Life to Life: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (19 page)

"You went to medical school in...?"

"Right after World War I. Hung out my
shingle in '25. Right up here on Azusa Avenue. Stayed in the same
office forty years."

"Long time, Jud," I observe admiringly.

"Seems like forty days."

"Really?"

"Yes. 'Cept for the nagging. That was good
for forty lifetimes."

I grin. "Expect to have that many?"

He chuckled again. "Why not?"

"Who nagged you?"

"Everybody nagged me. Do
this. Get that. Buy more. Doctor less. Retire, retire, retire.
Hell, no man should ever retire, especially no professional man.
It's a shame to just throw away all that experience. I can still
tell more from a look into your eyes than most of these kids today
can ever know with all their damned machines. Of course..."
Chuckle. "... I may not be able to see your eyes."

"Does it bother you to be old, Jud?"

"Bothers me to be broken-down. It's
undignified to be old. Nothing works like it should. Being very old
is like being very young."

"How's that?"

"Nothing works like it should for a baby,
either. Can't feed himself. Drools and shits his pants. Can't walk,
can't talk—just sits there and grins or sits there and complains.
It's the same."

"You seem to be doing okay," I say.

"It comes and goes. One of these days it
will just keep on going, and I can't say that I mind the idea."

I take a pull at the root beer. "How do you
feel about immortality?"

He smiles and replies, "I'm all for it."

"Seriously."

"Seriously?" Another
little smile. "I was a medical doctor forty years,
Ford."

"Uh huh."

"I've seen it all. Brains, intestines, every
organ, every bone. I've seen it all."

"Uh huh."

"But I never saw a soul."

"I hear the soul is invisible."

"I never saw one."

"Ever see a miracle?"

"Saw those all the time,
sure. Patients who had no medical reason to be alive but kept on
living anyway. Patients who had died, I mean medically died, but
started living again. Sure. Happens all the time. We doctors don't
talk a lot about those cases because it makes us a bit less than
God and some of us can't take that. But it happens all the
tune."

I gave him time to catch his breath, then
ask, "Remember Maybelle Mathison?"

"Who?"

"Also known as Maizey
McCall. Stunt rider in the movies."

"Oh her. Sure. Well, she'd messed herself
up. Too many injuries. Those crazy stunts. I don't know why people
treat themselves that way. Death wish, maybe. I've often wondered
..."

"Maizey wanted to have a baby, though."

"Sure she did. They all do, after they've
fixed it so there's no way they can."

"What was Maizey's particular problem,
Jud?"

Maybe he does not hear that because he just
takes a breath and plunges on. "Figures have been about the same
for as far back as the record goes. One in six. That's the odds.
Census figures from a century ago bear it out. Not a modern
phenomenon; probably always been that way from the dawn of time.
One in six marriages is childless. That's bad enough odds, wouldn't
you say. But then she goes out there and throws herself off moving
horses, tumbles down hillsides, all that crazy stuff, then comes to
me in tears because she can't make a baby."

"But you helped her."

"No, I couldn't help her. Went through the
usual stuff. Called in an OB—did the BBT and the semen check, tried
counseling, tried—"

"What is a BBT?"

He is talking and
obviously thinking like a doctor, now. "Basal Body Temperature
charts, to determine ovulation. She was okay there, like clockwork.
Did a sperm count on her husband, that was okay. Found the trouble
with a tubal insufflation. That's where we pump a gas into the
uterus and listen to hear it escaping through the Fallopian tubes
into the abdominal cavity. If it doesn't move, you know the tubes
are blocked. She was totally blocked, both tubes. Inoperable, in
those days. We recommended that she adopt and we closed the book on
her."

"We?"

"Me and these two obstetricians. Two because
she wanted a second opinion. But she wanted more opinions than
that, I guess. About a dozen more, from what I heard."

"So she did find help."

"Not medical help, no, not possible. We
simply did not know enough back then to do the sort of things being
done today for infertile women. The first test-tube baby was born
in England in about '78."

I sip the root beer and
speak around the bottle as I remind him, "She did have a baby,
Jud."

"Tell me about it. I delivered it."

I raise my eyebrows and inquire, "Normal
delivery?"

"In every respect. Beautiful baby."

“
Jud...”

"Uh-huh?"

"Was Mary a virgin?"

"Mary who?"

"Holy Mary, Mother of God."

"Oh, that Mary." He
chuckles, purses his lips, chuckles again. "From the medical
standpoint, no, she was not a virgin. Not unless they were
using
in vitro
techniques in ancient Israel. Even with
in vitro
, though, there has to be a
human father to supply the fertilizing sperm. A virgin could be
fertilized
in vitro
then implanted without losing her virginity but I doubt very
much they knew how to do that two thousand years ago. Even today it
is a very delicate procedure, with more failures than
successes."

He is fully a doctor again and the old eyes
are sparkling with the intellectual activity. I want to keep that
going. "I read somewhere once about spontaneous fertilization using
electrical stimuli."

He takes his first sip of root beer, speaks
almost absently. "I heard of that, too, but I doubt it has ever
been done with humans."

"Why wouldn't Mary the Mother of God have
been fertilized that way, though, allowing for supernatural
influences?"

I have walked right into
it, see. He smiles as he tells me: "Because she had a boy. A
spontaneous fertilization would always produce a female offspring.
To get a male you need the Y chromosome and women don't carry them.
Sperm do, and that's the only thing little boys are made
of."

"Maizy had a girl."

"That's right."

'Two X chromosomes."

"That's right. An X-Y pairing will result in
a boy. An X-X pairing makes a girl."

"What is the actual effect of tubal
blockage?"

"The actual effect." We
are doctoring again. "Well...an ovum ripens inside the ovary and
gets spit out. The Fallopian tube captures it and begins working
it toward the uterus. If sperm are present in the tube,
fertilization can occur. Bang—you've got an embryo right there in
the tube. It continues its journey on into the uterus where it
attaches itself to the lining and you've got yourself a successful
pregnancy."

"But when the tubes are irreversibly
blocked..."

"Well now they're
using
in vitro
to
solve that problem in some cases. That literally means in glass.
They remove the mature ovum from the mother and place it in a dish
with active sperm. If fertilization occurs, the embryo is implanted
in the mother's uterus. Nature has been helped a bit, that's all,
but all the rules still apply. An X from the daddy sperm produces a
girl. A Y from the daddy makes a boy. What's all this about,
Ford?"

I smile and say, "Miracle babies."

He smiles back. "I believe in miracles."

I say, "But not in immortality."

"Didn't say that. Said, I think, I'm in
favor of it."

"But you've never seen a soul."

"Quit looking for it, long time ago."

"Why?"

"Waste of time. The human body does not have
a soul."

"Sure of that, huh?"

"Uh huh. We don't have souls. Souls have
us."

"That makes a difference, doesn't it."

"Damn right it does. Hear
the same stuff from brain surgeons, except they're looking for the
mind. You can't go into the brain looking for a mind. On the other
hand, you cannot go into the mind except through the brain. What
does that tell you, Ford?"

I say, "Minds have brains."

He slaps my knee. "Right. And souls have
bodies."

I grin and say, "See what you mean,
yeah."

"It makes a difference. I never saw a soul
because I spent all my tune messing with bodies."

"Did Maizey McCall have a miracle baby?"

The ninety-one-year-old retired medical
doctor produces a long black cigar from an inside pocket, lights
it, and says to me, "Damn right she did."

Chapter Twenty-Four: State of the Art

Biblical peoples were not as unsophisticated
as modem sophisticates would have them. They lived in a far
simpler time, sure, but these people baked bricks and built homes
and temples, they practiced agriculture and animal husbandry, they
sailed the open seas and engaged in international commerce.

They knew where babies come from, too.

Maybe they had never seen
an ovum or a sperm, but neither have most moderns, at first hand.
Certainly the ancients had the cause-and-effect relationship all
worked out as regards the role of sex in procreation. Perhaps they
did tend to think of the female as soil prepared for planting, but
of course many modern men think of women as dirt, too. At any rate,
the most ancient biblical scriptures refer to the man's ejaculate
as his seed, and they certainly knew that any seed had to find
fertile soil if it were to produce anything. But they were a lot
smarter than that, even, because they knew all about child-bearing
ages and the role of menstrual cycles in the woman.

As far back as Abraham, at least, they knew
that.

Genesis 18:11 makes that
very clear: "Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in age; it
had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women." That meant
she'd gone through menopause. Sarah knew what that meant because
she laughed when the Lord promised her and Abraham a baby, when she
was ninety and Abraham a hundred years old.

See? Even in that antiquity it was enough to
laugh at God himself over such a thing. Surely he jested! But he
did not jest, if you believe the Bible. This is prelude to the
birth of Isaac.

Can we take this stuff
literally? I mean, okay,
faith
has been defined as a belief in something that
the senses refute—but many modern Christians apparently try to
hedge their faith by rationalizing. Like: "Well, it was never
intended that we take this literally."

Baloney.

Those old guys told it like it was. If we
don't want to believe it, okay, let's just not believe it. But for
crying out loud let's not make idiots out of those people just so
they won't offend our twentieth-century sensibilities. Liars,
maybe; okay—but not idiots.

When father Abraham tells
us that the Lord appeared to him by the oaks of Mamre—along with a
couple of angels, I guess—and that he entertained them and fed
them—what are we to make of that if we can't take him
literally?

What would be nonliteral?

That he dreamed it? Or that he was suffering
a delusion? Or that three Bedouins conned him out of a free meal?
These same guys went on to wipe out Sodom and Gomorrah. Did
Abraham's delusion do that? And was Sarah so deluded, also, that at
the age of ninety she hallucinated a pregnancy that produced Isaac,
later the father of Esau and Jacob? How much can we nonliteralize
this stuff?

The apologists tell us
that they reckoned time differently in those days. Obviously Adam
could not have lived eight hundred years. And Sarah could not have
conceived a child at the age of ninety. No matter how you reckon
the time, though, the nonliteralists cannot wipe out Sarah's
amusement at God's promise or the entirely literal and
common-sense statement that "it had ceased to be with Sarah after
the manner of women."

I have to go with the
religious conservatives in the matter. Either believe it or don't;
but don't try to rewrite the script for your own
comfort.

I believe that when one of
the ancients talked about sitting down and breaking bread with the
Lord, that is precisely what he meant to say. He is walking along a
dusty road. Nobody is anywhere around. Suddenly the Lord appears
from nowhere and makes personal contact. Often angels also appear:
these do not have wings and they are not wraiths; they are flesh
and blood and can easily be mistaken for ordinary folks.
Apparently they are capable of being harmed, too, just like
ordinary folks, because sometimes the reporter protects them from
other ordinary folks. Like at Sodom, when Lot took in the same
group who approached Abraham at Mamre. (Genesis 19.)

Lately a new generation of
literalists have been having great fun reinterpreting scripture
from a UFO viewpoint. Also many clerics privately (and a few
publicly) have taken to reexamining the Bible in this light—and it
does make for fascinating reading. They note that references to the
Lord in these accounts often sound as though the reporter is
describing a force rather than an entity, and the angels do sound
an awful lot like beings who have emerged from a UFO. Indeed, the
word
angel
is
derived from the Greek
angelos
which means messenger.

Think about it, and remember that these were
very worldly men, responsible men, tribal leaders and so forth.
They were sophisticated at a certain level, but remember that this
was before the machine age on earth. There were no machines. How
does a guy describe a mind-blowing machine if he has never seen
even a refrigerator or a washer?