Shootik

by Aleksya Sokol

  “We looked around to see if there was somebody to whom this baby belonged. We sat and waited for a long time, but nobody came to pick it up. It was clearly abandoned.”

  Sogolov made a pause, looking at the fellow who looked as if he also was just abandoned there, between nowhere and nobody, hardly aware of what was being told him. And about him…He heard phrases, segments of the whole story. The calling of the police…the extensive search for the baby’s parents or anybody responsible for its life. With no result. Notices being placed in local newspapers, Broadcasts on radio and showing the little boy’s photograph on TV.

  Meanwhile, Sogolov, being a medical doctor, was entrusted, at his request, with the care of the little foundling. Taking it home and examining it, he soon found out that it had been strongly sedated, in order not to make any sound, he concluded…Obviously left there to die quietly. Who would have done this? It was too cruel to be true, but it was true. Examining further, he found a lot of punctures on the baby’s body. From injection needles.

  Who knows what had been injected into its body, and for what purpose…

  “We took you with us, that day,” Sogolov continued, “what else could we do after waiting for hours for someone to come who may have ‘forgotten’ you there?”

  "I’ll spare you all the details of the formalities which had to be attended to allow me to care for you for the time being…And later to be allowed to adopt you. After two years, and no result from the search we had started, you became my adopted son.

  “However…” he paused, "before that, it had become clear to me that your body had been misused for experiments which left you for quite a long time in a sort of absent-minded state, if not in trance. You appeared not to be here somehow, though you were not unconscious. In a way you were somewhere else, as strange as this may sound to you now. It is still a mystery to me, a medical doctor, and to a few of my colleagues whom I involved in the case as well, as to what, or for what purpose, your little body was misused.

  “In the end, when you were in your second year, it was Marusja who helped me. She…can see things. She always did. So she treated you in her own way, I remember her singing strange songs to you, using weird and wonderful words, and sounds…Talking to you as well. She tried to convey her knowledge to me, but I could make no sense of it at the time.”

  “But her doings worked marvels and you started to ‘come back’ to our world, gradually. We named you Alexei, and called you Alex and Alioscha – remember? A Russian name. Alexei Sogolov, that’s how you were registered. I have all the documents, if you would like to see them.”

  The man in the armchair was crying now, his head bent down and his shoulders shaking in convulsive heart-rending weeping, which sounded as if it were breaking out from somewhere deep inside him.

  A huge black hole within himself, filling with light now, like resurrection from death. Sogolov let him cry, just being there, at arm’s reach from him. Staying with him, the tea getting cold, untouched. But this did not matter now. What mattered was that his son was back and would hear the rest of the story. Soon…

  "Apart from your absences from time to time, and they were getting less frequent as you grew up, you were a very bright child. By the time you entered school, it was noticeable that you were especially gifted. In fact, you were ahead of your classmates and knew more than the average pupil might come to absorb through ordinary learning. Chemistry, particularly, seemed to be of special interest to you when you entered university.

  "One day, we had a visitor. From France. An exquisitely well-dressed gentleman whose name was…Antoine Baron Casimir…

  “A B, we called him! Just A B!”

  The man now called Alioscha cried out, as if he had just been woken up. Sogolov looked at him in amazement.

  “Yes,” he said, “and he came to reclaim you as his son. There was nothing I could do against the evidence of the papers he had in his hand. You would be further taken care of, he said. In the best possible way.”

  “I was to be called A from that moment onwards,” A exclaimed.

  The doctor rose from his chair. Now it was his turn to switch from telling a story to stand face to face with a human being coming back from a separate reality into which he was drawn by a will beyond his own. The game was over, however, though it might take the rest of this fellow’s lifetime to recover from his so-called destiny.

  Memory had returned to the man whose many names ceased to be valid from that moment when he took the parcel to the post office. Addressed ‘To Anna’, it sealed his former life, opening a totally unknown and unsecured space for his future. If he still had a future…Nevertheless, he was at peace with it, and now that he could bridge the gap between two separate life spans, his being, by adoption, Alexei Sogolov, and still, by birth, the illegitimate son of a great mogul…the industrialist and criminal…Antoine Baron Casmir…he ignored the rest of the names…Now it was time to stand between these double realities to find out who, in fact, he was.

  It was far past midnight and litres of tea had been drunk when the two men finished sharing their parts of the story.

  The baby, apparently abandoned between the bushes, had been laid there to be found. Somebody had been watching them, Sogolov and Marusja, when they took it home with them. The boy grew up and had an almost normal childhood, were it not for something that had been done to him and which would draw him back into their power-field when they needed him. They…his biological father and his family. But by then, the lad would have forgotten all that happened before. They would make sure he would.

  It was Antoine Baron Casmir, his biological father, a scientist, as he made himself known, who ordered the experiments to be made. In the name of science, as he argued. Somewhere, deep inside him, he also knew that he was playing with fire, which one day would burn him. Somehow even deeper, through his better knowledge, he longed for this fire. Burning very low, it was constantly warning him against proceeding with his manipulations.

  But, playing God, arguing: “Did not God Himself allow Mephisto to continue doing his work? Well then…” The system which he had created for his ambitious aims would not give up, even if he did. Systems are perfect servants of the cause. And his system was clearly delineated. A system cannot step out of its prescribed limits.

  Neither can a person who is governed by a system. That was why he created it. Protected by his creation, he felt himself invincible. The boy, Aristide, which name would be shortened to A, had to be prepared to obey the system. That was his ruthless plan, and with it, the preparation of others…To secure his power over them.

  Antoine Casmir hated people, as he also hated himself. Unable to love, hate was his spouse and partner, who allowed him to discharge emotional energy, which often oppressed him to an almost unbearable degree. Nevertheless, it allowed him to seduce almost everybody with his charms, by displaying a kaleidoscope of moods to which women in particular fell prey. Only he knew that it was played, played to that particular point when he withdrew, freeing himself as it were, leaving them burning in their desires. Like Casanova. This was his climax, the elegant retreat. With hate to accompany it. This emotional disturbance might be due to a genetic defect, or be a by-product of his intellectual overdoses and unscrupulous acuity, with which he was able to lead people into his play. One way or another, this compensated him, to a certain point at least, for his feeling of personal insufficiency. He created his own reality, like a magician on a stage, never revealing what happened behind it.

  But he had to have somebody to incorporate his ideals. He had to have an heir and successor for his establishment. And he needed people to believe in its presumably benevolent goals. Scruples, he had none.

  If people were so dull as not to perceive how they were being tricked and manipulated, they did not deserve better.

  What he did not take into account was that this child of his may have been born for a purpose which was not in his fatherly hands to undo. By the freedom of choice granted to all humans, he, Casmir
, could follow Mephistopheles, but there was a still higher law which regulated good and evil on quite different terms.

  Evil would be allowed as the counterpart of good, without which it was unthinkable, and everything which could go wrong would in fact be allowed, so that humans could choose which way they wanted to go. And should they choose for the good, evil would have to be redeemed, not only suppressed or beaten. Redeemers were many of those on the crossroads…or passing through the dark night of their souls…mastering the crises of their lives…being on the threshold of life and death, which were the moments when fundamental truth revealed itself.

  Alexei-Aristide was on that crossroads at this moment. Uniting in his now opened mind were two distinct ways of being. Antagonistic and complementary as they were, he was above them, being held by something which he could not name. That state enabled him to see beyond what had been done to him, and what he also had done to other people, programmed as he was through drugs and technology to do so. His own being, however, that which cannot be touched by any of these means, had remained protected and ready to be resumed. Thanks to the person who had assumed the role of being his adoptive father…and who had not let him down throughout all these years.

  “I did not know where you were…” Sogolov was telling of the time when his adopted son disappeared mysteriously, without leaving a trace…

  “That was the time,” Alexei interrupted him, “when they revealed to me whose son I was by birth…with clear evidence of this fact, which I was obliged to accept, and to swear never to contact you again, under the threat that if I did…Marusja and you would be in danger. I hated them and the whole family, and yet I was in their hands. One day…I woke up and could remember nothing of my past. My memory was gone and someone was telling me who I was: Aristide Antoine…whom I finally ‘became’, better to say incorporated, as a borrowed identity. They managed somehow to delete all I had been.”

  “No, they could not, Alioscha, may I call you that?”

  “Yes, please…father…”

  “They could not delete it, just obscure it to some extent. What you are cannot be taken away from you, because it is protected by powers far stronger than those with which they operate. Still, you had to go through this malevolent territory to…wake up, my son!”

  “Was I then…meant…to be used like that?”

  “Let’s say that perhaps…it was your own decision to come and help to redeem that soul, which is, as we cannot deny, also a part of humanity.”

  “A wicked part?”

  “Yes…No…just a part which lost its connection with the whole. Let me read something to you.”

  Sogolov stood up, went to a bookshelf and took an aubergine-coloured book from it. Opening it, he read:

  “Once upon a time…when everything was perfect, one errant human mind managed to force the doors of perception of the Great Beyond…Dimensions closed to human eyes. Those who aspire not for the common good but for personal fancies and power centred on their little selves, get what they want, not knowing what they do to mankind, of which they are part…and therefore to themselves. Their time is stopped once they have crossed forbidden borders and they are caught in a changeless sphere. Doomed to be there and wait…until the time came when humankind will have matured enough to open doors in lawful ways, to chambers closed to the eager eyes and grasping hands of those who, driven by desire, just violate sacred space.”

  Twelfth Picture

  When Solveig left him, Staretz remembered, things started gradually changing. His luxurious boat didn’t obey his mental orders with the same precision as it did before, and what was more embarrassing for his self-esteem was that he was losing the power to steer it the way he wanted it to go. It even got stuck on a sandbank once and wouldn’t move before heavy rains raised the level of the river and lifted it. Staretz, who had had another name as a young man, was not only furious, he also felt himself brought into discredit, as though he had been dishonoured as a man! He could not understand what was happening, and the river gave him no answer. In fact, the river was rushing in his ears but he was losing the ability to hear what it was saying.

  The river is life itself, but life has to be lived; otherwise, it robs one of one’s time and space. And it was space which started to become less, as if it were shrinking…

  The spacious boat was visibly losing space, the sides moving closer and closer to each other, reducing each compartment proportionally in size until one after the other they dissolved into air as though they had never existed.

  “One day I found myself occupying a boat with space just enough for one and nothing to remind me of its former comfort and pomp. I had a steering wheel in my hands and enough food and water, which replenished itself somehow without me having to do anything. That was all. My mental power was gone. The boat didn’t respond to my instructions. I had to use my muscles and my senses to steer it through the rapids…”

  “I must have lost consciousness at a certain point because when I came to myself, I was no longer on the river. I was in the middle of nowhere in the open sea.”

  It was then that his real journey began. A journey which lasted countless years, a timeless time through immeasurable space in a little boat made of a strange unsinkable material. From time to time it was seen from fishermen’s boats and other vessels, but it disappeared from their view when they tried to come nearer to it. It radiated an unusual mixture of colours, that little boat…People started to tell stories about it, inspired by a blend of admiration and fear.

  The young man in it grew older…and gradually wiser. The boat had suffered all kinds of damage but still would not sink. When the Old Man was gone…it was still there, like a toy dropped into the big blue sea, being driven by the wind, beaten by the waves, thrown against the rocks, sometimes washed upon a shore and reclaimed by the sea…Until somebody found it and tied it firmly with a rope to a rock. To tell us the story…

  Chapter 14

  “All in the Name of Science”

  That was his motto. Dr Professor, the respectable scientist, well thought-of, although not without the inevitable envy characteristic of those of his colleagues who had no share in his fortune and position in that prestigious world, Antoine Casmir was as unscrupulous as only he could be. His experiments, most of them highly confidential to the rest of the world, were performed secretly in his home-labs, as he called them, known only to a very few initiated into his plans. To the public, anything was valid, as he proclaimed, in the name of science.

  This kind of any-thing had started with his experiments on his own illegitimate son, for whom he had no parental feelings, except for later purposes, known only to himself at the time. For the sake of future goals, the child was registered as his natural son and given his family name. Aristide. All male names starting with A, as this was settled in the family’s tradition, would be, in due time, entitled to use his name with all the privileges. If all went well, as he said to himself. In such a case, the boy would become a designed person, to act according to his, Antoine Casmir’s, will. Otherwise, no power! If the experiments were successful…what a breakthrough for human engineering! The idea was to introduce into a child’s mind and body the same kind of patterns which governed his highest ambition: the creation of personalities who would act on his instructions, as though these were original parts of them. Whatever the child was in itself, had, for this purpose, to be prevented from developing in a normal way.

  His empire would be on the leading edge of the New World, as he had already started to imagine it to be!

  The mother who had given birth to this specimen was well compensated for her services and assured that the child would be well cared for. Not that she was feeling very maternal about that, as he knew, when he had selected her for purposes ready-made in his mind. A crime against humanity? Legalised under different names, the production of a new human specimen, incorporating the special wishes of its parents, was already being practiced in the fields of gen-technology all around the world
. All this to be done even more perfectly with the generous help of his new technology, of course! Who could refuse its offers? Antoine Casmir and his Green Dolphin Enterprise were launching a millennium target for a brave new world, no doubt. What could go wrong? Nothing…as long as the majority of human minds could be caused to stay insensible…

  More than thirty years later. Deeply asleep, in a three-day coma already, the patient who had been rescued from a frontal collision car accident was on the edge of ‘coming back’. Seventy-two hours according to clock time and seventy-two years of this patient’s lifetime had merged on the other side of his biological reality into a sudden expansion of consciousness into a timeless space. The eternal now, unthinkable and yet very real! And therein, everything interconnected. His body was irremediably, inseparably, connected with all bodies of the planet, mineral, vegetable, animal and also human. The latter was the most painful, since this made him feel what others felt. He saw his physical body immobilised in a comatose state in a hospital room, whilst experiencing himself as being both a witness and a protagonist of quite a different and extremely moving drama, far beyond a personal one, on this other level. Aware of everything on both sides, he also saw the other fellow, occupying another bed in the same hospital. Jurij…with only some bones broken, whilst he, Antoine Casmir, was miraculously saved from major physical injuries, the coma being the only result of the crash.

  What did they know about the states of consciousness of people in coma? Nothing of what he knew now…and could tell them, if…yes, if…he decided to wake up.

  Whilst being no more than just biologically alive to the doctors in charge, the patient’s out-of-body consciousness continued expanding into an astounding multidimensional reality, which he could not have imagined in his wildest dreams. All things which were registered as having happened in the world’s history, coloured by different people’s views of each event, were there, and still happening! Nothing was dead, or gone by…There was no such state. Nothing of people’s doings had a separate existence of its own making or will. Every seemingly separate living being was living the life of the whole planet, if not the life of the universe. And he, this human creature in its present embodiment as Antoine Casmir, was tightly tied in his existence with other beings. As theirs were with his. There they were, each one of them in the role they played in a lifespan in which he thought that he had been the Great Master of his fate! There she was, his Soulway, the woman who had left him…Now, she was someone else’s Soulway…Jurij’s…whom he almost killed in that accident. Of course, it was no accident. This he knew for sure now.