Alec was trying to work out Sacha’s latter assurance.
“I don’t see people as physical objects, Dad. It would be like worrying about a pair of pants that are ready for disposal. It simply doesn’t matter. What matters is whether the pants served you well. If they’ve served the purpose for which they’d been made.”
“Are you comparing a human life to a pair of pants?” This was getting to be too much.
“No, of course not.” There was a moment’s silence. Then Sacha tried again. “As a scientist you know that the body consists of a number of chemicals held together by biochemical and electromagnetic bonds...”
“How on earth did you know that?”
Sacha was right, of course. The moment Alec asked the question he realized it must have sounded silly. Obviously his son must have read it somewhere. God knows he went through all the books at home, the local library, and the extensive library at Caltech.
“Quite,” Sacha agreed. “So if you were to think of the man’s body in those terms, you wouldn’t give it much weight, would you, Dad?”
“You are leading up to man being more than the sum of his parts,” Alec nodded in spite of himself.
“Not at all. Man is none of his parts. Any more than his old pants are.”
They walked on in silence. A moment later Alec saw his son flying over a lustrous surface of an almost absurdly serene lake. They don’t make lakes like that on Earth. Not even mirrors. Somehow, they found themselves on the Home Planet. Alec spread his arms, gave himself a gentle push and joined his son. They soared up and down, swirled in spiral descents only to rise again towards the enormous sun.
“Careful, son. Remember what happened to Icarus,” Alec’s voice was filled with joy and wonder as only the Home Planet can inspire.
“I really don’t like being careful. I don’t think this is what it’s all about...”
Alec was still wondering if Daedalus could really have been held accountable, when he noticed that they were both walking along the beach. The moment of illusion had past.
Illusion? It was much too real for that.
Alec looked over his shoulder. There was no sign of the Coastal Patrol. There were also no people staring towards the sea, as though waiting for the next chapter of the gory incident to unfold.
“Was there an accident, back there?” he murmured under his breath.
“Was there, Dad?”
There and then, for the first time, Alec really understood Sacha’s point of view. He was not like any of the people he’d ever known. He was like the others in as much as he wore a similar “pair of pants”. Sacha that walked the Earth, by his side, was but a shadow of his real self. Even on the Home Planet his ‘body’ was a glorified version of the earthly Sacha. A version, Alec suspected, created for his and Suzy’s benefit.
Sacha, regardless of his physical appearance, was still a globule of light, shimmering with ineffable light in the Undiscovered Country.
Chapter 4
Grandpa Desmond
At first, Grandpa McBride treated Sacha as a wee lad. Then, as a bigger lad. And finally as a young adolescent. He didn’t pretend Sacha was something special, unless one considers all children special. If he ever noticed somewhat odd or, to put it mildly, at times unconventional behaviour, he didn’t let on.
Grandpa Des was the only member of the Baldwin and McBride clans who did not treat Sacha as a wunderkind. Of course Sacha was bright, but Dr. McBride held that all children were bright, and remained so until adults destroyed their innate abilities. He thought that Einstein was right: “Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything one learned in school.” At least that danger was over. Sacha would not have too much to forget. He wouldn’t be retarded by the limitations of his teachers.
Sacha was six when Professor McBride took him on a tour of his university. They walked side by side. Each time they neared anyone, the students would step to one side to let them pass. After only a few such occurrences Sacha asked his grandfather why they did that.
“It’s a sign of rrrespect, lad,” Desmond answered, and caught his breath. Well, it was partially true. It was because he was a professor and they were students. The students might have just been playing safe. He did have a reputation of being somewhat of a holy terror. Alec had once told him so.
“But don’t you respect them, Grandpa?” Sacha’s tone placed an accent on ‘them’.
Dr. Desmond McBride knew there and then that he must be very careful when he talked to the wee lad. “Of courrrse I do, laddie. Of courrse I do.”
The next moment Sacha pulled hard on Grandpa’s sleeve. Obediently Dr. McBride allowed himself to be pulled to one side of the corridor. The oncoming students did the same against the opposite wall. The group of students stared at the chivalrous duo with quizzical expressions having no idea what they were supposed to do. Then they nodded, bowed, and slowly sidled along the wall on their way.
“I think they really respect you, Grandpa,” Sacha affirmed, when they also resumed their walk. “Only they didn’t know that you respect them, too.”
They had to step out of student’s way four more times before Sacha let it pass. He was getting the message that if one party gets off the way, the other can pass. And the students were unlikely to take advantage of the extra space. There was no need to hold up all the traffic going both ways.
Usually, on return home, Sacha would run up to the door and wait to be let in. This time he stood to one side and let his grandfather reach the door first.
“I thank you for your sign of respect, lad,” the professor said bowing to his grandson.
“Oh, I respect you a lot, Grandpa, but I had to wait because you have the key.”
Alicia thought she knew why Desmond poured so much love on Sacha. It was, she thought, the guilt Desmond carried, for so many years, about the way he’d treated his own boys. In fact, just his remaining boy.
It was a bizarre story. It dated back to Dr. McBride’s sons’ late teens. Desmond had been busy at Caltech. Due to his colleague’s illness he was lumbered with a series of additional lectures he could neither postpone nor delegate to anyone else. He’d previously promised his two sons to take them skiing to the Vale. The snow conditions were reportedly perfect. At the last moment Dr. McBride had to cancel.
The boys raised Cain about broken promises. Finally, his wife asked if he would mind if she took the boys skiing on her own. There was nothing wrong with the idea, except that Marla, his wife, was a fairly poor skier. She could hold her own on the easy, even on some intermediate runs, but that was about it. The boys regarded themselves as experts. They were good, but not that good. The last time Desmond skied with them he could still leave them well behind. Especially on fresh snow.
The lads liked to look for challenges to test their prowess. They had long planned a surprise. It was to have been for their father, but... it was not to be. Over a period of time they had saved their money to rent a helicopter. Marla and their two sons had been whisked onto pristine, virginal slopes. All that remained was the getting down.
Perhaps, for the sake of their mother, the boys took it fairly easy. Perhaps they waited a little too long, skied too slowly. The midday sun warmed up the slopes a little too much. A minor avalanche caught them about halfway down. It wasn’t a big avalanche. Experts could probably avoid it with ease. They were no experts. Not on pristine snow.
John, the younger boy, died with his mother. George, who was almost nineteen at the time, emigrated to Australia after his father refused to speak to him for three months. They hadn’t spoken to each other for many years although George did send a telegram for Desmond’s wedding. It was terse, but it was a gesture. His father hadn’t responded.
The scars ran deep.
Now Desmond was pouring love on Sacha. He had time. He was not trying to build a career to support his two sons and a young wife, to give them the best he could. That was then, a million years ago. Now, he was slowing down. But mostly, he wanted
to give love. He felt a well within him that had never been used to its capacity. He tried his best. He didn’t impose himself, but was always available.
Always.
On occasion, Alec would drop Sacha off at Dr. McBride’s office at Caltech for a short while. He didn’t abuse the privilege, and Desmond insisted that he didn’t mind.
“Whenever you want to, son. Whenever you want to,” the professor assured.
In fact grandpa found little chats with Sacha a lot more stimulating than shuffling papers on his desk. They must have been… Whenever Alec returned to pick up his son, invariably there was a wondrous expression on Desmond’s face.
“I think I understand, Grandpa,” Sacha had once said when Dr. McBride found it difficult to explain to him the gravitational field. “Gravity is like love. It is forever attracting. It neither judges nor expects anything in return. It just encloses you in its protective embrace, both the good and bad, with equal equanimity.”
Equanimity? This was not at all how a eight-year-old talked. By now Alec was used to such vocabulary from his son, but Desmond didn’t see his grandson often enough to catch up with the lad’s reading habits. He no more expected childish patter than he could imagine that Sacha would stop thinking. His mind, Desmond knew, was a very precious thing. But it still resided in the body of a boy. Of a wee lad. And Desmond knew he must cater to both. He talked to Sacha as he would to an adult. Otherwise, he treated him as he would any eight-year-old.
“Yes, Sacha, m’son. I darrre say, it is at that.” What else could he have said to the laddie? And then Desmond McBride scratched his balding head for a long time. “I dare say it is...” he murmured under his breath.
He wondered why he’d never thought of it that way.
On another occasion the professor asked Sacha about religion. He didn’t want to, but Suzy asked him to find out Sacha’s thoughts on the subject. For reasons Desmond didn’t quite understand she didn’t want to ask her own son herself. There was little Desmond wouldn’t do for Suzy. She was Alec’s wife, and Alec gave him Alicia. And Alicia brought a strange feeling of youth into his life. It was like being given another chance. For happiness. He’d waited for her for a very, very long time. And now Suzy gave him Sacha.
Meeting Suzy’s request, he thought, would not be easy. He was not a religious man himself, and he carried no residual emotions on the subject. He thought religion was fine for people who needed it. He asked Sacha point black if he had any interest in any religion. He always asked Sacha things point blank. No matter what the subject. He was not a man to beat about the bush. He thought it a waste of time. And with Sacha, he soon found out, directness was the only way. If he tried hedging about anything, the lad could see through his subterfuge in an instant. So he asked him point blank. Sacha replied, just as directly, that he still didn’t understand what religion was all about.
“I read all I could find, and there was nothing there that made any sense,” Sacha said with sadness in his voice. “I wish I could help them...”
Sacha didn’t elucidate what was it and just whom he wanted to help. Desmond didn’t pursue the matter. He found dialogue on religious matters over his head. He felt that talking about religion was like listening to, or watching, the blind leading the blind. At the very most he thought that religion might have its place in the sanctuary of your own home. It wasn’t something to be aired in public. But it was Sacha who returned to the subject some minutes later.
“And you, Grandpa, do you understand any religion?”
“No son. I don’t. As for myself, when I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That’s about it,” Desmond replied. He didn’t find it necessary to credit Abraham Lincoln with the authorship of this terse creed.
“So religion is about feeling good and bad?”
“I don’t know, son. I just don’t know.” And Desmond’s voice also carried a hint of distress. As though he’d lost something and couldn’t find it again. As though it just wasn’t there anymore.
There had been many such exchanges, on just about every subject under the sun. Once the professor wondered if his own children, way back when, had asked similar questions. Or, for that matter, had they, or he, given similar answers. Perhaps all children have access to a source to which doors are closed once they, or we, have grown up. He reached back in his memory. Yes, there was definitely a door there, somewhere, which closed once you grew older. He wondered if the same thing would happen to Sacha.
It would be such a great pity.
How often does a man in his seventies, early seventies, have an opportunity to learn? It could no longer be from books. Not books on religion. Whatever had been put in writing had been run through the translation process of arranging thoughts into words and sentences that readers would understand. By then, the essence became too diluted. Too emaciated. Perhaps made ineffectual.
Sacha did not take grandpa’s understanding into account. His thoughts came out directly, unhampered by considerations of grammar or syntax. He just let his thoughts spill out as if he and whomever he addressed were on the same wavelength. Why can’t adults do that? Poets do, occasionally. Poets do not address their words to our minds, or intellects. They speak directly to our hearts. And even if we don’t understand some of the words, it doesn’t matter. We get the spirit of the subject. That elusive essence. They get us on the same wavelength. In this sense Sacha was born a poet.
Desmond hoped he would remain one. Forever.
Over the last few years, Desmond was getting into the habit of thanking his lucky stars. After years of loneliness in which his work has been his only passion, his only companion, even escape, he’d met Alec Baldwin. He recalled, vaguely, their first meeting.
“A beanstalk with a mop-a-top, stepping from one foot to another, as though swaying in the wind,” he mused, when he first saw him.
That was Alec.
But there was a spark in the young man’s eye that the professor spotted immediately. He’d suspected, and was since proven right, that Alec would venture into territories that other physicists dared not tread. At his first opportunity he had advanced Alec’s name for the Nobel Prize. Why not? Dr. Alexander Baldwin’s Theory of Information was as far ahead of the thinking of his own generation as Galileo’s was over the thinking of the Vatican. Alec didn’t get the Prize he deserved. Some well-established traditionalist got it instead, but this in no way diminished the professor’s admiration for the young man. And at least, Alec didn’t have to recant his theory, nor was he tortured, nor burned at the stake.
“Perrrhaps we are making some prrrogrress,” the professor admitted, when he was recounting the story to Sacha. Not the story of Galileo and Giordano Bruno, but of Sacha’s father.
There were other yarns Dr. McBride shared with Sacha. Always with expansive imagination, slightly exaggerated, and augmented with broad and rambling r’s. The professor was proud of his Scottish ancestry and he affirmed it at every opportunity.
Over the years, he told Sacha many stories from Alec’s past. He and Sacha’s father had crossed the continent many a time. Fate also took them to Central and South America, to Europe, and even to Africa where the hunger for knowledge was perhaps greater than in any country. They both enjoyed making physics accessible to, what is commonly referred to as, the common people. Only there was nothing common about the people they’d met. What was common about them was their insatiable desire to learn. To learn facts, the truth—even in a very simplified form. The people seemed tired of falsehoods their TV and radio promulgated. They wanted to hear something they could believe. Without doubts.
Sacha’s favourite was the tale about the trip his father and the professor had shared to Machu Picchu. When the old man spoke of the soaring tors clad in their gray, misty tonsures attesting to their longevity, the silent sentinels of the sacred ruins, his eyes grew misty, his voice lowered as though sharing some arcane secrets. Then as he recounted their shenanigans with the visiting Russian physicist at the UCLA, the pro
fessor sounded like a student himself, the spark in his eyes dispelled the previous mists, and glittered with youthful mischief. That was the time when the professor counted himself among the staunch defenders of pure science. Uncompromising truth. Anyone who dared to make a cocktail by mixing his beloved physics with any vintage of cosmic consciousness was in for a painful surprise. And that was exactly what he and Alec had concocted for the poor, unsuspecting visiting lecturer.
“Don’t mess with physics,” Dr. McBride warned his students. “God knows they are messed up enough already,” he would add incongruously.
But the professor also loved the lighter side of his career. His stories grew and became embelished with time. And so it was with the story of Dr. Goudoff, the hapless Russian.
“I almost lost my tenure, laddie,” Dr. McBride declared with a chuckle. Actually, his professorship was never in any danger. But he thought this extra tidbit raised the hazard of the operation to a new level.
There was a great deal to tell, even from the years before the professor met Sacha’s father. The lad listened wide-eyed, staring at his grandfather with undisguised admiration. Sacha’s grandfather unfolded a world that Sacha couldn’t learn from books. A world of real people struggling, as Sacha put it, to meet their destiny. He didn’t venture to speculate what his father’s or Grandpa’s destiny might have been. Those were sacred grounds, he once said. They belonged in the sacred garden of each and every entity. It was the ground no one dared to tread uninvited. But then, almost as an after-thought, his grandfather did invite him.
“I wonder what would have happened if I had lost my tenure. Where would the currents of fate have taken me, eh lad?”
Sacha—The Way Back Page 5