text: *They say we are not alone.* *We all live just this side of madness, after all.* \*\*\* Phenomena that people don’t understand are easily dismissed. UFO sightings are explained away, ghosts are medicalized into auditory hallucinations, and on and on it goes until little by little we’ve stripped all of the magic out of the world. We even know the time and circumstances surrounding the birth of the universe. But some mysteries persist. Many ancient creation myths posit so-called *ex nihilo* creation -- something from nothing. Even the modern creation myth -- the dogma of science -- is silent on the question of why there is something rather than nothing. \*\*\* A phenomenon often occurs at the moment before death in which the subject experiences an intense and inexplicable euphoria. Neuroscience tells us that this is merely the inevitable result of cascading neurotransmitters and global neuronal firing. \*\*\* The clearest footage of the assassination of John F. Kennedy has come to be known as the Zapruder Film, and in it Kennedy can be seen at the moment of his death being struck in the head by gunfire, supposedly by a single sniper’s bullet: that which was fired by Lee Harvey Oswald. However, many amateur conspiracy theorists have noted that Kennedy falls in the wrong direction, fueling speculation that Oswald was either not the shooter, or that a second shooter fired a shot from the infamous “grassy knoll” which was in front of Kennedy at that time. Were he to have been struck by Oswald’s bullet alone, which was supposedly fired from the Book Depository behind him, the force of the bullet should have propelled him forwards, not backwards. What these well-intentioned skeptics fail to note, however, is that a bullet entering the brain causes an electrical signal to be sent from the central nervous system to every major muscle group in the body, causing them all to contract simultaneously. The pectoral muscles are far stronger than those in the abdomen, and at maximum force will overwhelm the influence of the latter. Thus the subject throws their upper body backwards instead of merely acquiescing to the force imparted by the bullet itself. \*\*\* The phenomenology of near-death experiences provides some of the best evidence we can find on the door at the edge of the universe. It’s not clear why some people report vivid visual, auditory and tactile hallucinations after suffering clinical death, or why some of these involve so-called “out of body experiences” while others undergo some of the more familiar religious rigamarole. I knew a man, years ago, who killed his son across a brutal span of three years. It made the news, but everyone outside of his immediate family has forgotten the boy’s name, and it is spoken no more outside of courtrooms and lawyers’ offices. He was sentenced to death, and eventually his appeals were exhausted, and then, as Banksy once lamented, the boy’s name touched a man’s lips for the last time. These were the early days of the pharmaceutical protest against state-sponsored capital punishment, when the drugs required for lethal injection were in short supply -- the days before civil rights groups pointed out that improperly administering these drugs can potentially lead to a slow, conscious death by paralysis rather than the intended immediate and painless variety. To spare you some of the more technical details, why don’t I just skip to the part where my acquaintance ended up frothing at the mouth and convulsing on the medical table, fully conscious and very much alive? Reflecting on the experience, he explained to me that in what he thought would be his final moments he saw the door, and it was rather strange to describe, for it was not like any ordinary door. The door at the edge of the universe is not a wooden gateway at all, but merely a darker patch of space, or such was how our murderer described it. Things watched him from the other side, he said, and, indeed, watch us all. \*\*\* World War II was what you might call a “high pressure” time; at least so it went for a while. Until the battles of Stalingrad and Midway, the existential pressure, so to speak, must have been quite high. Doors are sometimes open and sometimes closed. Anybody who lives in a windy area can tell you that these two states of being produce very different results viz a viz air pressure in a room. Much has been made, theodically speaking, of the atrocities which occurred during this high-pressure period. Mass deaths happened under God’s nose and prompted many to ask why He did nothing to stop them. It might be of more benefit, to these people, to ask why it was that He couldn’t *see* them. \*\*\* Schizophrenics often complain of the effects of radiation, from cell phone towers, from solar bombardment, and so on. These are, of course, actually real but too weak to do any actual damage. I worked in a psych ward for a time, and I can tell you that there are many different types of people who come for treatment there. Addicts are common. The suicidal make up a large chunk of the population. But then there are the delusional. These are always the most difficult to handle. Delusional people are very hard to put on talk therapy and so the doctors will pump them full of drugs first, and as much as they will deny it a large part of the reason is simply to make them compliant to these demands. It just makes the job easier. But drugs are a lot like people: different strokes for different folks. There’s a classic distinction between “uppers” and “downers,” but that’s much too simplistic. The real difference between drugs is their ability to open you up or shut you down. Really delusional people have a very hard time filtering things out, and that’s the source of their paranoia most of the time. These patients are like cheap radios, mostly picking up useless noise, but occasionally tuning in to something you might want to hear. Ben was the first one to tell me about the door. He actually fell into two categories of mental illness: he was both delusional and suicidal. He had survived an attempt brought on by the stress of constantly looking over his shoulder for CIA kidnappers. For a survivor of MKUltra this is almost certainly forgivable. He told me of a dark patch in space, far out beyond the reaches of the galaxy, a nightmarish thing he had seen in that liminal space between life and death -- a gateway beyond which all he could see was the void, all he could hear was silence and all he could feel was .