Talking with Einstein
Posted on February 2, 2023 by Jim Ross
After attending a high-level military meeting on drones, Larry confides to Sara, “I never wanted to play a role in launching weapons. But here I am, testing drones by air and under water, and why? To keep up with the Russians, because if they can, we have to.”
Over the next few days, Larry sinks into a disconcerting quiet, and heads to bed early without dinner. As he starts battling his way out from under, he tells his wife Sara, who is also my daughter, “We’ve got to build a shed where I can work on my inventions, far from here, where nobody’ll know what I’m up to.”
Sara calls me, “Larry wants to build a shed in West Virginia where he can work on his inventions. He’s given me a budget. He says the royalties will cover it in a heartbeat.”
Larry’s sense of urgency intensifies. “It’s been nearly a year since I died. What have I accomplished in the past year to prove that I deserved to live?”
—
A year ago, Sara saw Larry fall, turn purple, and become nonresponsive—he had no pulse—then
kept his blood pumping to his brain until paramedics arrived to shock Larry back to
life. It was touch and
go but he came to.
The docs said Larry’s recovery was nothing short of a miracle. “V-fibs suffered at home have a one in a million rate of survival without deficits. He’s that one.”
While still trapped in a hospital bed recovering from dual surgeries, Larry landed a new job. At first, it wasn’t clear to him what he’d be doing, but the people who hired him knew. Released, Larry threw himself into the new job full throttle.
—
It had been a year since Larry’s brief death and re-birth. To celebrate, Sara plans a dinner party for an inner circle of six friends. Her ulterior motive is to distract Larry from his obsession with his inventions. However, by calling it a re-birthday party, Sara accomplishes the opposite. That reinforces Larry’s awareness that he died and his perseverating on the question, “What have I accomplished in the past year to prove I deserved to live?”
Commanding center stage for their dinner guests, Larry regales them, “I’ve got all these inventions in the works. There’s no conflict of interest with my job as long as my creations don’t overlap with my work scope. I just need the time and a quiet space to work where nobody can find out what I’m up to and steal my ideas.”
Larry reels off a list. At first, someone says one of his ideas had already been given a thumbs down on Shark Tank, but Larry gets angry and says, “You just don’t understand. Lots of inventions get thumbs-downed on Shark Tank and then make millions without help from a shark.” Knowing Larry’s not looking for genuine feedback, the dinner guests ooh and aah to support his aspirations and avoid deflating his hopes. They tell him his ideas will enrich the world and line his pockets. Privately, they disagree, and tell Sara that all of Larry’s supposed inventions already exist or are nonstarters. Sara keeps me posted on the goings on. I tell her I’m not inclined to build Larry an invention shed.
As Larry’s thoughts continue to race, he confides to Sara, “I don’t really know what’s happening to me. It’s just like the movie Beautiful Mind. I see how everything is connected. I see things nobody else can. And it’s all in technicolor.”
The next day, Sara drives Larry to her safe space: my house, where she grew up, where her mother and I still live. When they arrive, I’ve just gotten home from a grueling meeting, and want to blow off some energy. I announce, “I’m going for a walk.”
“I’ll join you,” Larry says, reaching for his coat.
We drive a couple of miles to a spot near the woods.
Now it begins. “I’ve been talking with Albert Einstein,” Larry tells me, “and he’s been making the theory of relativity a no brainer. It’s so simple a baby could understand it.”
As we pass the stables, Larry just above a whisper says, “Did you know I can speak in Alien now?”
I say, “Can you really? Show me.”
Larry looks around to confirm the coast is clear. Finding no one, at the top of his lungs, he then speaks tongues or emits word garbage. After 45 seconds, he abruptly stops.
I respond to Larry by asking a series of questions in English.
“Why didn’t you answer me in Alien?” Larry asks.
“I can understand it,” I say, “but I can’t speak it.”
Later that night, I’m at my computer when Larry emerges from the basement, and takes the seat next to me, something he’d never done before. “I see everything differently,” he says. He explains what he’s seeing now that he couldn’t see before. “If only people understood how everything on earth is intimately interconnected, how interdependent all our systems are, and we all are on each other.” Eventually, we agree to call it a night.
All night long, after everyone’s supposedly gone to sleep, Larry keeps telling Sara he wants to get up and tell me something, claiming “Joe will understand.” Knowing Larry is wired for sound, Sara keeps holding him in bed so he doesn’t go upstairs to wake me.
The next day, while I’m out at a meeting, things deteriorate because nobody can grasp what Larry’s trying to express. Perhaps he was talking to them in Alien. They have no choice but to have him hospitalized. When I arrive home, Larry’s already gone.
Two days later, from the hospital, Larry calls me, “I’m in Heaven, been talking with Einstein and the Dalai Lama. I see now, all man’s inventions should focus on one thing: bringing about peace among all living things, on earth and wherever else life exists. All our actions must build on our experience of compassion.”
Larry stays in Heaven for the next couple of days. “Trust me, Heaven’s really good,” he says. “The human brain is an antenna and a beacon to the light of the world.”
Later, I repeat Larry’s last line to close friends who know what’s going on. They say, “It sounds like he’s onto something. And, he’s said it brilliantly. He’s experiencing light itself.”
Within a few days, Larry starts slipping from Heaven’s grasp. “I’ve been thinking about the need to start a new civilization,” he says. “The biggest consideration is that it be far away enough from all other civilizations that it won't be affected by the mass destruction that will soon be coming.”
When Sara and I visit, Larry says. “I’m in the matrix. I don’t know how to get out,” as he repeatedly traces a circle in the air with his right forefinger. “This is Hell.” When he says “Hell,” he projects terror from his eyes.
As he keeps tracing circles to demonstrate the matrix, I put my hand in the way to interrupt his circling and disrupt the matrix.
“What’re you doing?” he asks.
“I’m creating a door,” I say, “I’m giving you a way out. You just have to step through.”
“I can’t,” Larry says, obviously frustrated. “The door closes before I can step through. Anyway, there’s work I have to do here before I can leave.”
A couple of days later, Larry tells me and Sara, “I’ll never invent anything again. I’ve lost all my powers. I turn over my powers to you.” Moments later, he begins crying, “I can’t stand this. And it’s been going on for two thousand years. Two thousand years.”
I try to reassure him. “You’ll create again. This place is the matrix. You need to get out of the matrix and back to the time/space continuum.”
The next day, Sara and I visit again. Larry’s eyes are locked shut. Sara asks him, “What year is it?” His answer is wildly incorrect. She then asks him, “What is the date of your birth?” and he gets that completely wrong too. Sara asks him to open his eyes.
“You open them,” Larry says. I suggest, jokingly, “Why not tape them open?”
Eyes wide shut, Larry asks, “What planet are we on?” “Uranus,” I answer, deliberately mispronouncing the planet’s name as a test. If Larry doesn’t laugh, the matrix has a tighter grip on him than I thought.
Larry’s doesn’t laugh but his eyes snap open. He stands abruptly and announces, “We gotta get outta here.”
I ask Larry for the names of his three children. He incorrectly answers, “Mark, Luke, and John.”
I ask, “Are you Donald Trump?”
At that, Larry laughs. “The idea’s crazy enough it might work.”
To draw Larry out and give him a lift, I say, “It’s Karaoke time.”
Larry breaks into the John Denver version of West Virginia. Done, he whines, “I want to go there. I can invent there. No, I can breathe there.”
A couple of days later, Larry can name his children correctly and asks us a series of questions to help orient him: “What’s today’s date?” “What’s the temperature outside?” and “How many levels does this hospital have?”
I ask him, “Why do you want to know how many levels this place has?”
He whispers, “Don’t tell anyone but I’m planning to break out of here. First, I need to figure out how to get onto a lower security floor.”
The docs keep playing with Larry’s meds but nothing makes much difference. And he refuses the meds that have the highest probability of bringing him back.
While we’re not there, Larry obtains an eight-feet-long by four-feet-wide sheet of paper, writes all over it, and tapes it to the wall of his room. Or perhaps he tapes it up first and then writes all over it. In any case, when we arrive, we see he’s drawn a flow chart of what’s coming and at what points he might intervene to disrupt the cataclysm.
The only meds that Larry is willing to take and have the desired effect are anti-anxiety meds. They reduce agitation sufficiently that Larry can get four hours of sleep per night. The problem is, certain nurses prefer to give him the anti-anxiety meds during the day so he’ll sleep through their shifts and they don’t have to manage him. By sleeping his days away, even with more anti-anxiety meds, Larry can’t sleep at night.
After a few weeks, Larry demands a meeting with the unit’s chief psychiatrist. Sara and I attend.
Larry tells the doctor, “I'm the second coming of Christ.”
Sara asks, “Do you really think so?”
Larry responds, “Aren’t we all?”
Daily, the residents of Larry’s unit parade through the halls. It’s evident that many are street people: homeless drug addicts, some also prostitutes. Nearly all voluntarily committed themselves to the psych ward to escape extreme cold and get easy access to free methadone. Larry observes their behavior and interactions but doesn’t join their parade.
Eventually, the docs concoct the right combination of meds and Larry becomes more cooperative about taking them. He begins to snap out of the matrix. He pleads to be released so he can return to his family. “I just want the peace and quiet of home.”
Just before being released, he announces, “If my harvest is bountiful, I plan to give half to the homeless.”
He’s released from the hospital to our house for two weeks of outpatient care. Two weeks later, he’s certified to return to his job, where he’s responsible for field testing the feasibility of deploying drones through air and water to deliver weapons of mass destruction.
“It’s good to get back to work,” Larry says, “but I’ll be the first to admit, my heart’s not in it the way it once was.”