‘I was very clear. I did warn you. I can remember.’
And I could remember too. Of course I could. I could remember everything. His voice echoed in my mind.
If you want to stay a normal human being, you should leave right now. Because this won’t be a normal experience.
I scowled. ‘It was a little bloody vague. It sounded like generic marketing. You should have been specific.’
‘Oh, and you would have believed that?’
I stared at the frayed edges of his denim shorts. I doubted they had ever seen a washing machine. I could smell him. Alberto Ribas came with a scent. A not-so-delicate bouquet of musk and brine and bad breath and goat and body odour with a secondary note of Hawaiian Tropic (an incongruous note too, given that his general aesthetic seemed to be halfway between unrehabilitated caveman and pirate). I tried to ignore it. Which was quite hard when your senses were literally out of this world, and you were confined to a tiny Fiat Panda with weak air conditioning.
‘I don’t know what I would have believed,’ I said. But I knew he was right. I knew I wouldn’t have believed any of it.
‘It was for a reason, you know. It was all for a reason. La Presencia only comes to you for a reason. When I first encountered it, I was an old drunk. I had all kinds of issues after my wife Julia died, and it helped me. It gave me what I needed to get sober. That is why I always carry this with me.’ He dug in his denim short pocket and pulled out his miniature rum bottle full of seawater. Seawater that wasn’t just seawater. I could see its soft glow. ‘It’s from La Presencia. It’s why Christina had the olive jar. She wanted to be near it, always. I want to be near it. Near La Presencia. Near those mysterious photons. It senses when I get weak. It glows and gives me strength. You see, none of this is an accident. You coming here, you coming to see me, you going in the water. La Presencia wanted you. Christina wanted you. The changes are going to help you. The talents. They’re getting stronger, right? They get stronger for a few days. Eventually you will be able to control them. I told you that you would develop them. Remember? In the hospital. Now, not everyone touched by La Presencia gets the same powers in the same way, so I need to know…What has emerged so far? What extra-sensory talents? Telepathy? Telekinesis? Clairvoyance? Precognition?’
The words were ridiculous. The truth even more so. I thought of the lobster. The one I had seen ahead of time. ‘Yes, yes, yes, and – I think – yes.’
‘None of these skills by the way are unique,’ said Alberto. ‘Everyone on Earth has these things. You know, when someone runs into some guy on the street and says, “I was just thinking of you.” La precognición…precognition. That happens. All the time. Or when we feel someone looking at us from a window before we see them. Telepathy. It happens all the time. Every time we have a déjà vu. Every time we are thinking of a word and someone says that word on the radio. These things happen far more than a coincidence. You know Jung?’
‘The psychiatrist? Yes.’
‘Well, he talked of “la coincidencia significativa” – “meaningful coincidence”. The psychiatric world wasn’t ready to hear it, but it was there and he observed it in his patients repeatedly. La actividad paranormal es normal. We add the para because we are embarrassed by what we don’t understand about ourselves. So what happens with La Presencia is all these abilities we have are unlocked and empowered. It makes us become ourselves.’
‘Hmm,’ I hummed, doubtfully. ‘What about telekinesis? Are you telling me that most people move things with their mind?’
‘No. Es verdad. You are right. Telekinesis is the one that is not so common. But even so, it happens, sometimes, when the wish is strong enough and the thing is small. A father wanting their weak child’s birthday candle to go out actually adds the force to their blow if they think it strongly enough…Telekinesis…it is there.’ He tapped the side of his skull. ‘It is there in everyone. And in you, it has now come alive. The human mind is a dark ocean. A Mariana Trench. La Presencia gives it light.’
Particles of Light
Ridiculous, I thought to myself. Although of course it wasn’t just a thought to myself.
‘Yes, I agree,’ Alberto said. ‘I really do. It is ridiculous. Like so many things have seemed in the past. Like the Earth moving around the sun. Like animals having intelligence. But there is a science to it all.’
He began to go into some serious scientific detail.
He talked to me about a 2011 study from Cornell University that showed that precognition and telepathy is measurable in a lab setting. He talked about how humans are essentially telepathic creatures and how our silent thoughts aren’t contained in our minds any more than light is contained in a lightbulb. He talked about how the scientific establishment still lives in the age of Aristotle and how it is still seen as blasphemy to question old-fashioned ideas of cause and effect, especially in relation to time. He talked about quantum physics and quantum entanglement. He talked about retro causation – the way the future interacts with the past just as the past impacts the future. He talked about photons – particles of light – which are famed for disobeying previously devised rules of space and time. About how light is fundamentally timeless. And that we have these particles in our body. Our bodies create inner light. Biophotons. And the bioluminescent photons of La Presencia interact with the bioluminescent photons within us, because light gets through and inside everything. And, via the triggering of a stunningly complex hormonal response and a kind of biological information transfer, these new photons untap our potential. And that manifests in different ways, depending on the person, but it tends to make hidden things seen. Minds, futures, pleasures and sensations that were once covered or blocked.
‘And once that happens, amiga mía, a brave new world is waiting.’
His smug tone was annoying me. Or maybe it was the heat and the stifling air in the car and the fact that I didn’t like having my view of reality challenged. No. I think it was him.
‘You know where the phrase “brave new world” comes from?’ I asked.
‘Yes. Of course. Aldous Huxley. God of the hippies.’
I shook my head. ‘William Shakespeare. In The Tempest. A play about a crazy manipulative man on a magical island who likes the sound of his own voice and causes a lot of mischief because of a chip on his shoulder.’
‘Muy bien,’ he said, pulling a white hair from his chest. ‘Muy bien. That is me. Crazy…manipulative…I have had worse.’ Then he pointed at an upcoming turning. ‘There,’ he said. ‘A la derecha. To Es Cubells.’
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
‘To church,’ he said, smiling. ‘So you better have been a good girl.’
In my life I have only twice had the urge to slap someone’s face. Both times it was Alberto Ribas’s.
If I couldn’t lash out at Alberto, perhaps I could find a weak spot. I kept trying to access his mind but wasn’t getting very far. In fact, he was almost as unreadable as he’d been the first time I’d seen him. I still couldn’t decipher his age, his loves, his fears, his memories. The only difference – and the thing that made me trust him just a little – was that I could pick up on a gentle sadness that he didn’t wear on the surface. Not a guilty sadness, but something more existential. A kind of continual sense of mourning leaked out of him, appearing in my mind daubed in muted shades of grey and green, like boiled cabbage, which was in such contrast to his permanently smiling, tanned, leathery face and Zeus beard.
So, in the absence of psychic understanding, I had to ask questions. The most obvious one being: ‘Why are we going to church?’
The road was winding and narrow and quiet. We passed a solitary tapas bar with no one outside.
‘Very important research. You will be able to further our understanding.’
‘Of?’
‘La Presencia.’
‘I don’t want to understand La Presencia. I don’t want to stick forks into people.’ I thought of the semi-solid vaporous creatures that looked like watercolours. ‘I don’t want to be part-Salacian. I don’t want to be Heroic Champion of the Lobsters. I want to understand what happened to my friend.’
‘It’s the same thing. Understanding La Presencia is understanding what happened to your friend.’
‘So it killed her? That thing in the ocean killed her? And you sent me down there for it to kill me too?’
Alberto sighed like a creaking door. ‘I did not want to kill you, Grace. You can be a terribly annoying person, yes, but I did not want to kill you. La Presencia wasn’t there to hurt you. La Presencia wants to help and La Presencia wants to be helped. It recruited you, as Christina knew it would.’
‘How many other people have come into contact with it?’
‘I did a lot of research…for the book…La vida imposible…Asked a lot of people…Read a lot of accounts…It is thought to be very few. Beyond me and you and Christina, only a handful that we know of. There was a fisherman called Joan Bonanova in the thirties. And as you will see, there was an encounter in the nineteenth century. And more recently, in living memory, there was an incident forty years ago, but that was different…’
