All heads looked up.
“It is the semi-versary of Desmond’s first proposal,” she added in an even more serious tone of voice.
“But you’ve been engaged hardly at all!” Suzy’s math didn’t add up.
“Not at all, we’ve been engaged for two weeks.”
“What? I thought you said...” now Alec was also lost.
“I said first proposal. I turned him down. I told him that if he didn’t take care of himself, start exercising, walking and that sort of thing, he would be too old for me.”
“You said that to the Professor?” Alec’s eyes were filled with disbelief. One doesn’t talk like that to heads of departments at Caltech, let alone deputy Chancellors.
“Not in as many words, but he got the idea,” she smiled gently at her husband.
“She wants to destrroy me and inherrit my forrtune,” Desmond commented sadly.
“Darling, I had no idea you had a fortune!” Alicia looked at Desmond with disbelief.
“You mean you didn’t fall for my money? Well, just as well. I don’t have any. But I could have had. And wherre would you have been then?” he concluded triumphantly.
“I strongly suspect, right here,” Alicia observed calmly.
“Thank God forr that. Forr a moment I though you would’ve left me forr a richerr man.”
“Aren’t you two ever going to grow up?” Suzy wanted to know.
“Not if I can help it!” they replied in perfect unison.
Right then Alec suspected that those two had on earth what Sue and he’d only just discovered in the Undiscovered Country.
Suzy nodded. She’d read his thoughts.
***
24
Delight
“Do you think Adam and Eve really walked around naked?” Suzy asked, sucking on a leg of a delicious Alaska crab. The lunch had been over a half-hour ago, but Suzy managed to find an odd juicy leg buried under a pile of empty shells.
“As naked as the leg you’rre chewing on, lass. They werre also rred, all overr, frrom the shame of it all,” Desmond enlightened her authoritatively.
“Now, Des…” Alicia tried hard to make at least one of them grow up.
“She’d starrted it,” Desmond replied defensively. “But now that you mention it, it could have been rrather fun in the old Parradise,” he smacked his lips.
“You, my dear husband, are a dirty old man,” Alicia declared.
“Thank you, lassie, but easy on the old?”
This paradise wasn’t so bad either, even for hikers from other realms. One could easily get used to eating crabs’ legs and washing down them cool wine.
“Anyone for a swim?” Des asked eyeing both ladies. “I can’t prromise to be naked, but I’ll pull m’shorrts a high as they’ll go, if that’ll please you?”
“You might try pulling them over your head, dear,” Alicia suggested.
“Love to oblige, but wouldn’t be able to see you, m’love,” Des answered unabashed.
The sun finally dissolved the coastal fog but not the gathering cloud. The ladies decided on a quick dip. With the rolling breakers gathering force, Sacha remained with Alec and Desmond. Matt, as usual, lurked in the shadows.
As Alicia and Suzy ran down the steps, Des turned to Alec.
“I’ve been on the phone...” he declared, and when his announcement failed to elicit any response from Alec, he added rather bashfully: “...need a word with you, lad.”
This wasn’t at all like the Professor. When he was serious, Desmond invariably got to the point by the shortest route. His next words confirmed Alec’s suspicions.
“I’m afraid, my lad, we didn’t make the final short list,” he sounded more annoyed then crestfallen.
“Des, making it even to the officially non-existent short list was quite a, ah... honour.” Alec offered his reassurance.
Desmond stopped and looked up at his favourite, if adopted, son.
“So you’re not all broken up about it?”
“I’m a bit young to start living in the past. I rather think that winning the prize would have cramped my style.”
“That’s the spirit!” Desmond approved heartily. His good spirits returned instantly. “I wouldn’t mind it eitherr, if it werren’t forr the fact that the leaderr on the shorrt-shorrt is a buckarroo who’s got the quantum theorry all mixed up again with some sorrt of comic... I mean, cosmic converrgence. For the life of me I can’t underrstand those Scandinavian morrons, I mean solons.”
Alec loved Professor’s multiple Freudian slips.
“The guy who’s actually up therre could be that fellow Goudoff’s cousin. Orr even himself!” The Professor threw up his hands. “What is the worrld coming to?”
“Perhaps there are other roads to the truth?”
“Perhaps. But I wish those journeymen wouldn’t call themselves physicists.” The rolling r’s have subsided together with the Professor’s pulse.
Alec didn’t say anything. The Professor looked out to the sea and muttered, “It’s all politics, these days. That’s what it is. Politics.”
So that was that.
Actually, Alec’s reaction went a lot deeper than he’d let on. As he sat back, he felt a strange movement in his veins. Not just in legs and spine. In his whole body. The news seemed to have released him from the Democlesian sword hanging over his head, threatening to cut him down to mediocrity. To make him part of the dreaded “them”. Des, Dr. Desmond McBride, was one of a handful of men who’d escaped being absorbed into the academic establishment. He remained young. In every sense of the word. He would probably die young.
Had Alec looked up, he would have noticed Matt studying him through the open door of the living room. For a moment or two, his eyes seemed to smoulder like two crimson embers, then the light was gone, and a satisfied smile replaced his impassive face.
The big man went inside the living room and sat down. His work was almost done.
Later, that evening, Suzy and Alec, tried to read on the terrace. It wasn’t easy. The wind whined and whistled, palms swayed precariously, the house creaked. The Pacific was no longer peaceful. The swell was mounting higher by the minute; white crests raced each other, furiously, towards the shore.
Then came the first drops.
Just a few, large drops plopped on the terrace rail; practically in slow motion, as if with premeditation, some distance apart. Within the subsequent sixty seconds the sky released all its pent up energies. There was neither lightening nor thunder, but the roar of the downpour on the terrace roof sufficed to drown their voices. For a moment, they sat mesmerized.
Not for long.
At first drops, Desmond moved his chair as far back from the edge of the terrace as it would go. Alicia was about to call him a chicken when a furious gust of wind drove the torrent almost horizontally. Alicia, Suzy and Alec were instantly drenched.
Both women screamed, giggled, flapped their arms, and run for cover. Alec laughed. He was enjoying the downpour to the full. It was the next best thing to a swim he hadn’t had for months. He loved the deluge pelting his body from head to toe. It made him feel alive.
“Would it be rraining a wee bit, lassie?” Desmond asked innocently.
Later that day, alone in his room, Alec raised himself to his feet. His legs gave way a second later, but he actually stood up on his own. Matt, always at hand when needed, caught him in time, and gave him a thorough massage.
For the next few days, mostly at night so as not to attract attention, Alec practiced standing up, and sustaining a vertical position, each time for a few seconds longer.
“It’s amazing,” he told Suzy later, “how we all take such elementary motions for granted. A child takes a year or so to learn how to stand. Perhaps longer. No one ever seems concerned with how many muscular movements must be coordinated, how much energy must be pumped and directed at an increased rate…” he sighed deeply. “No one ever wonders how many trillions of electrochemical reactions must take place in your b
rain, let alone the rest of you body, in the right order, for a man to stand up.”
“I suppose we relegate all that to our subconscious?” she offered.
“The hypothalamus,” he corrected. “It links the nervous system to the endocrine system via the pituitary gland… never mind that. The question is just how many people have you met who ever, even once, expressed any interest…”
“…in their subconscious?” she repeated.
“We inhabit magnificent, awe inspiring machines that man is apt to destroy by puling a trigger with a single finger. We are so much better at destroying than at creating...” I was darn close to destroying myself, he thought, guilt showing on his face.
“We are the image and likeness...”
“Are we? I sometime wonder.” His smile was bitter. “We are reputedly created unto the image of some superior being, but what we really are remains a mystery...”
Suzy put her arms around Alec’s shoulders.
“We take so many things for granted,” she conceded. “But I’ll never take you for granted, my husband. I know who you really are, remember?”
In that moment, as though by a wave of a magic wand, the image of Sacha, globe of delight, of euphoria, of utter happiness, shimmered before his eyes. And just as suddenly, years of struggles, of search and frustrations, of transient successes and lasting disappointments––all in search of the nature of his being became worthwhile. Even the time he spent in the wheelchair.
“There is a reason for everything,” he nodded to himself as much as to Suzy. “And you are reason enough for me to live.”
For almost a week, Alec exercised daily. Not just daily, but most of the time. Some days ago, he’d asked Sandra for a sign. He got it when he’d felt Suzy kicking his ankle under the table. He would never forget that moment. It was all he needed. He no longer sat and read, and, on occasion felt sorry for himself, but made his physical body his priority. His mind was mending in parallel. Failure, if one could call it that, to be awarded the Nobel Prize, released him from exorbitant expectations. In many ways, it was a blessing in disguise.
For hours on end he lifted small weights strapped to his ankles. He held on to the furniture, and attempted little knee bends. He stood against a wall and tried raising himself on his toes. He did not believe in miracles. Throughout his life hard work brought him results. He applied the same philosophy to his legs. He was getting results.
Dr. Alexander Baldwin was a fighter.
As Suzy had once suspected, she and Alec were completely naked. It didn’t really matter that much, because they both sported enough body hair to make Lady Godiva green with envy. Dark brown, actually, but envious, nevertheless. They were both so hairy that when Suzy first saw Alec, she couldn’t believe her eyes.
“Take that stuff off at once,” she commanded, “you look like a gorilla.”
It should be mentioned that the sounds that emerged from her throat were precisely those of a large ape. A she-gorilla, to be precise. Or she could have been a chimpanzee. An orangutan? Alec was not an expert on simians. What Alec ‘heard’ were her thoughts.
But whatever the subspecies, she was the cutest anthropoid ape he’d ever seen.
“Agh, agh, aghrr,” he replied politely, assuring Suzy that the hair was not only quality of his indubitable charm, but the aspect of himself he admired most.
Alec suddenly realized that he could see himself from her point of view. He looked at himself through her eyes. How very strange! How very different. To say that he was surprised would be a vast understatement. This is when the shifting takes place, he mused. He could animate his physical form to be able to see through it, to make use of its senses, but he could not enter it until he left Suzy’s host. We are all one, but our attention decides where we are at any particular moment in the unfolding sequence. Just for fun, he tried to see himself through Suzy’s eyes dancing the tango with himself many, many years ago. On second thought, he decided to wait until she was less hirsute. Less shaggy. Or at least until she stopped scratching herself allover.
“Thank you very much, you monkey!” She obviously retained the ability to read his thoughts.
“Ape,” he corrected. “I am quite advanced on the scale of evolution. Whoever started this zoo must have done it quite a while ago.”
They both had the facility to go in and out of their bodies, almost as easily as Alec once had with the pods in Hades. Almost, because contrary to his previous experience, the bodies they now occupied had achieved a rudimentary intelligence, enabling them to move from place to place, to feed themselves, albeit at a purely instinctive level, and, probably, to reproduce themselves. This last remained a moot point because, peer as they both did, they could not see any other living creatures in their vicinity.
“This must be just after I gave you my rib.”
No matter what he thought, his mental activities were available to Suzy with only a minimum of attention. And vice versa.
“You mean we’re in Eden? The Garden of Eden?” She couldn’t quite believe it.
“It feels very much like it,” he mused. “There is a certain virginity, a pristine innocence in the air. Don’t you feel it?” The next thought that crossed his mind surprised even himself. “If this is time travel, then it’s unlikely to upset any sequential order in the universe.”
“Why would you think of such a thing now? Shouldn’t you think of a way to get back?”
“You mean you don’t like being in Paradise?”
Alec had to remind himself that he’d been travelling in strange realms since he was a boy. For Suzy this was still very much an untested experience. Both, in fact and figuratively.
“It appears that Eden is not all it was later made out to be,” he offered, “or at least, what Moses transformed it into. Assuming he was a fundamentalist, which, frankly, I doubt very much. Nevertheless, I suspect there really is no ‘good and evil’ here. We can’t expect the host bodies we occupy, to oppose the laws of nature. They must obey or perish.”
“They haven’t eaten the apple,” Suzy was getting into the spirit of things.
“Precisely,” he nodded his hairy head. “Their self-awareness has not yet realized that they can oppose, regardless of consequences. They really have no free will.”
“Are you telling me that you are Adam and little moi is Eve?”
“Don’t be silly darling. We both are Adam and both are Eve. The two are an integral part of a more advanced humanoid. I mean Homo sapiens. Adam symbolizes the conscious mind and Eve the subconscious, you know that?”
She knew that, but it was fun thinking otherwise.
“If a billion Christians and another billion Moslems can think otherwise, then why shouldn’t I?”
Alec ignored that. He never wasted time on fundamentalist interpretations, which accepted in the scriptures only whatever suited them, and ignored everything else. This was neither time nor place for theological discussions. Not that he knew much about theology. He’s always been too busy to waste time finding out more about his reputed biblical origins.
“You mean that the so called ‘man’s fall’ was the irrevocable consequence of evolution?”
“Define ‘man’. If you mean that our beingness, which we both experienced in the Undiscovered Country, became more and more entangled in material consciousness, then yes. It was definitely our fall. But if you think of this beauty which is housing my consciousness at this present moment, than it was a meteoric rise for them.”
“But if we, beings of light––sort of… pure consciousness–– want to experience life as a mode of becoming then, surely, we want to advance the entities we occupy as much as we possibly can...”
Suzy’s fur was almost shining. Her apish eyes were filled with intelligence. She was right. In the physical realm we don’t look with the eyes, we look through them.
“Precisely,” he nodded once more. And once again he directed his brooding, blood-shot eyes at Suzy. She was magnificently put together. Her body
functioned with ease, exhibited a great lightness of foot, enjoyed a superb sense of balance. He could sense all that. There was also an undeniable kindness about the bodies they occupied. Perhaps they hadn’t learned to kill and maim, and take advantage of their fellow creatures. Alec suspected that, in those days, the earth had been so sparsely populated that the animals seldom if ever came in contact with each other. Just as well that these two had one another for company, he thought.
“There is a price to pay, of course. They became aware of duality, of good and evil.”
“May I touch you?” He felt gentle probing of her fingers on his skin. It gave him pleasure. He didn’t want her to stop. He experienced utter delight.
“Did you know,” she probed his mind, “that in Hebrew, the word Eden means Delight?”
If he didn’t before, he knew it now. And then he felt her smile. “You haven’t changed much in this skin,” she purred. He didn’t know apes could purr.
And, as soon, the delight was gone. Only its memory remained. He sighed, almost like a human.
“It’s strange,” he resumed. “To experience delight, we must touch. Even a foot apart, we are completely separate. Lonely. Or they are. As I’ve said before, the Garden of Eden is not all it’s struck out to be. The only way they can travel, to where we are now, is to make a full circle. They must sacrifice their innocence in order to regain it.”
“They must die in order to come alive?” Suzy mused.
“In a manner of speaking, I am hoping that you and I are approaching our innocence once more, only this time we must do so in full consciousness. Maybe this is what it’s all about. To go back whence we came.”
“Only, as you said, in full consciousness...”
And for an instant of eternity two globules of light merged into a singularity of being... somewhere, somewhen, in the Undiscovered Country. Time stopped, the Wholeness was theirs. They were one again.
Alexander: [Alexander Trilogy Book Two] Page 32