I’d made the popcorn, as always, but at least Fred brought the beers.
“Can’t be a meeting of the Smart Guys Marching Society without some brewskis,” he said, letting the bottles rattle noisily as he dropped the bag on my new coffee table.
“Hey, watch it!” I lunged for the bowl of cheese whirls, now perched precariously at table’s edge.
Bill, munching peanuts, reached past my hand for the framed photo. “You got it framed!” he said — or, rather, mumbled. A lone peanut escaped his mouth, bounced off the throw rug, and scurried under the sofa.
“It’s a goddam feeding frenzy around here.” I was crouched by the sofa, reaching under for the peanut. All I came up with was a fistful of dustballs.
Bill looked at Fred, smirking. “Is he a good boy or what?”
“I happen to like a clean house,” I said, wiping my hand with a napkin.
“Lemme see the picture,” Fred was saying, craning to see over Bill’s shoulder. It was the Polaroid we’d taken with the auto shutter last week of the four of us — me, Bill, Fred, and Mark. Not a pretty sight. We looked like the chorus of a musical called Forty-Something: assorted beards, glasses, and receding hairlines, in sneakers, shorts, and one particularly vivid Hawaiian shirt.
“Whew,” Fred said, wincing at our smiling, casual poses. “It’s a good thing we’re smart.”
“That’s open to debate,” Mark growled, coming in the porch door, laden with grocery bags. His dark glasses, dark hair, and military-stiff bearing — a legacy of his career as an Intelligence officer turned journalist — were softened as always for me by his willingness to drop a few actual bucks for some real eats.
“My favorite Smart Guy!” Bill exclaimed, bouncing up to take bags from Mark. “Cold cuts, slaw... now we’re in business.”
“Look, are we here to eat or talk?” Fred looked concerned. A lawyer by trade, but philosopher by avocation, he rarely let our monthly discussions stray from what he liked to call “the big issues” — life, death, truth, etc. The usual suspects. He stroked his neat beard thoughtfully. “Today we’re doing Middle East policy, right?”
“I hope not,” Bill said, settling back on the sofa. He had the trim, wiry frame of a marathon runner, which in fact he was. “I brought a great Atlantic Monthly article about health care.”
He pulled copies of the magazine article from his back pocket, passed them around. A long-time actor and theater director, he had a tendency to try to control the flow and content of our discussions. With little success, I might add.
“What happened to the Middle East?” Fred complained.
Mark shrugged. “Don’t look at me. I was nowhere near there all week.”
“Ha. Ha.” Bill nodded toward the pages in our hands. “We’re doin’ health care.”
As a psychotherapist, with years of experience handling conflicts, I decided it was time to apply my professional skills to the impasse.
“We’ll flip a coin,” I said, doing so. Unfortunately, it bounced off the table and, with a perversity I’d swear was deliberate, rolled under the sofa.
Mark looked glum. “It’s gonna be a long afternoon.”
Let me explain. The Smart Guys Marching Society began as an impromptu bull session a couple of years before, when the four of us (and our wives and kids) were barbecuing in my backyard.
It was a typical Southern California day, the smog doing a slow dissolve over the Hollywood Hills. Lazy Sunday conversation turned into impassioned debate, the four of us guys huddled around the smoking grill. Women and children were scattered about, doing real life, while we grappled with such pragmatic concerns as Roman military strategy, foreign aid, and the merits of certain dead film directors.
“Can you believe these guys?” Bill ranted to his wife, throwing up his hands. “They think Sturges is overrated!” She stared back at him, unblinking.
We decided to make it a formal event, every Sunday afternoon. Stag. We didn’t plan it that way — our wives simply had the good sense not to want to come.
“I have better things to do,” Mark’s wife reportedly told him.
“Like what?”
“Like... anything.” Case closed.
Anyway, that’s how the whole thing started. Every Sunday afternoon (excepting holidays, kids’ birthdays, and visits from in-laws) the four of us — therapist, actor, journalist, and lawyer — met in my game room to scarf down munchies, trade insults, and debate the issues of the day.
This particular afternoon, however, would take a decidedly different turn, one that would change our lives, and the course of the Smart Guys, forever...
The conversation had somehow drifted away from the Middle East, health care reform, and other such rhetorical stalwarts to various tales of unexplained phenomena.
“But that’s just my point,” Fred was saying, pretty exasperated by now. “We know from Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle that the observed is changed by the observer.”
“So—?” Bill said.
“So, that explains unexplained phenomena. We cocreate reality, see? Research indicates that the more you believe in ghosts, for example, the greater the likelihood that you’ll encounter one.”
“Geez, I don’t know.” Mark shrugged. “I believe in intelligent debate, and in all the years I’ve come here I haven’t encountered it yet.”
Fred gave him a look. “The salient factor is that reality, or what we call reality, is codetermined by both observer and observed. Subject and object, if you prefer.”
“Reality is reality, dammit.” Mark folded his arms.
Bill gnawed a fingernail reflectively. “Does this have anything to do with Jung?”
I perked up. “That depends. Why?”
“I have this friend. An actor. I directed him last year at the Taper. George is a real fitness buff, hits the gym every day. And he’s noticed a strange phenomenon, and is making a hobby of compiling other people’s experiences, to see if there’s a pattern at work.”
“Since when do actors care about other people?” Mark said, opening another beer.
“Ignore him,” I said. “What phenomenon?”
Bill went on: “George said he notices that when he goes to his locker in the gym’s locker room, even if it appears totally deserted, the moment another guy shows up, it turns out this other guy’s locker is right next to his.”
“Coincidence,” Mark said.
Bill shook his head. “George has made a study of this. No matter what part of the locker room — I mean, he’ll just pick a locker at random — and four times out of five somebody’s stuff is in the next one. With all these other lockers around.”
“That is strange,” I admitted.
“He’s asked lots of other people, and they’ve had the same experience. It’s like there’s some kind of primal, unconscious need to bond or something.”
I nodded. “That’s why you mentioned Jung... Maybe you’re referring to his concept of synchronicity.”
“Oh, yeah... like when you’re thinking of someone, and the phone rings and it’s that person on the line.”
“Or,” I said, “perhaps the locker-room phenomenon is caused by some mechanism in the collective unconscious toward merging, or community...”
Fred stared at a corn chip as though it held the secrets of the universe. “I’m thinking now in terms of quantum physics. The tendency of subatomic particles, even at vast distances, to resonate at similar vibratory frequencies.” He popped the corn chip into his mouth. “I mean, at that level, everything — you, me, this table — is just a collection of vibratory frequencies, out of which comes form.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “That place where Buddhism and physics meet. Emptiness rising into form, manifesting reality.”