PEEK-A-BOO: The Strange Tale of the Disappearing Wife
A lifespan can be divided into innumerably many parts, each completely independent of the others, so that it does not follow from the fact that I existed a little while ago that I must exist now unless there is some cause that as it were creates me all over again at this moment, i.e. which conserves me … the same power and action are needed to conserve anything in existence at each individual moment of its duration as would be required to create that thing de novo if it were not yet in existence — Rene Descartes
On December 16, 2022, Anne Marie ceased to exist. Just when she was all but certain she’d made it through the pandemic. She hadn’t gotten ill and died, she simply stopped being. The timing of her disappearance was curious and perhaps ironic. Her great fear had been that the virus would take her, and now it seemed she’d dodged the bullet. Then, cruelly, during some infinitesimally tiny unit of what the physicists call Planck time (i.e., in a flash), the universe had simply forgotten to recreate her. But why Anne Marie? Had she neglected to renew her subscription, to pay her rent, allowed her meter to run out, so to speak? It’s not certain that even an omniscient God could answer that question. He might just have to shrug his Olympian shoulders and say, “Shit happens.” It was a hiccup, perhaps not unlike the little quantum fluctuations that are said to have triggered the creation of the universe, but in reverse.
Her husband, Blake, was at first not aware of her absence. To understand this, you have to ask whether someone who ceases to exist (other than by way of a documentable event like a heart attack or a plane crash) could ever have existed to begin with. The awareness that something was amiss crept over him like a bug up the leg. There was evidence that another person had once, and recently, shared his life, but it had the quality of a will o’ the wisp. Nothing brought into being by her action in the world — whether a carton of milk picked up at the corner market or a Post-It left on the refigerator — survived her. If she’d murdered the landlady with an axe, there’d be no body. Nonetheless, there was something etched faintly on the ether, a sort of trace. It was when he drew back the duvet to go to bed and noticed the faint stain of menstrual blood on the sheet that his mind began to reel. We’ve had the experience of losing something that — until we notice it’s gone — had been securely in our possession. A key, a document, a favorite pen. There and then not there, with no apparent chain of causation. These things never return. Where have they gone? We search madly, then put it down to a slip in memory, and eventually forget it, but if we were to catalog all those lost things, it would fill pages of a ledger.
As it happens, Blake was an accountant — a controller, to be precise — and cataloging things came naturally to him. As soon as the idea took hold of him, he began to list methodically all the things he’d ever lost, as comprehensively as his memory would allow. He was surprised by his recall. A favorite stuffed animal from childhood (a koala bear), a fake gold medal from a high school sports event, a pair of high-grade earbuds, a set of long-handled barbecue tongs. None lost on holidays or in long-distance moves, where there might be a traceable path to the moment of loss. Just there on Monday and gone on Tuesday. Once he’d started to count, it became an obsession, and led to grave doubts about his presence of mind, as well as odd speculations about the possible existence of a cosmic lost and found or the idea, now so big in sci-fi, that they’d found their way into a parallel universe. He did not speak to his friends about this. Blake was a rational man, and was known to all as such. The thoughts he was having were anything but rational.
He Googled phrases like “sudden disappearances” and “mysterious missing persons,” looking to see if there were others having his experience. It could, he thought, be some kind of mass delusion or collective amnesia, but these searches led him mostly down rabbit holes of alien abduction lore. Early on, he read one account that did seem akin to what he was feeling. A high school girl in Passaic, NJ, Greta M., prone in childhood to inventing imaginary friends, reported a real friend missing after she failed to turn up at school for three days in a row. They had been “besties,” inseparable. When the school informed her that they had no record of the girl ever having attended, Greta and her parents came to the conclusion that she had relapsed into fantasy, and she was put on meds and cogntive behavioral therapy. Shortly thereafter, she committed suicide, leaving a note saying that she wanted to be where her friend was.
He combed through sub-Reddit threads with headings like “Where Is My Child?” and “Strange Disappearances” and even found mothers who believed that their children had been “raptured up.” All through this, Blake’s body memories of intimacies — the stroke of skin, a tingling in the nipples, a throbbing in the groin, grew stronger, but he still could not connect these to the phantom in his head, much less to a woman named Anne Marie who had been his wife but was now no more. When he’d begun to think he was losing it, conversation with the latest iteration of Open AI’s ChatGPT gave him some reassurance:
BLAKE: If I feel the presence of another person when there is no one there, am I losing my mind?
ChatGPT: Experiencing a sense of presence does not necessarily indicate that you are “losing your mind.” While this phenomenon can sometimes be associated with certain medical or psychological conditions, it can also be a relatively normal experience that occurs under specific circumstances. For example, it’s not uncommon for people to report feeling a presence in dimly lit or unfamiliar environments, during periods of emotional distress, or when they are physically fatigued.
Shortly after this conversation, he came across an article about a professor of Buddhist Studies at the university of Chicago who was studying the correspondence between an outlier branch of theoretical physics and philosophy called flash theory and the ancient Buddhist concept of continuous creation, which maintained that all things were recreated from scratch 16,000,000 times per second, with the same expenditure of energy as the first time. We don’t see this, the professor said, but it could be loosely compared to the illusion of motion created by film moving through a projector at 24 fps. The professor quoted a passage translated from the Pali Canon: “As an entity vanishes, it gives rise to a new entity of almost the same nature which originates immediately afterwards. Thus there is an uninterrupted flow of causally connected momentary entities of the same kind, the so-called santāna … the world … is at every moment distinct from the world in the previous or next moment…”
Although Blake found this interesting, and had every so often thought that Buddhism might be the right religion for a non-religious, rationally-minded guy like himself, he didn’t at first see the relevance of the article to what he was experiencing. Not until, coming out of a dream, he felt his mind ‘flip’ to a new and alarming perspective — not his own perception of an “other” in his midst, but the perception of what had caused that perception to occur in the first place. This was the moment he slipped from rationality, and he decided to go back to the Chatbot.
BLAKE: Can someone just cease to be?
ChatGPT: Ceasing to be would be a violation of the laws of conservation of energy, as well as principles of causation. However, in Process Philosophy, as in some schools of Buddhist thought, being comprises a series of events. Events are moments of becoming and perishing. They arise, undergo transformation, and eventually fade away.
Unaccustomed to such thoughts, Blake began to worry not only about his sanity, but about his existence. He lost his appetite, and his work began to suffer. He decided to take three days off and go to Las Vegas, where he hoped that the unrelenting flow of wins and losses, twenty-four hours a day, would reassure him of continuity. Nothing says cause and effect like gambling.
I’ll return to Blake, but we can’t just write off Anne Marie, can we? After all, it must feel like something to be nothing. At least, to put it another way, it must feel like nothing, whatever that feels like. Maybe a kind of purgatory. If the roulette wheel stopped on 16, never to move again, wouldn’t it feel like 16? Now, this goes into the realm of speculation and projection, but as you’ll see below, there did emerge some evidence from Anne Marie herself, or at least something purporting to be Anne Marie. The fact that this evidence arose in a series of channeling sessions will make it dubious to some, but let’s hear it out. By this testimony, we can surmise what she was not feeling: she was not feeling like a victim of locked-in syndrome, trapped in a terrible bubble, unable to move or speak. Nor was she feeling like an hyper-Helen Keller, deprived of all senses, not only of sight, hearing and speeech. Bottom line: she was not entirely without form, like the cosmos before Genesis. You see, there is that pesky law of conservation of energy that the Chatbot mentioned. What she was feeling was unmoored. She could, in a fashion, still observe the passing train of time, but she could only see into the car that represented the moment when she had stopped being. Does that violate the laws of physics? Probably. But just because her existence in the world had ended when the hiccup occurred did not mean that her existence as her in her had ended. She still saw what she had been doing just before the hiccup. In fact, she could see within a limited distance before that, as far back as when Blake had gone to work that morning, and the press of his lips on her cheek. From where it was she saw these things, she couldn’t say, nor can I. A disembodied and disconnected dream state is how she might have put it, characterized by a constant wish to get back on that train. The initial pang of fear, that she’d been selected to be discontinued due to some fatal karmic flaw, had lasted for less time than a little hangover. What was left was a process of gestation, which like all such processes, was subject to chance. Her egg might grow, or it might implode, and if it imploded, she thought that might really and truly be the end, and that it might be better that way.
When I use phrases like “she thought” or “she felt,” I am, of course, expressing the inexpressible. One would suppose that you can’t think or feel if you don’t exist, sort of the converse of Descartes’ “Cogito, Ergo Sum.” But again: the conservation of energy principle. Physicists now believe that even subatomic particles may have some baseline sense of beingness, a self-referential faculty — if only to explain crazy things like non-locality. And it’s not just panpsychists, but hardcore materialists like old Max Planck himself who, when faced with quantum mechanics, had to allow for the possibility that all matter was consciousness. So for now, let’s just say that Anne Marie, unmoored as she was, was at least as conscious as a quark, and because her wavefunction had once, recently, been ‘collapsed’ into the form of a human being, the traces of existence she sensed were the exact counterpart of the traces Blake sensed. In this way, they were still entangled, just as two subatomic particles can be entangled over vast regions of space. And this was true even though, as a matter of matter, there was no more Anne Marie.
If a poet of the late-Romantic period had been asked to comment, he might simply have said that this was a description of love. Indeed, more and more, Blake missed the thing he no longer had, and came to define this missing as love.
Did Anne Marie miss Blake? It might be more accurate to say that she, like him, missed what she was missing, as a tree ripped out by the roots might miss its soil or a planet knocked out of the solar system like a billiard ball might miss its gravitational attraction to the others. But if she could somehow have seen how her absence had affected him, she might well have felt a very deep appreciation.
On what authority can I speak of these things? Only one. I am the observer, and as we’ve learned from that same quantum physics, nothing can be located until it is observed. I’m the one to whom Blake turned when there was nowhere else to go, when the police and the professor of Buddhism and ChatGPT-7 and all his friends had come up empty. I am a private investigator whose métier is missing persons, and my name is Stephan Raszer. My successes have all been based on old-fashioned legwork, but otherwise my m.o. fits no definition of conventional. I have tracked missing people to the ends of the earth and through every kind of labyrinth, some of them not of this world, but I had never been handed a case quite like this. I take my clients on faith, but nonetheless believed at first that Blake needed meds, that he suffered from the most serious kind of “anima projection,” i.e., that he had imagined a woman named Anne Marie who had never, in fact, existed except within him. That is, until Blake agreed to undergo 5-MeO-DMT therapy at an underground clinic outside of Alamogordo run by Mescalero Apaches. Under the influence of the psychedelic, Blake, who had no training in higher calculus, produced a sophisticated set of equations based on Schrödinger by way of Bohmian hidden variables that appeared to suggest coordinates (in Hilbert Space, if you must know) for the mysterious Anne Marie, along with a rendering of her face in pastels and the channeling of her voice uttering only a plaintive, “Where am I?” (This was to be the first of many such sessions) It was after hearing her voice that he no longer doubted her once upon a time existence.
And here we come to something like a denouement, as much as we’re likely to get. I was fortunate enough to have an acquaintance, Joe, who works at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland and was a key member of the team that proved the existence of the Higgs boson, popularly known as the “God particle.” He agreed to review Blake’s equations, and afterwards, impressed, asked, “What are we looking at here exactly?” “We’re looking, I think…at a portrait of the wavefunction of a woman who once existed but doesn’t anymore. Not dead, kidnapped or abducted, just gone.” He knitted his brow, smiled, and said, “In that case, this has her returning to the quantum vaccuum, the pre-universe where things are in a continual state of becoming. A kind of cosmic cataract that produces a spray of virtual particles and anti-particles that mostly annihilate each other. Only a handful make it out to become actual particles, but those particles are what make up the physical universe. But outside possibly of black hole singularities, I don’t know that they can go back in.”
“So,” I asked, “if our Anne Marie just dropped into that abyss one day — who knows why — and is smeared out over a trillion light years, how could any sort of integrated identity, any sort of ‘I’ capable of saying, ‘Where am I?’ possibly remain?”
“It couldn’t,” Joe answered with only a slight tremor of uncertainty. “Unless there is a force even stronger than the four fundmental forces — gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces.” “What would be the nature of that force, Joe?” I pressed him. He shrugged and replied, “I dunno. Some kind of quantum memory maybe. But it makes no sense.”
But that — that — did make sense to me, because after all, what force is stronger than the gnawing, chafing, tearing sense of what we once had but is now lost? We come in pairs and we are meant to be so. Without this, the essential yin-yang balance is lost. But as for restoring Anne Marie to existence, all I could say to Blake was, “I’m sorry I couldn’t get her back, man, but she’s out there. Keep talking. If she can slip out, maybe…maybe she can slip back in.”
Two years later, almost to the day of Anne Marie’s disappearance, Blake, now the owner of a bait and tackle shop on on Oak Creek, just north of Sedona, Arizona, rang me up. “I think I have something,” he said. Blake now had a full beard and salt and pepper hair that fell to his shoulders. His eyes had the far-cast look of prophets. He lived alone behind the bait and tackle shop, making occasional forays to the orange rocks that give Sedona its allure. The rocks are said to induce telluric currents from the core of the earth, a geomantic radio capable of transmitting signals from the astral realm. New Age souvenir shacks in town even sell crystal-studded stethoscopes for listening to the hum. We sat by the creek and smoked a cigarette.
“I think I know where she is,” he said. “It’ll sound as weird as I look.”
“Try me,” I said.
“I’ve been reading a lot. Trying to find someone who describes feeling the way I feel. The bookstores in Sedona have everything spiritual, but eighty percent of it is garbage. Then a girl turns me on to this guy, ibn-Arabi, this twelfth century Sufi.”
“I’m familiar with him,” I said. “Go on.”
“So I’m on the rocks one day. I took the book with me. He talks about something called the imaginal realm…alam-al-mithal in Arabic. It’s the place where things are made. It’s not heaven, and it’s not God, but kind of a workshop, where ideas in both God’s imagination and ours are given form, and then sent into the world. Like a middle ground between heaven and earth. I guess you know all this, but — ”
“Please go on. I want to hear it from your end.”
“Anyhow, the thing is that stuff from the imaginal realm can come and go. Like a revolving door. Take something fantastic like a dragon, or a spaceship. It could become and then, just as quickly, unbecome. And it’s happening all the time. Every sliver of a second. But these things aren’t imaginary, like a fairy tale. They live among us, and then maybe…they don’t. Like peek-a-boo.”
Blake, through torment, exquisite longing, lost jobs and friends, and dozens of DMT trips, had found his way back to a wisdom as old as the Sedona rocks, and now knew that the woman he had come to call Anne Marie had once been at his side, and in a sense, always would be.
“I know this,” he said. “I know how to love. Everyone, everything…the wren that sings from my live oak, the customers who come in for bait, the girl who bags my groceries, you. They’re all constantly being made, and could just as easily be unmade. Every single instant is precious, and the only way to live is to love as if it all might disappear in a flash. I think now that I didn’t love her that way when she was mine, and that’s how I let her slip away. I won’t let that happen again. When a very young kid covers his eyes in a game of peek-a-boo with mommy, he thinks for a moment that mommy has really gone away, and he uncovers them quickly to make sure she comes back. That’s the way we should live.”
You may be inclined to conclude that Blake, the former accountant, had become a wild-eyed mystic, spouting woo to the wren in his live oak. But in my mind, he had also become the most genuine of scientists, for he now saw the world as the cascade of fleeting beauties that it is.
