The Book of Knowledge. Playing Another Reality. C. Castaneda award

“I am a meter… and a half… plus eight… centimeters…” I raised my eyebrow in surprise and quoted my own verse.

“Ugh… It won’t be enough! Well, what do you want me to do with you?! I’ll have to write it down like this, a meter… and a half…” the buzzing woman dictated to herself.

“Alice is a member of the Main Society of Spell-casters in our country!” someone shouted from the crowd already gathered around us.

“And what is your… weight?” ignoring the exclamations, the woman continued.

“Is it important for spell-casters?” I was even more surprised.

“No, it’s not important for spell-casters, but it does matter to television!”

“I don’t know,” I was confused.

“How can you not know?”

“It’s not important for the spell-casters. So I didn’t weigh myself.”

“Outrage! Branded outrage, stop… or brandy outrage? Anyhow, in fact, apparently, it doesn’t matter to you either… So, where did we stop, baby? Ah, your weight! We’ll definitely have to weigh you! I’ll write it down now, ‘to weigh!’ Remind me before the show!”

A voice from the crowd came again, “There, on the show, let Alice recite more! Have you heard the way she casts spells? Everyone will be delighted!”

The buzzing woman finished the word ‘weigh!’, gave an appraising glance at me and asked, “What is your bust size?”

The hall froze… A silent scene… However, the woman, realizing that she would not get an answer until the Apocalypse, instantly ducked under my furs, found a thin blouse and sighed heavily, “Not Hollywood, of course, but for the second roles it will fit… So we’ll write it down… And that’s all with you! The next one!”

…I returned home. SHE met me at the door.

“A gift, you have already forgotten about, awaits you. Open your email. This letter now is rightfully yours as well.”

In fact, I found a letter in my email, from the old critic who, as it turned out during the literary event, was a well-known poet-translator in the literary circles of the last century. The text of his letter was quite laconic, “Dear Alice, I am sending the gift I promised you. Sincerely, M.V.” I opened the attached file, a document called “Letter”, and… It was a letter by Boris Pasternak, with whom I had so suddenly and so strongly wanted to get acquainted just a couple of hours before!

In his letter dated December 15, 1955 and addressed to the old critic, poet-translator, Pasternak expressed in black and white his attitude to poetry and poets in general, and to spell-casters in particular. He wrote about the existence of some Other Secret Power which was selecting spells that would remain for centuries. “The power of spell-casters is usually recognized late. In some cases, they initially have tragic notes leading to suicide, in others – features of foresight, revealed by posthumous victory…”

Pasternak’s letter was a greeting from Another Reality, and SHE sat opposite smiling, “The surprises are not over for today. Open the book about Alexander.” Unable to resist, I took out the gifted book of 400 pages. Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t read it all at once. “Just look it through!” SHE hinted.

There were almost no poems in the book, just a life story of Blok, whose mysterious “Poet”, enchanted my soul in childhood, remained a great secret for me. I obediently leafed through, when suddenly I came across that poem inside the text. “Wow!” I breathed out and started reading. A year before his death, Blok had got an unofficial daughter, named Alexandra, the same name that my parents gave me at birth. Her mother died. The woman who adopted the girl gave her that poem with a note that it had been dedicated to Alexandra by her father, and indicated his name, although the poem had been written almost 15 years before Alexandra’s birth. “He saw the Future, too,” I thought. So, almost 20 years after my acquaintance with Blok, the Higher Forces told me the secret of the “Poet”.

I was about to fall into the realm of dreams, but as soon as my physical body touched the bed, and my eyes hadn’t yet closed, I suddenly saw the Patriarch right in front of me. I jumped out of bed and rubbed my eyes, but the vision didn’t disappear.

“Come in, be bold,” he said with a smile, and I clearly saw the Temple of my Soul.

Landing my head on the pillow, I closed my eyes and opened them again, but the picture remained the same. I was in the Temple of my Soul and at the same time in my room, so both Realities combined in one, there were no boundaries anymore there.

“You are very tired, Alice. You need to relax. Let’s go.”

Since my last visit to the Temple of my Soul, nothing changed in it, but the Light was on again. I still didn’t understand where it was coming from. However, I was very tired and really wanted to rest. We approached the niche with climbing plants and white flowers, where there was a table, at which the Patriarch used to write something. I glanced down the left corridor and saw my Moon Cat. The Cat came up to me and climbed onto my shoulder humming the Music of the Spheres.

“Hello, Moony!” I whispered joyfully, scratching the Cat behind the ear. “Do you know what’s there, behind the door at the end of the left corridor?”

The Cat obediently jumped down to the floor and walked with an important gait towards that very door. I looked questioning at the Patriarch, whether I could look behind that door. He nodded in agreement. The Cat opened it with the paws, and I saw the bottomless dark blue Sky. The same one that I had painted as a background in the paintings about the Girl with the Moon Cat. I took a step into the Sky following the Cat. We walked through the Sky, although it seemed that we should fall and fall-fall-fall, since there was the Void under our feet and around us. Then I saw the Earth as a small ball which could easily fit in my palm.

“Where are we now, Moony? What kind of place is it?”

The Cat meowed in response something like, “What’s the difference? Take a walk to your health.”

The Sphere where we found ourselves was an intermediate state belonging to both Realities. One could return to Earth from there or observe the Earthly Reality through the Window to the World.

“They mostly fly this Sphere through, and at a fairly high speed,” it flashed in my mind for some reason.

I thought that there should be a vertical tunnel there, through which I had once flown up from the Earth to listen to the Music of the Spheres. One could get Knowledge there, since Heaven was an open Book, and everything one wanted to know instantly appeared on its pages. In my childhood, a Voice had taught me the structure of the Universe there. Both formulas and geometric figures appeared on the screen of Eternity, as if the stars were forming into certain patterns, figures and words.

“Moony, can it be the place of a Higher Educational Institution?”

The Cat purred contentedly. I realized that my Moony lived in the Temple of my Soul. I had never met him before, because the Cat was fond of walking by himself in different Spheres, otherwise, how could he know the Music of the Spheres? I mentally invited him to return, but the Cat purred, “I’ll probably wander around here, and you go back.”

I returned to the Temple. So I got to know where the door, located next to the entrance to the Library of the Universe, led to. I approached the Patriarch, remembering that all the doors in the right corridor, which he had shown me the previous time, were associated with the sin of suicide. I asked him if the final door of the right corridor was the entrance to Hell, the Lower Astral. The Patriarch nodded, adding that I needed another door. He pointed with his hand to what could be seen behind the climbing plants with white flowers parting in front of me in the niche opposite the entrance to the Temple.

Another level of Heavens, one of the Spheres where I had never been before. I stepped inside. Everything was flooded with the Light, but not that of the Sun. Permeating the entire space, it didn’t blind the eye at all. Emerald grass was underfoot. Multi-colored butterflies were fluttering over the flowers. A beautiful huge meadow, a friendly forest on the right… everything was just like in childhood, when my grandfather and I had used to wander through the forests next to our cottage in summer. Voices were heard in the distance. The bright souls of the departed lived there. That Sphere was filled with joy and tranquility. Nothing negative reached that level, being settled downstairs. All that existed There were mental images created in the likeness of what we got used to on the Earth, and / or (?) vice versa, on the Earth like in Heavens. There was nothing to be afraid of, but I was afraid of going too far, since the morning would come soon, and I needed to get back on time.

Therefore, I fell into the flowering grass, listened to the birds singing, watching the magical butterflies and the Light that surrounded me. My own inner Light was slowly merging with the Universal One. I was dissolving in It, because I was a part of It. We had the same nature or structure, or composition, or whatever it was. Call it something for me. All I knew then – I was That Light.

16. NO MAGIC WANDS

Every ‘Good Morning’ started in my garage. Sometimes the garage also greeted me with its ‘Good Evening’. The house of my silver Fox, the furthest one in the corridor, was located right next to the Never Opening Gates. Or rather, one could open them only inside, because right behind them, there was a hill. The Gates were crooked, therefore, the right door of my garage opened until 45 degrees. Another convenience was the distance between the opposite garages, too small to turn around, so I used to drive in, weaving along the entire corridor in reverse. It was more fun to do it when someone had left the car right in the corridor, not in the garage. Especially in winter evenings, because the car with an automatic front-wheel drive didn’t like to eat porridge of snow, moving in reverse, and expressing its protest, stopped, demanding me to pick up a shovel and clear the way from the beginning of the corridor up to those Never Opening Gates. However, the Gates were already walled up with snow. People dumped it unexpectedly, and I kept thinking, why those with obvious vision problems were allowed to drive vehicles, because an inscription on the Gates shouted in capital letters, “Don’t cover me with snow! Let me drive too!” Even I could still see it from afar. So, until the snow melting, every morning started for me with exercises, which I often had to repeat in the evening, and God knew what exercises it would consist of the next day.

In spring, the snow from the hill behind the Never Opening Gates started melting and flowed directly to my garage door. At night, the ‘sea’ was covered with a thick crust of ice, so in the morning I chipped it off to open the doors, and then, with a shovel, scooped out the water under the ice. By evening, a new portion of melted snow used to arrive. So, if any of you lacks physical exercise, welcome, let’s do it together.

In summer, people dumped garbage at the Gates. Once, someone wasn’t even lazy to bring and put on public display heavy windows with a balcony door. I informed the security guard I couldn’t drive out, and he asked in surprise, “Don’t you need windows?” I said I needed to go to work. The guard thought for a moment and offered me to sell those windows to someone.

That morning I found both garage doors covered with snow up to the lock level. No, it wasn’t even snow, it was a stone wall of snow. I understood that the Tractor had arrived at night and done its best for everyone, except me. It had gathered snow from all over the corridor, safely locking with it the Never Opening Gates and, to increase my physical activity, my garage, which I had been clearing about half an hour the previous night. At night, as luck would have it, frost set in and the snow turned into stone. “Immured!” I breathed out involuntarily, realizing that the tools were inside the garage.

Of course, if I could get to work by public transport, I would have done so, but the Higher Forces sent me to an industrial zone outside the city, reachable by public transport right by the end of the working day.

I sighed heavily and headed to the Chairman’s booth, whom I had repeatedly asked to warn me about every planned visit of the Tractor, so that I would leave my Fox for a night outside its house. It was interesting that when everyone should hand over some money, they called everyone in advance and several times in a row, but informing only one person about the Tractor was an insoluble problem.

The Chairman sat in the booth drinking tea.

“Good morning!” I said and looked at him questioning.

“500 rubles!” the Chairman said happily and handed me the receipt.

“What for?” I asked, already knowing his answer.

“For clearing snow from the area!”

“Could you give me a shovel instead of a receipt?”

The Chairman smiled.

“500 rubles first, and then a shovel!”

“Listen, did you see what happened to my garage after clearing snow from the area?”

“Yes, I did,” the Chairman chuckled.

“So what should I do now?”

“Pay 500 rubles and pick up a shovel.”

“Why should I pay for clearing snow from the area, if after it, and not for the first time, my private area, which I clear every single day by myself, turns into a stone wall and I have to pick up a shovel?”

“Because you got the furthest garage at the Never Opening Gates. It’s not me to be blamed!”

“Who is to be blamed for that?”

“It’s you, of course! If I were you, I would never agree to get that garage for anything in the world! I know what it means!”

“Did I have a choice?”

“No! Anyhow, I can do you a favor.”

“What favor?” I became interested.

“500 rubles first.”

I handed over the money. The Chairman smiled and said in a condescending voice, “For paying double fees for your garage, I will allow your car to spend the winter outside. The same problems are in the next corridor. The Land Cruiser has been spending nights without a roof for the second winter.”

“Are you saying that I have to pay the fees for the garage and the same amount in addition so that you allow me to leave my car in the corridor and not in the garage?”

“Why do they say that there are no beautiful and simultaneously smart women on the Earth?” The Chairman laughed.

“Give me a shovel!”

Having dug up the immured Fox, I noticed traces of cat’s paws on the bonnet.

“Moony! Have you decided to be materialized?!”

There was a rustling sound in the corner.

“Listen, I don’t mind if you’re not at all gray, as you are on the figurine of the Girl with the Cat!”

The Cat crawled out into the Light and looked at me with interest. He was exactly gray, smoky, with white paws and a white tie around the neck. I smiled.

“Hello! How beautiful you are! Sorry, I don’t have time to communicate with you now. I’m already late for work. See you in Another Reality. But if you have some business on the Earth, you can live in the house of my Fox!”

The Cat jumped onto the shelf and curled up into a ball.

I almost got to work. I worked in an industrial zone in the southern direction, not far from the take-off point of the iron birds. I needed only to cross the railroad tracks, which no one had traveled on for a long time, as evidenced by a giant stone left by someone onto the rails to the right of the roadway. Suddenly, the car in front of me stopped and died right on the rails. I patiently waited for the continuation, but even after ten minutes the situation hadn’t changed. There was no one observed on the road, which had only two lanes for driving – towards work and back home. I decided to drive around the stalled car. Performing that action, all of a sudden, I noticed a Magic Wand waving out of the snowy bushes to make me stop. Disobeying the order of the Magic Wand was a sin. I stopped.

The Magic Wand looked satisfied rubbing his hands.

“Finally, at least someone drove into the Middle of Nowhere!” he muttered under his breath and added loudly, “Good morning, girl!”

“Hello,” I said.

“Well, you got caught! How could you get caught, huh? Get in my car. I adore small, stupid and inexperienced girls!” the Magic Wand licked his lips.

“What would you do in my place?” I asked after getting into his car.

“The same. It’s just unclear to me why you stayed there for ten minutes waiting for the stalled old stuff to re-start. Wasted time. I’m completely frozen! Okay, give me your docs.”

I handed over my driving documents. The Magic Wand studied them for a long time and suddenly exclaimed in surprise, “Wow! Are you a city girl?! What are you doing here, in the Middle of Nowhere?”

“Working.”

“Do you work here?!” the Wand was even more surprised. “Is there no work left in the city?”

“It happened to me so.”

“Where do you work here?”

“Right around the corner.”

“Well, you got it in full, the city girl! Have you realized how badly you are trapped?”

“Yes, I am late for work.”

“No, you seem not to understand it yet. Okay, let’s find it out now. Tell me the truth like the Saint Spirit, about your work. What are you doing there?”

The words concerning my work most likely would seem Another Reality to you, although they had nothing to do with it. Many things often seemed to be different than they were in reality. In brief, I worked with capital letters.

“ABS, PVC, HPL, CPL, MDF, fiberboard, chipboard,” I said the usual abracadabra of abbreviations.

“Hey you, the city girl, better not show off!” the Magic Wand got angry.

“You got it wrong! Just one thousand and one things that…”

“Well done, already closer to the point… So, one thousand and one, you say… And how many thousand do you get for your one thousand and one things?”

“Almost nothing, catastrophically,” I told the absolute truth.

“If you earn almost catastrophically nothing, it’s cheaper to be late for work for the whole day than to get caught on the road!”

“How much cheaper?” I asked.

“I’m even afraid to scare you voicing something.”

I suddenly thought that, probably, apart from spiders, there wasn’t much in life to scare me, but just in case, I asked, “So say something not scary!”

“You are kind of a slow-witted city girl! Tell me something that won’t scare you too much. It’s you who got caught, not me.”

“I am afraid too… to offend you,” I said, since I couldn’t even imagine the current prices of the Magic Wands.

“Okay, let’s do this way. Take out your wallet. Everything we find inside now will suddenly fall out onto the floor and will be lost for you! Agreed?”

I thought that God existed, and nodded in agreement joyfully, because I remembered very well that, fortunately, only few days were left before the salary.

Seeing the contents of my wallet, the Magic Wand became very upset and asked in surprise, “Is the city girl a beggar?! Do you really have nothing else?!”

I spread my hands helplessly, dropping the contents of my wallet to the floor.

“I have spells!” I suddenly recalled. “Do you want me to cast them?”

“My Lord, you’re also crazy! Take your docs and leave, save you God! Just as my advice for the future, you may break the laws, everyone does it, but you must never be caught!”

When I got to the office, I didn’t rejoice for long, since the electricity suddenly turned off, and after a couple of hours we were allowed to go home. Thus, another theorem in my life was proven, if the garage was walled up in the morning, there was no need to drive out anywhere.

I returned to the city and was about to leave my Fox in its house, when a passer-by suddenly stopped me. His face beamed with a satisfied smile. Without even hiding his joy, he said, “Your headlight bulb burned out!”

Why were people always happy to give bad news and receive only good news? With such thought in mind, I went to a branded car service. I was put in a queue and assured that they would definitely change the light bulb in a month.

“You have no light bulbs,” I supposed.

“We have no time to change light bulbs!”

“How long does it take to change one?”

“Not more than five minutes. Usually, two…”

“Are you saying that I have to wait a month for you to change my light bulb in two minutes?”

“Why do you need us to change it? You can change it Around the Corner. They change everything for everyone there, right away and for a penny!”

“Should I buy a light bulb from you, at least?”

“There are more than enough light bulbs Around the Corner!”

Never expected to receive such practical advice from a branded car service, I sincerely thanked them and hurried Around the Corner.

…I was drinking coffee in a cafe near my home, when a man at a distant table by the window, impossible to be recognized with my earthly vision, having pierced me with his gaze, stood up finally and approached me.

“Good evening, lady! Excuse me, could you remind me the way I know you?”

“Ruslan, hello!” I exclaimed joyfully, recognizing my former colleague.

“I’m sorry, I’m not kidding. I had a stroke, I remember almost nothing… I saw you, and it seemed to me that we had met somewhere. Who are you? What’s your name? Please tell me.”

“Ruslan, I am Alice.”

“Alice… What an unusual name! I remember your eyes. I’m waiting for a friend here. I have a plane at night. Now I work far away. In an investment company. As General Manager. Would you sit with me for a while? Shall we drink coffee?”

The Black Box of Memory was opened. It always happened at such moments. I usually tried to keep it locked up just to learn to live ‘here and now’.

“We worked together, Ruslan, and were on first-name terms. Do you remember my Brother?”

“Brother? Ah… yes! I remember! What were you doing there?”

“It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Listen, Alice, I think I start recalling. You are like greetings from my past life! Was it you who wrote poetry?! My God! Where were you supposed to fly to that early morning, when I accompanied you to the airport in a motorcade with flashing lights?”

“Probably on vacation,” I said, smiling.

“No, it was a business trip to Italy, you often went there with Brother!”

I definitely remembered myself fly to Switzerland then, but I didn’t argue.

“Tell me about yourself, Alice, so many years have passed!”

I told him something, then he told me about him. Ruslan hadn’t changed at all, the same character, the same speeches and actions.

“You know, Alice, at first, you spoke like a stranger, no emotions, but recalling out job and Brother, your eyes were shining. It’s nostalgia, right?”

“You can’t live in the Past, Ruslan. That’s wrong, really.”

“That’s why they took it away from me,” he said thoughtfully.

…That evening, I watched already the second TV film about RAM, saw familiar faces in the hall, laughed and wept. We were all her students and… children. Irina from the city of Kazan appeared on the screen. She was 36 years old and had two children, a girl and a boy, her son was six years old, her daughter was a high school student. Irina had the terminal stage of cancer, diagnosed shortly before the seminar. She placed her rug next to mine, and I thought, maybe I could do something for her, help her with something. During the break, we started talking, and I asked if Irina had found the cause of her illness.

“Yes, Alice, I have the wrong attitude towards children. I’m going to Saint Matrona, and a miracle will happen! She’ll cure me, everything will pass right away! You’ll see!”

“What do you mean, wrong attitude?”

“I scold them. Especially my daughter. Instead of doing her homework, she reads romance novels.”

“Are you just scolding?”

“Yes… Imagine, I enter her room in full confidence that she is studying history, but find out a love story book on her lap! So I start scolding, because she has exams soon, meanwhile she’s occupied with all sorts of nonsense! Then, of course, we make up. I know I should not do that, but…”

I looked into her huge brown eyes and understood perfectly well that the reason was not at all the voiced. Most children tried to avoid doing homework, and almost all parents scolded them for that, but not all parents got cancer.

I gave to Irina as a gift my book of spells dedicated to my mother. She opened the book. Pointing to one of the few photos survived, of me at the age of four, sitting on my mother’s lap, Irina asked, “Is that your mother?”