The Shroud Codex (23 page)

“What was Paul working on when his mother died?” Castle asked.

“Do either of you have any background in physics?” Silver asked.

“None whatsoever,” Anne volunteered.

“I took undergraduate physics in college,” Castle said.

“That’s about what I expected,” Silver said with a smile. “Paul was working in advanced particle physics, the cutting edge of physics today, and he was trying to postulate the unified field theory that Einstein failed to formulate at the end of his career.”

“I’m not sure I know what that means,” Castle said.

“I’m not surprised,” Silver replied as he clicked his mouse, preparing
to type in a short answer to an email. “I will try to keep this simple so you both get the basic idea.”

Castle and Anne agreed that made sense.

“In the last century, quantum mechanics challenged our fundamental understanding of time and space, just as did Einstein with relativity theory. In other words, physicists like your brother came to understand we do not live in a world defined by the four dimensions of length, width, height, and time. We frequently use the example of a famous novel Edwin Abbott published in 1884, called
Flatland
. In Abbott’s flatland, the characters in the novel lived in a two-dimensional world in which there was only length and width. The world was flat in that no object had any height. This opened up an interesting possibility. Creatures like us who live in the added dimension of height take on magical properties in flatland. If you hover above flatland, you can enter the two-dimensional world as if you appear from nowhere. Then, if you leap out of flatland, it looks like you have disappeared. Appearing here and then there gives the impression you have walked through walls in flatland, when all you have really done is to hover above it in the dimension of height, waiting to choose when you want to enter the next room. Vanishing from the world of flatland and rematerializing suddenly out of nowhere is incomprehensible to flatlanders, who have no concept of height, but is no problem whatsoever to you, provided you live in three dimensions. Do you follow me?”

“Yes, I think so,” Castle said for himself and Anne.

“You’ve got to read the books written by Michio Kaku,” Silver said. “He’s a theoretical physicist at the City University of New York. He’s written several books explaining advanced physics to laymen and he’s brilliant at it. Kaku uses another example. When H. G. Wells wrote his novel
The Invisible Man
in 1897, he showed the limitations of our four dimensions. There is this stranger who
is completely covered with white bandages around his face, a hat that covers his head, and dark glasses. The invisible man turns out to be a Mr. Griffen of University College, who has discovered a way to make himself disappear by changing the refractive and reflective properties of human skin. Instead of using his discovery to better the human condition, Griffen uses his ability to disappear to commit a score of petty crimes. The point is that by learning to tap into invisibility as a fifth spatial dimension beyond length, width, and height, the invisible man is able to manifest the type of powers we typically attribute to ghosts or phantoms.”

“So, what is the point?” Castle asked bluntly. “I’m sure I would benefit from taking one of your graduate courses, but I’m afraid I would turn out to be a disappointing candidate for a physics Ph.D.”

Silver got the message. “My point is that physicists like your brother and me have come to believe that we may live in a universe that has as many as ten dimensions, not just four.”

“What are the other six?” Anne asked. “Is this what my brother was searching for?”

“Yes,” Silver acknowledged. “It is. Specifically, your brother was working with complex equations that explain observations particle physicists make when observing subatomic particles in complex and ridiculously expensive machines like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN on the French-Swiss border near Geneva. Physicists like Paul Bartholomew were investigating what we call ‘M-Theory,’ sometimes called ‘the Theory of Everything,’ an advanced version of what we physicists call ‘string theory.’ We can postulate that instead of a four-dimensional world, maybe we live in ten-dimensional space. A bumblebee flying in ten-dimensional space could conceivably go everywhere at once, without seeming to be anywhere.”

“I don’t get it,” Anne said.

“Neither do I,” Castle added.

“Don’t worry,” Silver said. “Nobody really gets it.”

“What are the additional dimensions?” Castle asked. “Do you have names for them, or can you describe how they work?”

“Not really,” Silver said. “That’s the type of question Paul was working at answering when he was here in Princeton at the institute. Physicists fifty years ago would have said all this is nonsense, but the top physicists today worldwide are considering phenomena like time warps, or what astronomers call ‘worm-holes,’ physical constructs where you can enter in the universe here and come out in a parallel universe where everything is the same except maybe that you didn’t die.”

“It sounds like science fiction,” Castle said critically. “So you are telling me that modern physics consider all these H. G. Wells phenomena to be possible?”

“Modern physics does not rule out time travel, if that’s what you are asking,” Silver answered. “Nor does it rule out that a lot of what we experience in our four dimensions might look very different if we could see the same phenomena in the ten dimensions or more that might truly define our universe.”

For Castle, what he was hearing from Dr. Silver connected immediately with what Father Bartholomew had told him in their therapy session. Bartholomew had cautioned Castle not to rule out that his after-life experience may have happened exactly as he experienced it. What Castle realized listening to Silver was that Bartholomew was trying to tell him something that modern particle physics was seriously contemplating: for instance, that an afterlife may exist as a parallel world in which we remain alive. Bartholomew objected when Castle insisted his slippages in time back to Golgotha two thousand years ago on the day Christ died had been strictly a trick of Bartholomew’s subconscious. What if Bartholomew, instead of being psychologically disturbed, had just
slipped in time and space so he could experience one or more of the dimensions beyond? Dr. Silver said many modern physicists accepted them as real.

Castle had struggled to understand how someone as brilliant as Paul Bartholomew could fail to see that his physical manifestation of the hair and beard of the man in the Shroud of Turin, or the stigmata he experienced, were obvious manifestations of a psychological disorder. Maybe what Bartholomew was trying to tell him was that the interventions into his life, including the scourge marks he experienced, were really happening, not in our four dimensions, but through an intervention from a dimension beyond our here and now.

Dr. Silver had just explained that the invisible man appeared and disappeared at will, just as the third-dimensional hyperbeing appeared and disappeared in flatland. To Castle, the idea was bizarre, but if we truly lived in a world not bounded by our four dimensions, maybe Rod Serling was right after all. Was it possible the
Twilight Zone
was more reality than we ever thought it was? Is it possible we live in the
Twilight Zone
and don’t realize it?

“Do you know that Father Bartholomew claims to have suffered an after-life experience in which God asked him to return to earth?” Castle asked Dr. Silver.

“I’ve been reading about it in the newspaper and watching the news reports on television,” Silver answered. “I’m not an expert on the Shroud of Turin or the stigmata Paul claims to be manifesting.”

“What sense do you make of what’s happening to Father Bartholomew?” Castle asked, anxious to get the physicist’s perspective. “Do you think what he is going through right now has anything to do with his career as a physicist?”

“I’m not sure,” Silver answered. “All I know is that Paul Bartholomew
is not only a priest, he is also a brilliant physicist. What he is going through with the stigmata and the Shroud may just be his most recent scientific experiment. I wouldn’t put it past Paul to use himself as his own human guinea pig in the most recent phase of his search for God. Truthfully, that’s what I think.”

“So you don’t think my brother is crazy?” Anne asked.

“We are probably all a little bit crazy,” Silver answered with a grin. “But if your brother is crazy he reached that stage through the other side.”

“What do you mean?” Castle asked. “What other side?”

“Paul was always so brilliant that he was beyond most human beings, even at the Institute for Advanced Study,” Silver explained. “That’s why I think he had few friends and never married. It was always hard to understand Paul. He was a loner by nature, except when it came to his mother.”

“I understand,” Anne said quietly.

“Maybe I can explain it to you with one more example,” Silver said, seeing that Castle and Anne were doing their best to understand what he was talking about. “I’m not sure this will help, but what if we live in a complex reality where a person could be both dead and alive at the same time?”

“How is that possible?” Castle asked.

“Simple,” Silver answered. “The person is dead and alive at the same time because the universe has split apart into a parallel world. In one world the person is dead, but in the other world the person is very much alive. People in each world insist that their world is the only real world and that all other worlds are imaginary or made-up. Universes might split up into millions of branches. In one branch you live to be ninety years old and never marry. In another branch you die tragically young, fighting bravely in combat. In one branch you have ten children; in
another branch your only child dies at childbirth and you never have another one, or at least that’s what you are led to believe.”

“What’s the point?” Anne asked.

“The point,” Silver said, “is that you would have no way of knowing which reality was real. Maybe they are all real, simultaneously. Maybe you live in all of them at the same time. How would you ever tell the difference?”

Castle and Anne thanked Dr. Silver for being so generous with his time. The professor dismissed it, saying he hoped his comments helped. Silver’s experience was that most laypeople left his office much more confused than when they arrived. He had long ago given up on being able to explain modern advanced physics to anyone but the most advanced graduate students.

On the ride back to New York, Anne and Castle were quiet for a long while.

“Dr. Castle, what do you think that was all about?” Anne finally asked.

“I’m not sure what I think,” Castle answered, “but I’m sure your brother would have understood every word.”

“It reminds me of something he said to me when we were alone in the hospital,” Anne said.

“What’s that?”

“At the time, I wasn’t sure what Paul meant,” she began slowly, wanting to be sure she explained this carefully, “but he said we were all stuck in time.”

“Stuck in time?”

“Yes, that’s what he said. And when I asked him what he meant, Paul said we live our lives like the future is ahead of us, unknown, and that the past is behind us, completely determined.”

“Did Paul see it differently?”

“Yes,” Anne said. “Paul said the truth is our destiny is determined for us when we are born. Our future draws us forward,
much like a seed contains the mature tree. Paul said it’s our past that’s a fiction. We invent stories about who we were and where we came from to explain things that happen to us in life. Our memories are faulty and the stories we tell about ourselves change, often depending upon what is happening to us now. Maybe that’s why he gave up physics.”

“What do you mean?” Castle asked.

“Maybe Paul came to the conclusion that it was his destiny to find God, but that in physics he wasn’t getting there. Then our mother died. Paul said at that moment he realized he wanted to be reunited with his mother. Maybe he decided God, not physics, was his doorway to the dimensions he needed to travel to get back together with his mother. That’s why he decided to become a priest.”

“Why exactly is that?” Castle asked.

“Maybe because Paul concluded he did have a vocation all along. That’s what he told me. That he had been resisting God, thinking he could find God through an equation. When Mom died, he gave up and decided that accepting God in his heart was the only way to find God here on earth.”

Castle reminded himself that Bartholomew had told him much the same thing, that finding God involved an experience, not an intellectual exercise.

“One thing about what Dr. Silver said bothers me,” Anne said, with a concerned look on her face.

“What’s that?” Castle asked.

“If Dr. Silver is right, how would we ever be sure anything happening here is the way we think it is happening?”

“I’ve dealt with that question for decades in psychiatry,” Castle said. “Today was the first time I realized that physicists are asking the exact same question.”

“Does anyone have an answer?” Anne wanted to know.

“I doubt it,” Castle said with resignation. “I go about my job every day confident I see the world the way it truly is. But truthfully, I don’t know.”

“Wasn’t that Dr. Silver’s point?” Anne speculated.

“What’s that?” Castle asked.

“When it comes to somebody as brilliant as my brother, maybe nobody can ever be sure what is real. That’s what I think Dr. Silver was trying to tell us today.”

Saturday

New York City

Day 17

Castle began the weekend thinking about Anne. Sitting at his desk and sorting through his correspondence, he came across an invitation to attend a black-tie charity dinner that night at one of his favorite French restaurants. Castle had put the invitation aside, thinking he would figure out who to ask to be his date, but when Father Bartholomew’s case took center stage, Castle forgot about social obligations, at least for the moment.

On impulse, he called Anne at the Waldorf.