The monodreme - Chapter 15: The Gift

At the moment when the International Dateline reaches midnight it is the same day all around the globe.  When that imaginary line, drawn down the Pacific Ocean, reached midnight of Saturday 25^th December 1999, it was Christmas Day all around the world for just one hair’s breadth of a moment.  One eternal moment.

In Banford, in Christine’s house, it was noon.  Away to the west, in Times Square, New York, it was 7am.  Away to the east, across the Himalayas, it was 6pm.  Way up, in an invisible slot cut from the rock of the highest mountain on Earth, six people were sitting in six armchairs that were arranged in a circle facing each other.

Around the world roughly half of the people had been waiting, with varying degrees of anticipation, for Sal Phillips’s announcement.  The remainder of the world’s population had gone about its business as usual, oblivious to, or largely unconcerned with such matters.

I know this because I know everything about that moment.  Everybody who was alive on the planet at that time knows about that moment.

On a small round table, in the centre of our circle of chairs, was a spherical clock resting in a stand.  It was a special clock that showed the time at the International Dateline from whatever angle you looked at it.  It was a special clock made by the most powerful being in the universe.  I was looking at Real Sal, observing the calmness in her face, the quiet purpose in her eyes.  But as the reading of the clock reached for midnight I glanced at it, and it was in that moment, which wasn’t really a moment, where a new day hadn’t quite yet been born, that the clock, and the universe, stopped.

7am in Times Square – the light rain, which had been falling for twenty minutes, now held its position in the air.  Raindrops as brittle as glass hung motionless, reflecting the lights of a frozen city.  A sizeable crowd had gathered, despite the early hour and the fact that it was Christmas morning and raining, in the hope that Sal’s announcement would somehow make it onto the giant plasma screen they were gazing up at.  And now the blood no longer pumped in their veins, their hair and nails were no longer growing, and they could not move, not even to blink, not even to fall down, because the world had stopped.  Everything had stopped.  The air itself was as solid and silent as the clearest, hardest diamond.  All around the Earth not a breeze could stir.  Tornadoes and hurricanes were now sculptures of wind, waves were as still as iron.  Away to the centre of the solar system the sun had ceased its journeying.  Solar flares arced solidly like bright, jagged bridges.  The surface of Sol was a silent, glassy landscape of mountains, and whirlpools of frozen, heatless fire.  The planets would not orbit and the Milky Way refused to turn.  The out breath of the entire universe had stopped.  Light itself had stalled and could no longer travel, held fast, the prisoner of a stopped clock.  Everything had stopped everywhere.  Everything had stopped, but the minds of the people of Earth.

The silence was deafening.  Never had a living soul heard such an all-encompassing, absolute quiet.  And in that silence we began to hear each others’ thoughts.

In the paralysis of our physical world our minds began to move freely, leaving our bodies, moving out into the infinitely crafted, crystalline beauty of an eternal moment.  Take a perfect photograph of the universe, make it three dimensional, and then get inside it and float around.  See a spiral of cigarette smoke from all angles.

I always liked being a passenger on long road journeys.  Whether it was in a car or on a bus, it didn’t matter, as long as I had a window seat.  There’s something mesmerising about watching miles and miles of road unravelling beneath you, piling up and falling away, piling up and falling away.  Britain is such a tiny country, yet you can sit in a car for hours while the earth rolls by.  Sometimes I’d try to hold every stone and blade of grass, every square centimetre of tarmac that we drove past, in my mind, just so I could get a sense of how big the world is.

“How far have we travelled?”

“Thirty eight miles.”

“What’s the circumference of the world?”

“25,000 miles.”

Now, as I left my body and moved out into the solidified moment, every stone, every blade of grass and every centimetre of tarmac everywhere was on hold for me.  I could travel anywhere I wished and examine anything in the world in the tiniest detail.  I noted that now I was outside of my body, now that I was free of my physical eyes, I had perfect vision.  It was as though, rather than seeing by perceiving and interpreting reflected light, I was now seeing with my knowing.  The knowledge of where I was and what my surroundings looked like was simply a part of me.  The tiniest detail was laid out before me as plain as day.  A thought occurred to me: that this was how the Go saw things – vividly, uncompromising.  In my bodiless state, with my perfectly honed senses, I could go anywhere and examine anything – the smallest dewdrop – for the perfect truth of how it was formed.

Except…something was pulling me.  I was trying to drift away across the Himalayas, go exploring, but instead found myself being drawn gently back by the gravity of Real Sal, back into the impossible slot in the mountainside and over the shoulder of my own body, which was still sitting there in the armchair.  I floated over the table and the stopped clock.  And as I drifted towards Real Sal she turned and looked at me.  If I had been present in my body I would have gasped with surprise.  In a universe where even the electrons no longer orbited their nuclei Real Sal could still move – or was she only moving in my mind?  And as she looked at me I sensed the presence of other minds.  Pee and Osmo and Christine and Fake were there, but now there were more besides, hundreds of them, gathering around, pressing forward, also drawn to Real Sal.  She had brought them to the mountain.  I could feel their numbers, all crowding into the same space, hundreds at first, then thousands, then millions of minds, all overlapping with each other, all sharing the same space and the same experience.

Sal’s face drew closer and her brow began to loom over us like a mountain.  We were heading for her left eye.  The coloured fibres of the iris grew thick, like the massive rivers of an alien planet.  Their green toned depths were converging into a circular, continent-sized waterfall that was pouring itself away into the glossy black hole that was Real Sal’s pupil.  The gravity of that black hole was pulling us in too, the souls of everyone on Earth.  Together, as one being with billions of minds, all awake at once, we dropped into the pupil of Real Sal’s left eye, and we saw the world through it – we saw how she saw and we felt what she felt.

Then her mind spoke.

- Hello.

I was reminded of the time I had first heard MarvinMilton in my mind.  The warmth in that voice was so complete, so unconditionally accepting, that it made your life up to that point seem utterly barren, devoid of love.  It was only now, hearing that voice, that you knew what love was.  Two syllables were enough to tell you that there was somebody somewhere who could see every corner of your being and still not want to turn away.

And somehow, through force of habit perhaps, we found ourselves translating the beauty, the subtlety, and the wide-ranging meanings contained within her thought into our own languages.  Sal’s mind hadn’t spoken in English.  She had simply inserted pure thought into our knowing.  With that one thought we knew her intimately.  We knew her strength and her simplicity.  It seemed tragic that such an amazing thought should go through the translation process in my own mind and come out as something so mundane as ‘hello’.  I realised right then why there is so much misunderstanding between people.  Words are not enough.

- I have a gift for each of you.  But first I think that it’s time we all got to know each other, said the living light that was Real Sal’s stream of consciousness, only it was more of an ocean, and it bore us all away on waves of coruscating blue and white radiance to a small, dark bedroom.

Posters and postcards cover the walls like a mosaic.  There aren’t too many pop groups here, although the Manic Street Preachers make an appearance.  On one wall, surrounded by a bevy of feisty comic strip girls and female Klingon warriors, cheek by cheek with Tank Girl, Albert Einstein pokes his tongue out at us.  Up in the far corner Felix the Cat conspires with Marilyn Monroe and the Gorrilaz.  On the top shelf of a small bookcase by the single futon bed are two cuddly creatures, a Flat Eric and an NTL Monkey.  They’re sitting back to back as if they’ve just had an argument.  The room is almost tidy, but there is too much pop culture squeezed into any and every available space for it ever to be restful.  Whichever direction you look there are faces peering at you.  Che Guevara, Big Brother and Scooby Doo all have their eyes on you.  There is no escape from the iconography of the Twentieth Century.  Not here.

We see all of these things and we understand them.  We are the disembodied minds of the human race.  Now we discover we have a body again, the body of a schoolgirl from Banford.  And anything that we see through her eyes we see with her memories and her character.  We know, for example, that the untidy pile of notebooks, journals and sketchpads on the floor against the wall was once the most precious and significant item in this room.  We know what’s in them: a determined attempt to leave a mark on the world and make sense of it, a desperate struggle between honesty and self deceit, a mix of frustration and admiration for the human race, proposals for utopias, ideas on love and sex, exclamations of diamond bright anger.

It is Sunday 28^th November.  MarvinMilton died just a few hours ago.  There is a suitcase lying open on the floor in the middle of the room.  Even as we step closer to it, and our face is bathed in the beam of light that is shining through the gap in the bundled coat, we experience a flood of recent memories: MarvinMilton, falling from a dark sky; his eyes, his voice, telling us amazing things, showing us new worlds, giving us a mission, and then dying; a night time phone call to George, good old George, who is on his way over right now to save us from touching the monodreme.  We love George.  Yet the light is shining directly into our left eye, and it is not evil at all.  It is ancient, yet it is so inexperienced and curious.  It is utterly unselfconscious, unmarred by any shadow – of guilt or shame or fear.  The light has no sense of itself as being separate from that which it shines on.  The light has no sense of needing anything.  It is only curious.  This light wants only to shine.  It is pure and it is innocent and it does not deserve to be sent to the bottom of the sea.  We must rescue it, before George arrives to rescue us.

We reach out and we untie the knot in the sleeves of George’s coat.  We open the coat out, lay it flat, and the room is lit up in a blazing glory that does not burn or dazzle.  It seems as if a summer day has come to the bedroom.  We reach out to touch it, but then we hesitate, almost remembering something that MarvinMilton once said.  But the light is warm and reassuring.  It’s calling to us.  It wants to play.  The scent of a distant summer meadow passes by on a green breeze.  There’s music playing somewhere.  Slowly we reach out our hands and we touch the sun.

The monodreme is smooth and hard and cool to the touch.  We rest our hands on it and breathe a sigh of relief.  There is no evil.  Everything’s okay.  But then our palms adhere to the surface and a lump of dread solidifies in our chest.  We try to pull our hands back but they are stuck fast and the monodreme has become incredibly heavy.  We can’t lift it.  We can’t even budge it.  And now our palms are starting to sink into the monodreme.  It’s no longer hard.  A wave of fear and revulsion engulfs us as the monodreme bulges between our fingers and slowly pours over our hands.  We want to panic.  We are panicking, but only on the inside.  Our heart, which is the heart of a solitary girl, races for all of us, pounds frantically for an entire race, but we cannot move.  We are held, mesmerised, as the misshapen monodreme stretches, moving up our arms.  It seems to be getting smaller, but it’s hard to tell.  Then an unpleasant sensation informs us that it is entering into us, through the skin of our fingers and hands and arms.  Its presence inside us is a jagged, amorphous energy, a cold heat that sends tendrils up inside our arms, exploring.  We have never felt so alone and afraid as at this moment.  The faces in the room loom about us, watching impassively.  It’s your own fault, they are saying.  MarvinMilton told you not to touch it.  George and Osmo and Pee trusted you not to touch it.  Look what you’ve done now.  You’ve unleashed a horror, and you will be the first victim.  The faces we had thought of as friends have become cold-eyed spectators.  They will not help us.  They think we deserve this.  They will just watch, and judge, and condemn.  We are alone.

I’m sorry, thinks a small voice somewhere in the crashing torrent of our terror, but it’s no good.  It’s no help.  The monodreme doesn’t stop.  We think it anyway, over and over again.  I’m sorry.  I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean it.

Our arms are coated in a membrane of gold.  The probes of energy inside are reaching past our shoulders and into our torso.  There’s nothing we can do to stop it.  We can’t even faint.  All we wish for now is oblivion.  Let us sleep, slip into a coma, die, anything.  We just don’t want to be awake anymore.  We don’t want to be feeling this anymore.  We don’t want to be thinking about it anymore.  Please.  George.  Where are you, George?  Why aren’t you here yet?  Why aren’t you here?  I’m sorry.  I’m so sorry.  Please make it stop.

But it doesn’t stop.  The faces in the room watch on as the cold heat reaches our heart and lungs and encapsulates them, pierces them.  It sends a shoot up our throat and discovers our brain.  It fills our eyes with blistering colours that dance and transmute constantly.  We are utterly possessed.  Every cell of our body has been taken from us.  It’s over.

The room is dark now.  The monodreme has been absorbed completely into our body, so all of its light is now on the inside.  The room is quiet, ordinary once more.  We can see the branches and leaves of the sycamore outside through the half open window.  They’re rustling slightly.  We can see the line of the rooftops across the street, the TV aerials and the satellite dish, the night sky beyond.  There are stars peeping through the pale broken clouds.  A cool breeze enters in.  A cat yowls in the yard next door.

We sit and wait.  We are pulsing with a foreign, alien energy.  Every inch of our body is alive with it.  We sit and wait, and nothing happens.  We lift our arm.  Nothing stops us.  We run our fingers through our hair.  It’s drenched with sweat.  The room is still.  We try to stand.  Nothing prevents us.  The monodreme is still there, alive and awake inside us, filling us with light and energy, but it isn’t doing anything.  It’s just being there.  It’s just being and watching.

Our terror subsides, giving way to exhaustion and bewilderment and curiosity.  We begin to think again.  We walk to the window and look out into the night.  We begin to realise things.  The monodreme is not evil, no.  It is not good, either.  That was just something we had projected onto it ourselves.  The monodreme is, in fact, almost a blank.  It has no personality.  MarvinMilton had withdrawn his personality, along with the memory of what it was like to see the world through the vessel of a sentient being.  Now it doesn’t even have an understanding of what a personality is, or that the body it has taken over has one.  All it knows is that it has encountered something new and strange and it wants to find out more.

And now the monodreme can feel what it is to live inside a human body, to look out through a pair of human eyes, to sift and interpret the surroundings through human senses, and a human mind.  It discovers that there is meaning attached to everything it perceives.  We walk about the room, picking things up, looking at them, looking at everything.  That pattern of tonal changes over there is a wall.  It is a wall with posters on it.  One of the posters is an image of a man called Einstein.  He is sticking his tongue out.  The small regular shapes on the poster are letters, forming words: a quote of something that this man once said about war.  This man was an intelligent man, a wise man.  Now he is dead.  So much meaning.  And every item, every poster, every object, is attached to a whole flood of associations.  And in turn every association is attached to an ocean of further associations, on and on.  It’s all interconnected in an infinity of combinations.

Interesting.

Now the monodreme has taken up residence in every last cell of our body it has become passive, a passenger.  Through us it is directed.  Through us its ancient strength is channelled.  It sees no separation between our thoughts and emotions and its power.  There is no separation.  Compared to its age and raw potency Sal Phillips is as powerful as, well, absolutely nothing at all, but compared to the mental and emotional complexity of Sal Phillips the monodreme is as motivated as an empty sheet of paper, only less so.  Now the strength and the personality have joined we realise that the reality around us is as weak as a dream - weaker in fact, because we can control this dream as easily as we can think.  The walls of this room are made of nothing but light.  They remain held together only because we allow them to be.  This entire universe is nothing more than a delightful playground that will bend and change as we wish.  Anything is possible.  This reality will obey us.  This reality is us.  There is no separation.  If we wipe away all that is before us it would be equivalent to becoming tired of a daydream and choosing to replace it with another.  It wouldn’t mean anything at all - would it?

We move back to the window and look out.  George is down in the garden, hunched over, scrabbling for stones.  Good old George.  Do we really want to erase him?  No, of course we don’t.  We’ll have to concentrate, keep our guard up.  George must continue to live, unharmed.  Everybody must.  Can we make sure that happens?  Can we make sure nobody is harmed by our irresistible willpower?

We have a lot to think about.  Now we begin to understand the danger that the human race, the Earth, the entire universe will be in, for as long as Sal Phillips and the monodreme continue to exist.  Now, as the mind that is six billion minds, we understand it is a miracle that we are still alive at all.

•

George turns and looks up at us, but then he fades away before he can speak and we are floating in blackness.  Then we hear the voice of our beloved Sal Phillips.

- I remembered MarvinMilton and his fear that we would touch the monodreme.  I wanted to know what he had experienced.  As I practised with my power I realised that I could know anything that was true, because truth is just one facet of the process of infinity, and there is no separation between it and me.  I decided to relive what MarvinMilton had lived through.

The blackness shifts to light and we are jogging for our lives over a field of yellow.  The thing that pursues us has no name but it fills us with terror.  We have no name but we are filled with terror.  We know what will happen if it catches us.  We have seen our loved ones ripped apart by things such as this.  But even if we had never seen such a thing before we would still jog for our lives because a deep instinct has overridden our mind.  We are a mindless jogging thing, intent on nothing more than escape, only we are slow, and it is fast, and there is nowhere to hide.  We ignore everything that does not offer us hope.  A thing lies on the ground and it is strange and it shines and we have never seen such a thing before, and normally we would be interested in it because it is unusual, but right now it does not offer us hope so we ignore it with our mind, but something is wrong because our body changes direction and jogs towards the thing, even though we are busy trying to escape from the ripping thing.  Even though we are mindless with terror our body stops and we bend down and we put our hands on the shining thing.  The ripping thing lands on our back and sinks its teeth into our neck and we fall onto our side with the ripping thing ripping us with its claws, and the world is white with terror and the shining thing is stuck to our hands.  The word ‘monodreme’ appears in our mind.  We are being eaten alive and we wait now instinctively for the whiteness of the world to take us away from the pain and the terror, but we can’t stop ourselves from looking at the monodreme, which is changing shape in our hands and entering into us through our skin.  We lie there helplessly in the grass and the ripping thing feeds on us, and the pain is unbearable, but there is nowhere for us to go, and the monodreme fills us up until it is all on the inside.

We lie there, waiting and waiting, and the ripping thing continues to feed, but it is slowing down now.  It is having difficulty tearing our flesh with its teeth because we are more real than it is.  The ripping thing feels lighter to us, as if it is barely even there anymore, so we risk sitting up.  We sit up easily and we wonder if the ripping thing has gone, but when we turn we see that it is still there and its teeth are embedded in our arm, and we look straight into its eyes and we feel the pure terror that we always feel when we see the face of a ripping thing, even though we can no longer feel its bite, and we wish the terrible thing would not be there, that there would not be any ripping things anywhere ever again, and then, suddenly, it isn’t there anymore and we are sitting in a field alone, our blood all around us.

The day becomes a dream and we do much walking from place to place, and we learn that we don’t have to be wounded if we don’t want to be.  We learn that if there are things that frighten us we can think them away forever.  We learn that the loved ones of our family are not as real as us either, that they are just a part of a dream.  We could think them away if we wanted to, but we don’t want to.  All the same, they sense a change in us and they are afraid and they run away from us.  We don’t like this, and wish for them to come to us, and suddenly some irresistible force physically draws them towards us, but they are screaming with fear and we let them go quickly.  They flee.  We feel strange and lonely.  And then nighttime comes and we lie down and see the stars.

Everything is a dream, and we dream that we are up amongst the stars.  We feel safe because nothing is as real as we are, but then we realise we have become lost in our dream and don’t know how to get back.  Each direction we turn looks the same to us, just stars and stars and stars.  We search for something familiar to help us find our way back.  Everything seems very far away and we begin to panic.  The monodreme is shining inside us.  The monodreme has caused all of this trouble.  We force it out of our body by thinking about it hard, and it is in our hands and we intend to throw it away, but the sky is big and we are afraid to let go of it, so we stop and we listen very hard for the slightest sound that might help us.  All is quiet so we listen harder and harder, sure somehow, that we will hear something eventually - and eventually we do.  But the sound is in our mind rather than our ears.

We go toward the sound.  It is very quiet but we follow it, on and on.  The sound is coming from a tiny speck in the sky.  We go towards it and gradually the speck gets closer and larger and, after a long, long time, we find out that the speck is not a tiny speck at all.  It is the biggest thing there ever was, and the closer we get to it the bigger it gets, until it seems like it will just keep getting bigger and bigger forever, without us ever reaching it.

We touch the speck that is too big to be a speck and we sit on it and a thing appears that does not look like a ripping thing but does not look like family either.  We are not sure whether we should think it away or not so we listen to its mind to find out what it is.  We find out it is a girl called Sal Phillips who has just run through a cemetery and an industrial estate to find out what the glowing light was that was falling from the sky, and we learn what Klingons are and animal rights and humanitarianism and the Manic Street Preachers and George and Albert Einstein and Sugar Puffs and school and ambitions and morals and sex and homemade vegetarian lasagne and books and songs and TV and Stig of the Dump and Watership Down and Gormenghast and Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy.  We listen to her mind and stare into her eyes and the dream becomes more beautiful and ugly and amazing and desperate than we could ever have imagined, and we learn how to share thoughts with other beings using words, and how to question our own thoughts and actions.  We learn so much it is like we become somebody different.  Our past self becomes nothing more than the memory of a dream of being an animal.  We are a long way from home, and what would Sal think of us if she knew we had destroyed all of that life?  We try to keep the knowledge from her but it crowds in at the edges of our thoughts like a black madness.

Sal and her friends are beautiful creatures that have lived incredible, rich lives.  They must not be thought away.  They must be allowed to continue.  We must let go of the monodreme so that we don’t endanger them any longer with our fear and instincts and weakness.  But we must explain to Sal and her friends that they must never touch the monodreme themselves.  It’s a terrible risk and we wonder if there is a simple way of getting rid of the monodreme forever.  We look into our self for an answer.  We can find out anything that is true, because truth is just one facet of the process of infinity, and nothing is separate.  Only, there’s just so much of it.  It’s like endless space.  Finding the right piece of truth is a question of finding the right question, and finding the right question is like finding a needle in a solar system.

We do the best we can.  It somehow doesn’t feel enough, but the black madness is threatening to rush in and wash us away forever.  There is no time for more.  We identify that if we let go of the monodreme we will die.  The monodreme will remain harmless as long as it doesn’t come into contact with a living, sentient being.  It will be a noble, selfless sacrifice.  Sal would understand.  We must do it soon because we are afraid.

As Sal ties the coat around the monodreme we know we haven’t asked the right question.  Then we are floating in blackness once more.

•

We are the human race, the mind that is six billion minds, all awake at once.  We are returned to our bodies, still reeling from our experiences, but the eternal Christmas Day does not finish – not quite yet.  We are returned to our bodies, but our mental connection is not broken.  We are still one being.  What one of us experiences we all experience.  And now, to reacclimatise ourselves with being human, we are reliving the last few moments before the world stopped.  We are reliving them together, each one of us experiencing the same few moments from six billion points of view, all at the same time.

It’s impossible of course.  How could an individual concentrate well enough to be aware of everything that is going on for six billion souls when it’s all happening simultaneously?  Our minds don’t work like that.  Surely we’d have to have the awareness and perceptions of a god.

But it turns out to be easy.  It just happens, despite the limitations we think we have.  We observe enough, experience enough, to age us by a hundred lifetimes, and on one level that is how long it takes, and yet on another level it’s just a few moments – a couple of heartbeats from our lives.  We see everything.

Many are asleep.  We see their dreams, in all of their soul-splitting horror, shrug-making strangeness, unreasonable beauty and breathtaking hilarity.

Some people are simply sitting, admiring the scenery.  We see glaciers and pyramids, sunsets over forests, savannahs under rain clouds, train tracks through deserts, washing over fences, chimney stacks and power plants, estuaries at low tide, taxi cabs in cities, military machines, rockets and garbage heaps to the horizon.  We see cemeteries and skyscrapers and waiting rooms and factory floors and shopping malls and hospitals and blasted schoolrooms.  We see cigarette ends and buses, medicine cabinets and sock drawers.

There is an Elvis Presley impersonator holding up a grocery store.

There are three actors preparing Oscar acceptance speeches.

There is a teenage girl who is so self centred that she’s actually beginning to notice it herself.

There are people panicking because the end of the world is coming.

There are countless people watching TV.

There are people crying with hunger.

There are thousands of people who are just plain bored.

There is a very small girl who is being abused by her father, physically, mentally and emotionally, just as she was yesterday, and the day before that and the day before that.  It is happening now, and we see it.  We see it through her eyes, and we see it through his, and we don’t know how we can ever be healed, but at least now we all know.  At least now we all know.

We all see each other.  We see each other and we see ourselves.  The starving and the overfed see each other.  All of the religions, including the atheists and the agnostics, see each other.  The terrorists, the world leaders and the victims of both, they see each other.  The cowardly and the brave, the shunned and the popular, the self-effacing and the self important, the shy and the confident, the worried and the carefree, the disturbed and the tranquil, we’re all there.  Young people now know what it is to be old – exactly the same as being young, of course.  Boys now know what it is to be a man, and a girl, and a woman, and a man who wants to be a woman and vice versa; vice versa many times over in all directions.  We all know now what it is to be attacked, and to be the attacker.  We know what it is to harm, and also to heal.  We know what it is to help, and to hinder, and what it is to do nothing at all.

We know who we are at last.

And I am aware of a train of thought somewhere in the midst of this ocean of consciousness and experience.  It belongs to me, George Hanson.  It is marvelling at all of the imagination the human race possesses.  The terrible ways in which we manage to survive, hold on to ourselves, when it seems that we are so withered and worn that we should just blow away.  We know so much more than we think.  We know enough to make us happy.  It’s all there, shared out amongst us, I can see it when I turn my head to one side and catch it with the corner of my eye.  But we feel so small and so alone.

I see the remarkable poetic thoughts of scientists.

Light travels over one hundred and eighty six thousand miles every second.  Every second.

What’s the circumference of the world?

About twenty five thousand miles.

How far does light travel in an entire year?  Too far to imagine in terms of tarmac roads.  But that vast, unimaginable distance is a light year.  The spiralled disc of our galaxy, the Milky Way, is roughly two hundred and fifty thousand light years across.  That kind of distance defies comprehension.  You can hear the words but you can’t make them feel real.  And the Milky Way is a speck in the universe.  From some planets out there it looks like one more star in the night sky.  From some planets it can’t be seen at all.  Two hundred and fifty thousand light years across, and too small to be seen!  You can hear the words but you can’t make them feel real.

What are we, asks my train of thought, that our immediate surroundings should seem so big to us, so all-encompassing?  And all the while, within every cell of our bodies, molecules twist, atoms dance and electrons spin, around and around.

There is no separation between the bustling activity of Times Square, the swirling grandeur of the Andromeda Galaxy, and a child facing a corner and closing his eyes to the room, shutting out everything external, and retreating inwards in search of safety or peace.  There is no separation.  There is no difference.  Nothing is bigger, or more important, than anything else.  There is no separation between Monday and Tuesday.  There is no separation between the gawky kid besieged by an assault of acne, a bad wardrobe and a lisp, and the good-looking kid at the back of the class, besieged by their own popularity.  There is no separation between religion and science, the left and the right, the east and the west, the north and the south.  Every point on a globe is the centre, regardless of datelines.  Every person is the centre of a universe.  It all goes around and around.  There is no separation between yesterday and tomorrow.  They are the same thing.

I find I am pleased with this train of thought, but still some of the six billion disagree.

•

The world began to move again.  I was back in my armchair in Mount Everest.  Real Sal was looking at me.  Suddenly, silently, it began to snow, even though we were inside the mountain.  I looked into Real Sal’s eyes and I knew that around the world, as the people began to move once more, snow fell on them, wherever they were.  But the snow was made from feather light crystals of radiance rather than frozen water.  It fell in the desert beneath the sun, and it fell in the darkness of the night beneath the moon and clouds.  It fell indoors and outdoors, on the sleeping and the awake, in the daylight and in people’s dreams.  When it landed on your skin it tingled slightly and then disappeared.  It could be seen by everyone, even the blind.  When it landed on the ground, or on the roof of a house, or the branch of a tree, it stayed awhile, long enough for the world to be coated in a covering of gentle white light.  The deserts, the ice fields, the forests and the cities all shone, as if the heavens had descended and blanketed them in light.  All around the world it drifted down, absolutely vertical it fell, despite any wind or breeze that happened to be blowing, as if its destination was the centre of the world.  It was not slippery or cold, but it could be kicked into the air by the feet of delighted children, and even adults too.  It could be picked up and fashioned into crumbly balls that dripped iridescent flakes and exploded into a silent white firework on impact when thrown at your neighbour.  It fell in planes, yet did not dazzle or dismay the pilots.  It fell in submarines at the bottom of the ocean.

And everywhere people were looking at each other and at themselves with new eyes.

Real Sal rose to her feet, her eyes aglow with a joy that was silent, contained, but bottomless.  She pressed a finger to her lips (we were dumbstruck anyway) and she gestured for us to follow her.  Me and Osmo and Pee and Christine and Fake Sal jumped up and ran after her towards the edge of the mountain where we all became invisible and sailed out into the sky over the mountain range to go see the world, and how the people of Earth were reacting to the gift they had been given.  Sal took us soaring down amongst the people, snaking back and forth through time like Father Christmas on his deliveries, so that we could see the moment when everybody everywhere stirred from the eternal Christmas day.

While the snow fell Sal Phillips allowed nobody to be harmed or frightened, but the light shone and everybody reflected.