“Sue, you’re a marvel. I may be sinful and vicious, but to you I’ll always be beneficent.”
“Ouch!”
“What?”
“You are butchering Mizra Khan. If I can quote from memory, he said ‘To the sinful and vicious, I may appear to be evil. But to the good––beneficent am I’.”
“Did he?” and Alec gazed at his wife with renewed admiration. “How on earth can you remember such things?”
“It’s almost as easy as the hieroglyphics which you scribble on the blackboard when you give one of your lectures.”
She had a point. He recalled the first physics lecture he’d attended as a student. He remembered it for one reason only. He’d understood almost nothing. It was that inability to comprehend that propelled him to study physics. He could never bypass a challenge.
Alec looked as Suzy’s list for some time.
“You know? This whole list tells me only one thing. It says in many different ways that I am consciousness.”
Alicia’s laughter reached them from below. The bride had changed immediately after they’d returned home from the restaurant. The loose chiffon she now wore performed exciting acrobatics in the wind. It was evident that Des loved every second of it. He strutted like a young stallion showing off his first conquest.
“I knew it would be tough,” Desmond announced at the top of the winding stairs. “I can harrdly keep up with this lassie.”
“It is I who could hardly keep up with you, darling. You must have been cheating when you told me your age.”
“I did it only to prrotect my poorr life,” he fired back.
And so it went on.
Alec thought it was time for a drink. Since arriving, almost a week ago, they’d hardly drunk any alcohol at all. Not counting the Sangria and the wine with meals, of course. But no Scotch. It was high time to make up for the grave sin of omission.
In spite of their long walk and Desmond’s protests, he didn’t look the least bit tired. They seemed blessed with a new lease on life, or better still, with a new lease of youth. They both had decades of living to catch up on. Memories to share. Alicia did most of the listening. Until recently, she had had someone with whom she’d shared her dreams. Desmond had been forced to keep his innermost thoughts to himself for a much longer time. Never, never in his sober mind, would he have dared to imagine that now, in his early sixties, he would inherit a beautiful woman many years his junior, and, to all intent and purposes, a daughter and a son. He kept staring at Alicia, as though not quite believing his eyes. Now and then he got up, walked up to her as though to make sure she was real.
A little after nine, Suzy tapped Alec’s ankle under the table, and pointed to the bedroom. He understood immediately. Only later that night did he realize that he had registered a semblance of feeling in his leg.
“All this fresh sea air makes me sleepy,” he said immediately. “If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll turn in.”
Suzy stifled an imaginary yawn.
“May I join you my husband?”
“You’d better. I wouldn’t trust you with this Casanova on the same terrace.”
But no one heard them. The newlyweds sat looking into each other’s eyes. They had to make up for many, many years.
Alec didn’t shower but lifted himself onto the bed still in his swimming trunks. Suzy joined him smelling of perfumed soap.
“Love you,” she said in half tone.
“What darling?”
“Say goodnight to Sacha,” she said, this time her voice really sounding sleepy. There had been many emotions today.
“Goodnight, Sacha.”
But Sacha was already out in the pasture, going in and out, at will.
Suzy switched off the light. She had no courage to say what she had to say facing him.
“I’ve made an appointment with Dr. Shulling for next Monday,” she said under the protection of darkness.
Alec had seen Dr. Shulling three times. He was the best neurologist around. It was he who’d declared that there was nothing organically wrong with Alec’s legs or spine.
“That’s OK. We’ll just cancel it,” he said quietly.
“Alec, please...” There was pain in her voice.
“Switch on the light,” he asked softly.
“Why?”
“Do it.”
Alec pulled the sheets up over his chest.
“Look,” he said in a loud whisper.
Suzy looked on as he moved first his left then his right big toe. Then he wagged them both in opposite directions. Up and down.
“I felt your tap on my ankle at the table,” he said.
Suzy switched off the light to hide her tears.
“I l-love you,” she repeated in half-whimper.
“I know,” he whispered, “I know Sue…” He, too, couldn’t say any more.
It’s been a long time. There were times when he had virtually lost hope. When the paralysis had been moving up his spine, he’d read articles on muscular dystrophy. He was scared. Then came incontinence. Without Matt, he would have drowned in his own excrement. Later, he’d lost control over most of his body. Even his neck had stiffened.
Yet the physical degeneration was not the worst of it. There had been moments when he was losing faith in his mental capacity. The simplest scientific articles he’d had to read two or three times, before grasping their import. He’d had to stick to lectures on well-tried subjects, avoiding anything new. It had been then that he’d thought that he’d joined the establishment. That he’d become one of them.
“Is my pride at the bottom of all this? Is it my exalted ego?” he’d asked himself a thousand times. But most often he just cried a silent cry: “Why me?”
Last week he’d stumbled upon a possible cause for his insensateness and even a degree of mental stolidity. He became convinced that he’s been denying his true nature. He wasn’t sure yet, but it seemed that it wasn’t his body denying him its efficacy. It had been he who, in some way, had been denying his body. He was shortchanging himself.
During the last two days he’d managed to use the bathroom. On his own. It wasn’t a question of lifting himself from the wheelchair onto the toilet seat. It was a question of knowing when to go, and then getting there on time.
And now he moved his toes. Both of them.
“Sometimes you choke on fear,” he thought. “Sometimes on pure joy. Dear Sue...”
***
22
Come Fly with Me
“The earth is nothing more, nor less, than a recycling factory,” Alec declared next morning at breakfast.
“You’ve been dreaming again, Ali?” Alicia was watching her son masticating his second egg. Suzy just finished feeding Sacha.
Alicia should have been used to her son’s sudden declarations. Apparently, over the last few years, she’d forgotten about some of his mental gymnastics. She’d always enjoyed, indeed encouraged his ventures into the realm of imagination, but hardly shared any of them. Certainly none since Alec has moved out to live on his own.
“Good morning, mother,” he answered. “Come and eat with us.” Alec leaned over to pull the chair out for his mother, and continued as though he hadn’t been interrupted.
“Animals must eat animals, other members of fauna digest most of the flora, the bacteria break down the remainder into ever smaller particles, and finally the atoms decay––complements of the omnipresent weaker force. With a bit of luck, in no time at all, we end up as pure energy. And yet the Creator’s genius is such that even the discarded materials fill us with awe, though here, on earth, we, as the rest of nature, are but a weak echo of our original beauty.”
“Wow!” was all Alicia could contribute to this tirade.
Alec had been thinking of Suzy’s breathtaking beauty on the Home Planet. And, he suspected, the Home Planet was only once removed from physical reality. How would she seem in higher realms?
“Some of us are as beautiful as we could ever be,” Desmond affir
med, as if reading Alec’s thoughts. He stood behind Alicia, his eyes on her golden hair.
“Good morning, Oh Delphian Oracle. But I beg to differ.”
Alicia and Desmond brought their soft-boiled eggs. Maria had been given a day off, and Matt had his breakfast earlier.
“Delphic,” Alicia corrected belatedly. “Delphic Oracle. Delphian sound too much like a fish.”
“Dolphins are not fish, mother,” Suzy butted in.
Alec threw his hands up in the air. “Whatever,” he sighed. “The question is not how beautiful we are on earth, but how beautiful we could be if, for instance, the earth was transformed into a Garden of Eden.”
“You mean no pollution of air, water, food, ears, eyes, lungs...”
“That sort of thing. And you forgot ‘minds’ or their physical equivalents, our brains.”
“So what has this to do with recycling?” Suzy brought the meeting to order. She wondered if Alec was not just celebrating another successful evacuation of his bowls. After the last month or two, this would have been reason enough for exultation that he was overtly displaying.
“Everything. We, the sapient Homos, are not cooperating with nature. We are not recycling the earth as fast as she is ready to absorb our… our excrement.”
Suzy sighed. ‘I must have been right,’ she thought.
“Bon appétit,” Alicia murmured.
“All right, our refuse, offal, scum, dregs, sediment, trash, debris, dross...” he corrected.
“I think we get the picturre. Not much morre palatable, lad, but what arre you leading up to?” Desmond finished his egg and sat back to enjoy his coffee and toast.
“Frankly, after you two love-birds came in, I lost my train of thought. But I think I was trying to make a point that we completely misunderstand not only the purpose of physical life, but the environment in which we find ourselves.”
Desmond looked at Alec questioningly.
“Therre is morre to all this than you’rre saying, lad, isn’t therre?”
“Well, if the earth is a giant recycling factory, then who operates it?”
“The so-called naturre, I prresume,” Desmond offered.
“Then you are crediting nature with inherent intelligence?”
“With inforrrmation. And I got that, dearr Doctorr Baldwin, frrom yourr own Theorry.” Desmond’s tone wagged a finger at his pupil.
The Theory of Information held, inter alia, that, at their most basic level, the so-called laws of nature are derived from the omnipresent information, rather as space is omnipresent, or as gravity is omnipresent in reasonable proximity to a given mass. The Theory further treats the whole universe as an interconnected mass. The interconnector is Information.
“Touché. But there should be, like you’ve just said, more to it than that.”
For a while they just sipped coffee. Alicia entered into a whispering discussion with Sacha; Matt appeared, miraculously, to clear the table. With the exception of Alec, they evidently thought that it was far too early for a philosophical discussion. Or a scientific one for that matter. Alec was left alone with his thoughts. Finally Desmond took pity on him.
“Oh, all right, lad. Out with it.”
Alec needed to share his ideas, though he wasn’t sure that he was ready. Still, it wasn’t often that he had Desmond’s ear all to himself.
“We are in the process of continuous becoming...” he started, his tone not yet quite confident. He sounded as though he’d interrupted himself. The Professor did not say a word. “‘I die daily’, said Paul the Apostle,” Alec continued apparently on a different tack. “I’m telling you that we die millions of times a second. The subatomic particles of which we are made up wink in and out of existence faster then we can become consciously aware of them, not that we ever could. Even our large, infinitely complex cellular structures subsist in a constant state of division and dissolution. And this, as you well know, is not some theoretical mumbo-jumbo, but pure science backed up by controlled laboratory observations. Physically, we are walking corpses, the living dead––zombies, if you like. Knowing this I find it important to find out if I am any more than meets the eye.”
With this Alec leaned forwards in his chair. For a moment he looked as though he was ready to get up and pace the terrace. He felt better for having unburdened himself. Down below, the ocean continued its Sisyphean struggle against the sandy shores. What a waste of energy, Alec thought. Yet... I’m sure there is a reason for that, too. How does it fit into the recycling concept? Obviously it must. Only we are all so damnably stupid. We know so little. We are...
“And this really bothers you?” Desmond’s voice reached him from afar.
“What? Sorry, I’ve been gathering wool again.” Alec kept his eyes on the far, far horizon. “Yes, it does bother me. It bothers me because I’m not sure anymore if I am going in the right direction.”
Desmond didn’t say anything, but his face showed signs of concern. Long, long ago, he struggled with similar problems. Perhaps everyone did. He’d resolved them by keeping busy.
“Have you tried just living?” he asked quietly.
Alec gasped. The words had such a familiar ring... He remembered. So many years ago. ‘Just living’ was exactly what Sandra had advocated.
Last week the universe collapsed upon itself, and enclosed Alicia and Des in a warm womb of mutual self-discovery. Last night was quite different. It had more to do with the previous day, with the sharing of their joy not just with each other, but also with Suzy and Alec. It was almost like a renewal of vows. So soon after their first, but still, it was special. The altar, the flowers, the priest, the light coming in through the stained glass windows way up above them––the sun casting its multi-hued blessings on their union, it all made yesterday unforgettable.
Today they felt as though they’ve known each other all their lives. Not that the process of mutual discovery and exploration was over. That would continue for the rest of their days. It was because the last barriers that they’d originally erected to protect the most secret chambers of their hearts had collapsed. They became one as much as any two people can. Perhaps such unity can only be achieved by people of a certain age, a certain maturity. Or, perhaps nature, in her glorious abundance, steered them on such a course just to help Alicia deal with her son’s problems.
They sat on the terrace, hands touching, the vastness of the Pacific stretched before them, a world unto themselves.
Later that day, Sacha remained with the McBrides. Alec bestowed this title, quite correctly, upon Desmond and his mother on the way back from the church, and it became his favourite appellative. He called them that at every opportunity. Actually, even before the return trip he’d started singing outside the church: “Here come McBrides, here come McBrides...” he chanted, to the tune of Mendelssohn’s wedding march.
“Will the McBrides be joining us on the beach at this time?”
“No, the McBrides will stay and read a book. The Baldwins can go for a walk, if they wish,” his mother replied. “I told Maria she can go home early. She’s done so much for us in recent days.”
The Baldwins went alone.
No one knew where Matt was.
Alec had asked Suzy previously, but he now posed his question differently. “Come, fly with me,” he said. And, having said it, he had no idea why he’d chosen those particular words. He was in a good mood. As light as air? Perhaps he felt like flying. His heart felt a light as a feather.
They remained within speaking distance of each other. Alec was half-expecting to start flying, at any moment, or for both of them to soar into some strange reality. He continued to feel a strange expectation as though something momentous was about to take place. Only he had no idea what.
Nothing happened.
A light supper, sandwiches and nuts, was washed down with Scotch’n water, for the gentlemen, and Sangria for ‘The Girls’. Desmond would not refer to the ladies in any other way. Suzy had lost her title of lassie to Alicia and re
signed herself to being called just plain ‘lass’, and Sacha remained a wee lad. Only Maria managed to retain her baptismal name, although only just. On some occasions Desmond referred to her as La Zorrita, because, he’d said, no one dared to get near his property in his absence, because it was common knowledge that it was Maria who looked after it.
“La Zorrita would not let the ungodly get within a stone’s thrrow...” he’d once told them. And he meant it.
For a while they all remained on the terrace, until the sea-air made them sleepy. They retired early. Suzy took care of Sacha, while Alec fell immediately into an uneasy asleep. He kept tossing and turning, agitated by––he knew not what. Perhaps his body was attempting to exercise. About midnight he woke up. Turning on the side meant dragging his legs, one over the other, with his hands. It didn’t hurt but was frustrating.
In order not to wake Suzy, he lifted himself onto the wheelchair, and went to sit on the terrace. He found Matt sitting on the twin swing-chair suspended from the beams overhead. After a minute or two, without a single word, Matt lifted Alec and placed him on the swing beside himself. It wasn’t the first time that Alec suspected Matt of being able to read his thoughts. But for the life of him, he would never ask him such a question. There was something about Matt that was both inviting and forbidding. He was an excellent hired help. Even a friend. Yet…
They sat, side by side, in silence.
The gentle sway, to and fro, seemed to echo the ripple of the waves washing the pebbles on the ebbing ocean. Alec found it soothing. The moon, low over the western horizon, bounced its rays along the water, picking up the very tops of the gentle swell. The night was filled with idyllic, carefree serenity.
Not so Alec. He felt he had something to do. Only... He opened his eyes.
Matt was gone. Suzy sat next to him. She’d raised his arm and cuddled underneath it. Without a single word they watched the moon spin its gossamer beams all the way to the dark horizon.
And then, finally, it happened.
Alexander: [Alexander Trilogy Book Two] Page 29