Alexander: [Alexander Trilogy Book Two]

by Stan I. S. Law

  Now he was ready.

  He looked and there was light. He’d taken the first step that would lead, in the fullness of infant time, to seeing himself in the perfect mirror of his own creation. The living mirror of becoming.

  Even as he hovered in the original void, the Nothingness resolved itself into a glorious darkness. And against this darkness the substance of his mental body shimmered against the rich, velvety background. Soon, first tenuous, then, discernible against the ocean of Nothingness, gaseous clouds came into being; followed by great nebulae, luminous mysteries––giants that call the vastness of space their home. And then stars shimmered, salting the expanse with the joy of light. They twinkled shyly, as though not sure if it was time, yet, for them to appear. The ancient denizens of timeless infinity…

  All moving.

  There was no more stasis. No more Hades of the lugubrious ancients. In Hades there is no hope. Here ideas fulminated in effulgent glory. What made such a diametric difference, he wondered? What really underscored the difference between heaven and hell? Were they not both but states of consciousness? One of absolute absence, the other of absolute potential.

  The latter was also the source of ultimate bliss.

  For a long time Alec remained motionless on the sofa. Sacha continued sleeping, content on the carpet. Alec wondered what would have happened had he not heard his son’s joyful laughter. Can one hear without any ears?

  Apparently.

  Bliss, he’d learned, contrary to many religions, must be earned. It may have its being in the infinite potential, but it can only be experienced for services rendered. Without the due process of becoming, bliss is a sister of stasis. A state to be avoided. Nor is it accorded out of mercy of some agency so many people worship. Nor is it something that exists in its own right. It needs a mirror.

  There is no bliss without awareness of bliss.

  Like everything else, it is a state of mind. Of consciousness? The Far Country is as far as the mind can reach. Beyond that, there is just pure being. All is potential. Lemuria, he now understood, was but an illustration of a mental realm. Of magic gone wild. He sensed its pathological echoes in the Middle Ages, finally becoming subverted by uncontrolled emotions. Exploitation of weaker minds by the stronger. This motif repeated itself throughout history. Alec smiled sadly.

  It continues to flourish today.

  Could it be that the lessons have already inscribed a full circle?

  “What happened?”

  Suzy’s hands were full of plastic bags she carried from the garage. It took two more trips, hopefully just to the elevator, before she deposited the last load on the kitchen counter.

  “I’m sorry darling…” He didn’t know what else to say. Watching her carry the groceries while he remained utterly useless.

  “I called your cellular three times and you didn’t answer. I was worried.” She looked at her husband, concern in her eyes. “You’ve been away, haven’t you?”

  “I thought it was just for a moment,” he still had no control over his sudden ‘departures’. ‘Away’ in their vernacular, meant asleep, day-dreaming, completely lost in work, and, in Alec’s case, in Atlantis, or Lemuria or suspended in the very center of the universe. She was learning to detect, from his eyes and facial expression, which it might have been.

  “It was really far, this time, wasn’t it? Then she smiled and faced the mess in the kitchen. “Let me unpack and then I’ll also tell you something.”

  Matt had already put the heavier articles away. Suzy never understood how Matt did those things. Surely she’d only turned her back for a few seconds?

  She turned to Alec. She never asked her husband, well, almost never, what precisely happened. She’d learned to trust that he would share his insights with her, if he possibly could. Some things came out only a month after the ‘event’. Some... perhaps some she would never know.

  “They have to be experienced,” he told her. “They just don’t make sense when broken down into words. There’s only so much you can reduce to a ‘horizontally structured communication’.”

  He meant writing or talking. Sometimes the omission of a seemingly innocuous detail changed the whole impression. You could never describe a whole event simultaneously, as it had been experienced. You had to break it down into a sequential order.

  Meanwhile, Sacha decided that whatever was happening around him was not sufficiently interesting to wake up. He turned his head a little to one side, commented a perfunctory ‘goo-goo-goo’, and returned to wherever he’d been before.

  They both smiled.

  “I still say he knows something he’s not telling. I think he spends an awful lot of time in heaven, or some other paradise we know nothing about,” Suzy knelt down, kissed him gently and returned to the kitchen. Matt withdrew with his usual bow.

  Finally, the lunch dishes were cleared and the kitchen restored to its acceptable, if not pristine, order. With Matt’s help, Alec sat down on the sofa facing Suzy. Their legs were entwined, as they leaned back against the two opposing armrests. Suzy slowly massaged Alec’s feet. Matt had told her that she couldn’t do that too often. With her other hand, Suzy caressed a glass of Chilean Merlot, while Alec sniffed at a brandy that Desmond brought him last Thursday.

  “It doesn’t even smell like Scotch,” the Professor confessed accusingly, thus disqualifying it from being fit for human consumption.

  Alec liked Armagnac. It couldn’t match Remi Martin for the bouquet, but it was softer on the palate. Frankly, Alec liked anything that was remotely alcoholic. He drew the line only at some French concoctions that seemed produced for the sole purpose of giving man a lockjaw. Like Pernod, or that bitter red poison, which he was sure only the French could drink after some ten generations of futile attempts at acquiring the taste.

  Later, when finally alone, Alec gave Suzy an outline of his ‘dream’. It was harder and harder to call these visions dreams, but also he could not call them visions because he did not ‘see’ them— he was right in them. ‘Experiences’ would have served except that everything was an experience. Meeting an idiot was an experience, as was meeting a sage. They still didn’t find a word to define Alec’s peek-a-boo’s. And even peek-a-boo, whatever meaning the expression acquired was not exact any more. Alec no longer shifted positions before and after such events. Suzy did her best to take Alec’s escapades seriously. It wasn’t easy, but when she managed to do so, she insisted it was all Sandra’s scrambling for attention.

  Alec described, as best he could, the unfolding events, up to the point when he thought he was dead, in Hades, wherein ‘abandon all hope ye who enter here’ flashed though his awareness. At this point he stopped and tapped himself on the forehead. “You won’t believe this,” he muttered, “but something very similar happened to me when I was a kid.” He thought for a little while and then he quoted as though reading his own thoughts:

  “….I remained in the non-space for aeons. I filled the endless void with innumerable possibilities. Countless, wondrous possibilities. With ideas that heretofore had their being only within myself. Within my mind? Wherever I looked there was my presence. Virtual presence. My presence did not exist as yet, but it had the potential to become anything, perhaps everything. Only the ideas remained just that. Just ideas.

  And I dreamed for a few more aeons....”

  “In a way, this was just a continuation of the exposition of the same creative process. Or perhaps, what preceded it. Only how you can precede anything when there is no time is beyond me... That’s the trouble, you see, with trying to describe a gestalt image in a sequential order. When you are ‘in it’, time is of no consequence. None at all.”

  “It seems to me that when you were little, you were spared the unpleasantness of stasis, don’t you think?” Suzy’s intuitive perceptions were working overtime.

  “How clever of you. Had I witnessed the utter emptiness of the... you know, of where I’d been, I probably would have gone crazy. I must be much stronger now.
” And then he remembered. “But didn’t you say you had something to tell me also?”

  She smiled. “I’m afraid my esoteric experiences don’t match yours, darling. Not by a long shot, but, well, I might as well tell you. About half-an-hour after I left, I was about halfway through my shopping list, when I heard distinct laughter. It was somehow familiar, though quite impossible to accept. Only the laughter didn’t sound like ha-ha, ha-ha, only more like it was saying round and round pa-pa, pa-pa, pa-pa. It doesn’t make any sense, does it?”

  Alec didn’t say anything. So he hadn’t imagined Sacha calling him from the void. Suzy had heard him even as he had. Does everything have to make rational sense?

  “Yes it does, Sue. It makes enormous sense to me.” And he recounted to her the rest of the dream. Suzy sat quietly, listening and gradually––believing. When Alec was through they both looked at Sacha.

  But Sacha said nothing. There was no need to.

  ***

  18

  Mu

  There were good days, and there were bad days. The real problem Alec had to face had little to do with his legs, although, it was all interconnected. After the Hades experience, he had recurring moments of facing imaginary monsters, perhaps evils is a better word. But even that wasn’t the dilemma. The real problem was that in those moments he became acutely aware of his infirmity. Usually paralysis means that one has no sensation of feeling. But in those moments, his limbs, his back, his upper arms were filled with pounding dull pain. Perhaps imaginary, but that didn’t make it any easier to bear.

  The attendant agony was that he was unable to move. He couldn’t run, couldn’t escape. He had to face his enemy. He was paralyzed, waiting to be devoured by his own fears.

  In such, fortuitously brief, moments, he embraced death as his only deliverer. He regarded his body not just as an inconvenience but as a prison sentence with no possibility of parole. The actual pain subsided quickly, but the resulting depression lingered on for hours, sometimes for days at a time. If it hadn’t been for Matt’s stoic tolerance and staunch imperturbability, Alec would have found a way to end it all. With Matt around, he couldn’t. Matt seemed to have access to his subconscious and always appeared at his side when things seemed darkest. And recently, the dark moments increased in frequency to an intolerable level.

  During his late teens, Alec had read about the Kingdom of Mu. It was described in the same paperback that introduced him to Atlantis and Lemuria. The same book had chapters on other ancient civilizations, the Bermuda Triangle, and even Flying Saucers. He was grateful that, so far, he’d managed to elude little green men and other nonsense of immature, if not demented minds.

  But he did not escape the Kingdom of Mu.

  He tried.

  On the last few occasions, the moment he’d felt the sensation of falling, which often preceded his ventures into the unknown, he’d forced himself to remain fully alert. A number of times he’d succeeded. But whatever had been forcing him to advance his knowledge of some other realities, be it in the realm of imagination or, perhaps, in the deep atavistic recesses of his own mind, had not been easily discouraged.

  While fighting a loosing battle, Alec began reading some books Suzy had given him on ancient religions. He had no desire to switch professions to a country preacher, nor to start his own, tax-free-all-expenses-paid church of the New and Unexplainable, although the latter would certainly benefit his pocket. After the first three books he came to a conclusion that no church in existence today had anything to do with the ancient teaching to which they auspiciously and overtly claimed allegiance. Nothing whatsoever. Even the official pronouncements of their leaders were at odds with the reputedly holy words, the words of God, as they said. Alec tried to open his mind, to suspend all judgment––all to no avail. Whatever the great avatars of the past brought to earth has been long dead and forgotten. Loving one’s neighbor—rather then killing him, not stuffing one’s pockets and/or stomachs like starving pigs, which most North-Americans resembled, choosing the middle ground, not seeking revenge... wherever he looked, at home or abroad, the original teaching was gone. And often the closer one got to the administrative headquarters of the cult, sect, or church, the greater both mental and physical debauchery. Not always, but all too often.

  What happened?

  On Thursday he asked Desmond.

  “Religions were what all the Great Masters came to destroy, lad. They came to free humanity from the oppression of priesthood. That’s why they were slaughtered in the first place.”

  “You’re serious?” Alec didn’t quite dare to go that far.

  “Look at the scriptures. I don’t know much about the Hindus and Buddhists, but in Judaism and Christianity, or Islam for that matter, the records speaks for themselves.”

  “Just what do you know about scriptures, Des? I thought they weren’t quite your cup of tea?” Alec’s eyes were growing larger.

  “They’re not. But they were once, or I thought they might be,” Des smiled, seeing the disbelief in Alec’s eyes. “You think I’ve always been such a cold fish, do you, lad?”

  “I never thought you were a fish, Des. But I also never thought you were a sheep.”

  “Ah, you’re thinking of our colleague again: ‘In order to be an immaculate member of a flock of sheep, one must above all be a sheep oneself.’ Ha, ha. Albert did have his moments,” Des admitted.

  Few people realized that a number of world-class physicists would make an even better living as professional comedians. Einstein was no exception.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to...”

  “None taken. I don’t take offense easily. If I did, I couldn’t deal with the politicians, which I have to do to run my department. But, let’s get back to your question. Before I took up physics, I gobbled up libraries of esoteric stuff that would make your ears curl. There are tons of the stuff, and the vast majority not worth looking at. But there are some exceptions, ah... the angel cometh...”

  “Good evening, Professor, how are you today?”

  Desmond got up with the agility of a young man. He must have been exercising in secret. He kissed Suzy on both cheeks and sat down again. “That must keep me going till next Thursday,” he said miserably. And then, almost as an after thought, he reached in his pocket and pulled out a little box. He handed it to Suzy.

  “See if you like these, lass” he muttered.

  Suzy opened the box that had the appearance of long years of use. The blue velvet on the outside was wearing thin at all corners. Inside was a beautiful necklace of brown and yellow amber. The translucent fossils shone with a variety of deep if muted lights as though coming from different sources. Gingerly, Suzy took it out. The necklace was long enough to go twice around her neck.

  “Professor! May I try it on?”

  “Why not, lassie, it’s yourrs if you like it?” Desmond’s rolled r’s always reappeared when his emotions were involved.

  Suzy apparently hadn’t heard him. She run out into the hall and faced the mirror. There she dressed the necklace around her neck, then rolled the beads twice over, and finally reverted to a single long strand. With the necklace sill around her neck, but also holding on to it with both hands as though refusing to let go, she came back and faced the Professor.

  “Do you like them, Des?” she asked. Alec could swear that her eyes were shining.

  “Me? Why should I like them? They’rre yourrs.”

  “What? Mine? Why? Why today? Mine?”

  She couldn’t have heard his first offering.

  “Aye, that appearrs to be what I’ve just said,” the Professor remained cool, almost distant, but Alec knew him well enough to note that Des enjoyed the effect the necklace had on Suzy. But when his dear wife, instead of thanking the Professor politely, threw herself at her benefactor, he’d ‘lost his cool’ completely. He held her as she kissed him, again and again on both cheeks, then embraced him, and then kissed him again. All this time Dr. McBride gave the appearance of trying to extricat
e himself from her bodily assault, though... not very hard.

  “Why, lassie, you’ll squeeze the life out of me. Now that’ll be quite enough. It’ll last me a month. Two months! Maybe longerr...” But his eyes suddenly misted.

  “You’re so very, very kind, Desmond. You are by far my favourite uncle.”

  “Aye, you’rre even like a niece, ney, like a daughterr to me, lassie. Now you see that you enjoy them,” he admonished when at last he regained his breath.

  Only later did they learn that the necklace was in Desmond’s family longer than he cared to remember. He found it some time ago, but only this morning he’d decided that it was wasting, just lying there, in the drawer. He brought it over at once.

  “To whom could I possibly give it to?” he asked wistfully. Alec mused that had Des thought of the necklace sooner, his mother might have been the lucky recipient. At the very least, it remained in the family. It turned out, much later, that the ambers were Desmond’s last link to his own past. He was now a free man.

  “We were talking about religions?” Alec tried to return to the previous subject without seeming ungrateful. The Professor needed to get his teeth into something less emotional.

  “Aye, that we were,” Desmond affirmed, his voice a little steadier.

  “You were talking about the volumes that had been written on esoteric subjects,” Alec prompted.

  “Ah, yes. Well, after a couple of years of midnight oil, I discovered that all the ancient wise men taught just about the same thing. It became equally as apparent that humanity was nowhere near ready to adopt their teaching. But that’s only a byproduct of my research. What I really wanted to find was the philosopher’s stone. Only I didn’t want to change base metal into gold, but ignorance into knowledge. Or, as our departed friend put it, I wanted to know the thoughts of God.”

  Alec knew all of Einstein’s famous expressions. It seemed that, in their heart of hearts, all scientists were searching for the same thing. Only a great many of them, human that they were, got sidetracked. They started building bombs instead.