The Ezekiel Code Page 4
“What?”
“The apron. You’re wearing my apron.”
He looked down at the frilly yellow and white polka dot apron still tied around his waist. He grinned. “Ah!” he said, untying it and tossing it over to her. “Sorry about that.”
“That’s all right,” she said, fastening the apron around her own waist. “Mr. Banyon? Are you okay? You seem… I don’t know…”
“Yeah! I’m fine. Just got things on my mind, I guess. I’ll be in my office. Oh, by the way…”
“Yes?”
“Think there’s any chance of maybe serving something besides bean soup on Mondays?”
“Why?”
“Oh, you know. Old Tom’s still complaining about having bean soup every Monday. I just wondered.”
Jenny laughed. “If it was top sirloin steak and baked potato with a side of fresh green salad and a choice of wine, Old Tom would still complain.”
“Yeah,” Banyon nodded with a grin, “I suppose you’re right.”
“Besides,” Jenny added, “Who’s running this place anyway? You or Old Tom?”
“You, I think!” Banyon said, laughing, as he left the kitchen.
When he entered his office, He found Angela was already waiting for him.
“Angela! I didn’t expect you for another half hour or so.”
“One of my classes was cancelled this afternoon, so I was able to get away a little sooner.”
“Great. Have I got something to show you!”
“I’ve got something to show you, too,” she said, handing him a piece of paper.
“What’s this?”
“Read it.”
He read the typewritten note:
FOR SALE: COMPUTER WITH MONITOR AND PRINTER. ONLY FOUR YE-
ARS OLD. WORKS PERFECTLY. SACRIFICE, ONLY $400.00.
He looked up at her and shrugged. “So?”
“That was on the bulletin board at school,” she explained. “I think you should buy it.”
He laughed. “Me? Whatever for? I hate computers.”
“Actually, I was thinking of me”, she replied. “I mean, since I’m doing most of the bookwork now, it would be a lot easier to do on a computer with one of those bookkeeping programs. This old ledger book stuff is a pain in the you-know-what. And you’d be surprised at what else it would come in handy for. We have the funds and the price is a steal, believe me. And besides that, we could get access to the internet.”
Banyon scoffed. “The internet! You mean all that dot com stuff? Hah! What in the world do we need that for?”
“Well, for one thing,” she said, hoping to persuade him with her best sales pitch and a bit of attitude, “how about access to everything in the world you could ever possibly want to know about numerology and gematria and religion and…”
That caught his attention. “That’s on the internet?”
“You betcha,” she grinned, thinking she’d hooked him.
“Hmm…” he scratched his chin.
“Come on, Zeke. It’s about time you made the leap from the dark ages into the modern world. Don’t you think?”
“Well…”
“Great! Give me a blank check and I’ll pick up the computer tomorrow.”
“But,” he said looking around the cramped quarters of the office, “where in the world would we put it?”
“Glad you mentioned that,” she said. “That’s the next thing I need to talk to you about.”
“Oh no. What now?”
“You know that empty room down at the end of the hall?”
“Of course. It’s another small storage room.”
“But it’s pretty much empty now, right?”
“Pretty much, yes.”
“Well, if you can make an office out of this little room, I figured I could make an office out of that little room. What do you think? We could put the computer in there and, really, I could use the space instead of both of us trying to share this one small office. I mean, what with trying to organize the fund drives and other stuff. You know? Doesn’t that seem like a good idea?”
He had to agree. It was a reasonable request and the storage room was not being used for much of anything anyway.
“You’re right,” he conceded. “It’s actually a good idea. But you’ll need a desk and file cabinets, and…”
“Got that all figured out,” she said. “I have two desks at home. I only need one and I have some other things that I could bring down here. That is, if it’s okay with you.”
“Sure. That sounds okay to me.”
“Cool!” she said with a big grin on her face. “Maybe we can do it this weekend.”
“Well, okay,” Banyon shrugged. “Why not?”.
“Just one thing…”
“What’s that?”
Angela grinned. “You wouldn’t happen to have a pickup truck, would you?”
“No, but I know someone who does. I’m sure I could borrow it.”
“So you’ll help me move the stuff then?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Well…”
“Of course I’ll help you,” he laughed. “I’ll call my friend tomorrow and arrange to borrow the truck.”
“All right!” she said, excitedly. “Thank you!”
“So if you’re through planning my life for me,” he said, “I have something I’ve been dying to show you.”
The two of them huddled around his desk as he explained his discovery about the numbers 6 and 9 and the symbology attributed to them according to the numerology book.
“What do you make of that?” he asked. “Pretty weird, huh?”
“Wait a minute,” she said, grabbing a pencil and a sheet of paper. “Let me get this straight. Nine represents Mars but Mars turns out to have an alphanumeric value of six?”
“Right.”
“And six represents Venus but Venus has a value of nine?”
“Yes.”
“Hmm… well, yes, that is curious, I’ll have to admit,” she said thoughtfully as she doodled with the numbers 6 and 9. “You know what?”
“What?”
“Look at this.”
“Look at what?”
In her doodling she had drawn a 6 and a 9, fairly large, very close to each other, almost touching. The result was a large 69. She handed him the piece of paper.
“What?” he asked, looking at her scribbles.
She reached in her purse and, after a little digging, she produced a keychain with a black and white ceramic symbol on it. She placed it on the piece of paper next to the large 69.
“Yin yang,” she said.
Banyon still didn’t see the connection. “Yin yang?”
“Look,” she said, pointing out the similarity between the alternating black and white swirl design of the symbol on her keychain and the 69 she had doodled on the paper. “This is a Chinese symbol representing the yin and the yang of the universe.”
“Gees, you’re right! Look at that! I’ve heard of yin and yang before but I guess I never really paid much attention to what it meant. Something about opposites, right? Balance of nature? That sort of thing?”
Angela laughed. “Well, you must have paid attention somewhere along the line because that’s exactly the idea, yes. Also the interrelatedness of things. That’s why in the black part of the design there’s a small white dot and…”
“And in the white part,” he finished the sentence for her, “there’s a small black dot. I get it. Very interesting! The whole thing… amazing! How can this be? Is this all just coincidence? I mean, think about it. What are the odds of all these seemingly unrelated things all having this… this…”
“Interconnectedness?” she offered.
“Yes, exactly! That’s it.”
“I don’t know. It’s kind of exciting but it’s weird!”
“What else do you know about this yin yang thing?” he asked.
“Well, believe it or not, my anthropology professor actually mentioned this symbol the othe
r day when we were discussing differences and similarities between cultures around the world. I remember he said yin symbolizes the female energy and yang is the male energy.”
“Interesting. Like the Mars-Venus thing. Male, female.”
“Yes. And I remember he wrote the word, Qi, on the board. I think he pronounced it like the word key.”
“What did it mean?”
“It’s a Chinese word that means life force, or something like that.”
“Life force?”
“Yes. It was kind of hard to understand but basically it’s kind of like… um…” she stumbled around for the right word. “Man, I don’t know. Kind of an all-encompassing essence that flows through everything.”
“Everything?”
“Yes. Everything. You, me, this desk, the wall, everything.”
“Well I guess that’s not unlike some concepts of God,” Banyon admitted.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you’ve heard it said that God is in everything, right?”
“Oh! Yeah, that’s right. Same idea, I guess.”
“And one could think of God as a life force, right?”
“Yes, I guess you could. Wow. Cool!”
“Qi, huh?” Banyon muttered, punching buttons on his pocket calculator. He scratched something down on the piece of paper. “Guess what?” he said after a few moments.
“What? Qi equals nine?”
“No, but something just as curious.”
“What is it?”
Going on the idea that Qi and God are the same thing, at least maybe in some sense, I figured the value of each word just to see what it might be.”
“And…?”
“And they each equal twenty-six!”
“No kidding?”
“Yeah. You know what’s kind of interesting about that? The English alphabet that we’re using to do all of this has twenty-six letters in it.”
“How synchronistic,” she said, grinning.
Banyon stood up and turned to gaze out the window. “You know what?”
“What?”
“I wonder if it’s possible that the English alphabet could be a cipher of some kind.”
“A cipher?”
“Yeah. You know. A tool for unlocking a code.”
“A code? What are you talking about?”
He laughed. “I don’t know, actually! It’s crazy, I know.” He paused for moment, looking down, and then turned to her. “Have you ever heard of the Bible Code?”
“No. What’s the Bible code?”
He sat down again. “Well, apparently there seems to be information encoded within the original Hebrew text of the Torah.” “The Torah?”
“That’s the Hebrew word for the first five books of the Old Testament.”
“Oh. So what do you mean, encoded? What kind of information?”
“This was just recently discovered. The information - it could be a word or a group of related words or a phrase or even a date - is found hidden within the text by using what they call a skip code.”
“A skip code?”
“Yeah. What the researchers did was to eliminate all the punctuation and all the spaces between the words in the text of the Torah. So they ended up with pages and pages of lines of text in one long string of letters. Legend has it that this is how Moses actually wrote it. Essentially, each page just looked like a big block of letters. You see what I’m saying? And the skip coding works like this.” He went on to explain as well as he could, given his own limited knowledge of the subject. “You start with the first letter of the text in the book of Genesis and skip, say for example, ten letters. Now you have the first letter and the tenth letter. Then you skip another ten letters and record that. And so on, all the way through the entire Torah. Then you look to see what words or phrases may have been spelled out among those particular letters. And there are several different skip sequences that can be applied. Like you could try skipping every third letter all the way through. Or every 18th letter, and so on.”
“But,” she laughed, “that would take for ever!”
“Well, yeah. But they do it with a computer. They’ve developed a program that can process thousands of skip code functions in no time.”
“See?” she grinned smugly. “I told you computers were good for something. So what kind of information have they found by doing this?”
“Amazing stuff. The guy who wrote the book about it actually discovered the name of the Prime Minister of Israel hidden in the text. It was spelled vertically instead of horizontally.”
“Vertically?”
“Yeah, you know, like a word spelled vertically in a crossword puzzle?”
“You’re kidding!”
“No, but wait. What’s really amazing is that the phrase, Assassin That Will Assassinate, was also found hidden in the text and it was spelled out horizontally, crisscrossing the Prime Minister’s name. You see? Like a crossword puzzle!”
“What? Come on,” Angela said, with a fair degree of skepticism in her voice.
“It’s true. And a year later the Prime Minister was assassinated.”
“Oh, yes! I remember! But, how can that be? You mean the future is foretold in this code?
That’s crazy!”
“I know it sounds crazy. But mathematicians around the world have studied this phenomenon and it appears to be real.”
“What else have they found?”
“Well, that’s even weirder.”
“That’s okay. I’m sitting down. Lay it on me,” she said. “This is better than the X-Files.”
Banyon lit up a cigarette and leaned back in his chair. “All right. Believe it or not, it seems that nearly every significant event in history and the names of the key people involved in the unfolding of those events, and even the dates of those events, are encoded within the pages of the Torah.”
“Come on! You mean…”
“The Kennedy assassination. The bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma. Both World Wars. The landing of a man on the moon. The Gulf War. Hitler. Watergate. President Clinton. Thomas Edison. Even the name we gave to that comet just recently, ShoemakerLevy, was found encoded in the text. It just goes on and on.”
“This is too much,” she said, reaching into her purse for a pack of cigarettes. “I mean, how could such a code exist? And why?”
“Why, I don’t know. But as to how it was done, believe it or not, the code actually states that it was done by computer!”
“Computer! But I thought this was written three thousand years ago! Who had a computer three thousand years ago? Are you saying the word computer is actually encoded in the text?”
“Yup. Of course it’s in Hebrew, but it’s exactly the modern Hebrew word for computer. And I don’t just mean the word computer is in there all by itself. It was a whole phrase that said something like, It was created by computer.”
“But what was created by computer? How do they know what it was? It could be anything.”
“Ah! But here’s the kicker,” Banyon explained. “The clue to what a lot of these words and phrases refer to is found in the word or phrase that crosses it. Just like the name of the Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, was crossed by the phrase, Assassin will assassinate. In the case of the words, It was created by computer, the phrase that crossed it was something like, The wri- ting by God on the tablets.”
“Great,” Angela said, rolling her eyes. “So God’s a computer nerd. Sort of a cosmic Bill Gates. Is that the deal?”
Banyon let out a good laugh. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “I don’t know what to think of the whole thing. But now you see why it occurred to me that the English alphabet just might be something similar to the Bible Code. I mean if there’s one code, why not two? Or more? Or maybe they’re all just parts of one big code. I don’t know. What do you think?”
Angela didn’t know what to think. Her head was spinning just trying to comprehend the implications of such a thing. It seemed preposterous. On the other
hand, if there really was some kind of a code in the Bible, as these brilliant and obviously educated men seemed to believe, then maybe Banyon’s alphabet code wasn’t so crazy after all. She finally conceded.
“Well,” she said, shrugging her shoulders, “I suppose you could be on to something. I mean if the Bible Code is real then, well, why not?”
Banyon was listening but he was scribbling something down on a note pad and punching his little pocket calculator. “You know what the word, code, comes out to?” he asked.
“I don’t know. What?”
“Twenty-seven!”
Angela caught it right away. “Two plus seven is nine,” she grinned. He nodded his head thoughtfully. “This means something,” he said. “This has got to mean something.”
5
Angela’s knack for organizing the seemingly unorganizable was put to the test the following weekend. Still, by the end of the day, she and Banyon had managed to turn the extra storage room into a surprisingly decent little office, computer and all. The room was quite small but at least it had a window that helped brighten things up. Banyon sat down in front of the computer and stared at it like it was a piece of alien technology from a galaxy far, far away. Cautiously, he ran a finger across the top of the monitor and then quickly recoiled his hand as if he wasn’t sure it was safe. Angela caught him out of the corner of her eye as she straightened the sheer white curtain she’d just hung over the window. She couldn’t help but laugh as she recalled the apes cautiously poking at the mysterious black monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The comparison was just so appropriate… and funny.
“What?” Banyon asked.
“You!” she said. “It won’t bite, you know. It isn’t even plugged in.”
He grinned. “Yeah, yeah. Well, so now that we have this thing, how do we get on the internet?”
“Oh my! For a techno-Neanderthal you’re sure jumping into things!”
“Well, I paid for this contraption! I want to see how it works!”
Angela reached for her purse and pulled out a CD. “This,” she said, “is our ticket to the information super highway!”
“What is it?”
“It’s everything we need to get onto the internet. We just plug in the computer, slip the disk in, and in minutes we’ll be signed up and logged on!”
“Will it hurt?”