I came out of Basilica Cistern and called Yousef asking to meet him after his class. There was a coffee shop near his workplace, so I decided to wait for him there. Yousef walked in through the door of the café and apologized for making me wait.
“How are you now?” He took a seat across me, but I shook my head.
“I want to ask you about something. Is it possible to see someone from another dimension?” I paused to see his expression, but hadn’t expected him to react calmly.
“Who did you see last night?” Yousef asked, and I was taken aback by his sudden question. I didn’t expect him to catch up on it quickly, but I told him that I met Dylan in Romania, and it mightn’t be my first time there.
“What if it’s a dream?” He asked me again.
“Dreams are not perfectly structured. One is bound to find the flaw after carefully analyzing them.” I reasoned to which he agreed himself but said, “Then, how are you sure it is real?”
I tenderly touched my band-aided cheek and replied, “That is what I want to find out.” Then, I told him everything in detail, and he patiently listened to it.
“The idea of seeing someone from the other world is not entirely impossible, but it’s difficult to find actual records.” He remarked, and I became anxious.
“You don’t think I’m a lunatic, do you?
“You wouldn’t have come here if you wanted me to tell you that.” He said. “Ms. Cordon, there are laws of the world are incomprehensible. You and I cannot explain them. However, Parallel universe is only a speculation. Interacting with or crossing over to another dimension while being conscious of it is humanly impossible.”
“Then, how do you explain this?” I showed him the hairpin that Dylan had returned, but he shook his head.
“I’m not a physicist, so I can’t explain it, but Irem might know someone.” He called Irem, and the girl showed after twenty five minutes at the coffee shop. She sat next to me and put her bag and I-pad on the table, ordering herself Turkish coffee.
“Why did you call me here?” She asked us, and I turned to Irem. “I’ve heard one of your friend is doing his research in quantum physics. Can I meet him?”
“Is everything alright?” She was confused. I told her that I was working on a new sci-fi book and wanted to do some proper research.
“Well, I can arrange for you to meet Hisam tomorrow, but he is going nuts with his research. He’s looking into the historical artifacts that can artificially create wormhole in space.” She spoke and her words caught my attention.
“Artifacts?”
“You know about London Hammer, right?” Irem asked us looking at our clueless faces, then explained, “It is believed to be the artifact that had appeared from another dimension, and Hisam is now interested in this theory. Recently, he’s been looking into this.” She opened her I-pad and showed me a picture of a dagger.
I shot up from my chair in surprise when I looked at it. It was the same dagger from the desert, but its red stone was missing.
“Where did you find the picture of it?” I asked Irem who was shocked at my outburst. “I found it at the museum, but Hisam says it hadn’t been there before.”
“When did you get this picture?” I asked Irem to clear my doubt.
“Ten days ago.” It’s when I was back on train in Romania.
“Can I see Hisam?”
Next day, Irem arranged a meeting for me with Hisam in the evening and accompanied me to see him as well. Hisam greeted us, and Irem introduced us to each other. I told him that I was writing a sci-fi book and wanted his help in this regard. I asked him if it was possible to enter alternate universe and experience it firsthand.
“According to physicist, Parallel universe or multiple realities do exist, and we experience it everyday without actually realizing it. Our multiple selves exist in separate realities, each self living a slightly or a completely different life. Think of it as Schrodinger’s cat case where a tiny particle can be in two different states at same time unless observed, so everyone is divided into multiple selves in different planes unless one reality is chosen or manifested.”
Hisam had explained to me, but said, “However, it is rare for someone to become conscious of it except for having a feeling of De Ja Vu or Mandela effect where you realize that the things are different from how you remember them.”
I connected all the dots, and concluded this might be the case. It’s I who had appeared in his world and switched between two realities. But, there must be another me in his world. Where was she? Did something happen to her, and I kept showing up in her place instead?
“Irem told me you’re looking into the historical artifacts?”
“You know that the wormhole is a hypothetical passage in space-time that bridges the two worlds. It’s not true but not entirely impossible. If something from another world can appear here, it would mean that thing might create a rift in the space too.”
“That thing might open up the portal?” Was my hairpin a link between our worlds?
“Yes, look at this dagger.” Hisam showed me the picture. “Irem says it’s at the museum, but I don’t recall seeing it there before.”
“You might remember it differently.” I pushed hoping to be wrong.
“I may be, but not the curator at the museum.”
I asked Hisam about the curator, and went to see him next day at the museum. I inquired him about the dagger, and he said same that he didn’t remember it being there before. The dagger originated from Northern Africa, near Western Sahara and it had confirmed my suspicions. Three people couldn’t randomly have a false memory about a dagger.
It didn’t belong to our world.
I thanked the curator for his time and went back to my hotel. Things troubled me, and if I had been any wise, I’d have stopped looking into the matter, but the curiosity won over me again.
There’s call from Natasha and I decided to finally answer it. I told her I might come back next month and receive the proper treatment. I was lost in my thoughts when I got a call from Irem who told me Hisam was going to Morocco for his research and asked me if I was interested in joining him since it’d help me with my new book.
I readily agreed to the opportunity and asked Irem about the further details as she was also going for her photography project.
In three days, we departed for Morocco and arrived at Blue Oasis of Morocco, Chefchaouen.
As we drove to Hisam’s friend house, I told myself that this would be the last time I was going to look for Dylan.
Amira was 22 weeks months along, so Irem and I helped her dinner in the kitchen and clean the place afterwards.
The rooftop terrace gave a beautiful view of the entire city. After the breakfast in the morning, I went to the terrace and leaned over the wall to see the view when Amira joined me.
“It’s peaceful, isn’t it?” She asked sitting down on a chair and I nodded in reply. “Karim and I have never thought that we would settle down here and start our family.”
“It is indeed peaceful here.” “Are you seeing someone?” Her question caught me off guard.
“Hallucinations?
She let out an amused laughter and said, “Not that. I am talking about being with someone.” I flushed in embarrassment. Since when did I become this unhinged?
I told her that I wasn’t currently seeing anyone and didn’t want to be tied down to one place.
“I feel I don’t belong anywhere.” This constant feeling of self-exile, and being displaced even at a right place is a burden. I had a house, and family but not a sense of belonging. I had never been at home. In the end, I didn’t know what a home was.
“Home is a feeling, rather a place. You will belong to a place when you find home in yourself.” Amira answered, and I realized that she wasn’t wrong about it.
“Do you also think there’s a third being that mysteriously guides us?” I asked her.
“I do”, she replied. “In Islamic account, it’s believed that Khidr resides in waters and guides those who seek the truth. He had appeared before Moses and imparted the knowledge of Al-Ghaib to him.”
“Is he the unseen one?” I asked her.
“He’s a mystical being. One can’t tell if he’s a saint or prophet, but when he met with Moses where two seas met, it’s place that separated two worlds: the world of seen and the unseen. There is a fine barrier between the higher and the lower realms, and the intermediary realm materializes what’s abstract and imagined.”
I had become interested in her insight so I asked her, “What’s this place called then?”
“Does it matter what’s that place called? Certain things can’t be named, but it doesn’t mean that they are any less real. Say, your mind is also a place where you can see the imagined. Both you and I are places, but if it assures you we call this place Barzakh or Imaginary Realm; a place that divides the two worlds.”
The more I asked about these things, the more confused I became. If there’s third realm, then who are the people of that place? Dead or Undead Ones?
Amira suggested me to visit a library if I wanted to learn more about it. I visited a public library with Irem and asked the librarian for the section of philosophy and theology. I looked for Ibn Al-Arabi’s works in the respective section and picked out his book, Fasus-Al-Hikam, “Seal of Wisdom” on mysticism and the nature of Knowledge through the prophetic figures of Adam, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Jesus and others as well.
I sat down at a table and flipped through the book to look for the chapter of Moses and Khidr. The story mentioned Khidr, a mystic being who met with Moses and imparted him knowledge of the unseen.
Al-Arabi wrote Al-Khidr had inspired Moses with the knowledge of self through the incidents he had witnessed during their journey. The sinking of boat was parallel to Moses being put into ark in Nile; the killing of a boy to the Copt Moses had killed, and Khidr’s straightening of wall of the orphans to Moses being protected in Pharaoh’s household by God Himself.
There’s inward wisdom to all the outward acts Moses had encountered in his life.
I read more on the parable of Moses and Al-Khidr, and learnt that Moses and Joshua had met Khidr at a place where the two seas met and the dead fish disappeared into the water making a channel through it as in a tunnel.
Tunnel? I paused reading for a second to process it.
The book said that the salted fish in the vessel that was for eating had come back to life and escaped into the water making a channel.
Where could it have gone? Did it escape to another realm? The place where the two seas met and a dead fish came back to life, how could such a place possibly exist?
I immediately got up from the chair and looked for Ibn Arabi’s other books. I came across his book, The Meccan Openings in which he wrote about his encounter with a man who had seen a WORLD different from ours and having been to that place. However, I put the book back on shelf as I had no time to read such an extensive book on theology.
I recalled Amira’s words about an intermediary realm between the Higher and Lower Realm, Barzakh.
I picked his another book from the section and read about Barzakh which is a barrier or place of dead before resurrection. However, in mysticism, it’s an Imaginal Realm that materializes the Form from the Noetic Realm to our Material World.
I closed the book, unable to digest it any further and analyzed the entire picture.
I met Yousef and Irem, and both of them led me to find things. Yousef himself was a scholar, but he pointed Hisam to me through Irem which made me follow him to Morocco. Amira was merely a housewife, but she suddenly mentioned the account of Khidr to me.
Did it mean the things I had been experiencing had hidden meaning to them as well?
The old man at the book shop in Paris who sold me the book, the woman on the train, the boy in the desert, Yousef and Amira, they all were guiding me to something else.
They all had wanted me to find Something. I had told Yousef about Dylan, but when I showed the hairpin to him, he told me he couldn’t help me further, instead he asked me to see Hisam who brought us to Amira. They were not ordinary people.
The dagger had materialized itself in this world, but what about the hairpin?
I pulled out the hairpin from my purse, and carefully inspected it. It’s a plain golden hairstick with a plum floral design. When I inspected it, I sensed that something might be missing. The design was too simple.
There should have been a pearl or stone on the petals to complete the design.
The dagger that suddenly appeared here, and the hairpin that I forgot in that world only to be returned again showed that there’s a connection between the two. Since I was the holder of this hairpin, this could be the reason that I kept returning to that place.
I came out of library and called my mother asking about her well-being, then inquired about the origins of grandmother’s hairpin.
‘Why are you suddenly asking me about it?’ She questioned me. I told her I was looking at the hairpin and started missing her. She knew that among her children, I was the closest one to grandmother.
‘Mother-in-law got it in an auction when she went to China.’ In 1940s, grandmother went to Changsha with my grandfather who gifted that hairstick to her after winning it at the auction.
‘Your sister had wanted that hairstick, but your grandmother left it for you’, said my mother.
I wanted to tell her that she had left a curse to me. Why would someone want a hair relic that is unearthed from some ancient tomb or left behind by a dead person?
I asked my mother if she could find some old pictures of grandmother wearing that hairstick and send them to me on the phone. I talked to her for a few minutes about my vacation then, Irem came and I had to end the call.
“Did you find what you were looking for.” She asked me, but I didn’t tell her the truth.
“Sort of. I don’t get it much, the philosophical stuff.” I answered her.
“Hisam called and asked us to go come back. We are leaving for the desert tomorrow.”
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