The Keith Papers
by Kevin Bennett
part 1 of 2
Before we stepped onto the stage — I was one of the cameramen for the tour — the Guru turned to me with a smile and said, “Keith, have you ever had union with a Starman?”
“What?”
“A Starman,” he whispered, glancing through the curtain at the gathering crowd.
“I’m not gay,” I said.
“Well, that doesn’t matter; they’re not human. Have you ever had union with one?”
“No, no, I haven’t.”
The Guru laughed. “It is the most supernatural experience there is. The six fingers they have—”
A voice over a loudspeaker cut him off: “Introducing Professor Emeritus Albert Vladimir Kahn, the Guru of the Mind!”
The crowd went wild.
“That’s us,” said the Guru.
I trained my camera on him as the curtain swept aside and we came out onto the stage; I in shadow, he in the spotlight.
The students in the auditorium stood, clapping madly. Cheers bounced around the space like toddlers in a playpen. The Guru raised his hands and smiled. The cheers got louder.
“Oh, thank you so much,” he said, still smiling, “No, really; it’s too much,” but they kept cheering and applauding.
Then, with a suddenness that nearly made me drop my camera, all sound quit as the Guru swiftly dropped his hands to his sides. On a pullout LCD to the left of the eyepiece I could see the other four views of the cameramen in the audience. On those little screens the Guru had a very serious face.
He held the pause, then fell into another smile.
I put my eye back to the camera and trained it on his profile. There was a man mixing all four takes together in the sound booth at the back of the auditorium, and they were being projected above and behind the Guru on a larger-than-life screen that stretched to the light-grid some eighty feet above.
The Guru spoke: “I’ve just used telekinesis. On every one of you. I sent a message with my mind by screwing my face up like this,” he made the sour expression, “and looking sternly at you. I silenced you with this swift movement of my arms, because I knew my larger-than-life image is being projected above our heads on this massive screen.” He made a broad gesture.
I saw the POV behind the Guru switch to me, and I zoomed in. Guru Kahn continued: “By doing two simple things I controlled every one of you.” He paused for effect, winking at me. The crowd laughed as Kahn’s doppelganger mimicked him on-screen. “Crowd hypnosis... it’s also a form of telekinesis and telepathy. Now: I need a beautiful young female volunteer — and be aware, girls, I will touch you!”
Another chuckle took a lap around the auditorium.
A thousand young college girls raised their hands and squealed. I played my camera slowly over them. The Guru joked with his worshippers: “C’mon now, not one? Not a single solitary figure? Albeit a nice figure...” He made an hourglass with his hands.
The girls squealed louder.
The Guru put a finger to his mouth, cocked his hip, and pretended to select one of the young ladies as one might choose a bottle of wine. Finally he pointed at a redhead with green eyes: “You. You’re the prettiest girl in the room. Come on up, sweetheart,”
The blushing girl moved from the third row to the aisle, and the guru began apace: “I just gave you all a message that this young lady is beauty incarnate.” An excited murmur followed the redhead’s ascent to the stage. The Guru was smiling at her as he said: “Through my words, actions, and thoughts, I have affected all of you. Now...”
By then she was beside the Guru. He took a microphone from a stand and gave it to her: “What’s your name, love?”
“G-Gillian,” she stuttered.
“G-Gillian, everybody. Applause!”
They clapped.
“I’m just telekinetic all over the place, ain’t I?” Another laugh.
I saw my camera was active again, so I moved around behind the couple to get them both in the shot. “Gillian,” said the Guru, and immediately kissed her full on the mouth.
The audience “ooohed” and laughed, the men cheering and clapping wildly. Gillian flinched a little and jumped back, putting a hand to her mouth as she blushed even redder.
“Mr. Kahn!” she squealed.
“I didn’t tell you how I was going to touch you, did I?”
“No...”
“You’re probably a little offended, yes?”
“Well, if it had been one of the uglier professors, maybe.”
The audience laughed.
The Guru smiled with them: “But you didn’t expect a fifty-year old man to kiss you in front of a multitude, did you?”
“No, sir.”
Guru Kahn reached out quickly and tickled Gillian’s stomach. She jerked away with a yelp. The Guru moved in once more to tickle her, but halted at the last moment. She flinched anyway. He moved to kiss her, but again stopped at the last moment. She flinched at that, too.
“In seconds I’ve conditioned this young woman to act as I desire her to. I wanted her to flinch at my advances, so I kissed her and tickled her. Gillian, sweetheart, thanks for coming up tonight, you can take your seat again, and I’ll take that,” he took the microphone from her.
Gillian ran back to her seat, blushing and giggling. Her girlfriends squealed as she clambered over their legs. I followed her a moment with my camera. The Guru continued and the POV switched: “That, ladies and gentlemen, is all that is behind mind control. It’s easy, even humorous.
“But there’s more to it than just parlor tricks. We live in perpetual consciousness. As humankind we are self-aware. We think. We love. We feel. We, eventually, die. But for those scant seconds that are our lives, we know. Other people. Other things. And we affect everyone around us — from our conceptualization to our death — with our thoughts. Yet thought, that most essential part of our very being, cannot be measured.
“Yes, scientists can measure which parts of the brain are active, where blood is apportioned in the head, etcetera. But thought has no space, no width, no breadth. The only dimension a thought can occupy is the fourth: time.”
The room was silent. I almost missed it when they dinged me to catch another angle of the Guru.
“Yet time itself is elusive as a thought! Is it real, or merely a cognitive placeholder? We see the effects of time; bodies get old, rot, and die; but when they do, where do the thoughts go? Does anyone know?”
Several shouted answers. The Guru paced the stage, nodding. “Somehow we understand time. And thought. But they are merely placeholders for our minds! Merely methods by which we understand this dimension.
“We live in a very strange place. No molecules touch. Stars go nova. There’s a critter called a duck-billed platypus that has evolutionists and creationists befuddled the world over.”
I smirked and adjusted my camera. I knew a thing or two about “creationism.” Old Emmett Johnson, my history prof back home, was a nut on the subject and always drilled into our heads the scientific principles hidden in the Bible. I guess that’s the kind of stuff you’ll get, growing up in a small town.
My headset dinged, I adjusted the camera. The Guru was saying, “When I kissed Gillian, though I felt her supple sexy scarlet lips, we never actually came into contact. The atoms of her lips and mine never really touched... That’s a legally defensible position, guys.”
Everybody laughed.
“Matter consists of molecules that never touch. And those molecules are comprised of...? Nothing. You all knew that, right? That everything around us — it’s essentially nothing. Are you beginning to see?”
I panned across all the open, nodding faces. The Guru continued: “If everything is essentially nothing, then moving no-things with the mind shouldn’t be difficult. I’m talking telekinesis, folks. Keith, keep your fingers on the zoom button,” He made a finger-pistol at me.
“All of you, in expectation of a miracle, will convince yourselves it happened! These are the seeds of telekinesis. We’ve thought about it wrong all our lives. It isn’t so difficult as clearing your mind, or eating the right food, or building a supercomputer — no, no, no!
“This universe — every atom, every molecule, every thought we have, or thing we do — it’s all illusory. This isn’t the real world. But it is our world, to manipulate as we please. When you realize the effort behind a thought is the same used to move physical objects, you will move them. When you see that my thoughts and yours are all part of the same thing, well, then you can control that thing.” The room was silent.
I pulled away from the camera’s eyepiece, glancing at Steve the deckhand who had his fingers through the belt loops in his stage-blacks. Is this supposed to be happening? I thought.
He grinned at me: Wait for it, he seemed to say.
“...ultimate proof,” Kahn was saying, “Gillian, remember me?”
Everyone could hear her nervous chuckle.
“Close your eyes and think of my lips, Gillian. Keith, get your camera on her. Bill, get another camera on me, split the screen. Folks, remember when I kissed the sexiest girl in the room? Gillian, don’t fret now, honey. Just close your eyes, relax. Imagine how it felt for me to kiss you on this stage. Imagine doing it again—”
POP!
Gillian’s seat was empty. People stood from their chairs and gasped. Gillian’s girlfriends screamed — but there she was, on the stage, instantaneously, standing right next to the Guru.
“Open your eyes now, Gillian.”
She did. And she gasped, and she screamed, and she fainted.
The Guru motioned to some deckhands, and Steve behind me came from the wings, grabbed Gillian up under the arms, and escorted her off the stage.
The Guru pursed his lips. “Telekinesis,” he said above the rising murmur. “Telepathy. You’ve just seen it for yourselves. It is real.
“Through mutual need, want, and desire, we forced Gillian’s molecules from that spot to the one beside me. Just as when I move my hand and push molecules of air. It’s the same thing. We’re all telepathic and telekinetic and will remain such until we die.”
He was pacing again, meeting the eyes of thousands as I followed with my camera. “The ancients knew. To build their pyramids they moved tons of rock that cranes can’t lift today. How else do you think they were built? UFOs?” He smiled. “Maybe. Or maybe we, like they, are kings and queens. Royalty whose thrones rest in our minds... only we’ve forgotten how to sit in them.”
* * *
Copyright © 2011 by Kevin Bennett
