessly, an unfolding panorama of infinite possibilities. Then, in quick succession, two events shattered that sense of boundlessness: the death of his father, followed by his divorce. The emotional impact snapped the elastic time of youth, and left him with a knot of torn and shriveled strands. Now he feared there wasn’t enough time to fulfill his dreams. The car shuddered as Dara shifted gears and accelerated to overtake a heavily loaded Mack truck, looming too close for comfort. Heart beating faster, he gripped the steering wheel to steady the Jeep in the crosswind. The adrenaline triggered a familiar anxiety: Would he end up spending his entire career searching in vain for extraterrestrial intelligence? In a universe so vast, the immense distances and time spans seemed to mock his feeble explorations. The odds were heavily stacked against first contact happening during his short eighty or ninety years. “I feel like I’m living in a bubble universe,” he had confided to the therapist. “A relatively tiny region only some eighty-light years across. Beyond that, the infinite stretches of the cosmos remain forever out of bounds, forever incommunicado. Almost the entire universe is out of reach. I can never be in contact with it. Never know what life or intelligence might be out there.” When she asked him what he meant, he explained: “Let’s say the average human life is about eighty years. Well, if all information depends on the transmission of light signals through space, as Einstein proved, then, at the fastest-possible speeds the only contemporary signals that could reach our planet during my lifetime would come from, at most, eighty-light years away. All the rest, from fifteen to twenty billion light-years distant, would arrive only after I’m gone. All I can hope to pick up are ancient signals from worlds that may have ceased to exist millions, or even billions, of years ago. That’s what I mean: cosmic isolation. No cosmic connection. No hope of making contact. No possibility of live intergalactic communication. All I will ever hear are dead messages—or worse, eternal silence. Yet I’ve dedicated my life to this search.” She had looked at him without saying anything, silently inviting him to feel his way into his own words. But he thought she was waiting for further explanation. “Most of the universe is ‘off limits’—we cannot know what is out there now! All we have are electromagnetic echoes of what used to be, a long, long time ago. We are confined, or condemned, to isolated event horizons, trapped in our ‘bubble’ universe.” He felt the isolation again now, sitting behind the wheel, shut in behind the windshield, a self-contained world speeding down Highway 1 past other people, trapped in their own bubbles of metal and glass, people whose stories he would never know. Fellow travelers forever out of reach. “Life is a series of glancing encounters,” he had said to the therapist, and he repeated it now to the passing traffic. “We glimpse only surfaces, never really touch each other’s deeper selves.” He was thinking of Michelle. “Relationships are like billiard balls: We bump into each other, make connections, and before we know it ricochet out of reach.” This feeling of alienation had been growing in him ever since his divorce. Coupled with the death of his father, his sense of isolation had collapsed into sharp focus. He recalled telling the therapist how one night the rapid-fire ticking of the desk clock inherited from his grandfather pounded on his nerves. He stared at the second hand jerking its way around the face, each insistent tick-tock snipping at his future. Time was slipping away. Without anyone close in his life anymore, the “bubble universe” was closing in. He had lost his wife because of his obsession with work, and now he feared it might have been all in vain. What was the point of wrecking his marriage and losing his family if at the end of his life all he had to show were a bunch of computer data and charts reminding him over and over of the eternal silences of space? He had grabbed the clock and flung it across the room. It hit the wall and shattered, spewing mechanical entrails on the floor. The image disturbed him: Yes, the clock had stopped ticking, but the end of time came only at the end of life—even clockwork life. The only way out of time was through the nothingness of death. As he dodged the sand dunes creeping onto the road near Monterey, he caught the eye of a passing driver, and realized he was speaking out loud. He shook off a momentary embarrassment, and continued his reverie, as if telling his tale to passersby would make a difference. He raced on in a kind of trance, overtaking cars and trucks, hardly noticing them. The speedometer pushed past ninety-five, and the quickening pace of his heart, revving in his chest, brought him back to his senses. He eased off the gas. Having to deal with his feelings in a mature, responsible way was, he thought, perhaps the most valuable lesson of his life. Yet, ironically, for the past year since his divorce, he had thrown himself headlong into his work at NASA. But something had shifted, he now realized. As he drove through Carmel, the sun was dipping behind the horizon, casting an ochre tint on the hills. He was beginning to see the difference between obsession and passion. He no longer felt totally driven by his work; devoted, yes, but starting to open up to something more. With the last outskirts of the Carmel Highlands behind him, and nothing but the curves of the open road ahead, he drove into the descending twilight. The looming hills of Big Sur beckoned. The pulse of city life and the pressure of the university had fallen away. He felt his shoulders relax and his chest expand as he filled his lungs with the evening air. He realized he was looking forward to meeting Maya, and learning more about her work with the dolphin Darwin. |
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