I=MC∞
An infinite index, took the equation beyond time. Beyond physical reality.
No wonder it made so much sense. Only at the very beginning he had no idea why! The equation was easier to understand in terms of the Far Country, the image generated by his mind, than in terms of the Home Planet, which dealt with quite different concepts. The Far Country seemed to have an affinity with the equation itself. The Home Planet explored the flexibility of time; the Far County virtually denied it. Or, to turn tables on all three factors, the Far Country suggested the absence of time and space, and suggested that he, himself was the light...
“Time is a very funny thing,” he remembered saying.
“It helps to arrange experiences into a sequence. It stops them from happening all at once,” she’d replied.
Sandra sounded as though she knew every answer. Every answer to every question. To everything. Even the thoughts of God? Einstein would have been jealous indeed. She’d acted, and had spoken, as though information was always there for the taking.
Always.
And then...
Some indefinable period later... he saw the mini-universe taking the shape of his earthly contours. Galaxies joined by sparsely populated segments of space, individual stars hanging in the middle of nowhere, clouds and nebulas churning, gathering angular momentum, preparing for the stars yet to be.
“I am the universe,” he heard his own emotive thoughts.
The trillions upon trillions of atoms of his mental body began to dissolve, once more, into impenetrable darkness. They’d only been sustained by his mental effort—yet only for a little while.
‘I am the universe,’ he echoed his own memories. And immediately he recalled his image of Sacha: ‘Sacha was not claiming membership to the universe, he was the universe. Total, complete, with nothing missing, nothing encroaching on its wholeness.’
My son, a universe unto himself. All the Information that ever existed or ever will exist was there. It was embodied in his son.
Gradually, in slow, painstaking stages, Alec relaxed.
The meaning of his youthful exploits was finally coming home. Even Sandra made ‘scientific’ sense. It was inevitable that she and I become one... he mused. We always have been. Inseparable. Like two peas in a pod...
“We merely restored the balance,” he smiled at his own thoughts.
And there was no contradiction between his inner and outer, or his imaginary and physical worlds. The realities were not many. What differed was our ability to recognize the Truth. In one way, there were as many realities as there were intelligent, self-aware beings throughout the universes. In another, there was but One Reality.
Yet, if he could forget the deductive process, if he could return to his younger days, even for a moment, he’d do so at once. He had never admitted to himself, let alone anyone else, how he missed not being able to talk to Sandra. Sandra had been his best friend, his mother, the elder sister he’d never had, his confidante, his tutor, his absolute authority, the rock upon which he could lean in moments of weakness. Also, in a way he could not fully comprehend, she was the source of a strange, enigmatic power. He would give half his life to have Sandra by his side.
But... aren’t I and Sandra one? Are not all my thoughts accessible to her?
Conversely, are not her thoughts available to me? Perhaps I must just re-learn to listen.
To myself?
Apparently.
Isn’t that just a trifle neurotic? Sounds stupid listening to oneself. I’ve never found myself a very interesting fellow. Perhaps that was why, as a youth, I tried so hard to escape from myself.
And now?
Now I’m stuck in my body.
How dull.
And then Sacha spoke clearly in his head.
You are not stuck, daddy. You’re as free as you decide to be!
He looked down at his son reposing, carefree, in his crib. No questions roiled, as yet, the bliss of his being. No problems to solve, no enigmas to churn in his mind during the late hours of the night; no tossing and turning. His tiny face showed nothing but utter bliss.
Is that the answer? Just… total bliss?
Yet Alec rebelled against a life with no challenges. Time enough for being after a life of becoming. Time enough for rest after I solve what I am destined to solve. After I find out who I really am.
But he didn’t. Not yet.
At some level of perception he could not accept that there was an agency, Sandra, or any other concept, which, or who, would interfere with his own personal freedom. Even as his scientific mind was beginning to accept her, his ego rebelled. His ego needed to be supreme. To be the only God he answered to. A God he and he alone could control.
Next morning he couldn’t get out of bed. By noon an ambulance took him to the hospital. After three days he left the neurological department in a wheelchair. He had no control over his lower body. And the stiffness was moving up. Daily. He dreaded the thought that it might reach his brain. The neurosurgeons appeared helpless. After a dozen ECG, EEGs, MRIs, CTs and other fangle-dangle scans, he was declared healthy.
Only he couldn’t move.
***
11
Christmas in California
Neither of them would ever admit it to each other, but both Alec and Suzy had spent the first few months in California expecting an earthquake to happen at any moment. Alec had gone through this period well before Suzy, but her time followed. Apparently most new arrivals go through it. Alec admitted later that before he’d rented the new apartment, he’d had an engineer from Caltech check out the structural plans for safety. Apparently all the new buildings in the Los Angeles area have been over-designed with earthquakes in mind. Alec trusted his colleague and thought no more about it until Suzy brought it up.
“I should have asked you before... before we brought Sacha home...” she began haltingly.
“Well, darling, why don’t you ask me now?” This wasn’t like Suzy. She was usually a very direct person.
“Well, now that Alicia and my parents are coming...”
“You’ve already asked them?”
“You did say I could!”
“Darling, you don’t need my permission to do anything, but this is not what you want to ask me, is it?”
“No!” When Suzy was angry it took her a few seconds to settle down. As with a smouldering volcano, Alec knew better than to get too close.
“It just crossed my mind that if both, Alicia and my parents, and you and Sacha and I and the Professor were to be here for Christmas, and there was a really big earthquake...”
It had to happen. A wonder it took so long.
“Darling. If we die, we die. But seriously. Before I handed over my first rent cheque, I had the structural drawings looked over by a friend of mine.”
“I knew you did! I mean would have...” she sounded flustered. “You know something, I really love you.” But she was still simmering.
“I was beginning to wonder...” And he only just avoided one of Sacha’s tiny slippers aimed at his head. That was when Alec was still able to dodge missiles coming his way.
Since Alec moved into the wheelchair, the concept of dying had taken on a new meaning. There was talk of Lou Gehrig’s disease, but the prognosis was not supported by all the symptoms. The physicians refused to commit themselves to any one diagnosis, though they were considering every imaginable neurological disorder in the medical books. So far they’d drawn a blank. Alec refused to subject himself to a psychiatric examination. His mind was doing pretty well, he claimed. “Come to one of my lectures,” he’d said many a time. He also refused to reduce his schedule.
“Darling,” he told Suzy, “it’s all that keeps me going.”
She didn’t say anything. In fact, Alec refused to discuss his creeping paralysis with anyone. “It will go away,” he told Suzy when she begged him to take it easy.
But the day he returned from the hospital, a male nurse accompanied him. A b
ig man who would have made more money as a professional wrestler than a nurse. But Matthew needed to help people. That was his professional motivation. It had something to do with his parents having survived the holocaust by being helped by others. Without Matt, Alec wouldn’t have been able to get out of bed. The big man also catered to all of Alec’s sanitary needs.
Other than that, life went on as usual.
In some ways, Suzy’s temper tantrums, as well as the sudden concern for her own safety, were amusing. It hadn’t always been so. Not quite. Alec had sailed with her so many times he’d lost count. She had never been afraid of anything. He recalled when on one occasion a combination of her temper and bravura had cost them a mast. They’d been sailing on their beloved Lake Champlain in rather tempestuous weather. Normally, it’s safer to be out on the open sea in such conditions than in restricted waters, such as a lake, where a good gust could put you on the rocks in just about any direction. But it’s OK if you use sound judgment and have a modicum of experience.
This had not been a dark and stormy night. It had been a magnificent day, but a high was approaching from the south at a good twenty to twenty-five knots. While in the lee of any island, which by the way pepper the whole lake, they hadn’t felt the need to reef the sails. Nevertheless, Alec always felt responsible not so much for himself but for anyone on board and even for the sailing vessel itself. When he’d heard on the radio what was coming, he told Suzy to steer into the wind so that he could reef the main a band if not two. Suzy obeyed. But just as he’d gotten to the mast to ease the main sheet, Suzy had pulled hard to port, and before Alec could get back to the cockpit, they cleared the lee of the small isle. The wind hit them with such force that the shrouds on the starboard gave way. Suzy immediately tried to get back behind the island, but it was too late. The mast above the spreaders snapped like a matchstick. Once they were safe again, Alec asked Suzy what on earth had made her take such a peculiar action. Still fuming, though by now most certainly at herself, she’d snapped:
“You should’ve said ‘please’!”
And that was that.
All this happened years ago, when Suzy was no more than seventeen or eighteen. Since then, she’d brought her temper well under control. An odd plate or two, maybe a slipper aimed at him, often with quite amazing precision, would be as far as she would go. But truly, today Alec would trust Suzy with Sacha’s and his own life in the middle of the Pacific. Temper was one thing, irresponsibility quite another. But some remnants of her disposition survived time. They’d clung to her like the memory of her youth. Just enough to make life more interesting. Just enough to feel that she belonged half-straddled across the San Andreas Fault. Well... almost.
At any rate, at the time, Alec’s answer regarding the earthquakes seemed to have satisfied her concern for her family, though it did nothing to ease her state of mind in other respects. Perhaps not so much her mind as her poor, exhausted body. Sacha took it upon himself to fill the jungle in which he resided with resounding... singing? His performances sounded like a cross between crying and singing. Something boisterous and very loud, she said. And Sacha did it only—only—at night. During the day he woke up at regular intervals, gulped down the prescribed nourishment, and reverted to the blissful existence from whence he came. During the initial six weeks, his lungs developed sufficient power to wake the dead, which is what Suzy felt like after the first few of his nocturnal concerts.
Suzy was getting very, very tired.
In addition, after the initial few weeks, Alec could no longer contribute his share of parenting.
The night after Alec had come back from his last lecture tour, he and Suzy had had a peculiar exchange. They’d argued. Alec was becoming really concerned for her health. And Suzy wasn’t fully over her previous qualms regarding earthquakes. But really, a sort of cumulative starvation of not having enough time to talk had precipitated their squabble. Really talk, like they used to back home, in Montreal.
Yes, Suzy still referred to Montreal as home. Alec suspected that when he was out of the country, she was lonely. She must have missed her friends. Even her new ‘painting’ friends had to wait until Sacha gave her more time. At the time Suzy was still half-dead from having missed a good night’s sleep for at least a week. Alec had suggested that they take on a baby-sitter for a few nights. They might have asked Matt, he slept in the adjoining apartment, but taking care of a baby wasn’t his job. He was a nurse, not a nanny. But Suzy would have none of it.
“You think you are immortal?”
“Aren’t you? I thought you knew that we all are,” she snapped back.
“Who told you that?” He was too surprised to say anything more biting.
“You did!”
“I never told you anything of the sort.”
“You told me yesterday...” and even as she was saying it, she looked up at him in a peculiar way.
“But yesterday I was out of town,” he replied, meeting her eyes.
“I know,” she said slowly, and then remained silent.
After a while of tense silence, Suzy murmured under her breath. “Something boisterous and very loud.”
“What dear?”
“Sacha’s midnight concerts. Something boisterous and very loud. His performances usually last from midnight till about three in the morning. Sometimes till four. Then he goes to sleep as if nothing’s happened.”
“Yes, you told me that. So?”
“Alec, have you been peek-a-booing again?”
“How do I know? You’re the only one who’s ever noticed it. Or so you said.”
“And I’m not around when you’re travelling, am I?”
Alec froze. “You’re trying to tell me that, in some form or another, I disturb Sacha’s sleep when I’m not here?”
“Disturb? Hardly the right word. You’re playing with him in the noisiest way imaginable! He made exactly the same sounds when you were playing with him this afternoon.” She looked him straight in the eye. “Something boisterous and very loud, remember? That’s what I told you Sacha was doing when he first raised the racket in the middle of the night.
“And he stopped when I got back... at night, that is,” Alec mused, not altogether displeased.
“And restarted when you were busy all day,” she accused.
“Suzy, it must be a coincidence...” Now he pleaded.
But neither of them believed in coincidences. Not any more.
There were minutes, sometimes hours, when Alec felt life in his lower limbs. He would feel a prickle and a tingle, like blood returning to legs that had fallen asleep. The next moment, as he was ready to get up, he would fall over the side of the wheelchair. On one occasion Matt had saved him from falling down the stairs. Stupidly, he’d decided he could make it.
At times, he was ready to give up. Not just physically but mentally as well. He wouldn’t tell Suzy but his reputation at Caltech had probably suffered permanent damage. Somehow, the diagnosis that he was physically OK had leaked out. The sophomores began referring to him as Dr. Alexandra, the Histeron Prosteron. A sort of reversal of logic, and erroneously implying hysterical connotations.
He could cope with that. He, too, had been cruel to his lecturers in his sophomore days. What was harder to take was his relationship with Sacha. Whatever ‘inner’ abilities he’d once had were gone. What was the point of being able to play with Sacha ‘at a distance’, when he had absolutely no recollection of it? At least his paralysis seemed to affect only the lower part of his body. It didn’t affect his lungs or his heart. It was as though he was not allowed to walk. To move forward. As if he was forced to keep still.
Behind the stillness anger stirred, churned, and grew even as a volcano churns and boils before an eruption. He drew on his reserves of will power to contain the storm brewing inside him. For his own sake as well as his family.
He and Matthew, now his constant shadow, had spent over two weeks touring Europe and then have been contracted for one more week; this time fo
r a tour of South America. Alec had categorically refused to cancel any of his engagements.
“If Hawking can do it, so can I,” he insisted. Stephen W. Hawking, a theoretical physicist and one of Alec’s heroes, had been stricken with ALS, a motor neuron disease, many years ago, yet continued to function more successfully than most of his academic colleagues.
Alec had also dreamt of going on such trips with Suzy, but it was not to be. Not yet. He returned exhausted, to find Suzy even more so. Sacha demanded a lot more attention than Alec ever imagined. He began to appreciate all women who performed maternal duties in their stride.
And then they found an answer.
They’d invited Alicia to join them for the week before Christmas. At this time of the year Caltech was on slow revs, and Alec could spend much more time at home. Not that he could do much. Most of the time, Matt proved more useful than Alec. Matt was simply a very nice man. Willing to be of help to anyone, at any time. They’d agreed that with Alec’s––or really Matt’s––help, Alicia could look after Sacha, while Suzy would fly to Kingston, to spend a few days with her parents. She would then return with them to spend Christmas, all together, in California. Luckily, the apartment next door was still free.
Alicia agreed at once and actually offered to come much sooner, to give Suzy a longer rest.
“Don’t even think about it, mother, not till you meet the heir to the throne. Believe me, one week will be quite enough!” Alec warned.
Neither Alec nor Suzy mentioned Alec’s condition. His mother would find out soon enough, when she got to LA. When Alicia did finally see Alec, he slapped his thigh and sighed, “The old war injury, m’dear. Playing up again, you know!” He said it with such a perfect imitation of his father’s British accent that his mother burst out laughing before she had a chance to worry. The details came later.
Alexander: [Alexander Trilogy Book Two] Page 14