Beneficiaries

Bars are frequent settings for stories -- and bartenders commonly the ones who draw the story out of the teller. "Beneficiaries" is a bit of an homage to two writers who set a series of delightful stories in a pub, L. Sprague deCamp (Tales from Gavagan's Bar) and Arthur C. Clarke (Tales from the White Hart). I hope I did the idea justice.

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Beneficiaries

“Scotch.  Double.  Neat.”

Jim Quick, for twenty years the bartender at O’Donnell’s Irish Pub, wiped his hands on a towel, tossed it on the counter behind the bar, and turned to his newest patron with a smile.  “Do you have a favorite, then?  Single malt?  Blend?”

“It doesn’t matter,” the man said, slumping on the barstool and running his hand through hair still damp from the rain.  “Whatever’s handy.”

Jim selected a bottle, and filled a glass with amber liquid.  “Here’s a Glenfiddich.  Always popular.  Cheers, mate.”

The man held up the glass to Jim, and took a sip.

It was a quiet night—the only ones in O’Donnell’s were the regulars.  And this guy, who Jim had never seen before.  Despite having the downcast look of a dog that had been left alone in the back yard during a thunderstorm, and being just about as wet, there was something curiously compelling about him.  Jim leaned on the polished mahogany bar.  “You look like you need some cheering up.”

One corner of the man’s mouth twitched.  “I suppose.”

“Let me guess.  Problem with the ladies?”

“Oh, no.  They beat down the door to my bedroom, honestly.”

Jim looked at him, smiling and frowning at the same time.  The man in front of him was completely ordinary-looking, and in fact, the most striking thing about him was how nondescript he was.  If he’d had to describe this fellow to the police, Jim would have been hard-pressed to name one feature about him that didn’t begin with the word “average.”  But even so, there was no doubt in Jim’s mind that the man was speaking the literal truth.

“Lucky you.”

“I suppose,” the man said again.

Jim gave him a crooked grin.  “Hey, if you’ve got more than you want, you could send one or two over to my place.  It’s been too long since I had a nice tumble.”

The man shrugged.  “Okay.”

“Come on, then.”  Jim layered on all of the kindly reassurance that he’d learned from twenty years of dealing with despondent drinkers.  “Out with it. What’s eating at you?”

The man raised an eyebrow.  “Did I tell you that my name is Ted Cruz?”

Jim’s eyes opened wide.  “Seriously?  As in the weaselly Senator guy?”  He shook his head.  “That must be a bit of a burden, having a famous name like that.”

The guy slumped down even further.  “No, it’s not really.”  He stared into the depths of his scotch.  “I lied.  My real name is Britney Spears.”

Jim stared at him, and then burst into guffaws.  “Oh, mate, I’m sorry to have a laugh at your expense, but… oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, whatever can your parents have been thinking?”  Then he dissolved into helpless laughter again.

The man put both hands over his face, and leaned into them, sitting motionless for nearly a minute.

Jim finally got a hold of himself, and wiped his streaming eyes with the back of his hand, then reached out and thwacked the man on his shoulder.  “I’m sorry for laughing, mate.  That was unkind of me.  Next round is on the house, to make up for my bad manners.”

The man didn’t move.

“Ah…”  Jim frowned, and tapped the man’s shoulder.  “Are you all right?”  There was no response.  “I’m heartily sorry for laughing at you, um… Britney.”

The man dropped one hand, and glared at Jim with the one exposed eye.  “My name is not Britney Spears.  I was lying again.”

Jim shook his head.  “You were just having me on?”

“Yes,” the man said, one hand still covering half of his face.

“Well, you’re the finest liar I’ve ever met, and I’ve met a few,” Jim said.

Finally the other hand moved.  “No, I’m not.  I’m a terrible liar.  I just make stupid shit up.  It’s not even halfway to believable.”

Jim shrugged.  “Suit yourself.”

The man gave a harsh sigh.  “Look. I’m going to tell you something, and see if you believe that.  Tell you a story.  Okay?”

Jim looked down the bar.  The other patrons seemed to be in no imminent need of refills, and no one new had come in since the conversation had begun, so he leaned on the bar.  “Sounds worth hearing.”

“My uncle Harry died three months ago,” the man began.

“A pity,” Jim said.  “My condolences.”

“Thanks.  Uncle Harry was a bit of an oddball.  He was my mother’s brother, and was filthy rich.  He never married, and so when he died we inherited a good bit of his money, his house, and his stuff.”

“Lucky,” Jim said.

“Funny you should put it that way.  I’d always been jealous of Uncle Harry, because he had everything.  My mom and dad always just barely scraped by, but Uncle Harry made money without even trying.  My dad used to say that he could mint gold coins with his fingertips.  He always seemed to succeed at whatever he tried, and had a new girlfriend every week—and each one was always prettier than the last.  But even so, he never gave us anything while he was alive.  Not one cent.  I remember at one Christmas dinner, he came over, ate our food and drank our wine, and didn’t give a damn thing to anyone—not a single present to any of us.  He even told us that he had no reason to give away what was his, why should anyone expect a handout?  And the funny thing is—at the time, we all just sort of swallowed it.  ‘Harry’s a rogue,’ my mom said, in this kind of indulgent way.  And my dad said, ‘He’s a charmer, that’s for sure.’”

“Bit of an asshole, sounds like.”

“Well, maybe it seems that way now.  But no one was saying it then.”  The man nodded toward Jim, as if to point out how significant that was.  “He almost seemed to make a point of saying outrageous shit, just to see if anyone would challenge him.  Nobody ever did.”

“And you inherited his money when he died.  So you got the best of him, in the end.”

“Yes and no.  Just from his bank balance, my parents will never want for anything again, and that’s a blessing.  But the kids… he specifically willed each of us something.  He gave my sister a silver ring, and my brother a suave-looking felt hat with a leather hatband.  Me… he gave me a necklace.”

“A necklace?”  Jim peered at the man’s neck, which was bare.  “Not your style, then?”

The man gave a mirthless laugh.  “Actually, it was beautiful.  A gold Celtic cross on a thin gold chain.  When my mom gave it to me, said that Uncle Harry had wanted me in particular to have it, I thought it was pretty cool.  But I don’t wear necklaces much, so I just put the box in my pocket and forgot about it.”

Jim smiled.  “A nice keepsake of your uncle, still.”

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of its creator, Petr Vodicka, and the Wikimedia Commons]

“I got woken up by the telephone the morning after we got the gifts from Uncle Harry’s estate—it was a Saturday, I remember.  Seven o’clock.  It was my brother, calling me up to tell me he’d won the lottery.”

“Your brother won the lottery?” Jim said, in awe.  “That’s stupendous!”

“Yeah,” the man said, without much enthusiasm.  “But what I didn’t tell you is that he was on the verge of bankruptcy.  He’d gone out the night before with some friends, sort of as a last fling.  He was so embarrassed by his financial problems that he hadn’t wanted to ask any of us for help.  But he said that evening, he’d put Uncle Harry’s hat on, and suddenly had this feeling like… he couldn’t lose.  He bought one lottery ticket—just one—with the last dollar in his wallet.  And now he’s a millionaire.”

“That’s quite a story.”

Again there was that momentary twitch in the corner of the man’s mouth.  “Yeah.  And my sister… I didn’t tell you about her, either.  She recently was diagnosed with ALS.  You know, Lou Gehrig’s.  She had the tremors, weakness, and all… she was pretty despondent about it.”

“Isn’t that…”  Jim stopped, bit his lip.  “Terminal?”

The man nodded.  “Yeah.  Two years, they said.  Five, tops.  Most of it you’re bedridden.  One of the most horrible diseases around.”  He paused, took another sip of his scotch.  “Only, thing is—she went to the doctor two weeks ago, and he said she’s cured.  No sign of illness.  In fact, they’re looking into whether she was misdiagnosed in the first place, because no one, he said, ever is cured of ALS.  If you get it, you die.”  The man looked up at Jim, his eyes intense.  “She was wearing Uncle Harry’s ring when she went in for the checkup—the one where they told her the disease was gone.”

Jim stared at the man in astonishment.  “That’s… that’s fantastic.”

“We were all thrilled about it.  First my brother strikes it rich while wearing Uncle Harry’s hat, and then my sister is cured of a fatal disease while wearing his ring.”  He looked at Jim, his eyebrows raised.

“So… the necklace?” Jim prompted.

“It went missing.”

“No!” Jim said, aghast.

“When I found out my sister had been cured while wearing his ring, I thought, ‘I wonder if there’s something about Uncle Harry’s stuff that’s making all this happen?’  So, I took the necklace out of the box, and put it on.  I slipped it inside my shirt, and wore it all day.  I didn’t notice anything different.  Then, that evening… I suddenly realized that it was gone.  I turned my apartment upside down—I looked inside the sofa, under chairs, everywhere I could think of.  It was gone.”

“Well, that’s devastating,” Jim said with feeling.

“Mmm-hmm.”  The man didn't sound particularly devastated.  “So, anyway, that night, I was in the bathroom, and getting ready for bed, and I took my shirt off.  And I saw this.”

The man stood up, and lifted his shirt.  In the center of his upper chest was a small mark, shaped like a Celtic cross—a circle with a cross through it.

“Tattoo?”

“Not one I asked for.  But it’s the same shape as the design on the necklace pendant.  So I called my brother and sister, and we got together the next day for lunch.  And guess what I found out?”

“I wouldn’t try,” Jim said.

“Both the hat and the ring had had a Celtic cross design—it was on the hatband, and engraved into the band of the ring.  Both the hat and the ring had gone missing, too—the hat the day after my brother won the lottery, and the ring the day after my sister was given a clean bill of health.  And then they told me the best part—my brother now has a tiny Celtic cross mark on his temple, right at his hairline—you have to look close to even see it—and my sister has one on her right ring finger.”

“Sweet mother of God,” Jim said, under his breath.  “Wealth, health, and…?”  He looked at the man, a question in his eyes.

An attractive young woman, a cosmopolitan in one slender hand, came up to the man, and said, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I couldn’t help but notice…”  She laughed nervously, reddened, and set her drink down on the bar.  “This is… this really isn’t like me.”  She stopped, and looked at him, smiling.

“It’s okay,” he said, as if he already had the script memorized, and was just waiting for her to recite her lines.

“It’s just that… when you had your shirt pulled up, I couldn't help looking at your bare chest, and I thought, Wow, he is so hot!  It just… it just came over me so suddenly, and I thought, hey, you only live once, right?  So I thought…”  She looked down coyly.  “Are you doing anything this evening?  I thought maybe we could go to my apartment, and you know… get to know each other a little.”  She looked up, smiled.

The man looked at Jim.  “Wealth, health, and I sure as hell would just like to be believed because I’m actually telling the truth.”  He sighed, and glanced over at the woman, who was hanging on his every word, even though there was no way she could possibly have had any idea what he was talking about.  “Not to mention women finding me attractive because I actually am.  The brother who was poor gets money, the sister who was sick gets well, and you know what that implies about me?”  He shook his head.  “Oh, well, I guess there’s nothing to be done about it.  Uncle Harry did the best he could, all things considered.”  He looked up at the woman, managed a smile, and said, “I’m really good in bed.”

She wiggled her eyebrows.  “I’m sure you are.”

“My name is Margaret Thatcher.”

She gave a coquettish laugh.  “That’s fine with me.  Mine’s Terry.”

The man slid a ten dollar bill across the bar, told Jim to keep the change, and Jim watched as the two of them exited into the rainy night.  Leo Corcoran, one of the bar’s regulars, came up, pint of Guinness in hand, and said, “It’s a right quiet night, Jimmy boy.  Who was that nice-looking young man you were talking to?  Dashing sort of fellow, I thought.  I’ve not seen him in here before.”

“Interesting gentleman.”  Jim picked up a towel and polished a glass with it.  “Quite a lady’s man, I fancy.  I think he’ll be scoring a nice little home run this evening, with that sweet blonde who left on his arm.  But odd thing, you know?  Fellow’s name is ‘Margaret Thatcher.’”

“Is that a fact?”

“It is,” Jim said.

“Never know what you’ll hear next, some days.  Stretches your capacity for belief, sometimes.”

“That’s God’s honest truth, lad,” Jim said.  “God’s honest truth.”

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It's obvious to regular readers of Skeptophilia that I'm fascinated with geology and paleontology.  That's why this week's book-of-the-week is brand new: Thomas Halliday's Otherlands: A Journey Through Extinct Worlds.

Halliday takes us to sixteen different bygone worlds -- each one represented by a fossil site, from our ancestral australopithecenes in what is now Tanzania to the Precambrian Ediacaran seas, filled with animals that are nothing short of bizarre.  (One, in fact, is so weird-looking it was christened Hallucigenia.)  Halliday doesn't just tell us about the fossils, though; he recreates in words what the place would have looked like back when those animals and plants were alive, giving a rich perspective on just how much the Earth has changed over its history -- and how fragile the web of life is.

It's a beautiful and eye-opening book -- if you love thinking about prehistory, you need a copy of Otherlands.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Sonata for Ghost Violin

A few years ago, I was spending the night in a hotel, and every time I went down the hall that led to my room, I kept hearing music.  It wasn't the piped-in elevator music you sometimes hear; it was something classical, and was faint, as if it were coming from a distance.  It was probably someone watching an orchestral concert on television, but although I tried, I could never figure out where it was coming from.

When I got home, I started thinking about that experience, and it spurred me to write this odd little short story.

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Sonata for Ghost Violin

Luke Reilly was fifteen the first time he heard the music.

He was sitting in his high school biology class, and at first he thought that he was hearing the band playing in the music room down the hall.  It didn’t sound like band music, though.  He could hear a piano, and what sounded like a violin, playing some complex piece in a minor key.  It was far more polished than the high school band ever sounded.

He looked around.  Mr. Dennis, the biology teacher, was droning on about genes and Punnett squares as if they were the most interesting thing ever, and if he heard the music, he was ignoring it.  Luke glanced at his classmates, whose faces registered a spectrum of emotion from boredom to interest.  No one had that odd frown that seems universal when someone hears something incongruous, and so Luke simply tuned it out and tried to return his attention to Mr. Dennis’s lecture.

The music faded out toward the end of the period, and if it was present at all during lunch he couldn’t hear it for the noise in the cafeteria.  It came back during seventh period English, and he asked the girl sitting next to him if she knew where the music was coming from.  The English wing was on the other side of the school from the band room, so even if it was the band playing, it wasn’t likely it could be heard from that far away.

The girl gave him a quizzical look, and said, “What music?”

Luke said, “I thought I heard some music playing,” and then smiled and shrugged it off.  He was letting his imagination get the better of him.

He heard it again that evening, during dinner, and was on the verge of asking his dad whether he’d left the television on when he recognized it as the same odd, dark melody he’d heard earlier.  He started paying more attention to it.  He could hear the violin, weaving in and out of the piano’s steady, shimmering undercurrent of sound.  It faded as he listened, came back again for about five minutes, and then fell silent just as the family got up from the table and began bringing plates into the kitchen to be washed.

In the weeks that followed, Luke found the music coming back again and again.  It was always the same piece.  It faded at different points, picked up at different points, but it never changed to a new melody.  He never heard the beginning of it, and he never heard it end.  It just played for a while, and then fell silent, as if he was walking past a concert hall and hearing fragments of their performance, but no complete piece.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

At first, he listened for it, and he found himself tensed, trying to force his ears to pick up the sounds of the musical instruments against the backdrop of whatever ambient noise was present.  But it never came when called.  It was there, or it wasn’t.  It didn’t seem to matter where he was, what he was doing, or who he was with.  He heard it playing when he was eighteen and was in the process of happily losing his virginity to Kelly Trent on the rug in front of a fireplace in her parents’ living room, and afterwards he thought, “At least they could have played the Hallelujah Chorus for me, or something.”  The fact that he could joke about it—to himself, at least—is an indication of how ordinary it had come to seem to him.

Still, he never told anyone about it.  When he married, at age twenty-three, the music was playing during his wedding ceremony, the minor key counterpoint jarring against the organist’s strident pounding out of the Mendelssohn Wedding March.  He heard it off and on during the following ten years, sometimes several times in one day, sometimes only little snatches of it interspersed by weeks of silence.

It was there—or it wasn’t.  And that was that.  A sonata for ghost violin and spectral piano.

When he was thirty-six years old, and a rising star in the real estate business, a father of three children, he began to notice that the music was getting louder.  He still was able to tune it out most of the time.

Except at night.  He would lie awake for hours, there in the dark with Vanessa sleeping next to him, with the music that only he could hear whirling around him.  This was the point that he began to wonder if he should tell someone about it—Vanessa, perhaps, or maybe even a therapist.

But what would he tell them?  He looked over at his clock, whose glowing red face said 2:30 a.m., then listened as the violin and piano played a glittering arpeggio of notes.  Could he tell a therapist that he heard music that wasn’t there?  What could they possibly do about that?  It wasn't like he was crazy, or anything.

But over the next few weeks, Luke found himself having to ask people to repeat what they’d said.  The music was getting loud enough to drown out softer sounds, and after having been asked to repeat something three times, one of his coworkers said, “Reilly, I think it’s time for you to get your ears checked.  You’re going deaf, buddy.”  But Luke didn’t want to explain that it was not deafness.  He heard just fine.  In fact, he could hear so well that he was hearing things that everyone else couldn't.

One June morning in that year, after yet another sleepless night, he couldn’t bear it any more.

He left home that morning, and kissed Vanessa goodbye.  Once he got to his car, he called into the office and said that he was sick, that he wouldn’t be in to work that day.  He had no idea who in the office he was talking to, or what they’d said in response.  The piano and violin were jangling painfully in his skull, drowning out all the other sounds in the world.  When he was passed by an eighteen-wheeler, its compression brakes growling, he was barely aware of it.  He left the main highway, took a road up into the hills, to a nature preserve twenty miles out of town.

To where there was silence.

But, of course, there wasn’t silence there.  The quiet of the park just made the percussion of the piano hammers on the strings sound louder, the drawing of the bow across the violin seeming to play its notes by vibrating his backbone in resonance.  He left his car, stumbling up a trail into the trees, his hands clamped over his ears—not that it helped.

Crescendo.  Luke fell against a dark, damp tree trunk, not able to hear himself screaming in pain, and the bark of the tree tore skin from his back as he slithered to a sitting position.  He looked frantically around, hoping for some obvious way to kill himself—a cliff to jump from, a lake to drown himself in—but all was peaceful and safe, and quiet to everyone but him.

He unclamped his hands from the side of his head, looking with horror at the blood that had flowed from his ears, staining his palms crimson.  His eyes rolled upwards as he lost consciousness.

***

The music was still whirling around him when he opened his eyes.  Unfamiliar faces looked down on him—men and women in fancy dress.  Overhead was a chandelier, and a turn of his head showed tables with food, immaculately-dressed waiters dispensing wine, unperturbed by the fact that one of the guests had fainted.

“Honey,” a woman said, fanning his face, a worried crease on her forehead.  Dangling emerald earrings swung from her earlobes, catching the light in flashes.  “George.  Are you okay?  We were dancing, and you clapped your hands over your ears and collapsed.”

“George?”  His voice sounded foreign, alien.  Some other man's voice.  Still, the music swirled in the air, the same familiar pairing of violin and piano he had known for the past twenty years.  But at least it was at a comfortable volume now.  He struggled to sit up.

“No, George, wait, we’ve called the paramedics,” the woman said.  “Just stay lying down.  You’ll be fine.”

“My name’s not George,” he said.  “It’s Luke.  Luke Reilly.  Who are you?”

The woman gave a frightened glance at the people who were standing near her, and then looked down at him and tried to smile.  “I’m Marie.  Your wife.  Marie.”  She stroked his face.  “You’ve been unconscious for about five minutes.  But don’t worry, you’ll be okay.”

And as he looked up, from one strange, unknown face to another, the music finally ended.

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One of my favorite writers is the inimitable Mary Roach, who has blended her insatiable curiosity, her knowledge of science, and her wonderfully irreverent sense of humor into books like Stiff (about death), Bonk (about sex), Spook (about beliefs in the afterlife), and Packing for Mars (about what we'd need to prepare for if we made a long space journey and/or tried to colonize another planet).  Her most recent book, Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, is another brilliant look at a feature of humanity's place in the natural world -- this time, what happens when humans and other species come into conflict.

Roach looks at how we deal with garbage-raiding bears, moose wandering the roads, voracious gulls and rats, and the potentially dangerous troops of monkeys that regularly run into humans in many places in the tropics -- and how, even with our superior brains, we often find ourselves on the losing end of the battle.

Mary Roach's style makes for wonderfully fun reading, and this is no exception.  If you're interested in our role in the natural world, love to find out more about animals, or just want a good laugh -- put Fuzz on your to-read list.  You won't be disappointed.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Menagerie

For this week's Fiction Friday, here's an odd little short story I wrote a while back when I was pondering what my life would be like without the anxiety and emotional ups-and-downs I've dealt with since I was a child.  Would you simply delete unpleasant feelings if you could?  And if so, would you end up losing more than you gained?

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Menagerie

“Your body is completely relaxed.  You are tranquil, floating, totally comfortable.”  Fay Devillier’s soothing voice was the only sound in the room, other than the soft breathing of her client who sat, legs crossed, on a yoga mat, hands on his knees, eyes closed.

“You can still hear my voice, and are able to respond to my questions.  You are not asleep, just very, very relaxed.  Do feel relaxed, Jesse?”

Jesse Goldman’s lips opened, just a little, and he said, “Yes.”

“Excellent.  Now, without losing your sense of peace and relaxation, I want you to become aware of your anxiety.  Picture it.  Keep it in front of your attention.  But your anxiety is not you.  It is something you are curious about, something you are observing.  Think of your anxiety as an animal, some small animal in front of you.  It can’t harm you.  You are watching it.  Can you see it?”

“Yes,” Jesse said again.

“What do you want to say to it, Jesse?”

“Get out of my body,” Jesse said, his voice barely audible.  “I don’t want you any more.”

“That’s very good.  How did your anxiety-animal react when you said that?”

“It didn’t like it.  It’s glaring at me.”

“But you know it can’t hurt you, right?  It can only go back into your body if you let it.”

“Yes.”

“Good.  Now, go deep into your breathing.  Let your vision of the anxiety-animal fade away.  Give your attention to your breathing.”

Jesse sat quietly for several minutes, breathing.

“When you are ready, let your awareness rise like a bubble rising in water.  Expanding, floating to the top.  When it reaches the top, open your eyes.  You will awake feeling no anxiety, only peace.”

In a few moments, Jesse opened his eyes, blinked a few times, and then smiled.  Fay, seated in the lotus position in front of him, smiled back.

“How do you feel, Jesse?”

“Great.”  He stretched, his back cracking pleasantly.  “That was awesome.  I’m not feeling jittery any more.”

“Now, remember, you may feel your anxiety trying to sneak back in.  When you do, just close your eyes and breathe.  What you did today, you did—not me.  You can go into yourself any time you want.  Any bad feeling you have, you can banish this way.”

Jesse nodded. “I’d like to try to get rid of a few others.  I have other feelings I’d like to get rid of.”

“We can work on those next time.”  She reached out and touched his shoulder.  “But just remember that you don’t have to try to tackle everything at once.”

***

Jesse rode the bus back to his apartment feeling lighter than he had in months.  Maybe years.  Anxiety had been part of his life as long as he could remember.  The nervous clutch in the belly, the sweat breaking out on the skin, the heart racing—all were familiar sensations, sure to come any time he was faced with a challenge he thought he couldn’t achieve, which was often.  This probably explained why Jesse, the prep-school-educated only child of a lawyer father and a doctor mother, was working for twelve dollars an hour as an aide in the public library.

When he got back to his apartment, he met his roommate, Dale Warren, leaving for work.

“Hey, Goldman.  What did you think of the hypnotist chick?”

“Pretty good,” Jesse said.

“Told you.  Rachel said she was amazing.”

“Tell Rachel thanks for recommending her.”

“We’re going to see a movie tonight.  I’ll tell her.”  Dale grinned.  “Rachel’s friend Sarah is still available, dude.  You think the hypnotist could help you get over your being too big a wuss to ask her out?”

Previously, such a question would have made Jesse’s heart give a nervous little gallop, but now, all he felt was calm.  He gave his roommate a confident smile.  “Yeah.  Yeah, I think she might.”

Jesse had two hours before his shift began at the library, so he went into his bedroom, figuring he’d take a quick nap—his feeling of relaxation was really extraordinary.  He hadn't felt this good in a long, long time.  He was caught between astonishment and happiness at the well-being that washed over him.  He felt like he could actually sleep soundly, something that had never been easy.  But when he opened his bedroom door, all thoughts of sleep vanished.

Sitting in the middle of his bed was a squirrel.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nickomargolies at English Wikipedia, Common Squirrel, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The squirrel was just sitting there, shivering.  It didn’t look cold, it looked more like it had a disorder of the central nervous system.  Its entire body was vibrating, almost as if it were being subjected to periodic electric shocks.

Was this what rabies looked like?  Then he glanced over at his window, which was closed.

So how had it gotten into his room?

Then he realized two other things, in increasing order of bizarreness.  First, he didn’t feel at all alarmed by the fact that there was an apparently diseased squirrel in the middle of his bed, and second, the squirrel looked a lot like the way he had imagined his anxiety during hypnosis.

Without taking his eyes off the animal, he reached over and picked up his tennis racket, which was leaning against the wall behind the door.  He walked slowly toward the bed, and then extended the racket, and poked the animal in the side with the end of it.

“Shoo,” he said.

The squirrel looked up at Jesse and said, in a high-pitched but perfectly clear voice, “Fuck off.”

Jesse dropped the racket.

“You talk?” Jesse said.

The squirrel just gave him a sour look, and its face twitched.

“Are you the animal I visualized when I was at the hypnotist?”

“Bright guy.  Got it in one.”

A thought floated through his head, wondering why he wasn't freaking out about this.  Any normal person would be beyond freaking out by this point.  “How can you be real?”

“You did it,” the squirrel said, a bitter tone in its voice.  “You figure it out.”

“I’m having a hallucination.”

“Suit yourself.”

“So, you really are real, then?”

“Look, I’m not going to spend my time discussing existential issues with you.”  The squirrel looked up at him.  “Say, you got some of those anti-anxiety meds you always pop like candy?  I could use a couple.”

Jesse frowned.  “Is this… is this why I feel so much better?  Because you’re not inside me any more?”

“Oh, sure.”  The squirrel's voice cracked as its body shook.  “Lord it over me.  Think about how I feel.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Jesse said, and then realized that he didn’t actually feel very sorry at all.  “But you were the one making me upset, making it so I couldn’t cope.”

“Seriously?  That’s what you think?”  The squirrel snorted.  “Try again, buster.”

Jesse sat down on the edge of the bed.  “Well, whatever. I feel better, so I really don’t care if I’m hallucinating you or not.  Now, move over, because I’m taking a nap.  I feel like I could sleep for days.”  He set his alarm clock for two hours.  “But I still have to go to work, so I’d better just make it till eleven o’clock.”

***

Jesse woke up, after one of the soundest, most refreshing sleeps he could remember, just before his alarm went off.  The squirrel had moved to the top of his bookcase, where it sat, shivering and glaring at him.  Jesse changed into his work clothes, and twice had to stop himself from breaking into whistling.  He did feel a twinge of guilt about the squirrel’s apparent discomfort, and didn’t want to rub it in its face too obviously.

While on a break at the library, he called Fay Devillier, and asked if she had any openings later in the week—that he felt so much better, he wanted to see her more than once a week.  She sounded pleased, and surprised, but cautioned him against being too aggressive.

“Don’t push things too fast, Jesse.  I’m happy you feel our work has been helpful, but slow and steady is best.”

“No, I really want to try this again.  Can we?”

“I have an opening Thursday at ten.  Can you make that?”

“Yes.  And I know just what I want to work on.”

***

“Shyness is not necessarily a bad thing,” Fay said, at ten o’clock on Thursday morning.  “What we think of as negative or unpleasant emotions can sometimes serve a purpose.”

“It’s a problem to me,” Jesse said.  “I can’t face asking a girl out.  I’m totally awkward at parties.  I hate it.”

“Well…”  She sounded hesitant.  “If you find it to be that big an impediment to your life…”

“I do.”

***

When Jesse returned to his apartment, he was not really all that surprised to see that there was a little bird sitting on his dresser, which put its head under its wing when he looked at it.  The squirrel was splayed out on its back on Jesse’s pillow, a cool, wet washcloth on its forehead, its body still wracked by tremors.

He barely gave them a glance.  He went to his telephone and picked it up, and dialed a number he’d written on a slip of paper next to his nightstand.

“Hi, Sarah?  This is Jesse Goldman—I’m Dale Warren’s roommate.  I was wondering… would you like to go catch a movie or something tonight?”

***

Fay Devillier looked at Jesse doubtfully, as he walked into her office at ten o’clock sharp the following Tuesday.

“You look… good, Jesse,” she said tentatively.

“I feel great.  Hey, I’ve already had two dates with Sarah.  She’s great.  I haven’t had a panic attack in over a week.  I’m doing awesome.”

“That’s good.  I mean… yeah, that’s good.”  Fay paused and shook her head.  “Look, I have to tell you that I have some misgivings about this.  You seem like you’re… changing too fast.  Like you’re imposing your will over your problems—forcing yourself to make big changes quickly.  I’m worried that it won’t be permanent, that you could have a setback.”

“I’m not.  And it’s not me imposing my will, or at least in the way you mean—that I’m somehow just submerging my feelings.  Your hypnotherapy hasn’t made me able to control my bad feelings—it’s taken them away.  I had therapy for years that was designed to help me control my feelings.  It never worked.  What you’ve helped me to do is to remove the feelings entirely.”

“Feelings aren’t bad things, in and of themselves,” Fay said.  “I’m sorry if I gave you that impression. Feelings are there for a reason.”

“They’re making it too hard for me to do what I want to do.”

Fay looked at him uncertainly.  “Are you sure…” she began, and then stopped.

“I’m sure.  I want to do it again.”

She bit her lip.  “Once more.  Only once.  And then you need to sit back, and let yourself just be for a while.  The whole point of this isn’t to tear yourself apart, you know.”

“Maybe not.  But I sure don’t mind tearing away the parts of me that cause me pain.”

Fay frowned at him, and then took a deep breath.  “All right.  One more time, then.  What will it be this time?”

“Fear.”

***

Jesse caught only a glimpse of the rabbit’s white tail as it zoomed under the dresser when he walked into his bedroom at a little before noon.

The bird was standing in front of the mirror on his dresser, both wings over its eyes.

The squirrel had somehow opened the bottle of Southern Comfort Jesse had sitting on top of his bookcase, and lay next to a mostly-empty glass in an alcoholic stupor.  It was still shivering.

This was awesome.  No fear.  No anxiety.  No shyness.

Of course, there were other parts of him that he could sure do without.  Wouldn’t it be nice not to be angry at his parents any more for all of the head trips they put on him when he was a kid?  Wouldn’t it be great not to feel sad any more about his beloved grandma dying last year?  Wouldn’t it be easier if he didn’t feel jealous of Dale for being better-looking than he was?

He lay back on his bed, and cupped his hands behind his head.

Fay said she wasn’t going to help him any more, that what he was doing was dangerous.  But he didn’t feel afraid to do it, so what exactly was the problem?  He peered over at the rabbit, which had poked its whiskered face out from under the dresser.  As soon as he turned its way, it dashed back into the dark space and disappeared.

He closed his eyes.  Focused on his breathing, made each breath deep and deliberate.  He concentrated on the air moving in and out of his chest, felt his heart beating more slowly as relaxation seeped through his body.

Anger. Sadness. Jealousy. Pain. Loss. Grief. Rage. Laziness. Destructiveness. Greed.

How much better it would be, how much more peaceful and quiet and calm, without any of them.

Jesse Goldman sank back, descending, his awareness pulling one emotion, then another, then another, out into the sunlight for him to watch and then to banish, until finally there was nothing left, nothing but an empty beam of sunlight with only a few particles of dust swirling in it to give it substance.

***

Dale Warren got home from work at a little after seven.  He dropped his lunchbox on the counter, chucked his keys onto the coffee table, then went over to check voicemail.  He’d left a message with Rachel about going to a party that evening—a yes from her would make what had been an otherwise fairly boring day have at least the promise of a good end.

The voice on the only message, however, wasn’t Rachel’s.  “This is Jessica McVeigh,” came a pinched, annoyed female voice.  Dale recognized the name of Jesse’s boss at the library.  “Jesse, where are you?  Louise is sick today, and we’re short-handed.  Call me when you get this.”

Dale frowned.  Missing work without calling in wasn’t like Jesse.  It wasn’t like him at all.  He went to Jesse’s bedroom, and knocked on the door.

“Yo, Goldman, you in there?”

There was no response, so Dale opened the door.

Jesse Goldman was lying on his bed, his hands still behind his head, a beatific smile on his face.

“Goldman?” Dale said, and walked over to the bed, and shook his roommate’s arm.

Jesse didn’t awaken, didn’t even stir.  His chest still rose and fell, slowly, rhythmically, the only thing that showed that he was still alive.

And that was when Dale noticed that he and Jesse were not alone in the dimly-lit bedroom.  In every corner, on every surface, there was an animal of some kind.  A large snake was coiled around the base of Jesse’s floor lamp, its forked tongue flicking, watched him through lidless eyes.  A monkey sat beside the bookcase, systematically tearing up one of Jesse’s old college chemistry textbooks.  A basset hound, its long ears drooping, gazed at Dale for a moment, then gave a heartfelt sigh and curled up in a pile of dirty clothes on the floor next to the bed.  A packrat was scurrying back and forth, picking up objects in its mouth, and bringing them back to pile them up in the corner by the window.  It already had a small stack of coins, several paper clips, a flash drive, a keychain, and Jesse’s wristwatch.  There were others animals there, too—he could make out several different kinds of birds, a frog, a scorpion, a lizard of some sort, and most alarmingly, what appeared to be a black panther, sitting inside the closet, looking out at Dale through the half-open door.  As their eyes met it gave a low, throaty, dangerous-sounding growl, and Dale caught a glimpse of white teeth.

Dale backed toward the door, his heart jittering uncertainly against his ribs.

“Jesse?” he said again, his voice coming out as a squeak.

A squirrel raised its head from a spot on the bookcase, and regarded Dale through bloodshot eyes.  “Don’t bother,” the squirrel said.  “He can’t hear you.  He thought he’d be better off this way.  Moron.”

Dale turned and ran out of the room, and was dialing 911 when he heard the squirrel’s shrill voice call after him, “Don’t blame me.  I tried to tell him.”

*****************************************

I've mentioned before how fascinated I am with the parts of history that still are largely mysterious -- the top of the list being the European Dark Ages, between the fall of Rome and the re-consolidation of central government under people like Charlemagne and Alfred the Great.  Not all that much was being written down in the interim, and much of the history we have comes from much later (such as History of the Kings of Britain, by Geoffrey of Monmouth, chronicling the events of the fourth through the eighth centuries C.E. -- but written in the twelfth century).

"Dark Ages," though, may be an unfair appellation, according to the new book Matthew Gabriele and David Perry called The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe.  Gabriele and Perry look at what is known of those years, and their contention is that it wasn't the savage, ignorant hotbed of backwards superstition many of us picture, but a rich and complex world, including the majesty of Byzantium, the beauty and scientific advancements of Moorish Spain, and the artistic genius of the master illuminators found in just about every Christian abbey in Europe.

It's an interesting perspective.  It certainly doesn't settle all the questions; we're still relying on a paucity of actual records, and the ones we have (Geoffrey's work being a case in point) sometimes being as full of legends, myths, and folk tales as they are of actual history.  But The Bright Ages goes a long way toward dispelling the sense that medieval Europe was seven hundred years of nothing but human misery.  It's a fascinating look at humanity's distant, and shadowed, past.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]