Finally, the ladies decided to have a two-man, women in this case, exhibition in the corridors of the Architectural department of Caltech. Assuming the department would agree, of course.
“Oh, they’ll agrree, all rright,” the Professor assured. “I’ll see to that m’self.”
So that was that. The following Saturday Alicia was booked on the midday flight to Montreal. The overtones of sadness were hovering in the air even today. One could detect a slightly forced gaiety. The Professor tried to recount as many jokes as he could recall. In the meantime, Alec, who’d recovered partially from his physical and emotional nadir of a week ago, was busy offering Matt help in toping-up the drinks. For her part, Alicia appeared none too keen to return to the solitude of her Montreal home.
“You’re all here, now,” she said. “You’re all I’ve got.”
And with that she withdrew to her room to attend to some forgotten chore. She couldn’t face her son in the mood she was in. He needed cheering, not sad faces.
Only Suzy held her own.
As of last week, Alec and Matt slept together in the adjoining apartment. It was easier on Suzy when Alec called for help in the middle of the night. She needed her sleep to be able to give Sacha her best. And Suzy too would miss Alicia, perhaps most of all. With the hours spent together, painting, they grew closer than most daughters and in-laws can grow. They also shared other interests, from their taste in books, to the love of sailing, and even to the dryness of their red wine. They behaved more like sisters than what their relative ages would indicate. Alicia, single-handedly, managed to fill in the gap left by Suzy’s Montreal friends. And Suzy loved her for it.
After a week’s break, Alec resumed his lectures at Caltech. More and more publications mentioned his Theory. More articles appeared in the scientific press, each requiring his scrutiny, correction if need be, to protect the purity of his concept. In some ways, Alec has become very much his own man. In others, he was no more than a spectator. There were no creative juices stirring his imagination. On the other hand, he no longer needed to hang on to Desmond’s coat tails. He gave his lectures at Caltech and wrote such articles as have been expected of him to foster the advancing research done by other scientists in the field.
Nevertheless, for now, he delayed accepting a string of invitations for another Pan-American lecture tour. The thought that his physical condition was temporary kept him going. At work he kept busy. At home he spent hours just watching Sacha. For now, he’d achieved an innocuous condition of mental and physical stasis.
And then, for no apparent reason, he was swamped with a treacherous flood of doubts.
The Thursday after Alicia left for Montreal, Alec decided to talk to Desmond about his purported alter ego, Sandra. He resolved to divulge just enough to get the benefit of the older man’s experience.
“You’re not telling me much, lad,” Desmond looked up at his favourite adopted son. Even when both were sitting, Des had to look up at Alec. “Don’t you think you could trust me with the truth?” There was not even a suggestion of the Scottish r’s in Desmond’s answer. There was concern and a little sadness.
“It’s not very scientific...” Alec started again.
“I was a man before I became a scientist, lad. And I still am, no matter what they write about me.”
There was a hint of smile in Desmond’s tone. It helped. Alec needed to relax particularly when dealing with this subject.
“So you won’t laugh?”
“That I can promise. But laughter never really hurt anybody, and many it helped.”
Alec had spent the next hour and a half giving the old Professor a précis of his ‘inner’ life. It had to be brief, but Alec had learned to be concise and precise at the same time. His scientific training came in handy. After he finished, Dr. McBride continued to look pensive. He remained silent for so long that Alec suspected that he’d lost interest. But, knowing the Professor, he didn’t interrupt. He waited even though the palms of his hands got a bit moist. It wasn’t every day that Alec bared his soul to anyone. No matter how close. And, frankly, this could cost him his job. He was supposed to be a scientist. To think like a scientist.
“You’ve got to be scientific about this, if at all possible,” Desmond said at long last. “Since Pythagoras, to this very day mathematicians have been trying to equate reality with a mathematical equation. The transforms, the fractals, they’re all tending, to my mind, towards the same direction. Maybe they’ll find that God, or Ultimate Reality, is a number, although Lederman prefers to think of Her as a beautiful melody. It would be unscientific to deny your experiences, as you call them, just because they do not fit neatly into your existing mathematical coordinates.”
And again the Professor lapsed into silence.
Then, after some more pensive minutes, the Professor asked Alec a number of questions. They were as broad and far-reaching as Alec’s story. Dr. McBride asked Alec about his youth, his imagination, his interpretation of his inner travels, his aspirations, even about Atlantis. Finally he asked the vital question.
“Does any of this fit in with the Information Theory?”
Alec explained his own understanding of how there was a link, though not as yet very tenable. But it didn’t contradict it either.
“They’re like two parallel lines. They appear to meet in infinity.”
Although the Professor was strictly a theoretician dealing with quantum mechanics, he, like all theoretical physicists, was well acquainted with the theory of relativity. In an Einsteinian universe, two parallel lines did meet. Rather like longitudinal lines on the Earth represented on a globe. According to Einstein, space, due to gravity, curved upon itself.
“That’s what you’ve got to be, lad. Scientific. If what happens contradicts your mind, then you’ll venture into religion. If it doesn’t––you’re on sound ground. But... it’s not going to be easy, is it?”
“No, Sir. Although, thinking of Einstein... he did say that science without religion is lame…” Alec looked for support for his cause which although it had nothing to do with any religion, it did sound like a construct of some New Age movement.
“...while religion without science is blind. Aye, he did say that. Make sure you are not groping in the dark and up a blind alley. At the same time, since we’re banding quotations from our favourite relativist, he also said that the only real valuable thing is intuition,” the Professor wielded both, the rod and the staff.
Then Desmond sat up and looked Alec in the eye.
“If you cannot deny what you experienced, then it must be true. Unless you are crazy. Are you?” There was little if any humour in the Professor’s tone.
Alec smiled. “Why don’t you tell me.”
“I’m not a psychiatrist, and if I were, I doubt I would trust myself. But you don’t have that luxury, lad. You must trust yourself. If you don’t––who will?”
So it was all down to trusting one’s intuition. No matter how improbable, how seemingly unscientific, how shrouded in mystery, he had to plod on. Einstein and McBride could not both be wrong. Not in Alec’s mind. And then he remembered his original hero, Richard Feynman. The man, who’d made quantum theory almost palatable to mere mortals, once said: ‘It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. Far more marvelous is the truth than any artist of the past imagined!’
Three weeks later came that fateful night from which Alec took a good week to recover. Matt put him to bed at the usual time. Alec looked tired but relatively relaxed, content after a busy day. The dream started, like an ordinary dream. Alec found himself sitting on the sofa in the living room. He found that he was perspiring heavily, his pajama damp on his back, his forehead covered with beads of sweat. At the very edge of his awareness, he knew he was still dreaming. After all, he couldn’t have walked to the sofa.
At the same time, he couldn’t be sure. “Did Matt put me here…?”
Usually, on waking, Alec enjoyed vivid memories of his dreams. This ti
me it took a while before he recalled what happened. It was almost as though he wanted to block the dream from his memory. But to no avail. First in snippets, little fragments woven into a jagged cloth, then with an overwhelming power the recall forced itself on his mind.
It hadn’t been a dream, it was a nightmare.
He’d dreamt that he was going back in time. Not in a single instant, as in the case of Atlantis, but rather like a spectator watching disjointed events, as history unfolded itself before his chimerical eyes. It was like watching a movie. A flash of the Second, then First World War; chimneys belching smoke of the early industrial revolution; a procession of magnificent buildings he’d associated with intellectual Renaissance. All this was over in seconds, as though viewed from a fast moving train. Finally his temporal regression reached the dark ages.
That was when the nightmare had started.
None of it made sense. Not waken sense. He felt drawn by tremendous forces—struggling for supremacy? It was as though he were pulled in all directions, at once, by powerful tides of human psyche. He saw images of devils with fiery eyes, demons with tails split into multiple prongs as depicted by various medieval artists, who must have made the same chimerical journey. Dante’s inferno was little more than a foretaste of what had been really taking place in peoples’ minds, perhaps their souls. Hatred was palpable; the desire to kill and exploit permeated the air the breathed. People were being burned at the stake, not for any transgressions or purported blasphemy, but for fun. The perpetrators, clad in lay and priestly robes alike, danced around the funeral pyres, rejoicing and screaming praise to their dark masters.
Next he witnessed a senseless, convoluting mass of human bodies, contorting in wild, ritualistic gyrations at some satanic rock concert. The cacophony of noise and blinding lights complemented the image of utter desolation.
The image shifted to a large group of people, their faces frozen into immobility of expectation. They were looking up to a wooden platform where men in long red coats and skullcaps were readying themselves to flay a woman. Not just to scalp her, but to strip off her skin as one might skin a hare or a rabbit. She’d been tied, hand and foot to a pole, naked. She was still alive. Alec covered his ears with his palms in a futile attempt to block her agonizing screams.
It must have been at that moment that he’d crawled out of his bed and staggered to the living room, where he’d collapsed on the sofa. He must have managed it on his own. By the time he’d awoken, his mind refused to support the memories. Now, they were creeping back. Slowly, vividly. In minute detail.
Had such things really happened? Ever?
He shook his head, then closed his eyes against the flood of new memories. He refused to allow them into his conscious mind. By shear effort of will he blocked them out. He hoped, permanently.
“Let them remain in the darkness were they belong,” he whispered, wiping his moist forehead for the tenth time.
At first light, Matt found him asleep on the sofa. Gently, he returned Alec’s limp body to his bed. The expression on the big man’s face gave nothing away. Not even surprise at Alec making his way across the room on his own.
The following day, Alec still had no idea why this nightmare had been thrust upon him. Discounting the Atlantis experience, he hadn’t experienced any dreams that vivid since the time he’d found himself suspended in the center of the universe, in the Far Country. He was thirteen then. There and then he’d learned that wherever and whenever he was, his presence defined the center of the universe. Not other people’s but his very own, particular, subjective universe. “I am the only reality,” he remembered hearing his own thoughts reverberating in the vastness of cosmos. What of others? What of the people who led saintly lives; of monks and nuns, of hermits or martyrs of all religions? What of the monsters of today’s nightmares? What were their universes like? Were their universes as real? Was there any similarity? Should there be? Why? Why was it that every man, woman, and child, had to build, create, their very own, their unique, individual universe? Why was it necessary?
Then Alec remembered the dark ages, during which autocrats, demagogues tried, often by force, to impose their realities, their universes, on others. Some time later he suspected that, at long last, he understood the reason for his nightmare. He was to think twice before attempting to convince anyone of the validity of his own reality. No matter how good or bad. The consequences of authoritarian, theocratic dogmatism had been too dismal, too lurid, too ghastly to contemplate. He could share his findings, offer them as a free gift, but never, never impose them on others.
But the most frightening thing he’d discovered was that the vast majority of those self-styled fanatics suffered from a deep-seated conviction that they were doing the right thing.
The following two weeks passed without any unusual incidents. Sacha was growing at an alarming rate. Suzy resumed her painting. Alec recovered reasonable use of his arms—at least up to the elbows. He could move his shoulders, but only with considerable pain. Matt continued to remain practically invisible.
They were all reasonably content with their fate.
Following his discussion with Desmond, Alec had taken a week off to digest the menu of philosophical hors d’oeuvres, before returning to serious work. He needed a clear mind, unimpeded by extracurricular factors. Finally he’d settled down. He didn’t question, didn’t meander from his chosen field, but stuck to the straight course. He was happy just living. Alas, it didn’t last. The memories of his nightmare continued to haunt him.
Then it happened again.
It came upon him suddenly, without any apparent cause. As always, it happened at night. He felt it coming. He sensed it without being able to explain his premonitions. He rebelled. Another hallucination? He braced himself for the worst.
“Why me?” he asked the dark walls that seemed to close in on him cutting off any hope of escape.
“Why me?”
The walls remained silent. They stared back at him in stoic indifference. With a superhuman effort he managed to transfer his weight from his bed to the adjoining wheelchair. He rested for a minute, then pushed the wheels towards the window. From the vantage of the fourth floor street lamps extended east and west like a string of golden nuggets marking the way to the unknown. Perhaps the past and the future? Here and there, a dark shadow of a man, his shoulders hunched, as though trying to shrink into non-existence, shuffled along the sidewalk.
“Is he a universe unto himself?” Alec couldn’t help wondering. “Is he searching for the meaning of it all, whatever it might be?”
But the distant shadow wouldn’t answer either. He could just hear the click-clack of stiletto heals of a working girl, her legs casting grotesque long shadows along the sidewalk; returning, dejected, from her night vigil?
“What of her universe?” he mused, a bitter smile, a snigger, momentarily distracting him from his own woes.
The night, the trees, the street maintained a covenant of silence. Only his heart wanted to scream, or at least to shout again and again in a recurrent protest to whoever might listen... “Why me? Why me?”
Silence.
“There are six billion people on Earth. And there are a trillion, trillion Earths scattered throughout the universe. And each entity here, and everywhere, must discover his and her own answer to the eternal question: Why me...?”
And as his hands moved his wheelchair back towards his bed, he perceived a nagging pulse in his heart, in his veins, in every cell of his body whispering, insisting, demanding to be heard, acknowledged.
Because I am, because I am, because…
Throughout this time Matt hasn’t moved a muscle. Now he got up, lifted Alec from the wheelchair and carefully placed him back in bed. He covered him with a blanket—as carefully, as gently, as a mother would cover her baby. Without a word, in eerie silence, Matt returned to his own divan. Soon his breathing was once more slow and regular, that of a man at peace with himself.
Alec did not share Matt
’s serenity. He was not meant to rest much that night…
He was gazing at a large plaza. He stood, immobile, seemingly relaxed, looking down from the third story balcony of a sprawling palace. He was also much taller than he was in the reality he’d left behind. In his bed. Sleeping. But most of all, he stood. Yet something else was wrong.
“I don’t belong here,” he muttered. He was hardly aware of a disdainful sneer half-hidden by his thick moustache. A pointed beard hung loosely halfway down his chest.
“I don’t belong, here,” he repeated, this time out-loud. His voice was deep, raspy, seemingly used to giving orders.
The body he occupied didn’t appear to mind. Alec knew he was elsewhen the moment he looked down. Even before he realized that he was standing on his own feet. Yet the next moment his identity began to waver. Not just his own body was missing but his emotional make up. He was already enjoying his new, seven-foot physique, his surroundings, his evidently exalted position. He enjoyed towering over others. Over the vassals. Masses of them.
His sneer widened his cruel mouth.
“Peasants,” he spat out. “Bah!”
It was a judgment of mental satisfaction, even acceptance, without any emotional contentment. The next instant he sensed strange currents churning in the darkness behind him.
He shrugged. No one could harm him. They can plot, but they have no power to carry out their puny schemes. Not any more.
Outside the darkness became less acute. The moon, having cleared the clouds, offered enough light to permit the workers to continue with their labour. There was no time to stop. It could be too risky.
The towering gods had been hoisted, one by one, to face the ocean—to protect them all from the evil spirits. The gods, their expressions grim, immobile, frozen in stone forever, towered over the landscape, threatening anyone who would dare to approach their coast. The last colossus would be raised tomorrow; then, he could rest. From the day they’d started erecting the barrier, he had to use all his powers—great powers—even for the Third Son of the Third Son of the First King. Only his magic maintained the horrendous waves from smiting his people.
Alexander: [Alexander Trilogy Book Two] Page 21