Evidence for the Eternal

© 1999 H. David Blalock
All rights reserved.

"When did you start hearing the voices?"

Robert Exeter stared out the window that screened the psychiatrist's office from the building standing within twelve feet of where he sat. He could see himself in the pane's reflection, a silhouette in shadow and light superimposed on the outside world.

"Mr. Exeter?"

He snapped back into the office. "I'm sorry. What?"

"You came to me saying you were bothered by voices. When did you start hearing them?" Dr. Ellen Stuart repeated. She tapped her pen against her desktop idly, her green eyes watching him closely from below graying hair bound in a tight bun. Exeter smiled apologetically. He had a nice smile, one that actually reached his eyes. She was so used to people who smiled insincerely that it often took her by surprise when she met someone who genuinely smiled. Exeter's folder might have said he was over sixty, but his whole being seemed younger. Her first impression had been he was just under forty. The clean-shaven face, the mane of jet-black hair untouched by gray, the grace of a man half his age, all combined to give him a much younger appearance.

"Bothered? I don't know if I'd call it being bothered. More like concerned. I guess I was about twelve when Andrew started talking to me," he told her. "Martha first spoke to me on my twenty-fifth birthday. As for the others, well," he shrugged, "I really can't say. Some I think I've heard since I was little, others I'm just now starting to hear."

She frowned at him and switched to tapping her front tooth with the pen. "So, you're hearing new voices now," she prompted.

He nodded. "Oh, yes. Almost daily. Yesterday, a voice introducing itself as Doug spoke to me," he went on. "He's different than any voice I've heard so far. I guess I've been expecting to hear from him, or someone like him, though."

"Really? How?"

Exeter was struggling for the right words. Dr. Stuart waited patiently as he stood and began to pace the length of her office, his long legs striding quickly back and forth.

"He's more knowledgeable than the others," he went on, as if not hearing her question. "He seems better informed."

"About what?"

Exeter waved his hands vaguely. "Everything. Especially about me."

Dr. Stuart nodded. "And that makes you uncomfortable," she suggested.

He stopped pacing and looked at her blankly. "No. Why should it?"

The psychiatrist shifted in her seat. "Well, some people feel it's an unacceptable invasion of privacy for someone to know so much."

Exeter resumed pacing. "Oh, no. It doesn't bother me. It's just, he seems to know so much, but he won't tell me the things I want to know."

"Things...?"

"Well, like, do I ever win the lottery? How successful will I become?" He seemed drawn again to the window. "When will I die?"

"Excuse me, but I have to ask," the doctor interrupted. "How is Doug supposed to know all this?"

Exeter smiled at her and walked to the window to look outside. For a long moment he stood quietly watching. "There's something I haven't told you, doc."

"Yes?"

"These voices I hear—Andrew, John, Martha, Robert, Phillip, even Doug ---they're all me."

Dr. Stuart scratched a note. "Excellent. I think we're making definite progress, Robert. That you realize these voices are internal is a major step."

"It's not just that they're internal, doc," Exeter stopped her. He stepped away from the window and regarded her silently for a moment before walking to the desk and sitting on its edge. "Do you believe in reincarnation?"

Exeter's question took Dr. Stuart by surprise, though she would never admit it. As a matter of fact, she was a recent Hindu convert, something she had not discussed with any of her patients. She was still concerned that such a revelation might lose her some of her more conventionally minded clients. She had an anxious moment wondering if Exeter was toying with her, seeing how she might react at his knowledge of her secret. But then Exeter was going on as if the question were already answered.

"I'm not sure I do, myself, but..." He stopped and picked up a ballpoint pen from her desk. "Let's say you have a man. His name is Joe." Exeter indicated the pen. "Is what makes up Joe on the outside or the inside, or is it a combination of both?"

She looked at the pen and back to him. "What do you think?"

Exeter smiled at her question. "Don't want to commit, eh? Can't say I blame you." He gazed at the pen for a moment, as if considering its existence. "When Joe dies," and here he unscrewed the barrel of the pen, parting it into its components and removing the ink cartridge, "is that the end of Joe? When the outside expires, does the inside go with it?" He looked at the ink cartridge closely. "If the inside doesn't go with it, if it really existed, where did it go?"

She watched him as he pondered his own question. It was obvious he was performing something he had done several times before. For himself? For someone else?

He finally seemed to come to a conclusion. "It goes back into itself, doc. It returns to itself and then finds a new—outlet, if you will."

"You're talking about transmigration of souls, the movement of a soul from body to body through multiple lifetimes," she said. "Reincarnation, transmigration, they're pretty much the same essentially."

He raised at eyebrow at her cynically. "Do you have another pen?"

It took her a second to grasp the question, then she opened the center drawer and pulled out another ballpoint to hand to him. He quickly broke it open and slipped the first pen's ink cartridge inside the barrel, then regarded the two brass tubes sticking out of the barrel.

"Don't all pens come with an ink cartridge already installed?" he asked her.

She caught the inference. "You think that these voices you're hearing are the dead trying to inhabit your body?" she asked quietly. It was possible Exeter was more ill than she had realized.

Exeter frowned at her, then his eyes wandered away to the window again. "Well, yes and no."

"Yes and no?"

He hefted his weight off the desk and walked to the window. She couldn't help noticing that he seemed drawn to the window the way a moth is drawn to a flame, seemingly without the will to stop. She was suddenly aware of the six-floor drop to the alleyway outside. With an effort, she kept to her own seat. It wouldn't be wise to precipitate something he might not actually be considering.

"They are all me, past and present, and now, in Doug, future. Doug is me, or that part of me that is not physical, but in the future."

Dr. Stuart thought about that for a second, then made a note of it. It could be an indication of a coming crisis. When she looked back at Exeter, he was gazing out the window again. She knew she should wait until pressure of speech prompted him to resume the conversation, but then she knew that wouldn't work. He seemed to carry on a continual internal dialog with his voices.

"Mr. Exeter?"

He seemed to come back from far away and politely turned to her.

"How do you think it's possible that Doug should be in the future and here as well?" she asked.

Exeter's forehead creased and he seemed to listen for a moment. "Bilocation," he said at last. "There have been many reports of people seeing loved ones at the moment of their death hundreds of miles away. Bilocation negates time as well as space." Again he was drawn to the window. "The evidence of the eternal," he murmured. Standing, he approached the glass.

Unreasoning anxiety brought Dr. Stuart out from behind her desk to place herself between him and the window.

"Robert, I'm having a little trouble sorting this out," she said, putting a bit of pressure on his forearm to move him away from the window. "What do you mean by 'evidence of the eternal'?"

He didn't resist her guiding him across the room to sit by her desk. He seemed not to notice either her nervousness or his own actions, staring vacantly ahead.

"What does it mean, 'eternal'?" he asked the air before him. "How do we conceive time? We see a linear set of cause and effect events and call their order 'time.' We mark the relative motions of planetary bodies to calibrate that order. We use 'time' to calibrate, measure, and define 'time' without realizing how insubstantial it really is. It remains merely a description of a perception, not a reality."

She knew he was lost in thought, voicing his ideas, possibly momentarily unaware of her presence. She knew better than to interrupt. Such a monologue could be very revealing.

"'Eternal' is better, I think," he went on. "It infers no structure, encompasses all 'time' and perhaps a little more—past, present, future, what preceded the past, what succeeds the future. All at once in existence. All at once." He came back to the room and cast about until he saw her. "That's what I'm talking about, doc. The eternal is what really exists, not just what we define as existing. And Doug, Robert, Martha, Andrew— they're all parts of the real me, not just the part others define as me. I'm not just Robert Exeter. I am eternal."

Megalomania? Dr. Stuart thought. Perhaps he was losing his grip on reality and replacing it with one of his own invention. One question should touch that possibility, expose its core. "And what about God? How does God fit into that?"

"What about God?" he repeated, turning the question over in his mind. "He is eternal, the Creator of all things—"

"But, if you are eternal..."

Exeter's eyes widened and he looked sharply at her. "I don't believe I'm God, if that's what you're trying to say."

Dr. Stuart nodded encouragingly. "Good, good."

He snorted. "I'm trying to carry on a discussion with my analyst," he mumbled. "Of course she'll analyze everything to death. Why should she listen?"

"Robert, it's my job."

"I know, I know," he waved her defense away. Sighing, he passed a hand through his hair. "It's just, I have no one to talk to. I'm a bachelor, living alone. My job keeps me traveling, so I haven't time for a social life. Hell, I barely make it to these appointments with you." He lapsed again into silence.

"Couldn't it be that the voices are simply substitutes for the companions you lack on the outside?" she suggested at last.

He thought about that for just a second. "If the voices are internal, doesn't that still mean they're me?"

She was caught short at that. "I don't think that answers my question," she scolded.

"But it does."

She saw that Exeter wasn't disposed to continue that line of reasoning and felt she might have entertained his delusion too long. She might have lost him altogether, but she certainly could expect little fruitful exchange now. Looking at her watch, she noticed with dismay there were still more than twenty minutes of the session to go. Worse, he had seen her steal the glance at the time.

"Should we stop for the day, doc?"

She sat down at the desk and put her chin in her hand, elbow on the tabletop. He watched her for a moment, then his eyes wandered toward the window.

"What's out there?" she wanted to know. "You keep looking out the window. Are you looking for something?"

He blinked and shook his head. "I guess you could say I was looking at something."

"What's that?"

"Doug told me he passed after falling from a window."

She worried her pen in her hands. "Doug? But, isn't Doug supposed to be in your future?"

Exeter nodded, never taking his eyes from the window. Dr. Stuart regarded him silently. It would make a kind of sense, she supposed. She had assumed Doug was a living person in a kind of telepathic link to Exeter—in his delusion, of course. Once again, making assumptions had put her behind the curve. He was ahead of her.

"It's a little weird," he nearly whispered, "knowing that, looking at the window. I wonder if—" He gasped suddenly and she saw him grab the arms of his chair as if startled.

"Yes?"

Exeter turned a face bright with sudden enlightenment to her. He fairly beamed. "I know now why the voices talk to me, doc. I know why, of all the manifestations of my eternal being, I was picked to hear them."

A sudden dread filled her and a chill ran along her spine. She swallowed. "And why is that, do you think?" she asked in as steady a voice as she could muster.

He was pulling away from her now, mentally and physically. His voice deepened in timbre as he spoke, echoing oddly in the office. "People who have near-death experiences talk about the bright light, the sense of peace they encounter. I understand that now. I feel that."

She clutched her pen until her knuckles whitened and her jaw dropped at what she saw.

Exeter was transforming.

A pale blue light grew around him, forming an aura that flickered, then glowed stronger. The thick black hair whitened until it flowed around his head like a halo of snow. His eyes, burning with a calm yellow flame, found the window as he rose and wafted toward it. Dr. Stuart, stunned, sat helplessly, unable to believe what she knew she was seeing.

"Doug isn't supposed to die that way, doc," Exeter's voice came to her, reverberating subliminally in her mind. The conversational tone of the words contrasted to the supernatural vision. "I am." There was no fear in this assertion. It was a simple statement of fact, made in the same tone one might remark about the weather. "But by doing this, I ensure that my eternal being will reach its goal."

The question rose in her mind unbidden, but before she could utter it, he answered.

"To reach out and touch God, to find Perfection, to attain the Ultimate." His eyes seemed to reach into her soul, resonating against something that quickened under their scrutiny. In that instant, she felt more vulnerable than she had ever been. He was inside her mind, not an invader, but an observer. He took in everything she was in a glance, understood her in a depth at once inhuman and beneficent. He flashed her that quick smile. "Nirvana, if you will. I am so close. Just the awareness of that closeness is so sweet—"

She almost cried out as he stepped through the window and disappeared.

The quiet that was left in the room settled slowly as she tried to adjust to what had happened. She shook her head and looked around. Exeter was gone, that much was certain. How much else she had actually seen in the last few seconds, she wasn't sure. She stumbled to the window and leaned out. On the pavement in the alleyway six floors below she could see Exeter's broken body. She clasped a hand over her mouth and turned away, closing her eyes to shut out the image.

"Do not mourn for him," a voice whispered in her ear.

Her eyes popped open and she snapped around, looking for the source of the voice. She was alone in the room.

"Hello, Ellen," the voice came again. She felt it just behind her ear, knew it was impossible, but could not stop it. "My name is Rachel."

Dr. Stuart began to scream.

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