It was on that strange night when Venus and Jupiter aligned and the Train to Elsewhere took a small, unauthorized detour into a sleepy town called Half Past Hollow.
Where the sands hummed softly in pastel colors and the air was so light, it almost felt like the time had taken off its running shoes and stood there, barefoot.
Bearton Rogers, usually quite content with quiet thoughts and silent contemplation, had grown a little bored of meditating on the void.
It felt … almost too still. Even for a bear of great philosophical patience.
So he wandered the train, watching sand mountains roll by like melted sherbet. And that’s when he bumped into a man, an older one perhaps, but with a flicker in his eyes like someone who still knew how to whistle backward.
The man was staring at the stars so insistently, as if they held a secret map to something that hadn’t been invented yet.
“Did you notice?” he suddenly asked without looking away.
“Notice what?” Bearton asked, cautious as ever.
The man whispered: “Venus and Jupiter, they’re in conversation tonight. Old friends. Dangerous dreamers.”
Bearton tilted his head: “Planets talk?”
“Oh, maybe planets don’t,” the man smiled, “but minds do.”
Then he turned, stuck out his hand and firmly introduced himself: “David. David Bohm.”
Bearton shook his hand—feeling a little faint and still disoriented from the ride through Hades. The bear had even forgotten to introduce himself. Although the man didn’t seem to mind at all.
Bohm leaned in a little and continued: “Most scientists think that the universe is confused. That particles are chaotic, like scattered socks in a dryer. That nothing’s real until you stare it down.”
Bearton nodded. Although he couldn’t at all relate to the sock paradox that the man had described, as he himself was highly organized—had his own special sock-sorting-routine.
“But I don’t buy it,” Bohm continued. “I think there’s a hidden pattern. A quiet rhythm underneath it all. Not loud like logic, maybe more like jazz music or like a secret symphony.”
Bearton blinked slowly. “A hidden symphony?” he mirrored back and suddenly remembered the bizarre music that had been playing throughout Hades, and it gave him chills.
“Yes,” Bohm grinned.
“A pilot wave. Like an unseen thread guiding every step, even when it looks like we’re lost.”
Suddenly Bohm picked up a napkin from a passing tea cart, folded it into a small triangle and began explaining enthusiastically: “This here’s what you see, what’s unfolded. We call it reality. But there’s more.”
He unfolded it again, smooth and flat.
“And in here, folded between the folds, is the whole story. The implicate order.”
“Implicate order?”
Bearton mirrored Bohm again and scratched his head.
“Yes!” exclaimed Bohm with a strange joy, as if excited for finally having had captured bear’s attention.
“You see,” he added gently: “everything’s inside everything. Even the bear is in the star. And the star is in the bear.”
Bearton sat back, tucking paws under him, thinking very hard and not at all. The sky above them glimmered like it knew the joke. The train gently curved through the dunes, and the stars kept on shimmering.
“So,” said Bearton at last, “If nothing’s separate, what’s the point of traveling?”
Bohm smiled in mild confusion, quietly looking for an adequate answer while gently tapping his chin.
And before he could give the bear a reasonable reply, suddenly out of nowhere, Bob the Cat appeared, holding a telescope, wearing a black hat and a look that said: “I told you; the stars were scheming.”
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