“Not so much spiral as periods of relative stagnation separated by jumps. My book did not specify in which direction the human race was jumping. Up or down.”
“Like a yo-yo?” Suzy put in.
“Not really. I don’t think that it is really a question of up or down. It could well be a lateral movement, only, as I’ve already said, into a different set of coordinates.”
Suzy was looking up at Alec, her eyes misty.
“What?” he asked. “What is it?”
She smiled. “You sound very wise, and clever, and learned, when you talk like that.”
“I thought we were having a serious discussion,” he shrugged.
“We are, darling. You can’t blame me for admiring my own husband,” she looked hurt. Actually, she was only pretending. With the hurt, not the admiration. She brushed her lips against his. When he didn’t respond she kissed him.
“Alright! All right, I forgive you...”
“For admiring you?”
And they sat silently for a little while. As always, they enjoyed the periods of silence as much as when they talked. It was as though they continued to communicate on some different level.
“I suppose we should get back...?” she said.
“Don’t you like it here?”
“Sacha...”
He turned his wheels at once.
“I am sure he’s all right, I just... well, I miss him,” she admitted. “In a certain way I seem to miss him virtually all the time. And then, sometimes, I seem to feel he’s right here, with us, or with me, when I’m doing something. I wonder if all mothers feel that way about their babies.”
“You are not all mothers,” Alec affirmed with conviction. “But Sacha does seem to have a peculiar ability to communicate his presence. I’ve felt it a number of times.”
“You too?” She was surprised. She assumed it was a mother’s prerogative to have such feelings.
“I don’t think it’s anything to do with our perception,” he addressed her unspoken question. “I think it’s something to do with Sacha himself. Some kind of ability that may be latent in all of us. There are so many abilities we don’t seem to use.”
“Or lose…?”
They were at the front door of the cottage when Alec stopped once more.
“You know, this Atlantis business? I just remembered,” he sounded excited. “Actually, it’s more to do with cycles. As you’ve said, there’s been the golden age, then the silver and the bronze. And now we are in, what you once called, Kali Yuga,” Alec had a near-photographic memory for names––names that mattered to him. “Well, if that is true, then the next cycle would take us back to the golden age, right?”
“Yes, darling,” she agreed, but her eyes were saying ‘so what’? She didn’t want to tell him that in Hindu philosophy each age was spread over hundreds of thousands, up to almost two million years. The Grand Age which incorporated cycles within cycles was said to last some 4,320,000,000 years. Bit long to hold your breath.
“Then...” He was interrupted by Sacha’s joyful troll. “We’ll talk about it later,” he said, and pushed harder on the wheels.
The Professor, the Normans and Alicia were all sitting in a semi-circle watching Sacha give his performance. Maria was peeking through a crack in the door. Matt, as usual, contrived to remain inconspicuous. There seemed to be moments in which Sacha was so happy that he felt the need to sing. It was as if something occurred, or perhaps was happening, that gave him great joy. Obviously, no one had any way of knowing what that something might be. Alec had actually attempted to relate his son’s more boisterous moments with whatever preceded them. No cake. There were various possible explanations but, he conceded, one had to be six months old to know what makes a six-month-old happy. Apart from the bottle, that is.
It was time to present Desmond with the prize Scotch. Suzy took Sacha, who was evidently going through his last coda, to the bedroom, while Alec wheeled himself to the kitchen, got some ice and fetched the King of the Scots.
Desmond was almost as elated as he’d been when he had announced that Alec’s nomination for the Nobel Prize had been accepted. However, when Alec offered him ice, he very nearly exploded in disgust. Rising to his full five-foot-six-and-a-half, he wagged his finger an inch from Alec’s nose, and thundered:
“Arre ye crrazy, lad, putting frrozen waterr into the nectarr of the Gods?” The Professor looked aghast.
“But you always...” Alec decided to stop. There was no reason to tempt his fate.
“I always nothing, lad. I neverr always anything. I judge everrything on its merrits. And this King of Them All deserrves morre rrespect than being diluted with a common solvent!”
The Professor took the bottle defensively in both palms as if to protect it from unworthy hands. Then he looked sideways at Alec and added in half tone.
“But if you pass y’rr glass a little closerr, I’ll let you have a drrop orr two.”
Alec did and got his generous drop or two. He thought himself lucky that John and Joan had gone to freshen up before dinner. It saved both, his face and reputation. He would never again offer a common solvent to anyone sniffing anything more ancient than a twelve-year-old.
As usual, the dinner was simple. None of them liked to eat a lot before retiring. Suzy laid Sacha in the tiny cot, which Maria had brought for him from her own home. Maria, in spite of the Professor’s five guests, not to mention Matt, was a tower of strength. She took looking after them all in her stride. She acted more like a mother hen, than a maid. Suzy developed a genuine affection for her. Maria had never complained, never been too tired to do anything. If only there were more Marias in the world, she’d once told Desmond.
“Ah, they don’t make them like Maria anymore. She’s one in a million. She’s been looking after this shack for over twenty years. She was about sixteen when she started. And she was as good then as she is now.”
“Is she single, then?” Suzy was taken aback.
“Don’t you believe it. Last time I visited her home, she had three little ones and she confessed that the forth one was on the way!”
“How does she manage all this then? My hands are full just with Sacha.”
“As I’ve just told you, lass, they don’t make them like Maria any more. There is, of course, her mother who looks after the children when Maria’s here. And her auntie, and grandmother, and probably half the village.”
And here, she now has Matt to help, he almost added, but pulled short. He couldn’t quite figure out Matt.
No one could.
With Sacha asleep, Suzy picked up a book and stretched out next to Alec’s chair. After a page or two, she put her book down.
“What did happen exactly, yesterday? In, you know, the place you visited?”
Suzy found the Atlantis story a little corny. Like a cliché dating back to Alec’s youth, at which time his imagination took him to all sorts of unlikely places. She tried hard not to sound flippant about the whole thing.
For a long time Alec didn’t answer. She was used to that. Many years ago she used to think that Alec hadn’t heard her. By now she’d learned that Alec never answered unless he thought about his answer first. His thoughts may have been spontaneous but his words were invariably measured.
“It’s not just what happened, it is rather how it happened,” he said at last.
She waited. She knew that, given time, she would get an account worth waiting for. He’d never disappointed her yet.
“Well, first of all, the reality there seemed to have responded to my curiosity. When I wanted to learn something, conditions appeared that enabled me to satisfy my wants. In fact, in hindsight, it seems they responded to my subliminal thoughts.”
Here Alec described the strange relationship between his desire for information and its apparent availability. As best he could he described the wall-map of the land, ocean, and later of the solar system.
“It was quite incredible. The moment I wanted to learn about my whereabouts, the map appe
ared on the wall. When I became interested in the historical context, the solar system appeared. And this was the punch line: our solar system with an additional planet. Such a planet, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter could only have existed in the very distant past where the present asteroid belt is.”
He didn’t tell her how he apparently reverted the solar system to its present configuration. Frankly, he was scared to even think about it. This was the case when the reality responded to his subliminal thoughts. The extra planet collided with his perception of reality. What he did tell her, though, was about the apparent resolution of inertia. Finally, he told her about his desire to find out what he really looked like.
“I don’t mind telling you that it scared the living daylights out of me,” he admitted at last. “I hardly looked human at all. Can you imagine? A living mirror? Those guys who inhabited my dream were more advanced than we shall be hundreds of years from now. And yet, they seemed to be living in the distant past...”
In all this time Suzy hasn’t said a word. She listened looking at Alec, as though afraid that he might peek-a-boo again. She’s heard about lucid dreams, but this was well beyond anything she’d read.
“You know,” Alec started again after a long pause, “in Atlantis I’d lost my physical body but retained my own power of imagination. Or, except for my physical characteristics, I remained myself. I wonder what might happen in other realities in which I might also lose my imaginary powers. Like the difference I’d once experienced between the Far Country and the Home Planet. If you recall, one was based on the powers of imagination, the other on our mental conceptualization. Not the same, by a long shot.”
“I remember very well, darling. We discussed it many times. I almost feel as though I’d been there with you,” Suzy said.
It was apparent that she resented not being able to have ‘traveled’ with him. It was a part of him, which, it seemed, they could never share. Not fully.
“You must have thought about it…” he turned to a different subject, “the only difference between animals and humans is that animals are in a state of being, while humans––becoming. I am not talking about biological evolution only of consciousness, which takes advantage of it. Becoming is a conscious process. Sacha is still mostly in the first, or primal or perhaps the transitional stage. For becoming we need self-awareness, and in him this condition is just awakening...”
Suzy loved Alec expounding his theories.
“By those standards not many people would qualify to be called human,” she put in with a grin. “But, you may be right. I’ve read somewhere that in the biological sense, evolution advances at a rate somewhere between dead slow and dead slow. I think it was James Burke, the science historian, who’d said it. Barring accidents, evolution would not advance at all. But now, for the first time in history, we, humans, seem to be standing at the edge of taking charge of our evolution. I’d think that once we’ve defined the genome, fully, the rest would be just hard work.”
“You’re right, of course, but it’s not quite what I had in mind. I was thinking not of the development of our genes, our physical envelope, but of that, which resides in it. That is, if the two can be treated as separate concepts. Like id, ego and superego we discussed before.”
She nodded and closed her eyes. Her knit brow indicated that she was concentrating on Alec’s every word.
“I’m beginning to suspect that the realities of the past, such as Atlantis, or Lemuria, or any other civilization which appears only in esoteric literature, or seems buried in the hoary past, do not disappear as though never having existed. Somewhere, in our genes, there seems to linger a distant echo. An archaic memory of something not easily accessible.”
Alec pushed his chair against the wall and leaned his head on the partition for support, as though against a headboard. His eyes, as was usual on such occasions, were searching the horizon that he could just see through the corner window.
“Past civilizations,” he went on, “continue in some kind of limbo or virtual reality, which may or may not be accessed and/or even populated by intelligent species. Now that I think about it, the body I occupied in Atlantis may not have been human at all––unless we redefine what we mean by human altogether...”
Suddenly Alec stopped.
He recalled that the body he’d occupied in Atlantis was dead on his departure. Perhaps the man, if it had been a man, just died on my arrival and I’d only used his body for convenience. This concept was too involved for an instant analysis… perhaps later, he mused. This subject was the one thing he didn’t share with Suzy. Confessing to the possibility that in that reality he may have been a zombie was not a pleasant realization. There was one other detail: that man’s eyes had been almost red, as if blood shot. Could the sun have affected the population of the Earth differently then? Assuming it was Earth...
“You mean as referring to self-awareness rather than a particular species?”
“Precisely. If they look similar, and exhibit self-awareness we would or should probably accord them human status.”
“How generous of us...” Suzy did not approve of human superiority. In Montreal she was a part-time member of a society that was involved in forming cells of political pressure to restore ecological balance. She thought that the biblical statement in the first book of Genesis that, in the interpretation of fundamentalists, give man the right to exploit and subject all other species on earth, was a pathological misnomer.
“I didn’t mean this in a condescending way,” he looked up at her. “Surely, Sue, you know me better than that?”
“Sorry. It’s just that with the riots and all, we’re hearing so much about exploitation of man by man, it begins to sound as if some of us belong to a different species right here and now.” There was a trace of sadness in her voice. Suzy wanted all people to be nice and generous. She’d never asked herself if she was.
And then they both stopped talking. They both looked, simultaneously, at Sacha. He was lying quietly, breathing deeply as though enjoying the sea air. But it was his eyes that startled them both. Sacha wasn’t sleeping. His blue eyes were wide open, and they could both swear that he smiled his approval at their musings. As they both leaned over his cot, Sacha let out a long, joyful, high-pitched note. A single, melodious tone that swelled, rose, and then diminished to almost a whisper. Then he closed his eyes and slept without uttering another sound.
Suzy and Alec decided to follow his example. As if by magic, there was a gentle knock on the door, and Matt’s massive frame filled the doorframe. He lifted Alec from the chair, and placed him on the bed with the ease with which Suzy handled Sacha. His task done, the giant withdrew without a word.
Only then Alec realized that he hadn’t told Suzy about being able to walk in the other body. The hairy, dead man’s body. Somehow, right now, it seemed a lot less important. Also, he detected in her eyes a certain reticence to accepting his attitude towards his experiences. If felt as though she was humouring him—not actually denying that none of it ever happened, but giving it as much credence as one would to a vivid dream.
“Either that, or I need an extensive session on a psychiatrist’s couch…” he murmured. He didn’t like the sound of his own voice.
Yet, for reasons that were hard to define, they both wondered if they would ever learn to share their dreams. They both wanted to.
Perhaps...
***
15
Return to the Far Country
They drove back together, as previously, only this time they all ended up in the young Baldwins’ residence. Suzy insisted that before her parents return to Canada, they should at least enjoy a late lunch together, and then she and Matt would drive them to the airport, while Alicia and Desmond could reminisce about the holidays while babysitting Sacha. Professor needed very little convincing. Alec remained silent.
As for Matt, well, he was becoming an enigma. Since coming to live with them, he hasn’t taken a single day off.
&nbs
p; “You never know when I might be needed,” he affirmed.
He was right, of course. Alec not only couldn’t get in or out of the chair on his own, but he couldn’t even reach for a book on a higher shelf, reach for a glass to get some water, nor take care of his own sanitary needs. His arms, better for a short while in Solana Beach, were again loosing their strength. They thought of taking him to New York where a specialist claimed to have achieved some sort of breakthrough with back injuries, but Alec categorically refused.
“They’ve done all the tests on me that they’re going to do,” he stated with utter conviction.” Then his voice wavered. “I can’t explain to you how I know,” he said, turning to Suzy, “but I am convinced that this is something I have to do myself.”
“Perhaps, but how can we help you, darling?” She did her best to blink away tears welling in her eyes.
Alec looked up at her like a boy who was caught doing something naughty.
“There was a time, Sue, when I thought I was simply going the wrong way. Now? Now I seem to be walking in circles. Like people…” he added after a momentary pause, “Like people I’ve always looked down on.”
Matt looked on at this interchange, his face, even as his large frame, frozen in Sphinxian immobility. There was pain in his eyes, only no one noticed.
After six days at Desmond’s house on the shores of the mighty Pacific, Los Angeles looked and smelled overpopulated. Alec, in a moment of renewed hope, decided that the moment he could afford it, they would buy something further out, even if it meant commuting for an hour each day. Initially, the avoidance of driving for hours was exactly why he bought the apartment close to Caltech. He thought commuting was a waste of time. Now, he was having seconds thoughts. He apparently hadn’t noticed that well in excess of five million other angelic citizens shared his newly acquired sentiment. This preference accounted, in large measure, for the homicidal tendencies one developed commuting on the Californian Expressways.
Alexander: [Alexander Trilogy Book Two] Page 19