The Propagational Library (4): The Room

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From the journal of Gabriel Naude:

I had my first session in “the room” yesterday. Adrienne and Eldon say it may be the only session, not counting the “big” one. Depends on a lot of things, they say. Especially (a) how much power they can suck out of the electrical grid and (b) obviously, how soon Kali starts banging on the front door. We’ll see.

I’m still trying to get exactly what happened when they threw the switch. By “they” I don’t mean A&E, specifically, although they were there in the room when it happened. The person at the control panel was actually a research assistant, a grad student in neuroelectronics named Mary Reppola, according to the nameplate on her lab door. (The Lanes sometimes call “the room” MARY’S room, and they look at each other and laugh. I’ll never get the joke, I know that. Or 90% of the other jokes they have with each other.)

Anyhow. Mary Reppola threw the switch, and for a split-second I thought nothing had happened at all. In the next split-second I realized I was BOTH looking out through the plexiglass window at Mary, Eldon, and Adrienne, AND watching the confused look on my own face. I thought it was a reflection on the inside of the plexiglass but it wasn’t a reflection, because when I sort of raised my right hand towards it I didn’t see it like a reflection. The person in the “reflection” didn’t raise the shoulder and upper arm at the right side of the “reflection.” He raised the shoulder and upper arm at the LEFT side, like at HIS right.

And that was it, that was all. Demonstration over. I was just sitting inside “the room,” on a low stool covered with cracked and split red vinyl so the stuffing was poking out. (Later, last night, I thought about that seat. I’m pretty sure it was okay when I first sat down. Not cracked at all. Got to remember to ask Mary about it when I see her again.)

“The room” itself was actually a room within a room. Mary and the Lanes were on the outside of THAT room. Shielded, they told me, which wasn’t exactly a good thing to tell somebody who wouldn’t be out there with them, looking in. “The room” reminded me of a room I sat in once during a routine hearing test when I was a kid. Maybe 10-15 feet in all directions, the outside made of thick steel plates bolted and/or welded together along the seams. A door in one side, kind of like a hatch or bulkhead door on a ship, with a wheel to seal it closed. And a horizontal window in another side so you could look out and the tester or the researcher could look in. The inside of the hearing-test room, though, had been lined with old-fashioned acoustic tiles. “The room” on the other hand was lined with some sort of jagged metal pyramid structures on the floor, walls, and ceiling. They looked like teeth. While Mary fastened one wire to my head and on to my chest, and ran them down to the stool itself, she told me the room was anechoic, even spelled it for me, but I don’t know what that means yet. Once I sat down inside it I didn’t have to do anything. I just sat there looking through the window.

Then Mary left me alone, sealed “the room,” and went out to the shielded room and her control panel. She turned a knob or toggled a switch or pressed a button, whatever. I saw what I saw, or think I saw anyhow. And then I didn’t see it.

Mary stood up, came through the heavy door into the outer unshielded room, and opened the door to “the room.” She checked me for a couple of things — pulse rate and like that. And a minute or two later I walked out. Eldon greeted me first, and shook my hand, and when I said something like, “Well now…” he burst out laughing and said, “Success! He’s not speaking Chinese!” Which made not only Adrienne but Mary crack up, too. A weird bunch.

The whole thing a little anticlimactic, really. But they warned me about that upfront. They wouldn’t even have bothered demonstrating it, they said. But I insisted. I had to know, I said. I had to understand.

In fact,I was more confused afterwards than I was before. They tell me my confusion is natural. Later, they showed me why, using a graph from the EEG circuitry in the walls of “the room.” The line was an average, they said, over a given interval of time. But they had it onscreen, projected on the wall with a computer, and they used some kind of software to highlight just a second’s worth. Then they zoomed in on the highlighted piece, blew it up so I could see all the dips and surges hidden inside what looked like a smooth inclined line.

There it was, my split-second: a steep steep sudden drop to ZERO, then a just as sudden spike off the top of the screen.

Depending on how you looked at it, for that split-second I was either brain-dead, or never more alive in my life. Maybe a little of both.

They’d worry, they said, if I WASN’T confused.

—-

Later:

Adrienne and I were playing gin last night while Eldon was down in Chile checking on Kali. I knocked with 10, which I could see surprised the hell out of her. I laughed. And while we were tallying up our points she suddenly asked me if I knew how her mother died.

“Kind of a strange question to ask somebody out of the blue,” I said.

No, she said, it really wasn’t in a way. Turns out, the last time she saw her mother they too were playing gin on a Thursday night, while Daddy Matt was off on some project or another.

The next day, Friday, that was the first day of the Midwest Blackout: that four days in mid-August 30 years ago, with no power at all between the Appalachians and the Black Hills. It hit at noon, when everybody was at work or school or whatever. From then on, if you wanted to pick a fight with somebody who lived in that whole stretch of the country, all you had to do was say global warming was a myth.

Adrienne and her parents lived in the New York area, not the Midwest, so the blackout didn’t hit them. Or rather, it didn’t hit them the same way it hit everybody out there. It took Adrienne a couple days to make the connection, she said, and quite a few years more to understand the connection.

On that Friday, just before lunch, Dolly Burghar, nee Magaziner, sat down on a vinyl-covered stool inside a steel-toothed box about a half-mile from where we were playing gin. Her husband Matthew flipped a switch, turned a knob, whatever. Two minutes later, the steel box was empty. And chaos erupted in the Midwest when all the a/c units, all the lights, all the refrigerators, all the gasoline pumps, dentists’ and mechanics’ drills, microwave ovens, elevators, airport radar systems, fire alarms, EVERYTHING shut down.

Under the circumstances, Matt Burghar wasn’t about to go public about the little experiment he and Dolly had been conducting at just that moment. Especially since anyone who dug a little might discover there was more to the Midwest Blackout than just a crazy string of coincidental failures of multiple backup systems, storage batteries, generators, and electrical substations. Her dad, Adrienne said, had known it would take a lot of power, had calculated how MUCH power, and had arranged to “borrow” just that much from the Midwest grid for just a few minutes. Stealing a little here, a little there. Just a few petawatts, divided up into tens of millions of fragments. No one would ever notice its absence.

…Except, of course, that they HAD noticed. Not the absence itself, just its effects.

Lost in all the hue and cry, to everyone but Adrienne and of course Matt Burghar: Dolly Burghar was GONE.

So Adrienne’s telling me this story. And of course I’m thinking of me sitting on that same stool a couple days ago. And for some reason, haha, crazy I know but I’ve suddenly got some big questions. Like, what the hell happened? Not what happened in the Midwest. I know about that. What had happened IN “THE GODDAM ROOM”???

Adrienne didn’t answer my question directly. She just said her parents were sure it would work. She said Dolly and Matt had been researching it for years. They’d checked and rechecked everything, all the data, all the analyses of the data. All the analyses of the analyses, I guess. It WOULD work. It HAD TO work.

So what was “it”?

“Remember ventriloquists?” she asked me.

Of course I did, I said. Hadn’t seen any since I was a kid but, like most kids, I loved the idea of throwing my voice. Making it come out of a cupboard or a fire hydrant or a dog or whatever.

Right, Adrienne said. Now imagine what it must be like to throw your MIND.

She was so serious when she said it that I couldn’t laugh. Couldn’t even smile. But I was thinking, oh boy yeah was I ever thinking. I was thinking about some of those crackpots Dolly Burghar’d been funding over the years. The mystic swamis, the Castanedans.

Adrienne must’ve misunderstood the look on my face. “It’d be cool, wouldn’t it?” she said. “Not just useful but FUN.” She actually used the word “fun.”

I guess I had a different take on it. I’d sat right there on that stool, in that box, after all. All I could wonder about was how much “fun” Dolly Burghar’s last two minutes might have been.

So I asked Adrienne about that, in the gentlest way I could think of right then. “So your mother…?”

We don’t know, she said. We’ll never know. We think we know. But we don’t KNOW-know.

“And you think I…?”

She repeated what she and Eldon had told me back at my house, weeks ago. One chance in a million million. The timing would have to be just right. They had to know, with absolute certainty, that Kali was THERE, right THEN. Because they knew they were going to kill not just a single regional power grid, but the whole country’s. Maybe the whole hemisphere’s. And possibly kill it for good. All for the sake of me:

Sitting there on a stool in a steel room. A room wired in such a way that it could read what was happening in my head — for the sake of a researcher on the other side of the glass, a researcher who would soon be dead. But a room also wired in such a way as to somehow jolt what was happening in my head, to push it suddenly and completely OUTSIDE my head. And keep it there, long enough for Kali to obliterate planet, hemisphere, building, room, stool, and yes me and my head itself. While it — I? — watched.

And then? THEN?

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[The image at the top of this chapter has been doctored. I found the original, of an actual
anechoic chamber, here, at the site of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology in Germany.]

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