“I could sense her lack of indifference – it was so valuable, so rare!…” – THE PLACE OF QUARANTINE
It was these words that caused something to shift in my mind. I suddenly interrupted her, “Wait, wait” – and turned away, trying to apprehend this microscopic change. Tina looked at me with some alarm; I grinned to calm her, then nodded and said, “I understand you perfectly, better than you think – and, by the way… Please think hard, don’t rush, this is serious: How would you describe the place where this ‘someone’ of yours is located? How would you label this place – or perhaps you might be able to just show it to me?”
“What is there to think hard about?” Tina shrugged. “It’s here, around me – and around again, everywhere.”
“Wait a moment; here’s our world” – I drew an imaginary circle on the table. “And here you are” – I mark a point at its center – “show me where your interlocutor is? To the right, to the left, all around?”
“No,” Tina shook her head, “he’s here” – she made a gesture as if poking through the plane of the table with her finger. “Under the table, above the table and here, a little to one side, if you look in that direction, but the table doesn’t matter; that place always remains with me. Only out there, as I said, there is none of the crowdedness we have here.”
“Amazing…” I muttered, looking at her hand and rubbing my temple. “Amazing and strange, and very precise. You know, I’m working on something; I’m trying to explain how thoughts are born. Both yours and mine – but I’m still unable to tell you in a comprehensible way. It seems I don’t yet understand the most important thing myself.”
The sense of a shift in my mind was still with me; I caught it. I was ready to start formulating it – in solitude, in silence.
Soon we said goodbye. “I’m leaving tomorrow,” I told her. “Maybe we’ll see each other again, who knows.”
“Yes,” she responded to my tone, “as I was saying, the world is such a crowded place…”
For some reason, I couldn’t hold her gaze. “In any case,” I said, looking down at the table, “I believe this ‘symptom’ of yours is not a fantasy or drivel. It is something very real, and you are wonderful – with or without it.”
“Oh, thank you, thank you,” Tina laughed, and it was a strange laugh. Then I looked at her at last and saw in her eyes, deep inside, a very adult confusion and longing. So out of harmony with her lipstick and the bright streak in her hair.
Going to the skytrain station, I muttered in different ways, “Dimensions, dimensions, there are many of them, far more than three…” I wanted to laugh, feeling an incredible burst of energy. In the car, I pressed my forehead against the glass door and looked out at the city, stretching in all directions, the skyscrapers piercing plane after plane. The train made a semicircle, turning toward the Chao Praya River; the monorail bend changed the perspective, altered the geometry – the geometry of the city, the geometry of the world. Bringing together points that had seemed dispersed, like on my fractal curves… I looked through the glass, like an emperor over my domain from the top of a hill. Gradually it became clearer what I needed to do next with the equations and the mysterious field. With the flows that establish balance – the balance of energy, the balance of consciousness.
And suddenly, I was struck by something else, like an electric spark or the overly adult gaze of a teenager. I sensed with every fiber of my body that I didn’t want to, I couldn’t fly away from here – from Bangkok, from Tina. I finally had real allies – maybe for the first time in my life. I could sense their lack of indifference – it was so valuable, so rare! A city full of alien realities; a girl whose life was infinitely distant from mine had suddenly become incredibly close – much closer than snooty Bern and my colleagues, not willing to open their eyes a bit wider…” – THE PLACE OF QUARANTINE
Image credit: Thinking-Silence
“This book may well change our perception of life itself!” – Readers’ Favorite
He didn’t expect to wake up dead. Now he wants to prove the afterlife exists. Is there any hope that our memory and consciousness remain intact after death?
Read The Place of Quarantine today to open your mind to destiny!
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