By PATRICK CABELLO HANSEL
Your author has asked you to suspend disbelief on more than one occasion. That a multi-million dollar criminal enterprise disguised as a non-profit can be hidden in plain site in the part of East Phillips once known as “the swale.” That a 4-year-old could expertly call 911 and communicate exact details. That tunnels and passageways can appear out of nowhere.
But feature this: we are asked to suspend disbelief all the time. Or maybe it’s suspend belief (which it our crazy world, can amount to the same thing). We are asked to believe that there is liberty and justice for all, that anyone can become President, that if you just work hard enough, you can do anything, that it’s just a few “bad apples” that spoil (take your pick: the police, the NFL, the entertainment industry), that the Vikings will win the Super Bowl if they just get the right: coach, GM, quarterback, kicker.
So why should it surprise you that our blessed little family, under the threat of an evil man’s gun travelled not only through space but through time, ending up in the swale, the same place in space, but a different place in time: the 1870s, when the mystery surrounding Mateo Kelly Hidalgo began. *
The beginning of Mateo Kelly Hidalgo was certain: son of Guadalupe Hidalgo and Matthew Kelly, born ten minutes after his brother Marcos in 1868. His father was an Irish patriot who fled the Potato Famine in the 1840s and fought in the U.S. Army in the Mexican War. Until he saw the cruelty and imperialism of his adopted country, when he switched sides and joined the San Patricios, Irishmen who fought for Mexico. His mother, Guadalupe, could trace her lineage back to the Golden Age of Andalucía, before the Reconquista under Ferdinand and Isabella/ Luz and Angel were both descended from Guadalupe’s sons, but whether it was Marcos or Mateo, no one knew.
The end of Mateo Kelly Hidalgo remains clouded in mystery. Some say that he was kidnapped by Guadalupe’s family and raised in Mexico. Some say he died of typhus or cholera when it ravages the swale. And more than a few have written about a young boy named Mateo, who was murdered, and whose spirit roamed the swale for years and years later.
So how did our precious family and Brian Fleming, their captor get to the 1870s? By a tesseract, of course! A tesseract is a four dimensional cube, first used in 1888 by Charles Howard Hinton. A regular cube has three dimensions: height, length, breadth. A tesseract adds the fourth: time. Made famous by Madeline L’Engle in “A Wrinkle in Time.” People travel through time and space via a tesseract, where time and space bend. Don’t believe me? Ask Einstein about it,
So now we have our protagonists and villain in the 1870s. Will we find out what happens to them and their search for their missing daughter Lupita? Stay tuned.
* For more information on Mateo Kelly Hidalgo, readers may wish to consult the first novella in this series “Searching, especially chapters 9-24. If after doing that, you remain confused, well welcome to the club!
