Old Lessons
My heart ached as I petted Sam. I’d fallen hard for Lacas. The fact that he asked me to marry him was a surprise, but only because we hadn’t yet been together for a year. I knew almost as soon as I met him that I was in love. Whenever he was near, I tingled with excitement. I wanted to immerse myself in him. I wanted to live within the grip of his masculine embrace and the intoxicating musk of his body. Whenever he wasn’t near, I missed him. I thought about him constantly; what he was doing, who he was seeing, when I’d get to see him again.
I was afraid of the love I felt because of how different Lac was than my previous loves. He was big and brash, stereotypically manly, unashamedly sexual. The way he’d leaned over the counter upon our first meeting and admitted to being a fister; part of me was appalled by the raw honesty, but another part was mesmerized.
Through all my previous relationships in all my previous lives, I always assumed the role of protector and provider. I thought it was my duty because of my endless life. Lac turned that on its head. He was the big spoon. He was the strong one. He made me feel safe in his enveloping arms. I wanted that. I wanted to be protected again. I wanted to be vulnerable. I longed to have a pair of strong arms to retreat into and a deep chest to rest against when my endless life felt too long. I wanted a champion, like Tom had been for me.
I thought I was going to get to have it. Each time Lac pulled me against him, I hoped to regain what I lost when Tom died. The dynamic would never be the same between me and Lac as it had been between me and Tom. Tom was my father. I wanted Lac to be my husband. From both, I desired a protector.
Being responsible can be a thankless task. I accepted responsibility when my original life ended. I did what I thought was right and gave up my wants and needs for the wants and needs of all of humanity. I existed in that role for more than five centuries. In all that long time, countless people had sought shelter and protection in me, but none had ever offered their protection to me. Lac was the first.
Now, the protection was being withdrawn. As Lac’s accusations thundered in my mind, his angry words which insisted I was a fraud, I felt I was losing him. I didn’t want to give Lacas up. I didn’t want to lose another champion like I lost Tom.
My heart was heavy in my chest. A lump of emotion filled the back of my throat. I knelt down next to Sam and hugged him. I used my implant to beg my dog to let me. I needed to feel love from somewhere, even if it was the love of a dog. Sam whined as my desperate sadness bombarded him through our connected implants. I apologized for making him sad. “I’m sorry, boy. I can’t help it.” I closed my eyes and wept into Sam’s fur.
After a few minutes, a deeper shadow than that of the oak tree appeared behind me. Lac lowered himself to his knees and draped a heavy arm over my shoulders. “You really are a human being, aren’t you?”
Lac’s question cut me even deeper than his former accusations had. I lashed out in bitter anger. “WHAT THE FUCK ELSE COULD I BE?”
He took his arm from my shoulders in response to my shouting. Only his hand returned to land gently on the back of my neck. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. It’s obvious I hurt you. I didn’t mean to. I’m confused and I’m scared. I don’t understand the…the implications of the story you told. I wanted to ask you to marry me, almost since we first met. In my wildest imagination, I never thought your answer would be to tell me that you’ve had seven lives before this one. Please, Marvin, tell me the rest of it. If you’ve had seven partners before me, the others must have found a way to come to terms with this…whatever this is. Help me do the same.”
I saw a glimmer of hope in Lac’s apology. I thought, just maybe, I’d still get to have him. I blinked my tears away and sniffed. I took my face out of Sam’s fur and used the bottom of my shirt to wipe at the tears and snot I’d left on his back. “Will you listen to all of it?”
“I will. I want to understand. Tell me your story. Help me to see the person who that poor, abused little boy grew into.”
I sniffed again and patted Sam’s head. He whimpered because he was still sad in response to my sadness. Luckily, making a dog happy was one of the simplest things in the world. I forced an enthusiastic voice out of my mouth and ruffled Sam’s face. “Who wants a treat? Do you want a treat? Do you? Do you want a treat?”
Sam barked and licked my face and wagged his whip-like tail with excitement over the promise of food. He ran across the yard and pranced at the back door as he waited to be let into the kitchen. Lac stood off his knees and offered his hand to help me up. I stood on my own. “Offer it to me only if I get to keep it.”
Lac took his hand back and moved toward the house. I put my hand on the bark of the oak tree and whispered. “Wish me luck.”
I let all of us into the back of the house and gave Sam a piece of beef jerky with a generous dollop of peanut butter smeared on top. He took his treat into the corner to feast upon it. I led Lac into the living room. I didn’t know where to restart my tale. My emotions were raw from the wild swings they’d been through. I considered the idea of using my implant to show what the house looked like when Tom owned it, but I didn’t think that would matter very much to the story.
I decided I needed to move. “Let’s go for a walk. We’ll take Sam out and breathe the air. It’s a nice day. I think the sunshine will make me feel better. I can tell you some more as we go.”
Lac agreed and went to put his shoes on. I ran to my room to change my tear-stained shirt. I was several paces into the room when the smell hit me. My bedroom stank like a truck stop outhouse. The man-funk was heavy in the air, too heavy to be alluring. It had fermented overnight to become stench. I took a moment to strip the soiled bedclothes and wad them up with the waterproof cover from the night before. There were some other articles of cast-off clothing here and there around the room, but I didn’t bother with them. I changed my shirt and carried the reeking pile of laundry to the basement to deal with later. Before I left the pile, I threw the tiny basement windows open wide.
I hurried back to the main floor and got Sam ready for his walk. I used my implant to explain to Sam that we were about to go out and that he needed to stay with me no matter what. I felt his mind agree. The three of us headed out into the late morning sunshine.
* * * *
Sam loved to walk. The stereotype about Great Danes being lazy was certainly true, but if the day was nice, and the air was full of smells, Sam was in his glory. He sniffed the air and let his head turn toward the most interesting odors. Often, when he and I walked together, I would keep our implants linked but would leave my mind passive so I could experience what he did.
Sam classified each new smell into a few basic categories. First, it was either a threat or not. After that, it was either food or not. If a scent was neither a threat nor food, it was quickly disregarded. If Sam judged a smell to be a potential threat, he would move himself between it and me until the scent passed. Every time Sam moved to protect me, my heart filled with joy. I might have been the leader of our small, two-member pack, but Sam was my champion, my guardian. Even though there had never been any real danger from any of those smells, I appreciated Sam’s willingness to stand against whatever danger there might have been.
As we strolled along the sidewalk with the grassed-over street to our right and the ancient brick rowhomes to our left, I found myself in the middle of the group again. Lac was on the outside, near the street, and Sam on the inside, near the homes.
Lac moved to the edge of the sidewalk and walked like the boy from my memory, with one foot on the curb and one foot off. “Tell me about this.” He said of his silly, loping walk.
I shrugged like the boy had. “The man and the woman were small time drug dealers. They used me to run errands from the time I was five. I was an unwanted child, a little pain in the ass, to quote the woman. As long as I was minimally useful, they would feed me. I never got much to eat; just enough to keep from starving. The man, not the one you saw from my memory, but another; he taught me to use a basic map of the neighborhood so I could find addresses. That’s how I earned my keep, by delivering small amounts of drugs for them. When I did well, I would get a slice of pizza for my trouble. If I made a mistake, the woman would stub her cigarettes out on my arm, or on my back, or on my front.”
Lac stopped our stroll and stood with both feet in the street. He was almost exactly my height as he gazed at me with his kind, brown eyes. I gazed back to see the flecks of gold in his irises. “Why didn’t anyone help you? Why did it take a murderer to rescue you from that misery?”
“Who would have helped me?” I asked to make a point. “You saw where I lived. The one constant in that place was desperation. Everyone was desperate for their next meal, their next dollar, their next fix. They didn’t have the capacity to help themselves, let alone to give a damn about the dirty little waif who delivered their rock.”
“So, if not for that murderer…”
“I would have died. Either I would have starved, or one of the woman’s men would have beaten me to death. Perhaps I would have suffered something worse.”
“Worse?”
“I was never sexually abused, but I consider it a miracle that I wasn’t. Had I lived under those conditions much longer, it’s almost certain that I would have been raped by one of the ever-changing partners the woman kept.”
“My God…” Lac said and trailed off into silence. He was obviously shocked by the starkness of my situation.
A tiny hover-car moved silently along the road. A woman sat inside of the plastic dome of the passenger compartment. She had a pile of groceries on the seat next to her. The motion of the automated vehicle made the neatly trimmed grass of the thoroughfare wave like the amber grain from the old United States National Anthem. Lac stepped onto the curb to get out of the way.
“Why was the murderer different?”
“Please don’t call him that.”
Lac raised his hands in a gesture of confusion. “That’s what he was, wasn’t he?”
“He was a contract killer. That was how he earned his living. The people Tom killed were all bad people. He never killed an innocent, and he never harmed a child. I won’t allow you to malign his memory by referring to him as a murderer. Whatever he was or whatever he wasn’t, he was everything to me. Tom was my hero, my savior, and my father.”
Lac accepted my reproach gracefully. “I’m sorry for speaking ill of the dead. I keep saying this, but I just don’t understand. The world I live in is so different from that one. The very fabric of it is different. I don’t understand a world where someone can walk into a house that isn’t theirs, shoot two people to death, kidnap a child, and be praised as a hero.”
I saw my boyfriend’s point. The modern world, the twenty-sixth century one, was a far cry from the twentieth century. The current population no longer lived with daily violence, addiction, misery, and murder. Somehow, I needed to explain the difference. I had an idea, but I didn’t know if it was a good one.
I held my hand out, and he stared at it. He was surprised because I’d refused to take his hand earlier. “This is not a gesture of affection.” I explained. “It’s one of practicality. I can show you the world I came from, but it helps if we’re in physical contact. I can stream my memories through your implant directly into your mind. You’ll see them just like they came from the Synthetic Location Projector. Do I have your permission? Will you travel back in time with me?”
“I’m ready.” He said and took my hand.
I closed my eyes and concentrated. I linked my implant with his and with the master computer system. I found the data I wanted and streamed it to both of us. When I opened my eyes, the year was 1993. The grassy streets were paved with potholed asphalt. Cars were parked bumper to bumper along both curbs. Discarded cigarette butts and fast-food wrappers littered the sidewalk. The air was sour with automobile exhaust.
A delivery truck roared between the parked cars, a trail of sooty black belched from its clattering exhaust stack. The truck’s brakes screeched as it stopped at the corner. People in loud colors and ripped, stonewashed jeans thronged the sidewalk. The buildings sprouted cracks and other signs of decay. Their facades were weathered and stained with pollution. Hip Hop music blared from the open front door of a house across the street.
Lac released my hand and rotated on his heels to give himself a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of his new surroundings. Sam wasn’t fazed by the change. I hadn’t bothered to include his implant in the projection. He still existed in the world in the present. Only Lac and I experienced the world of the past.
He shared his thoughts on what he saw. “It’s awful; loud and smelly and polluted. There’s no green anywhere! How did people live like this?”
“They don’t know any different. This city was founded over three hundred years ago, back in the sixteen hundreds. It started organically, but the layout was quickly taken over by the city planners. They gave us the grid we have today. In the nineteenth century, The Industrial Revolution took over and gave us factories and wealth. In the middle of the twentieth century, the factories died and bequeathed us poverty and crime. The one constant was the city and its people. They survive like weeds that grow from cracks in the concrete. They live the best that they can.”
Even before I finished my speech, a twelve-year-old boy, thin and small for his age, charged along the sidewalk. He ran as fast as his legs would carry him. An overloaded bookbag slammed against his back with every urgent step. A gang of four other kids followed on his heels. They jeered and threatened as they ran.
The boy charged up the stairs of Tom’s rowhome. He tripped on the second step and landed hard on his stomach. The gang fell upon him, kicking and punching. The boy made a feeble attempt at self-defense but could do nothing against the sheer number of striking fists and feet. He rolled his body into a tight ball and resigned himself to endure the beating.
Lac had a difficult time watching the scene. “We should do something.”
“We can’t. This is a memory, and it cannot be changed. Don’t worry; someone is about to help.”
The front door of the house flew open and a big man in black slacks and a plain white undershirt hurried out. He shouted foul obscenity at the gang of kids. They fled like they’d been shot from a cannon. Tom Collins ran down the steps and struggled to lower his great bulk onto his knees so he could check on his ward. Little Marvin Gaye Collins unwound himself from his ball and fell into the protective arms of his adopted father.
To his credit, the boy did not cry. He was scared and he was sad, but he did not shed tears. During the four years the pair had been father and son, the boy never cried. Tom patted his back and released his son from his embrace. He gripped the painted handrail of the wooden front steps and dragged himself to his feet. He lit a cigarette and snapped his lighter closed.
“What was it about?” He asked as he drew on his cigarette and blew the smoke out to the side.
Marvin tucked his chin to his chest and shook his head.
“It had to be about something.”
Marvin shook his head again.
Tom guided the boy to the side, then he lowered himself to sit on the steps. He breathed some more cigarette smoke and exhaled it. The grey cloud wreathed Marvin’s head. Tom fanned it away and apologized. “Sorry ‘bout that. Filthy fuckin’ habit.”
“I don’t mind.” Marvin said, and he really didn’t. The odor of cigarette smoke permeated every aspect of the small boy’s life. His clothes, his bedding, even his schoolbooks bore the scent of Tom’s nearly constant chain smoking. For Marvin, the odor of cigarettes was the comforting scent of his first and only real home. It was also the scent of his hero, Tom Collins.
Tom drew on his cigarette and talked the smoke from his chest. “Please, son; I can’t help if I don’t know what’s wrong.”
Marvin exhaled a sigh which sounded like his problem didn’t have an easy solution. “Remember I had to bring in clothes for gym class this week? Today was the first time we had to get changed. The other kids saw the marks on my body, the ones from the woman. They said I must have a disease, like AIDs or something. They said I was a freak.”
Tom raised his head to look in the direction the other kids had run. He scowled with murderous rage. He blinked the scowl away before he let Marvin see his face again. Tom finished his cigarette, and field-stripped the butt like he was taught when he served in the Vietnam War. He scattered the loose tobacco and the small twist of paper into the breeze and dusted his hands off. “You know none of that’s true, right?”
The boy nodded wordlessly.
“Alright, my boy, if you can’t join them, you beat them. It’s time you learned to defend yourself. We’re going to teach you to fight.”
The boy didn’t see the logic in Tom’s plan. “But…but they’re stronger than me.”
“Son, there will always be someone out there who is stronger than you. That’s a fact of life. The only thing we can do is make you more ruthless than them. Your first lesson starts now. Rule number one is, there is no such thing as a fair fight. If someone raises their hands to you, your job is to beat them any way you can. I’ve heard people say that there’s no honor in fighting dirty. I would say to them, there’s no honor in defeat either. Does that make sense?”
The boy nodded, then he shook his head. Tom’s speech had gone over his twelve-year-old head. The big man grinned at his mistake. “Don’t worry about honor. First thing’s first, we’ll teach you to fight. We’ll worry about honor some other time.” He held his hand out for the boy to shake. “Deal?”
Marvin smiled and the crisis was over. “Deal!” He said and shook.
Tom gathered Marvin’s dropped bookbag from the front walk to carry it into the house. “Let’s go in and get you squared-away.” The pair went in through the screen door.
I let the memory fade and the ancient city dissolve from view. When it was gone, the three of us resumed our stroll.
“What happened after?” Lac asked.
“He taught me to fight. Tom was a Marine. He fought in the Vietnam War. The war is where he learned to survive. Tom taught me to fight efficiently and brutally. He taught me to exploit weakness. He helped me to use my small strength to take down the biggest bullies. There were still times I had to run, but they were few.”
“He obviously loved you.”
“He did…and I loved him. I still love him. I miss him. When Tom took me in, he had no idea what he was in for. I was nothing, barely a shell of a human being. Tom had to create me, like Geppetto created Pinocchio. I had no emotions. I suffered so much living with the woman, I lost the ability to feel. I couldn’t keep to a schedule. I didn’t understand having regular meals, or a time to get up, or a time to sleep. I couldn’t even read.
“Tom had to teach me everything. He had tutors come to get me up to speed with the other kids my age. It took more than two years of intensive work before I could go to public school. He sent me to psychologists to heal my emotional wounds. He used his connections to get me a birth certificate and a social security number. I had none of that. I didn’t exist in any official records. Before I met Tom, I was a marionette, just going through the motions while someone else pulled my strings. He made me a real boy. He taught me to have a will of my own. He brought me to life. That’s why I can’t bear to hear you refer to him as a murderer. He was never a murderer in my eyes. He was my dad.”
Lac held his tongue after I finished talking about Tom. We walked two long blocks in near silence. I stopped us at the intersection of a main thoroughfare. We had to wait while a half-dozen of the automated hover-cars passed along the grass-covered street. Sam sat and leaned his heavy body against mine. I patted his head and scratched his floppy ears. Our implants weren’t connected, but Sam could tell my emotions were off. Animals are much more attuned to emotions than humans. I always thought that because God denied them speech, He granted them intuition.
The hover cars went on their way to wherever their passengers desired. The three of us stepped off the curb and crossed to the other side. Lac found his voice when we regained the sidewalk. “I think I’m missing something. Tom was a contract killer, right? I don’t understand how he could be a killer for hire and a father you loved. The two seem mutually exclusive.”
“I’m not sure I understand your premise. Are you saying that once someone kills, they can never be loved?”
Lac shook his head, then he nodded in an unintentional mimic of twelve-year-old Marvin. “I can’t quite find the words I want, but sort-of, yeah.”
“Would it surprise you to learn that I killed people?”
Lac stopped in his tracks and stared at me. Wide-eyed shock branded itself on his face. Suddenly, he blinked and grinned. “Sure, you did.” He said sarcastically. “You don’t even step on spiders. I’ve seen you pick them up with your bare hands and take them outside like they’re lost children. I get the point you’re making, but I don’t believe you.”
I held my hand out to him again. “Do you want me to show you, or just tell you?”
Lac eyed my hand like he was afraid I had a spider in my palm. He shook his head. “Just tell me. I’m still not over watching Tom kill those people earlier.”
We walked on as I explained. “Tom spent my twelfth and thirteenth year teaching me to fight and helping me build up my body. When I was fourteen, he decided I was big enough to learn to shoot. We built a simple firing range in the basement of the house. It’s still there. I could teach you if you wanted to learn.”
“Pass.” Lac said like the suggestion was the most distasteful thing he’d heard all day.
“Anyway, I learned to shoot. Tom taught me to use all types of weapons. He also taught me how to take care of them. On my fifteenth birthday, he gave me a .38 Special as a present.”
“What’s that?”
“Originally, the term ‘thirty-eight special’ referred to a cartridge. They were invented at the end of the eighteen hundreds because they offered higher velocity and better stopping power. Later, the term was used interchangeably with ‘Saturday Night Special.’ Both refer to a cheaply built, usually snub-nose revolver, of five or six shot capacity. They were everywhere back then. Weapons which fired nine-millimeter rounds were replacing them as the popular choice for thugs, so the old .38 Specials got a lot cheaper. You could pick one up in a pawn shop for a few dollars. The number ‘thirty-eight’ refers to the caliber. The bullets it fires are point-three-eight of an inch in diameter. It’s a very loud, easily concealed weapon. Because of its short barrel, its accuracy is poor beyond a few feet.
“Tom suggested I store the gun in my nightstand. His work kept him away from the house, sometimes for days on end. The neighborhood had been getting worse, so he wanted me to have some protection when I was alone. In August of the following year, the gun saved my life. Summers in the city used to be the worst for crime. Something about the relentless heat sends the violence through the roof. The air conditioner in Tom’s house was on the fritz and he was away on a job. I was laying in bed trying to get to sleep with all the windows open. I heard a noise downstairs. I took the gun from the nightstand and crept down to see. A junkie had unhooked a window screen with a switchblade. He was going to frisk the house for drug money. I confronted him and he lunged at me. I shot him four times in the chest and once in the head.”
“Why did you shoot him in the head?”
“To make sure he was dead.”
Lac stopped our walk again. He was visibly shocked by my ready admission. I was certain that Lac had just mentally branded me a murderer. I was tempted to read his thoughts to confirm, but I held back.
I didn’t need to read Sam’s thoughts to know that he was upset, but his reasons were different. Sam protested the repeated stops of our walk with a frustrated bark. I was frustrated that my dog was frustrated, so I aborted the walk and headed for home. Once we were moving again, I explained why I killed the junkie.
“If a man raises his hand to you, you must put him down. If you don’t, he will inevitably raise his hand to you again. If a man threatens your life by physical action, he has declared himself your enemy. A man must kill his enemies, or they will certainly kill him. That’s the way the world works.”
“You mean that’s the way it used to work.”
“No, Lac. That’s the way the world will always work.”
Lac stopped our walk again. Sam got mad and barked. I stroked his neck to smooth down his raised hackles. “Shush, Sam.” I scolded him gently. I focused my thoughts and used my implant to tell Sam to go home without us. He barked once more for good measure and padded off down the sidewalk.
Lac confronted me about my opinions once Sam was well away from us. He spread his arms wide like he wanted to make an example of the entire city to prove his point. “This isn’t the world you grew up in. People don’t treat each other like cave men. We don’t have to always be at each other’s throats to survive.”
“Yeah, you’re welcome.”
“What?”
I hadn’t meant to express myself the way I had. I dismissed Lac’s question. “Nothing, nothing, that part comes later. Finish your thought.”
Lac eyed me warily like he was certain he’d missed something important. He was right, but I had no intention of confirming his suspicion. He shook his head to clear the tangent and went on with what he’d been saying. “I’m saying that your lessons no longer apply. The world has grown out of its animal phase.”
“You’re wrong. The lessons Tom taught are basic to human nature. They’re basic to all nature.” I tried to explain with a metaphor. “Do you know anything about plants? Have you ever done any gardening?”
“Sure.”
“Have you ever planted too may seeds in a pot?”
“Yeah.”
“What happened?”
“Some of the plants started to wither as the other ones shaded them out. The plants that grew the fastest blocked the others. I had to split them up and repot the smaller ones to keep them from dying.”
“That’s exactly the point I’ve been trying to make. It’s in the nature of all life to compete. It’s that competition which led to the violence of the past. All violence, from fistfights to nuclear war, is just an extreme form of competition. We know at our most primal level that resources are limited. Our nature demands we fight for our share.”
Lac raised his voice to argue. He seemed to be as frustrated with my speech as Sam had been with our incessant stopping. “What are you talking about? I’ve never been in a fight in my whole life!”
I took a long step toward my boyfriend and put my finger against the center of his powerful chest. “That doesn’t mean you can’t fight, or that you don’t know how. The drive to do battle is still in here. It’s woven into your DNA. You can’t escape it or make it go away because you don’t want to admit that it exists within you.”
“You’re wrong!”
“I’m not.” I started to walk toward the house. I was thirsty from talking too much and tired of standing in the street like a spectacle. I wanted to sit on my porch with a glass of lemonade in my hand and my dog in my lap.
Lac matched his steps to mine because I didn’t give him another option. I tried once more to make my point, this time with a historical instead of an evolutionary argument. “In the middle of the twenty-first century, the population collapsed. There was a lot of wrong-headed thinking back then which said the world was getting overcrowded. The thinking became pervasive in academia and was presumed correct. Young people were discouraged by their olders and betters, and they stopped reproducing. More and more people aged out and died off. With no one to replace them, the world’s population dropped from almost nine billion at its height to less than three.
“The lack of population brought about many more problems than the perceived overpopulation ever could. The governments of the world did everything they could to encourage people to have children. The first of my new lives occurred roughly at that time. I did my part and had a big family. Eventually the population grew and leveled off at a sustainable level. The one marvelous good which came out of the collapse and regrowth of the world was that we were better able to plan for the population when it grew the second time. You have never had to fight, because there has always been enough; not just enough, but plenty. You have plenty of space, plenty of food, plenty of opportunity to thrive. You were planted in your own pot. You have never had to worry about beating anyone else out.”
Lac was forced to agree with my assessment, but he held onto his original opinion that fighting and killing were unnecessary. We were almost to the house when I explained why he was wrong.
“The point I’m making is, IF you find yourself in a situation like I described, you either prove you’re not to be trifled with, or you open yourself to being trifled with. Whether you prove yourself with words, with fists, or with firearms, the end result will be the same. If you win, you live to fight another day. If you lose, either you die or you lay down to be walked on from then forward. Tom taught me to prove myself decisively. Only when I bested my opponents with overwhelming force, did I never have to fight the same battle again. All contests are like that; fight to win, shoot to kill. There are no other choices.”
