Friday, April 3, 1998 | 9:01 a.m.
HE'S DEFINITELY not touchy-feely, this Bill Branon. With his hair buzz and cast-iron bearing, he comes off like an ex-military man, largely because he is: Navy, medical corps and intelligence. If you've read his two thrillers -- "Let Us Prey" and "Devils Hole" -- you know that he understands deep, molten rage and is capable of imagining all sorts of grotesque violence. Rape. Castration. A bullet up the rectum. And, if you believe his jacket copy, he's capable of carrying it out, being an expert on demolition and weaponry. An autodidact, he's more widely read in philosophy and the hard sciences than most of us are in the TV listings. No, definitely not touchy-feely.
He does have a spiritual side, however. "I don't dismiss religion," the Las Vegan says. "I champion it. Religion is intuitively predictive. It stockpiles possibilities; it should lead and finance science."
Religion and science -- and, of course, a three-legged talking coyote named j.b. -- form the core of "Timesong," Branon's latest book, published by the local Huntington Press. On one level, it's simply the story of j.b. and his friend Tom, an autistic human boy who's father has died -- an inspirational fable you can read to your kids. "It is and it isn't," Branon says. Because on another level, it's a loving bon voyage to his cancer-stricken mother.
And on its most ambitious level, "Timesong" is his attempt to reconcile advanced science and religion into a vision of the afterlife that a hard thinker and closet softie like Branon can buy into. Think of it as the Sweet Quantum Hereafter:
Physics tells us that because you can't destroy mass or energy, there is a stable number of indestructible building blocks in the universe. Add to that recent theories positing that the universe may not eventually coast to a halt after all. "Given a finite number of building blocks and an infinite amount of time," Branon believes it's not only possible but perhaps even inevitable that those particles will reassemble into the same people we are now. In that way, the dead will be with us again.
As the coyote, j.b., tells Tom, the autistic boy, hoping to ease the loss of his father: "You can't die, Tom. You're father can't die, either. None of us can. We can only change. Sometimes the parts, the particles, make a tree, sometimes a star, sometimes you and me, sometimes your dad again. The changing doesn't stop. Ever." It's an immensely comforting notion to a man who's mother has cancer.
At some point, Branon had to say to himself, A talking coyote is just the thing to get this across. For a reason: He wants to knock man from his humanocentric pedestal. "There are things we can get from other species," he says. The coyotes in the book, for instance, take "the changing" for granted; they don't fear the unknown. Says Branon, citing the complex beauties of whale songs, "I just don't think we are the only ones who can conceptualize our existence."
Hey, hey, going New Age on us there, Branon? No, he says. "Honest to God, I hate wacko metaphysics," he says. "I try so hard not to believe in this unseen stuff." But then he tells me about the angels.
He believes he's seen two, once as a child in church, following a terrible fire in Hartford, Conn., and the other as a Navy medical man who'd just finished an autopsy on a friend. As he describes them, both angels were unexplainable blobs of light.
Plenty of people have had similar experiences, he says, but clam up about them. "We're embarrassed to talk about it. As a result, we're missing something." And so a man of the mind has to confront a phenomenon of the spirit.
To some, of course, quantum mechanics is wacko metaphysics, requiring as much blind faith as any religion. Grasping high physics is like understanding God: "How to you describe the color red to a blind man?" Branon asks.
"Timesong" doesn't groan under its payload of such mind bending; it's mostly present in trace elements and in the foreword and afterward.
It all makes for a radical departure from his other work.
"Looks kind of squishy," said a friend who'd seen -- but not read -- "Timesong." That depends on whether you find talking coyotes addressing life after death "squishy." Admittedly, it required a bit of adjustment -- I don't normally operate in fable mode -- but ultimately I didn't agree with my friend. "Who among us," asks Huntington publisher Anthony Curtis, "hasn't wondered about these things?"
You may believe in Branon's quantum hereafter; you may not. But, in its vision of science and religion finally merging -- "they're chasing the same rabbit," as j.b. puts it -- it's at least thought-provoking. Branon will settle for that. "I want the reader to run with the premise, the parent and the child," he says. And in the face of cancer and the unfathomable vastness of the universe and his suspicion that if there is a God, he's largely indifferent to our sufferings and pleadings, it is, for Branon, a conclusion that works. "I am," he says, "the blind man who now knows what red is."
And his theory has more mundane applications, Branon says. He was cleaning his garage recently when he found a piece of miscellaneous junk he'd been saving for no clear reason. Reassembling particles in mind, he threw it out. "It's going to be here again, so what the heck!"
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