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!]

Bad Blood

The moral of this short story is either "Don't judge a book by its cover" or "Be careful who you piss off."  Both of them seem like decent takeaways.

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Bad Blood

Melba Crane looked up as Dr. Carlisle entered the room.  She smiled, revealing a row of straight, white, and undoubtedly false teeth.  “Hello, doctor!  I don’t think we’ve met yet.  How are you today?”

Dorian Carlisle looked at his new patient.  She was tiny, frail-looking, with carefully-styled curly hair of a pure snowy white, and eyes the color of faded cornflowers.  “I’m fine, Mrs. Crane.  I’m Dr. Carlisle—I’m looking after Dr. Kelly’s patients while he’s on vacation.”

Mrs. Crane nodded, and raised one thin eyebrow.  “My, you look so young.  It’s hard to believe you’re a doctor.”  She giggled.  “I’m sorry, that was rude of me.”

“Not at all.”  Dr. Carlisle lifted one of Mrs. Crane’s delicate wrists and felt gently for a pulse.  “I take it as a compliment.”

“It will be even more of a compliment when you’re my age.  I just turned eighty-seven three weeks ago.”

“Well, happy belated birthday.  I hear you had kind of a rough night last night.”

Mrs. Crane gave a little tsk and a dismissive gesture of her hand.  “Just a few palpitations, that’s all.  Nothing this old heart of mine hasn’t seen a hundred times before.”

“Still, let’s give a listen.”  Dr. Carlisle pressed his stethoscope to her chest.  Other than a slight heart murmur, the beat sounded steady and strong—remarkable for someone her age.

“How long will Dr. Kelly be away?”  Mrs. Crane asked, as Dr. Carlisle continued his examination.

“Two weeks.  He and his family went to Hawaii.”

“Oh, Hawaii, how lovely.  Such a nice man, and with a beautiful wife and two wonderful children.  He’s shown me pictures.”

Dr. Carlisle nodded.  “They’re nice folks.”  He pointed to a small framed photograph of a somewhat younger Mrs. Crane with a tall, well-built man, who appeared to be about thirty.  The man was darkly good looking, with a short, clipped beard and angular features.  He wore a confident smile, and stood behind Mrs. Crane, who was seated, her legs primly crossed at the ankle.  The man had his hand on her shoulder.

“Your son?” Dr. Carlisle asked.

Mrs. Crane nodded, and smiled fondly.  “Yes, that’s Derek.  My only son.”

“Do you get to see him often?”

“Oh, yes.  He visits me every day, especially now that I’m here in the nursing home.”  She paused and sighed.  “His father was Satan, you know.”

Dr. Carlisle froze, and he just stared at her.  She didn’t react, just maintained her gentle smile, her blue eyes regarding him with grandmotherly fondness.

He must have misheard her.  What did she say?  His father was a saint.  His father liked satin.  His father was named Stan.  His father looked like Santa.  But each of those collided with his memory, which stubbornly clung to what it had first heard.  Finally, he said, “I beg your pardon?”

“Satan,” Mrs. Crane said, her expression still mild and bland.  “That’s Derek’s father.  Lucifer.  He used to visit, too, quite often, when Derek was little, but I expect he has other concerns these days.”  She giggled again.  “And I’m sure he’s had dalliances with other ladies since my time.  Quite a charmer, you know, whatever else you might say about him.”

“Oh,” Dr. Carlisle croaked out.  “That’s interesting.”

“Well, of course, you couldn’t ask him to be faithful.”  If she heard his tentative tone, she gave no sign of it.  “He isn’t that type.  I did have to put up with a great deal of disapproval from people who thought it was immoral that I had a child out of wedlock.  But after all—” she tittered—“what else could they have expected?  He’s Satan, after all.”

"Satan," from Gustave Doré's illustrations for Milton's Paradise Lost (1866) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Dr. Carlisle cleared his throat.  “Yes, well, Mrs. Crane, I have to finish my examination of you, and see a couple of other patients this morning, so…”  He trailed off.

Mrs. Crane gave her little wave of the hand again.  “Oh, of course, doctor.  I’m being a garrulous old woman, going on like that.  I’m sorry I’ve kept you.”

“It’s no problem, really.  And I wouldn’t worry about the palpitations—usually they’re not an indication of anything serious, especially if they don’t last long, as in your case.  Your blood pressure is fine, and your last blood work was normal, so I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

“I tried to tell the nurse that.  But she insisted that I see the doctor this morning.  I’m sorry I’m keeping you away from patients who need your help more than I do.”

“No worries, Mrs. Crane.”  Dr. Carlisle hung his stethoscope around his neck.  “Take care, and have a nice day.”

“You too, doctor.  It’s been lovely talking to you.”

Dr. Carlisle opened the door, and exited into the hall, feeling a bit dazed.

He stood for a moment, frowning slightly, and then came to a decision.  He walked off down the hall toward the nurses’ station, and set his clipboard on the counter, and leaned against it.

“Excuse me, nurse…?”  He smiled.  “I’m covering for Dr. Kelly this week and next.  I’m Dr. Carlisle—my office is up at Colville General.”

The nurse, a slim, middle-aged woman with gold-rimmed glasses and short salt-and-pepper hair, gave him a hand.  “I’m glad to meet you.  Dana Treadwell.  If there’s anything I can do…”

“Well, actually,” Dr. Carlisle said,  “I do have a question.  About Mrs. Crane, in 214.”

Dana gave him a quirky half-smile.  “She’s an interesting case.”

Dr. Carlisle nodded.  “That’s my impression.  She’s here because of advanced osteoporosis, but is there anything else that you can tell me that might be helpful?”

“Has periodic mild cardiac arrhythmia.  She had a full cardio workup about six months ago, showed nothing serious of note.  Some tendency to elevated blood pressure, but nothing that medication can’t keep in check.”  She paused, gave Dr. Carlisle a speculative look.  “Some signs of mild dementia.”

“That’s what I wanted to ask you about.  Is she… is she delusional?”

“That depends on what you mean,” Dana said.  “Mentally, I hope I’m as with it when I’m eighty-seven.  But she is prone to… flights of fancy.  Particularly about her past.”

Dr. Carlisle didn’t answer for a moment.  Should he mention the whole Satan thing?  He decided against it.  “She does seem to like telling stories,” he finally said.

Dana's smile turned into a full-fledged grin.  “That she does.”

***

The following day, Dr. Carlisle was making his rounds, and passed Mrs. Crane’s room, and heard a male voice.  Curiosity did battle with reluctance to talk to her again, and curiosity won.  He knocked lightly, then stepped into the room.

Mrs. Crane looked up from a conversation she was having with a man who was seated at the edge of the bed, gently holding her hand.  When the man turned toward him, Dr. Carlisle immediately recognized him as the man in the photograph—noticeably older, perhaps in his mid to late fifties, but clearly the same person.  He still had the same carefully-maintained short beard, the same dark handsomeness, the same sense of strength, energy, presence.

“Oh, doctor, I’m so glad you’ve stopped by!” Mrs. Crane said.  “This is my son, Derek.”

“Dorian Carlisle,” Dr. Carlisle said.  “Nice to meet you.  I’m going to be your mother’s doctor for the next two weeks, until Dr. Kelly returns.”

Derek got up and extended a hand.  “Derek Crane."  They clasped hands.  Derek’s hand jerked, and a quick flinch crossed his face.

“Sorry,” Dr. Carlisle said, almost reflexively.

“It’s nothing.  Three weeks ago, I hurt my hand doing some home renovations.  I guess it’s still not completely healed.”

“I didn’t mean to…” Dr. Carlisle started, but Derek cut him off.

“It’s nothing.  Mom has been telling me about your visit yesterday.  It sounds like she talked your ear off.”

Dr. Carlisle smiled.  “Not at all. It was a pleasure.  I’d much rather chat with my patients and get to know them—otherwise, all too easily this job starts being about symptoms and treatments, and stops being about people.”

Mrs. Crane beamed at them.  “Well, it’s so nice of you to take time from your busy schedule to stop in.  I haven’t had any more palpitations.”

“That’s good,” Dr. Carlisle said.  “I just wanted to see how you were doing.  Nice to meet you, Derek.”

“Likewise.” Derek smiled.

Was there something—tense? speculative? about the smile?

No, that was ridiculous.  Mrs. Crane had just primed him to be wary of her son because she’s delusional.

Dr. Carlisle exited the room, and then stopped suddenly, his face registering shock.  He looked down at his hands.  On his right ring finger he wore his high school class ring, from St. Thomas More Catholic Academy.  He raised the ring to his eye, and saw, on each side of the blue stone in the setting, a tiny engraved cross.

***

That night, Dr. Carlisle told his girlfriend about Mrs. Crane over dinner.

“Now I want to meet this lady.”  Nicole grinned.

“Can’t do that. I can’t even tell you her name.  Privacy laws, and all that. I probably shouldn’t have even told you as much as I did.”

“It’s not like I’m going to go and tell anyone.  And I want to hear about your job.  It’s a huge part of your life.”

He took a sip of wine.  “And this one was just so out of left field.  I’ve dealt with people with dementia before, but they always show some kind of across-the-board disturbance in their behavior.  This was like, one thing.  In other respects, she seems so normal.”

“You didn’t talk to her that long.”

“No,” he admitted.  “But you learn to recognize dementia when you see it.  There was something about the way she looked at you—you could tell that her brain was just fine.”

Nicole raised an eyebrow.  “So, you think she really did have a fling with Satan?”

He scowled.  “No, of course not.  But I think she believes it.  But then…” he trailed off.

“But then what?”

“Her son jumped when I shook his hand, like he’d been shocked, or something.  Then he made some excuse about how he’d hurt his hand a couple of weeks ago.  But I noticed afterwards—I was wearing my high school ring.  It’s got crosses engraved on it.  And it was probably blessed by the bishop.”

“You’re kidding me, right?  I thought you’d given up all of that religious stuff when you moved out of your parents’ house.”

“I did.”

“Maybe you didn’t,” Nicole said.

“All I’m saying is that it was weird.”

“You’re acting pretty weird, yourself.”

“I just wonder if it might not be possible to test it.  See if maybe she’s telling the truth.”

“You do believe her!  Dorian, you’re losing it.  Satan?  You think she got laid by Satan?”

He sat back in his chair.  “I dunno,” he finally said.  “All I can say is, she believes it enough that it made me wonder.”

***

The next day, other than a quick walk down the hall in the early morning hours, Dr. Carlisle avoided that wing of the nursing home until after lunch.  When he finally went down the hallway toward room 214, he found that his heart was pounding.  But he was stopped in the hall before he got to Mrs. Crane’s room by the nurse he’d spoken to two days earlier, Dana Treadwell.

“You missed some excitement,” Dana said.

“What happened?”

“A bad spill.  Broken leg, possible fractured pelvis.”

Dr. Carlisle swallowed.  “Which one of the patients?”

“Not a patient,” Dana said.  “Mrs. Crane’s son.  Slipped on wet tile right outside his mother’s room, and fell.  Hard to believe you could be so badly hurt from a fall.  They brought him to Colville General—I heard he’s still in surgery.”

“That’s too bad,” he said, trying to keep his voice level.

“Mrs. Crane was really upset.”

“I’m sure,” Dr. Carlisle said.

Dana seemed to pick up the odd tone in his voice.  She raised one eyebrow.  “Yeah.  She was completely distraught.”

“Really?”

Dana nodded.  “Especially after her ex-husband came by.  We finally had to give her a sedative.”

Dr. Carlisle tried to think of something to say, and finally just choked out, “That’s too bad,” and turned away, hoping that Dana wouldn’t notice the ghastly expression on his face.  He stuck his hand in his lab jacket pocket, and fingered the small glass bottle, now empty, that he’d filled early that morning at the font in the nursing home’s chapel.

“Oh, and Dr. Carlisle?” Dana said, and he turned.

“You might want to know that before we finally got her to go to sleep, your name came up.”

“Me?” Dr. Carlisle squeaked.  “What did she say?”

“Something about your ‘needing an ocean of holy water.’  You might want to let Dr. Bennett handle her case from now on.”  She smiled.  “Just a suggestion.”

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It's kind of sad that there are so many math-phobes in the world, because at its basis, there is something compelling and fascinating about the world of numbers.  Humans have been driven to quantify things for millennia -- probably beginning with the understandable desire to count goods and belongings -- but it very quickly became a source of curiosity to find out why numbers work as they do.

The history of mathematics and its impact on humanity is the subject of the brilliant book The Art of More: How Mathematics Created Civilization by Michael Brooks.  In it he looks at how our ancestors' discovery of how to measure and enumerate the world grew into a field of study that unlocked hidden realms of science -- leading Galileo to comment, with some awe, that "Mathematics is the language with which God wrote the universe."  Brooks's deft handling of this difficult and intimidating subject makes it uniquely accessible to the layperson -- so don't let your past experiences in math class dissuade you from reading this wonderful and eye-opening book.

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

The Hourglass

Folks who have read a lot of my stories will recognize Flanagan's Irish Pub as a setting for a number of different scenes, and the friendly blonde bartender Valerie who works there has shown up as a recurring minor character in several of my books and short stories.  It's based on a real pub -- the Rongovian Embassy to the United States, in Trumansburg, New York -- now several years defunct, but a fixture for decades in this part of the Finger Lakes.

The idea for "The Hourglass" came to me out of the blue one October day, as I was picturing the interior of the Rongo (as locals called it), and suddenly I had a powerful image of two twenty-somethings, strangers, coming into the bar and both ordering a pint of Guinness.  This starts a conversation... about what? I had to write the story to find out.

The result is a story-within-a-story that is one of the twistiest things I've ever written, and I submit it to you for this week's Fiction Friday, along with a question: what do you think happened at the end?

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The Hourglass

Chad Tarlow consulted his watch.  Seven thirty.  Plenty of time for a pint.  Only one, as usual, both because the beer he liked was expensive, and also because he needed to be lucid when he got back to his apartment.  He still had about five hours of reading and writing to do for his graduate classes, and he’d seen the results of writing papers in an alcohol-induced fog.  He only had two semesters left and he’d have his master’s degree and his teaching license.  No sense screwing it up now.

He sat at the bar, and gave a smile to Valerie, the cute bartender.  Valerie, he knew, was taken, in a long-term relationship with a guy who worked for the college as some kind of environmental researcher.  No use to hit on her.  He did a slow look around the bar, to see if there were any other prospects, but Flanagan’s was pretty dead. Oh, well, it was not like he had time for a girlfriend anyhow.  He sighed, and turned back to find a foamy pint of Guinness waiting for him.

“Saw you come in,” Valerie said, grinning and wiping her hands on a towel.

“I’m getting predictable.” 

“Nothing wrong with knowing what you like.”  She headed off to the other end of the bar to pour a drink for an elderly man who looked like he’d already had one too many.

The door opened, letting in a rush of cool autumn air, and a few dead leaves.  Chad looked up from his pint and saw, with a pang of disappointment, that the newcomer was a young man.  He was perhaps twenty-five, with tousled curly hair, dark eyes, and an angular jaw that was in need of a shave.  He stopped for a moment, and glanced around the place as if looking for someone.

No single women here tonight, bud.  Hope you weren’t counting on getting any.

The man seemed to consider leaving, then with a little shrug came up to the bar, shucked his windbreaker and woolen scarf, and hung them over the back of the barstool two down from where Chad sat.  Valerie came over wearing her usual friendly smile.  “What can I get you?” 

“You have Guinness on tap?”

“Yup.”

“A pint, then.”  He slid a ten-dollar bill toward her and sat down, leaning forward, elbows on the bar.

She drew the pint, and while it was settling she gave him his change.  “You from around here?  Haven’t seen you in here before.”

“I live in Skaneateles.  My first time in here.”

She slid the pint toward him. “Nice town, Skaneateles.” 

“That it is.”

Valerie went to attend to the elderly gentleman, who was waving at her in a rather woozy fashion, leaving Chad and the newcomer with their pints and the awkward silence that always descends between people who are strangers but who are forced to be near each other by circumstance.

“What do you do in Skaneateles?”  Chad finally said, feeling that he couldn’t just sit there without saying anything, drink his beer, and then leave.  But once said, it sounded ridiculous – an empty sentence, like “Have a nice day.”

But the newcomer smiled faintly, and said, “I’m a writer.”

“Really?  What do you write?”

“Novels.  Science fiction, mainly, and some fantasy.  Mostly speculative stuff.”

“That’s cool.”  Chad swiveled a little towards him.  “I’ve always wondered how writers think of their plots.  Especially you science fiction guys.  I mean, you not only have to make up your plot and characters and all, you have to invent a whole world.”

The man smiled again, and took a sip of his pint. “I get asked that a lot.  By the way, my name’s Aaron.”  He extended his hand, which Chad shook.

“Chad.  I’m a grad student in education.  Heading toward teaching physics in high school – provided, of course, that I can get a job.”

Aaron nodded.  “Not easy, these days.”

“But you work from home.  Pretty cool.  You just write stories, and your customers come to you.”

He looked down.  “Something like that.”  He glanced over at the window for a moment, again seeming like he was looking for something or someone.  Then he turned back toward Chad.  “It’s usually the plots that get me stuck.  It can take a long time to work out plot points, because in science fiction, everything’s got to hang together.  The readers immediately pick up on it if there’s an inconsistency.”

“How do you work it out when you get stuck?”

Aaron shrugged.  “I don’t know.  Usually the solution just comes to me sooner or later.  I’m not sure from where.  But when I get badly stuck, sometimes it takes weeks to figure my way through it.”  He paused.  “In fact, I’m trying to work something out right now.  It’s why I went for a drive today – to try to clear my brain and see if I could figure out how the story should go.”

“What are you stuck on?” 

“You want me to tell you?” Aaron's dark eyebrows lifted a little.  “I don’t want to bore you.”

“It won’t bore me.  Look, dude, I have several hours of reading educational philosophy when I get home.  Anything you could come up with would be fascinating by comparison.”

Aaron laughed.  “All right.  It’s a time travel story.”

“Okay.”

“But the time travel isn’t really the point.  I mean, it’s not like The Time Machine, where it went into the fictional technology and all.  Even though it depends on being able to reverse the hourglass, this story focuses more on an ethical dilemma.  And I want to make sure that the story works out the right way.  You know, not corny or trite.  And I’m not sure what to do.”

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Michael Himbeault, Hourglass , CC BY 2.0]

“So, when does the character travel to?”

Aaron took another pull on his pint.  “Here’s the deal.  The main character is a nice guy, but he had a really shitty childhood.  His mother was a complete whackjob.  Borderline personality, controlling, manipulative.”  He gestured with one hand.  “The kind of woman who should never be allowed to have children.  But like a lot of borderlines, she appeared normal enough on first glance.  In fact, she was kind of a magnetic personality.  Most people figured out soon enough that she was psycho.  She lost job after job, and so on.  And made her son’s life miserable.”

“Poor kid,” Chad said.

“Right?  The main character’s father was a decent guy, kept trying to help his wife, even though she was kind of beyond help, and stayed in the marriage to shield his son as much as he could.  But the mom was nuts enough that it didn’t really help.  And when the main character was seventeen, his mom had a total flip-out and killed his dad.  She ended up in jail.”

“Wow.  Seriously heavy stuff.”

“Yup.  So, anyway, that’s the setup.  That’s all in the past, in the story.  The reader just finds out about it in the first few chapters.  The son grows up, and he’s got a shitload of baggage from what he went through as a kid.  I mean, graduating from high school – mom’s in jail for killing dad.  The kind of thing most kids never have to deal with.”

“I hope not.  I don’t know what I’d do if something like that happened to one of my students.”

“I guess it happens sometimes.  Teachers got to deal with all sorts of stuff they wish they’d never had to see.  In fact, in the story, it’s the main character’s teachers, and some of his dad’s relatives, that save him.  So, anyway, he grows up, mostly normal, but has all of this psychotic stuff in his past.  Then, time travel is invented.  Scientists find a way to send people backwards, forwards, whatever you want.  And the guy gets an idea; what if he goes back in time, and stops his mom from meeting his father?”

“Seriously?  Like Back to the Future, only in reverse?”

Aaron smiled.  “Sort of like that.  He knows that if he does that, he’ll save his father from twenty years in a horrible relationship, that will end with his being shot to death by the woman he’d married.  But of course, you see the dilemma.”

“If he succeeds, he’ll cease to exist.”

Aaron nodded.  “And I have to be able to answer the question, confidently enough that what my character does makes sense.  You know?  If I’m not sure, I won’t be able to write it convincingly.  So, I guess the question is: do you save someone decades of unhappiness and an early death, at the cost of your own life?  Or do you save your own life even if it means someone you care about will be miserable?”

“The father might have been just as miserable had he not met the mom,” Chad said.  “You never know.”

“That’s true.  But even so.  What should he do?”  Aaron held up one hand, palm upwards.  “It’s just a story, after all.  I can make it come out whatever way I want.”

“Is the main character happy with his life?  I mean, if he’s screwed up himself, maybe he’d be better off, you know… not existing.  Kind of a clean suicide.”

“I didn’t want to make it that clear-cut.  That seemed too corny.  Like, he’s just wanting out, so he goes back in time to kill himself painlessly and save dad the trauma as an added benefit.  In the story, he’s kind of ordinary.  Some days good, some days bad.  He’s got some memories and shit to deal with, yeah – but he’s not, like, despondent or anything.”

“Wow,” Chad said.  “That’s a really interesting question.  I can see why you’re stuck.”

Aaron smiled, and took another drink.  “A puzzler, isn’t it?”

“Well, here’s an idea.  Maybe he should go back in time, you know… and present the idea to the dad.  Tell him what is going to happen.  Let the dad decide.”

“That’s kind of a cop-out.”

“Yeah, but, you know, see if the dad thinks all the misery would be worth it, to have a kid.”

“How could the dad judge that?  You know, condemn himself to twenty years of misery, and knowing he’d be killed at the end of it by the woman he’d married?  Do you really think anyone would be willing to do that voluntarily?”

“I don’t know,” Chad said.  “Maybe it’s a good thing we don’t know our futures.”

“Believe me,” Aaron responded, with some vigor, “since I started working on this story, I’ve thought about that many times.”

Chad finished his pint.  “Well, I’ve got to get going.”

“Educational philosophy waits for no man.”  Aaron gave him a smile.

“Nope.  And, with luck, once I’m actually teaching I’ll never have to read this crap again.”

This got a laugh. “That’s why I stick to writing science fiction.  People actually want to read it.”

Chad stood up, and shook Aaron’s hand.  “Good luck with your story.  I think it’s an interesting idea.  I’m sure you’ll work it out.”

“I hope so,” Aaron said.

Chad picked up his backpack from next to the barstool, and said goodbye to Valerie.  As he was approaching the door, it opened, admitting another gust of cool air.  A woman walked in – slim, with shoulder-length brown hair and sparkling blue eyes.  She glanced his way, and smiled.

No boyfriend in tow.  Okay, did he really need to stop at one pint?  He had time for another, right?

Chad opened his mouth to say something to her – his usual pickup line was, “Can I buy you a drink, or would you prefer to break my heart?”, which worked about fifty percent of the time, and in the other half of the cases just resulted in an eyeroll.  But something in him seemed to stall.  The words would not form, and the smile died on his lips.

The woman walked past him, and up to the bar. Chad turned to watch her.  And up on a shelf, behind the bar, was something he had never noticed before – a large hourglass in an ornate wooden frame, filled with white sand.  Valerie turned away from the elderly gentleman, who was finally paying his tab and seemed to be trying to determine if he could successfully stand up.  The woman sat down on one of the barstools at the otherwise empty bar, crossed her legs at the ankles, and rested her elbows on the polished mahogany top, smiling at Valerie and saying something too quietly for Chad to hear.  Valerie smiled, and turned – and then picked up the hourglass and flipped it over.

Chad watched the stream of sand spilling downwards for a moment, a distant expression on his face, like someone just waked from dreaming.  Then he walked out, alone, into the windy October night.

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

Like many people, I've always been interested in Roman history, and read such classics as Tacitus's Annals of Imperial Rome and Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars with a combination of fascination and horror.  (And an awareness that both authors were hardly unbiased observers.)  Fictionalized accounts such as Robert Graves's I, Claudius and Claudius the God further brought to life these figures from ancient history.

One thing that is striking about the accounts of the Roman Empire is how dangerous it was to be in power.  Very few of the emperors of Rome died peaceful deaths; a good many of them were murdered, often by their own family members.  Claudius, in fact, seems to have been poisoned by his fourth wife, Agrippina, mother of the infamous Nero.

It's always made me wonder what could possibly be so attractive about achieving power that comes with such an enormous risk.  This is the subject of Mary Beard's book Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern, which considers the lives of autocrats past and present through the lens of the art they inspired -- whether flattering or deliberately unflattering.

It's a fascinating look at how the search for power has driven history, and the cost it exacted on both the powerful and their subjects.  If you're a history buff, put this interesting and provocative book on your to-read list.

[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.

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

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.

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

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!]

Waves

For this week's Fiction Friday, a short story that was inspired by something that my son and a friend saw while walking along the Delaware River while they were students at Salem College in Carney's Point, New Jersey.  The description of what they saw is pretty much as it happened and was related to me.

The explanation of it, however, is pure fiction.

I hope.

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

Waves

October gloom hung low over the Delaware River, wisps of mist rising from the murky, oil-slicked water to vanish into the uniform gray of the clouds.  Nick Dominique and Brady Elkano tramped silently through the knee-high grass, boots making squelching noises in the muddy ground that sloped at an imperceptible angle down toward the river’s shore.

“Whose stupid fucking idea was it to come down here today?”  Brady pulled his scuffed khaki jacket around him and shivered.

“Yours,” Nick said.

“Well, I’m freezing my ass off.”

“It’s not that bad.”  Nick was tall and lanky, his bony limbs never quite covered by shirts and pants that always seemed too wide in the waist and too short in the arms and legs.  He ran fingers through unkempt curly brown hair.  “Better than playing computer games in the apartment all afternoon.”

“At least the apartment has heat.”  Brady was compact and sturdy and dark, and turned a wry eye on his friend.  “There’s nothing down here but trash anyway.”

“I dunno.  There’s the stuff from the military depot.  Jake Warshawski said he found some kind of old air pump.  It was half-buried in the mud, but he took it out and cleaned it up and he said it needed a few parts but looked like he could get it working.”

“What do you want with an air pump?”

Nick laughed.  “Dude.  You know what I mean.  There’s not gonna be another air pump.  I just mean, you never know what we might find.”

Brady shivered again.  “You should drop out of college and be a junk collector.”

By this time, they were at the river’s edge.  On the other side they could see the skyline of Wilmington, Delaware, vague and fogged and surreal, its perpetual noise and bustle and traffic deadened by distance and still air.  The water flowed smoothly, silently, only a few eddies showing turbulence as it flowed over unseen obstructions.  Nick picked up a rock from the mud and sent it skittering across the surface, leaving a trail of circular waves before disappearing with a plunk.

“I think my boots are leaking,” Brady said.  Nick ignored him, and picked up a stick to poke around in the ragged, brown stalks of dying grass.

“What are you looking for?” Brady said, after watching him for five minutes.

“I’ll know when I find it.”

Brady swore under his breath. “My boots are leaking.”

“Take ‘em off.”

“You are ridiculous.”  But both boys wandered along the shore, kicking at washed up garbage and branches, every once in a while leaning over to fish something interesting out of the saturated soil.  Nick found a gear wheel missing two teeth, rinsed the grime off of it in the river, and shook it dry.

“What’re you gonna do with that?”

“I don’t know yet.”

Upstream they came on a long concrete jetty, sticking out into the river like a finger.  On the upstream side the mud was thicker, and there were pieces of net, a chunk of a Styrofoam cooler, and an old wooden sign that had the words “Keep Out” painted on it in stenciled black letters.  Brady stepped up onto the jetty and walked the thirty or so feet until it began to look crumbled and unsafe, and stood there, looking out over the river.  Nick stayed nearer to shore, poking around in the mud, still looking for interesting finds that the current might have washed his way.

That was when he noticed something shiny.

It was a mere pinpoint, like a speck of glitter on the surface of the black, smelly ooze.  He was still holding a stick he’d found earlier, and he pushed at it, and it didn’t move.  He could feel that the speck was just the top bit of something large and solid, so he lay down on his belly on the rough cement surface of the jetty and reached his long fingers down into the frigid mud.

Whatever it was had a smooth surface, and it was stuck more firmly than he expected.  He pulled on it, and felt it give a little.  Then with a thick slurping sound, it came loose, and sat, dripping sulfur-smelling goo, in the palms of both hands.

He swiveled around and dunked it in the comparatively cleaner water on the other side of the jetty.  Now the whole thing showed itself to be a gleaming metal ring, about two inches wide and perhaps five across.  It was heavy, gold in color, and had an inscription around it that said:

AQUA * VITAE * EST *VITA * SAPIENTIAE * AQUA * MORTIS * EST * MORS * SAPIENTIAE

He stared at it, frowning.  Nick had taken a couple of years of Latin in high school, and he recognized the word for “water,” but the rest of it didn’t make much sense.  He thought vita meant “road,” but something about that didn’t sound right.

Honestly, at the time he was taking Latin, he’d been far more interested in hiking and climbing trees and learning to shoot a bow and arrow than in memorizing conjugations and declensions.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

He stood up, gripping the ring tightly, as if he were afraid it would escape from his hand.  “Hey!  Brady!  You gotta see what I found.”

His friend turned, his expression unreadable in the gloom.  Nick walked down the jetty, his long stride closing the distance quickly.

“What is it?” Brady said as Nick approached.  His voice sounded ready to be unimpressed.  “Something else for your trash collection?”

“No.  This is really cool.”  He held out the ring.

Brady’s dark eyebrows rose.  “Wow.”

 
“Told you.”

Brady took it, and peered at the writing that encircled the outside.  “What does that mean?”

“Beats the hell out of me.”

“Well, it’s interesting.  You think it could be some kind of Indian artifact or something?”

“Could be,” Nick said, but he sounded doubtful.  “Did the Indians around here cast stuff in gold?”

“You think that’s gold?”

“It’s heavy enough to be.  But it's got a Latin inscription.  I don't think the Indians would have written in Latin.”

Brady frowned, and handed it back.  “I wonder if we should, like, contact a museum or something.”

“Maybe.”  Nick held it up in the thin, gray light.  “I wonder what it was for?  It’s too big to be a bracelet.”

Brady shrugged, and looked out over the river again. Nick continued to stare at the metal ring, which is why he didn’t see what was happening until he heard Brady’s voice saying, “Nick, what the fuck is that?”

Nick peered past his friend, and at first thought he was looking at some sort of optical illusion, a trick of the odd, attenuated light or the rank mist that hung low over the water.  But it was unmistakable.  The river water had bubbled up, like there was some sort of disturbance underneath it, as if a giant head was about to surface.  Waves rolled off of it, making soft slushy noises and proceeding outward in all directions.  The boys stood still, watching.  Already the first and smallest ones were rocking against the tip of the jetty, splitting and turning down the sides until they dissipated against the mud.

“We should get out of here,” Brady said.

For once, Nick didn’t argue.  Brady shoved past him, taking off at a jog down the cement wall, Nick following him at a fast walk.  They reached shore in a few seconds, and Nick turned over his shoulder to look out over the river.  The disturbance was still there, like a dark, wet hill, churning waves now slopping against the shore.  But nothing else was visible of whatever it was that was causing it.

Brady kept at his jog all the way across the grassy meadow, and up toward the road where Nick’s truck, an aging Toyota pickup, was parked.  When they scrambled up the embankment, both boys turned back toward the river, but the low scrubby trees along the road obscured their view.

It wasn’t until they were both in the truck, the engine coughing into life, that Nick spoke.  “That was creepy.”

“No shit.”

“What do you think it was?”

“I have no idea.”

“Maybe a big fish or something.”  He pulled the truck out onto the road, and accelerated back toward town.

Brady gave Nick a scowl.  “A fish?  How big a fish would it have to be?”

“I dunno.  You got a better suggestion?”

“No.”

“Okay, then.”

They made the rest of the drive in silence.  Even Nick was happy to step back into the warmth of the house where he and Brady rented rooms, both leaving their mud-caked shoes on the front porch.

“I’m hitting the shower.”  Nick pulled off his jacket and threw it on the couch in the living room.

“Let me know when you’re done,” Brady said, plopping down in a rocking chair and turning on the television with a remote.  “I’m next.”

Nick trotted up the stairs, his sock-clad feet making little noise on the wooden steps, and went into the bathroom.  He shucked his damp, dirt-splotched clothes and turned on the shower, giving it a minute for the antiquated water heater to pump some warm water up to the second floor, then he stepped in.

The heat felt delicious on his skin, but he noticed something else almost immediately.  At first, he thought he was overhearing Brady downstairs listening to the television, but he quickly realized it couldn’t be that—there was no way it would be audible from this far away, not with the door closed and the water running.

But he heard a voice.  Thin, low, but clearly audible.

Where did you put it?  I can’t see it.  I can’t.  Where is it?  Where did you put it?

Over and over, a monotonous drone, repeating the same words over and over.  The voice had a strange, rolling accent, but he couldn’t place what sort.  It sounded antiquated and stilted and vaguely British, the sort of accent you might expect from a second-string actor in a Shakespearean play.

Nick stood there, the water cascading over his skin, his shower forgotten for a moment.  He frowned, listening, trying to figure out where the voice was coming from, but it seemed not to be localizable.  He turned the water off, hoping to hear it more clearly.

As soon as he did, the voice stopped.

Nick stood there in the shower, naked and dripping wet, his face a study in confusion.  After a moment, he turned the faucet on again.

The voice started again, as soon as the hot water hit his skin.

He hurried through the rest of his shower, then dried off and cinched the towel around his waist. He picked up his filthy clothes and walked back to his room, pitching them into the hamper.  There was a loud clunk as the pocket of his trousers hit the side of the hamper, and he reached in and pulled them out again, extracting the gleaming metal ring.

He stared at it for a moment, then set it on his dresser, and got out dry clothes and began to dress.

Where did you put it?  I can’t see it.

When he was fully dressed, he picked up the ring again, looked at the inscription, and then sat down at his computer.

Twenty minutes of messing about with Google Translate later, he had scrawled on a piece of scrap paper the words “Water Life Is Life Wisdom Water Death Is Death Wisdom.”  Vita evidently meant “life,” not “road.”  But he was no closer to figuring out what the mysterious words meant.

He went to the window, where gray light was filtering in through the grimy glass pane, and turned the ring over in his hand.  Bits of river mud still clung to the surface, now drying to a gray-brown, fouling the inside of the ring where there were other, fainter engravings.  Nick went back into the bathroom.  From the upstairs landing, he could hear Brady’s television show still playing.  Either his roommate had forgotten about showering, or (more likely) had fallen asleep in front of the television.  Nick pulled a couple of pieces of paper towel from a roll hanging on the wall, turned on the tap, and put the ring under the stream.

And immediately the voice was back, but with a more sinister tone. There it is.  Who are you?  What are you doing with it?  Give it back.

Nick jerked his hand out of the water as if he’d been stung.  There was water dripping from the ring into the sink, and in rhythm with the water drops, he heard clipped bits of words. it… give… where… you?... NOW.

He retreated into his room, drying the ring on the edge of his shirt, listening for the voice and hearing nothing but silence.

Nick looked at the inside of the ring.  There were shallow grooves running the circumference of the ring, but they were difficult to see.  The metal was polished smooth, whether through artifice or through long use was impossible to tell, and it had all but eradicated the markings.  He squinted at them, and thought he could make out the rippling contour of a long body.  At first, he thought it was a snake, but after some turning of the ring this way and that, he could make out the impressions of jointed legs ending in claws.  A dragon, perhaps.

Still holding the ring, he trotted downstairs to the living room.  His roommate, as expected, was lying sprawled in the recliner, eyes closed and mouth hanging open, a game show of some kind playing unheeded on the television.

“Hey, Brady,” Nick said.

Brady opened one eye, blinked, and said, in a slurred voice, “You done with the shower?”

“Yeah.  But that’s not why I woke you up.  Take a look at this.”  He handed the ring to his friend, who peered at it, then looked up and shrugged.

“Yeah?”

“I think this ring is…”  He had started to say cursed but stopped in time; it sounded ridiculous, even to him.  “...weird,” he finished.

“Weird how?”  Brady gave him a wry eye.  “Some kind of artifact, maybe.”

“Look, dude, just get up, I need to show you something.”

Brady gave a groan and stood up.  Nick led him into the kitchen, then put his hand out for the metal ring.  Nick turned the faucet with a squeak, and the water began to flow over the ring.  Immediately the monotonous droning voice began again, in the middle of a sentence, as if it had been speaking, unheard, the whole time.

yours.  Give it back.  Now.  It must come back to me.  I will find you.  You must not keep it.

Brady jumped, and said, under his breath, “Holy shit.”

Nick shut the tap off, and once again, the voice broke up into fragments.

I will find you.  You must not… ring…  Give… I… find… keep…

And then it stopped.

"You heard it, too."  It was not a question.

Brady looked at his friend with wide eyes.  "Yes."

"This has to do with the thing we saw in the river."

"All we saw was a bunch of waves."

"Yeah, but something was causing them.  There was something under there."

Brady didn't have an answer to that.

"What should we do?" Nick asked.

"I dunno.  Give it back?"

"Throw it into the river?"

"That's what I'm thinking."  Brady's voice shook.

"What if it's valuable?  And besides, suppose there is some kind of, um, thing, there in the river.  How could it get it back?  There's no way it could know where we are."

"You didn't notice how the voice broke up when the water stopped?"

"Yes."

"And there were pieces of it whenever a drip hit the sink."

"Okay," Nick said.  "I see where you're going.  Whenever the water makes a connection, it can talk to us.  But that doesn't mean it knows where we are."

"All water connects.  The water goes down the sink, into the sewer, then to some kind of treatment plant, then out to the river.  It's linked all the way.  If it can talk to us, it can find out where we are."

"When I was in the shower, I heard the voice, but all it did was ask questions about the ring.  When I put the ring itself under water, it said, 'There it is.'"

"There you go," Brady said.  "There's no reason to think that it doesn't know where we are."

"Not if the ring is away from the water."

"You need to throw it back, dude."

"I dunno."  Nick could hear the doubt in his own voice, and wondered if he was just making excuses to keep it.  "If it's worth something, we should try to find a museum to buy it from us.  I'd split the money with you."  He smiled, even though it looked a little shaky.  "Even though I'm the one that found it."

"Okay, I guess.  But I don't think it's a good idea.  This is freaky."

There was no arguing with that.  But Nick looked at the gold ring, with its strange, archaic words, and his heart beat a little faster.  Not yet.  It could wait until he'd thought more about this.

***

Sleep was restless that night.  There were no dreams, or at least none of note, but Nick tossed and turned, troubled by a vague anxiety that things weren't right.  Several times he found himself lying in bed, listening, hearing nothing, but all of his senses on alert.  Finally at around four o'clock he drifted off into a doze, but he got up at six feeling unrefreshed, hoping that a shower and coffee would wake him up.

He walked into the bathroom, and had turned on the tap before he remembered about his experience from the previous day.

He turned the water off, and got dressed.  He could skip a day's shower.

Nick put coffee on, being careful about getting his hands under the stream from the tap, and was standing listening to the comforting gurgle from the percolator when it registered that the ring was gone.

He'd left it on the counter, he was certain of that, after his demonstration to Brady that the voice in the water was real.  But the counter was empty, except for the dirty dishes from last night's dinner.  Frowning, he went up the stairs, his bare feet making little noise on the steps, and knocked on Brady's bedroom door.

No answer.

"Hey, Brady, wake up."

Still no answer.

"Dude, did you take the ring?  I hope you didn't get any smart ideas about throwing it back on your own. 'cuz I'll be pissed if you did."

Silence.

Nick opened the door.

 
What struck him first was the damp chill in the air.  The window stood wide open, and a cold breeze was blowing in.

The next thing he saw was that Brady wasn't there.

Nick walked in, feeling an icy sensation that the winter air was insufficient to cause.  Brady's bedsheets were rumpled, as if he'd slept in it, but the blanket and bed surface were soaking wet.  From the mattress came the heavy smell of river water.  There was also a wet spot between the window and the bed, cool and slick under his feet.

"Brady?"  His voice came out in a breathless whisper.

No answer, not that he expected one.

Nick ripped apart Brady's room, becoming more and more frantic, pitching aside sodden textbooks and piles of clothing, pulling boxes out of his closet, opening drawers in his desk.  He finally found the ring in Brady's sock drawer.

It couldn't see the ring, because it wasn't underwater.  But it found Brady.  It found him, and took him away.

Nick went to the bathroom, walking like a somnambulist, turned the tap on, and dunked the ring under the stream.  Instantly the voice started again, thin and whispery and evil.

There it is.  I knew he had it hidden.  Give it back.  It is not yours.  Give it back.

"What did you do with Brady?"  Nick said, his breath coming in tight, painful whistles.

He is here with me.  You will be soon.  You will stay with me forever.

"Where are you?"

You know.  And I know where you are.  Give it back.  It is not yours.

A catch formed in his throat, an angry sob that wanted to exit, but Nick kept it behind clenched teeth.  "You killed him."

He will be here with me forever.  So will you, very soon.

"I'll give you your fucking ring back.  Why do you want it so much?  So much that you would kill?"

Because it is mine.  It has been mine since I came here.

"How long have you been here?"

Longer than I can remember.  Years uncounted, I have been here. I will be here when you are gone.  Unless I bring you here to be with me.  Then we will stay here together forever.

Nick turned off the water, and the voice was cut off.

Still holding the dripping gold ring in his hand, he went to the closet and grabbed his jacket, pulling it on as he walked outside and toward his truck.  He grabbed something else as he walked, from where it leaned against the wall of the garden shed, and tossed it into the bed of the truck before he got in.

He kept himself from thinking as he drove toward the Delaware River and the jetty where he'd found the ring the previous day.  If he let himself think, he'd fall apart.  There was time for falling apart later.  Now, he had a task to accomplish.

As he scrambled down the embankment into the wet field that bordered the river, he saw drag marks.  Something large had passed this way, very recently.  The dead grass was crushed and slimy with mud in a great swath between the river and the highway.  As he walked toward the jetty, his boots squelching in the ooze, he saw once again the bubble of water about twenty yards out, rising from the flat surface of the river.  There was something under there, something that sensed his approach and was coming to meet him.

Something that perhaps resembled the serpentine design on the inside of the ring. But he didn't let himself think about that, either.

He walked out onto the jetty, reached the end, stood there, leaning out toward the oil-slicked water.

"You want your goddamn ring back?" Nick shouted.  "Here you go."

He set the ring down on the stone, and hefted the sledgehammer he'd brought from the garden shed.  There was a sloshing noise, and the disturbance began to move, accelerating toward shore.

Nick raised the steel head of the sledgehammer high, brought it down on the glittering surface of the ring.  It took three strikes, during which time the raised blob of water began to boil and churn.  White waves of turbulence streamed away from it, like the bow wave of a boat.  But on the third hit, the ring split in two, twisting and blackening, and there was a smell of sulfur that quickly dissipated on the winter breeze.

The raised hemisphere of water collapsed.  A few small waves lapped the shore, and then the river flowed on smoothly, its surface flat and glassy and gray under the cloud cover.

***

A woman walking her dog found Brady Elkano's body washed up on a gravel spit downstream two days later.  An autopsy determined that he had drowned, although there were some unexplained gouges in the skin of his left leg.  Suicide was suspected, but given Brady's personality, it didn't seem plausible.  Nick argued against that explanation with particular vehemence, although he didn't have any better explanation for why his friend had apparently hiked down to the river in the middle of the night to go swimming wearing nothing but a pair of boxers.

Brady's parents came a week later to take his belongings, his father sternly silent, his mother weeping quietly as they boxed his clothes and books and personal items.

By that time, his bed had dried out, although a year later, when Nick Dominique graduated from college and moved to Colorado, the air in Brady's room still carried the faint stink of river mud.

 **********************************

Neil deGrasse Tyson has become deservedly famous for his efforts to bring the latest findings of astronomers and astrophysicists to laypeople.  Not only has he given hundreds of public talks on everything from the Big Bang to UFOs, a couple of years ago he launched (and hosted) an updated reboot of Carl Sagan's wildly successful 1980 series Cosmos.

He has also communicated his vision through his writing, and this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is his 2019 Letters From an Astrophysicist.  A public figure like Tyson gets inundated with correspondence, and Tyson's drive to teach and inspire has impelled him to answer many of them personally (however arduous it may seem to those of us who struggle to keep up with a dozen emails!).  In Letters, he has selected 101 of his most intriguing pieces of correspondence, along with his answers to each -- in the process creating a book that is a testimony to his intelligence, his sense of humor, his passion as a scientist, and his commitment to inquiry.

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

The Germ Theory of Disease

When you think of werewolves in the state of Washington (if you ever do), what probably comes to mind is a certain trilogy of books That Shall Not Be Named.  For this week's Fiction Friday, here's a different take on the idea of werewolves in general, not to mention love stories.

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

The Germ Theory of Disease

Olivia Tanner realized it wasn’t going to be an ordinary ride home from work when a middle-aged businessman turned into a werewolf on the #217 bus from downtown Seattle to Bellevue.

It was very late at night, one of the last bus runs of the evening, and there weren’t many people aboard – just herself, a nice-looking, well-built blond guy in jeans and a sweatshirt sitting across from her reading a Stephen King novel, a sleeping teenager in the back row, and one or two others.  Near the front was a suit-clad, overweight businessman, his balding head sporting a rather pathetic attempt at a combover.  He had a briefcase sitting on the seat next to him, and was looking at some papers in a manila folder.  There was no conversation, only the swish of the traffic, the whining of the bus engine, and the occasional burst of static and unintelligible talk from the bus driver’s intercom.

They were on the middle of the I-90 bridge when it happened, which was an atrocious place for a werewolf to appear suddenly.  Even if the bus had stopped, there was nowhere useful to run, and given that it was night the choices would have boiled down to being eaten by the werewolf or getting run over by a car.

She was staring out of the window into the darkness, thinking about how glad she’d be to get back to her apartment and her bed – when she heard a noise, like someone tearing a bedsheet.  She looked around, wondering what had happened, and that’s when she saw it.  Standing up from the seat where the businessman had been seated was a creature that was unmistakably a werewolf.  Its forehead was sloping, with dark, almond-shaped eyes and bristling brows.  It had a long, tapered snout, and as she stared at it, one side of the muzzle lifted, revealing a sharp yellow canine tooth.  Pointed ears, rimmed with coarse hair, stood up from the side of its head.  It gave a low snarl, and turned toward her.  Their gaze met, and the creature’s eyes narrowed.  As it turned, she saw that its body was still basically human, but muscled like no one she’d ever seen.  It was naked, its chest and back hairy, and was prodigiously male.  One hand came out – its nails were long, pointed claws, like an eagle’s talons – and it grasped the seat, steadying itself.  She heard the little popping sound as its hand closed on the headrest and the claws punctured the plastic lining.  Muscles in its abdomen and legs stood out, tensing, as it readied itself to jump at her.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Through all of this, Olivia sat completely still, transfixed, like a mouse mesmerized by a snake.  She shrank back, never taking her eyes off the werewolf, and tried to push her body backwards against the seat.  A whimpering noise came from her open mouth, but she couldn’t speak, couldn’t scream, couldn’t do anything but sit and wait for the thing to spring.

Then she caught a second movement, from the blond man across the aisle, and she turned to see him rise from his seat.  But it wasn’t him – was it?  The man who now stood next to her, also mother-naked, muscles rippling, his face shining in its own light, had wings.  And a sword.  The sword was glowing so brightly in the dimly-lit bus that Olivia could hardly look at it.  The wings, huge, feathered wings, speckled brown like a hawk’s, arose from broad shoulders.  His eyes were fixed on the monster in the aisle.  The werewolf swiveled its horrid head away from Olivia, and looked at the angelic figure blocking its way.  It gave a rough, angry growl, almost like a cough, and leapt at the winged man.

As the werewolf passed Olivia, it made a sweeping pass at her face with one clawed hand.  She ducked, and felt the wind as it missed her by inches.  The winged man brought up his sword, and there was a swish and a thud, and the werewolf’s head flew backwards, landed in the aisle, and rolled under a seat.  Dark blood gouted up from the severed neck.  The werewolf’s clawed hands rose for a moment, as if to investigate this strange condition of being headless.  Then it realized it was dead, and tumbled forward with a crash.

The angel figure let his sword drop to his side.  His other hand came up, and smoothed back his blond hair. Olivia just stared, her eyes perfect circles of terror.  The man looked down at himself, seemed to realize that he was being watched by a strange woman while wearing nothing but an embarrassed smile.  He shrugged, and said, “Oops.”  Then he sat down in the seat, his wings giving a little rustling sound as they folded inward, and he once again became the tall, lean man with the Stephen King book, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt.  He looked over at her, smiled and shrugged again.  Olivia looked at the floor.  The body of the werewolf was gone.  Once more the businessman was sitting in his seat, his balding head shining a little in the light from the overhead fluorescents.  He seemed to be feeling ill.  He was sweating, and as she watched, he passed a hand across his face, and coughed.

There were still puncture marks in the seat headrest two rows up.

She looked back at the blond man, opened her mouth, and tried to think of something to say.  Nothing came out.

“Hey,” he finally said.  “You want to go to the Starbucks in Eastgate and talk?”
Olivia just nodded.  Afterwards, she was never sure why she acquiesced, but at the time, it seemed like the only possible thing to do.

*****

The blond man, whose name was Nathan Hendrickson, sat across from Olivia in the Starbucks, drinking a mocha cappuccino with extra whipped cream and cinnamon sprinkles.  A raspberry danish, so far untouched, sat on a plate in front of him.  At first they engaged in small talk.  Nathan said that he worked as a manager at Chili’s downtown, and Olivia responded that she was a clerk in a clothing store.  Both of them lived in Bellevue, took the bus because they hated the traffic, and had a serious sweet tooth.

“But…” Olivia began, setting down her cup of vanilla chai and trying to think of how to phrase the question.

“What the fuck just happened on the bus?” Nathan said, in a conversational voice.

“Yeah,” Olivia said with some feeling.

Nathan took a bite of his raspberry danish. “It’s kind of hard to explain.”

“I thought it would be.  But you’re the one who suggested we come here.  I figured you wanted to explain it.”

“Well, let me just say this – check out the obituary columns in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer tomorrow.  The following day, at the latest.”

“Looking for who?”

“The bald guy.  He’ll be dead in twenty-four hours.”

Olivia frowned, looked down, shook her head.  “Can you tell me what happened?  It looked to me like you saved my life.  But… Jesus.  You had wings.  And no clothes on.”

Nathan blushed.  “Yeah, sorry about that.  It just happens.  I can’t take my clothes with me.”

“It’s okay. I mean, you…”  She stopped.  She’d been about to say, “You look just fine naked,” but decided that wasn’t something you said to someone you’d only met a half-hour ago, even if that person had just saved you from being ripped limb from limb by a werewolf.

“The issue is, you weren’t supposed to see all that.  Most people can’t.  Didn’t it strike you as a little weird that no one else said anything, screamed, nothing?  The kid in the back didn’t even wake up.  The bus driver didn’t slam on the brakes.”

“Of course.”  Truthfully, it hadn’t really registered with her until that moment.

“Most people can’t see these… events.  When they happen.  Which isn’t often.”

“So…that bald dude wasn’t really a werewolf?”

“Well, he was.  But not what you probably think of when you think of the word ‘werewolf.’  You know, some dude who turns into a wolf at the full moon, rips people up, and so on.”

“What is it, then?”

“Well, you know about the germ theory of disease, right?”

“It’s a theory?  I thought it was true.”

Nathan smiled.  “Well, back in the nineteenth century, it was just a theory.  People had this idea that these little things, these blobs you can only see under a microscope, caused things like scarlet fever and cholera and diphtheria.  Other people said, ‘Bullshit.  Little things like that, causing people to cough their lungs up?  Ridiculous.’  There was one Scottish doctor who was so contemptuous of the germ theory of disease that he used to sharpen his scalpel on the sole of his boot before surgery.”

“He must have had a hell of a lot of malpractice insurance.”

“No such thing, in those days.  But the point is, what you can’t see can kill you.  It just took a while for them to figure it out.”

“And this werewolf thing I saw…”  Olivia stopped, ending with an implied question mark.

“It’s a disease of the mind.  A fatal one, sadly.  When you’re infected, your spirit becomes the beast that you saw.  It’s transmitted by… well, I guess you could call it psychic bites.”

“Sort of like rabies.”

“Sort of.  If that guy’s werewolf had bitten you, or scratched you, you’d have turned as well.  But I killed it before it could.”

“And now he’s going to die?”

Nathan nodded, looked down.  “Yes.  You can’t live without your spirit, or at least not very long.  The werewolf is a diseased spirit, but you still die if it’s killed.  Even though it’s diseased, it’s somehow keeping you alive.  Without it, you die.”  He paused, then said, “It’s like with heart disease.  Heart disease can kill you, but taking out your heart would kill you a lot faster.”  His face became serious.  “The difference is, heart disease doesn’t try to jump to innocent people around you.”

“So the bald guy…”  Again she trailed off.

“Will be found dead.  Soon.  It’ll probably look like he had a heart attack or stroke.  His death will be attributed to natural causes.  But it’s one less werewolf out there, biting people and spreading the infection.”

“What would it have been like if I’d been bitten?”

Nathan’s eyes narrowed.  “I don’t know.  It’s weird.  You could see it, and you could see me… or at least me as I, um… really am.  Most people can’t.  Most people… if they’re bitten, they just have a sudden twinge – a pang of pain, it feels like a pulled muscle or a sore joint.  But then within two weeks, they turn, and they’re out there biting others and spreading the infection, without knowing it.”  He paused.  “How it would have been for you, I don’t know, given that you would have seen what the werewolf was really doing.”

Olivia didn’t answer for a moment.

“That’s horrifying,” she finally said.

“Yes.  That’s why I try to stop as many infected people as I can, before they can infect others.”

“They have no idea they’re doing it?”

“Not consciously.  But it does change their behavior, just like the rabies virus does.  Did you know that the rabies virus makes carnivores more aggressive, and herbivores more docile?  The virus does what it takes to spread – making a raccoon bite, or making a deer stand still and let itself be bitten – both of them serve to spread the virus to a new host.  In the case of this one, the person who’s been turned becomes more social.  They want to be around people.  They actually feel fit and energetic.  Their personalities become forward, pushy, extroverted.  You find a lot of ‘em in bars, dance clubs, at athletic events.  Eventually, they die – but it can take a year or two, and by that time they’ve usually infected hundreds of others.”

Olivia shuddered.  “And you?  What are you?  Some kind of guardian angel, or something?”

Nathan laughed.  “An angel?  Hardly.”

“You have wings.”

“Yeah.  So do sparrows.  That doesn’t make them angels.”

“Okay, if you’re not an angel, what are you?”

He grinned.  “I work for the Invisible Animal Control Department.  Or the Center for Psychic Disease Control.  However you want to look at it.”

“So… you’re, like, the Naked Winged Werewolf Avenger, or something?”

“I like that.  Can I use it?”

Olivia just stared at him for a moment.  “Look,” she finally said.  “Be straight with me.  Am I losing my mind?  Because if I am… fuck.  I just want to know, okay?”

“You’re not losing your mind.  What you saw was my spirit standing up and challenging the bald man’s werewolf spirit.  That’s why we were…. um, you know.  Naked.  No clothes allowed in the spirit world.”  He brightened.  “Your spirit is naked, too, you know.”

“I’ve never seen it,” Olivia said, dryly.

“Yeah, that’s a puzzler.  You weren’t supposed to see what you saw, and I honestly have no idea why you did.  But you’re not crazy.  You saw what was really happening.  It was the other people on the bus that didn’t.  All they would have seen is me and the bald dude, sitting there minding our own business.  No one else saw anything.”

“Including that sword of yours cutting the werewolf’s head off?”

“Yup.” He grinned.  “And by the way, that sword only hurts werewolves.  No worries about my being armed and dangerous.”

Olivia rolled her eyes.  “Trust me, at the moment that’s the least of my worries.”

Nathan just grinned at her.

“Now what do I do?  I mean, assuming that I actually believe all of this.”  And she suddenly realized that she did believe it.  There was no disputing what she’d seen, and Nathan’s explanation made as much sense as any other she could come up with.

“I guess, we finish our coffee and pastries, and we both go home.”

“And tomorrow, I just go to work, and you go back to… werewolf hunting?”

“I have to work, too.  Werewolf hunting doesn’t pay my rent.”

“Oh.”  She looked up at him.  “How do I avoid getting bitten?  I mean, you’re not going to be there next time, probably.”

“Given that you can see them, you’ll at least have more of an advantage than other people.  But honestly, not that many people are werewolves.  I kill maybe three, four a month.  Five in a good month.  And that’s with going out to look for them, hanging out in werewolf-friendly places.  I get at least one a month right in Chili’s.”

“Convenient for you.”

 
Nathan nodded.  “Yup.  But you shouldn’t worry.  Your likelihood of getting bitten, even if you couldn’t see them, is pretty small.”

She looked at him, one eyebrow raised.  “Any chance I could take out some extra insurance?  You want to have dinner together some time?”

Nathan gave her a dazzling smile.  “Sure.  I’m free tomorrow evening, in fact.  How about that new Japanese restaurant up in the University District?  I’ve been wanting to try it.”

“Sure.”

Nathan stood, and then went over, and gave her a light kiss on the mouth.  Olivia felt a tingling sensation, like a static shock.

“You’re pretty forward yourself.”  She smiled up at him.

“Can’t let the werewolves have all the fun.”

*****

Olivia found the bald man’s obituary in the Post-Intelligencer two days later.

It read:

MARTIN 

Douglas J. Martin, 47, of Bellevue, died suddenly Tuesday morning.  He was a valued employee of Rush Life Insurance Agency of Seattle, where he had worked for fourteen years.  He was a graduate of Pacific Lutheran University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in business administration in 1985.  He was awarded an MBA in finance from the University of Washington in 1990.  Martin’s passing is mourned by a brother, Thomas, of Tacoma, and a sister, Mary McWilliams, of Tukwila.  He was preceded in death by his parents, Nelson and Denise (Trudell) Martin.

Olivia looked down at the photograph of the suit-clad man, with his neat wire-framed glasses and his combover.  A shiver ran through her frame as she remembered the rippling muscles and yellow fangs of the werewolf he’d become.  He could have bitten or scratched her, infected her.  If he had, in a week or two she'd be out partying at bars, looking for victims without even knowing it.

Or maybe she was losing her mind.  At the moment, those two possibilities seemed equally likely.

*****

One date with Nathan became two, then three, and pretty soon Olivia’s roommate, Andrea, was asking when she’d get to meet this blond god that Olivia was so taken with.

“Soon,” Olivia said.  “I’ll have him over here for dinner some time.  Once we run out of new restaurants to try.”

“That could take years.”  Andrea wiggled her eyebrows.  “Maybe you’ll be having him come over for, you know.  Other reasons.  At some point.”

“Maybe at some point.”

 
“You certainly have been seeing him a lot.  When have you been one to run off after the night life?  I always thought of you as being more of the come home early, cuddle up with a nice book type.”

Olivia shrugged.  “I’m just having fun, that’s all.  Are you jealous?”

“Yeah.  A little.  And if he turns out to be as gorgeous as you say, I’m going to be a lot jealous.”

*****

A little under three weeks later, she woke up on a Saturday morning with a sudden, stabbing pain, right behind both shoulder blades.  She yelped a little and reached back, but the pain was gone, as instantaneously as it had occurred.  After lying still for a moment, she wasn’t completely convinced that it’d been real, that she hadn’t dreamed it.

She tried to relax, to go back to sleep, but she felt restless, with a fiery energy that was completely unlike her usual reluctance to get up on her days off.  Finally, she stretched, yawning, and went into the bathroom, and turned on the shower.

As she was drying herself off, there it was, that jolt of pain again.  Once more she slid her hands over her bare shoulders.  Her skin felt normal, smooth, unmarked, and she massaged her shoulder muscles a little – but honestly, there was no reason to.  She felt fine.  Better than fine, actually.  She felt wonderful.  But why did she keep feeling that sudden twinge?

She glanced in the mirror.  And only for a moment – in a flash nearly as quick as the pain had been – she saw a reflection of herself, her face shining from its own light, and behind her a pair of long, tapered wings, streaked like a falcon’s.  She gasped, and looked again – and she was back to being herself, just regular Olivia.  The whole thing had taken less than a second.  She reached back, feeling behind her, but there was nothing there.

She leaned toward the mirror, mouth hanging open a little, and her image blurred, and there were the wings again, as if her body had hung back just for a little, had taken a while to catch up.  Then there was a shimmer as she became an ordinary human again.  Every time she moved, there was a quick image of a naked, shining, winged woman, who was clearly herself and yet so obviously not – and then like an image coming into focus, the vision would go away, and all she’d see was her own familiar form.

And that was when she remembered their first kiss, when she’d felt an electric zing as their lips touched.

Heart pounding, she turned off the shower, pulled on her bathrobe, and went into her bedroom, and picked up her cellphone and dialed it.

“Hello?” said a sleepy voice.

“It's Olivia.  Goddammit, I’ve… did you know you were contagious?”

He sounded genuinely mystified.  “I am?”

“Nathan, I’ve got wings.”

“You do?  How’s that possible?”

“Well, I think you’re the one who can tell me that.”  Olivia tried to keep the indignation out of her voice, with only marginal success.  “You’ve infected me.  With, I don’t know, Contagious Naked Winged Werewolf Avenger disease, or something.”

“I didn’t know it was contagious.”  He paused.  “Look, I’m sorry.  You already could see the werewolf, three weeks ago.  Maybe you were already infected somehow.”

“I don’t think so,” Olivia said.  “I’m sure that this came from you.”

“Sorry,” he said again.

“Look, I’m not mad at you.  It’s more that I’d at least have liked to have had a choice in the matter.”

“Germs don’t ask you if you want to be infected.  Remember the Germ Theory of Disease?”

Olivia felt her wings flex, rustle quietly, and then with a shiver she sensed her newly winged spirit reintegrating with her body.  Really, she felt remarkably well.  Well enough to fly.  Maybe well enough to hunt werewolves.

“Well,” she admitted, “I guess you have a point.”
“I gotta say it’s kinda cool.”  His voice rose with excitement, and she could virtually hear him smiling.  “I never thought I'd have a girlfriend who was... you know.  Like me.  Don’t you think this could be fun?”

“Fun,” she said, and was silent for a moment.  Then something in her seemed to shift, and she hoped it wasn’t just the wings.  “Okay, fine.  What the hell.  You know where I can get a sword?”

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

I remember when I first learned about the tragedy of how much classical literature has been lost.  Take, for example, Sophocles, which anyone who's taken a college lit class probably knows because of his plays Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus.  He was the author of at least 120 plays, of which only seven have survived.  While we consider him to be one of the most brilliant ancient Greek playwrights, we don't even have ten percent of the literature he wrote.  As Carl Sagan put it, it's as if all we had of Shakespeare was Timon of Athens, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Cymbeline, and were judging his talent based upon that.

The same is true of just about every classical Greek and Roman writer.  Little to nothing of their work survives; some are only known because of references to their writing in other authors.  Some of what we do have was saved by fortunate chance; this is the subject of Stephen Greenblatt's wonderful book The Swerve, which is about how a fifteenth-century book collector, Poggio Bracciolini, discovered in a monastic library what might well have been the sole remaining copy of Lucretius's masterwork De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), which was one of the first pieces of writing to take seriously Democritus's idea that all matter is made of atoms.

The Swerve looks at the history of Lucretius's work (and its origin in the philosophy of Epicurus) and the monastic tradition that allowed it to survive, as well as Poggio's own life and times and how his discovery altered the course of our pursuit of natural history.  (This is the "swerve" referenced in the title.)  It's a fascinating read for anyone who enjoys history or science (or the history of science).  His writing is clear, lucid, and quick-paced, about as far from the stereotype of historical writing being dry and boring as you could get.  You definitely need to put this one on your to-read list.

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