Deliberacy

Happy New Year to all of you still reading my irregular rants and occasional stories. Here’s wishing that 2008 brings much joy, happiness and healing to the world.

Interestingly enough, although work on my new novel slowed to almost nothing in the latter part of 2007– I have completed several new short fiction pieces. Hope you like this one.

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 The Martyr’s Daughter

Thousands of tiny lines, spiraling into a complex pattern different from that of every other human on Earth push the send button, plunging me into a vortex. I can’t recall exactly how a vortex is created—something about the tangential velocity varying inversely as the distance from the center of rotation… In non-technical terms it translates into What if it’s not her? What if she doesn’t remember? What if she remembers but doesn’t want to hear from me?

            Maybe she’s sick of people out of the past calling her up and telling her how sorry they are. And how wonderful her mother was.

            It’s hard not to think of The Martyr as wonderful. Any person who doesn’t respond to poverty and need by switching the TV channel to something less depressing qualifies as wonderful. And The Martyr did so much more than that.

            But The Martyr’s dead now, wonderful or not.

            No matter how quick her killers were, they couldn’t have been fast enough. And it really doesn’t count that she probably knew she was going to die, or that she was unafraid or prepared, or any of that cool, spiritual shit. ‘Cause no matter how ready she was, when the inevitable was right there in front of her, she must have realized the pain that bullet would bring. To the daughter who loved her. To the strangers who’d been praying for her safe release.
 
            The delay between the click of the trigger and nothing must have felt like eternity. If the speed of sound is 344 m/s (769 mph in arid conditions at 70 degrees Fahrenheit) and the average bullet discharged from a pistol travels at 1000 feet per second, then without bothering to do the calculations it’s safe to guess only a nanosecond in actual time passed.

            An endless nanosecond.

            Time’s a headfuck that way. Some things, the ones you dread, they drag on and on. Others—boom—they’re done. Just like that. Even if you want them to last forever.

            Like when I fucked The Martyr’s daughter. Only I wish I hadn’t. Or that it had been different.

            I  don’t call her The Martyr to protect her identity—unless you’ve had your head up your ass for the last two years, you know who she is. Working to bring aid and hope to Iraqis. I call her that because to me, that’s who she is. Or was. It’s been over a year now.

            Over a year since I saw Tessa on TV—cool and composed as she answered questions about her mom. God, she was hot in that interview. I imagined us together, in a field of poppies. Papaver somniferum, the opium poppy—essential ingredient of  morphine, codeine and papaverine. Morphine to dull the pain and papaverine for erectile dysfunction. I wanted to hold her there, surrounded by those crimson cups swaying in the breeze, until she forgot everything else in the world—mothers and wars and all of it.

            Instead I sat in my apartment and cried. For her. For The Martyr. For all the death and destruction out there. Then I went drinking and brought home some blonde who couldn’t hold a candle to Tessa.

            There’s a fine line between sanity and madness; right and wrong. Guys my age are being pushed across it everyday—all over the world I guess—but especially in Iraq. Raping and murdering children. What kind of monster rapes a 14-year-old child, then kills her and her entire family?

            That’s the kind of horror The Martyr was working to stop. That was the hatred she was up against. The hatred that killed her. Leaving Tessa officially an orphan at 24. But she’d been on her own much longer than that—Tessa was an orphan when I first met her; a victim of her mother’s causes.

            Looking at the blonde’s golden hair tousled on my pillow, I wondered how stupid or naive or desperate a woman would have to be to go home with a complete stranger. I imagined my hands pressing against her throat, crushing her trachea. We all have the capacity I realized, gently caressing her soft skin, for violence and cruelty. The only thing separating me from the monsters is volition. Such a small thing, making all the difference in the world. The choice not to be cruel. Awareness that the suffering of others only makes me suffer more.

            The blonde woke up around 3:00 am. She said she needed to go, so I offered to walk her home. But she laughed at me and said something about being able to handle it. I don’t think she had a clue what it was, or how often she narrowly avoided it.

            I go for blondes these days. I’m drawn to that lack of eumelanin—making me the equivalent of any hot-blooded Cro-Magnon man. Blonde, the evolutionary desirable of the last Ice Age, when men were scarce and female competition fierce. But blonde is only relevant to me because I can’t imagine Tessa with anything but dark hair.

            She wasn’t a child at 14. Tessa was born mature. Serious. We only did it once. She took me by the hand and nodded toward the door, outside away from our friends and the clueless adults. We found ourselves a comfy little spot in a nearby playground—one of those platforms at the top of the slide. It wasn’t my first time. But it was my first time sober.

            There’s nothing worse than suddenly finding all your dreams come true. That’s what happened. My perfect girl, standing over me, slowly pulling that skimpy pink tank-top over her head. It was too good to be true.

            So I fucked it up. Came too soon. Left her feeling confused and undesirable. I guess I should have explained that it was just too much. She was too much. But I was 15. And humiliated. So I didn’t say shit about it and hooked up with one of her friends later that weekend.

            That was my event horizon. No escape.  Not from the gravitational pull of my own black hole; that region of empty space with a pointlike singularity at the center. I fell into nothingness. I’ve been here for years. Trapped. Empty. Filled with emptiness. Tessa and I stayed friends for a while, but it was never the same. I’d hurt her. Hurt us both. We grew up and drifted apart. New friends and new girls came and went. I didn’t think about her much. Not until they took The Martyr.

            Now this vortex swirls around me. The phone rings again—it’s the fifth, maybe sixth ring. I could just hang-up. My finger inches unbidden to the end button, as my eyes flick over an article I’ve been reading, resting on the term Hawking Radiation. That stuff that might be emitted from black holes, allowing them to lose mass, shrink, possibly evaporate altogether. Thermal radiation leaking out of nothingness. An empty shell radiating warmth.

            Try a little tenderness. It’s Stephen Hawking speaking in Otis Reading’s voice and he’s pointing out the escape route. Emptiness can not give off heat. For there to be warmth, then the body can not be nothing. It seems obvious now. Like the Laws of Gravity after Newton explained them to the world.

            “Hello?”

            Tessa’s voice, breathless from running for the phone, familiar yet distant wrenches my cognitive functions to a halt and science slips away.

            “Hello?” she says again.

            I hear, or think I hear, a note of expectation in her voice. A quiver of anticipation, like she intuitively recognizes she’s on the verge of something momentous.