Sacha—The Way Back (Alexander Trilogy Book III)

by Stan I. S. Law

  There is a reason for everything, she finally realized. There most certainly is where her Sacha is concerned.

  Deborah was becoming a very smart girl. She’d discovered Sacha’s Internet account. After all, Sacha and his father shared both first and second names. By sheer luck, she’d also discovered his password. It wasn’t that difficult. He’d chosen PEEKA. Poor Boo had been left out. She’d e-mailed his broker. The man e-mailed back providing evidence that Sacha had recently acquired a controlling interest in the Supermarket he’d broken into two nights ago. You can’t rob yourself, she thought.

  The next day she got Sacha released. The lawyers offered him their services to sue the system for compensation. He called them hypocrites.

  “You are the system,” he said good-naturedly. “Sue yourselves.”

  He thanked Deborah for her efforts and excused himself that same evening again. He returned to jail, only this time as an uninvited guest. It is incredibly easy to gain access almost anywhere when they can’t see you. You might set off one or two alarms, but soon things would get back to normal. It just takes a little longer to find the right opportunity.

  He continued his work with the convicts—mostly with men who had killed, often in anger, in a moment of weakness. In a single moment in which they’d lost control of their dark-side. He wondered how often we forget that physical reality is a dualistic reality. That, under certain circumstances, we are all capable of dire extremes. And yet we all are so quick to judge.

  Others.

  Sacha couldn’t do his work during the day. To talk to those people, he had to drop his cloak of invisibility. They didn’t always react to mental contact only. They actually told him that most of them heard voices often enough. A sort of self-defense mechanism, they said.

  “Otherwise you’d go nuts, here,” one man assured him after Sacha opened his mind to the source of strength within his own being. The next moment a guard was making his rounds and Sacha had to disappear again. After the guard left, Sacha’s contour became once more visible. The man wasn’t surprised.

  “Some of us even see disappearing men,” he’d said.

  Sacha was on the verge of giving up.

  “T’is OK, man. Just kiddin’,” and the man grinned from ear to ear.

  Two other convicts he’d come across had killed no one. They’d never carried a gun, nor partaken in an armed robbery. Nor had they hurt or injured anyone except for some slightly bruised egos, a little wounded pride. Though they may have been indirectly responsible for insurance premiums being raised by a few bucks for a few thousand customers. Those men were completely amoral. They neither suffered nor had they ever felt joy. They were constructs of pure intellectual energy; men who chose to match their wits against the combined efforts of the greater Los Angeles police force. All they needed was awakening to other facets of their own being.

  Although they presented an easier task for Sacha, the men paid dearly for years of neglect of their emotional body. When Sacha reinstated their capacity to feel, the flood of emotions they experienced made full-grown men cry like little children.

  Once Sacha came across a prison guard who was venting his ire, on a groveling inmate, with a nightstick. Sacha could not reveal his own presence, so he scanned the man’s mind. It was filled with hatred. Not just towards the inmates, but the world at large, including his wife and children. Sacha had neither chance nor time to find out why. But there was a glimmer of humanity left in the unfortunate man. He had two huskies. Two dogs he’d raised from puppies and regarded as his only friends. Sacha planted the aura of his favourite dog around the man on the receiving end of the guard’s nightstick.

  The guard raised the stick for another sadistic blow. The weapon remained suspended in the air, wavered and then fell from the guard’s limp fingers. Would it change the guard’s mind? No one could tell. No one knows the future. We can only hope.

  There are people who think that dogs and other animals do not have auras. Sacha had met a student of theology at the Sorbonne who’d claimed that if there is such a thing as aura then only human beings could have it, because only human beings have souls. At the time Sacha didn’t attempt to convince the student otherwise. There is a fundamental difference between people not aware of being blind, and those who insists on maintaining and exacerbating their blindness. The first group is silently crying out for help. To help the second group would break the universal law of free will. Sacha knew that before he’d learned to walk.

  There were other cases with which he wasn’t as successful. There was only so much you could do with a hardened mindset. He had to try. He thought it imperative that a new way of thinking, a new conceptualization of reality be made available to people at all levels. It would be up to them, later, to carry on. To spread the good news. Wherever it would take them.

  One man had baby blue eyes. He was small, slimy and unpleasantly soft. The sort of man whose hand you would not want to shake. He gave an impression that he wouldn’t hurt a fly. He didn’t. But he had dispatched from this world his mother, his wife and two children.

  He was quite mad.

  There was no room in the institutions for criminally insane. They gave him triple life, the sentence for the two children to be served concurrently. Maybe his children were twins, thought Sacha with grim humor. Possibility of parole had been set in a few hundred years. Sacha wondered if repairing the man’s mind would be doing him a favor. He would have to face his acts in a new light. That might really drive him crazy. On the other hand, not doing it would only postpone the process of realization to a later time.

  Sacha always wondered where some religious people got that idea that you could murder a dozen people, then sigh deeply, say that you were sorry and retire on a silver-edged cloud in the never-never land. The Christians have evolved a complex theology in which they claim that someone else died for their sins, and therefore they could escape the consequences of their actions with impunity. Sacha wondered if they also thought that someone else would go to hell for them, a destination they freely advocated to all ‘unbelievers’.

  It took millennia to develop such mindsets.

  They also thought that we had but one single life, a single embodiment, and thereafter we either lazed around forever, or we fried for an equally ridiculous duration in some bottomless pit. Those people had read the same scriptures Sacha had read; yet Sacha concluded that we had to pay our debts. To the last shekel. The last talent. That nothing was ever for free.

  Or maybe they haven’t read those books at all?

  Then there were other believers who thought that we had many lives. That we died and were born again. They were both right and wrong. We have just one life. In fact, we are never born nor would we ever die. The real ‘I’ does not have a body he or she could destroy. Nor could It perish by Itself. There is nothing to sit on a cloud, and there is nothing to burn in hell. Or anywhere else. But we do have to pay our debts. It is a question of restoring balance.

  Sacha thought that that was the problem with religions. Each one of them offered a little bit of the truth, but not one presented the big picture. All religions taken together were like a jigsaw puzzle. If you studied all of them at the same time, you got pretty close to the truth. But not many people did that. Some were forbidden to do so by their religious leaders.

  The blind leading the blind...

  Sacha scanned the little man’s mind and withdrew immediately. He may have been wrong about that idea of hell. The man’s mind was hell. His placid, vacant face was a mask concealing agonies such as Sacha had never encountered in anyone. The man was still in physical consciousness but he’d lost all sensation of time. He thought he’d stay here, with his memories, for all eternity.

  Gingerly, Sacha probed again.

  This time it was a little easier. Apparently there were oscillations in the man’s psyche. It seesawed between despair and total numbness. Like a leg going to sleep. There were moments when the man wasn’t human at all. When he was truly dea
d. All of him except for his physical body. Sacha prodded this numbness and planted a few sparks, an echo or two, which the poor creature might remember. In a few minutes the man opened his eyes. He looked around and saw Sacha. He cringed.

  It took all of Sacha’s powers to maintain his own equilibrium. Slowly, very slowly, Sacha caressed the numbness that just as slowly began to respond. When Sacha left an hour later, the man was crying. He’d experienced feelings for the first time in forty years. The rest was up to him.

  “Where are the priests, the chaplains, the psychiatrists, the social workers?” Sasha murmured into the somber darkness cut by jarring, exposed bulbs of the common space.

  Billions of dollars had been spent on building bigger and better prisons. Better for whom? Armies of guards have been trained to vent their frustrations on the sick, lonely, often quite helpless people. The convicts had to pay for their crimes. And who would pay for society’s crimes that had failed to provide those same prisoners with a sense of self-respect? Who’d failed to lend a helping hand, long ago, before it became too late?

  Who were the people who took pride in the way we treated those who needed our help most of all? We don’t even kick a lame dog, do we? But we kick people when they sink into the gutter. We kick them when they become too weak to get up by their own strength. Some professional do-gooders refer to them as brothers.

  But they treat them as lepers.

  Sacha got back home in the early hours. He crawled into bed and lay back. Deborah didn’t say a word. She knew he had his work. Just as she did, once. She gently stroked his short hair, until he left his body. This time he rose directly to the Undiscovered Realm. He longed for home. His real home. A realm wherein all individualizations of the Whole are replete with light and love. Where they all are individualizations of life and love. Where they feel one with each other.

  And with the Whole.

  Chapter 20

  Deborah

  “You shouldn’t have done it, Deborah. I wasn’t suffering, you know. I was just visiting,” he remonstrated her gently.

  Actually she knew that, but by the time it came to the forefront of her awareness the ‘damage’ had been done. This was the first time they spoke about his release from jail. She looked as though she’d been naughty and would be punished for her transgressions. Sacha could only smile.

  “That will come later,” he said, wagging a stern finger.

  She giggled and cuddled up under his arm.

  “I know. But I missed you so...”

  The press was so nagging that Sacha was ready to escape back to Montreal. He was playing with the idea of changing his name. It wouldn’t work, he realized. In Montreal they didn’t know his name but the paparazzi had a field-day anyway.

  The next time he and Deborah went for a walk, just to be alone for a while, he’d been recognized from the newspaper photos that were splattered over his corner of North America.

  “Aren’t you the man...?”

  “Yes ma’am, I most certainly am. And you, I am sure are the lady…” Before the ‘lady’ recovered, he and Deborah were some distance away.

  Then, someone started a page for him on the Internet. He wanted to issue a disclaimer but had second thoughts. He offered to cooperate with the page-makers providing they let him maintain anonymity in private life. He was thinking of his parents. The idol-makers agreed at once. They also lied. In spite of all that Sacha had seen and experienced, he was quite incapable of losing faith in human nature. “If you don’t give them a chance, how can you expect them to choose the right course?”

  One evening, the four of them went for a drive. Suzy and Alec returned home alone, while Sacha and Deborah moved in with Alicia. Just for a change. Grandma was overjoyed. So was Deborah. They fell into each other’s arms as though bridging the gulf of time that separated two dearest friends. Actually they’ve seen each other only four days ago.

  “Were they treating you right, little one?” Alicia looked at Sacha sternly.

  “Oh, Grandma, you look wonderful. Just wonderful!”

  No one in his or her sane mind would question the veracity of Deborah’s assurance. Alicia had no such intention, either. She was as good for Deborah as Deborah was for her. Alicia was good for Deborah because she, in spite of her knowledge, treated her as a perfectly normal teenager. And Deborah gave Alicia a new lease on life. After Desmond’s death, Alicia was lost. She felt useless. After she’d lost her first husband, Alec’s father, she went for a European tour. Now she was no longer willing to give up the comforts of her home. She was also much less resilient. And this was again where Deborah came in. She had enough resilience for an army, and more than enough for the two of them. Sacha enjoyed just looking at the two women together. They intermeshed, complemented each other, almost combined into a single unit greater than the sum of its parts. Even their auras displayed similar hues.

  And both of them continued to learn from each other.

  When Sacha went out in late evening, the two sat together, sometimes even holding hands, feeding each other strength to overcome their fear for Sacha’s safety. They weren’t sure what they were afraid of, but they were. Perhaps it is a woman’s lot to worry when men go out to war. And, in so many ways, this was exactly what Sacha did. He said he went out to learn, but really he was fighting ignorance and indifference.

  Once Deborah had asked him why did he do what he did. At first, he didn’t appear to understand the question. He couldn’t understand her lack of understanding.

  “I help them because, at a certain level of being, they and I are one. By helping them, I help myself.”

  She’d listened with such attention that she seemed dead to the rest of the world. She didn’t just love Sacha. She worshipped him.

  “There is really only one consciousness,” he continued. “We are just its individualized expressions. Without us consciousness just is. With us, you could say that consciousness is life. Because of us, you and me, and all the inhabitants of the whole biosphere, it lives. It changes from passive to an active mode. It experiences the joy of becoming.”

  “But what about you? Don’t you deserve your own life?”

  “I have my life. I am fulfilling my dream.”

  He could have said I don’t have life, life has me. He could also have said ‘I am life’. He could have told her that when he’ll withdraw from this body, it will no longer be alive. To explain to her the dream of Bardo would have been more than Deborah could absorb at this moment. Perhaps later he would explain. Right then, she’d taken his assurance in the literal sense. It meant that he lived the way he wanted to live. She had never really dreamt of anything. She never imagined that if she had, her dreams could possibly come true. But if she might dream, if she really could, she would dream...

  She stopped. She had no right to include Sacha in her dreams. No right at all. He’d already given her so much. More than she could ever imagine, or dream for that matter, if only she knew how to dream.

  They talked for hours.

  Sacha slept a short while during the day, and then, while still waiting for answers to his e-mails, he was relatively free. He continued to work at night. It was the only way for him to learn more without attracting publicity.

  Deborah remained for him a constant source of surprise. Also, of inspiration. Even at her youthful age, after her tough beginnings, she could have become as hard as nails. Again and again he realized that, in many ways, she was mature well beyond her years. Yet against this background Sacha discovered in her a gentle, inexplicable vulnerability that made her desirable beyond his wildest imagination. If anyone or anything had the power to dissuade or divert him from the course of his chosen destiny, it would have been she. Only she was no Jezebel. She was a mature woman as vulnerable as a newborn baby.

  Sacha also realized that, in many ways, she was more vulnerable now then when he’d met her. For at least one previous life, and almost eighteen years of this one, she has been busy attempting to overcome the vicissitud
es of half-life. Of an emotional and, to a great extent, intellectual starvation. And on that day in Montreal she had been born again. Born to a world, to a reality she did not even suspect existed. And yet her previous and present lives belonged to matrices that existed all over the world, side by side. Perhaps both perceptions, of both worlds were blind. Blind to each other. And this gulf of mutual exclusion was protected by the organizations that benefit from such disparity. Another pitfall of duality.

  “What is sin?” she asked him, one day. She was reading an article in a LA newspaper. Sacha watched her as she wagged her head from side to side, as though at odds with whatever she was reading.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “It says here that we are all sinners. What are sinners?”

  At eighteen years of age, Deborah had never been to church. Or synagogue, or any other institution of religious persuasion. Except, perhaps, in England, when she was too young to remember, let alone understand. Whatever her other faults, she’d never sinned. She couldn’t have. She had no idea what sin was. She’d heard about God, of course. People always said ‘good God’, or ‘for Christ’s sake’, or even more often ‘God will punish you for this’. This last she’d heard often enough, back in Montreal. Mostly when she had insisted on full payment of the agreed amount for her services. For a while she’d thought that God was a crooked accountant who was cooking the books in favor of Johns. She didn’t like God at all.

  “The word is a translation of a Greek word used in archery. It means missing the mark. Not quite hitting the bull’s eye,” Sacha offered, watching her intently.

  “And if you miss the bull’s eye you are sent to hell?”

  He smiled. The same old story. Religions made up tales to control their faithful. To them the truth was of little consequence. The important thing was to keep a tight grip on the wallets of those who believed in a particular faction. Sacha remembered a marvelous example of this contention. Until the twelfth century priests, bishops, even popes, had married. After all, what could be more natural? And then the leaders at the top of the ecclesiastic hierarchy had noticed that their organization was loosing out on clergymen who were leaving their assets to their children. In other words, on parents who had been trying to help their own flesh and blood. This wouldn’t do. All money, all worldly domains were to be left to the Church and to the Church alone. The priesthood rebelled. Soon a new rule had been introduced into the sacerdotal ranks. The rule of celibacy. Now no children would inherit the fruit of their father’s labor. Oh, the clergymen would still have children, they do to this day, only the little bastards wouldn’t inherit anything. After all such children were illegal. The Church called them illegitimate. In the eyes of the Church, it was as though they haven’t been born.