Beyond Time Book

Beyond Time begins on September 11th 2001 at 8:48 in Lower Manhattan.

Winnie O’Reilly Corrington is rushing late for her appointment in the World Trade Tower with the only person in the world who has the power to intervene with the powerful Corringtons, a First Family of Virginia, to retain custody of her children.

What happens that day of infamy that shocked the world throws Winnie into a personal revivification of other tragedies that also changed the world.

At Bellevue Hospital along with other survivors, the hospital staff discovers Winnie has a concussion and amnesia yet denies being at the scene of the terrorist attack, despite her clothes dirtied by the same residue of soot, ash and powdered concrete found on other victims. Instead, she tells of an emotional and personal odyssey taking place over several centuries that draws the attention of attending psychiatrist Jack Raskin.

Befuddled, he calls on long-time peer and former lover, Dr. Sophia Attenborough, a highly regarded psychotherapist who has turned to past life regression therapy after a long and honored career as a traditional psychotherapist. Under Attenborough’s deft regressive hand, Winnie is hypnotized and becomes flooded with overwhelming images of other times, and other peoples, in which she interacts as both observer and participant.

The adventures she relates range from Napolean’s Spain, the Jazz age in Harlem, the Great Depression, witnessing as a Roman guard the young messiah crucified in Jerusalem, traveling with the vast nomadic conquering tribe of Mongols—and many more. Winnie weaves a tale of tragedy and love, betrayal and drama that spans centuries and geography, all deeply interconnected in the recesses of her mind as one soul that experienced all.

The novel Beyond Time had its genesis about 17 years ago when a friend insisted I see a poster of one of Goya’s sitters, Senora Sabesa Garcia. Just as she had intrigued him, the young girl did me. It was her quiet insouciance, and a seeming ledger of stories lying deep within her to be told.

On the day I began writing, I was having lunch with a friend in a downtown deli. As my eyes wandered around the room, there was Sabesa staring down, her face seemingly amused, either at my chutzpah to take on a novel after only writing for newspapers, magazines and public relations, or the fact that I’d never finished a previous novel and never pursued marketing a script I wrote that had won an award. Perhaps the prospect of public humiliation in writing this blog will do the motivational trick.

This book is one person’s stab at how incredibly we became the sum total of so many fragmentations, genetics, experiences, environments, happenstances, synchronicities when in one slight alteration, a drop of blood, a few less brain cells, born to different parents, different status, different DNA amalgamation, each of us could have been quite a totally different person. Who was it that said that it took the Grand Canyon eight million years to become the glory it is today? So why would we conclude it takes us only one turn of the wheel?