So I was in the Sovereign Center to see a boxing match a few weeks ago. I had never been there before, and found the place oddly disorienting as I tried to take in all the various food stands selling quesediallas, the women hawking programs by the escalators, and small groups of ticket holders milling about the promenade. With five minutes to spare before the first match, I wandered casually into the bathroom, vaguely aware that someone was shouting at me and waving me down as I walked through the entrance. I almost turned around to find out what they were shouting about but I didn’t. Strangers were always shouting weird things at me in public and I was getting tired of it. So I went into a stall and took care of business.
Afterwards, when I made my way to the sinks to wash my hands, a heavyset middle-aged woman with the same fashion sense as Raggedy Ann came out of a nearby stall.
“Oh, the cleaning woman is here,” I thought, and reflected on the fact that I’m never totally comfortable when the cleaning woman is in the men’s room when I am.
Then she said, “Uh-oh. A man.”
There was an awkward pause.
“Am I in the woman’s room?” I asked.
“You sure are,” she said.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I thought this was the men’s room.”
“I figured,” she said.
I went outside and found my fiancé, Stacey, waiting for me. “I just walked into the women’s room,” I told her.
“I thought I saw you headed the wrong way,” she said. “I can’t leave you alone for a second.”
(By the way, I think Stacey looks like Robin Tunney, from Prison Break and The Craft. She disagrees. But this is my blog, so...)
Of course, this was not the first time I accidentally wandered into the women’s room. A couple of years ago, I made the same mistake in a multiplex. I had noticed, over the years, that most movie theaters give their two, gendered bathrooms one large, fancy entranceway with the men’s rooms down a passage that curves off to the right and women’s rooms in the one that curves to the left. When I was in the middle of watching the movie The Human Stain, I started feeling the effects of the enormous Cherry Coke I had gulped down over the past half hour. I didn’t want to miss too much of the film, so I jogged out of the theater, down the hall to the grand bathroom entranceway, and instinctively hooked a right. My immediate reaction was anger and confusion. “God damn it!” I cursed aloud to myself. “Where the hell are the urinals? What the hell kind of men’s room is this, anyway? Stupid movie theater.”
On my way out I had an intuition that I had just made a mistake and double checked the signs on the doors. That was when I knew that some wise guy architect had broken with convention and put the women’s room on the right and the men’s room on the left. Just to mess with me. Good thing there was nobody in there with me that time.
Of course, even when I’m in the right bathroom, I have to admit, it is never a place I enjoy going. I don’t mind my own bathroom so much, but I’m never comfortable using a friend’s bathroom, whether it is a teeny little watercloset tucked under a staircase, or one of those beautiful, hotel-like affairs, complete with a hot tub and novelty seashell shaped soap. And I certainly don’t like public bathrooms. There’s always something wrong. Missing paper towels. No soap. Annoying graffiti. Huge scary guys who glared at you as you approach your destination, asking you with their eyes why you’ve wandered into their bathroom.
I remember one of my college dorms, Monroe Hall had a spotless bathroom. At least, it was spotless for about an hour after the cleaning staff gave it the once over. Then every guy on the floor would shave, and the sinks would be filled with thick clots of facial hair that only the brave would try to rinse down the sink or clean off with a tissue. On Sunday mornings, it was not uncommon to find vomit in the bathtub, another stall door leaning from its hinges, and on one occasion, half of the ceramic sink broken away. How someone was able to break a sink in half, even in a drunken rage, is still a mystery to me. Maybe the Incredible Hulk got drunk and used my dorm’s men’s room.
“Hulk hates stupid ceramic sink!”
Luckily, the newspaper I used to work for, The Richmond County Excelsior, had a pretty good men’s room. It was functional, and every once in a while some men would hang out in there to talk about things they didn’t want the boss overhearing. It was only ever annoying when I’m washing my face to freshen up and one of the other reporters comes in to say something snarky about my last article, like, “So, looks like you misspelled Wayne Chrebet’s name yesterday. How’d you manage that one?”
Of course, rumor had it that, as nice as the men’s room was, the women’s room was much better. Apparently, in addition to the bathroom proper, they even had a connecting room with a carpet, a make-up mirror, and a couch. None of the men had seen it, and sometimes we had wished, in our most tired moments working under deadline, for a couch to take a power nap on. Sometimes we’d even complain amongst ourselves that we didn’t get a couch for our bathroom. On one such occasion, I was brave enough to complain to a female colleague. I said, “I’m jealous. Why do the women get a couch and we don’t?”
She replied, “I tell you what, when men get menstrual cramps, they can get a couch to relax on, too.”
“Oh,” I said. “I guess you can keep the couch.”
I’ve used good bathrooms in my time and bad bathrooms. The College of St. Nicholas (where I teach) has its share of both. I’ve really taken to the men’s rooms in the New Science Wing. It is nice and sparkly and pretty. But the one on the upper floor of St. Nicholas Hall that obviously used to be a women’s room because it has no urinals – that one is really the pits. I’ve also had harrowing experiences in St. Nicholas' sharing a bathroom with a former student who I gave a C to the previous semester. But these are all minor quibbles. My greatest bathroom misfortune was the fact that toilet bowls cost me a cherished childhood friendship.
When I was in the fifth grade, I knew a quirky guy named Hans who was an expert at making huge castles and cities out of Lego. He was a child genius, destined to be an architect, but he had bad body odor and was very sloppy. He tended to chew on his pens and they’d explode in his mouth and get ink all over his face and clothes. I thought he was really cool and he didn’t have a lot of friends, so I invited him to hang out at my house. I had an early home computer called the PC junior and we played some first generation adventure games on it, like King’s Quest and The Ancient Art of War. But he kept wandering off from the computer game to walk two rooms down the hall to use my bathroom. He must have used the bathroom six times in one hour. Then he returned to the game we were playing and we really got in groove. We were really absorbed in it.
Then my father came downstairs and said, “What the hell is this?”
Hans and I followed his gaze and we saw rivers of water pouring down the hallway. Hans had overstuffed the toilet and overflowed it. Water had been gushing over the rim of the toilet in a torrent for the ten minutes since Hans' last trip to the bathroom and the whole basement was flooded with an inch of water. And it was carpeted.
After Hans went home, my father took me aside and said, “Please don’t invite him over here any more.”
Not long afterwards, Hans invited me over his house for a sleepover. It was my first sleepover, and it was a lot of fun, and Hans and I stayed up all night talking about nonsense with our friends Mitch and Robert. The next morning, I was awake and wondering if I’d had any real sleep at all. Everyone else was out light a light. Groggy, I woke up, rubbed the sleep mucus from my eyes, and stumbled into the hallway, where Hans had said his bathroom was.
I opened the door and was about to walk in when I stopped dead in my tracks.
Hans' dad was in the bathroom, stark naked, with his left foot up on the sink as he was cutting his toe nails. Since his legs were spread wide apart, it was difficult for my eyes to avoid staring straight ahead at his dangling bait and tackle. I took several steps back.
The normally calm, glasses-wearing intellectual looked annoyed. “Bathroom doors are closed for a reason,” he said in an even voice.
They’re usually locked for a reason, too, I thought, but was too scared to say anything.
Hans' dad casually closed the door in my face. I went back to bed, still needing to go to the bathroom, but too scared to explore the other restrooms in the household. I never told Hans I saw his father naked, and his dad didn’t mention anything about the incident at the very tense breakfast which followed.
While I cannot prove it, I wouldn’t be surprised if Hans' dad took his son aside, shortly thereafter, and said, “Please don’t invite Marc over here any more.”
Whether or not this really happened, I never went over Hans' house again and he never went over mine. And a potentially golden friendship was flushed down the toilet.
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Men with Guns
Mr. Dennis Cavanaugh finished cleaning the .44 Magnum and placed the rag on the workbench beside him. “So you’ve never fired a gun before, Marc?”
There was no judgment in the question, but enough traces of the bewilderment for me to wonder if it was rare for a 20-year-old male in the rural parts of upstate New York to have no experience whatsoever with firearms. I had handled toy guns in stores, and had gotten pretty good at firing off laser volleys at the gangsters in Hogan’s Alley on my Nintendo Entertainment System during my junior high school years, but I had never actually touched a real rifle or handgun. “No,” I replied honestly.
A shade less than six feet tall, I had short brown hair that I combed back over my head, slightly arched eyebrows, and deep brown eyes. My gold, wire-rimmed glasses and goatee added at least three years to my face, often causing people to forget that I was under the legal drinking age. A third-year college student at the time, I stood with Mr. Cavanaugh in the basement of the Cavanaugh home. Displayed on the walls and shelves around me were an assortment of rifles, handguns, and bows and arrows used for both target practice and hunting game. All told, it was an impressive collection of weapons – the kind of collection I might have grown up with had my dad been an outdoorsman, too.
Mr. Cavanaugh still had a muted concern in his eyes. “Mrs. Cavanugh wanted me to make sure your mother said it was okay that we take you out shooting.”
I smiled cheerfully. “I didn’t tell her.”
Mr. Cavanaugh raised his eyebrows. “You didn’t?”
“If I told her, she’d just get worried and tell me not to do it,” I said. “I figure I’ll do it, I’ll survive, and then I’ll tell her all about it when I get back to campus. This way, I can do what I want, not worry her, and still not keep it a secret for long.”
Mr. Cavanaugh massaged his jaw thoughtfully. “I just don’t want her to think that your friend’s parents are a bunch of crazy hicks that have nothing better to do than take her son out shooting.”
“She’d never think that,” I said, trying to convince myself of this as much as my host.
Cavanaugh gave me an easy smile. “Okay, then. It sounds like we should have a quick safety lesson before we go out.” The older gentleman held the gun aloft, facing its barrel away from me (and himself), and pointing it towards the basement wall. “Never point the gun at anything you aren’t going to shoot at.” He paused to make sure that I heard and understood the rule. He saw my nod, and continued. “It’s not a toy. You’ve been trained to think of it as a toy, but it’s a weapon. Never play with it or point it at a human.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“Also, remember that every gun is loaded.”
I looked up at Mr. Cavanaugh. “You mean never assume it’s unloaded?”
“I mean every gun is loaded,” the man repeated, speaking with a calm deliberateness. “Even if it isn’t loaded, it’s loaded. If you start thinking a gun is empty, you get careless. You start pointing at things you shouldn’t. Better to assume it’s always loaded. Every gun is loaded.”
“I understand.”
Cavanaugh rested the gun gently on my palm. It weighed more than the gray plastic arcade guns I was used to carrying, but it was no heavier than I expected. The feel of the metal against my skin wasn’t cold or clammy, as such contact was often described in books I had read. Instead, it felt alive; it felt alien. It possessed a power that I was only then fully realizing, and it filled me with fearful awe. I now had the power, through either incompetence or insane whim, to take a person’s life, and I was briefly terrified of that power. The sense of distrust, of myself and of a lifeless object, had been the same three years ago when I first got behind the wheel of a car and realized how easy a thing it would be to run someone over. But I had learned to drive responsibly and I was sure I would learn how to handle weapons at a shooting range with just as much maturity.
Sean Cavanaugh appeared in the doorway just in time to see me looking down on the weapon with barely concealed reverence. “Wicked, huh?”
I smiled slightly, wanting to show enthusiasm for the gun to Sean without appearing too frivolous in front of Sean’s father. “Yes.”
Slightly shorter than me, Sean was nevertheless more impressive because his body was muscular and well-tanned, making mine seem almost soft and undefined in comparison. We had been college roommates in the State University of New York at Honeychurch Falls for the past two years. The rural college, Binghampton’s chief rival for the title of best state institution in New York, had the advantage of being small and competitive, and it also had a student body that was sixty-percent female. Since the campus atmosphere was so agreeable, and since I lived more than six hours away from home, we rarely left campus for long. This visit to Sean’s house came at a time close to finals when we were in desperate need of a break from studying and from the processed chicken that the dining hall cooks served five times daily.
“I see you showed him Dirty Harry’s gun first, dad,” Sean said. “That’s the one Marc was the most excited about using.”
I handed the weapon back to Mr. Cavanaugh. “Clint Eastwood rules.”
“Well, now you can be Clint for a day,” said Sean. “Just don’t try firing it one-handed like he does in the films. It’s not really done that way. You’ll hurt your wrist.”
“That’s right,” agreed Sean’s father. “These things have a hell of a kick. If you’re not ready for it, it’ll blow you right over.”
I was disappointed. One of the main reasons I was excited about visiting my roommate’s family again that weekend was for the opportunity to finally fire off a real gun. And one of the things I had looked forward to more than anything was firing Dirty Harry’s gun the way that Dirty Harry fired it – one-handed. “Okay,” I said at last.
It took less than a half an hour for the us to gear up and say goodbye to Mrs. Cavanaugh – who entreated me to be careful – before heading out to the shooting range. Mr. Cavanaugh drove us just outside of town, heading in the direction of lands owned by Matt Turow, a close family friend who had always made the Cavanaughs feel welcome to use the range on his property. As we drove, Sean gave me a tour of Strawberry Town from the car. The town, which rested just south of Buffalo, was one of the most rural that I had ever seen, but had a peaceful beauty that made me wish I lived in a place like it. I was (and am) a terrible judge of population, but I would have been surprised if more than about five thousand people lived in the area, which was best known outside its limits for its annual strawberry festival. As we drove past a particularly woodsy area, one house struck me as looking particularly modern, and it seemed as if an area of woods had recently been cleared to make room for it.
“See that yellow house?” Sean pointed. “Downstaters from Queens. They came up here three years ago because they were tired of the nose and the rudeness of the city. They wanted to get away from it all.”
“That’s why I went to school in Honeychurch Falls,” I said. “I wanted to get away from the coarse New York personality.”
“Yeah, but when you moved upstate, you didn’t bring the coarse New York personality with you,” Sean said. “These people did. They thought they could cure themselves of being overworked and bitter by coming out here, but they brought their problems with them. We tried to make them welcome, but they just wanted to be left alone.”
“They didn’t realize it, but they were the first to start transforming their little haven into the kind of unfriendly city they had just left,” Sean’s father observed.
“Since then, more trees have been knocked down to make room for even more bitter city refugees,” said Sean. “They’re spreading like a bad cancer.”
“Luckily, there’s still so much untouched land up here,” I observed.
Sean turned away from the car window. “How long will that last? Ten years? Twenty? The forestland we drove by on the way here used to be open for the public. When I was a kid, I used to go for nature walks on it. But now fences have been put up and nobody’s allowed to walk or hunt on the land. I don’t know who owns it, only that more and more land is being lost to this enclosure crap. And each time I come home from college on a visit the town looks different than before.”
“Well,” began Mr. Cavanaugh, “we’re friends with a lot of land owners in the area, like Matt Turow, who are good people. As long as people like Matt are around, who have some sense of community, we don’t have to worry about being booted out of nature.” As if one cue, Cavanaugh pulled the car into a short dirt road that led up to a small, two-story house. “And here we are,” he said, rolling the car to a halt beside the house and putting it in park.
Getting out of the car, Mr. Cavanaugh unpacked the weapons and the supply bag from the trunk and led the two young men past the house to the grounds behind it. Turow was home, barely awake, sitting on a rocking chair on the porch as we walked past. He was a craggy faced fellow in a T-shirt and baseball cap. “Hi, Cavanaughs.”
“We’re just taking Marc here shooting,” Mr. Cavanaugh said. “It’s his first time.”
“His first time?” Turow repeated with tired incredulity. “Where’d he grow up, a septic tank?”
Sean chuckled, his dad looked embarrassed for me, and I reddened with anger. I must admit, that remark didn’t win me over to Mr. Turow.
“He’s a great young man,” Mr. Cavanaugh replied. “We’ll see you later.”
And we moved on to the target range.
The dirt path sloped gradually down until the we found ourselves in an open field. While the trees and bushes surrounding the field were still brown and dead from winter, the grass was bright green and wet from rainfall earlier in the morning. The range itself was a row of three bull’s-eye targets hung from a wooden frame at the base of the incline.
“That’s the safest place for a range, because all bullets that miss or pass through the target will hit the side of the hill,” Sean explained. “If the range had been placed in front of the woods instead, bullets could go wildly through the trees and hit anyone who could be walking there. No one is supposed to be wandering around there, but you have to play it safe.”
We had brought three guns with them that day – a 7.62 millimeter Russian SKS Assault Rifle, a Remington model 870 12-gauge shotgun, and a Smith and Wesson .44 Magnum. We were all wearing what reminded me of giant red earmuffs made of plastic to protect our eardrums from the sounds of the gunfire.
Sean’s father went first, positioning himself fifteen years from the target and resting their supply bag to the side. He loaded the SKS, which looked a lot like the AK-47s with the curved clips used by terrorists in action movies, and braced it between his breast and shoulder bones. He aimed at the target that was left of center and fired off one round, which blasted a hole through the dead center of the target. After pulling the trigger twice more and landing both shots near the bull’s-eye, he handed off the rifle to me.
“Here you go.” Mr. Cavanaugh pointed to the part of his chest against which he had braced the weapon. “Place the butt here, not against your shoulder or you’ll hurt yourself.”
I did so. Then I aimed the gun just as if I were playing a shoot-‘em-up video game. Once I felt I had the target in sight, I pulled the trigger. Chunks of the target exploded into the air as the bullets struck its surface. Though it was now hard to tell which holes were mine and which were Mr. Cavanaugh’s, they were all clustered around the bull’s-eye. I almost yelled out in excitement, but stopped myself, not wanting Mr. Cavanaugh to think I was going to get too charged up to remember the safety lecture. Mr. Cavanaugh nodded. There was an expression of subdued surprised on his face. “Very good, Marc. That was your first shot ever, huh?”
“Yes.” That rocked, I thought.
I then stood back and allowed Sean to take a turn. I watched my roommate pose like one of the little green army man toys that came in the plastic bag of fifty for 99 cents, with legs spread, weapon centered on target and eye set level with the rifle. Though his face looked tight set and grim, he was clearly enjoying himself just as much as I had during my turn at the target as he shot round after round into the bull’s-eye. Once Sean spent his ammo, we moved on to the shotgun.
As I accepted the new weapon from Mr. Cavanaugh, I accidentally let the facedown barrel brush against the wet lawn. Sean and his father offered simultaneous protests that the end of the weapon was getting grass and rainwater on it. Embarrassed that I had gotten he gun dirty, I impulsively lifted the barrel and brushed the blades of grass off of it with my fingers. Sean and his father both flinched and winced in horror.
I jerked my hand away from the barrel. “What?”
“Never do that,” said Sean.
“It’s unloaded, isn’t it? The safety is on?”
“It’s loaded,” said Sean’s father, “and the safety is off.”
“Oh,” I murmured, realizing it has taken me less than an hour to ignore the safety instructions I had been given. I flexed my fingers before my eyes slowly and deliberately, silently thanking God that they had not been blasted off into the woods due to my carelessness.
Mr. Cavanaugh looked concerned for several moments, weighing what to say. He thought he had already said it all, to no avail. Still, seeing the muted fear in my face convinced him that the almost catastrophic mistake had mad its own impression on me. “Okay, you can shoot now,” was all Mr. Cavanaugh said.
I regained my composure quickly and raised the shotgun. When I pulled the trigger, I felt the weapon jump up more than I expected, but I retained my grip. When I lowered the gun, I saw a hole the size of a tennis ball drilled through the outside rim of the target, far away from the bull’s-eye.
“Damn,” I said. I steadied myself and fired again. This time, the slug blasted through the target, grazing the red center and knocking out the large chunk of yellow. “Ah,” I smiled.
The shotgun was reloaded and passed around two more times before we moved on to the final weapon. Smiling, Sean raised aloft the handgun. “Dirty Harry time.”
I took the gun in the proper manner and aimed it at a fresh target. I was tempted to try it one-handed right away, but my last experience disobeying the safety lecture was fresh in my mind. With two hands on the gun, I pulled the trigger. The barrel kicked up as if it had just spat out a cannonball. (Well … not really. But it was a hefty kick.) The jolt did nothing to sprain my wrists, but it was enough of a shock that it sent the bullet too high and too far to the left to hit the bull’s-eye.
Handguns are generally less accurate than rifles,” Sean reassured. “Especially this one.”
“Hmmm.” I tried it again, two-handed. The shot was still high and wide, but not as bad. Then I made a decision. I slowly released my left hand from the gun and aimed the weapon with his right hand only, waiting for sounds of complaint from his hosts. No protests came – only an admonishment from the other men to beware of the sudden kick. I pulled the trigger. The gun bucked under my grip like a wild horse trying to throw its mount, but I maintained a strong hold on the barrel. The shot went high and to the left.
I smiled. “That was cool.”
And it was.
I’ll always remember the feel of firing Dirty Harry’s gun just like Clint Eastwood, and I’ll always remember the enormous fun it was.
And, on the flip side, every few months I’ll look at my fingers during a moment of quiet self awareness and be thankful that I didn’t accidentally blow them off while wiping the grass off of the barrel of the rifle.
Yikes!
There was no judgment in the question, but enough traces of the bewilderment for me to wonder if it was rare for a 20-year-old male in the rural parts of upstate New York to have no experience whatsoever with firearms. I had handled toy guns in stores, and had gotten pretty good at firing off laser volleys at the gangsters in Hogan’s Alley on my Nintendo Entertainment System during my junior high school years, but I had never actually touched a real rifle or handgun. “No,” I replied honestly.
A shade less than six feet tall, I had short brown hair that I combed back over my head, slightly arched eyebrows, and deep brown eyes. My gold, wire-rimmed glasses and goatee added at least three years to my face, often causing people to forget that I was under the legal drinking age. A third-year college student at the time, I stood with Mr. Cavanaugh in the basement of the Cavanaugh home. Displayed on the walls and shelves around me were an assortment of rifles, handguns, and bows and arrows used for both target practice and hunting game. All told, it was an impressive collection of weapons – the kind of collection I might have grown up with had my dad been an outdoorsman, too.
Mr. Cavanaugh still had a muted concern in his eyes. “Mrs. Cavanugh wanted me to make sure your mother said it was okay that we take you out shooting.”
I smiled cheerfully. “I didn’t tell her.”
Mr. Cavanaugh raised his eyebrows. “You didn’t?”
“If I told her, she’d just get worried and tell me not to do it,” I said. “I figure I’ll do it, I’ll survive, and then I’ll tell her all about it when I get back to campus. This way, I can do what I want, not worry her, and still not keep it a secret for long.”
Mr. Cavanaugh massaged his jaw thoughtfully. “I just don’t want her to think that your friend’s parents are a bunch of crazy hicks that have nothing better to do than take her son out shooting.”
“She’d never think that,” I said, trying to convince myself of this as much as my host.
Cavanaugh gave me an easy smile. “Okay, then. It sounds like we should have a quick safety lesson before we go out.” The older gentleman held the gun aloft, facing its barrel away from me (and himself), and pointing it towards the basement wall. “Never point the gun at anything you aren’t going to shoot at.” He paused to make sure that I heard and understood the rule. He saw my nod, and continued. “It’s not a toy. You’ve been trained to think of it as a toy, but it’s a weapon. Never play with it or point it at a human.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“Also, remember that every gun is loaded.”
I looked up at Mr. Cavanaugh. “You mean never assume it’s unloaded?”
“I mean every gun is loaded,” the man repeated, speaking with a calm deliberateness. “Even if it isn’t loaded, it’s loaded. If you start thinking a gun is empty, you get careless. You start pointing at things you shouldn’t. Better to assume it’s always loaded. Every gun is loaded.”
“I understand.”
Cavanaugh rested the gun gently on my palm. It weighed more than the gray plastic arcade guns I was used to carrying, but it was no heavier than I expected. The feel of the metal against my skin wasn’t cold or clammy, as such contact was often described in books I had read. Instead, it felt alive; it felt alien. It possessed a power that I was only then fully realizing, and it filled me with fearful awe. I now had the power, through either incompetence or insane whim, to take a person’s life, and I was briefly terrified of that power. The sense of distrust, of myself and of a lifeless object, had been the same three years ago when I first got behind the wheel of a car and realized how easy a thing it would be to run someone over. But I had learned to drive responsibly and I was sure I would learn how to handle weapons at a shooting range with just as much maturity.
Sean Cavanaugh appeared in the doorway just in time to see me looking down on the weapon with barely concealed reverence. “Wicked, huh?”
I smiled slightly, wanting to show enthusiasm for the gun to Sean without appearing too frivolous in front of Sean’s father. “Yes.”
Slightly shorter than me, Sean was nevertheless more impressive because his body was muscular and well-tanned, making mine seem almost soft and undefined in comparison. We had been college roommates in the State University of New York at Honeychurch Falls for the past two years. The rural college, Binghampton’s chief rival for the title of best state institution in New York, had the advantage of being small and competitive, and it also had a student body that was sixty-percent female. Since the campus atmosphere was so agreeable, and since I lived more than six hours away from home, we rarely left campus for long. This visit to Sean’s house came at a time close to finals when we were in desperate need of a break from studying and from the processed chicken that the dining hall cooks served five times daily.
“I see you showed him Dirty Harry’s gun first, dad,” Sean said. “That’s the one Marc was the most excited about using.”
I handed the weapon back to Mr. Cavanaugh. “Clint Eastwood rules.”
“Well, now you can be Clint for a day,” said Sean. “Just don’t try firing it one-handed like he does in the films. It’s not really done that way. You’ll hurt your wrist.”
“That’s right,” agreed Sean’s father. “These things have a hell of a kick. If you’re not ready for it, it’ll blow you right over.”
I was disappointed. One of the main reasons I was excited about visiting my roommate’s family again that weekend was for the opportunity to finally fire off a real gun. And one of the things I had looked forward to more than anything was firing Dirty Harry’s gun the way that Dirty Harry fired it – one-handed. “Okay,” I said at last.
It took less than a half an hour for the us to gear up and say goodbye to Mrs. Cavanaugh – who entreated me to be careful – before heading out to the shooting range. Mr. Cavanaugh drove us just outside of town, heading in the direction of lands owned by Matt Turow, a close family friend who had always made the Cavanaughs feel welcome to use the range on his property. As we drove, Sean gave me a tour of Strawberry Town from the car. The town, which rested just south of Buffalo, was one of the most rural that I had ever seen, but had a peaceful beauty that made me wish I lived in a place like it. I was (and am) a terrible judge of population, but I would have been surprised if more than about five thousand people lived in the area, which was best known outside its limits for its annual strawberry festival. As we drove past a particularly woodsy area, one house struck me as looking particularly modern, and it seemed as if an area of woods had recently been cleared to make room for it.
“See that yellow house?” Sean pointed. “Downstaters from Queens. They came up here three years ago because they were tired of the nose and the rudeness of the city. They wanted to get away from it all.”
“That’s why I went to school in Honeychurch Falls,” I said. “I wanted to get away from the coarse New York personality.”
“Yeah, but when you moved upstate, you didn’t bring the coarse New York personality with you,” Sean said. “These people did. They thought they could cure themselves of being overworked and bitter by coming out here, but they brought their problems with them. We tried to make them welcome, but they just wanted to be left alone.”
“They didn’t realize it, but they were the first to start transforming their little haven into the kind of unfriendly city they had just left,” Sean’s father observed.
“Since then, more trees have been knocked down to make room for even more bitter city refugees,” said Sean. “They’re spreading like a bad cancer.”
“Luckily, there’s still so much untouched land up here,” I observed.
Sean turned away from the car window. “How long will that last? Ten years? Twenty? The forestland we drove by on the way here used to be open for the public. When I was a kid, I used to go for nature walks on it. But now fences have been put up and nobody’s allowed to walk or hunt on the land. I don’t know who owns it, only that more and more land is being lost to this enclosure crap. And each time I come home from college on a visit the town looks different than before.”
“Well,” began Mr. Cavanaugh, “we’re friends with a lot of land owners in the area, like Matt Turow, who are good people. As long as people like Matt are around, who have some sense of community, we don’t have to worry about being booted out of nature.” As if one cue, Cavanaugh pulled the car into a short dirt road that led up to a small, two-story house. “And here we are,” he said, rolling the car to a halt beside the house and putting it in park.
Getting out of the car, Mr. Cavanaugh unpacked the weapons and the supply bag from the trunk and led the two young men past the house to the grounds behind it. Turow was home, barely awake, sitting on a rocking chair on the porch as we walked past. He was a craggy faced fellow in a T-shirt and baseball cap. “Hi, Cavanaughs.”
“We’re just taking Marc here shooting,” Mr. Cavanaugh said. “It’s his first time.”
“His first time?” Turow repeated with tired incredulity. “Where’d he grow up, a septic tank?”
Sean chuckled, his dad looked embarrassed for me, and I reddened with anger. I must admit, that remark didn’t win me over to Mr. Turow.
“He’s a great young man,” Mr. Cavanaugh replied. “We’ll see you later.”
And we moved on to the target range.
The dirt path sloped gradually down until the we found ourselves in an open field. While the trees and bushes surrounding the field were still brown and dead from winter, the grass was bright green and wet from rainfall earlier in the morning. The range itself was a row of three bull’s-eye targets hung from a wooden frame at the base of the incline.
“That’s the safest place for a range, because all bullets that miss or pass through the target will hit the side of the hill,” Sean explained. “If the range had been placed in front of the woods instead, bullets could go wildly through the trees and hit anyone who could be walking there. No one is supposed to be wandering around there, but you have to play it safe.”
We had brought three guns with them that day – a 7.62 millimeter Russian SKS Assault Rifle, a Remington model 870 12-gauge shotgun, and a Smith and Wesson .44 Magnum. We were all wearing what reminded me of giant red earmuffs made of plastic to protect our eardrums from the sounds of the gunfire.
Sean’s father went first, positioning himself fifteen years from the target and resting their supply bag to the side. He loaded the SKS, which looked a lot like the AK-47s with the curved clips used by terrorists in action movies, and braced it between his breast and shoulder bones. He aimed at the target that was left of center and fired off one round, which blasted a hole through the dead center of the target. After pulling the trigger twice more and landing both shots near the bull’s-eye, he handed off the rifle to me.
“Here you go.” Mr. Cavanaugh pointed to the part of his chest against which he had braced the weapon. “Place the butt here, not against your shoulder or you’ll hurt yourself.”
I did so. Then I aimed the gun just as if I were playing a shoot-‘em-up video game. Once I felt I had the target in sight, I pulled the trigger. Chunks of the target exploded into the air as the bullets struck its surface. Though it was now hard to tell which holes were mine and which were Mr. Cavanaugh’s, they were all clustered around the bull’s-eye. I almost yelled out in excitement, but stopped myself, not wanting Mr. Cavanaugh to think I was going to get too charged up to remember the safety lecture. Mr. Cavanaugh nodded. There was an expression of subdued surprised on his face. “Very good, Marc. That was your first shot ever, huh?”
“Yes.” That rocked, I thought.
I then stood back and allowed Sean to take a turn. I watched my roommate pose like one of the little green army man toys that came in the plastic bag of fifty for 99 cents, with legs spread, weapon centered on target and eye set level with the rifle. Though his face looked tight set and grim, he was clearly enjoying himself just as much as I had during my turn at the target as he shot round after round into the bull’s-eye. Once Sean spent his ammo, we moved on to the shotgun.
As I accepted the new weapon from Mr. Cavanaugh, I accidentally let the facedown barrel brush against the wet lawn. Sean and his father offered simultaneous protests that the end of the weapon was getting grass and rainwater on it. Embarrassed that I had gotten he gun dirty, I impulsively lifted the barrel and brushed the blades of grass off of it with my fingers. Sean and his father both flinched and winced in horror.
I jerked my hand away from the barrel. “What?”
“Never do that,” said Sean.
“It’s unloaded, isn’t it? The safety is on?”
“It’s loaded,” said Sean’s father, “and the safety is off.”
“Oh,” I murmured, realizing it has taken me less than an hour to ignore the safety instructions I had been given. I flexed my fingers before my eyes slowly and deliberately, silently thanking God that they had not been blasted off into the woods due to my carelessness.
Mr. Cavanaugh looked concerned for several moments, weighing what to say. He thought he had already said it all, to no avail. Still, seeing the muted fear in my face convinced him that the almost catastrophic mistake had mad its own impression on me. “Okay, you can shoot now,” was all Mr. Cavanaugh said.
I regained my composure quickly and raised the shotgun. When I pulled the trigger, I felt the weapon jump up more than I expected, but I retained my grip. When I lowered the gun, I saw a hole the size of a tennis ball drilled through the outside rim of the target, far away from the bull’s-eye.
“Damn,” I said. I steadied myself and fired again. This time, the slug blasted through the target, grazing the red center and knocking out the large chunk of yellow. “Ah,” I smiled.
The shotgun was reloaded and passed around two more times before we moved on to the final weapon. Smiling, Sean raised aloft the handgun. “Dirty Harry time.”
I took the gun in the proper manner and aimed it at a fresh target. I was tempted to try it one-handed right away, but my last experience disobeying the safety lecture was fresh in my mind. With two hands on the gun, I pulled the trigger. The barrel kicked up as if it had just spat out a cannonball. (Well … not really. But it was a hefty kick.) The jolt did nothing to sprain my wrists, but it was enough of a shock that it sent the bullet too high and too far to the left to hit the bull’s-eye.
Handguns are generally less accurate than rifles,” Sean reassured. “Especially this one.”
“Hmmm.” I tried it again, two-handed. The shot was still high and wide, but not as bad. Then I made a decision. I slowly released my left hand from the gun and aimed the weapon with his right hand only, waiting for sounds of complaint from his hosts. No protests came – only an admonishment from the other men to beware of the sudden kick. I pulled the trigger. The gun bucked under my grip like a wild horse trying to throw its mount, but I maintained a strong hold on the barrel. The shot went high and to the left.
I smiled. “That was cool.”
And it was.
I’ll always remember the feel of firing Dirty Harry’s gun just like Clint Eastwood, and I’ll always remember the enormous fun it was.
And, on the flip side, every few months I’ll look at my fingers during a moment of quiet self awareness and be thankful that I didn’t accidentally blow them off while wiping the grass off of the barrel of the rifle.
Yikes!
Dial Tone
I opened the door to Saint Thomas’ rectory to find the two police officers Father Jim Makem had told me to expect standing on the steps outside. I greeted them in a friendly fashion, as any good secretary would do, and invited them in to warm themselves in the waiting room while I went to fetch Father Jim. It was an unseasonably cold April, which was not surprising since most of the New York area had been forced to endure that it had snowed on the first day of spring. The officers stepped inside but remained standing, waiting patiently in front of the secretary cubicle in which I had been working.
Before I left to page the father, I noted (with an inner smile) that the officers were something of a mismatched pair. One of them was a large, overweight man who wore a brown derby squashed down over his eyes and his badge pinned to the collar of his rumpled tan trench coat. He removed a fat cigar from his mouth as he entered and extinguished it in the ashtray which rested on the waiting room table. His partner, a slim, attractive Puerto Rican woman in her thirties, seemed his opposite in virtually every respect. She had poise, personal beauty, and class – traits which her partner was in dire need of. They reminded me a lot of the Batman characters Bullock and Montoya – police officers who had a love/hate relationship with Batman – but their names were actually Trask and Colon.
When he heard that the police had arrived, Father Jim came down the stairs and shook the hands of the officers in serious-yet-friendly manner. At six-foot-six, the priest stood half a head taller than Trask and had a similarly barrel-chested build, so he dwarfed the still-formidable-looking Trask.
“Hello,” the female officer said. “I’m Ileana Colon, and this is my partner, Douglas Trask.”
“Father Jim,” the priest replied.
“I understand you’ve had some vandalism,” Trask said in a deep, gravelly voice.
“Yes.” Father Jim nodded and his eyes dipped downward in an expression that was more sad than angry.
Although I hadn’t actually seen the vandalism, I knew what it was. Someone had broken into the church and used black permanent marker to write “The pope is the whore of Satan” on the wall. On the floor just below the inscription, fifty seven multi-colored condoms in transparent plastic packages had been neatly arranged in the figure of an inverted crucifix. Apparently, Saint Thomas’ wasn’t the fist incident of vandalism. Other churches had been hit recently, and the local press was already theorizing that the vandals came from the same nameless cult that had been leaving the bodies of animals in children’s playgrounds.
With the officers following close behind him, Father Jim left the rectory and headed out towards the site of the vandalism, leaving me alone with my thoughts. The police were the first of many visitors to come to the rectory that night, and I, being only the secretary, found myself occasionally discouraged that I was missing all the juicy parts. Once the door shut on Father Jim’s conference room, it was back to sitting waiting for the phone to ring.
The first time I was left with nothing to do, I began to look around the office, wondering if there was anything around of interest. It was the first time I had worked at this job, so I was still feeling my way around, trying to become comfortable with it. I was covering my friend Marissa’s secretary hours while she went on a cross-country hunting trip. I hoped that the additional earnings would ensure that I was able to see Amy Grant at Madison Square Garden this coming August. It was a bonus that there wasn’t much I had to do aside from answering the phone, since I’d never really used a complex, office-type phone before and had no idea how to manage three lines and an intercom properly.
The little office I was placed in had a soft brown, wooden paneling, and on its walls were a multitude of pictures such as the Sacred Heart and Our Lady of Fatima. Contrasting the strongly religious pictures with some humor were a number of little joke plaques with clever phrases printed on them, like: “Being a priest doesn’t pay much, but the retirement benefits are out of this world.”
I leaned back in the office chair and folded my fingers behind my head. For the moment, the place was dead silent and I felt as if I had it all to myself. With a solid block of quiet time spread out ahead of me, I felt it was the perfect opportunity to begin reading the book I had brought with me – Rush Limbaugh’s The Way Things Ought to Be.
I had read straight through to page fifty-seven before I heard the sound of footsteps on the rectory stairs. Without hesitation, I snapped the book shut and slid it discretely under the desk, resting it atop my lap. The sight of such a potentially offensive book consistently plummeted other peoples’ estimation of me in the past, and I did not want to chance provoking that reaction from Father Jim. (Of course, because I had chosen to be so secretive, there would be no way for me to ever find out that the priest had a copy of the same book in the study upstairs.)
“The police have gone.” Jim (who looked remarkably like character-actor Brendan Gleeson) leaned on the counter above my desk and assumed a casual pose. To make himself more comfortable, he had unfastened the top button of his shirt and his starched white collar was hanging out in midair. “They didn’t learn anything new here, but they are certain they’ll find the vandals soon.”
Observing the digital clock on the corner of my desk, Jim straightened up and brushed some lint off his inky black slacks. “Pretty soon I’ll have to interview a couple that’s getting married and right after that I’ll be going out to talk to the Confirmation students, so I’ll probably be busy all night. Have you gotten the hang of the phone yet?”
“I know what I’m supposed to do, but I’m nervous because I haven’t done it yet. There are a few steps, so there’s a lot of room to make a mistake.”
“You’ll be okay.” The priest dug an envelope out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me. “Here’s your pay before I forget.”
“Thank you.” I pulled my pay out of the envelope and slipped it into my wallet.
“I guess you’re excited about graduating from high school.” Jim closed the top button on his shirt and slid his priest’s collar back into position.
“Sure am.”
“Lot of stuff going on at the end of the year now.” Jim’s face melted into a half-mischievous, half-self-conscious smile. “So, have you asked a beautiful young girl to the prom yet?”
I cleared my throat, shifted position in my seat, and glanced down at my hands. “I’ve asked seven beautiful young girls to the prom.”
“Ah.” Jim instantly regretted bringing up the sore subject. He patted me reassuringly on the shoulder and added, “I’d forget about it if I were you. Thousands of other girls where those seven came from.”
I smiled at the horribly familiar line. “I haven’t had any luck in the past, so I won’t hold my breath.”
Jim waved his hand dismissively. “Don’t talk like that. You should hear how you sound. It’s maudlin and ridiculous.”
“Yeah. I don’t mean to sound like a poor thing. I’m just close to graduation and I haven’t dated much at all in high school.”
“A lot of people don’t date much until they reach college,” Jim reassured me.
“Junior high was worse, of course,” I added. “It was so bad I had a complex about dating. I went into high school upset because I new the prom was coming and I wasn’t looking forward to not finding a date for it. So my freshman year of high school I had this uneasy feeling that each year I’d get closer to the prom and, in the end, still not go.”
“Oh, Marc…”
“I told my friend Smiley all this and he had a funny response. He blinked a few times and said, ‘So, Marc, I guess you’re not exactly a ‘cup-is-half-full’ kind of guy, are you?’ But here I am, and it is prom time, and my self-fulfilled prophecy has come to pass.”
There was a moment of quiet.
Jim stuck his hands in his pockets and rocked slightly back and forth on his heels. “You know, whenever I get depressed about my own track record in life, I remember a bumper sticker I saw as a kid. It said: ‘If the devil ever taunts you with your past, just remind him of his future.’”
I smirked. “I’ve got to remember that one.”
Father Jim shook his head in disbelief. “Wow. I can barely believe that twenty years have passed since my own graduation. They’ve gone by…like a blur.” As he said this, he made a slow, sweeping motion with his hand. “Whatever you do, don’t let everything slip by you. Forget your depressions and live life to the fullest, the way God wants you to.”
Even though it was an old, almost trite message, it regained its freshness after Jim restated it.
Then I found myself chuckling.
“What?”
“I think events conspired to prevent me from going. It isn’t entirely my fault.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” I said, “my high school allows people who don’t go to the school to go to the prom. Funnily enough, the girls in my high school can’t stand the guys. So they’ve all asked their cousins, or their thirty-year-old boyfriends to take them.”
“Thirty-year-old boyfriends?”
“Well, yeah. Guys that age hate dating women in their thirties because they feel that those women all either want to get married right away, because their clock is ticking, or they are bitter about past boyfriends. (I’m not saying this is how I feel, but I heard several men that age say this. And Smiley says it, too.) So they like to date younger women. As young as possible. And high school girls get a boyfriend with money and a career out of the deal, who can buy them things, take them around, and act all worldly and mature. And they’re probably better in bed than high school guys. And that is why most teen pregnancies, so I hear, are from guys in their twenties and thirties, and not high school guys. Now, I think this all kind of sucks, not just because of the sort of cradle-robbing, Lolita-esque, statutory rape angle, but because … well … there’s no girls to go to the prom with.”
The priest’s mind reeled at this. There were a million questions he seemed to want to ask, but he finally settled on the final thing I said. “So you aren’t the only one not going to the prom?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Funnily enough, there’s this really cool guy Bubba, who took a lot of steroids, and worked out til he got lots of muscles. He was the hottest guy in junior high, and all the women swooned over him. In fact, my first crush didn’t have the time of day for me, but loved Bubba. But now it is high school and Bubba, the kind of junior high, can’t get a date. He even came up to me and said, ‘Marc, what the hell is going on around here? You can’t get a prom date, I can’t get a prom date. What’s with all these cousins and middle-aged guy dates?’”
“’Well, we all know what the cousins are about,’ I said. ‘Parents are worried their daughters will have sex with their prom dates, so they send them with a relative.’
“’That might not work,’ Bubba said. ‘I know I’d do my cousin. She’s hot.’”
Father Jim winced at this point in my narrative. “Yes, yes, but what did he say about the situation you were both in?”
“Bubba didn’t know what to do about it,” I said. “He was very angry and said, ‘I don’t get it, Marc. I’m handsome. Put you in a suit, you’re diesel and ready to rock n’ roll. What the hell?’”
“So, no solution?”
“Yeah,” I said. “He’s not going.”
“And the seven girls you asked were all going with cousins and thirty-year-olds?” Father Jim asked.
“Hmmm…”
“You don’t have to answer.”
“Well, the first girl I asked could only go with a Jewish guy, and I’m not Jewish. The next two girls I asked were the smartest, coolest girls in the school, and I found out they were both lesbians. Then I asked a really cool hippie chick, and she told me she was boycotting the prom because it was a symbol of Western capitalist decadence and objectified women. A junior girl then asked me to take her to the prom because she wanted to go twice before she graduated. But she had a boyfriend and he objected, so she uninvited me.”
“What about the other two?” he asked.
“Oh, I was just kidding at that point. I don’t even remember who I asked. It just figured, ‘Ask five, why not ask seven?’ They picked up on this, and probably heard that I’d been bouncing from girl to girl, were insulted they were low on my list, and said ‘No.’ And good for them, really.”
“So none of this has anything to do with your theory about the thirtysomething dates and the cousins.”
I cleared my throat. “Ahem. Well … I don’t know. Some of these were probably excuses to avoid hurting my feelings. In other cases, I think an invisible – or visible - parent was involved. The Jewish girl is going with her cousin, for example.”
“Ah.”
“So I guess that’s life.”
“I guess so,” said Father Jim.
He looked at his watch. “Well, I better get to work. Call me if you need anything.”
“10-4,” I said.
And Jim sodded off.
The conversation wound up leaving me in a thoughtful, subdued mood, but not a depressed one. Jim had given me something to think about. When the phone range, the shock of reality intruding on my thoughts startled me, and it took me a second to recover.
I gingerly plucked up the pone receiver and held it between my head and shoulder, keeping my hands free as I spoke so I could play aimlessly with the parish envelopes. “Hello, Saint Thomas’ rectory,” I said in his happy secretary voice.
“Hello? Father Jim?” The woman’s reply from the other end was a little hesitant.
“Ah, no,” I said apologetically. “I’m just the secretary. Would you like me to get him?”
“Yes, please.”
I wasn’t sure originally, but now I was positive there was something wrong with the woman’s voice. It seemed to quiver or shake as if she had some sort of speech impediment. It was hard to tell since she barely spoke more than two words at a time to me.
“Hold on.” I hesitated a second, looking over the multitude of little black buttons and flashing lights all over the telephone. I tried to go over in my mind the instructions Father Jim had given me when I first arrived. “Let me see,” I murmured under my breath. “It’s ‘Hold,’ then ‘Intercom,’ and then…two and four? Yes. Two and four.”
My fingers danced along the keys, hitting “Intercom” first and then the number twenty four. After two or three beep noises that were too high frequency for me to hear well, Father Jim’s voice appeared on the intercom.
“Yes, Marc?”
“Call for you.”
“Got it.”
Knowing that the father had transferred the call, I hung up and sat back in my swivel chair. I regarded the empty waiting room that my cubicle was attached to with a blank expression and felt things slowly drift out of focus. Before I could slip into one of my habitual, trance-like states, the telephone rang again.
It was the same woman.
“I never got to talk to Father Jim. My line was cut off.”
I frowned, knowing that my inexperience was probably somehow responsible. Feeling I had to make it up to her by getting the Father as quickly as I could, I hurriedly hit “intercom,” summoned Father Jim to the phone, and told him that the caller was back online. After I hung up the phone, my irritation with myself lingered, and I wondered what I did to lose the woman’s call. Little mistakes like that – which most other people couldn’t care less about – had a tendency to bother me and I found himself suddenly too restless to read my book or do much of anything at all.
“So, what do I do now?” I mumbled to myself.
It occurred to me that I could pray, which was an appropriate thing to do in a church. I rolled the option around in my head a moment before responding verbally to it.
“Nah. I don’t even know how to do that properly.”
Praying to God was something I was never very good at, so I tried to improve my communication with Heaven by picking someone I felt more comfortable chatting with. I wanted someone I could relate better to than God, who was little more than a distant, masculine force whom nobody had ever seen. As it turned out, Mary was the ideal choice for me. She was a kind, beautiful mother figure, who had an advantage over God in that she was human, female, and was never, at any time, responsible for killing most of the earth’s inhabitants with a torrential rainstorm.
Knowing that exhibiting this attitude towards God was not the fastest way to get into Heaven, I later alternated prayers between Mary and God. I found a gimmick to make God more human simply by picturing the pleasant, bearded image of Jesus that one found in paintings as the logical recipient of my prayers. (Not the bloody Jesus hanging on the cross, but the well groomed Jesus of paintings, surrounded by sheep in a field and smiling warmly at a posse of young children. That Jesus.) Now that was a sympathetic audience. I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it sooner, it was so simple. However, despite my best efforts, my preference for Mary stayed with me.
In the end, it turned out I didn’t have to pray to pass time in the office since something happened to distract me. Just as Father Jim had predicted, a young couple arrived at the door shortly thereafter, and I let them in. There was a man in his twenties, with a strong, unshaven jaw and steel grey eyes, whom I wasn’t particularly interested in at all. The fiancé on the other hand, was a pleasantly familiar sight.
Her eyes were soft brown, like the wavy curls of her hair, and they glinted with humor and intelligence. Her complexion was slightly bronzed as well, adding to my suspicion she was not only Italian, but of a "purer" descent than my own German-diluted blood (if one will forgive me for coaching these descriptions in dangerously Nazi-sounding terms ... apologies). The bridge of her nose was raised slightly, but it added rather than detracted from her looks, giving her face character and an unlikely beauty. (She looked vaguely like Valeria Golino, from Rain Man and Hot Shots.)
I had noticed her every Saturday evening as mass and would always cast furtive glances in her direction during the slow parts. It was hardly the case that I was filled with lustful thoughts throughout the entire mass, but there was no denying she was a distraction. Still, her regular presence at the end of his pew gave me a bizarre sense of comfort and completeness, and I was put off whenever she wasn’t there. In some bizarre sort of way, I had come to think of seeing her each week as having a relationship of a kind with her. Of course, she didn’t know I was alive, but that was nothing new for me.
Unfortunately, this man of hers with the steel grey eyes had recently appeared next to her in church and I took an instant dislike to him. Knowing that he would soon be her husband did not further endear him to me.
“Is Father Jim in?” Steel Grey Eyes asked.
Before I could respond, Father Jim appeared at the door of his office and invited the couple in. When the door closed, its heavy brown wood prevented any sound from sifting through. The silence was not long-lasting as the telephone rang the instant the door jam clicked.
“Saint Thomas’ rectory, secretary speaking.”
“Father Jim, please,” a woman’s voice asked.
“I’m sorry, he’s in conference right now.” I fumbled for a pad and pencil to take her name and phone number down with. “Can I take a message?”
The moment she heard this, the woman began to break down. “Please, can you get him?”
“Um…I’m not sure – “
“Please,” she pleaded. “I have to talk to him. I’ve tried to reach him twice already and I got disconnected. My father…” She stopped, too overcome to continue.
I hadn’t recognized her voice because it was composed at first, but now it was trembling again, and he knew it was the same woman from before. He closed his eyes and could feel the tears coming down her cheeks.
“My father is dying.”
Oh, God, I thought. And I hung up on her twice. “I’ll go get him.”
I placed the phone gently on the table and went over to knock on the conference room door. It didn’t take long for me to coax Father Jim away from the meeting, and I was too worried about the caller to even notice that the Italian woman was staring at me as I stood in the doorway.
Father Jim took the phone from off of the table and listened to what the woman had to say. When she was done, it was his unenviable task to tell her that he couldn’t go to the hospital. “I’m sorry, Marilla, but I’m not going to be able to get there right away.”
I didn’t know what the woman’s reply was, but I knew that I was disappointed that Father Jim didn’t just cast off everything else to help her. An interview with an engaged couple and the instruction of a Confirmation class seemed like pretty small time stuff next to what she and her father were going through.
Jim was soothing and apologetic as he spoke to Marilla, but it was clear that he was pained to hear her so distraught. “There is a chaplain at the hospital. It’s his job to give Last Rites to patients there. You should have him do it…I understand that, but the rites have to be administered. I could stop everything and leave right now and – God forbid – still arrive too late.”
I knew the priest was right, but it didn’t make it any easier for me to listen to. I couldn’t even conceive how Marilla felt. (And I hung up on her. Twice. I forgot to press the ‘hold’ button before the ‘intercom’ button. Twice. And I was warned about doing it, too.)
“I promise,” Jim added, “when I’m done I’ll be right over to see you. I’ll get Father Romano to cover my Confirmation class and I’ll be there in a half hour. In the meantime, you should have the chaplain see your father. I’ll come and visit him afterwards.”
I sank into my chair and rested my forehead against my palm. She called looking for help and I made her eat dial tone. Twice. Good God, what a moron.
Father Jim wished her well and reassured her that he would be there as soon as he could before hanging up and returning to the couple in his office.
I mentally pounded myself over and over, viciously cutting myself apart in my mind. I just couldn’t get over the stupidity of what I’d done. I couldn’t get Marilla’s pained voice out of my mind. I had to do something to make it up to her, to ease the guilt I felt.
It came to me without him even really thinking. I didn’t plan it or realize I was about to do it. I just did it. I pulled myself out of my chair, walked to the center of the room, and knelt on the red carpet. Feeling the beginnings of a tear in my right eye, I felt the same quiver I heard over the phone creep into my voice as I spoke.
“Please, God…whatever your will is towards her, father…please help her.”
It was short and simple, but I had never prayed more earnestly to God in my life. This time I needed no gimmick and no image to summon in my mind. This time my feelings were strong enough to make the connection. It was all there in the strength of my guilt, the certainty of my faith, and the rare depth of the compassion which I felt for a person whom I had never met.
Before I left to page the father, I noted (with an inner smile) that the officers were something of a mismatched pair. One of them was a large, overweight man who wore a brown derby squashed down over his eyes and his badge pinned to the collar of his rumpled tan trench coat. He removed a fat cigar from his mouth as he entered and extinguished it in the ashtray which rested on the waiting room table. His partner, a slim, attractive Puerto Rican woman in her thirties, seemed his opposite in virtually every respect. She had poise, personal beauty, and class – traits which her partner was in dire need of. They reminded me a lot of the Batman characters Bullock and Montoya – police officers who had a love/hate relationship with Batman – but their names were actually Trask and Colon.
When he heard that the police had arrived, Father Jim came down the stairs and shook the hands of the officers in serious-yet-friendly manner. At six-foot-six, the priest stood half a head taller than Trask and had a similarly barrel-chested build, so he dwarfed the still-formidable-looking Trask.
“Hello,” the female officer said. “I’m Ileana Colon, and this is my partner, Douglas Trask.”
“Father Jim,” the priest replied.
“I understand you’ve had some vandalism,” Trask said in a deep, gravelly voice.
“Yes.” Father Jim nodded and his eyes dipped downward in an expression that was more sad than angry.
Although I hadn’t actually seen the vandalism, I knew what it was. Someone had broken into the church and used black permanent marker to write “The pope is the whore of Satan” on the wall. On the floor just below the inscription, fifty seven multi-colored condoms in transparent plastic packages had been neatly arranged in the figure of an inverted crucifix. Apparently, Saint Thomas’ wasn’t the fist incident of vandalism. Other churches had been hit recently, and the local press was already theorizing that the vandals came from the same nameless cult that had been leaving the bodies of animals in children’s playgrounds.
With the officers following close behind him, Father Jim left the rectory and headed out towards the site of the vandalism, leaving me alone with my thoughts. The police were the first of many visitors to come to the rectory that night, and I, being only the secretary, found myself occasionally discouraged that I was missing all the juicy parts. Once the door shut on Father Jim’s conference room, it was back to sitting waiting for the phone to ring.
The first time I was left with nothing to do, I began to look around the office, wondering if there was anything around of interest. It was the first time I had worked at this job, so I was still feeling my way around, trying to become comfortable with it. I was covering my friend Marissa’s secretary hours while she went on a cross-country hunting trip. I hoped that the additional earnings would ensure that I was able to see Amy Grant at Madison Square Garden this coming August. It was a bonus that there wasn’t much I had to do aside from answering the phone, since I’d never really used a complex, office-type phone before and had no idea how to manage three lines and an intercom properly.
The little office I was placed in had a soft brown, wooden paneling, and on its walls were a multitude of pictures such as the Sacred Heart and Our Lady of Fatima. Contrasting the strongly religious pictures with some humor were a number of little joke plaques with clever phrases printed on them, like: “Being a priest doesn’t pay much, but the retirement benefits are out of this world.”
I leaned back in the office chair and folded my fingers behind my head. For the moment, the place was dead silent and I felt as if I had it all to myself. With a solid block of quiet time spread out ahead of me, I felt it was the perfect opportunity to begin reading the book I had brought with me – Rush Limbaugh’s The Way Things Ought to Be.
I had read straight through to page fifty-seven before I heard the sound of footsteps on the rectory stairs. Without hesitation, I snapped the book shut and slid it discretely under the desk, resting it atop my lap. The sight of such a potentially offensive book consistently plummeted other peoples’ estimation of me in the past, and I did not want to chance provoking that reaction from Father Jim. (Of course, because I had chosen to be so secretive, there would be no way for me to ever find out that the priest had a copy of the same book in the study upstairs.)
“The police have gone.” Jim (who looked remarkably like character-actor Brendan Gleeson) leaned on the counter above my desk and assumed a casual pose. To make himself more comfortable, he had unfastened the top button of his shirt and his starched white collar was hanging out in midair. “They didn’t learn anything new here, but they are certain they’ll find the vandals soon.”
Observing the digital clock on the corner of my desk, Jim straightened up and brushed some lint off his inky black slacks. “Pretty soon I’ll have to interview a couple that’s getting married and right after that I’ll be going out to talk to the Confirmation students, so I’ll probably be busy all night. Have you gotten the hang of the phone yet?”
“I know what I’m supposed to do, but I’m nervous because I haven’t done it yet. There are a few steps, so there’s a lot of room to make a mistake.”
“You’ll be okay.” The priest dug an envelope out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me. “Here’s your pay before I forget.”
“Thank you.” I pulled my pay out of the envelope and slipped it into my wallet.
“I guess you’re excited about graduating from high school.” Jim closed the top button on his shirt and slid his priest’s collar back into position.
“Sure am.”
“Lot of stuff going on at the end of the year now.” Jim’s face melted into a half-mischievous, half-self-conscious smile. “So, have you asked a beautiful young girl to the prom yet?”
I cleared my throat, shifted position in my seat, and glanced down at my hands. “I’ve asked seven beautiful young girls to the prom.”
“Ah.” Jim instantly regretted bringing up the sore subject. He patted me reassuringly on the shoulder and added, “I’d forget about it if I were you. Thousands of other girls where those seven came from.”
I smiled at the horribly familiar line. “I haven’t had any luck in the past, so I won’t hold my breath.”
Jim waved his hand dismissively. “Don’t talk like that. You should hear how you sound. It’s maudlin and ridiculous.”
“Yeah. I don’t mean to sound like a poor thing. I’m just close to graduation and I haven’t dated much at all in high school.”
“A lot of people don’t date much until they reach college,” Jim reassured me.
“Junior high was worse, of course,” I added. “It was so bad I had a complex about dating. I went into high school upset because I new the prom was coming and I wasn’t looking forward to not finding a date for it. So my freshman year of high school I had this uneasy feeling that each year I’d get closer to the prom and, in the end, still not go.”
“Oh, Marc…”
“I told my friend Smiley all this and he had a funny response. He blinked a few times and said, ‘So, Marc, I guess you’re not exactly a ‘cup-is-half-full’ kind of guy, are you?’ But here I am, and it is prom time, and my self-fulfilled prophecy has come to pass.”
There was a moment of quiet.
Jim stuck his hands in his pockets and rocked slightly back and forth on his heels. “You know, whenever I get depressed about my own track record in life, I remember a bumper sticker I saw as a kid. It said: ‘If the devil ever taunts you with your past, just remind him of his future.’”
I smirked. “I’ve got to remember that one.”
Father Jim shook his head in disbelief. “Wow. I can barely believe that twenty years have passed since my own graduation. They’ve gone by…like a blur.” As he said this, he made a slow, sweeping motion with his hand. “Whatever you do, don’t let everything slip by you. Forget your depressions and live life to the fullest, the way God wants you to.”
Even though it was an old, almost trite message, it regained its freshness after Jim restated it.
Then I found myself chuckling.
“What?”
“I think events conspired to prevent me from going. It isn’t entirely my fault.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” I said, “my high school allows people who don’t go to the school to go to the prom. Funnily enough, the girls in my high school can’t stand the guys. So they’ve all asked their cousins, or their thirty-year-old boyfriends to take them.”
“Thirty-year-old boyfriends?”
“Well, yeah. Guys that age hate dating women in their thirties because they feel that those women all either want to get married right away, because their clock is ticking, or they are bitter about past boyfriends. (I’m not saying this is how I feel, but I heard several men that age say this. And Smiley says it, too.) So they like to date younger women. As young as possible. And high school girls get a boyfriend with money and a career out of the deal, who can buy them things, take them around, and act all worldly and mature. And they’re probably better in bed than high school guys. And that is why most teen pregnancies, so I hear, are from guys in their twenties and thirties, and not high school guys. Now, I think this all kind of sucks, not just because of the sort of cradle-robbing, Lolita-esque, statutory rape angle, but because … well … there’s no girls to go to the prom with.”
The priest’s mind reeled at this. There were a million questions he seemed to want to ask, but he finally settled on the final thing I said. “So you aren’t the only one not going to the prom?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Funnily enough, there’s this really cool guy Bubba, who took a lot of steroids, and worked out til he got lots of muscles. He was the hottest guy in junior high, and all the women swooned over him. In fact, my first crush didn’t have the time of day for me, but loved Bubba. But now it is high school and Bubba, the kind of junior high, can’t get a date. He even came up to me and said, ‘Marc, what the hell is going on around here? You can’t get a prom date, I can’t get a prom date. What’s with all these cousins and middle-aged guy dates?’”
“’Well, we all know what the cousins are about,’ I said. ‘Parents are worried their daughters will have sex with their prom dates, so they send them with a relative.’
“’That might not work,’ Bubba said. ‘I know I’d do my cousin. She’s hot.’”
Father Jim winced at this point in my narrative. “Yes, yes, but what did he say about the situation you were both in?”
“Bubba didn’t know what to do about it,” I said. “He was very angry and said, ‘I don’t get it, Marc. I’m handsome. Put you in a suit, you’re diesel and ready to rock n’ roll. What the hell?’”
“So, no solution?”
“Yeah,” I said. “He’s not going.”
“And the seven girls you asked were all going with cousins and thirty-year-olds?” Father Jim asked.
“Hmmm…”
“You don’t have to answer.”
“Well, the first girl I asked could only go with a Jewish guy, and I’m not Jewish. The next two girls I asked were the smartest, coolest girls in the school, and I found out they were both lesbians. Then I asked a really cool hippie chick, and she told me she was boycotting the prom because it was a symbol of Western capitalist decadence and objectified women. A junior girl then asked me to take her to the prom because she wanted to go twice before she graduated. But she had a boyfriend and he objected, so she uninvited me.”
“What about the other two?” he asked.
“Oh, I was just kidding at that point. I don’t even remember who I asked. It just figured, ‘Ask five, why not ask seven?’ They picked up on this, and probably heard that I’d been bouncing from girl to girl, were insulted they were low on my list, and said ‘No.’ And good for them, really.”
“So none of this has anything to do with your theory about the thirtysomething dates and the cousins.”
I cleared my throat. “Ahem. Well … I don’t know. Some of these were probably excuses to avoid hurting my feelings. In other cases, I think an invisible – or visible - parent was involved. The Jewish girl is going with her cousin, for example.”
“Ah.”
“So I guess that’s life.”
“I guess so,” said Father Jim.
He looked at his watch. “Well, I better get to work. Call me if you need anything.”
“10-4,” I said.
And Jim sodded off.
The conversation wound up leaving me in a thoughtful, subdued mood, but not a depressed one. Jim had given me something to think about. When the phone range, the shock of reality intruding on my thoughts startled me, and it took me a second to recover.
I gingerly plucked up the pone receiver and held it between my head and shoulder, keeping my hands free as I spoke so I could play aimlessly with the parish envelopes. “Hello, Saint Thomas’ rectory,” I said in his happy secretary voice.
“Hello? Father Jim?” The woman’s reply from the other end was a little hesitant.
“Ah, no,” I said apologetically. “I’m just the secretary. Would you like me to get him?”
“Yes, please.”
I wasn’t sure originally, but now I was positive there was something wrong with the woman’s voice. It seemed to quiver or shake as if she had some sort of speech impediment. It was hard to tell since she barely spoke more than two words at a time to me.
“Hold on.” I hesitated a second, looking over the multitude of little black buttons and flashing lights all over the telephone. I tried to go over in my mind the instructions Father Jim had given me when I first arrived. “Let me see,” I murmured under my breath. “It’s ‘Hold,’ then ‘Intercom,’ and then…two and four? Yes. Two and four.”
My fingers danced along the keys, hitting “Intercom” first and then the number twenty four. After two or three beep noises that were too high frequency for me to hear well, Father Jim’s voice appeared on the intercom.
“Yes, Marc?”
“Call for you.”
“Got it.”
Knowing that the father had transferred the call, I hung up and sat back in my swivel chair. I regarded the empty waiting room that my cubicle was attached to with a blank expression and felt things slowly drift out of focus. Before I could slip into one of my habitual, trance-like states, the telephone rang again.
It was the same woman.
“I never got to talk to Father Jim. My line was cut off.”
I frowned, knowing that my inexperience was probably somehow responsible. Feeling I had to make it up to her by getting the Father as quickly as I could, I hurriedly hit “intercom,” summoned Father Jim to the phone, and told him that the caller was back online. After I hung up the phone, my irritation with myself lingered, and I wondered what I did to lose the woman’s call. Little mistakes like that – which most other people couldn’t care less about – had a tendency to bother me and I found himself suddenly too restless to read my book or do much of anything at all.
“So, what do I do now?” I mumbled to myself.
It occurred to me that I could pray, which was an appropriate thing to do in a church. I rolled the option around in my head a moment before responding verbally to it.
“Nah. I don’t even know how to do that properly.”
Praying to God was something I was never very good at, so I tried to improve my communication with Heaven by picking someone I felt more comfortable chatting with. I wanted someone I could relate better to than God, who was little more than a distant, masculine force whom nobody had ever seen. As it turned out, Mary was the ideal choice for me. She was a kind, beautiful mother figure, who had an advantage over God in that she was human, female, and was never, at any time, responsible for killing most of the earth’s inhabitants with a torrential rainstorm.
Knowing that exhibiting this attitude towards God was not the fastest way to get into Heaven, I later alternated prayers between Mary and God. I found a gimmick to make God more human simply by picturing the pleasant, bearded image of Jesus that one found in paintings as the logical recipient of my prayers. (Not the bloody Jesus hanging on the cross, but the well groomed Jesus of paintings, surrounded by sheep in a field and smiling warmly at a posse of young children. That Jesus.) Now that was a sympathetic audience. I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it sooner, it was so simple. However, despite my best efforts, my preference for Mary stayed with me.
In the end, it turned out I didn’t have to pray to pass time in the office since something happened to distract me. Just as Father Jim had predicted, a young couple arrived at the door shortly thereafter, and I let them in. There was a man in his twenties, with a strong, unshaven jaw and steel grey eyes, whom I wasn’t particularly interested in at all. The fiancé on the other hand, was a pleasantly familiar sight.
Her eyes were soft brown, like the wavy curls of her hair, and they glinted with humor and intelligence. Her complexion was slightly bronzed as well, adding to my suspicion she was not only Italian, but of a "purer" descent than my own German-diluted blood (if one will forgive me for coaching these descriptions in dangerously Nazi-sounding terms ... apologies). The bridge of her nose was raised slightly, but it added rather than detracted from her looks, giving her face character and an unlikely beauty. (She looked vaguely like Valeria Golino, from Rain Man and Hot Shots.)
I had noticed her every Saturday evening as mass and would always cast furtive glances in her direction during the slow parts. It was hardly the case that I was filled with lustful thoughts throughout the entire mass, but there was no denying she was a distraction. Still, her regular presence at the end of his pew gave me a bizarre sense of comfort and completeness, and I was put off whenever she wasn’t there. In some bizarre sort of way, I had come to think of seeing her each week as having a relationship of a kind with her. Of course, she didn’t know I was alive, but that was nothing new for me.
Unfortunately, this man of hers with the steel grey eyes had recently appeared next to her in church and I took an instant dislike to him. Knowing that he would soon be her husband did not further endear him to me.
“Is Father Jim in?” Steel Grey Eyes asked.
Before I could respond, Father Jim appeared at the door of his office and invited the couple in. When the door closed, its heavy brown wood prevented any sound from sifting through. The silence was not long-lasting as the telephone rang the instant the door jam clicked.
“Saint Thomas’ rectory, secretary speaking.”
“Father Jim, please,” a woman’s voice asked.
“I’m sorry, he’s in conference right now.” I fumbled for a pad and pencil to take her name and phone number down with. “Can I take a message?”
The moment she heard this, the woman began to break down. “Please, can you get him?”
“Um…I’m not sure – “
“Please,” she pleaded. “I have to talk to him. I’ve tried to reach him twice already and I got disconnected. My father…” She stopped, too overcome to continue.
I hadn’t recognized her voice because it was composed at first, but now it was trembling again, and he knew it was the same woman from before. He closed his eyes and could feel the tears coming down her cheeks.
“My father is dying.”
Oh, God, I thought. And I hung up on her twice. “I’ll go get him.”
I placed the phone gently on the table and went over to knock on the conference room door. It didn’t take long for me to coax Father Jim away from the meeting, and I was too worried about the caller to even notice that the Italian woman was staring at me as I stood in the doorway.
Father Jim took the phone from off of the table and listened to what the woman had to say. When she was done, it was his unenviable task to tell her that he couldn’t go to the hospital. “I’m sorry, Marilla, but I’m not going to be able to get there right away.”
I didn’t know what the woman’s reply was, but I knew that I was disappointed that Father Jim didn’t just cast off everything else to help her. An interview with an engaged couple and the instruction of a Confirmation class seemed like pretty small time stuff next to what she and her father were going through.
Jim was soothing and apologetic as he spoke to Marilla, but it was clear that he was pained to hear her so distraught. “There is a chaplain at the hospital. It’s his job to give Last Rites to patients there. You should have him do it…I understand that, but the rites have to be administered. I could stop everything and leave right now and – God forbid – still arrive too late.”
I knew the priest was right, but it didn’t make it any easier for me to listen to. I couldn’t even conceive how Marilla felt. (And I hung up on her. Twice. I forgot to press the ‘hold’ button before the ‘intercom’ button. Twice. And I was warned about doing it, too.)
“I promise,” Jim added, “when I’m done I’ll be right over to see you. I’ll get Father Romano to cover my Confirmation class and I’ll be there in a half hour. In the meantime, you should have the chaplain see your father. I’ll come and visit him afterwards.”
I sank into my chair and rested my forehead against my palm. She called looking for help and I made her eat dial tone. Twice. Good God, what a moron.
Father Jim wished her well and reassured her that he would be there as soon as he could before hanging up and returning to the couple in his office.
I mentally pounded myself over and over, viciously cutting myself apart in my mind. I just couldn’t get over the stupidity of what I’d done. I couldn’t get Marilla’s pained voice out of my mind. I had to do something to make it up to her, to ease the guilt I felt.
It came to me without him even really thinking. I didn’t plan it or realize I was about to do it. I just did it. I pulled myself out of my chair, walked to the center of the room, and knelt on the red carpet. Feeling the beginnings of a tear in my right eye, I felt the same quiver I heard over the phone creep into my voice as I spoke.
“Please, God…whatever your will is towards her, father…please help her.”
It was short and simple, but I had never prayed more earnestly to God in my life. This time I needed no gimmick and no image to summon in my mind. This time my feelings were strong enough to make the connection. It was all there in the strength of my guilt, the certainty of my faith, and the rare depth of the compassion which I felt for a person whom I had never met.
Friday, June 1, 2007
Dorm Daze: Fun with DeForest Kelly and . . . . . . . . THE WESTERN CANON OF LITERATURE
Living in a minuscule dorm room with one (or two, if you are a tripled freshman) roommates who are intent on leaving dirty laundry all over the floor, coming in drunk at three a.m. and throwing up into the garbage can, and spending as much time as possible playing video games is not conducive to study. Which is why, during my freshman year in college, I spent more time staying up playing dice into the wee hours of the morning than I did studying and going to class. I rarely went to the large lecture classes, because they were boring, followed the textbook, and the teacher wouldn't notice if I was gone anyway. The smaller classes were harder to skip. Still, I developed a series of really bad habits thanks to the rampant adolescent, Huck-Finn lifestyle promoted by dorm culture. One of the bad habits I developed was eating too much, which is why I gained the Freshman 30. (Forget the Freshman 15. That's kids stuff.) The other bad habit I developed was I started spending money on credit. (I never financially recovered from developing such a terrible habit. To this day, I still find living within my means difficult, and credit card companies just love me for it.)
Yep, my first semester stunk. Not because I had to learn to do my own laundry for the first time, or get myself a checking account, but because the class I was most interested in taking, Medieval Philosophy, was taught by a guy who seemed to hate me, and appeared to be out to get me. He also acted as if he had a little box in his office marked "truth" that he kept to himself and didn't let anyone else have a look at. The rest of my classes were required core courses - and nobody wants to take those, myself included, even though I agree, philosophically with the liberal arts core in a way that most lazy people don't.
Of course, one of the things that didn't help my bad attitude about attending class was high school. I felt like I didn't learn much in high school and classes designed for freshman in college are so easy (in order to ease freshmen into the scary world of the university) that I was convinced college would be as big of a waste of time. Yep, college would be yet another waiting room one had to spend four years in before one was allowed to enter the real world. Just like high school before it.
Fortunately, during my second semester, all this changed. I asked for permission to take a course specifically designed for upperclassmen, "The Age of Dante," as a mere freshman. I begged the teachers to let me in. It took much coaxing and many phone calls. I needed the intellectual challenge. And I needed to study Italian heritage. And how cool was the idea of reading a book about a dude who gets taken on a tour of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory? And he sees famous people like Ulysses in hell and Saint Francis in Heaven. Really cool! With reluctance, the two professors teaching the course - one in history, one in English - granted me permission, and I became the second freshman in history to take that course at that school. It was marvelous, and opened up a whole world of learning to me. I was reborn!
And I went from being a C student to an A, A- student. Thanks to Age of Dante, my attitude changed, and I started taking harder classes and getting more out of the easier ones. So, as a college professor now, I am allergic to the idea that the best way to win students over is to water down the curriculum. Sometimes what they need is a REAL challenge. And a REALLY MEATY CLASS.
But, I must admit, by the second half of my sophomore year, I was beginning to tire of work, work, work. A lot of my upperclassmen friends, who I met during Age of Dante, graduated between my freshman and sophomore years. The guys I came in with as a freshman (like Sean Cavanaugh) had decided that the best way to meet women was to pledge the co-ed service fraternity APO, and I did not join them in the endeavor because a) I was opposed to organizations that employed pledging, even if they did not haze and b) I heard that Bill Clinton was a member of APO and, at the time, I was one of those people who woke up in the morning hating Clinton, shaved my stubble hating Clinton, and ate my breakfast cereal hating Clinton before managing to get him out of my thoughts and have a normal rest-of-the-day. (Of course, since Bush II has been president, I've missed Clinton terribly...)
So, virtually friendless (Sean and the others were always off gallivanting with APO), I was left all alone, in my dorm, for most of my sophomore year, reading. Reading the great books. I learned a lot. I read Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Thoreau, Darwin, Thomas More, Cicero, Virgil, the Brontes, Chaucer, the letters and diaries of Galileo, Boethius, The Cosmographia of Bernardus Silvestrus, Beowulf, The Turn of the Screw, Gulliver's Travels, Lady Chatterly's Lover, Locke's Second Treatise of Government, and C.S. Lewis' A Grief Observed, The Great Divorce, and The Screwtape Letters. As a bunch, I'd give these books four stars. Two enthusiastic thumbs up.
And I felt smarter than I ever had before. Some of these works were fast-paced, fun reads (C.S. Lewis' stuff was like reading a fun beach novel, and yet was theologically interesting and emotionally rewarding), while others were very difficult reads. (Reading ten pages of Thucydides was harder than reading 1,000 pages of Anne Rice. REALLY HARD. But I loved it once the teacher explained to me what I had just read during the next days lecture. So I liked stuff like that in retrospect, and today it is one of my favorite books.)
After reading all this heady stuff, I needed a break. Half of it shored up my belief in the establishment, the church, marriage, family, and the patriarchy. That didn't rock my world, but put my conservatism on firmer idealogical and intellectual ground than it had been during all of my debates with my liberal atheist friends from 5th grade through 12th. If I only I had read all this stuff earlier, I would have held up my end better, I thought. On the other hand, the other half of the books I read, especially those written after the Enlightenment, made fun of all of the above, and reserved special venom for Catholics and middle-class morality. The British writers seemed to love making fun of the Italians, also, I noticed. As a whole, the post-Enlightenment stuff seemed to promote atheism, socialism, and feminism, and made all of the above seem far less frightening and unreasonable than I expected. (No wonder arch-conservatives only read the bible and Tom Clancy! I thought. They're safe, then! This stuff doesn't get inside your head that way! And no wonder I wasn't allowed to read this in High School! The excuse is that the adults were afraid the books would be too hard for the kids to understand. The real reason is that the education major doesn't prepare teachers to teach ACTUAL literature to young people and, even if they were trained and did teach such works properly, parents would go out of their minds if they saw little Timmy reading The Communist Manifesto and Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man in 11th grade ... or ever for that matter.)
So, after reading all of the above, what did I believe? What did I internalize? Was I conservative or liberal? Atheist or Catholic?
I read it all, made note of it all, and deferred judgment until my life experiences would give me more to go on. I felt too sheltered and ignorant to judge the validity of any of it, and it would only be years later, after I worked as a reporter and saw some of the world, that I would make my decision.
Until then, it was time to take a break.
It was time to read some fun paperbacks.
It was time to read a series of Star Trek novels featuring Dr. McCoy (played by the memorable and inimitable DeForest Kelly in the original series and fist six movies)! It was time to read Doctor's Orders and Shadows on the Sun!
And boy were they fun!
Dr. McCoy is a sweet, pacifistic, gentlemanly, grouchy, funny, Southern fellow who acts like a regular guy, a Jimmy Stewart everyman, next to Captain Kirk's Burt Lancaster-style morally ambiguous tough-guy, and Spock's Sherlock Holmes' style sexism and ruthless logic. Dr. McCoy is my favorite, and boy was it fun to see him in the spotlight, especially since, at the time, the original series saga had just ended with the film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. and my Star Trek was over.
So my Star Trek lived on in spin-off fiction, like Peter David's funny comic books, which featured an unlikely romance between Captain Kirk and feminist R. J. Blaise, and in novels by great women writers like Diane Duane, Diane Carey, and J.M. Dillard. (Interesting that, with the exception of Nicholas Meyer and Harlan Ellison, all of the best Trek writers are women ... especially Dorothy Fontana, the best of them all ... when the original Star Trek is, half the time, an action show for men with a tacked-on pacifist, multicultural message and, the other half of the time, actually kind of left-leaning, in its own, Kennedy-esque way.) So I took a week off of going to class and devoured ten Star Trek novels. I had bought them all years ago and never got around to reading them. They had once been hard for me to read, and it had once taken me several days to read each one. Now that I was a Plato veteran, I could slay a Trek novel in a few hours, enjoy the heck out of it, and move on to slay another.
My roommate, Aragorn O'Donnell, would come in, fresh from either class or APO, and shake his head at me.
"Are you still in bed?"
"Yep."
"Reading a new Trek novel I see."
"One you like, Aragorn. Final Frontier. About Kirk's dad."
"Well, I'm glad you got around to reading it after me suggesting it to you for five years." (By the way, Aragorn was named after a character from Lord of the Rings. His parent's liked the book too much, and so did he. His favorite character was Aragorn. He also looked a bit like Joachim Phoenix.)
"It is great, but it is no Doctor's Orders, let me tell you."
"You and Dr. McCoy. He's no Kirk."
"Kirk can't tie Dr. McCoy's shoes," I pronounced.
"But shouldn't you be going to class?"
"Class? What's that?"
"You're grades would be better if you went."
"I have an A- average," I said.
"You could have an A average."
"Not with Olansky. He gave the valedictorian an A- and ruined her 4.0."
"You might still get an A from him."
"Or I might stay home, read a Trek novel, and go back to class next week, and get an A- and be a happier person for taking a mental health day."
"Whatever, Marc," Aragorn said. He then went off to an APO meeting.
After reading a few more Trek novels, I announced to Aragorn. "It is time."
"For what?" he asked, looking up from his homework, and looking very much like Joachim Phoenix.
"I'm writing a Star Trek short story of my own."
"You know, you're in college. You have homework and drinking to do."
"Bah," I said. "There's a writing contest. Strange New Worlds. The company that published Trek fiction is offering to print stories by unpublished writers. Only ten will be chosen and about ten thousand will submit their entries. Mine will win."
"You sound sure of it."
"I am," I declared. "I will win."
"You haven't written the story yet."
"But I will win. And I have an idea, too. There have been several Trek stories where the Enterprise crew have to defend a Ghandi-like figure, or avenge the assassination of a Martin-Luther-King type. But what if they were forced to protect, or avenge, a world leader whose politics offended them to the very core of their being? What if they were assigned to avenge the assassination of a George Wallace type?"
"Okay. Sounds provocative," Aragorn admitted.
"I have another idea. A Quincy-style murder mystery with Dr. McCoy as the hero."
"You and Dr. McCoy."
I raised a dramatic finger. "Aha! I've got it!"
"What?"
"I'll combine both story ideas into one."
I got around to writing the story a year later, after returning from my trip to Italy, and worked Siena, Italy, into the story idea as well. To this day, I rather like the idea, even if the writing style is a bit ... undergraduate.
It didn't win the contest, by the way.
Here it is ... my Trek short story, which takes place after Shadows on the Sun, Star Trek VI, and Best Destiny. And I even included a character that Peter David wrote into his comic book, Sara Tuchinsky (who is, presumably, a real person?!?) Enjoy...
Star Trek: A More Perfect Union
A story dedicated to the memory of DeForest Kelly.
By Marc DiPaolo
Doctor McCoy knelt beside the body of President Gwyneth Voss, noting grimly that his medical tricorder registered no brain activity. She was lying facedown on the cold marble floor in front of Il Torre palace’s massive entrance-hall staircase, which she had fallen down mere moments before. The freshly awakened Kirk and Spock stood beside McCoy, their tired minds rapidly coming to the conclusion that the chief executive had been pushed to her death by her vice president, Edmund Badler, who stared numbly down on the scene from the top of the stairway.
“Is she dead?” The innocent look of shock plastered on the vice president’s face was made all the more credible by his uncharacteristically ridiculous striped pajamas.
Kirk swore under his breath. There was no way they could have acted any sooner. The sound of the fall had been loud enough to jolt him from his light sleep. Not even stopping to throw a robe over his bare chest, he had jumped out of bed, flung the bedroom door open, and raced out of his room, meeting Spock in the hall shortly before the groggy McCoy had emerged from his guest room and stumbled after them. They were on the scene of President Voss’ fall an instant later, but it was already too late.
Only now were palace lights going on around them as the rest of the residents were emerging from their rooms to investigate. A male servant appeared on the second floor hall beside Badler and cried out in alarm upon seeing Voss. Badler warned the servant to keep back and promptly did just the opposite by creeping down the stairs himself. Descending cautiously, he brushed his unkempt hair back over his pointed ears, reminding Kirk that the twenty-two-year-old man was as much Vulcan as human. As the first baby born on this planet, Badler had come to symbolize Bifrost’s dream of a perfect cultural union between the peoples of Earth and Vulcan. Even now, after having been discovered towering over the body of a dead woman, he acted with the poise of a Vulcan and the sensitivity of a human.
“What happened?” Though Kirk was staring directly up at Badler as he spoke, the question was directed just as much to Spock and McCoy as to the official.
Badler stopped halfway down the stairs, a respectful distance from the dead. “I couldn't sleep. I was going to the kitchen for some tea.”
“And then what?”
“I heard a sound,” said Badler. “I thought someone might be hurt and ran out to help….”
“You did not see her fall?” asked Spock.
“I saw no more than you.” Badler edged along the railing, stepping around the body when he reached the lower floor. “I know this all looks very bad, but I can assure you I didn’t push her.”
Quickly confirming that her neck had been broken in the fall, McCoy could feel her body heat melting away under his touch. A part of him was aware that she looked very feminine dressed in her silk nightgown, and his blue-gray eyes started to water.
“Bones?” asked Kirk.
McCoy failed to register Kirk’s question, so Spock ventured an observation. “Presumably, she was killed by a fall down the stairway. What caused the fall has yet to be determined.”
There were now eight servants at the top of the stairs, speaking to one another in hushed, agitated voices. Kirk realized it was only a matter of time before Voss’ husband was aroused by the commotion, and he didn’t want the man to stumble on the scene unprepared.
“Captain,” said Spock, “fifteen-point-seven seconds elapsed between the instant I heard the fall and the moment I raced into this chamber. That is more than enough time for an attacker to have pushed her and escaped down the second floor hallway.”
“He would have to have been as fast as lightning,” said Badler, “because I didn't see him.”
Kirk began to speak a question aloud, enunciating each word slowly and carefully. “Either way, accident or murder...”
Spock completed the thought. “Why did none of us hear a scream?”
“Exactly.”
McCoy slipped the tricorder into his robe and rose to his feet. “She didn't scream because the fall didn't kill her. She was already dead before she dropped down the stairs.”
McCoy was about to elaborate when a scream came from above. There was a flurry of movement and the sounds of heavy footfalls as a large, athletic figure raced down the steps, taking them two-by-two. The man dropped to the floor next to his wife and felt frantically for a pulse. Horror spread further across his face when he found none. Weeping, he scooped up the woman in his arms, catching her head with his hand before it lolled back.
No matter how much he wanted to look away, McCoy remained strangely transfixed by the scene. He had seen emotional displays of grief countless times before, but this was different. For one thing, it was not long ago that he was the one who held his dying love in his arms, cursing fate for stealing her away. For another, the man cradling Gwyneth Voss' body in his arms – her husband, Seh’dar – was a full-blooded Vulcan.
* * * *
Seh’dar thankfully accepted the glass of brandy from Dr. McCoy's grasp and sipped it to steady his nerves. He sat in an armchair in the drawing room adjacent to the main hall, listening to the sounds of his wife’s body being moved to the lower-level medical facilities by Enterprise crewmen. Vice President Badler, apparently still feeling awkward about being the first one to discover the body, remained quietly in the darkness in the corner of the room.
“I’m sorry, but I have to ask when the last time you saw your wife alive was.” Now uniformed, Kirk sat across from Seh’dar and Spock stood impassively by his side.
The bereaved Vulcan's eyes seemed to lose their focus on the present as his thoughts drifted to the recent past. “We were in bed. She had a headache. She was going to get up for some medicine. I would have gotten up, but I was ... barely aware.” His mouth twitched oddly into an expression that was neither a smile nor a grimace. “Later on, it sank in that she was gone. I was worried about her, so I got up. I didn't hear anything until I got close to the stairs, and then I saw my wife, dead, on the floor.”
“Doctor McCoy thinks she may have died of a stroke,” said Kirk.
A disbelieving sigh escaped Seh'dar's lips. “She was only forty-three.”
“It is strange,” McCoy admitted, “but not unheard of. Did she ever complain that she was feeling unwell before this evening?”
“Not that I can recall,” said Seh'dar.
“Was she on any medication?”
“Some allergy pills that she takes during the winter. That's all. You'll find them upstairs.”
Vice President Badler finally felt comfortable enough to step forward and place a consoling hand on Seh'dar's shoulder. The Vulcan welcomed the gesture, shuddering only slightly at the discomfort of the physical contact. In the moment that Badler’s face came forth from the shadows, McCoy noticed again the vague resemblance between Badler and a young Jim Kirk. Badler's type handsome was just as boyish as Kirk’s, but his eyes and smile were far less playful. McCoy predicted that the subtle quality of harshness would gradually etch itself deeper into Badler’s face, making him tougher and meaner-looking with age.
“It pains me to say this at a time like this,” Badler said suddenly, “but there are certain protocols which must be observed from now on.”
Already understanding, Seh'dar nodded silently.
“Captain Kirk, I formally request that you, as the official representative of the United Federation of Planets, swear me in as President Voss' successor,” Badler said.
“What?” McCoy glowered. “Now? Her body isn't even cold!”
Badler folded his arms in front of his chest, challenging the Starfleet men with his regal stance. “If Bifrost is to remain a stable planet, it must always have a president.”
“Doctor,” said Spock. “I must point out that Mr. Badler's interpretation of planetary law is correct. He must be sworn in at the next convenient moment.”
Seh'dar stood up and placed the empty glass on the table beside him. “Yes. The transition must be smooth and swift. The people will need us to be strong for them.”
The eagerness that McCoy saw in Badler seemed all the more acute when the vice president consulted his wrist chronometer. “Captain, I will take only a few moments to groom myself. I would appreciate it if you met me in the president's office in twenty minutes.”
Seh'dar slipped quickly between Kirk and Badler, moving towards the hall. “If you will excuse me, gentlemen, I have to tell my children what has happened.”
****
Edmund Badler, the fourth president of the United Federation of Planets' colony world Bifrost, was sworn into office with a reporter, a company of Enterprise crewmen, and representatives of the Voss Administration on hand as witnesses. Standing behind Badler was Seh’dar and his two children. Mina Voss, his six-year-old daughter, kept her red, tear-stained face looking down at the floor. The boy of fifteen, Joshua, directed a cold, steady gaze at the upstart vice president, clenching and unclenching his fists. Once the oath of office was taken, Badler attempted to lighten the heavy atmosphere with a firm handshake and a gracious smile. “Thank you, Captain Kirk. Your professionalism and sensitivity in this difficult time has helped us all.”
The warmth seemed sincere enough, but Kirk wondered how cordial Badler would have been if a reporter hadn’t been present.
It was not long before President Badler’s office was cleared of everyone save Kirk, Spock, and Badler himself.
The new president stood awkwardly at the center of the room, displaying a sudden reluctance to claim the vacant executive seat behind Gwyneth Voss’ desk. “I assume you have something to say to me, gentlemen.” “You know that the Klingon Ambassador and I were in the middle of critical negotiations with President Voss about the future of this world. As a Federation ambassador, I'm afraid I cannot leave until certain issues are resolved.” Kirk had paused several times in the middle of his sentences, weighing each phrase carefully before uttering it. The captain’s earnestness did not fail to make an impression on President Badler, who seemed to be suddenly aware of the weight of responsibility that had settled on his shoulders.
“Namely, The Voss Declaration of Secession,” said Badler. He looked down on what was now his desk. Still sitting freshly atop its surface was the declaration President Voss had drawn up to officially break Bifrost’s ties with the Federation. She died before signing it.
“I don’t expect an answer tonight, of course,” said Kirk.
The president tilted his head thoughtfully to one side, as if trying to recall something. “`Each morning when I wake up and look at myself in the mirror, I have to forgive myself for not being George Washington. The only way I can keep forgiving myself is if I always try to act in the best interests of my people, my conscience, and my God. Reconciling the demands of all three is an impossible task, but it is a goal I will never stop trying to reach.’”
“Is that a quote?” asked Kirk.
“President Voss said it in her address three months ago, on the eve of this colony's twenty-second anniversary,” explained Badler. “She was a remarkable woman.”
“She seemed so,” Kirk said slowly, not knowing where the conversation was heading.
“In the general election two days ago, sixty-five percent of the planet voted in favor of her agenda. They agreed it would be better to break away from the Federation than to allow it to establish a Klingon refugee colony on our soil.”
“The Federation does not want to lose Bifrost,” said Kirk. “But there are so few other locations to move these refugees. If this planet rejects them, the others will surely follow suit. And then, these refugees will be without a real home.”
“That is why I am in an unenviable position.” President Badler snatched the Act of Secession from the desk and held it before Kirk's face. “If I tear this up, I will be defying the will of the people, disrupting Bifrost’s mission charter, and spitting on the memory of a beloved president.”
“Yes, you will be,” Kirk said. “You will also be preserving a very important union between Bifrost and the Federation and you will be offering aid to a people in dire trouble.”
The president exhaled sharply through his nose. "I'd be a fool to veto this, and you know it.”
“No, I don’t know it.”
“Come on, Kirk! What do you care if I sign this or not? Either way, you're out of here in the next day or so, leaving me behind – alone – to face the consequences.”
“History will remember the role you'll play in forging a lasting peace between the Federation and the Klingon Empire,” Kirk replied.
Badler laughed. “Excellent! I can be the most beloved one-term president of all time, especially if the refugees decide to take the whole planet for themselves.”
“That’s absurd.”
“You know, Voss was not afraid of a military clash with the Klingons. What she really feared was the Klingons who came to our world with their families. Slow, friendly colonization is the real way to take over a planet. That’s a lesson the Native Americans learned all too well after they made foreign settlers welcome.”
“What does this mean?” asked Kirk. “Are you saying you’ll sign the declaration?”
President Badler walked deliberately around the desk and lowered himself into the seat. “I believe it is a mistake to secede.”
“Then tear up that declaration and let some good come out of tonight’s horrible event.”
The president laced his fingers together on his lap and pushed the chair back into a reclining position. “Perhaps.”
****
Like the rest of the planet Bifrost, Gwyneth Voss' bedroom was a historical study in itself. A mix of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, its decor was rich in elegant fabrics – velvet curtains, silk bed sheets, and lace decorations – that would seem frivolous to the primarily functional sensibilities of modern-day Earth. The plush surroundings appealed to Kirk, who himself preferred the earthiness of wooden furniture to glass tables and plastic chairs. He, Spock, and McCoy had entered the room with Seh'dar's blessing to obtain Gwyneth's pills. McCoy found them quickly enough, slipping them into his trouser pocket.
“I'll be sure to test these while I'm downstairs,” said the doctor.
Though there was nothing else keeping him from the examination room, he felt compelled to linger and investigate the bedroom with his comrades. There was so little he knew about Gwyneth Voss. Before last week, he didn't even know she existed.
McCoy noticed immediately that Seh’dar was strangely absent from the plethora of family photos hanging on the walls. And, after briefly perusing the president’s bedside bookshelf – which contained 1984, A Man for All Seasons, and The Stepford Wives – Spock pronounced that her library was comprised entirely of political tragedies concerning the social establishment’s defeat of an idealistic iconoclast. Kirk was drawn immediately to the bedroom's most provocative decoration - a wooden ventriloquist's dummy dressed in a tuxedo and top hat. The doll sat, partly slumped over, atop a wooden clothes chest at the foot of the bed. “I haven't seen one of these in years.”
McCoy couldn't help but smile at the strange object. “Gwyneth liked to entertain her children with that doll.”
Spock arched his right eyebrow. “Indeed?”
McCoy nodded. “She spoke kind of quiet about it when she told me, like she was sharing a little secret. She said it was a dark day for Badler when the political cartoonists found out about her `talent for animating lifeless wooden men.'”
Kirk gave McCoy a quizzical look. “When did you two have time to make small talk like that?”
McCoy shrugged. “In-between her debates with you and Spock she'd come talk to me. I guess she felt comfortable speaking to me about regular, ordinary things … you know, other than secession.”
Spock seemed about to say something, but cast his eyes warily on McCoy and stopped himself.
“What?” asked McCoy.
“Doctor McCoy, I admire you for placing your respect for life above all things,” said Spock. “However, because you are so sensitive to human suffering, it is sometimes difficult to speak freely before you without offending your sensibilities.”
McCoy placed his fists against his hips and glared back at Spock. “I know what you're gonna say, Spock. You're gonna say that President Voss' death, though tragic, could be a great boon to both us and the Klingons, right?”
“Which is what makes the timing of her death so convenient for her political adversaries, and so suspicious in my eyes,” Spock replied. “I am almost convinced that Voss was assassinated, but I will reserve judgement at least until you have had a chance to carefully examine her body.”
McCoy’s angry expression softened. “You may have a point. I’ll get right on it.”
****
Over the years, McCoy had visited dozens of civilizations that had molded themselves after past Earth societies, but the city of New Siena struck him as a particularly impressive replica of the Medieval metropolis of Siena, Italy. The stone-walled capital looked strangely beautiful in the darkness. Narrow cobblestone streets wound between powerfully built brown homes that seemed as old and sturdy as if they had actually been built in eleventh-century Tuscany. Il Torre Palace, the home of the Bifrost presidents, was a broad, rectangular castle with a massive bell tower rising out of its left side. It was modeled after the original Palazzo Pubblico – built centuries ago as the seat of government of the ancient Republic of Siena.
McCoy stood in the courtyard outside the presidential estate, just beyond the yellow barricades that Chekov had set up, nursing a mint julep in his right hand. While it was a strange time for McCoy to have a drink – it had been two hours since he pronounced President Voss dead, it would be another three before sunrise – he needed it. He didn't feel tired because he was fueled by nervous energy, but he realized sleep would soon become a necessity.
McCoy instinctively sensed Spock approaching from behind. Although Spock had never said as much, McCoy was absolutely certain that the spiritual link between them was never fully severed after Spock’s resurrection, since he could still feel Spock alive within him even though he no longer carried Spock’s spirit, or katra. He was always able to sense it when Spock was close, and he sometimes even had a feel for the Vulcan's state of mind. He also knew that, if he lived to see Spock die again, he would feel it with more poignancy than any pain he ever felt before, because a part of his soul would die with Spock. Spock stood wordlessly by McCoy's side and joined the doctor in his contemplation of the cityscape. Through the quiet of the sleeping city, the two men could hear the faint nocturnal chirps of Bifrost’s insect life. McCoy found the sounds strangely comforting.
“Beyond the borders of New Siena, there are numerous other landscapes and settlements molded from human and Vulcan civilizations of the past,” Spock said.
“They seem to have this one pegged pretty good, if the pictures I've seen of the original Siena are accurate,” McCoy replied.
“This world,” Spock began thoughtfully, “above all others in the Federation, has preoccupied me.”
Now it was McCoy’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “You never said anything before.”
“A Federation colony with a population that is half-human and half-Vulcan.” Although there was no audible impatience in the statement, McCoy sensed it nevertheless, and felt foolish for not making the connection sooner. Still, there had been a lot on his mind lately.
“Oh, of course. Well, it is a fascinating idea.” Spock nodded. “Two vastly different cultures occupying the same planet, trying to reconcile their differences, learn from one another's strengths, and grow beyond their mutual limitations.”
Clasping his hands behind his back and looking up at the stars, McCoy unconsciously copied Spock's stance. “Well, if they're half as successful in the task as you have been, Spock, then they're in good shape.”
Spock stiffened only slightly at the unexpected compliment. “From what I have heard, they have done well so far. There has been a great deal of intermarriage and almost no racial incidents. The humans have grown more sober and pragmatic, the Vulcans more emotional and artistic. I would be curious to see how this world progresses, with or without a Klingon social presence.”
****
Captain's Log, Stardate 9583.7:
No one was happier than I was when the Enterprise was granted a reprieve from retirement after the Roy Moss incident. But now it seems as if this ship and its crew have staved off decommission only to bear witness to a succession of untimely deaths.
First Dr. McCoy’s wife Jocelyn and now Gwyneth Voss. I’ve seen hundreds of people killed during my time in Starfleet, but somehow ...somehow it’s always worse when it’s a woman.
Mr. Spock and I have returned to the Enterprise to issue a full report to Starfleet.
Dr. McCoy is on the planet below, continuing his own investigation into President Voss’ death. His discovery of Lexorin in her bloodstream has raised some alarming questions that need answering.
Hopefully a meeting with her personal physician – an old associate of McCoy’s, Gabriel Manzoni – will make things clearer.
In a few moments, I will be meeting with the Klingon Ambassador in his quarters to inform him of recent events…
The Klingon Ambassador didn't even look up from his cooking, but continued to stir what looked like a plate of moving seaweed over the oven flame in his quarters aboard the Enterprise.
“What would you have me say, Kirk? That I am sorry she is dead?” The Ambassador raised a hand from the cooking pan to cut off Kirk's response. “No, I am not sorry. She was a bigger bigot than even you ever were. She would rather have seen all of the refugees of the Praxis disaster die than offer them safe haven on this planet.”
The Ambassador paused to add a spice to the writhing mass of tentacles he called an early breakfast. Although it had been frying under a high flame for several minutes, the heat had not yet killed whatever it was that was cooking. “She threatened to withdraw this planet from the Federation if it forced her to bend to its demands. If that is not racial hatred of the highest order, I do not know what is.”
“And she insulted you, personally,” said Kirk.
Kirk could not tell if the Klingon curled his lips up into a smile or a snarl. “That was the most honorable thing she did in my presence, Kirk. Her defense of you was sheer poetry.”
“I want you to know I didn't ask for it.”
The Klingon scoffed and waved a dismissive hand at Kirk. “Its not important. She is not the first person to throw my words back in my face since Camp Kittimer.”
This did not surprise Kirk at all. A grand statement like “There will be no peace as long as Kirk lives” does not easily pass into history.
“We've all said things we've wished we could take back. I've been quoted back to myself several times lately. I've rarely liked the sound of my own words.”
The meal completed, the Ambassador emptied the contents of the frying pan onto a plate and brought the dish over to his dining table. “Your galley cooks and your food dispensers could never do justice to this dish, Kirk. It is only palatable when served live.”
Kirk stood a respectful distance from the table, allowing the Ambassador to begin eating. “The new president opposes any notion of Bifrost breaking away from the Federation, but we don’t know how committed he really is to helping your people.”
“Wishful thinking, Kirk. Badler will either bow to the demands of his people or be replaced by someone who will.”
****
In the three days since the Enterprise had entered orbit around Bifrost, McCoy had only had two opportunities to walk along the streets of its capital city. The sun was close to rising on day four, and he found himself strolling along the winding, hilly streets in search of Doctor Manzoni. He and his former classmate had agreed to meet by a statue of Garibaldi on Main Street, but the problem now was finding it.
McCoy noted with muted interest that the street he traveled along had grown so narrow that he could touch buildings on either side simply by raising his arms laterally. Six yards further downhill, he came upon a crimson banner pasted up on his right that read "Protect Freedom: Vote Secession." It was left over from the election earlier in the week. Irksome-yet-useful, he remembered the slogan from before and used it as a landmark to find Main Street.
Three turns later, McCoy linked up with the walled city's pivotal roadway, finding with some surprise that absolutely nobody was walking about. The contrast between New Siena at 5 a.m. and at 5 p.m. was staggering. The last time he had seen this wide path was immediately after the away team had first beamed down to Bifrost’s surface. It seemed like ages ago simply because so much had happened since then… Transport had been more disorientating than usual because Sara, the transporter chief, had once again energized the beam without giving McCoy proper warning. Caught in mid-sentence, he had the wonderful pleasure of feeling his mouth dissolve and reassemble as he spoke. The rest of the statement begun on the transporter pad tumbled out on the threshold of Main Street before McCoy could stop it: “… cash it in right now. Oh, for Pete's sake! Just one time, I wish that woman would give me a proper warning.”
McCoy tested his jaw to see if it was okay. One small mercy was that he didn’t catch sight of it happening to himself this time. He hated that part of the beaming experience more than anything else. “Stuff like this never happens when Scotty runs the transporter,” McCoy complained. “That’s it. I don’t care that she’s been with this Enterprise since its maiden voyage - I’m not letting her transport me ever again.”
Kirk had smiled playfully back at his chief medical officer. “Have it your way, Bones.”
Once recovered from the sudden jolt, McCoy had realized that they were all standing at the edge of Main Street, where throngs of people were walking about and none of them seemed to be headed anywhere in particular.
“Let me guess,” said Kirk to Spock. “Passegiata.” “What's this?” asked McCoy, not wanting to attempt to pronounce the word Kirk had used.
“It's an old Italian social ritual,” responded Spock. “In self-contained cities like Siena on Earth, the entire population goes out for an evening walk in the hopes of casually encountering friends and family members. It is a means of maintaining a sense of community and preventing the city from growing impersonal.”
Why am I always the only one who doesn't know about these things? McCoy had thought.
They stood at the threshold of the street, watching as wave upon wave of people flowed by. Twice McCoy tried to step out into the street, but each time he felt overwhelmed by the crowd.
“How can anyone be social in this?” asked McCoy. “It looks like a goddamned stampede.”
“Look,” Kirk pointed. “Isn’t that her?”
McCoy followed Kirk's gaze and caught his first glimpse of President Gwyneth Voss. Dressed in a simple white blouse and a pair of slacks, she was socializing with the people on the street while moving in their general direction. The lines on her face gave her a classy, respectable beauty, and her shoulder-length brown hair had so far managed to stave off any trace of gray. McCoy couldn’t help but take instantly to the easy way in which she interacted with the ordinary people. She put on no airs at all. She was like Jim on the bridge of the Enterprise.
But that was three days ago. In the time that had elapsed since then, Voss had died and Badler had risen to succeed her. The very same street McCoy had first seen her striding confidently along amidst the crowd was now empty and silent. But not for long.
“Leo!” The scheduled appearance of Gabriel Manzoni was an agreeable one, bringing back more pleasant memories of years gone by.
“How are you, Gabriel?” McCoy shook Gabriel’s hand and quickly looked over the man he hadn’t seen in seven years. The strong, chiseled jaw had softened, the stomach had filled out and the hair had thinned, but Gabriel nevertheless looked remarkably good for his age.
“Okay, under the circumstances, Leo. It's really good to see you.” He gestured towards the road ahead. “Shall we walk?”
“Sure.”
The two started off along the level ground as the sky started to lighten several shades of blue.
“I heard about Jocelyn,” Gabriel said hesitantly, “and I just wanted to tell you I'm sorry.”
“Thanks. Now, don’t say anything more about it. It's bad enough that Jim and Spock have been walking on eggshells around me the past two months. I don't need you doing the same.”
“I promise I won’t, Leo.”
McCoy nodded. “Good.”
“You wanted to know about the Lexorin in the president’s blood?”
“Yes. Where did it come from? The pills were clearly for her allergies, as Seh’dar said.”
“I gave her heavy doses of Lexorin each night for the past four nights.”
“Why?”
“I was asked to keep it a secret, but I guess it'll all have to come out now.”
“Would you stop being cryptic already and just spit it out?”
Gabriel gave a resigned shrug. “Okay. Four nights ago, I got an emergency call from her husband to go to the palace. When I got there, I found her thrashing about on her bed screaming and shouting.”
“Was it some kind of seizure?”
Gabriel licked his lips thoughtfully. “It wasn’t that exactly. She kept yelling snatches of political speeches and slogans. The funny thing was she seemed to be debating herself, taking both sides of every issue. I’d heard stories that Bobby Fischer used to like to play against himself at chess, and it was like she was doing the same thing with political rhetoric.” “What was she yelling about?”
“Not surprisingly, Klingon refugees and secession. One minute, she'd yell something about why the Federation was the greatest thing since sliced bread, and the next she'd talk about how important it was for Bifrost to break away and forge its own destiny. She was saying a lot of stuff about wanting perfect union between humans and Vulcans and not letting the Klingons mess that up.”
McCoy massaged his jaw thoughtfully. “Did it seem like there were really two distinct personalities arguing the points?”
“Yes, it did. It really did.”
Just then, they came across the overlook at the edge of the fortress-like city, where a waist-high wall was all that stood between them and a hundred-foot plummet to the ground. The sky was still too dark for the men to see more than a few yards beyond the city limits, so the spectacular view of lush, Earth-like greenery that could be seen from the overlook during the daylight hours was now little more than a veil of murky black soup. Gabriel stopped walking and seated himself atop the wall, instantly giving McCoy paranoid visions of his friend toppling backwards into the abyss and cracking open on the ground like an Italian Humpty Dumpty.
“She had another fit the next night,” Gabriel continued. “After that, she seemed to get a little better, but I gave her some more medicine to prevent a relapse. It was horrible, because she was perfectly healthy before last week.”
“Why didn't she have one of those fits during her negotiations with Jim and the Klingon Ambassador?” “I don't know. Outwardly, at least, she was always fine during the day. I have no idea what was going on in her head while she was at those meetings.”
“If you knew about this, where were you last night?”
“I was called away,” Manzoni said. “An old man who lives nearby almost had his arm cut off in a freak accident. I was busy saving his life.”
McCoy shook his head sadly. “You should have warned me about her condition. If I had known ahead of time, I might have been more alert.”
“No, I couldn't have contacted you. Seh'dar pleaded with me not to tell anybody. He didn't want me to embarrass the president.”
“Well, there's no danger of her feeling embarrassed now, is there?”
“Don’t take it out on me!” Gabriel snapped. “It’s not my business to go around advertising privileged medical information about public figures. If anyone should have told you, it was her husband!”
“Gabriel, listen to me,” McCoy said quietly, holding his hand up for emphasis. “I’ve got some fairly strong suspicions about President Voss’ death. If I’m right, then I know from personal experience it’s a horrible way to go.”
Gabriel frowned. “That sounds pretty ominous there, Leo.”
“Don’t ask me to explain yet. It may not be too healthy for you to know any more than you do. I’ll tell you after things quiet down a little bit.”
Gabriel would have protested, but he reconsidered when he saw the look on McCoy’s face. “Okay, I’ll go home for now.”
McCoy soberly shook his fellow doctor’s hand goodbye. “You be careful, now. Don’t tell anybody we talked about any of this.”
“I won’t.” Without another word, Gabriel started off down the street, his feet moving quickly, his head lowered to the ground. A minute later, the shadows swallowed him up and the sounds of his footsteps disappeared into the distance.
Finding himself alone, McCoy felt a sudden warmth well up inside him. He knew people were supposed to feel cold when they were afraid, but it was different for him. At the moment, he was probably the only person who had a clear idea what was happening, and that realization made him feel anxious and vulnerable - especially walking about a strange city in the dark. It was time to get the hell out of there.
McCoy stepped away from the wall and pulled the communicator from his belt.
That was when he felt a heavy hand fall on his shoulder.
“Doctor McCoy, I would like a word with you.”
****
Checking first to make sure no one on the bridge was watching, Kirk yawned silently into his hand. Only twenty minutes sleep in the past thirty-seven hours did not make for a very well rested Iowa farm boy, and he found himself falling asleep in his captain’s chair.
Kirk swiveled around in his black command seat to regard his communications officer. “Uhura, any word from McCoy?”
“No, sir. Shall I contact him for you?”
“No, that’s fine. I’m going to go get some sleep. Can you wake me if the doctor calls with any news?”
“Yes, Captain.”
McCoy lowered his communicator and frowned at Seh’dar, wondering how any man, even a Vulcan, could kill his own wife.
“I overheard your conversation with Dr. Manzoni,” said Seh’dar. “Is there something you’d like to tell me?”
Beads of sweat started to appear at McCoy’s temples. He decided to lie and wondered if he could pull it off. “Why, yes. I think President Badler killed Gwyneth.”
“My son suspects the same thing. Was he that desperate to be president?”
“No. He didn’t intend to kill her.”
Seh’dar raised his eyebrow in a Spock-like fashion. “Really?”
“You see,” McCoy swallowed, “all he wanted to do was prevent her from signing the Act of Secession.”
“How did that desire result in her death?”
McCoy knew it would be wiser to continue the charade, but somehow he couldn’t stomach it any more. He was too angry. “You tell me,” challenged McCoy. “It was a Vulcan mind-meld, wasn’t it?”
Seh’dar’s eyes darkened. “How could a mind-meld be responsible for Gwyneth’s death?”
The anger was giving McCoy courage enough to continue, even at the risk of provoking the imperious Vulcan to action. “I know that Vulcans can use them to pull memories from people’s minds – sometimes forcibly. It’s also possible for the mind-meld to change people’s perceptions, to hypnotize them. And when Spock thought he was going to die, he planted his memories and personality in my head through a mind-meld.”
“I had heard that you once carried Spock’s katra.”
“Spock’s spiritual presence was so powerful it almost swallowed me whole,” McCoy said. “I fought so hard to keep control of my own thoughts and actions I almost went completely bonkers. To keep me stable, Jim gave me doses of Lexorin. Just like you called in Dr. Manzoni to give your wife Lexorin!” McCoy’s voice shook with outrage. “Did she know what you were doing to her?”
Seh’dar stared back at McCoy as if the doctor had grown a second head. “What exactly are you talking about?”
“You probably entered her thoughts as she slept – like a voice in a dream, coaxing her to change her mind and welcome the Klingons.”
“A few moments ago you said Badler was responsible. Now you’re saying I did something to my wife?”
“Never mind what I said about Badler. You killed her.”
Seh’dar’s body coiled like a snake’s. “You’re completely unhinged.”
“I suppose you didn’t mean to kill her,” McCoy continued. “She was no good to you dead – there was no guarantee Badler would act any different as president. In some ways, he is just as conservative as she was.”
McCoy took a bold step forward, but Seh’dar stood his ground. “You manipulated that poor woman. You spoke through her like a ventriloquist through a wooden doll. Your thoughts in her mind! Your voice through her mouth! But she wasn’t a doll! She was a human being.”
Seh’dar glared back at McCoy in silence.
“But she was too strong for you, wasn’t she?” asked McCoy. “She never submitted to your influence in public. Not for an instant. Her mind stayed dominant long enough for her to tell us all where to get off. Well, it’s no wonder she couldn’t take the pressure. The inner conflict was so intense it caused the stroke that killed her.”
McCoy paused, eyeing his opponent warily. “You know what really gets me, you green-blooded monster? She was your wife! Didn’t you have any feelings for her?”
“I loved my wife.”
“Well, I don’t understand how you could kill your own wife over politics. But then again, I’ve never found politics to be all that important. I’m just an old country doctor. Helping people is all that matters to me.”
“That is exactly what I’m doing,” Seh’dar said quietly. “I am helping hundreds of Klingons at the cost of one life. I can live with that cost. But I wish she hadn’t fought me. If she had merely acquiesced, she’d still be alive. I wasn’t asking much of her. All I wanted to do was make her act logically and morally.”
“Was it logical and moral to fry her brain?” McCoy cried.
Suddenly, Seh’dar came to life, charging his adversary. McCoy’s hand dove for his phaser, but it was too late. Seh’dar seized McCoy with steel-like fingers, hoisting him into the air, and pushing the doctor’s flailing body over the top of the waist-high overlook wall. McCoy tried to struggle, but his enraged, Vulcan-blooded opponent completely physically outclassed him. As Seh’dar held him dangling in the air over the abyss, all McCoy could do was look down at the hundred-foot drop below. The trees looked so far away.
“Nothing personal, doctor,” Seh’dar said calmly. “You just know too much.”
Then Seh’dar let McCoy drop.
On board the Enterprise, Spock felt a sudden rush of overwhelming anxiety.
McCoy.
At the moment McCoy fell, he flung both arms out and grabbed desperately for something to hold onto. He latched onto Seh’dar’s shoulder and arm, and held on with a strength he didn’t know he had, pulling Seh’dar over the edge with him. Seh’dar let out a surprised cry as he found himself falling to his death alongside his victim.
McCoy felt himself screaming as the ground beneath him raced closer. He tried to push himself away from Seh’dar as they plummeted, but the enraged Vulcan caught McCoy by the throat. McCoy stared up into Seh’dar’s soulless eyes, realizing that the final face he was going to see before dying was his killer’s.
In the last moment of life he had left, McCoy hurled a wild punch at the side of Seh’dar’s head. As his fist streaked toward its target, he saw it disappear into a billion pinpricks of yellow light.
****
Realizing what was about to happen, Spock pushed Captain Kirk away from the transporter pad. McCoy and Seh’dar flashed into existence above them and came streaking down from the platform. Carried by the momentum of their fall down below, they continued sailing through the air, screaming in fear and fury. The two men spun end over end, slamming with a harsh crack against the transporter room controls.
Sparks flew through the air, burning the transporter chief’s fingers before she could jump backwards.
A moment later, all was quiet.
Kirk placed his right hand on the transporter platform and pulled himself to his feet. “How did you know, Spock?”
“I heard Doctor McCoy call for help.” Spock carefully approached the tangled mass of limbs to see if McCoy had survived the fall.
When McCoy rolled over onto his back, the first thing he saw through a fuzzy haze of blurred vision was the transporter chief – her round, sweet face a picture of concern.
“Are you okay, doctor?” Sara asked.
McCoy could barely keep his eyes open, but he managed a weak smile. “Sara, my dear,” he slurred, “I could kiss you.”
Then he lost consciousness.
****
Carrying a bouquet of flowers under his arm, Captain Kirk walked into sickbay four hours later to find Doctor McCoy awake and on the mend. Spock was already by McCoy’s side, as he had been since the doctor was snatched from death’s grasp.
Kirk casually tossed the flowers in McCoy’s lap. “Here you go, doctor. A little `get well’ gift from Sara. She’d have delivered them personally, but she’s on duty another hour.”
McCoy picked them up and looked at them with vague interest. “I guess this means no hard feelings for all the times I called her incompetent.”
“She did a superb job,” said Spock. “As soon as it occurred to me that the president was killed by a Vulcan mind-meld, I aroused the captain and suggested that we return the planet to question Seh’dar. We were just about to transport to when I sensed your distress and told Sara to beam you up immediately. She had been tracking you all along and responded to my command within .76 seconds.”
“Spock, how in the hell can you calculate .76 seconds?” McCoy moved his head too much and felt a deep stab of pain. “Ow! Damn it.”
Kirk moved forward. “Are you okay?”
“The doctor has suffered three broken ribs and a fractured wrist,” pronounced Spock.
“Then you’re better off than your attacker,” Kirk said to McCoy. “Seh’dar died in the fall from the transporter pad, breaking his neck against the control bank.”
Kirk found McCoy’s expression uncharacteristically unreadable at that moment, so he continued. “You might like to know that Bifrost has officially chosen to remain a member planet of the Federation. President Badler has just begun negotiations with the Klingon Ambassador to establish a refugee colony in one of the less populated regions. And Badler also tells me he’s going to give you a commendation for solving President Voss’ murder.”
McCoy waved the news away. “I don’t want any damned commendation. I didn’t do anything special. Spock practically figured it out at the same time I did anyway.”
“I’d love to stand here and argue with you, but Spock and I have to return to the surface and continue the negotiations.” Kirk turned away and headed towards the door. “You get better, Bones.”
The sickbay doors whooshed open and Kirk stepped out into the hall. Spock started to follow but hesitated in the doorway when McCoy called after him, “Spock?”
“Yes?”
McCoy’s bright blue eyes glinted. “Thanks.”
Spock raised an eyebrow in the closest thing to a smile he would ever give McCoy. “My pleasure, doctor.”
Yep, my first semester stunk. Not because I had to learn to do my own laundry for the first time, or get myself a checking account, but because the class I was most interested in taking, Medieval Philosophy, was taught by a guy who seemed to hate me, and appeared to be out to get me. He also acted as if he had a little box in his office marked "truth" that he kept to himself and didn't let anyone else have a look at. The rest of my classes were required core courses - and nobody wants to take those, myself included, even though I agree, philosophically with the liberal arts core in a way that most lazy people don't.
Of course, one of the things that didn't help my bad attitude about attending class was high school. I felt like I didn't learn much in high school and classes designed for freshman in college are so easy (in order to ease freshmen into the scary world of the university) that I was convinced college would be as big of a waste of time. Yep, college would be yet another waiting room one had to spend four years in before one was allowed to enter the real world. Just like high school before it.
Fortunately, during my second semester, all this changed. I asked for permission to take a course specifically designed for upperclassmen, "The Age of Dante," as a mere freshman. I begged the teachers to let me in. It took much coaxing and many phone calls. I needed the intellectual challenge. And I needed to study Italian heritage. And how cool was the idea of reading a book about a dude who gets taken on a tour of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory? And he sees famous people like Ulysses in hell and Saint Francis in Heaven. Really cool! With reluctance, the two professors teaching the course - one in history, one in English - granted me permission, and I became the second freshman in history to take that course at that school. It was marvelous, and opened up a whole world of learning to me. I was reborn!
And I went from being a C student to an A, A- student. Thanks to Age of Dante, my attitude changed, and I started taking harder classes and getting more out of the easier ones. So, as a college professor now, I am allergic to the idea that the best way to win students over is to water down the curriculum. Sometimes what they need is a REAL challenge. And a REALLY MEATY CLASS.
But, I must admit, by the second half of my sophomore year, I was beginning to tire of work, work, work. A lot of my upperclassmen friends, who I met during Age of Dante, graduated between my freshman and sophomore years. The guys I came in with as a freshman (like Sean Cavanaugh) had decided that the best way to meet women was to pledge the co-ed service fraternity APO, and I did not join them in the endeavor because a) I was opposed to organizations that employed pledging, even if they did not haze and b) I heard that Bill Clinton was a member of APO and, at the time, I was one of those people who woke up in the morning hating Clinton, shaved my stubble hating Clinton, and ate my breakfast cereal hating Clinton before managing to get him out of my thoughts and have a normal rest-of-the-day. (Of course, since Bush II has been president, I've missed Clinton terribly...)
So, virtually friendless (Sean and the others were always off gallivanting with APO), I was left all alone, in my dorm, for most of my sophomore year, reading. Reading the great books. I learned a lot. I read Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Thoreau, Darwin, Thomas More, Cicero, Virgil, the Brontes, Chaucer, the letters and diaries of Galileo, Boethius, The Cosmographia of Bernardus Silvestrus, Beowulf, The Turn of the Screw, Gulliver's Travels, Lady Chatterly's Lover, Locke's Second Treatise of Government, and C.S. Lewis' A Grief Observed, The Great Divorce, and The Screwtape Letters. As a bunch, I'd give these books four stars. Two enthusiastic thumbs up.
And I felt smarter than I ever had before. Some of these works were fast-paced, fun reads (C.S. Lewis' stuff was like reading a fun beach novel, and yet was theologically interesting and emotionally rewarding), while others were very difficult reads. (Reading ten pages of Thucydides was harder than reading 1,000 pages of Anne Rice. REALLY HARD. But I loved it once the teacher explained to me what I had just read during the next days lecture. So I liked stuff like that in retrospect, and today it is one of my favorite books.)
After reading all this heady stuff, I needed a break. Half of it shored up my belief in the establishment, the church, marriage, family, and the patriarchy. That didn't rock my world, but put my conservatism on firmer idealogical and intellectual ground than it had been during all of my debates with my liberal atheist friends from 5th grade through 12th. If I only I had read all this stuff earlier, I would have held up my end better, I thought. On the other hand, the other half of the books I read, especially those written after the Enlightenment, made fun of all of the above, and reserved special venom for Catholics and middle-class morality. The British writers seemed to love making fun of the Italians, also, I noticed. As a whole, the post-Enlightenment stuff seemed to promote atheism, socialism, and feminism, and made all of the above seem far less frightening and unreasonable than I expected. (No wonder arch-conservatives only read the bible and Tom Clancy! I thought. They're safe, then! This stuff doesn't get inside your head that way! And no wonder I wasn't allowed to read this in High School! The excuse is that the adults were afraid the books would be too hard for the kids to understand. The real reason is that the education major doesn't prepare teachers to teach ACTUAL literature to young people and, even if they were trained and did teach such works properly, parents would go out of their minds if they saw little Timmy reading The Communist Manifesto and Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man in 11th grade ... or ever for that matter.)
So, after reading all of the above, what did I believe? What did I internalize? Was I conservative or liberal? Atheist or Catholic?
I read it all, made note of it all, and deferred judgment until my life experiences would give me more to go on. I felt too sheltered and ignorant to judge the validity of any of it, and it would only be years later, after I worked as a reporter and saw some of the world, that I would make my decision.
Until then, it was time to take a break.
It was time to read some fun paperbacks.
It was time to read a series of Star Trek novels featuring Dr. McCoy (played by the memorable and inimitable DeForest Kelly in the original series and fist six movies)! It was time to read Doctor's Orders and Shadows on the Sun!
And boy were they fun!
Dr. McCoy is a sweet, pacifistic, gentlemanly, grouchy, funny, Southern fellow who acts like a regular guy, a Jimmy Stewart everyman, next to Captain Kirk's Burt Lancaster-style morally ambiguous tough-guy, and Spock's Sherlock Holmes' style sexism and ruthless logic. Dr. McCoy is my favorite, and boy was it fun to see him in the spotlight, especially since, at the time, the original series saga had just ended with the film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. and my Star Trek was over.
So my Star Trek lived on in spin-off fiction, like Peter David's funny comic books, which featured an unlikely romance between Captain Kirk and feminist R. J. Blaise, and in novels by great women writers like Diane Duane, Diane Carey, and J.M. Dillard. (Interesting that, with the exception of Nicholas Meyer and Harlan Ellison, all of the best Trek writers are women ... especially Dorothy Fontana, the best of them all ... when the original Star Trek is, half the time, an action show for men with a tacked-on pacifist, multicultural message and, the other half of the time, actually kind of left-leaning, in its own, Kennedy-esque way.) So I took a week off of going to class and devoured ten Star Trek novels. I had bought them all years ago and never got around to reading them. They had once been hard for me to read, and it had once taken me several days to read each one. Now that I was a Plato veteran, I could slay a Trek novel in a few hours, enjoy the heck out of it, and move on to slay another.
My roommate, Aragorn O'Donnell, would come in, fresh from either class or APO, and shake his head at me.
"Are you still in bed?"
"Yep."
"Reading a new Trek novel I see."
"One you like, Aragorn. Final Frontier. About Kirk's dad."
"Well, I'm glad you got around to reading it after me suggesting it to you for five years." (By the way, Aragorn was named after a character from Lord of the Rings. His parent's liked the book too much, and so did he. His favorite character was Aragorn. He also looked a bit like Joachim Phoenix.)
"It is great, but it is no Doctor's Orders, let me tell you."
"You and Dr. McCoy. He's no Kirk."
"Kirk can't tie Dr. McCoy's shoes," I pronounced.
"But shouldn't you be going to class?"
"Class? What's that?"
"You're grades would be better if you went."
"I have an A- average," I said.
"You could have an A average."
"Not with Olansky. He gave the valedictorian an A- and ruined her 4.0."
"You might still get an A from him."
"Or I might stay home, read a Trek novel, and go back to class next week, and get an A- and be a happier person for taking a mental health day."
"Whatever, Marc," Aragorn said. He then went off to an APO meeting.
After reading a few more Trek novels, I announced to Aragorn. "It is time."
"For what?" he asked, looking up from his homework, and looking very much like Joachim Phoenix.
"I'm writing a Star Trek short story of my own."
"You know, you're in college. You have homework and drinking to do."
"Bah," I said. "There's a writing contest. Strange New Worlds. The company that published Trek fiction is offering to print stories by unpublished writers. Only ten will be chosen and about ten thousand will submit their entries. Mine will win."
"You sound sure of it."
"I am," I declared. "I will win."
"You haven't written the story yet."
"But I will win. And I have an idea, too. There have been several Trek stories where the Enterprise crew have to defend a Ghandi-like figure, or avenge the assassination of a Martin-Luther-King type. But what if they were forced to protect, or avenge, a world leader whose politics offended them to the very core of their being? What if they were assigned to avenge the assassination of a George Wallace type?"
"Okay. Sounds provocative," Aragorn admitted.
"I have another idea. A Quincy-style murder mystery with Dr. McCoy as the hero."
"You and Dr. McCoy."
I raised a dramatic finger. "Aha! I've got it!"
"What?"
"I'll combine both story ideas into one."
I got around to writing the story a year later, after returning from my trip to Italy, and worked Siena, Italy, into the story idea as well. To this day, I rather like the idea, even if the writing style is a bit ... undergraduate.
It didn't win the contest, by the way.
Here it is ... my Trek short story, which takes place after Shadows on the Sun, Star Trek VI, and Best Destiny. And I even included a character that Peter David wrote into his comic book, Sara Tuchinsky (who is, presumably, a real person?!?) Enjoy...
Star Trek: A More Perfect Union
A story dedicated to the memory of DeForest Kelly.
By Marc DiPaolo
Doctor McCoy knelt beside the body of President Gwyneth Voss, noting grimly that his medical tricorder registered no brain activity. She was lying facedown on the cold marble floor in front of Il Torre palace’s massive entrance-hall staircase, which she had fallen down mere moments before. The freshly awakened Kirk and Spock stood beside McCoy, their tired minds rapidly coming to the conclusion that the chief executive had been pushed to her death by her vice president, Edmund Badler, who stared numbly down on the scene from the top of the stairway.
“Is she dead?” The innocent look of shock plastered on the vice president’s face was made all the more credible by his uncharacteristically ridiculous striped pajamas.
Kirk swore under his breath. There was no way they could have acted any sooner. The sound of the fall had been loud enough to jolt him from his light sleep. Not even stopping to throw a robe over his bare chest, he had jumped out of bed, flung the bedroom door open, and raced out of his room, meeting Spock in the hall shortly before the groggy McCoy had emerged from his guest room and stumbled after them. They were on the scene of President Voss’ fall an instant later, but it was already too late.
Only now were palace lights going on around them as the rest of the residents were emerging from their rooms to investigate. A male servant appeared on the second floor hall beside Badler and cried out in alarm upon seeing Voss. Badler warned the servant to keep back and promptly did just the opposite by creeping down the stairs himself. Descending cautiously, he brushed his unkempt hair back over his pointed ears, reminding Kirk that the twenty-two-year-old man was as much Vulcan as human. As the first baby born on this planet, Badler had come to symbolize Bifrost’s dream of a perfect cultural union between the peoples of Earth and Vulcan. Even now, after having been discovered towering over the body of a dead woman, he acted with the poise of a Vulcan and the sensitivity of a human.
“What happened?” Though Kirk was staring directly up at Badler as he spoke, the question was directed just as much to Spock and McCoy as to the official.
Badler stopped halfway down the stairs, a respectful distance from the dead. “I couldn't sleep. I was going to the kitchen for some tea.”
“And then what?”
“I heard a sound,” said Badler. “I thought someone might be hurt and ran out to help….”
“You did not see her fall?” asked Spock.
“I saw no more than you.” Badler edged along the railing, stepping around the body when he reached the lower floor. “I know this all looks very bad, but I can assure you I didn’t push her.”
Quickly confirming that her neck had been broken in the fall, McCoy could feel her body heat melting away under his touch. A part of him was aware that she looked very feminine dressed in her silk nightgown, and his blue-gray eyes started to water.
“Bones?” asked Kirk.
McCoy failed to register Kirk’s question, so Spock ventured an observation. “Presumably, she was killed by a fall down the stairway. What caused the fall has yet to be determined.”
There were now eight servants at the top of the stairs, speaking to one another in hushed, agitated voices. Kirk realized it was only a matter of time before Voss’ husband was aroused by the commotion, and he didn’t want the man to stumble on the scene unprepared.
“Captain,” said Spock, “fifteen-point-seven seconds elapsed between the instant I heard the fall and the moment I raced into this chamber. That is more than enough time for an attacker to have pushed her and escaped down the second floor hallway.”
“He would have to have been as fast as lightning,” said Badler, “because I didn't see him.”
Kirk began to speak a question aloud, enunciating each word slowly and carefully. “Either way, accident or murder...”
Spock completed the thought. “Why did none of us hear a scream?”
“Exactly.”
McCoy slipped the tricorder into his robe and rose to his feet. “She didn't scream because the fall didn't kill her. She was already dead before she dropped down the stairs.”
McCoy was about to elaborate when a scream came from above. There was a flurry of movement and the sounds of heavy footfalls as a large, athletic figure raced down the steps, taking them two-by-two. The man dropped to the floor next to his wife and felt frantically for a pulse. Horror spread further across his face when he found none. Weeping, he scooped up the woman in his arms, catching her head with his hand before it lolled back.
No matter how much he wanted to look away, McCoy remained strangely transfixed by the scene. He had seen emotional displays of grief countless times before, but this was different. For one thing, it was not long ago that he was the one who held his dying love in his arms, cursing fate for stealing her away. For another, the man cradling Gwyneth Voss' body in his arms – her husband, Seh’dar – was a full-blooded Vulcan.
* * * *
Seh’dar thankfully accepted the glass of brandy from Dr. McCoy's grasp and sipped it to steady his nerves. He sat in an armchair in the drawing room adjacent to the main hall, listening to the sounds of his wife’s body being moved to the lower-level medical facilities by Enterprise crewmen. Vice President Badler, apparently still feeling awkward about being the first one to discover the body, remained quietly in the darkness in the corner of the room.
“I’m sorry, but I have to ask when the last time you saw your wife alive was.” Now uniformed, Kirk sat across from Seh’dar and Spock stood impassively by his side.
The bereaved Vulcan's eyes seemed to lose their focus on the present as his thoughts drifted to the recent past. “We were in bed. She had a headache. She was going to get up for some medicine. I would have gotten up, but I was ... barely aware.” His mouth twitched oddly into an expression that was neither a smile nor a grimace. “Later on, it sank in that she was gone. I was worried about her, so I got up. I didn't hear anything until I got close to the stairs, and then I saw my wife, dead, on the floor.”
“Doctor McCoy thinks she may have died of a stroke,” said Kirk.
A disbelieving sigh escaped Seh'dar's lips. “She was only forty-three.”
“It is strange,” McCoy admitted, “but not unheard of. Did she ever complain that she was feeling unwell before this evening?”
“Not that I can recall,” said Seh'dar.
“Was she on any medication?”
“Some allergy pills that she takes during the winter. That's all. You'll find them upstairs.”
Vice President Badler finally felt comfortable enough to step forward and place a consoling hand on Seh'dar's shoulder. The Vulcan welcomed the gesture, shuddering only slightly at the discomfort of the physical contact. In the moment that Badler’s face came forth from the shadows, McCoy noticed again the vague resemblance between Badler and a young Jim Kirk. Badler's type handsome was just as boyish as Kirk’s, but his eyes and smile were far less playful. McCoy predicted that the subtle quality of harshness would gradually etch itself deeper into Badler’s face, making him tougher and meaner-looking with age.
“It pains me to say this at a time like this,” Badler said suddenly, “but there are certain protocols which must be observed from now on.”
Already understanding, Seh'dar nodded silently.
“Captain Kirk, I formally request that you, as the official representative of the United Federation of Planets, swear me in as President Voss' successor,” Badler said.
“What?” McCoy glowered. “Now? Her body isn't even cold!”
Badler folded his arms in front of his chest, challenging the Starfleet men with his regal stance. “If Bifrost is to remain a stable planet, it must always have a president.”
“Doctor,” said Spock. “I must point out that Mr. Badler's interpretation of planetary law is correct. He must be sworn in at the next convenient moment.”
Seh'dar stood up and placed the empty glass on the table beside him. “Yes. The transition must be smooth and swift. The people will need us to be strong for them.”
The eagerness that McCoy saw in Badler seemed all the more acute when the vice president consulted his wrist chronometer. “Captain, I will take only a few moments to groom myself. I would appreciate it if you met me in the president's office in twenty minutes.”
Seh'dar slipped quickly between Kirk and Badler, moving towards the hall. “If you will excuse me, gentlemen, I have to tell my children what has happened.”
****
Edmund Badler, the fourth president of the United Federation of Planets' colony world Bifrost, was sworn into office with a reporter, a company of Enterprise crewmen, and representatives of the Voss Administration on hand as witnesses. Standing behind Badler was Seh’dar and his two children. Mina Voss, his six-year-old daughter, kept her red, tear-stained face looking down at the floor. The boy of fifteen, Joshua, directed a cold, steady gaze at the upstart vice president, clenching and unclenching his fists. Once the oath of office was taken, Badler attempted to lighten the heavy atmosphere with a firm handshake and a gracious smile. “Thank you, Captain Kirk. Your professionalism and sensitivity in this difficult time has helped us all.”
The warmth seemed sincere enough, but Kirk wondered how cordial Badler would have been if a reporter hadn’t been present.
It was not long before President Badler’s office was cleared of everyone save Kirk, Spock, and Badler himself.
The new president stood awkwardly at the center of the room, displaying a sudden reluctance to claim the vacant executive seat behind Gwyneth Voss’ desk. “I assume you have something to say to me, gentlemen.” “You know that the Klingon Ambassador and I were in the middle of critical negotiations with President Voss about the future of this world. As a Federation ambassador, I'm afraid I cannot leave until certain issues are resolved.” Kirk had paused several times in the middle of his sentences, weighing each phrase carefully before uttering it. The captain’s earnestness did not fail to make an impression on President Badler, who seemed to be suddenly aware of the weight of responsibility that had settled on his shoulders.
“Namely, The Voss Declaration of Secession,” said Badler. He looked down on what was now his desk. Still sitting freshly atop its surface was the declaration President Voss had drawn up to officially break Bifrost’s ties with the Federation. She died before signing it.
“I don’t expect an answer tonight, of course,” said Kirk.
The president tilted his head thoughtfully to one side, as if trying to recall something. “`Each morning when I wake up and look at myself in the mirror, I have to forgive myself for not being George Washington. The only way I can keep forgiving myself is if I always try to act in the best interests of my people, my conscience, and my God. Reconciling the demands of all three is an impossible task, but it is a goal I will never stop trying to reach.’”
“Is that a quote?” asked Kirk.
“President Voss said it in her address three months ago, on the eve of this colony's twenty-second anniversary,” explained Badler. “She was a remarkable woman.”
“She seemed so,” Kirk said slowly, not knowing where the conversation was heading.
“In the general election two days ago, sixty-five percent of the planet voted in favor of her agenda. They agreed it would be better to break away from the Federation than to allow it to establish a Klingon refugee colony on our soil.”
“The Federation does not want to lose Bifrost,” said Kirk. “But there are so few other locations to move these refugees. If this planet rejects them, the others will surely follow suit. And then, these refugees will be without a real home.”
“That is why I am in an unenviable position.” President Badler snatched the Act of Secession from the desk and held it before Kirk's face. “If I tear this up, I will be defying the will of the people, disrupting Bifrost’s mission charter, and spitting on the memory of a beloved president.”
“Yes, you will be,” Kirk said. “You will also be preserving a very important union between Bifrost and the Federation and you will be offering aid to a people in dire trouble.”
The president exhaled sharply through his nose. "I'd be a fool to veto this, and you know it.”
“No, I don’t know it.”
“Come on, Kirk! What do you care if I sign this or not? Either way, you're out of here in the next day or so, leaving me behind – alone – to face the consequences.”
“History will remember the role you'll play in forging a lasting peace between the Federation and the Klingon Empire,” Kirk replied.
Badler laughed. “Excellent! I can be the most beloved one-term president of all time, especially if the refugees decide to take the whole planet for themselves.”
“That’s absurd.”
“You know, Voss was not afraid of a military clash with the Klingons. What she really feared was the Klingons who came to our world with their families. Slow, friendly colonization is the real way to take over a planet. That’s a lesson the Native Americans learned all too well after they made foreign settlers welcome.”
“What does this mean?” asked Kirk. “Are you saying you’ll sign the declaration?”
President Badler walked deliberately around the desk and lowered himself into the seat. “I believe it is a mistake to secede.”
“Then tear up that declaration and let some good come out of tonight’s horrible event.”
The president laced his fingers together on his lap and pushed the chair back into a reclining position. “Perhaps.”
****
Like the rest of the planet Bifrost, Gwyneth Voss' bedroom was a historical study in itself. A mix of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, its decor was rich in elegant fabrics – velvet curtains, silk bed sheets, and lace decorations – that would seem frivolous to the primarily functional sensibilities of modern-day Earth. The plush surroundings appealed to Kirk, who himself preferred the earthiness of wooden furniture to glass tables and plastic chairs. He, Spock, and McCoy had entered the room with Seh'dar's blessing to obtain Gwyneth's pills. McCoy found them quickly enough, slipping them into his trouser pocket.
“I'll be sure to test these while I'm downstairs,” said the doctor.
Though there was nothing else keeping him from the examination room, he felt compelled to linger and investigate the bedroom with his comrades. There was so little he knew about Gwyneth Voss. Before last week, he didn't even know she existed.
McCoy noticed immediately that Seh’dar was strangely absent from the plethora of family photos hanging on the walls. And, after briefly perusing the president’s bedside bookshelf – which contained 1984, A Man for All Seasons, and The Stepford Wives – Spock pronounced that her library was comprised entirely of political tragedies concerning the social establishment’s defeat of an idealistic iconoclast. Kirk was drawn immediately to the bedroom's most provocative decoration - a wooden ventriloquist's dummy dressed in a tuxedo and top hat. The doll sat, partly slumped over, atop a wooden clothes chest at the foot of the bed. “I haven't seen one of these in years.”
McCoy couldn't help but smile at the strange object. “Gwyneth liked to entertain her children with that doll.”
Spock arched his right eyebrow. “Indeed?”
McCoy nodded. “She spoke kind of quiet about it when she told me, like she was sharing a little secret. She said it was a dark day for Badler when the political cartoonists found out about her `talent for animating lifeless wooden men.'”
Kirk gave McCoy a quizzical look. “When did you two have time to make small talk like that?”
McCoy shrugged. “In-between her debates with you and Spock she'd come talk to me. I guess she felt comfortable speaking to me about regular, ordinary things … you know, other than secession.”
Spock seemed about to say something, but cast his eyes warily on McCoy and stopped himself.
“What?” asked McCoy.
“Doctor McCoy, I admire you for placing your respect for life above all things,” said Spock. “However, because you are so sensitive to human suffering, it is sometimes difficult to speak freely before you without offending your sensibilities.”
McCoy placed his fists against his hips and glared back at Spock. “I know what you're gonna say, Spock. You're gonna say that President Voss' death, though tragic, could be a great boon to both us and the Klingons, right?”
“Which is what makes the timing of her death so convenient for her political adversaries, and so suspicious in my eyes,” Spock replied. “I am almost convinced that Voss was assassinated, but I will reserve judgement at least until you have had a chance to carefully examine her body.”
McCoy’s angry expression softened. “You may have a point. I’ll get right on it.”
****
Over the years, McCoy had visited dozens of civilizations that had molded themselves after past Earth societies, but the city of New Siena struck him as a particularly impressive replica of the Medieval metropolis of Siena, Italy. The stone-walled capital looked strangely beautiful in the darkness. Narrow cobblestone streets wound between powerfully built brown homes that seemed as old and sturdy as if they had actually been built in eleventh-century Tuscany. Il Torre Palace, the home of the Bifrost presidents, was a broad, rectangular castle with a massive bell tower rising out of its left side. It was modeled after the original Palazzo Pubblico – built centuries ago as the seat of government of the ancient Republic of Siena.
McCoy stood in the courtyard outside the presidential estate, just beyond the yellow barricades that Chekov had set up, nursing a mint julep in his right hand. While it was a strange time for McCoy to have a drink – it had been two hours since he pronounced President Voss dead, it would be another three before sunrise – he needed it. He didn't feel tired because he was fueled by nervous energy, but he realized sleep would soon become a necessity.
McCoy instinctively sensed Spock approaching from behind. Although Spock had never said as much, McCoy was absolutely certain that the spiritual link between them was never fully severed after Spock’s resurrection, since he could still feel Spock alive within him even though he no longer carried Spock’s spirit, or katra. He was always able to sense it when Spock was close, and he sometimes even had a feel for the Vulcan's state of mind. He also knew that, if he lived to see Spock die again, he would feel it with more poignancy than any pain he ever felt before, because a part of his soul would die with Spock. Spock stood wordlessly by McCoy's side and joined the doctor in his contemplation of the cityscape. Through the quiet of the sleeping city, the two men could hear the faint nocturnal chirps of Bifrost’s insect life. McCoy found the sounds strangely comforting.
“Beyond the borders of New Siena, there are numerous other landscapes and settlements molded from human and Vulcan civilizations of the past,” Spock said.
“They seem to have this one pegged pretty good, if the pictures I've seen of the original Siena are accurate,” McCoy replied.
“This world,” Spock began thoughtfully, “above all others in the Federation, has preoccupied me.”
Now it was McCoy’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “You never said anything before.”
“A Federation colony with a population that is half-human and half-Vulcan.” Although there was no audible impatience in the statement, McCoy sensed it nevertheless, and felt foolish for not making the connection sooner. Still, there had been a lot on his mind lately.
“Oh, of course. Well, it is a fascinating idea.” Spock nodded. “Two vastly different cultures occupying the same planet, trying to reconcile their differences, learn from one another's strengths, and grow beyond their mutual limitations.”
Clasping his hands behind his back and looking up at the stars, McCoy unconsciously copied Spock's stance. “Well, if they're half as successful in the task as you have been, Spock, then they're in good shape.”
Spock stiffened only slightly at the unexpected compliment. “From what I have heard, they have done well so far. There has been a great deal of intermarriage and almost no racial incidents. The humans have grown more sober and pragmatic, the Vulcans more emotional and artistic. I would be curious to see how this world progresses, with or without a Klingon social presence.”
****
Captain's Log, Stardate 9583.7:
No one was happier than I was when the Enterprise was granted a reprieve from retirement after the Roy Moss incident. But now it seems as if this ship and its crew have staved off decommission only to bear witness to a succession of untimely deaths.
First Dr. McCoy’s wife Jocelyn and now Gwyneth Voss. I’ve seen hundreds of people killed during my time in Starfleet, but somehow ...somehow it’s always worse when it’s a woman.
Mr. Spock and I have returned to the Enterprise to issue a full report to Starfleet.
Dr. McCoy is on the planet below, continuing his own investigation into President Voss’ death. His discovery of Lexorin in her bloodstream has raised some alarming questions that need answering.
Hopefully a meeting with her personal physician – an old associate of McCoy’s, Gabriel Manzoni – will make things clearer.
In a few moments, I will be meeting with the Klingon Ambassador in his quarters to inform him of recent events…
The Klingon Ambassador didn't even look up from his cooking, but continued to stir what looked like a plate of moving seaweed over the oven flame in his quarters aboard the Enterprise.
“What would you have me say, Kirk? That I am sorry she is dead?” The Ambassador raised a hand from the cooking pan to cut off Kirk's response. “No, I am not sorry. She was a bigger bigot than even you ever were. She would rather have seen all of the refugees of the Praxis disaster die than offer them safe haven on this planet.”
The Ambassador paused to add a spice to the writhing mass of tentacles he called an early breakfast. Although it had been frying under a high flame for several minutes, the heat had not yet killed whatever it was that was cooking. “She threatened to withdraw this planet from the Federation if it forced her to bend to its demands. If that is not racial hatred of the highest order, I do not know what is.”
“And she insulted you, personally,” said Kirk.
Kirk could not tell if the Klingon curled his lips up into a smile or a snarl. “That was the most honorable thing she did in my presence, Kirk. Her defense of you was sheer poetry.”
“I want you to know I didn't ask for it.”
The Klingon scoffed and waved a dismissive hand at Kirk. “Its not important. She is not the first person to throw my words back in my face since Camp Kittimer.”
This did not surprise Kirk at all. A grand statement like “There will be no peace as long as Kirk lives” does not easily pass into history.
“We've all said things we've wished we could take back. I've been quoted back to myself several times lately. I've rarely liked the sound of my own words.”
The meal completed, the Ambassador emptied the contents of the frying pan onto a plate and brought the dish over to his dining table. “Your galley cooks and your food dispensers could never do justice to this dish, Kirk. It is only palatable when served live.”
Kirk stood a respectful distance from the table, allowing the Ambassador to begin eating. “The new president opposes any notion of Bifrost breaking away from the Federation, but we don’t know how committed he really is to helping your people.”
“Wishful thinking, Kirk. Badler will either bow to the demands of his people or be replaced by someone who will.”
****
In the three days since the Enterprise had entered orbit around Bifrost, McCoy had only had two opportunities to walk along the streets of its capital city. The sun was close to rising on day four, and he found himself strolling along the winding, hilly streets in search of Doctor Manzoni. He and his former classmate had agreed to meet by a statue of Garibaldi on Main Street, but the problem now was finding it.
McCoy noted with muted interest that the street he traveled along had grown so narrow that he could touch buildings on either side simply by raising his arms laterally. Six yards further downhill, he came upon a crimson banner pasted up on his right that read "Protect Freedom: Vote Secession." It was left over from the election earlier in the week. Irksome-yet-useful, he remembered the slogan from before and used it as a landmark to find Main Street.
Three turns later, McCoy linked up with the walled city's pivotal roadway, finding with some surprise that absolutely nobody was walking about. The contrast between New Siena at 5 a.m. and at 5 p.m. was staggering. The last time he had seen this wide path was immediately after the away team had first beamed down to Bifrost’s surface. It seemed like ages ago simply because so much had happened since then… Transport had been more disorientating than usual because Sara, the transporter chief, had once again energized the beam without giving McCoy proper warning. Caught in mid-sentence, he had the wonderful pleasure of feeling his mouth dissolve and reassemble as he spoke. The rest of the statement begun on the transporter pad tumbled out on the threshold of Main Street before McCoy could stop it: “… cash it in right now. Oh, for Pete's sake! Just one time, I wish that woman would give me a proper warning.”
McCoy tested his jaw to see if it was okay. One small mercy was that he didn’t catch sight of it happening to himself this time. He hated that part of the beaming experience more than anything else. “Stuff like this never happens when Scotty runs the transporter,” McCoy complained. “That’s it. I don’t care that she’s been with this Enterprise since its maiden voyage - I’m not letting her transport me ever again.”
Kirk had smiled playfully back at his chief medical officer. “Have it your way, Bones.”
Once recovered from the sudden jolt, McCoy had realized that they were all standing at the edge of Main Street, where throngs of people were walking about and none of them seemed to be headed anywhere in particular.
“Let me guess,” said Kirk to Spock. “Passegiata.” “What's this?” asked McCoy, not wanting to attempt to pronounce the word Kirk had used.
“It's an old Italian social ritual,” responded Spock. “In self-contained cities like Siena on Earth, the entire population goes out for an evening walk in the hopes of casually encountering friends and family members. It is a means of maintaining a sense of community and preventing the city from growing impersonal.”
Why am I always the only one who doesn't know about these things? McCoy had thought.
They stood at the threshold of the street, watching as wave upon wave of people flowed by. Twice McCoy tried to step out into the street, but each time he felt overwhelmed by the crowd.
“How can anyone be social in this?” asked McCoy. “It looks like a goddamned stampede.”
“Look,” Kirk pointed. “Isn’t that her?”
McCoy followed Kirk's gaze and caught his first glimpse of President Gwyneth Voss. Dressed in a simple white blouse and a pair of slacks, she was socializing with the people on the street while moving in their general direction. The lines on her face gave her a classy, respectable beauty, and her shoulder-length brown hair had so far managed to stave off any trace of gray. McCoy couldn’t help but take instantly to the easy way in which she interacted with the ordinary people. She put on no airs at all. She was like Jim on the bridge of the Enterprise.
But that was three days ago. In the time that had elapsed since then, Voss had died and Badler had risen to succeed her. The very same street McCoy had first seen her striding confidently along amidst the crowd was now empty and silent. But not for long.
“Leo!” The scheduled appearance of Gabriel Manzoni was an agreeable one, bringing back more pleasant memories of years gone by.
“How are you, Gabriel?” McCoy shook Gabriel’s hand and quickly looked over the man he hadn’t seen in seven years. The strong, chiseled jaw had softened, the stomach had filled out and the hair had thinned, but Gabriel nevertheless looked remarkably good for his age.
“Okay, under the circumstances, Leo. It's really good to see you.” He gestured towards the road ahead. “Shall we walk?”
“Sure.”
The two started off along the level ground as the sky started to lighten several shades of blue.
“I heard about Jocelyn,” Gabriel said hesitantly, “and I just wanted to tell you I'm sorry.”
“Thanks. Now, don’t say anything more about it. It's bad enough that Jim and Spock have been walking on eggshells around me the past two months. I don't need you doing the same.”
“I promise I won’t, Leo.”
McCoy nodded. “Good.”
“You wanted to know about the Lexorin in the president’s blood?”
“Yes. Where did it come from? The pills were clearly for her allergies, as Seh’dar said.”
“I gave her heavy doses of Lexorin each night for the past four nights.”
“Why?”
“I was asked to keep it a secret, but I guess it'll all have to come out now.”
“Would you stop being cryptic already and just spit it out?”
Gabriel gave a resigned shrug. “Okay. Four nights ago, I got an emergency call from her husband to go to the palace. When I got there, I found her thrashing about on her bed screaming and shouting.”
“Was it some kind of seizure?”
Gabriel licked his lips thoughtfully. “It wasn’t that exactly. She kept yelling snatches of political speeches and slogans. The funny thing was she seemed to be debating herself, taking both sides of every issue. I’d heard stories that Bobby Fischer used to like to play against himself at chess, and it was like she was doing the same thing with political rhetoric.” “What was she yelling about?”
“Not surprisingly, Klingon refugees and secession. One minute, she'd yell something about why the Federation was the greatest thing since sliced bread, and the next she'd talk about how important it was for Bifrost to break away and forge its own destiny. She was saying a lot of stuff about wanting perfect union between humans and Vulcans and not letting the Klingons mess that up.”
McCoy massaged his jaw thoughtfully. “Did it seem like there were really two distinct personalities arguing the points?”
“Yes, it did. It really did.”
Just then, they came across the overlook at the edge of the fortress-like city, where a waist-high wall was all that stood between them and a hundred-foot plummet to the ground. The sky was still too dark for the men to see more than a few yards beyond the city limits, so the spectacular view of lush, Earth-like greenery that could be seen from the overlook during the daylight hours was now little more than a veil of murky black soup. Gabriel stopped walking and seated himself atop the wall, instantly giving McCoy paranoid visions of his friend toppling backwards into the abyss and cracking open on the ground like an Italian Humpty Dumpty.
“She had another fit the next night,” Gabriel continued. “After that, she seemed to get a little better, but I gave her some more medicine to prevent a relapse. It was horrible, because she was perfectly healthy before last week.”
“Why didn't she have one of those fits during her negotiations with Jim and the Klingon Ambassador?” “I don't know. Outwardly, at least, she was always fine during the day. I have no idea what was going on in her head while she was at those meetings.”
“If you knew about this, where were you last night?”
“I was called away,” Manzoni said. “An old man who lives nearby almost had his arm cut off in a freak accident. I was busy saving his life.”
McCoy shook his head sadly. “You should have warned me about her condition. If I had known ahead of time, I might have been more alert.”
“No, I couldn't have contacted you. Seh'dar pleaded with me not to tell anybody. He didn't want me to embarrass the president.”
“Well, there's no danger of her feeling embarrassed now, is there?”
“Don’t take it out on me!” Gabriel snapped. “It’s not my business to go around advertising privileged medical information about public figures. If anyone should have told you, it was her husband!”
“Gabriel, listen to me,” McCoy said quietly, holding his hand up for emphasis. “I’ve got some fairly strong suspicions about President Voss’ death. If I’m right, then I know from personal experience it’s a horrible way to go.”
Gabriel frowned. “That sounds pretty ominous there, Leo.”
“Don’t ask me to explain yet. It may not be too healthy for you to know any more than you do. I’ll tell you after things quiet down a little bit.”
Gabriel would have protested, but he reconsidered when he saw the look on McCoy’s face. “Okay, I’ll go home for now.”
McCoy soberly shook his fellow doctor’s hand goodbye. “You be careful, now. Don’t tell anybody we talked about any of this.”
“I won’t.” Without another word, Gabriel started off down the street, his feet moving quickly, his head lowered to the ground. A minute later, the shadows swallowed him up and the sounds of his footsteps disappeared into the distance.
Finding himself alone, McCoy felt a sudden warmth well up inside him. He knew people were supposed to feel cold when they were afraid, but it was different for him. At the moment, he was probably the only person who had a clear idea what was happening, and that realization made him feel anxious and vulnerable - especially walking about a strange city in the dark. It was time to get the hell out of there.
McCoy stepped away from the wall and pulled the communicator from his belt.
That was when he felt a heavy hand fall on his shoulder.
“Doctor McCoy, I would like a word with you.”
****
Checking first to make sure no one on the bridge was watching, Kirk yawned silently into his hand. Only twenty minutes sleep in the past thirty-seven hours did not make for a very well rested Iowa farm boy, and he found himself falling asleep in his captain’s chair.
Kirk swiveled around in his black command seat to regard his communications officer. “Uhura, any word from McCoy?”
“No, sir. Shall I contact him for you?”
“No, that’s fine. I’m going to go get some sleep. Can you wake me if the doctor calls with any news?”
“Yes, Captain.”
McCoy lowered his communicator and frowned at Seh’dar, wondering how any man, even a Vulcan, could kill his own wife.
“I overheard your conversation with Dr. Manzoni,” said Seh’dar. “Is there something you’d like to tell me?”
Beads of sweat started to appear at McCoy’s temples. He decided to lie and wondered if he could pull it off. “Why, yes. I think President Badler killed Gwyneth.”
“My son suspects the same thing. Was he that desperate to be president?”
“No. He didn’t intend to kill her.”
Seh’dar raised his eyebrow in a Spock-like fashion. “Really?”
“You see,” McCoy swallowed, “all he wanted to do was prevent her from signing the Act of Secession.”
“How did that desire result in her death?”
McCoy knew it would be wiser to continue the charade, but somehow he couldn’t stomach it any more. He was too angry. “You tell me,” challenged McCoy. “It was a Vulcan mind-meld, wasn’t it?”
Seh’dar’s eyes darkened. “How could a mind-meld be responsible for Gwyneth’s death?”
The anger was giving McCoy courage enough to continue, even at the risk of provoking the imperious Vulcan to action. “I know that Vulcans can use them to pull memories from people’s minds – sometimes forcibly. It’s also possible for the mind-meld to change people’s perceptions, to hypnotize them. And when Spock thought he was going to die, he planted his memories and personality in my head through a mind-meld.”
“I had heard that you once carried Spock’s katra.”
“Spock’s spiritual presence was so powerful it almost swallowed me whole,” McCoy said. “I fought so hard to keep control of my own thoughts and actions I almost went completely bonkers. To keep me stable, Jim gave me doses of Lexorin. Just like you called in Dr. Manzoni to give your wife Lexorin!” McCoy’s voice shook with outrage. “Did she know what you were doing to her?”
Seh’dar stared back at McCoy as if the doctor had grown a second head. “What exactly are you talking about?”
“You probably entered her thoughts as she slept – like a voice in a dream, coaxing her to change her mind and welcome the Klingons.”
“A few moments ago you said Badler was responsible. Now you’re saying I did something to my wife?”
“Never mind what I said about Badler. You killed her.”
Seh’dar’s body coiled like a snake’s. “You’re completely unhinged.”
“I suppose you didn’t mean to kill her,” McCoy continued. “She was no good to you dead – there was no guarantee Badler would act any different as president. In some ways, he is just as conservative as she was.”
McCoy took a bold step forward, but Seh’dar stood his ground. “You manipulated that poor woman. You spoke through her like a ventriloquist through a wooden doll. Your thoughts in her mind! Your voice through her mouth! But she wasn’t a doll! She was a human being.”
Seh’dar glared back at McCoy in silence.
“But she was too strong for you, wasn’t she?” asked McCoy. “She never submitted to your influence in public. Not for an instant. Her mind stayed dominant long enough for her to tell us all where to get off. Well, it’s no wonder she couldn’t take the pressure. The inner conflict was so intense it caused the stroke that killed her.”
McCoy paused, eyeing his opponent warily. “You know what really gets me, you green-blooded monster? She was your wife! Didn’t you have any feelings for her?”
“I loved my wife.”
“Well, I don’t understand how you could kill your own wife over politics. But then again, I’ve never found politics to be all that important. I’m just an old country doctor. Helping people is all that matters to me.”
“That is exactly what I’m doing,” Seh’dar said quietly. “I am helping hundreds of Klingons at the cost of one life. I can live with that cost. But I wish she hadn’t fought me. If she had merely acquiesced, she’d still be alive. I wasn’t asking much of her. All I wanted to do was make her act logically and morally.”
“Was it logical and moral to fry her brain?” McCoy cried.
Suddenly, Seh’dar came to life, charging his adversary. McCoy’s hand dove for his phaser, but it was too late. Seh’dar seized McCoy with steel-like fingers, hoisting him into the air, and pushing the doctor’s flailing body over the top of the waist-high overlook wall. McCoy tried to struggle, but his enraged, Vulcan-blooded opponent completely physically outclassed him. As Seh’dar held him dangling in the air over the abyss, all McCoy could do was look down at the hundred-foot drop below. The trees looked so far away.
“Nothing personal, doctor,” Seh’dar said calmly. “You just know too much.”
Then Seh’dar let McCoy drop.
On board the Enterprise, Spock felt a sudden rush of overwhelming anxiety.
McCoy.
At the moment McCoy fell, he flung both arms out and grabbed desperately for something to hold onto. He latched onto Seh’dar’s shoulder and arm, and held on with a strength he didn’t know he had, pulling Seh’dar over the edge with him. Seh’dar let out a surprised cry as he found himself falling to his death alongside his victim.
McCoy felt himself screaming as the ground beneath him raced closer. He tried to push himself away from Seh’dar as they plummeted, but the enraged Vulcan caught McCoy by the throat. McCoy stared up into Seh’dar’s soulless eyes, realizing that the final face he was going to see before dying was his killer’s.
In the last moment of life he had left, McCoy hurled a wild punch at the side of Seh’dar’s head. As his fist streaked toward its target, he saw it disappear into a billion pinpricks of yellow light.
****
Realizing what was about to happen, Spock pushed Captain Kirk away from the transporter pad. McCoy and Seh’dar flashed into existence above them and came streaking down from the platform. Carried by the momentum of their fall down below, they continued sailing through the air, screaming in fear and fury. The two men spun end over end, slamming with a harsh crack against the transporter room controls.
Sparks flew through the air, burning the transporter chief’s fingers before she could jump backwards.
A moment later, all was quiet.
Kirk placed his right hand on the transporter platform and pulled himself to his feet. “How did you know, Spock?”
“I heard Doctor McCoy call for help.” Spock carefully approached the tangled mass of limbs to see if McCoy had survived the fall.
When McCoy rolled over onto his back, the first thing he saw through a fuzzy haze of blurred vision was the transporter chief – her round, sweet face a picture of concern.
“Are you okay, doctor?” Sara asked.
McCoy could barely keep his eyes open, but he managed a weak smile. “Sara, my dear,” he slurred, “I could kiss you.”
Then he lost consciousness.
****
Carrying a bouquet of flowers under his arm, Captain Kirk walked into sickbay four hours later to find Doctor McCoy awake and on the mend. Spock was already by McCoy’s side, as he had been since the doctor was snatched from death’s grasp.
Kirk casually tossed the flowers in McCoy’s lap. “Here you go, doctor. A little `get well’ gift from Sara. She’d have delivered them personally, but she’s on duty another hour.”
McCoy picked them up and looked at them with vague interest. “I guess this means no hard feelings for all the times I called her incompetent.”
“She did a superb job,” said Spock. “As soon as it occurred to me that the president was killed by a Vulcan mind-meld, I aroused the captain and suggested that we return the planet to question Seh’dar. We were just about to transport to when I sensed your distress and told Sara to beam you up immediately. She had been tracking you all along and responded to my command within .76 seconds.”
“Spock, how in the hell can you calculate .76 seconds?” McCoy moved his head too much and felt a deep stab of pain. “Ow! Damn it.”
Kirk moved forward. “Are you okay?”
“The doctor has suffered three broken ribs and a fractured wrist,” pronounced Spock.
“Then you’re better off than your attacker,” Kirk said to McCoy. “Seh’dar died in the fall from the transporter pad, breaking his neck against the control bank.”
Kirk found McCoy’s expression uncharacteristically unreadable at that moment, so he continued. “You might like to know that Bifrost has officially chosen to remain a member planet of the Federation. President Badler has just begun negotiations with the Klingon Ambassador to establish a refugee colony in one of the less populated regions. And Badler also tells me he’s going to give you a commendation for solving President Voss’ murder.”
McCoy waved the news away. “I don’t want any damned commendation. I didn’t do anything special. Spock practically figured it out at the same time I did anyway.”
“I’d love to stand here and argue with you, but Spock and I have to return to the surface and continue the negotiations.” Kirk turned away and headed towards the door. “You get better, Bones.”
The sickbay doors whooshed open and Kirk stepped out into the hall. Spock started to follow but hesitated in the doorway when McCoy called after him, “Spock?”
“Yes?”
McCoy’s bright blue eyes glinted. “Thanks.”
Spock raised an eyebrow in the closest thing to a smile he would ever give McCoy. “My pleasure, doctor.”
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