The Believer, page 3
Vlad saw this orb while on an overnight vigil at the site of the former Ararat Lunatic Asylum, which started accepting patients—then called inmates—in 1865 and closed in 1998. The site he selected for investigation was J Ward, the former town jail co-opted by the asylum in 1886 to house the criminally insane.
It was around three in the morning when Vlad and his colleague saw the glowing orange ball in the doorway. “We automatically assumed it was someone trespassing who had a torch,” he explained, “so we actually went looking around. Nothing there.” They returned on successive occasions to eliminate potential causes. They thought it could have been an electric light, but there was no electricity in the building. They thought it could have been a car auto-lock, but the car light didn’t have that effect. “We don’t know what caused it, so we just assume it was something genuinely paranormal,” he said. “But it didn’t feel particularly paranormal.”
Recently, he fell asleep in a cell while on another overnight vigil at J Ward. “It was so quiet,” he shrugged.
The beam from Vlad’s torch caresses a coffee urn in the Bayview Room as I pad after him in the dark. Pictures of the original ironstone building indicate that the section where we find ourselves is fairly unchanged: two walls of windows, a balcony facing the water.
“I felt something; I don’t normally feel something,” Vlad says evenly as the EMF meter in his hand releases a crispy static. He peers through the glass doors leading out onto the balcony: empty except for a larval cluster of cigarette butts, a few broken glasses, the wind blowing over the dark water of the bay.
“There’s a lot of things we don’t know, a lot of stuff we don’t understand,” Vlad had explained to me. “If you look at astrophysics and cosmology, in essence, they’ve found that our understanding of the whole universe is made up of visible matter plus dark matter plus dark energy.
“Dark matter and dark energy—things we can’t physically measure with our equipment—makes up about ninety-seven percent of the universe, according to their estimates. And the rest of the physical matter that we do understand—the stuff that we’re made of, and the stars and the planets—that makes up about three percent of the universe as it’s known to us.”
He considered this for a moment. “But that argument seems a bit of a cop-out. To say we can’t explain ghosts so it must be quantum physics or it must be dark matter—something that we can’t physically detect or measure—it seems like almost a religious cop-out, so to speak, to default to something mystical, something beyond our comprehension . . .
“I don’t disagree with the scientists, but to say, ‘I can’t explain ghosts, so I’ll just put it over there and deal with it later’ . . .” He paused. “My whole interest in this is people have reported ghost activity for thousands of years, even in the Bible it’s been reported. And when it interacts with us—it must physically interact with the material world.”
Something that can physically interact with the world should be able to be recorded and measured; it may even have repeatability.
“You hear mediums and psychics talking about the energy not being strong enough,” he continued. “I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but they’ll say some ghosts don’t have the energy to interact properly with the world so they need to build up more energy before they do that. Quite often, it’s reported that right before something occurs you have this sudden cold and then you experience something weird. That implies the idea that as it gets cold, they’re drawing the energy to do something with it. Or some people have reported electrical problems, batteries draining from their phones or from their cameras just before something occurs.”
Vlad talked about ghost researchers who have recorded electromagnetic responses at the time of a ghost experience. “So, if there is activity there, I want to know in what part of the electromagnetic spectrum it actually occurs. People have reported everything from audio, temperature, magnetic fields, visible, infrared, thermal, all the way up to radiation, they’ve even had Geiger counters going off in one or two examples. It’s all through the spectrum, but nothing consistent. So the question is: what are the ideal conditions, and if we can find the ideal conditions can we reverse the process? Can we actually make an environment perfectly suitable for something to occur?”
The answer, he acknowledged, is not straightforward. “The problem is, the more you work in the field, the more you realize that it’s not just physics. It’s physics plus the psychology of whatever might be there, and a lot of these things don’t necessarily want to play by the rules.”
Hands clasped behind his back, Vlad meanders away from the balcony and down a hallway. I follow and am immediately hit by a wave of nausea. As Vlad disappears around a corner up ahead, I feel a fear so enormous that for one moment I cannot bring myself to follow or retreat, both ways being equally dark and empty. I do not sense a ghost but, often, absence is more terrifying than presence.
I am standing in a hallway above a bistro that smells of fried foods, but suddenly my mind is in Charlottesville, Virginia, where I was born. My maternal grandparents’ farm was my first home, and where I returned with my parents on weekends and holidays throughout my childhood until we moved to Australia, where my father was from, when I was a teenager. There were barns and paddocks. A goat that I fed from a baby bottle. A lake ringed by deep forest, where I would walk next to my grandfather as he whistled around a toothpick eternally clamped between his teeth.
Their house was beautiful from the outside and, probably, from the inside, but my memory of it is mostly a memory of fear. It wasn’t the sweeping spiral staircase, so high and so polished that I clung to the railing like a bird on a perch, convinced I would slip off at any moment and fall forever. It wasn’t the dim rooms looming off to each side, their deep corners like wells I might drown in. It wasn’t the locked door of my grandmother’s bedroom, or the edgeless solitude radiating all around.
What terrified me was the constant expectation that I was about to see a ghost. And by that I do not mean the monsters or bogeymen of every child’s nightmares. I mean the finely drawn, white, spectral body of Mrs. Peters, the former owner of the property, whom my mother and both of my grandparents habitually spoke about as though she were a malicious neighbor popping by uninvited.
6
In the Beginning
The Museum
Why do we have to die?
The question is written across a wall inside the Creation Museum next to a black-and-white photo of a mother and child staring at a coffin. There are other images around it—a man in a wheelchair, someone crouching in a corner, a flooded town.
Why do I suffer? Why am I here? Is there any hope? Am I alone?
The Creation Museum’s parking lot is immense and to walk across it is to travel back in time. This is less about the fossils displayed inside and more about the fact that the people who work here speak and think as though they are living in feudal times and waging—in a world of iPhones and heart transplants—a medieval war. Which is also, of course, what makes them so perfectly modern.
They’re just finishing their morning prayer meeting, a black-clad, armed security guard informs me. When they open the museum doors, they are smiling and adorable. Also, multitudinous: old and young, many of them volunteers, they stand alone or in groups, ready to help and watching.
It feels nice in here, I won’t lie. Sweet and wholesome, like the numerous diabetes-inducing pumpkin spice lattes I will consume from their coffee shop over the next few days. The vibe is Very Erudite, on account of the numerous mentions of the learned professionals on staff. But it’s also a Pretty Fun Place; it is, after all, targeted at children. So, in addition to the multimedia exhibits touting “the evidences for a young earth,” deriding “molecules-to-man evolution” and charting the moral decline of society, the Creation Museum features a planetarium, a pizza place, two fudge stands, a mining sluice, a zip line and a petting zoo inhabited by a zonkey and a zorse named, respectively, Cletus and Zoë. There is a chapel in the Creation Museum, and the building is also where the offices of Answers in Genesis are located.
Ken Ham is unavailable to meet on the days I visit but his face appears—smiling or serious under a cap of white hair—on books, DVDs, brochures and the napkin dispensers in the café. Aussie accent largely unaffected by thirty years in the States, he speaks before the films shown in the 4D movie/lecture theater, on DVDs played in the gift shop and from a television dangled delicately between the men’s and women’s bathrooms. The short syllables of his full name are in everyone’s mouths and are spoken with overtones of reverence and awe.
Burdened to tell others the facts supporting a biblical view of creation, Ham’s bio explains, he has spent his career promoting, to children in particular, a literal interpretation of the book of Genesis as the basis for biblical authority in all areas of their lives. While I cannot agree with him that authority is accuracy, I see his point: what happens early is, in vital ways, formative.
The first exhibit, in the lobby, is set to an audio accompaniment that sounds extremely close to the Game of Thrones theme. This exhibit considers the question of whether dragons were real: The Bible is authoritative, without error, and inspired by God. While dragon legends may be fanciful retellings of actual events, God’s Word tells us about two real dragon-like creatures.
After I read about the behemoth and the leviathan, the walls narrow, funneling me down a curving hallway past a stand of mobility scooters and strollers for rent and an eye-wateringly expensive souvenir photo booth. Then the walls open out into the Main Hall. Past a woolly mammoth skeleton and a white statue of Mary, Joseph and Jesus, I see a bucolic tableau of dinosaurs and cave people cavorting beneath a real waterfall: everyone together as the “PhD scientists” on staff here will assure you it was at the dawn of time, six thousand years ago.
Deeper in the museum, two plastic palaeontologists stand over a simulated dig, dinosaur bones at their feet. Their dialogue comes alive on the screen above them, where a white man in fieldwork gear gestures to the Asian man beside him and explains how they interpret their findings differently. Kim, his colleague, thinks the Spinosaurus died over a hundred million years ago and was covered by sediment caused by a local flood. But our white guy sees something different. “I believe this animal died in flood, but it wasn’t a local flood,” he says, augustly. “It was a massive flood that covered the earth. Noah’s flood.”
He explains that, according to the Bible, that was about 4,300 years ago and that’s how old he believes this fossil to be.
“We come to different conclusions because we have different starting points. I start with the Bible and my colleague doesn’t.” At this point, the camera zooms in and lingers on Kim’s face. “We all have the same facts, we merely interpret the facts differently because of our different starting points.”
Walking on, I reach a dim but luscious Eden, branches curving over a winding path. Frozen gazelles to the left, mountain goats to the right; a great comingled congress of big cats and zebras, llamas and kangaroos and a stegosaurus. Adam nestles in a flower patch with Eve. Thick ropes of root spiral upward to form an enormous tree trunk with apples bobbing enticingly overhead. Through concealed speakers: From the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you shall surely die.
Through a dark archway, I too am ejected from the Garden, left to twist down the path towards Corruption. Large black-and-white photos line the walls. A woman screaming in labor. A pile of skulls and bones. A man tightening a tourniquet around his arm. A sea of gravestones like small, white teeth. A plaque informs me that human sin introduced these things into the world: clothing, animal sacrifice, thorns, venom, carnivory, scavengers, cosmic aging, cosmic pain, conflict, poisons, weeds, burdensome work, disease and death. Sin changed everything. Where there was fellowship, now there is fear . . .
This is NOT how it was MEANT TO BE!
I am sitting in a circle on the floor of my year two classroom, listening to Mrs. S read us a story. Mrs. S visits each week. She wears much pink. Her hair: a perfect white cumulus above her smile. Kind. Never disciplines us, never has to; we are in thrall to her delight in us. Three decades later, remembering her still feels like curling up next to the heater.
Mrs S was always already more than the black numbers tattooed on her forearm which the bolder among us sometimes asked to see and to touch. I am eight years old and the numbers on Mrs. S’s arm are not shocking to me and they never were. They are just What Is, and What Is, to a child, is normal. Unlike my mother’s mother, who is not to be asked about the War, Mrs. S will roll up the soft sleeve of her pink sweater for a couple of moments before returning us to the book on her lap. We know that Mrs. S did not want to get this tattoo and that she got it in the Camp where she was called by a number instead of her name. We know a sliver of her sadness; it is always in the room with us.
We know the lesson: Never Again. To learn it is to live, though it is also a falling in the belly, a drop of distance that compresses time and space to a point of singularity.
Understand, “Never Again” is not something we are comforted with; it is a duty we are assigned because our lives depend on it. We are eight years old and this is the water we swim in.
I pause at an exhibit about Ebenezer the Allosaurus. A plaque explains that, having survived the flood on Noah’s ark, dinosaurs eventually went extinct for a variety of possible reasons including “a post-Flood Ice Age, or other post-Flood catastrophes, or maybe even because people killed them for food or sport.” The rest of the exhibits trace a line from the Corruption of Adam through the Catastrophe of the Flood to the Confusion of Babel.
I walk on through rooms of increasingly sparse and esoteric displays about Cross, Christ and Consummation. It’s not all bad news—God promises that a day is coming when He will judge sin and take away the curse.
And then I am unceremoniously spat out on the building’s lower level with this parting sentiment: Those who remain in unbelief, rejecting His completed work on the Cross, sacrificial death, and Resurrection from the dead, will suffer eternally in the lake of fire.
7
The Death Doula
Annie
Annie’s father left when she was six months old. As an adult she will meet him only briefly—long enough to be told how pleasing he found his life, his other children. Later, she will be told too long after the fact that he died. But her stepfather, John, is a kind man who works as a funeral director and embalmer in High Street, Northcote. Annie visits his office on weekends and school holidays, taking his lunch to the embalming room where he explains to her about the tubes dangling down from the ceiling that suck liquid from the bodies. He introduces her to the person he is working on, addressing them all the while, calling them by their name. I’m just telling my stepdaughter what happened to you, Tom. Whenever he goes silent for a day or so, she knows it means a baby came through.
She is about to turn sixteen when a vet hires her as a nurse. She learns as she goes; it is work she both loves and hates—like the vet himself, a real bastard she comes to admire enough to name her first child after. She is made tall by his trust even as she deals with his temper and his alcoholism, and a streak of something she can’t quite put her finger on. It materializes in the scalpel he throws at her face in frustration one day. And again the time she assists him with a hysterectomy on a bloated German shepherd and he instructs her to take the dog’s uterus outside and stick a scalpel in it. I want to understand what’s inside, he explains. She solemnly carries the dish outside, places it on the ground near the gully trap, crouching over it with the knife. There is one moment of serious inquiry before stinking black pus squirts over her face, her hands, her clothes.
“Of course he told me to take it outside. He knew what was going to happen,” Annie says, in her living room. “I still . . . I still . . . I could smell it for days, weeks, afterwards.” She can summon a memory of the smell even now because it was very similar to an elderly lady she worked with—much later, during her years as a medical practice manager—who had bowel cancer. “The husband was so old, he couldn’t look after her but he did his very best. I’d go out to the car, pick her up and bring her in. Once she leaked all over me, and it was the same smell.”
This reminds Annie of a third olfactory link: a crow she found in the gutter, barely alive. She picked it up, planning to find a box to put it in. “And it defecated on me,” she explains. “Same smell. It was so repulsive, something that I wanted to run away from, but I couldn’t. I was holding it. Just like that old lady, I was holding her.”
Annie was fourteen when she met the boy who would become an adult before her, and later her husband. He was three years older, over a foot taller. A police cadet at the time. She was fifteen when she had an abortion. Sixteen when she broke up with him and her mother pressured her to return to him. I’m not interested, she replied. But he kept coming round and speaking to her mother, who was a sucker for the approval of men. And so Annie agreed to hear him out. Met up with him in his car.
I can’t have this baby, she thought, a few months later. She was referred for an abortion but the doctor in Collins Street said he couldn’t touch her. A growth in her abdomen made the procedure too dangerous. Nothing he could do. You’ve made your bed, her mother said, now you’ve got to lie in it.
