“Magic is believing in yourself, if you can do that, you can make anything happen.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Playwright, Poet, Novelist and Dramatist, 1749-1832
ALEXANDER
ALEXANDER TRILOGY, BOOK II
Sequel to ALEC
Prequel to SACHA—The Way Back
Stan I.S. Law
INHOUSEPRESS, MONTREAL, CANADA
Copyright © Stanislaw Kapuscinski 2005, Kindle Edition 2011
http://stanlaw.ca
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
http://www.inhousepress.ca
This book is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, titles, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
CONTENTS
Prologue
The Beginning
1. Peek-a-boo
2. Dr. Alexander Baldwin, Ph.D.
3. The Top of the World
4. The Information Theory
5. Family Reunion
6. Stormy Night
Remembering
7. Who is Sandra?
8. Wedding Bells
9. Alec Baldwin III
10. Back to the Drawing Board
11. Christmas in California
12. The Game’s afoot, Mrs. Baldwin
Time
13. Atlantis
14. Reconciliation
15. Return to the Far Country
16. Magic
17. Hades
18. Mu
The Return
19. Sacha and Other Youngsters
20. Wisdom of the Past
21. Who am I?
22. Come Fly with Me
23 The Undiscovered Country
24. Delight
The Epilogue
Just Living
Prologue
Dr. Alexander Baldwin is a young, brilliant physicist, determined to unlock the secrets of the Universe. Yet, his scientific training is at odds with the memories of his youthful exploits that repeatedly drew him into the realm of irrepressible, often unbridled, imagination. He is only vaguely aware of having become a radically different person from the one of his youth.
Awkward, unseen elements from his past seem to pop up, as though to justify the present; elements that Alec has not experienced in his present life; elements so strong as to be pushing him with inexorable force. There are forces at play that he’d forgotten existed—forces akin to sorcery and Black Magic.
As the memories of his adolescent jaunts demand recognition, his mind and his emotions refuse to travel the same paths. His inner and outer selves are on a collision course. Ultimately, cajoling his wife and his son into his enigmatic reality, they all come very close to unlocking the secrets of the true nature of being.
***
The Beginning
I knew a man… such an one caught up to the third heaven.
2 Corinthians 12:2-4.
1
Peek-a-boo
The noise was overwhelming. The lightning struck repeatedly with blinding determination, frothing the water; steam rising in near vertical cones, joining with angry, convoluting clouds.
“Bastards,” he thought. “I deserve better than that.”
He did. He also dared to be original. Really original. Way past what the stereotype professors upholding the scientific status quo were capable of. No matter.
“I’ll show them!” he murmured through his teeth.
In the next instant, his anger left him. The sky resumed its serene countenance, the lustrous water stretched out to the northern slopes of the distant Adirondacks. Moments later, he couldn’t see that far. The western sun produced a shimmering sheen on the lake, barely disturbed by the dying breeze. The horizon closed in, the sky touching the water with blissful amity.
Had anyone told him that he had anything whatever to do with what happened moments ago, he would have denied it. After all, he was a hardnosed scientist, not some practitioner of hysterical mumbo-jumbo. What if he hadn’t been awarded summa cum laude? He was a Master of Science. A Magister. And down south, in the US of A, at Caltech, they recognized his intent. His potential. More so that the local upstarts.
“I really wish you wouldn’t do that!” Suzy’s tone of voice was much sterner than her face.
She was certainly disoriented but, all in all, she was beginning to get used to it. It wasn’t the first time that Alec had shifted from place to place in, what appeared to be, less than a second. One instant he was in one place, the next in another. It didn’t make any sense.
“I’m sorry, you know...” he started.
“Yes, I know. But it’s still getting on my nerves. It’s disconcerting.”
“I’m...” he began, reaching out for her waist in an attempt to embrace her, “...sorry.”
This time she sighed.
“At least I wish you wouldn’t do that when I am around. And especially when other people are coming. Surely you can do that for me?”
Yet, there was a poorly veiled threat in her plea. Not a threat of hell and damnation, but a festering omen of her unpredictable temper that she still managed to hold in relatively strong reins. Evidently even his Suzy had her limits. He regarded her azure eyes momentarily turning to tempered steel, only to relax in a smile that seldom left her face—the face he loved since he was a boy; ah, yes, a boy flexing his muscles to impress her. But it was her hair what really beguiled him. Long, flowing, tresses, now catching the rays of the evening sun which laced her golden filaments with streaks of red.
Alec smiled. For a briefest of moment their eyes studiously avoided each other. He knew that look in her eyes.
The ‘other people’ were Suzy and Alec’s parents. The occasion was his Master’s degree in physics, which he had just won at McGill University. His parents had decided to have a sort of Coming of Age party, before he’d leave to write his doctorate at Caltech. Alec wasn’t all that keen on both sets of parents paying court to their easy-going existence. His mom, Alicia, would repeatedly drop her usual hints such as: ‘isn’t it time you two lovebirds tied the knot?’ Dad, looking tired lately, a slight stoop down to Alec’s height hiding his conspiratorial smile, would whisper suggestions that it was high time Alec made an honest woman out of Suzy. ‘Not for me, you understand, son, but you know how mother is.’ Dad would follow this remark with a knowing wink.
As far as Alec knew, having lived together, on and off, for some five years, they were as honest with each other as anyone could be. But he would never say that to his dad.
Suzy’s parents seemed more understanding, or perhaps just more tolerant. Officially, or theoretically, he and Suzy had moved in together for practical, namely financial, reasons, just after Suzy started teaching French at the CEGEP. But neither of them ever thought that practicality had anything whatever to do with it. It just felt like the right thing to do. At any rate, Suzy’s mother seemed more preoccupied with her make-up than with her daughter’s marital status. Only Mr. Norman, Mr. John Norman, with whom Alec still found it impossible to get on first name terms, was as discrete as any father could be. Alec strongly suspected that, although Mr. Norman was well aware of their living arrangements, to him, the doting father, Suzanna remained the eternal, and eternally innocent, Vestal Virgin.
In a peculiar, indefinable way, Alec thought that the old man was right. There was a strange innocence in Suzy that, in spite of her occasional bouts of temper, made her almost child-like. This innocence comb
ined with her complete, unabashed, and almost overwhelming femininity, made her totally irresistible.
At least to him.
“I really don’t find your peek-a-boo tricks amusing,” she threw over her shoulder on her way to the kitchen. She still had to finish two large plates of canapés.
“Next you’ll be accusing me of sorcery, or black magic,” he mumbled, finding the idea as amusing as it was ridiculous. Luckily, by then Suzy was out of hearing. He once saw her reading up on Black magic, making it quite clear that she equated Black with Evil.
Nevertheless, her parting shot brought Alec back to his purported, if disconcerting, habit of shifting from one chair to another, or from one end of the room to the other side. He’d tried to explain to her, more than once, that, in spite of the many assurances of various talented Sci-Fi writers, there was no such thing as instantaneous traversing of space, any more that it was possible to travel through time. At least not backwards. We all travel through time forward. When we stop, it’s because we have just dropped dead. As for the first two cases, it is not just that science has not as yet found a way of doing so, but it never would. Time travel would create a paradox, which would forever remain irreconcilable. The concept of time travel made for good fantasy stories, but that’s all they were. Stories. And traversing from one side of the room to the other in-no-time-at-all would be equivalent to travel in time. Backwards. In this material universe of ours this could never happen, he’d repeated many times.
Except for his childhood experiences…
Alex shrugged. He wished his lingering memories would leave him alone.
Getting back to the real world, it was the same paradox as with the velocity of light. One couldn’t reach it for the simple reason that it would take infinite force to move mass at such velocity. And any object possessed of any mass would become infinite if it reached the magic C. The velocity of light. Albeit the stretching into infinity occurs only at right angles to the direction of travel––but infinite is infinite—in whatever direction. Nevertheless, Alec did, on occasion, appear to deny the laws of physics. At least in Suzy’s judgment. But Black magic? Bah and Humbug as his father would say. His dad was a great admirer of Ebenezer Scrooge—both, before and after Ebenezer’s metamorphosis.
But Suzy had her own ideas.
“You scientists are playing around with dangerous things. I’ve warned you before. Stop before you do yourself harm,” she’d insisted, on a number of occasions.
Suzy finished the appetizers and busied herself arranging flowers in the living room vase. She still contended that his peek-a-boos had something to do with the brand new 10TeV accelerator the experimental physicists were using in an attempt to find the Higgs particle. Alec had been invited on a tour of the monster only last month, to witness a series of experiments. The 10TeV accelerator yielded 10 trillion electron volts; hopefully enough to smash atoms into smallest particles known to man: the Higgs particles. A very excited Alec Baldwin Jr. had been the only undergraduate student invited.
“Darling, I told you...”
His voice trailed off into silence. He could hardly tell her that he had absolutely no idea what it was that she was seeing. He was not in the least bit aware of ever having ‘space-shifted’ in any way whatever.
“They will be here soon. Do I look all right?”
She hit him with an almost overwhelming wave of femininity. Her polka-dot dress, taken directly from a late 60s Hollywood musical, gave her a look of carefree girlishness. Her eyes grew larger, disarmingly innocent; her lips parted in a supplicatory smile, her head turned coquettishly over one shoulder. He said nothing but again tried to take her in his arms.
“Darling, not now. You’ll ruin my make up!”
She wiggled out, though not too fast, from his embrace. She must be nervous about tonight, Alec thought. She seldom if ever wore any make up. She didn’t need to.
Anyway, time travel was limited by similar constraints as space and light. As time is a factor of space, the two are inexplicably interwoven into spacetime. The only way to experience anything in another timeframe would necessitate a step outside space, outside time, and thus outside the material or physical universe. And that, according to all laws of physics, was impossible also.
“Oh yes? And what about the Black Holes?” Suzy had once asked. She seemed to capitalize the last two words.
She was right of course. No one knew what happens inside those singularities. No one knew everything. Not yet. That was precisely why Alec loved physics so much. The more you learned, the greater unknowns bubbled to the surface. It was as if the universe and its laws were playing their own game of peek-a-boo. Sometimes he thought he grasped some new concept, gained a fresh understanding, construed a new insight––the next instant, it would be gone. And, as with the Cheshire cat, only the grin lingered behind, suspended in the rarified space of theoretical physics—a vague aroma of things to come.
“That’s the fun with infinity,” he murmured under his breath. “It’s infinite!”
Suzy agreed with his arguments, she just didn’t believe them. She trusted the evidence of her own eyes. She knew that occasionally Alec moved outside the limits imposed by time or space, or any laws of physics, for that matter. On one occasion, he’d even changed his shirt on the way across the room. In no time at all. One moment he was standing by the window, pulling on the blinds, and the next instant he was by the door wearing a dark blue shirt. The white shirt he’d been wearing at the window had vanished into thin air. She saw it happen. No matter what he said later. Her mind was not constricted by his vast knowledge of physics. Sometimes he envied her. She could be so sure...
And when Suzy was sure, Alec knew better than to argue with her.
If Suzy’s observations were right, then his shifts in location could not be due to his incredibly fast movement from one armchair to another. No. So-called, telepathy was involved—if such were possible. The only theory that fitted the facts was that he was rebuilding, or reconstituting, his physical body from the available energy extant in the environment to which he was returning. From where? The posting address was of no consequence. Matter and energy were indestructible but interchangeable. If he was not present in one place, he had to be in another. But how? Should he be able to move backwards even one second in spacetime, the same principle would apply. Only then it would be more than easy to reconstitute his physical body in the exact location it was a second ago. In fact, in any duration of less than a few millennia, the same would apply. More or less. There could be tides or currents in the fabric of spacetime, of course; energy fields, gravitation, perhaps still unknown forces that, on occasion, could upset the laws of physical universe. The exceptions only served to prove the rule. But all this was theory. A figment of his overactive imagination. To date, it was not a part of physics. He should know. He was about to write his thesis.
Once or twice he attempted to explain the theory of his speculations to Suzy. He couldn’t tell her everything, because, well, on the face of it, it didn’t make sense! It was not a matter of mathematical logic, more like a... well, like an act of faith. Once you assumed that he’d done it, that Suzy’s peek-a-boo observations were not figments of her imagination, it seemed perfectly logical, but you needed that assumption based on faith...
On the other hand, perhaps it had me she, and not him, who resorted to some kind of shady magical practices. She was certainly beautiful enough to be a witch and get away with it.
Alec recalled when, as a boy, he just couldn’t accept that an object heavier than air could fly, like a 747, for instance. Or how could a boat or a ship made of steel or ferrocement float? But he’d seen planes fly, heavy ships float. He accepted these facts with his intellect but not with his emotions. At some level of his young perceptions, he still couldn’t accept it. Emotionally, it just didn’t make sense. Gradually his feelings caught up with his mind. But until that time, the principle of the vacuum created by the airfoil, and displacement governing the poss
ibility of floatation, remained just acts of faith. Like his imagination. When he closed his eyes, he could fly. But only with his eyes closed.
Suzy knew Alec was struggling in a reality other people recognized as ‘normal’, but she didn’t like it. And when Suzy didn’t like something, Alec often found it safer to let it go. Lately he did––and he paid for it.
And then the doorbell chimed.
“Darling...” His mother’s opening salvo reverberated in the hall. “You look absolutely gorgeous. But then you always do, darling. You always do.”
When she’s right, she’s right, Alec nodded from afar. She always did. Look gorgeous, that is.
Alicia didn’t look bad either. If it hadn’t been for the slightly excessive makeup, particularly the rouge underlining her cheekbones, she could have been Suzy’s elder sister. Not much older, either. Her figure was fantastic, the curve of her neck, patrician. It had been three months since Alec had last seen his mother. He wasn’t sure he would see much of her today. Suzy was bound to lead her to the cocktail cabinet where dear mom would be happiest. Not that she ‘drank’. She’d been known not to touch a drop of the hard-stuff for weeks at a time, just to be able to let herself go when an occasion presented itself.
“Alexander, darling!” his mother said, offering her cheek to be kissed. “Alec, doesn’t he look just wonderful?”
She’d taken to calling Alec—Alexander, when her son first left home. She felt it was more appropriate, more mature. Continuing to call her own husband Alec did not seem contradictory to her. After all, everyone knew how masculine Alec Baldwin Sr. was. “Not that there is anything...” She once tried to explain but lost her thought.
Alexander: [Alexander Trilogy Book Two] Page 1