to live on different islands, each of which was inhabited by only my residents having conservative views and so not willing to appear in other realms of my inner empire. That might have been the reason why I was never attracted to go abroad: I always knew how to find at least fleeting happiness in a limited space.
I ended up in the hospital because of my strange childhood behaviour, but in fact, my parents sent me here tired of their own relationship and affairs – the story being so banal that it is not worth telling. I always thought that I could read people’s thoughts but in another way than in science fiction. I could rather catch a person’s mood so quickly that a meaningless set of things, symbols and colours started to whirl around me. Making a more or less understandable and logical chain of these symbols, I could precisely describe the person’s thoughts in the past few days. On some days, with my eyes closed, I could see rays stretching through the Universe. They never crossed but influenced each other. Shining brightly, they filled a person’s soul and in this case I understood that the person made some decision. He found a thread to God but doesn’t know about it, rather, he thought: “That’s a great idea to paint the house”. These ideas mix with a person’s routine and he doesn’t see anything unique in them. But I know that as soon as a new idea is born God appears instantly. God exists because these rays spoke to me – now “the rays” disappeared but the idea of God permeated deeper than the place of imagination. I might have looked like a zombie in my childhood but when my parents decided to send me here I saw these rays, so I was never offended by them. They did what God told them to do. Many would consider their action immoral but my parents made the best decision in my life finding me a real home. Of course, later I understood that my unique ability was nothing but childish impressionability, which was the base for our strong friendship with Alan.
Being a fascination of sweet fantasies at night, the forest around our hospital becomes a wonderful cosy park in daylight where city-dwellers always have picnics. On that sunny day there were exceptionally many people because of another anniversary of our statehood and I was walking in this park with thoughts far from society but close to social base – first infatuation, which was obvious by my slouching back and my eyes down. Familiar and favourite forest irritated me at that time but not as much as people – infatuation didn’t seem unknown to me and I understood that everybody around is aware of it, which made me feel even more uneasy, but these thoughts were unknown. I was thinking that my dreams spirit, having moved into this unpleasant person by mistake, will pay attention to me. To do this I addressed the Universe creator with the effort of my thought and asked him to make the events in a way unpleasant but desirable to me, which will help me show my heroic nature, my commitment, which – as I learned later – was called “male idiocy”. And when I save the hated yet beloved girl – a tree branch might be falling on her and I will rush to push her away and save her or some rascal insults her with his careless attitude and – in my noble rage – I will blood his face but get hurt in return, so that my pain could become her suffering. Or I might spend twenty years in my silent fidelity to her, which she might guess on our chance meetings but which she will understand only years later and her heart will not stand the depth of my feeling. Optimistic scenarios were totally erased from my mind and so I didn’t even think about presenting her flowers, though I wanted to shower her with flowers but the banality of this thought caused another stage of my rage. Occasionally, to distract from these depressing thoughts of chivalry, I was also pondering on receiving Honorary Doctorate at our university.
I don’t know what impression I had on my face but as I was walking over our little stream bridge, a girl of about seven ran in front of me, shouted “turkey” and then ran away to her parents. Loud and intense laughter broke right behind me after the girl’s conclusion, and I was furious that my sweet fantasy of sufferings was interrupted by this sheer impudence and banality. Looking around I saw Alan who tried to soften his spontaneous reaction: “This girl – I know her. Her name’s Veronica. Strange name, right?”. My eyes were glued to his binoculars hanging from his neck. We were in that age when children, often consciously, decide if it’s time to grow up or not. Alan with all his look showed that he was not going to grow up, but later, the originality of his thoughts impressed me – these were the thoughts I wanted to hear from adults in my age.
Inconspicuously for both of us Alan became my spiritual advisor – more useful that any enlightened recluse monk and more interesting than any sophisticated philosopher because he gave me answers to my concrete questions and he also had binoculars which could distract me from my thoughts about infatuation. We often spent time in my room and in varied streams of thoughts discussed the main ideas of our time. Surrendering to Alan’s extraordinary reverie, I submerged into his ideas on complexity of the world and on the possibility to escape the island where we could have ended up in only two ways – by God’s will or by influence of gravity. I was always inclined to the first one whereas Alan totally believed in the other one, so our lines of discussions ramified and went on two parallel ways. Once, when we were arguing about the borders of our island, constantly resorting to the resources of our child fantasy in order to create the arguments supporting our viewpoints, our academic dialogue drew attention of the head doctor. He looked into my room to give some new books which he had always supplied me with. A small mahogany bookcase, which is still here, was full of children’s literature. His figure in a white gown was so majestic to our children’s impression and his face mottled with tiny sandy wrinkles pushed the plastic space of my room to the ceiling and his peculiar and expressive timbre of voice pushed it even further – beyond the room’s walls. On this day when I got a bit offended by Alan’s inability to listen to my ponderings, he sat on the edge of my bed next to Alan and noisily slurped his black coffee.
– Our world was different. All the Earth belonged to us and we were starting to move to the space. We thought we knew a lot about it. Many theories made us a genius to understand how the world is designed. We already started to spend more time on research than on new discoveries. And at the moment of complete confidence in our scientific methods happened something that jolted us down the abyss of contradiction. Remember: the number of scientific discoveries always equals to the number of contradictions which are born with it. When we were sure in the distance to the Sun and the scale of our Universe, we suddenly started to notice the contraction of the Universe. Everything was happening very fast – during a month. It seemed that the Universe border is far from us and we would feel the contraction millions of years later. But the Space is not vacuum with some balls as it appeared. It is as homogeneous as nobody could imagine. We were afraid of solitude in this limitless space where you should fly eighteen thousand years to the nearest star. Indeed, a long distance separated us from the geographical edge of the Universe, but this month showed that one can easily reach this edge abolishing space, leaving time and adding “Bowie’s effect” – by the name of the scientist who described it in our times. The common manifestation of this effect is gravity, but it appears to have only one formula. Elaborating, Bowie showed that interrelations in our world happen before the appearance of the objects of interrelation. In the “chicken-egg problem” first was birth, around which shaped a shell and feathers – with equal lack of right to originality. In some sense, there is a clash first and then these two stones hit each other. This interrelation energy, which works beyond time and space, appeared to be a physically measurable value with material qualities.
But it can be registered only in the moments of large-scale interrelation – for example, the Universe contraction. Gravity starts to work in a different way. All the world got mixed when the contraction started to manifest itself more and more. Initially, only a large number of stars was noticed near the Earth. It seemed like a dream. And we do not know if we are the only left living on the Earth or there are other regions where people also live but are unable to reach our island through the surrounding desert. It is funny, that we call this desert oasis an island.
At that time I was impressed by this story but now I think that this theory was largely created under the influence of impressions, making the mistake