The Adam Enigma (6 page)

He sipped his tea. “That afternoon the conference had a free day. There was a story about the Rio Chama de Milagro Shrine in the information packet. I had nothing planned so I decided to go. I even imagined it as a kind of a pilgrimage.”

Ramsey's eyes widened and he didn't bother to keep the incredulity out of his voice. “You? You were never religious.”

“Imagine that, a doctor of divinity with no religion,” Orensen said ironically. He said. “When you get older things begin to change.”

“I get it. What happened next?”

“The short version is a mind-blowing, transformative experience. But that's just to set it up. I'll tell you this: I would never have accepted it from anyone else as anything more than a hallucination. But I'll tell you there was nothing hallucinatory about the experience at all. It was as real as you and me sitting here.”

Ramsey reached for a fry, then set it down. He had never heard his old mentor speak so openly before. He realized that though they were
close, the old man had kept things from him and now was opening up. He settled back and listened.

“When I got there,” Orensen continued, “I walked along the paths looking at all the little curios left behind. At one point a man made eye contact with me. He was tall, muscular and redheaded. He came over and laid a hand on my arm. The next thing I know I'm being pulled up in some sort of light lattice. I tried to resist. I was scared, and then the light went away and I'm no longer outside. I'm sitting in a chapel. Then another light, blinding this time, and when it goes away, Melinda is sitting next to me, her hand is in mine.” He licked his lips, felt the tears come to his eyes again the way they did on that afternoon. He didn't bother to brush them away.

“She looked just like she did the year before she got sick.”

Ramsey felt his own pulse quicken. He was afraid to speak, feeling an onrush of tears would follow if he did. Melinda had been a second mother to him after his own mother died when he was eighteen. He nodded.

“What happened next I can only describe as a miracle. You see, during her illness I was her caretaker, setting up doctor visits and chemo and radiation treatments. I gave her medicine, cleaned up after her. I was always the caretaker, never the husband. I had walled off that feeling part of me because I knew if I ever let it peek out I would lose it and be no help at all. And because I didn't ever want to admit she was dying. So I never took the chance to tell her how much I loved her, how much she meant to me.

“When she died, all that grief and love and all the feelings I had stuffed inside for six months poured out. I cried every day for a year straight. And every day in the years that followed I had to decide just to live. I'll tell you, there never was a day I was happy. Living without her was the most wretched time of my life.

“So here she was sitting next to me, smiling. She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek and said, ‘I've been waiting a long time to speak with you.'”

“I said, ‘I thought you would never want to speak to me again after the way I acted when you were sick.'”

“'I always knew you loved me,'” she said.

“'I did . . . I still do. A day doesn't go by when I don't miss you . . . when I want to hold you once more . . . do a crossword puzzle together . . . go out for a walk.'”

“'Those were wonderful times, Roger. But now you have to stop holding me in grief and instead hold me in love.'”

“'How can I do that?'”

“Melinda then put her hand on my heart and said, ‘In here.'”

“Jonathan, at that moment it was like a warm wind went through me. It lasted maybe a minute and when it was gone, my grief was gone with it, and in its place were love and gratitude for the fifty-three years we had together.

“She smiled at me and I smiled for the first time . . . I mean truly smiled from my soul, from the very core of my heart, for the first time in six years. At that moment we were both satisfied and she disappeared.

“I opened my eyes. Strangely I was once more outside on the ground and that man I told you about was helping me up. He said, ‘I see you got what you came for.' I began to thank him, but he shook his head. ‘It's you,' he said and walked away.

“I can honestly say everything changed for the better after that day.”

Ramsey pursed his lips. He studied his mentor and friend. His face was shining like an angel from a Raphael painting. He didn't know what to say, afraid any comment would destroy the moment.

Then Orensen picked up a sweet potato fry. He dipped it in the salsa and ate it with gusto. He chose another, basting it the same way but stopped before bringing it to his mouth. “You should eat these before they get cold,” he said.

Ramsey smiled. “You're not asking me whether I believe your story or not.”

“Doesn't matter whether you believe or not. What matters is that I believe. It happened to me and it changed my life.”

Ramsey reached out to the old man and touched his hand gently. “I had my own non-ordinary experience at the Milagro Shrine, but nothing as profound as yours.”

Over the rest of the meal, he related what happened and all the coincidences around Adam Gwillt. They finished and Ramsey picked up the check.

They sat a few moments and Orensen said, “You didn't come here to listen to an old man talk about his dead wife . . . or did you?” He waved away Ramsey's response. “You want to know if you should take the job. Well now you have another coincidence, another piece of synchronicity as Jung would say. You have your answer. I'll cover your class for you until you get back.”

Ramsey's mind and gut were now in harmony. “I don't know how long I'll be.”

“So much the better.”

As they were about to get up, Orensen motioned for Ramsey to sit down. “There's something bigger than the shrine. Do you know about it?”

“No.”

“In the beginning there was a big controversy over whether the shrine should become part of the Catholic establishment since the Roman Catholic Church is very strong in northern New Mexico. But eventually it became a nonsectarian site supported by donations and run by a group called the Friends of the Shrine. A local priest actually rescinded his vows. But gradually something new emerged—an internet-based group called the New Gnostics, people impacted by the power of the shrine. I'm one. It's a religious movement totally different than anything else. We communicate through a password-protected website. I'll let you use my password if you like.”

Ramsey's eyes widened in surprise. “That would be fantastic. But wouldn't I be getting you in trouble?”

“The New Gnostics believe in the power of the shrine and now that it's gone, we'd like to know what happened.”

“You're certain I'll take the job.”

Orensen smiled. “I can see you're already on your way, and you're the only one who can do it.”

“Myriam said the same thing.”

“How far do you trust her?”

Ramsey weighed what he knew about her against his own anger toward her, and pangs of guilt over flaunting the rules of her program and causing it to lose its funding. He wanted to trust her but he couldn't be sure. She was a facilitator and manipulating people was part of her way of getting things done.

“I'll have to be careful,” he admitted.

Orensen nodded. “I'll do what I can to help.”

O
RENSEN WAVED GOODBYE
and Ramsey watched him cross the street to his car parked in front of the historic Louis Sullivan Jewel Box Bank. The bank's odd diamond-like façade was a city landmark. The Masonic-looking emblem seemed to point its tip right at the professor. Ramsey shook his head. The synchronicity contained in his friend's story and its connection to the shrine gave him a new jolt of energy. He checked his watch. The call to Des Moines would have to wait. He ordered a cup of coffee. He needed some time to think about all the coincidences that had led up to this point, coincidences that went back twenty years to a meeting with Orensen in his office.

Sitting behind a huge desk, littered with papers, tapes, post-it-notes, and strange curios, Professor Orensen had said, “I suspect your father has encouraged you to go into physical geography.”

Ramsey had nodded an agreement. It had been a wonderful academic and practical field of inquiry in America for over one hundred years. Geography's roots went back to the earliest mapmakers in Mesopotamia and Greece. Maps throughout history told the story of human development and that appealed to Ramsey. But what the professor said next changed his life forever.

“Human geography is where the future of the planet lies, Jonathan. Especially sacred places. Unwrapping the mystery behind their power will offer a guide to navigating through the troubled waters humanity will face as we approach the new millennium. Sacred geography is where the physical environment and spirit meet. If I were starting a career in geography today, that's what I would set my sights on.”

Ramsey took a sip of coffee and recalled the question that had niggled at him ever since his father had him read, at the age of sixteen, the writings of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. The famed anthropologist had written, “The land is a living book in which the myths are inscribed. A legend is captured in the very outlines of the landscape.”

Like Ramsey, it turned out that Orensen's urgings tied into a question that arose after the professor's own reading of Lévy-Bruhl: Do sacred places have an embedded and detectable power to transform and heal people?

A couple of years later when Ramsey had begun his graduate studies in human geography, there was a great intellectual debate over the validity and resurgence of interest in the principle of environmental determinism. Led by Jared Diamond's breakout book,
Guns, Germs, and Steel
, the idea was that the physical environment was the primary factor in the development of human cultures, deeply affecting consciousness as well as economic development. Place, in the geographical sense, was driving history.

Following in the footsteps of Lévy-Bruhl, Ramsey's initial research had centered on how sacred places had organized primitive societies. In these cultures, the whole natural world was alive with magic. Mountains, rivers, trees, almost anything could become sacred to a tribal group. Urged forward by Diamond, Ramsey had achieved a great insight. He discovered that a major factor in moving from nomadic tribal groups to primitive agricultural settlements was the establishment of permanent sacred places. Early on they were often burial grounds. He had written a paper on the effigy-mound builders, who prospered over 1,000 years ago in the upper Mississippi Valley. He demonstrated how critical these sacred mounds were to their success as agriculturalists. What became known as the Ramsey Principle stated that at least three percent of any early agriculturalist territory needed to be devoted to sacred places for it to become prosperous agricultural society.

So when the postdoc opportunity at the University of Oregon had come up, Ramsey proposed to Myriam that he would try to prove or disprove the possibility that there were inherently powerful spots
distributed across the planet, which humans have fashioned into sacred places. This had led him to investigate with the latest scientific energy detecting and remote sensing equipment some of the world's most famous sacred places.

Beginning in the United States, he had gone to the Medicine Wheel National Historic Landmark in Wyoming. From there he had traveled around the world. First to Jokhang in Tibet, then to Lourdes in France, India's sacred Elephanta Caves on Gharapuri Island, and the Minoan Caves in Crete. At each place he had used his ability to feel. As he often had described it to other researchers, “I was able to listen to the geographical story the place is telling. When listening deeply, I saw and felt the power of the place with new eyes and ears.”

It was like what Ramsey heard at a talk by one of the astronauts who had walked on the moon, Edgar Mitchell, who described the mystical experiences he and his fellow astronauts had when they saw the Earth from outer space. Mitchell had said, “On the return trip home, gazing through 240,000 miles of space toward the stars and the planet from which I had come, I suddenly experienced the universe as intelligent, loving, and harmonious.” At times Ramsey found himself wanting to understand this sort of experience more than he wanted to find answers to his research questions.

Ramsey felt the air pressure change around him, the slight prickle of static electricity. A faint rumble of thunder echoed against the dark clouds closing in on Grinnell. It reminded him of Glastonbury and a coincidence during his research trip that had ultimately led to the shrine and the growing mystery around Adam Gwillt.

The last stop on his travels had brought him to England. By this time he had collected a great variety of anomalous readings associated with a number of sacred places. He was sure that a number of these readings had to do with nearby massive crystalline structures but no clear pattern or correlation between the sites was evident. He was tired and was ready to head back to Eugene where he would make sense out of all the data he had collected. It was at Glastonbury, the last stop on his British itinerary, that the coincidence happened.