The Invisible: Four Readings

The Invisible

Four Readings

Ben Bennett

Copyright © 2024 Ben Bennett

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Translation from German: Tegan Raleigh

Cover design: Hazel Lam

Image: Shutterstock

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Contents

Prologue

I Coincidence

II Connection

III Comeback

IV Conclusion

Epilogue

One day it will have to be officially admitted

that what we have christened reality

is an even greater illusion

than the world of dreams

Salvador Dalí

In 1980, mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot makes a startling discovery: With the help of a mathematical formula, his IBM computer generates mysterious, infinite images that seem to arise out of nothing and might be a blueprint of the world, a DNA of the universe. This is why the Mandelbrot set is also called ‘the thumbprint of God’. What if it’s not the only one?

Prologue

Freight cars: orange, blue, red, brown. Lined up like colorful beads on a string.

Your train is on the adjacent track.

Someone behind you says, We’re going, finally! There’s relief in the voice because the train is running late. You can hear the deep sound of the engine as the container cars – orange, blue, red, brown – disappear behind you.

Finally, the last freight wagon.

But then comes the surprise.

You’re not moving. The freight train with the orange, blue, red, and brown cars was the one that left the station as you firmly believed you were on the way to your destination.

You fell for a sensory illusion. An illusion that felt deceptively real.

Is this the only such experience you’ve ever had in your life?

The train of life runs from alpha to omega, from the beginning of your life to its end. But is it really running? Or is the train that you’re on nothing but a perfect illusion? Is all the world just a stage, as Shakespeare believed? And we, the actors in a play, trapped in the script of our lives? Performers who come onto the stage with a role, only to leave when the mission has been completed? Is there a wall we can’t see behind that hides a greater truth?

Whoever wants to get a picture of God must be prepared to put together a puzzle with an infinite number of pieces. The jigsaw puzzle of life only gives the whole picture once it is complete. A lot in this book will seem incredible to you, and it will call everything you think you know into question. But the historical events included in the following readings are entirely true. As rational beings, we should be guided by facts. Go after the Invisible and discover it. It’s easy to find, but difficult to accept. Accept it. Or never see again beyond the wall you are about to look behind.

October 1901, Niagara Falls, USA

On her 63rd birthday, Annie Taylor climbs into an oak barrel. It is four-and-a-half-feet high, scarcely three-feet wide, and padded on the inside with cushions. She remains huddled within the barrel as it is sealed from the outside and a small boat takes it out on the water. It is pitch black all around her. She can hear muffled voices coming from the outside.

Good luck, Annie, someone says. Moments later, she can feel the barrel being released from the boat and then picking up speed in the current. Now she’s alone. She feels feverish and doubtful, but there is no reconsidering her decision and turning back. After twenty minutes of this, she approaches the falls.

To date, nobody has made it over Niagara Falls alive. But it’s the dawn of the new century and if she doesn’t do it, who else is going to prove that it’s actually possible?

Annie feels her barrel being pushed underwater. Incomprehensible forces spin her around like a particle of dust in a hurricane. Suddenly, there is a feeling of weightlessness. Then, the inferno. Her barrel plunges down the waterfall – 170 endless feet into the abyss.

Half an hour after the boat releases her, it picks her back up again downstream in the rapids. Miraculously, Annie is just slightly injured. From then on, nothing is the same as it was. Just a moment ago, she was a crazy old widow, and now she’s the first person to have made it over Niagara Falls alive.

Annie is exactly where she’s supposed to be.

Present day, Santa Barbara, USA

From his blooming garden, high above the peach-colored roofs of the whitewashed city, Adam could see it all: life and death, birth and decline. Two young seagulls that still had their gray feathers were making their first attempts at flight, clumsy and timid, under their mother and father’s watchful eyes, while on the roof of the same apartment building there was an old seagull, tired of living, that stretched its wings and let the breath of the ocean out of its lungs one last time.

Seagull or human – life sends us all down the same path: We are born, we learn to fly, we falter, we learn to fly, we falter, we fly, we falter, we fly, we falter, we fly, we falter, we fly. As far as our wings will carry us. As long as our wings will carry us.

One day, in a happy or a sad place, we lay down our wings forever. But what comes then? Will we ever fly again, as happy, brave, and invincible as in those days when the world was ours?

I

Coincidence

There’s nowhere you can be

that isn’t where you’re meant to be

John Lennon

January 2022, Paris, France

Let’s assume that God exists, Adam began, after gently tapping the microphone on the lectern to make sure it was on. Do you think he would want us to find him? Do you think he would set out a trail that would lead us to him?

He was in the sold-out Grand Amphithéâtre of the Sorbonne University in Paris, standing beneath Le Bois Sacré, or The Sacred Grove, by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. The painting, created at the end of the nineteenth century during the last years of the artist’s life, extended more than eighty feet across the curved wall behind him. The lights in the hall had been dimmed, creating a warm, almost solemn atmosphere.

Adam hoped that the mood would carry over to his audience, for he had come to prove nothing less than the existence of God. The existence of what he himself called the Invisible.

He was dressed in his midnight-blue suit, the one he wore for special events that Alison had liked so much. He was also wearing a white shirt and his Chucks, which she had decorated with all sorts of silly paintings to help him stand out from all the other senile old geezers. He only took them out of the closet on special occasions because they were so immeasurably valuable to him.

You’re not a senile old geezer, Adam – you’ve still got all the hair on your head and your eyes are bright, he could just hear her saying.

Then she’d beam as nobody else could, as if she were still a little girl looking forward to a life that lay before her like a blank sheet of paper. A little girl whose heart contained all the colors necessary to transform the white sheet of paper into a vibrant, beautiful, and meaningful image over the years and decades to come.

Yes, he still had all the hair on his head, though it had since gone gray. And now there was the addition of a short silver-gray beard.

And as for the brightness in his eyes… well, he tried to keep it as best he could in such a world. He looked down at his hands, which were trembling slightly with excitement. It was as if it were the very first day of his tour, his very first appearance before a large audience.

The loudspeakers carried his words to the farthest corners of the auditorium, which was filled to capacity. Under normal circumstances, there would have been a thousand people in the centuries-old tiers, sitting on the wooden benches under the gaze of magnificent statues. But the Invisible had artificially thinned out the hall. It had carved fine cracks in the walls of the world – cracks that could be denied or accepted. Cracks that would grow larger and larger to ultimately become a gaping wound that nobody but a blind man could still deny.

Adam started the presentation on his laptop and showed his first slide on the digital projector screen behind him on the podium.

Today, I’m going to tell you some incredible stories. Sometimes the truth sounds incredible. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Two puzzles

February 1979, Ohio, USA

It’s February 5th, 1979 – a freezing cold winter’s day in Lima, Ohio – when Jim Lewis plucks up his courage and dials a number he’s never called before. Jim Springer answers on the other end.

It takes a while for him to get answers to the questions that have troubled him for decades, ever since his mother told him that there was a second version of him that exists somewhere out in the far reaches of Ohio.

A second version who believes that his second half died at birth.

Finally, Jim Lewis asks the voice on the other end of the line, Are you my brother?

A few days later, on February 9th, the two Jims met in Jim Springer’s living room in Dayton, Ohio.

Where they saw their own reflections without the need for any mirror. After thirty-nine years, the identical twins were finally reunited.

Thirty-nine years after they were separated at birth and placed in two separate families’ care.

Thirty-nine years that they’ve spent not far from each other in the same state, without having the slightest suspicion of it.

But the story of their happy reunion doesn’t end there. It’s just the beginning. When they met on February 9th, 1979, their happy ending became just a side note as they discovered the following:

The two Jims weren’t alike in ways that might be expected from identical twins. But their lives were, indeed, like two peas in a pod:

Both Jims married women named Linda.

Both Jims divorced and remarried women named Betty.

Both Jims grew up with brothers named Larry, who were adopted, just like them.

Both Jims had dogs named Troy.

Both Jims named their sons James Allan.

Both Jims worked as deputy sheriffs after previously being employed at McDonald’s and a gas station.

Both Jims preferred to spend their vacations at the same beach in Florida.

Both Jims smoked the same brand of cigarettes and drank the same beer.

In short, both Jims had not just led almost exactly the same life, but the names of their family members, pets, favorite brands, and vacation spots were exactly the same. It was almost as if they were two identical people who had lived the same life in two different places.

It’s downright spooky, they declared that same year in a New York Times interview, which ultimately made their case a worldwide sensation. A little later, they became research subjects in the twin study conducted by psychologist Thomas J. Bouchard Jr. of the University of Minnesota. Shaking his head, Bouchard agreed with them and said, When you start to compound the coincidences, they become highly unlikely pretty quickly. In fact, I’m flabbergasted by some of the similarities.

To date, no explanation has been found.

Both Jims live to spry old age in Ohio. Both got married a third time.

Her name? Sandy.

June 2001, Wiltshire, England

Please return to Laura Buxton.

Andy Rivers