Entanglement (10 page)

He took a moment to bring himself back to the lonely present, to the reality in which she was no longer alive. Then he stood and walked over to Jack's computer screen, where he found an e-mail from Ernesto Olveiros, with the subject line “Charlie.”
Rubbing his eyes, Peter headed over to wake Jack.

Yet when he reached him, he hesitated for a moment, then went back and opened the e-mail himself.

It read:

Buddy, something's wrong. Charlie's unit still hasn't come back yet, and they're way overdue. We haven't been able to make radio contact, but will keep you posted.

Peter whispered, “Oh, God.”

Peter sat in a chair in the hallway, looking out the windows at the quiet school grounds outside.

At the far end of the hall, a janitor named Janice rounded the corner with her mop. Janice was in her 40s and had worked at the high school for almost as long as Peter had. She usually stopped to talk to him about her life, particularly since they tended to be the only ones at school on a Saturday, though today he was reluctant to engage her.

“Morning, Mr. Keller.”

“Morning, Janice,” he said in a voice that sounded subdued, even to him.

She gave him a second look, but plunged on anyhow. “How are the big ideas coming? You pull one of your all-nighters?”

Peter looked up at her with exhausted eyes and laughed ruefully. “You could say that.”

“Looks like it was a rough one, eh?”

“Yeah, I think I might have made a few miscalculations last night,” he said.

“Well, sorry to hear that,” Janice said, as she started to mop the floor around him. “Maybe you should go outside and take a walk. Get out into nature for a while. That usually helps clear the mind.”

Peter sat for a moment, looking at the floor, then up at her again. Janice had never said anything remotely like this to him in the past.

“Something wrong?”

He shook his head slightly. “No, no. Thanks, Janice. You're probably right.”

When she was gone, he opened the door and stepped outside on the school lawn, where he usually went only to smoke a cigarette. In fact, he had one in his palm right now.

The air was fresh from the drenching rain and smelled sweet and clean. Peter put the cigarette back in the packet and took a deep breath instead. A plain brown bird on an overhead branch made a long trill, as if calling to him. He didn't know the name of the bird, but that a creature so small and drab could produce such an elaborate song made something stir inside him.

After a few moments, he walked inside the school. Back in the classroom, he stood over Jack, who was still lying on the floor, deeply sleeping.

“Jack? Jack, wake up.”

Jack opened his eyes and sat up bolt upright to find Peter hovering in front of him.

“What's wrong?” he asked immediately.

Peter looked extremely uncomfortable.

“Listen, Jack. As much as I wanted this to work out, it wasn't my place—”

Jack interrupted, “What are you talking about?”

“It was wrong of me to have supported this idea.” He hesitated and tried a new tack. “Look, we all want to believe in magic and miracles—”

“Mr. Keller—”

Peter plunged on. “But sometimes the truth can be hard to take.” He hesitated again; every time he looked at Jack's face, he realized he was getting nowhere.

Jack said, “You know, I think you know a lot more about the heart than you give yourself credit for.”

“Look, I'm trying to tell you I'm sorry. For everything. For turning your situation into some kind of experiment, for getting your hopes up—”

“He's okay. Charlie's okay,” Jack said.

Peter studied Jack's face. He looked calm and self-assured.

“What?”

“He's okay.”

Peter asked, “How do you—”

Jack smiled. “I just know.”

Peter lowered his head; this made him feel even worse. “Oh, Jack. This is serious. There's something on your computer you should see.”

“From Charlie?”

Peter took a deep breath. Just as he was about to answer, there was the bleeping sound from the computer, signaling a Skype caller invitation.

Jack jumped to his feet and ran to the computer. On the screen was a Skype name list, and Charlie's name had changed from gray to green, from passive to active. A dialogue box popped up on the screen: “Charlie would like to open a video discussion.”

Jack looked over at Peter with a radiant smile.

“You had me going, Mr. Keller.”

Peter looked over at him, utterly confused.

Jack hit the accept button. On the computer, Charlie's face appeared and smiled into the camera. Except for his mussed fatigues and closely shaved haircut, he looked exactly like Jack.

“What's up with you, bro?” he said. “Half of Afghanistan told me I had to call you as soon as I came in. What's the deal?”

Jack's smile was radiant. ”Charlie, you ass, I thought something had happened to you! But you're safe. You're really okay?”

“Yeah, yeah. I'm okay.”

Behind Jack, Peter put a hand over his heart.

“What happened?” Jack asked.

“Classified, bro.”

“What's that mean?”

“Jack, classified means I can't tell you.”

On the other side of the world, Ernesto stuck his head into the video window.

“Jack, get your brother to quit acting like a macho shithead and tell you what a hero he is.” He playfully shook Charlie by the shoulders. “This dude's gonna get a freakin' medal.”

“C'mon, man. Tell me! I was terrified. You have no idea what kind of night I've had,” Jack said.

Charlie drank some water from a canteen and wiped his face with a handkerchief. He looked deeply into the Skype camera at his brother.

Then he said, “Okay, but this is just between us.” He leaned closer and lowered his voice. “Early this morning we got sent out to check out this village that was supposedly ambushed. On the way, there's an area with hills on one side. I was assigned to check out the ridge line. And I saw a coyote standing up there, and suddenly I thought of you. I had this flash of that camp we use to always go to as kids, remember? Coyote Camp?”

“Coyote Valley Youth Camp, man,” Jack said with a grin.

“Yeah! Thinking about it really made me miss my hippie brother.”

Jack beamed and looked over at Peter with a knowing, affectionate smile.

Charlie continued, “We spent hours around that village, looking for armaments, checking out rumors of a massacre. And as we were heading back to base, we passed the ridge again where I'd seen the coyote, and then I heard you, bro. I really heard you, calling me, warning me. Suddenly I had this
feeling
. You know?”

Jack nodded, his eyes damp.

Charlie said, “And then it hit me. There
aren't
any coyotes in Afghanistan. So I stopped the whole caravan, and everybody started cussing me out. And then we spotted it, up on the ridge line. Right where I thought I had seen that coyote, we saw this dude running off. Turned out he'd just planted an IED. If we'd gone three hundred feet forward—well, let's just say it wouldn't have been pretty, man.”

Jack took a deep breath, and he and Charlie sat for several minutes in silence, their heads bowed. To Peter, they almost looked as if they were praying.

Charlie was the one who eventually broke the spell. “So that's what happened. What's up with you, bro? Are you in some kind of laboratory or something?”

Jack didn't know what to say. He looked over at Peter, who nodded and said quietly, “We are.”

“So what did you want to tell me about when you called? Was there something specific?”

Jack rubbed his face and looked at Peter. “Nothing specific, man, just this feeling. It's over now. I have them all the time about you.”

Charlie laughed. “Yeah, I know. Me, too. Remember that time when Mom …”

Peter got up in the middle of what was turning out to be another story and left the brothers to reminisce as he walked outside to have a cigarette.

As he exited the building, he saw a line of bikers speeding by—the last was a woman with long black hair who raised her arm to wave as she disappeared around a corner. Peter was fairly sure that she was signaling to someone else nearby, but he chose not to look over his shoulder to verify this; for those few moments, he decided to be someone other than a scientist, to be a man receiving a final signal from his lover.

After he smoked his cigarette, he slipped quietly back into the classroom, where Jack and Charlie were still talking. He stopped at the pile of papers on his desk and began sorting them into two folders that had been impossible to see before—one marked “Current,” the other, “To File.”

Most were his own research papers, nearly ready for publication or review. All he had to do was retype them, stick them in envelopes, and mail them. He added Dori's manuscript, which he had ignored for so long, to the top of the “Current” file. And then he leafed through a pile of photos of Manuela, one after another, of her sitting in a café, smiling at him from various spots in his apartment, looking out at him with frank love across space and time.

Peter rearranged the stack and placed them in the “To File” folder, then shut it and turned to look at Jack, who was in the midst of retelling Charlie some childhood story that featured their grandmother. Peter, loath to interrupt, put the “Current” folder into his briefcase, slipped out into the hall, and quietly shut the door.

A quick calculation told him that Jack and Charlie were approximately 8,000 miles apart, but that didn't seem to make any difference. Just as his experiments had suggested so many years ago, they were still connected.

Outside, Peter turned into a northwesterly breeze as he dialed Dori's number on his cell phone. After a moment, an icon on his phone displayed two hands clasping together as the phone began to ring, and Peter waited for Dori to answer:
Connected
.

We all are,
he thought, filling his lungs with the pure scent of April.

He was more sure of it now than ever.

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHORS

Gregg Braden
is a
New York Times
best-selling author, a former senior computer systems designer for Marietta Aerospace and computer geologist for Phillips Petroleum, and the first technical operations manager for Cisco Systems. For over 26 years he has searched the remote monasteries of Egypt, Peru, and Tibet for the life-giving secrets that were encoded in the language of our most cherished traditions. His work has led to such pioneering books as
The Divine Matrix, Fractal Time,
and
Deep Truth.
Gregg's work is published in 17 languages and 27 countries and shows beyond any reasonable doubt that the key to our future lies in the wisdom of our past.

Website:
www.greggbraden.com

Lynn Lauber
is a fiction and nonfiction author, teacher, and book collaborator. She has published three books of her own with W. W. Norton & Co., as well as many collaborations with other authors. Her specialties include fiction, personal narrative, and self-improvement. Her essays have appeared in
The New York Times.
She has abridged audio books for such authors as John Updike, Oliver Sacks, Oprah Winfrey, and Gore Vidal.

Website:
www.lynnlauber.com

 

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