Paranormal
One heavy morning, when the outside world was ironbound with frost, I stood at a long French window in the playroom waiting to go down to breakfast. The sun was just risen beyond the ground, and stood above the lawns, his great red disk etched with naked twigs of the bushes. Under these bushes a gardener was chopping down a dead tree. I watched him. The axe flashed red, and fell. It rose again. The movement, steady and sure, fascinated me. Suddenly I realized that the sound of the blows did not synchronize with what I saw. The thud came when the axe was on the upstroke, ready for the next blow.
I disbelieved the evidence of my eyes. Then I thought my spectacles (those miracle workers) must have betrayed me; or that my illness had begun to affect my vision. I stared intently, screwing up the eye muscle against any possible intrusion of light or irrelevant image. But the picture I saw and the sound I heard remained disparate.
Then, while I stared, knowledge came to me; the knowledge that follows a recognition of a fact, of concrete experience, bringing with it a widening both of the universe and of the individual's understanding of it. These moments are rare, and they are wholly vital. For a flash, the recognizer is a god, who can say 'I am', as Jehovah said in the Old Testament.
On that frosty winter morning, between getting up and going down to breakfast, in an antiseptic, varnished institution where the inmates and staff were so dehumanized that they were little more than parts of the mechanism of the place, leaving me in a murmurous solitude, day after day bemused and lonely, elated by the very dreariness of things, there I stood transfigured...
I had found that time and space are not absolute. Their power was not law. They were not even unanimous; they quarreled with each other; and through their schism the human imagination, the hope, the faith, could slip, to further exploration where intuition had formerly hinted, but where logic and fatal common sense had denied.
I felt both power and exultation flooding my veins. The blood glowed warm within me, rising to my brain and pulsing there, like a crowd roaring some racial acclamation. I had found out the cheat of time and space; and if that were so, then other seemingly stable laws of nature might be questioned, to the advantage of this fettered and hoodwinked spirit, this hidden and oppressed self, locked in the dungeon of my body.
I looked again, and still the evidence wrote itself upon the frosty air, against the disk of the sun who had now risen an inch or two higher, like the minute-hand of a giant clock, jerking itself up toward the hour, invisibly visible in its motion. The beauty of this syncopation between sigh and sound released me from so much, from the mass of daily life, the burden of the flesh and its strict locality, from the drag of the earth.
That last was my most hated foe. The drag of the earth, the weight that would pull me day and night, making every movement, even the smooth gestures which we throw in sleep, a labor too heavy to be borne; the putting on of clothes, the passage from chair to chair, the endless travel from one room to another, and that final torture, the treadmill of the tandem, during those Sunday rides behind my brother, as I tried to do my share of the pedaling, under the goad of his tongue, lashing me to it.
But now I was free. Since time and space were deceivers, openly contradicting each other, and at best offering a compromise in place of a law, I was at liberty to doubt further, to carry on my exploration of the horizons of freedom. Still conscious of the warm blood whispering in my veins, I looked down at my wrist and saw the transparent flesh, the bird-bones, the channels of blue beneath the skin. All this was substance as fragile as a plant. It could not possibly outweigh the solid earth under my feet, where I and the rest of duped mankind walked with such docility.
The sun had brightened to a liquid fire that dazzled my sigh, reducing the woodman and his brief moment of revelation to a penumbral figure under the shadow of the bushes in the dead gray frost. I stared at the light, and the stuff of life within my body began to increase its speed of flow. I sensed, with a benignancy deeper and more assured than reason, that my limbs and trunk were lighter than they seemed, and that I had only to reduce them by an act of will, perhaps by a mere change of physical mechanics, to command them off the ground, out of the tyranny of gravitation.
I exerted that will, visualizing my hands and feet pressing downwards upon the center of the earth. It was no surprise to me that I left the ground, and glided about the room (which was empty) some twelve or eighteen inches above the parquet floor. At first I was afraid of collapsing, of tumbling and hurting myself. But I had only to draw in a deep breath, and to command the air through the heavy portions of my anatomy, watching it flow and dilute the solid bone and flesh through the helpful chemistry of the blood, this new, released and knowledgeable blood, and I soared higher, half-way to the ceiling. This thoroughly frightened me, and I allowed myself to subside, coming to the ground with a gentleness that was itself a sensuous delight.
I could not leave the matter there. I must put my discovery to the test again, and accordingly I drew in a deep breath and was just about to visualize that downward pressure of will upon body, when the door opened, and the nurse came in.
"Why, little boy?" she said. "Haven't you heard the breakfast bell?"
Then she took a second glance at me, stooped and peered into my face, "Is anything wrong? Are you feeling poorly this morning?"
I was almost indignant, and disclaimed the suggestion that I might have a temperature, for that would mean going to bed in the large ward where a pail stood conspicuously in the middle, on a sheet of mackintosh; an improvisation which disgusted me.
I hurried away without replying, leaving the nurse looking after me with some inquiry in her manner. The corridor and staircase were empty, for everybody was at breakfast in the vast dining-room below. Here was another opportunity! I drew my breath again, I scorned the liars of time and space, I took the presence of Christ into my hollow, featherweight bones, and I floated down the staircase without touching either tread or baluster. Alighting outside the dining-room door, I entered and took my seat, content now to live incognito amongst these wingless mortals.
