Suzy smiled, but her smile wasn’t all that happy.
Alicia and Des had already taken a walk on the beach, laid out breakfast, and waited for the ‘young’uns’ to start eating. The eggs were still to be made, since it was Alec’s turn to fry them. Being in a wheelchair was no excuse for slacking on his share of chores. He apologized for being late and donned the cook’s apron.
In the meantime Suzy finished feeding Sacha, who already resumed his inspection of the netting at the balustrade. His new hobby was to steal forks and spoons from the table, and throw them as far as he could onto the beach below. By the time they’d noticed his new preoccupation, three spoons and two forks were missing.
“It is self-evident,” Desmond declared with a straight face, “that the wee lad will grrow up to be a champion disc orr javelin thrrowerr. Prrobably both,” he added, after due consideration.
They all agreed except for Suzy. She had to recover the tableware. But even before she finished trying to dissuade Sacha from exercising his tensors, Matt replaced the missing items on the table. They had been rinsed and dried. Then––Matt disappeared again. If it were up to Suzy, she would have sworn that he was peek-a-boo’ing. Only for extended periods of time.
After a leisurely breakfast, Suzy took Alec for a drive. The day was too cloudy for the beach, and Sacha seemed quite content to catch up on his dream-time.
“Do you know that this is the first time, since Montreal, that you have invited me for a drive?” Alec asked.
“Frankly, I hadn’t thought about it, darling. Why, do you like the idea?”
“I suppose all you want to do is get away from Sacha, and The McBrides, and then park and neck?” He sounded hopeful.
“I haven’t thought of anything else since Montreal,” Suzy admitted. Then her tone changed. “What ever did happen to your Nobel Prize nomination?”
“No news is good news. If they haven’t called, then I’m probably still on the long-short list. Des would know.”
“You don’t seem concerned. Why?”
“Well, I don’t find fame that attractive. They start inviting you not because you’ve got something to say, only because you’re a laureate. Often the winner is said to be just a political gesture. You can do a fair amount of good with the money, of course, but…”
“But you’re still too busy living, to just sit back and be admired?” Her comment was as much an answer as a question. It would not have been true two weeks ago, but his mind seemed to have been opening up even as a new surge of blood began oxygenating his legs.
“Something like that...” he admitted.
My mind and body are irrevocably connected, he thought. The Romans had been right. Mens sana in corpore sano. Except for a few geniuses. Like Hawking or Beethoven. But how many Hawkings and Beethovens are there around?
Suzy drove slowly, admiring the scenery. They’d reached quite a high elevation. They were on a narrow country road, in the general direction of Escondido. Twenty minutes later they’d passed the town on their left and continued to climb the hills. Finally, Suzy pulled up at a rest area, big enough for no more then three cars. Luckily, there were alone. She wanted to take a panoramic look at the surrounding countryside. The car was facing west. The view was strange to say the least. They’d climbed above the coastal fog and could see the ocean emerging beyond its western limit. It looked as though the shimmering vastness was emerging from the clouds; the water and the sky embraced in some strange ritual.
For a while they sat, just looking. There was little to be said. Any description of the phenomenon would have diminished it. Neither of them wanted to lessen the magic. Then a single ray of sun punctured a hole in the coastal fog and revealed a sailboat making its way southward. A forlorn sail in an ocean of mystery.
“The light of our consciousness only plays upon the surface of the water...” Alec spoke in a whisper. “Just think of the depth to be explored...”
She kissed his sunburned arm and slid underneath it. With her head nestling against his neck and chin, his arm around her shoulders, she was content to let the world come to an end.
The sun grew bigger, much bigger, until it reached two or three times the diameter of the star they’d left behind. In it’s orange light the skin on Suzy’s arms gave a healthy glow.
“I made it didn’t I?” she whispered. She was afraid to destroy the image before her eyes. As Alec before her, she imagined she was visiting Machu Picchu. Only the pointed crags atop the soaring mountains were much, much higher, and infinitely more beautiful. It was as Machu Picchu would be if it were perfect, and in its original glory. The buildings were all meticulously put together of pristine white marble.
They were sitting on a rock that was soft to the touch. The valley before them extended… forever and a day. Farther along, the boundaries framing it alternated between green slopes and forbidding pinnacles, some wearing halos of white, puffy clouds as tonsures, just below the pinnacles.
“I made it...” she repeated, hardly believing her own eyes. “You never told me it was so beautiful...”
What could he say? He’d told her a dozen times, but words had been so inadequate. They only gave you fragments of reality. They could never describe the whole, the gestalt vision in a single word. And here one witnessed it all at once.
“Did you create it all? All this?”
“Didn’t you just say that you did it?” he smiled at her disbelief.
She was still too lost in awe to even think straight. It must have been the artist in her. Yet Alec realized that the view before him was richer, much richer, than anything he’d seen before. It must be her presence, he thought. She’d enhanced what he’d seen before. She’d added her own vision, her own dream, her innermost aspirations, which dwelled in her subconscious.
“You did it, darling. I merely... started, planted the seed. You made it grow and blossom,” and I had help. He was thinking of Sandra.
“You and Sandra are one,” she corrected him.
Once again Alec realized that even as he and Sandra merged into a single entity, Suzy and her Prince had never been apart. They’d always been one, yet her Prince was much closer to her awareness. What was missing was the realization. Acceptance? It explained so much. It explained her previous trip to the Home Planet. It explained the vision, or the experience, of the earth in its infancy. It explained her ability to join him in this realm.
“You are reading my thoughts,” he marveled aloud. His voice sounded melodious even to his own ears.
Suddenly she giggled exactly as Sandra once did. “Do they make love on the Home Planet?” she asked.
For a timeless instant they merged in absolute unity. It was not an intercourse of their bodies. It was the joining of minds
“Oh, my God!” Suzy caught her breath.
“My Goddess!” he echoed.
It didn’t last. The experience was too overwhelming to be sustained. When Suzy opened her eyes, the beauty of the valley remained.
They were floating in the center of the universe. The black womb embraced them, caressed them with its velvety softness. With sudden fierceness, the intense darkness was punctured with billions of stars. It was as though angels poured diamonds all around them. The sparks shimmered, and dazzled, and oscillated in diversity of forms, as if to awe them with iridescent light.
“The Far Country?” he sensed her emotive thought. “The Far Country…” the emotive resonance enclosed them in an enchanting symphony of light.
This was no longer just his domain. Not even his and Sandra’s. The image has expanded again; it grew richer with each moment as Suzy added her own creative stream to the universe. The reality grew exponentially and their awareness grew with it. They too became bigger, perhaps greater, more able to grasp the inexplicable splendour.
“All this is thanks to you...” Suzy pointed her emotive finger at a solitaire diamond. Even as she did so, it approached them, its effulgent fury fulminating before them, seemingly at their disposal.
> “The gods wield quite incredible power.”
Alec felt Sandra’s presence as never before. She sharpened his emotive senses beyond his wildest expectations. For the next fragment of eternity they absorbed the wonder of creation. Alec’s consciousness continued to expand.
“Will you join me, my husband?”
The galaxies, which a moment ago had been scattered all around, now coalesced and blazed in all their glory within their consciousness. They became bodies made up of countless stars, of countless galaxies...
The two universes, hers and his, overlapped and then merged in a phantasmagoric fanfare of light. The two became one. There was no more darkness. They rose above and beyond the Far Country. They became beings of pure light.
They both heard laughter.
Sacha?
A globule of light spun around them, performed a dance of joy, and came up close, touching their auras. Here he was their equal, perhaps more mature. His consciousness felt at home, more aware of this reality. Look, Sue, after all, he’d only recently left it...
I never left it Ali, I am always here. My body might be elsewhere, but I always remain in my true home.
These weren’t words, not even thoughts. It was a strange kind of direct perception. Sacha became Alec each time he addressed him, yet maintained equal contact with Suzy. This was the strangest realm...
Dad!
Alexander merged with another globule.
This time it was he who was caught in a dance of shear delight. His father was the essence of another being of light, pure light––yet definitely his dad. His own, dear, loving father...
Alec’s heaven erupted in an outburst of rapture. All light merged as though a single photon expanded to infinity in all directions.
...they stood apart, light facing light, reflected in each other’s glory, staring, not seeing, but being fully aware of the singularity of being...
“Sue.... Come back…” Alec shook her shoulder, “Suzy... Susanna!”
“Must I?”
The reluctance reached him from a distance far greater than that measured by men. Slowly, not wanting to let go of her true nature, she opened her eyes. She didn’t let go of Alec’s hand. His arm was still dressed over her shoulder, the fingers of his right hand and her left entwined. She still clung to him, as though seeking protection from the reality to which she was returning.
“I knew you could do it, “ she whispered. “I knew you would take me there...”
And before he could assure her that it hadn’t been he, at all, that was at the root of it all, she sat up straight, shook her head and exclaimed: “Sacha was there! And your father!” And then she started laughing, until tears filled her eyes.
“Sacha was there,” she repeated her voice still filled with euphoria.
“My dad…?”
“And he didn’t throw any spoons down from… where were we Alec?”
Alec smiled as he pictured his son, a globule of light, throwing spoons and forks at other globules. The image was too ridiculous for words. It was his turn to laugh at the image.
It took quite a while before they really came down to earth. A long while. After what seemed an eternity Alec looked at his watch. About twenty minutes had passed since Suzy had parked their car in the rest area. About ten minutes before they lost awareness of their surroundings, and another ten since they ‘came back’. The Home Planet, the Far Country, and the Reality Beyond, must have lasted mere seconds. The Reality Beyond, he whispered. The Unexplored Country. Inner realities play by their own rules, it seemed. No wonder up there we are eternal, endless, infinite.
“Do you think we visited heaven?” Suzy was beginning to calm down. She felt dreamy, happy, sated to overfilling, yet, in a strange way, aware of a new hunger. A hunger she’d never experienced before. The hunger Alec had felt from the time he was a fourteen-year-old boy.
“Heaven is a state of consciousness. Even the Bible teaches that. In other words, heaven can be whatever you imagine it to be. Like a place filled to overflowing with virgins...”
Had she been standing, and not overflowing with happiness, she would have kicked him.
“That is not a place you are ever likely to go, my dear husband. Not if I develop any connections with Saint Peter,” she warned but couldn’t make her voice sound even remotely threatening.
Actually it wasn’t the Christian heaven that offered such deliciae deliciorum.. No matter. Alec thought it unlikely that one could enter any such state, or reality, on one’s own. It seemed that the very act of union, of becoming one with someone, was the prerequisite for such an experience. Once there, the unity seemed universal. Maybe that is what heaven was all about. Of being whole, complete.
“I think so too...” she nodded. “And further more...”
“Have you been hearing my thoughts?”
“Why, I believe I might have been. Can you hear mine?”
I love you, I love you, I love you, I love... “You seem to be doing all right!” she said out loud seeing his expression.
“Is that all you think about? Love and...”
“...joining? Only this act in the upper spheres is immensely more satisfying.”
“You know, Sue, I rather think that it was your, ah... obvious predisposition that got you to all the three realms,” he said out loud again. Just transferring one’s thoughts felt unsatisfying.
“You mean sex?”
“Well…” he raised one eyebrow.
“I’ve never heard you object to it before?” She was her old tease again.
“Welcome back,” he murmured.
“You know,” she said, her voice more serious, “that time when I’d first read your thoughts? Well, I think that people got it all wrong. We don’t see with our eyes, we see through them.”
“Sacha is doing it all the time.”
“It must be nice to be so recently out of that bright place, before you lose all contact with reality...” Suzy’s voice sounded dreamy once again.
“This is your first time, Sue, well, practically your first time, and already you call that state ‘reality’, not where we are now. Don’t you find this strange?”
“No, Ali. For the life of me, I don’t. That place, in fact all those places, seemed much more natural than, well, than the wonderful life we are having here...” Then she looked up and grinned, “you are right, darling. It is extremely peculiar!”
“But all those realities felt like home. The Real Home, didn’t they?”
She didn’t answer, but Alec followed her thoughts without speaking. Something happened on their last trip together, or perhaps it was the experience of the singularity they both felt in the Far County, that gave them both the ability to hear each other’s thoughts. The unity they’d both experienced had been so intense, so profound that whatever kept them apart at the mental or emotional levels was gone. No secrets, not even secrets they didn’t know were secrets. He suspected they could be a million miles apart and read each other’s thoughts. Or emotions.
“It pales, a little, doesn’t it,” she said following his eyes and thoughts. He was looking at the ocean.
“And it was so beautiful before,” he agreed.
“Oh, it’s still beautiful,” she insisted, “only… only...”
“Only our consciousness, here, is too used to the modality of physical limitations,” he said.
On their way back they didn’t talk much. They preferred to listen to each other’s thoughts. The mind doesn’t think in letters and words, in grammatical sentences. It seems to paint gestalt pictures, three dimensional, with colours merging and adapting as the emotions enter the visual arena. Alec was digesting the reality he’d visited for the first time. Had he been thinking in words, he would have spelled that reality with a capital R. Reality. Rather like Paradise, or Eden. And yet it was none of these. It was a realm where consciousness existed in perfect bliss. Not bliss achieved as a reward for services rendered, but bliss that was there, waiting, for anyone who would e
nter. It was the Reality from which all happiness emerged. It was the Hub, the Source.
If there were a still higher Realm, then Alec felt no need for it. What if there were? Surely when all Princes and Princesses merged into a single pod, their awareness of themselves, of their Isness would be gone. Alec had no such ambitions. He was unspeakably happy that he had found Sacha there. He was so preoccupied with his son that he didn’t recognize his own father. He only saw him later, through Suzy’s eyes.
He did discover, nevertheless, that Princes and Princesses did commune with each other. He also suspected that in that Reality he was really Sandra. Perhaps Alexander, but certainly not Alec. His personality, the one he wore daily on his sleeve, was gone. What remained was Individuality. Or indivisibility. He couldn’t think of himself apart from all the other Princes and Princesses. That was heaven enough for him.
“You know, Sue, it wasn’t a dream we shared. It is here, now, that we’re dreaming. But it is my job to make this dream as exiting, as loving, as fascinating for Sandra as only I can. She’s given me a glimpse of heaven. I’ll give her the most wonderful dream she’ll ever dream. She may be the dreamer, but I shall make her dreams come true!”
Suzy nodded a little sadly.
“Trying to translate what we just experienced into, what you once called, horizontally structured communication, is a mistake. When in Rome do as the Romans. On earth, act like a human. If we aren’t the best that we can be, we probably would have evolved differently.”
Why is she always right, Alec wondered, forgetting she could read his thoughts. “Essentially you’re reiterating the ‘just living’ idea.”
They felt like little children. They laughed most all the way home. Suzy even tried ‘gagoooo’ing.” She wondered if Sacha could hear her.
Lunch was great.
Maria prepared a feast of seafood, which they washed down with Pouilly-Fuissé. “It is a special occasion,” Alicia declared gravely.
Alexander: [Alexander Trilogy Book Two] Page 31