“NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE,” VALDEMAR COUTINHO EXPLAINED TO HIS grandson. “With hope, an open mind, and imagination, we can find a way to recapture some of the life that has passed by, forgotten shards of memory, lost dreams.”

Jorge listened to his grandfather’s words, intrigued by the fierce determination that led the old man in his ceaseless attempts to unlock the mysteries the universe held in its secret heart.

“But how will we make it happen?” Jorge asked.

“By leaping into the unknown, by risking everything.” His voice rose in pitch and volume.

Jorge shuddered. “And will we see beyond the stars?” he said.

Valdemar smiled. “Perhaps. Unknown and undreamt things await only the illumination of discovery, which together, you and I must find.”

Jorge nodded, anxious to see the miracles of which Valdemar spoke.

People made fun of Valdemar’s wild talk: “His mind is gone, poor man,” Jorge heard their neighbor, Maria Fagundes, say, shaking her head with its garish plume of hair that had been dyed far too many times. “He talks of stars and light, and dreams, as if they are more important than the food one has to put on one’s plate.”

Maria’s friend, Celia Nunes agreed. “Too many years of sitting alone on a rock in the middle of the ocean has affected him.”

But Valdemar brushed off what others said about him. “Let them talk. What do I care if they laugh at me?”

Jorge’s parents had brought Valdemar from the Azores, three years earlier, to live with them in their home in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

“We can’t leave him on the islands,” Jorge’s mother had said. “He’s not in any condition to take care of himself. An old man all alone—who knows what might happen to him?”

Valdemar had come reluctantly, for although he missed his family, he had one wish, and that was to be buried on the islands, which, after all, were the only home he had ever known. He had worked as a schoolteacher for many years but had retired and pursued his interest in science.

“They’ve uprooted me,” Valdemar frequently said. “Pulled me from the soil of my past, where all my dreams and hopes were sown.”

Jorge’s parents both worked long hours at the small grocery store they owned, while Valdemar was left at home. They tried their best to ignore his fanciful talk, although when he spoke of such strange, unexpected things—“the melancholy song of beauty, the precipitous flights of love, the transformations of a visionary heart”—they too shook their heads and worried about Valdemar’s state of mind.

“What should we do?” Jorge’s mother would say. “He can’t go on like this. He’s an old man, why is he suddenly talking about love, about beauty?”

“Leave him be,” Jorge’s father would say. “When he was young he wrote poetry. Now that he’s old sometimes his mind wanders and returns to those times. He’s just confused.”

“But what if he does something?” she said. “What if something happens?”

“What could possibly happen?” Jorge’s father said. “If the old man wants to look through telescopes and pieces of glass, well then, what’s the harm? It’s enough that his hobby keeps him happy and out of the way.”

“What about Jorge?” she said.

“Jorge can help keep an eye on him,” he said. “Don’t worry, they’ll be fine.”

In the upstairs room a variety of lenses hung from the ceiling in front of each window, and mirrors were placed at various angles to reflect each image. Valdemar’s carefully arranged crystals and prisms sent out brilliant streams of light in all directions, which were captured by more lenses, and more mirrors, creating an effect of numerous rainbows and reflections, blended or superimposed one atop the other. Nothing was fixed but was always being calibrated, adjusted, fine-tuned, as Valdemar worked ever closer toward perfection.

He devised fantastic manifestations that Jorge, in his naïveté, thought were mere tricks Valdemar assembled for no other purpose than his own amusement. Jorge didn’t know—until it was too late—that these so-called tricks were all part of his grandfather’s serious work, which he allowed Jorge the privilege of observing—something he did for no one else.

Valdemar carefully mixed items in a beaker—a drop of sunlight, a moonsoaked bit of a dragonfly’s wing, a baby’s tear—heating things up, rarefying, distilling. Sometimes Jorge’s parents would take Valdemar and Jorge to the Ipswich River or Chebacco Lake, on the weekend, and Valdemar would nearly always bring home a glass jar of some mysterious find that he said would help him in his pursuits.

“How do you know what we need?” Jorge asked. “And where everything is supposed to go?”

“The right things find me,” his grandfather said, “allowing me to discover them when the moment is right. I merely make arrangements according to plans I see when everything else is swept from my mind.”

“What do you mean?”

“It takes many years for memories to return from the beginning of time,” Valdemar said, “where there is the blueprint for the future, for all that is to come.”

One day Jorge entered the realm of the workshop. Instinctively, he gasped and held his breath, as his arms rose and flailed wildly. Valdemar laughed as Jorge struggled to swim. All around him the sea flowed and swirled on each of the walls. Not a print or a painting, but the living sea of swells and whitecaps bursting into foam as they broke upon the rocks.

It was as if the ocean had somehow flooded the room. Jorge spun round and round while the waves crashed. He thought his senses were deceiving him, for not only could he see the ocean but he could also hear the roar of the surf, and smell the sea breeze, while Valdemar stood gazing in pride at his handiwork.

Two days later Jorge entered the room to find the island of Pico in all its immensity: its towering volcano rose majestically inside the room.

“Look, Jorge, the island I left behind.”

Jorge watched a tiny plume of smoke rise from the mountain’s peak, and clouds float in and out of the room like ghostly visitors Valdemar had summoned from some other world.

Of course, Jorge wanted to know how his grandfather did these things. Not only how he made three-dimensional figures appear out of nowhere but made them so that they moved and came and went, as if they were real.

“In time,” Valdemar would say, or, “It’s too soon, Jorge. Have patience.

Understanding will come when you are ready.”

Jorge was particularly happy when Valdemar asked him to help out, to move a prism, or adjust a piece of tubing, a beaker of water, or some other object.

Jorge held a sheet of black cardboard in his hand, as Valdemar adjusted a beam of light.

“Why are there holes in the cardboard, Grandpa?” Jorge asked.

“Take one more half step to the right, Jorge,” Valdemar said. “The holes are there to trick the light, to test how the light will bend.”

“Light can do that?”

“A beam of light can pass through such transformations to become a droplet of the sea, and then again become something solid, like you or me. We’ve traveled here from the farthest reaches of the universe, Jorge. I seek to find and capture this lost light. Who knows if some night when you are asleep you will not return to your former state and become a radiant light once again?”

Jorge repeatedly dreamt of this transformation: He saw himself streaming through space like a streak of golden light. While his grandfather spoke of the sunlight that kissed the flowers, urged them to grow, and magically warmed the ocean, evaporated water, and helped create the atmosphere, Jorge imagined himself as a beam of light kissing Julia da Costa, who lived down the street, warming her cheek with the radiance with which he shone.

Sometimes Valdemar frightened Jorge, as when he entered the room to discover his grandfather standing absolutely still. Is he dead? Jorge wondered. Valdemar didn’t respond or move for many long, torturous moments, turned to stone by concentration and perseverance, until his eyes finally reflected the image of his grandson standing there, looking worried and confused, and he winked and smiled at Jorge, his old self once again.

Another time Jorge entered to find Valdemar playing one continuous note on his viola, bowing steadily and smoothly, the note droning, as if it were liquid pouring from a fresh spring.

Valdemar sometimes trembled and spoke with an excitement that affected Jorge, too, giving them both the feeling they were on the verge of discovery.

“A wave of sound, Jorge, light and sound together, see?”

“Yes, Grandpa,” Jorge said, though he wasn’t sure what Valdemar was talking about. What did light have to do with sound?

“Music is a special element,” Valdemar said. “There are sounds you can feel before you can actually hear them. Perhaps a bridge suspended between waves of light and waves of sound. It’s in the angle of approach, the way you can see a star sometimes out of the corner of your eye, but not when you look straight at it.”

Jorge wrestled with what his grandfather said, trying to conjure an image, to absorb his words in a way that would lead to comprehension.

“Certain objects,” Valdemar continued, “are impossible to see from any but one angle, as when you are in a boat in the trough of a wave, you often can’t see what lies beyond the crest. There are things visible only under a particular shade of light, or a certain hue. A thing can be obscured by its own radiance, or the aura of some other nearer, brighter object, and when one factors in the variable of distance, then suddenly the visible can become invisible or vice versa.”

Jorge gazed up at him, uncomprehending. Maybe his grandfather really was crazy! Valdemar grabbed Jorge by the shoulder and squeezed. “Don’t you see, boy, the point where waves of sound and light converge with time, which itself is a wave, each overlapping, and where together, well, who knows what we may find, eh?”

The next day Jorge came home to find Valdemar upstairs laughing with Jorge’s grandmother, Maria Aurora, who had died soon after Jorge was born. Her photograph hung upon the wall, beside his grandfather’s bed, and Jorge recognized her at once.

He was neither surprised nor afraid.

Jorge wondered if she would speak, but apparently she either couldn’t or felt no need to; for Maria Aurora and Valdemar sat for several hours together, sharing their own past without the use of words.

After that, his grandmother began to visit regularly, always gazing at Jorge in a way that felt close, like the comforting patter of rain, or the muffled roar of the surf, and yet at the same time remote—a separateness traversed by the glow of affection and love that had come across vast distances to reach him.

Life went its usual course downstairs: minor crises concerning the grocery store arose and were resolved; visitors came and went amid the constant bustle of family life. Through it all Valdemar spent most of his time upstairs, conceiving ever more complex designs, in a maze of glass, screens, and tubes. When he did leave the house, it was only to find a book or a mirror, a lens, a clamp, or other odds and ends with which he conducted his desperate search. Jorge would walk beside his grandfather down to the hardware store or the post office. The boys Jorge knew from school played games with other boys their own age. But Jorge sensed his own difference, his separateness from the other boys. He was drawn to his grandfather, who referred to himself as a man shipwrecked in a strange land.

“You and me, we’re castaways, eh Jorge?” Valdemar would say.

Jorge would laugh and play along with the game. “Yes, Grandpa.”

Valdemar would proudly state that he was a man from another time, someone born in the wrong century, pointing out that the modern world, the ordinary, run-of-the mill world, was something alien and strange to him.

“I’m like a bird on the moon,” he’d say. “I have wings, but I lack the proper atmosphere for draft and lift; I cannot fly.”

He lived for another time, another place. “People no longer believe in magic,” he said. “They’ve forgotten to see the simple things for the miracles that they are; instead, they look for machines to do everything for them, forgetting that the magic is all around them and inside them as well.”

Valdemar was a man made for candlelight and mysteries, with an innate, unfailing awe for the universe around him: the miracle of a sunset, a bird’s flight, the sound of a baby’s laughter, the wonder of water, his excitement for life, in all its munificence. Jorge didn’t know anyone else who could sit and stare, completely enthralled by a puddle of water, the way his grandfather often did.

They went fishing and Valdemar would sit watching the waves unfurl, as if each were a word, a whisper, a tantalizing secret that had traversed the globe, seeking to deliver their message to his ears.

They cast their lines into the water, and while Jorge watched his line disappear into the water, Valdemar peered at the horizon, pointing, “There, Jorge, across all this ocean is home, the islands I left behind, and yet, have never left.”

He told Jorge about the legends of Atlantis. “The nine islands,” he said, “are the tips of great mountains, all that remain of that lost continent. Sometimes there are terrific eruptions in the ocean—fire, steam, boiling seawater, and molten rock, which cools and becomes part of the islands. Perhaps, eventually, Atlantis will rise again.”

Jorge watched his grandfather but unlike the rest of the family, who saw only an eccentric old man, Jorge saw the past, alive and present; Valdemar’s luxuriant green islands, surrounded by the blue sea; and the fires of hope and love in his sparkling eyes, which never seemed dull or lifeless like those of so many of the old people Jorge saw.

“We two are explorers, Jorge,” Valdemar would say. “Like Pedro de Barcelos and João Fernandes Lavrador, and the others who left the Azores to search for Antília or The Island of Seven Cities. We too are searching for what others no longer believe in.”

“I wish we could go to the Azores together, Grandpa,” Jorge said. His parents, he knew, had no desire to return. They never spoke of the islands, as if they’d forgotten their past. Jorge had never been there. All he knew of the Azores was from what Valdemar told him.

Valdemar continued his experiments. He became excited when he read an article about newly discovered gravity waves.

“Yes, you see, Jorge, even gravity operates with waves,” he exclaimed, reading from an article he’d found. “The whole universe is a sea of waves and currents, rippling, folding, unfolding.” Jorge nodded, not that he fully understood, but Valdemar’s enthusiasm and excitement were contagious. “The sea of humanity, too, perhaps, unconsciously operates on the principles of a living wave moving through time and space.”

Valdemar had Jorge read to him from books about black holes and parallel universes. He also kept up with the latest experiments and discoveries in physics and astronomy, by having friends in Portugal mail him magazine articles. Yet he preferred to explore with his own hands, examining all the facets of a single grain of sand, as if it were the most exquisite jewel, subjecting it to every type of inquiry imaginable. And, after fitting a tiny diamond chip into the eye of a needle, used to sew sails, and focusing a beam of light on it, he said: “Imagine passing through this glass eye of a needle yourself. Where do you suppose you would end up?”

Jorge shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“That is what we will discover, Jorge,” Valdemar said. “The two principal forces in the universe, Jorge, energy and inertia, life and death—which is the stronger? The force of attraction? The universe may be expanding outward, but perhaps only to reach a point where once again everything converges and becomes one again, like an inverted funnel, the lip spreading out, then folding back on itself, where the past will meet the future.

“Using the science of captured starlight, which has traveled through the vast ether of space, bringing with it the rarefied air of heaven through which it has passed, I will summon the beauteous apparition of the eyes of the lovely Maria de Conceição de Freitas, reflected in a pool of crystal water.”

Several days later, Jorge came home and discovered his grandfather dancing with none other than Maria da Conceição de Freitas, a woman who had died some sixty years earlier, and Valdemar’s sweetheart from the days of his youth, long before he and Jorge’s grandmother had met.

Valdemar turned to Jorge as they danced, and winked. He moved like a man half his age.

~ ~ ~

How his grandfather managed to disappear through the glass eye in the needle, Jorge couldn’t explain. Yet, he had no doubt that was what Valdemar had done.

It was June 10, the Day of Portugal and Jorge’s thirteenth birthday.

They’d had a small party downstairs. Jorge’s parents bought him a new bicycle, but it was Valdemar’s gifts that interested him the most: an origami book with fine-colored papers, a book on performing magic tricks—“It will do you good to learn sleight-of-hand,” Valdemar said—and Valdemar’s viola. “I want you to have this, to learn to play. Music expands forever, so what you play now will ring from one end of the planet to the other.”

There was still one more gift to open. Jorge’s parents protested. “Haven’t you given him enough,” Jorge’s father said.

Valdemar shook his head. “Go on, open it,” he said.

Jorge unwrapped the long box, and opening it, saw the telescope. There was a folded tripod, too.

“That must have cost a fortune,” Jorge’s mother said.

“He will need it,” Valdemar said.

Jorge didn’t understand, but was thrilled with the telescope.

“I can’t wait to look through it,” he said, rushing over to give his grandfather a hug.

“First, why don’t you make me something with your origami paper?” Valdemar said.

He watched Jorge expertly fold the bright golden paper into the shape of a three-dimensional star. It was easy for Jorge, who had already gone through several books on the subject and made numerous animals and geometric shapes.

As Jorge finished making the star, however, Valdemar suddenly leaped to his feet. “Of course, folding, that’s it,” he muttered, “How could I have forgotten?” He quickly made his way up the stairs.

Later, Valdemar helped Jorge set up the telescope. The two of them peered at the seas of the moon. “Maria they are called in Latin. Mare is just one,” Valdemar explained.

Before going to bed, Jorge entered the workroom. His grandfather was adjusting several lenses and tubes in front of the glass eye of the needle.

“Remember everything I’ve told you,” Valdemar said. “In the end, after all my searching, it was you who gave me the answer.”

“What did I do?” Jorge said.

“Your origami star,” Valdemar said. “It gave me the idea of folding space and light. That was what I needed to know.”

When Valdemar stepped into the center of the room, something happened. Jorge watched in amazement. He could see through his grandfather. Jorge stepped forward. Valdemar’s hand rose, palm out as if to stop him. He mouthed the word “good-bye,” and then appeared to slip into the beam of light focused on the tiny chip of diamond embedded in the needle’s eye.

He was gone. Jorge ran to the needle. He grasped the magnifying lens, and studied the glass. He thought he saw a tiny movement, but then there was nothing, only the light.

At first, Jorge was happy, thrilled that Valdemar had finally accomplished the difficult feat which had eluded him for so long. He knew that Valdemar had planned everything out. After all, Valdemar had spoken of projections, reflections, and space-time jumps for so many years that Jorge thought nothing of it, as if Valdemar were merely talking about taking a stroll down to the park. By the next morning, however, Jorge realized that Valdemar was gone for good, and he wouldn’t be coming back.

Valdemar’s family phoned the police. A frantic search was made. News reports described him as helpless and sickly—neither of which was true. They made him out to be a tottering, frail man who had wandered off and forgotten where he was, who he was.

People sent flyers with his picture in a thousand directions, and television reports requested anyone who saw him to call the 800 number listed. Jorge knew it was useless, they wouldn’t find him. The police investigation turned up nothing. No trace of him was found. Of course, no one cared to listen to Jorge when he tried to explain where Valdemar had gone. As far as they were concerned, he was simply a missing person, whereabouts unknown.

After several months they gave up. The family assumed he had slipped into the sea and washed away. They could imagine no other possibility for how a full-grown man could disappear. But Jorge could.

His grandfather was where he wanted to be. Valdemar had succeeded in projecting himself into the very place he sought. And who could say that by so doing he hadn’t slightly, perhaps imperceptibly, altered our world—in essence opening the doorway a chink, creating a pathway through which others might conceivably follow?

Jorge continued to arrange the lenses, attempting to make a projection in the same way that Valdemar had used them to summon Jorge’s grandmother whenever he wished to speak with her.

Sometimes, as he peered through the telescope, Jorge would see what he thought was a glimpse, a passing wisp, streaking across the night sky like a shooting star. Or he’d find a nebulous light, flaring or pulsing as if winking, communicating to some other region or far-off being, where there had only been dark, empty space before. He waved wildly, sure that Valdemar was able to see him.

Jorge hoped that, given enough time and patience, he might eventually find his way there, too; where, in another time and place, the elements would reform and perhaps the light grandfather had become would form into matter once again—a new star illuminating a distant, silent corner of space. And perhaps by then Jorge would be transformed as well: a newly formed comet or planet revolving around a bright new star.

Valdemar had found what he had been looking for, what he strove for so long to find: a way to that special realm, that place in space and time where he belonged, where there are no limits or restrictions, where past and future converged, just as he had said.

The old conjurer, even now, was probably recapturing lost moments, perhaps reciting a poem in the arms of Jorge’s grandmother, if not with his beloved, Maria da Conceição de Freitas. For in Valdemar’s universe there was room and love enough for both.