harles Rowe stopped seeing patients. He was getting old. He could feel his passions waning. His appetites were diminished.
In a corner of his study, Professor Rowe had accumulated box after box of papers. These comprised his manuscript. He did not re-read. He did not revise. He just continued to produce page after page, thought after thought, dissertation after dissertation.
His works were not published. He referred to them as “my book,” but he had approached no publisher. His writings were not divided into sections or chapters. They were not typed. These days, he spent eight or ten hours each day in the study, writing.
He wrote about God. He wrote about the soul. He wrote about death. He wrote about birth. He wrote about life. He chronicled the many gifts of his daughter, Charlotte, detailing her spirit communications and séances. He commented in infinite detail on these.
“The messages we receive through Charlotte are anything but simple. They form a complex and interweaving pattern representing layers upon layers of meaning and reality.”
Through Charlotte, Professor Rowe attempted repeatedly to contact his wife, but this was never successful.
“I believe,” he wrote, “that Charlotte’s personal and biological connection with her mother prevents or inhibits the flow of communication from the next plane. The spirit of the parent is in some way continuous with the spirit of the child. This spiritual connection should indicate a closeness of the deceased to their offspring after death. We see this happen all the time. Spirits of departed ancestors hover over the shoulders of surviving children. Close relatives who die appear in dreams to their survivors. So why would a close relative be inhibited from appearing to a mediumistic child?”
Professor Rowe wrote pages detailing such inconsistencies, looking here for the explanations that would bring everything into focus. Throughout a six-month period, he searched transcripts of Charlotte’s trances and copies of her automatic writings for hidden messages. He tried significant numbers as code keys, setting letters in rows three, six, seven, nine, and thirteen across. By taking a particular transcript, arranging the letters in thirteen-letter rows, and reading the columns from bottom to top and right to left, using only every thirteenth letter, he found the message:
“Only you forget.”
This code or pattern did not reveal any other message in any other transcripts. He tried similar codes with no result. He began using random-numbered patterns to arrange letters and found that, by subtle manipulations, he could spell any message he wanted to.
“Which is the correct message?” he wrote. “There are hidden meanings in the very letters, the minutest details of Charlotte’s trances. Without the key, I can’t tell the real messages from the false. Maybe they are all real messages. They all belong. Maybe they all form a code, and that code will unearth the true, final message.”
For the last ten weeks of his life, Professor Rowe did not leave his study.
“I am getting close,” he wrote. “I can feel it in every bone of my body. I see now that the strength of my earthly passions interfered with my attempts to break through the mysteries of the universe. We are so attached to this plane! We can’t let it go. We can’t deny it. Everything we do brings us back to the material. As I get older, I find that my material desires are waning. My material existence is becoming more tenuous. I have lost much of my interest in sex. I have lost my desire for food. The pleasure of wine is not such a pleasure for me anymore. When I was young, I believed that the pleasures of the flesh were ethereal in components. Now, I come to realize that these pleasures are deceptive. Their attraction is the attraction of the material. As I age, I come nearer to death. Death is the gateway to those mysteries of the spiritual that I explore. Therefore, I am becoming more spiritual. I am coming closer to the answers. I am coming closer to you, Miriam. It has been so long that we have been separated, so long that we have been apart, I am just waiting to be with you again. I am just waiting to see you, to feel your hair. There, that is my madness. I only think of you in terms of the material. I see! I hear! I feel! In the spiritual world, I will be blind and deaf. My senses fade on this plane as I grow old. I wait for them to be replaced by something new. I cannot imagine my new senses. Sometimes I believe that the only thing that prevents me from crossing over is my inability to imagine my other senses. My material senses must all drop away first. My material senses must cease to be real for me before my new senses will take over.”
Seven months before his death, Professor Rowe began to build a sensory deprivation chamber. He did not have that name for it, but that is what it was. He placed a great tank in the middle of his study, filled halfway with water. It latched closed in total darkness. His difficulty was that he needed to allow air into the tank without letting in light. After some consideration, he created a triple-layered top for the tank. The inside layer had openings at the sides for air to pass through. The middle layer had openings in the top. The outer layer had openings in the sides again. This provided a maze that air passed through easily, but that stymied light.
Once the tank was constructed, Professor Rowe inscribed it with symbols and coded messages in an intricate design. This, he painted over with black paint. Again, he decorated the tank with loops and whorls of letters and symbols. Again, he obliterated his work with black paint. He added yet a third layer of transcription, this one more overt, describing his intentions and, most of all, his questions. He had many questions. Why does every answer I discover open ten new questions?
The Professor’s first experience in the tank was fourteen weeks before his death.
He stripped all of his clothes and sat in the water with the lid open until his body was accustomed to the temperature of the water. After a while, he could barely feel it against his skin. He lay back and waited again, letting his mind go, letting his ears adjust, letting his hair soak. He closed his eyes, and he could feel that he was getting close to the truth. He hated to disturb himself in order to close the lid, but he roused himself, pulled the lid shut, and latched it.
At first, he was aware of lying there in the darkness. He could not stop thinking about being inside the tank. There he was, in the tank. The tank was around him. The water was lapping against him. Everything was dark, but his eyes strained to see what he knew was there, the metal lid, the latch, the air opening on the sides of the innermost lid. If he stretched his hand out, he would touch it. The metal would be cold. The desire became nearly irresistible, to stretch his hand out, to touch something. He restrained himself. Unconsciously, his arm twitched. The motion sent waves rippling through the water. Waves lapped up against his skin, giving him a feeling of chill.
He concentrated on remaining perfectly still. He tried to let his mind drift. He recited to himself the questions that he wanted to answer.
Where are you, God? What do you want from us?
He could not afterward pinpoint the moment when his train of thought stopped. His mind went blank. The blankness around him was an extension of his mind. His mind extended outward to the nothingness. The nothingness extended inward to his mind.
From far away, he perceived a force, an energy. It was moving slowly towards him. It wanted to join him. It had a message for him. It wanted to tell him— It wanted to tell him— The message was almost within his grasp. If he could only strain a little harder, he would know what it was. If the figure could only be a little closer.
“Daddy?” The lid of the tank rose, and light streamed in on him. The figure was gone. The message was gone.
Professor Rowe blinked his eyes.
Charlotte looked down at him.
“How long has it been?” he asked.
“Three hours,” she said. “You told me to get you after three hours.”
He sighed. “It seemed like only minutes,” he said, lifting himself out of the water and wrapping a towel around his body. He was cold.
Charlotte had brought him a robe, and he slipped into it. “I thought that three hours would be enough.”
He extended his stays in the chamber and chronicled all of his experiences there. He never again encountered the being who came so near to him during his first trial, and he never recaptured the feeling that the answers to his questions were so close.
His accounts were most typically like this:
“I was in a garden, a vast and beautiful garden, filled with the smell of soil, of grass, of leaves, of blossoms. There were no lights, so I could see nothing, but I swear that I could sense every blade of grass. Miriam was there, and she gave me an apple. The apple was full of light. It glowed. It was the only light in the garden.
“I took a bite of the apple. It had no taste, but inside there was a worm. I dug the worm out of the apple and put it on a piece of paper. The worm was white and smooth, about two inches long. I gave it a piece of the apple to eat.
“The worm created a second worm, a fuzzy white worm of about the same length and thickness. Then, these two worms created a third worm. I became afraid that the worms would crawl onto me, and I dropped the piece of paper onto the grass. The worms began to multiply. They created smaller and smaller worms. The grass was infused with them; these little white strands of creeping flesh were everywhere.
“This is interpreted through my mind.
“Is it any more clear or meaningful than a dream?
“Have I only discovered another way to dream?”
Professor Rowe became frustrated with his experiments, as he had with many more experiments before. He felt that only his first attempt had shown true promise.
“Why? What condition or factor opened a door that is now closed to me?”
Ten weeks before his death, Professor Rowe confined himself to his study. Charlotte brought trays of food every mealtime. He refused to open the door to her, waiting until she left to slip the sustenance inside. He wrote incessantly.
One day at lunchtime, Charlotte came downstairs and found the breakfast tray still lying on the floor. There were ants crawling over it, retreating in a thin black line to a chink in the wall.
She knocked on her father’s door.
“Father?”
There was no response. She knocked again.
“I’ve brought your lunch.”
Charlotte turned the knob on the study door and found it unlocked. She pushed the door open, calling again:
“Father?”
Inside, she found him. He was sitting in his large desk chair, his arms resting casually on the desk. In his hand, he held a pistol. The bullet had gone straight through his skull, and gore was splattered across the back of the chair and onto the wall.
On the desk below Professor Rowe’s hand was a stack of papers. Charlotte looked at her father’s face. It looked thin and worn and drawn, but peaceful. His eyes stared at her, but they were empty.
Charlotte pulled the stack of papers gently from beneath the corpse’s hand. She read through these papers. They chronicled in detail the last ten weeks of Professor Rowe’s life. They ended with the question: Why?
Charlotte gathered kindling and firewood. She arranged these in the hearth and lit them. The study was cold, and she stood in front of the fire for a moment, warming herself. Then, she took Professor Rowe’s papers and began to burn them. She burned the papers he had worked on at his desk, and then she pulled out the boxes of manuscript that sat in the corner.
Hour upon hour, with the heat of the fire assaulting her face and hands, Charlotte burned every remnant of her father’s work.
When Charlotte walked into her father’s study, the urge to read his manuscript was irresistible. It was like something outside herself goading her on. It was the voice of Nanette. It was the voice of the baby. It told her: here is the answer. He has done it. He has found the answer. Read it. You have to know.
She took the pages. They were stiff and yellowed. They made slight sighing noises as she gently moved them off the desk. Charlotte began to read.
There were notes about Melissa’s therapy. She read about Melissa. She read about Melissa’s dreams. She read about Melissa’s father. Charlotte read between the lines in a way her father had never been able to.
Then, Charlotte read about herself.
Charlotte read about her own dreams. She read things that had poured out of her mouth in thoughtless monologue, things that she had told her father just so that he could hear what he wanted to hear. She read about her own therapy sessions, and her own retellings of retellings of remembrances.
Charlotte read about the hypnosis sessions.
She read about the ones she remembered and the ones she didn’t remember.
As she read, she remembered.
On the day that Miriam Rowe died, she was churning ice cream in the kitchen. She spent hours each day alone in the kitchen, separated somehow from her family.
Charlotte never knew why her mother left the kitchen that day. Charlotte never knew for what reason Miriam Rowe came into to study that day.
The study door opened, and Miriam Rowe burst in, some question or excited comment on her lips. Whatever she planned to say never was said.
Professor Rowe was having a hypnosis session with Charlotte.
But he wasn’t having a hypnosis session with Charlotte.
The scene that Miriam Rowe saw shocking and unimaginable. Something in her mind and heart suddenly broke. Miriam Rowe began to scream.
Miriam screamed at Charlotte.
“It would be better if you were dead! It would have been better if you had never been born! It would have been better if I had ripped you out of my womb and killed you before you ever suffered this!”
Miriam screamed at Charles.
“You monster! I thought you were more than a man. I thought you were higher than a man. You are a monster! You are a base, earthly being! Why did I marry you? Why did I birth a child with you? What have you done? What have you done? There is no God, Charles! There is no God, not if you can do this.”
Miriam ran out of the study. Charlotte could hear her, still screaming at them as she went down the hall. Charles went after her, down the hallway.
Suddenly, the study was quiet.
Charlotte sat in the quiet study, unsure for the moment who she was or what was happening. She was not sure if she had been hypnotized. She was not sure whether something real had happened or not. She was sitting on the couch. She felt strange. She looked at the study. Was it a real place? Were those real books on real shelves on a real wall?
She rose quietly from where she sat. She adjusted her dress, feeling disassociated from her body, feeling far away and not herself at all.
Charlotte walked out of the study, with the feeling that she wasn’t walking at all. She seemed to be floating. Her body was moving, but it seemed to be out of her own control. Her head was light. Her head was so light that it was holding her up off of the floor, as she floated along towards something. Where was she going? She waited to find out.
Charlotte drifted through the house. It was quiet now. Everything was very quiet. Something had happened. What had happened? She looked down. Her feet were moving, one foot in front of the other, propelling her forward.
She expected, for some reason, to hear the sound of crying, but there was no sound.
Charlotte drifted into the kitchen.
There, in the kitchen, was a still and silent moment, frozen in time. There was no movement. On the floor, there was her mother. She lay, distended and distorted in an artistic way, in a pool of ice cream, strawberry ice cream. No, it wasn’t strawberry ice cream. It was just pink. It was pink with blood.
Swirls of blood wrapped into the ice cream, mingled with it, changing it.
Blood and ice cream mixed and pooled, flowed and splattered.
Charlotte’s father stood over this picture, also frozen, also unmoving. He stared at his hands, which were raised in front of his eyes. His hands were covered in blood. His hands were covered in ice cream.
Charles Rowe’s hair was matted. His face was frozen in a moment of terror. His eyes were opened, and Charlotte thought, momentarily, that he had finally discovered the truth that he was looking for.
She seemed to stand and watch this tableau for an infinite amount of time. As she watched, the silence was broken by the tick-tick-tick of her father’s pocket watch.
The watch was in Charles Rowe’s pocket, and it imposed itself into the silent scene. Tick-tick-tick.
Charles Rowe seemed to hear the watch, as well. He took it out of his pocket and looked at it. Tick-tick-tick. Time was passing. Time was always passing.
Charlotte’s father took the watch out of his pocket. He looked at it, and then he turned to his daughter.
“Charlotte,” he said. He held the gold pocket watch in his hand. He held it by its chain. He held it out to Charlotte as if it were an offering. “Come, Charlotte,” he said. He removed her from the kitchen, removed her to the next room, where there wasn’t the sight of her mother’s body or the smell of bloody ice cream.
Charlotte’s father held the pocket watch up in front of Charlotte’s face. He began to twirl it in his fingers, so that the gold surface turned round and round in front of Charlotte’s eyes. The gold chain and the gold watch reflected light, in small sparkles that dazzled the eyes.
“Charlotte,” her father said. “Charlotte, listen to my voice. Charlotte, don’t think of anything but the sound of my voice. Don’t look at anything but the pocket watch. See how it turns in the light? See how it casts reflections, rhythmically, with the rhythm of time passing. Each second as it passes is the same amount of time. The seconds passing create a rhythm. The light on the watch creates a rhythm. The rhythm is the passing of time. The rhythm is life. It is the rhythm of the soul. Listen to my voice, Charlotte. Listen to the sound of my voice.
“You are very relaxed, Charlotte. There is nothing in your memory. There is nothing in the past. There is only the sound of my voice. You are very relaxed. The relaxation starts at your toes. It moves up your legs, up to your neck and out to your hands. Your fingers and toes are relaxed. Your head and neck are relaxed. There is nothing around you. There is nothing in the world. There is only you; there is only the present; there is only my voice.
“Your eyelids are feeling heavy, Charlotte. Your eyes feel full and strange. You feel like closing your eyes. You feel like going into a deep and relaxing sleep. Your sleep will help you relax. Your sleep will help you forget. You will go into a deep and relaxing sleep, a sleep with no dreams. When you are asleep, you will forget. You want to forget, and the sleep will help you forget. Listen to the sound of my voice.
“Charlotte, you will forget everything you have seen here. You will put it away from your mind. Charlotte, you will forget everything about this day. You want to forget, and you will forget. You will only know that you came running into the kitchen to get something to eat, and you found your mother on the floor, dead. You don’t know what happened to her. You don’t know what could possibly have happened to her. You want to forget, and you will forget. Listen to the sound of my voice.
“This will be your deepest, most suppressed memory. When you go to sleep, everything will change. When you go to sleep, everything you want to forget will cease to be. Everything will stop. Listen to the sound of my voice.
“You will never know what happened. You want to forget. Go to sleep, now, Charlotte.”
I don’t think it is true, when I went into my father’s study that day, that he had shot himself in the head. I think the gun was there, on a table maybe, just sitting somewhere.
I think my father had been performing experiments in sleep deprivation on himself. I remember something about it in his notes. I think I remember. I can’t check my memory, or reinforce it, because I burned his notes, didn’t I?
I think that my father had fallen asleep, fallen into a deep sleep, a deep and heavy and forgetful sleep. To sleep, all you have to do is close your eyes. All you have to do is let your eyes close, let your heavy lids fall closed. If you want to sleep, all you have to do is close your eyes.
I think he was asleep on his desk, passed out in front of his writing. I saw the piles of papers on his desk, and I picked them up to read. I picked them up to read the truth.
When I put the papers down, things were different.
When I put the papers down, my eyes were wide open.
I don’t think he was dead, yet. I think that I took the gun that was lying there. I didn’t even wake him up. I took the gun and held it to his head.
I think I shot him. I killed him, and the blood spattered all over the room. That’s when the blood spattered all over the room.
Then, I burned all of the papers, all of the evidence, all of the ice cream memories.
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