Jing and Zo led the errant priest to the data terminal where they had witnessed the hack in progress. The data spool was still in place and hadn’t been re-wound yet. Even with the all the analytical engine mainframes down, electricity still fed into the complex from the windmills and the nearby river, stopped-up by a hydro-electric dam. The terminal couldn’t connect with the engines in its current state, but it could display the data that was recorded onto the spool. Zo pulled down one lever to re-wind the roll of punch paper and pushed it to stop, and then hit a button to play the data.

Ikaya grabbed the cable that connected the monitor to the the keyboard, the telegraph key, and the engine when the day’s data come on. He had Zo fast-forward the roll to the point when the mysterious access happened. He had clearly sensed something before, even if he didn’t say it. When the source with no origin appeared on the screen, it confirmed that there was something more to this than a masked identity. He knew something.

“You’re terrified,” Jing oberved. “That much is clear. Can you tell us what you know?”

“I was about to tell you when you cut me off. Clearly, your hunch was correct. This is the work of psychic. And yes… I know who this is.” Ikaya took a deep breath before continuing. “As I said, we’ve been following this case for some time. There had been a string of engine hacks in some of the major cities – Shusa, Hladdat, Hitonnen, and even Tiago. Your former employer in Tiago was of the companies affected. There have even been people from His Holiness’s office who have been following this rogue for quite some time. And some of them are now dead or have been injured.”

“Couldn’t the gendarmes or some other kind of police apprehend them?”

“We’ve shared as much of our information as we can with the Agency and local police departments. Unfortunately, ordinary people are no match for a Level 7 telepath.”

Ikaya took a few seconds. “Level 7 is the strongest level of psychic power that’s been observed in human beings. Most priests tend to be anywhere from Level 3 to 6. There is unlimited potential in what a Level 7 can do, and those powers must be used responsibly.”

“And what do you know about responsiblity?” Jing asked. It was more a dagger than a question.

“When are you going to let it go? It was seventeen years ago. Mura and I just happened and it works. And how can you kick me when I’m here to help?”

“Just like an Itanese to take whatever he wants,” Zo interjected. “And the priests are no better. I really don’t get you people.”

“Just like a Tanesh to be crass and disrespectful.” Shortly after Ikaya made this remark, Jing grabbed him and pulled him away from the cable. Jing told him, “You can go. I am going to call Shusa and ask for another expert.”

“Someone’s on the way. Probably on a train or dirigible. But they sent me to make the initial assessment.”

“Stick around, go, I don’t care. But I’m calling Shusa. No, I’m not.” Jing paused and told Zo to hook in the telegrapher key’s cable to the outgoing pocket for Shusa. “Please tap out to the Office of His Holiness that I find this agent Ikaya to be unsatisfactory, both in the present and in the past for behavior unbecoming for a priest.”

“You wouldn’t dare! Do you really think they’ll defrock me over something you said?”

“The many faces of the gods! We have a problem here, one that affects many jobs and your precious big city ordinators. As you said, this culprit has cost the lives of some of your colleagues, and all you can think about is saving your own skin. Zo, please tap in what he just said and that nice comment about you. Also, mention that our dear friend Ikaya has harmed me in the past.”

“I’m already on it,” Zo said, tapping out the longs and shorts. The engines were down, but the telegraph system still worked. Jing pointed to her proudly, “That’s someone who knows how to do their job!”

The beeping of the longs and shorts continued for a few minutes more, and then the message was transmitted. The gendarmes were coming soon and Jing still needed to look at the entry and exit logs for the data library. As for Ikaya, Jing hoped that he’d be professional enough to share what he knew with the Agency police and his fellow priests what he knew about the psychic hacker. As for what lie in store for Ikaya’s priesthood, Jing did not know if it would be the cruel face of Compassion or the kind face of Destruction.

to be continued…

Ikaya, the holy man, nervously looked at Jing and his young apprentice. It had been years since Jing last saw him, when he and his fiancee Mura had seen him to discuss officiating the wedding that never happened. Then the last time he heard the priest’s name was when Mura broke off the engagement, saying that she just could not stop the forces of nature. But she had to tell Jing this while he was working, coding away on an important file. His sojourn in Tiago, which he thought would become something permanent, had ended with a phone call. And this man ,who had stolen what could have been his life, arrived shortly after another one. One did not need to be a telepath to grasp that Jing was seething with anger.

“I’m really sorry,” Ikaya said. “I really am.”

“I don’t care about about your sorry apology. I don’t care about you,” Jing said. “If you can’t help us, then think yourself back to where you came from. The gendarmes are coming and perhaps they’ll do some good.”

“You know they have no idea how to investigate this.”

“Yes, but I can call His Holiness’s office. Perhaps they can send someone else. I’m sure someone can jaunt them in if they can’t do it themselves.”

“I’m here and I can help,” Ikaya pleaded. “When I heard that this had happened in Atosa, I volunteered right away.”

“Clearly you’ve never been interested. Why now?” At times, Jing preferred to be around the machines than he did around people. They were complicated and could make life difficult, but they worked if you understood them. People were complicated and often made life difficult, but one could never understand them. Especially when someone had taken vows for the enlightenment of humanity. That said, Jing was no misanthrope. He had trained and mentored many people over the years, watched them grow personally and professionally, and saw them move on to take on more responsibility. He hoped that he would be able to see Zo through all these things. This man in front of him, though, was irresponsible, even now.

In waiting for an answer, Jing had hoped the priest wouldn’t confirm his feeling. He didn’t like the man, but he hated even more that he disliked the priest, that it had caused him to look at all of them with suspicion many years ago. Others, especially some of the local priests, had helped him regain his trust for the House of Wisdom.

“I just wanted to say I’m sorry. My wife too told me to convey her regret when I told her I was coming this way. I knew I could help in this situation, but…”

“Oh, the many of faces of the gods, man! You’re just as self absorbed now as you were back then.” Jing sighed. “There are lots of livelihoods at stake here and all you can think about is how sorry you are.”

“Look, the House of Wisdom has been following this for quite some time. We’ve been tracking this case from Shusa to Hitonnen and then to the northern West Coast. We had some idea that Atosa would get hit sooner of later.”

“And somehow, you’ve never found it fit to give us the memo.” Jing wanted to say much more, especially to tell Ikaya what he could do with himself. The Itanese language was colorful in that way, after all. But there was a young woman present who called him her “work dad” and that made him hold back.

“Some security men from His Holiness’s office have died in the process.”

“Can you help us or not?” Jing cut in. “Save your talk for the gendarmes. We need to check the library.”

“You can show me the way,” Ikaya said, deferring to Jing. “But let’s take a look at the terminal first.”

to be continued…

Jing took the phone and put it back into its holder on the wall. He had called the local temple – there were no high level telepaths there, but they told him they would call the School of Wisdom in Shusa. There may be an expert there or they could find someone to dispatch. They didn’t tell him something he already didn’t know. Supposedly, some of them could teleport. He hoped one of them could simply think themselves over and caught whoever broke into the system.

All he knew was that the fez-heads were coming and they’d be utterly useless. Police always were.

The local police never investigated computational crimes. Neither did the Tribal Affairs officers – they only came to the Engine Complex if there was a crime involving a Tanesh on the grounds. Some agents and uniformed policemen from the Agency would come soon. They weren’t equipped to handle psychic crimes, though.

The phone rang again. It was the office of His Holiness, a man who spoke in crisp Shusa standard told him to wait, that someone would be there soon. The nearest qualified expert was in Tiago, and he’d be over shortly. This was somthing Jing wasn’t too happy to hear as he had left that city many years ago.

Jing had a very good idea of how frequently the trains took to get to the town near the engine complex from Tiago. He also knew roughly how long it would take for a dirigible to fly from the same arrival and destination. It would take a few weeks on train, a week and a half by dirigible. However, that crisp voice, that sounded like an announcer on the wireless, assured him that someone would be there soon.

He put his hand in his hip pocket to grab his keys. He needed to check the data storage library, which itself was the size of an industrial lot warehouse. He needed to check the area for any sign of break-in before the police got there and to see what the entry and exit logs read. He didn’t want to be caught not having read the clipboards in front of the police, especially the fez-heads. Many of them deplored that they were posted out in this “wasteland” full of nothing but “rejects and cows.” Jing had long suspected that many of the federal cops were rejects themselves – they either couldn’t get a desirable post (such as in Hitonnen or Shusa) for whatever reason, or they may have had such a post but were such problems that the Agency chose to sweep them out of civilization’s harm. Them and the Tribal Affairs police, who weren’t much better. Jing had to be ready for any of them.

He tried to send Zo home, saying that it might be dangerous. Zo laughed and said Jing might be the one who needed some protection. Besides, she had seen the hack happen as well, so she was needed as a witness in any case.

Right before Jing and Zo headed down the complex to inspect the library, they were hit with a small burst of air followed by two priests materializing in from of them. After they unclasped each other’s forearms, one of them vanished just as quickly. It took a moment for Jing to recognize the one remaining. It was Ikaya, the holy man.

to be continued…

On the rasterizer viewscreen, Jing monitored the requests that came in from all the engines networked with the Great Engine Complex. There was always a code identifying the engine and location requesting data, and this was all recorded on the spools of punch paper. Once he saw a spool was running out, he tapped the code for “halt.” Below the monitor was  a keyboard with the 60 syllabic characters of Phonic, with a key to tap a few times to select a Universal Character. Each syllable key on the keyboard automatically emitted the series of beeps – the longs and the shorts – but Jing preferred to tap it out on his singular telegrapher’s key, as the engines operated on a binary code, which was easily rendered in longs and shorts.

Zo, an adolescent girl from the local Tanesh reservation, was his apprentice. She was almost as old as long as he had been working at the Complex, which made her almost seventeen or eighteen years old. Had he stayed in the western city and got married, he could have had a daughter her age. He taught her things she needed to know such as tapping out code, reading the screen, and having an ear for the longs and shorts. He was teaching her how the gigantic engines worked and some more practical things for the job, like changing the data spools. After halting a terminal, he showed her how have the writing machine rewind the spool,  take the end slack out of the other bobbin, lift the spool away from its pin, and place it into a canister. Before putting in a fresh spool, he grabbed the hose from a nearby compressed airtank, pointed the nozzle at the writing machine, and showed her how to spray bursts of air at it to clean it. Before putting a fresh spool in, they would check the punching mechanism to make sure the puncher was clean and still sharp. The parts, which were crafted in Alys, were expensive not only for the workmanship, but also the voyage they took across the ocean to the United Republic. Everything was clean and Jing had Zo put in a new one.

In the past, Jing trained mostly boys who were sent by their parents from the reservations to learn a valuable trade. He found them difficult and challenging. Some, when they heard his Hladdat accent, would make fun of it. They thought it was funnier than Itanese accents, and it made very little difference to them, as their parents often talked about how they hated the Republic. They often had difficulty paying attention, especially when it came to learning the more mundane details of the job, such as what he and Zo were doing at the moment. They would often talk loudly and coarsely, and think that the telegrapher’s key was something to transmit ribald jokes. He often sent them home with an explanation to the director. The boys’ parents would come, contrite, sorry, and trying to bargain with both him and the director. They respected the director, who was Tanesh, and would makes claims that Jing was not such a bad man for a Republican.

So far, Zo was a good apprentice. She was smart, quick to learn, and paid attention to detail.

Zo put the canister on a cart to be taken to the data storage center. She then took a fresh data spool out of its canister, placed it in its pin, worked the slack through the punching area, put the end of the paper into the bobbin that would reel it in as the puncher wrote down the data. She wrote down the date on the new spool’s canister and filed in on the shelf until it ran out. After that task was completed, Jing had her come to the terminal and tap in “Go,” to unhalt the engine.

Before they moved on to another terminal, Jing had Zo practice reading the viewscreen. There was a request coming in, that she read and understood well. As he looked over Zo’s shoulder, Zing also saw something unusual – there was no code for the origin of the engine requesting files. Jing quickly moved to Zo’s right, where the telegrapher’s key sat next to the keyboard, and scrambled to tap in a “block” code. Whatever was accessing the engines quickly bypassed his commands. Over the years, Jing had learned a great deal about engine security and even helped with creating a firewall system that effectively kept a lot of the hackers out. Whoever it was, they were savvy enough to get past it.

He had never seen something like that, but he suspected this hack was a psychic crime. Somewhere out there, a rogue telepath knew to connect his or her mind with the engine and take data from it. He had heard rumors about this type of thing for years, that various engines have been hit and no hacker, no source had ever been found. Occasionally, data spools were stolen with no sign of break-in at the storage facilities.

Atosa had the largest group of engines in all of Itan. It was the hub of the network, all engines connected back to Atosa. As such, the Atosa Engine Complex was the largest target possible, an infinite data mine. Jing had to act quickly.

He picked up the intercom microphone and announced to all the coders and operators present to enter “Halt.” He picked up the earpiece of the phone and spoke into the phone’s mice attached to the wall, notifiying director of this compromise. She was on it was well and was finding no way to stop it.

Jing also felt he had no choice but to call the School of Wisdom. There was a temple in the nearby town, and if no expert was available, they could always call Shusa or Hitonnen to send someone over. However, since his once fiancee had left him for a holy man, he came to view the institution with distaste. While he understood the actions of one priest does not represent the entire institution, this priest was supposed to have officiated the wedding. And Jing remembered that the priest was a high-level telepath. Whoever the School of Wisdom dispatched, Jing hoped it would be anyone but this man.

to be continued…

For Jing, it was a routine night at the Atosa Engine Complex. Ever since the difference and analytical engines were invented a few hundred years before, it took that amount of time to refine the technology, to make them into working memory machines. In the late 19th millenium, a few businesses had an engine in floor, doing simple computations. By the turn of the the 20th millenium, massive warehouses were constructed to house massive engine mainframes. They were all networked and connected to the Engine Complex in Atosa, which provided backup computational power. The complex, located in the middle of the Great Plains of Atosa, which between two great mountain ranges in the Itano-Sutanese continent. It was Jing’s job to monitor all the requests for information from all the engines from all over the United Republic.

Jing was a professional coder. He wrote codes for the engine, recorded them on large spools of durable hemp paper. When he was younger, he got the job because he was fairly cheap labor. He originally was a telegraph operator from from a village between Hladdat and the ruins of Tlon. He had spent much of his youth going from one big city to another, getting hired on as a temporary worker, tapping out messages and decoding them wherever he went. Being a United Republic citizen, he moved easily from Hladdat to Hitonnen, to Shusa to some of the cities on the west coast. However, in the Itanese cities, such as Shusa or Hitonnen, it wasn’t easy being Sutanese, especially with companies that practiced preferences for the Itanese. So much for the rhetoric of the Sutan0-Itanese heritage.

He could have easily passed for Itanese, with his blond hair and dark blue eyes. His complexion, though, was a light brown, something that didn’t go away with generations of intermarriage between the two groups. The ethnic distinctions began to disappear some time after Chanen’s successful conquest of Sutan nearly 2000 years ago. Given that, at times, the Sutanese felt like they were treated like second hand citizens, they had culture on their side. Sutan had given the world writing, mathematics, science, theatre, and enlightenment. More specifically, they came from Tlon. Members of the Tlonite diaspora, especially in the United Republic, were viewed with a mix of fear and reverence, especially when it came to prophecies about the rebuilding of Sutan’s most ancient city. Like most citizens of the Republic, he was an adherent of the School of Wisdom, especially for the benefits of meditation and other means of enlightenment. However, he never believed the prophecies and felt that the Tlonites should simply accept their identity as Sutanese.

Out in the Great Plains of Atosa, in the land surrounding the Engine Complex, the lorries, gigantic cattle the size of elephants with wool like buffalo, grazed the fields, followed or led by riders on horseback, known as the lorry drivers. They were from Itanese tribes that have never became a part of the Itanese Empire or the United Republic. As Itan pushed forth in its manifest destiny, the Tanesh tribes were pushed into reservations or pockets of land no one wanted for settlement. They supported themselves with agriculture and driving lorries. Many of them also worked in the Great Engine Complex or the windmills and the hydro-electric dams that helped power it. It was quite a sight, in the middle of nowhere, the Engine Complex itself, and the landscape dotted with the windmills and the herds of lorries.

When he lived in a west coast city, he had a long-term contract with a with a punchware firm where he was given code and was simply required to tap it out for recording on the paper reels. He became quite good at it, got to know how code was written from looking at what the engineers wrote. Jing came to know good code from bad, got to see the various styles, and when there were discrepancies. He displayed a knack for improvising and writing code where there was none before. An engineer took notice and took him on as an apprentice. Soon, Jing had more prestige than simply being one of those telegraphing temps.

Life seemed good for Jing. He had a good job, he finally had professional respect, and he soon became engaged to a woman he met in the city. She was the daughter of a local businessman. Because Jing was in his late twenties and long had job instability, he was worried that his fiancee’s father would not approve of him. His concerns turned out for naught, and a date was soon set for the wedding. A holy man from the School of Wisdom would officiate the rites and reservation upon reservation was made for the festivities. However, the fiancee broke off the engagement.  There was some one else. It turned out to be the holy man.

Upon hearing the news, Jing decided to head east. To where, he didn’t know, but the Great River/Fine River seemed like a good place to start. In Itanese, the river that formed a natural boundary between western regions of Itan and Sutan was called The Great River. In Sutanese, it was called the Fine River. One day, at work, he telegraphed the train station to book the next trip out and then tapped a goodbye note to the engineer who mentored him. He then walked out of the office, caught a combustible bus going through downtown, and then went to the train station. The attendant gave him the option of upgrading to a dirigible flight, but he never cared for the idea of air travel. He had bought a ticket that would take him to the towns of Great River/Small River, through the Great Plains of Atosa, and to Shusa. He wanted the option of being able to get off anywhere.

He had never thought he would ever settle in the Great Plains. The Tanesh lived there and the Itanese liked them least of all. The Ndanthans who decided a life aboard a ship or on the road wasn’t for them, but failed to assimilate to the cities of the United Republic, also found their way to the plains. Some of them would complain that their black skin was an obstacle to making it in Itanese society. Then there were the Itanese and Sutanese people who were running from something, like him. Once he saw the expansive fields of lorries grazing the land and their drivers, the deep blueness of the sky, and the windmills, he decided his trainride was over. It was a long, uncomfortable ride as it was, and he could have held out for another destination. But he took his ticket to the box office and cashed out the value for what would have been the remainder of the trip.

In town, close to the train station, he observed the people. There were the city ladies, most likely from Shusa or Hitonnen, in their white dresses and parasols. They were seated at an outdoor restaurant table, enjoying lorry steaks, locally grown and killed, and having a lively conversation where they commented on the savageness of the land, the coarseness of the people, and how the Great Engine Complex ruined the landscape. They took out their portable soliotype cameras and pointed them everywhere. He had done such things in his travels from city to city. He had collected photos of the compact magnificence of Shusa, the ancient glory of Hladdat, and the monstrosity of the new skyscrapers in Hitonnen. He had left them behind, including most his clothes and other possessions he had managed to bring with him most of his youth. The only clothes he had were the ones he wore when he boarded the train and they hadn’t been washed in weeks.

Whatever job Jing would have whenever he arrived to where he was supposed to go was far from his mind when he boarded. It was only by luck that he got off at the station close to the Great Engine Complex. Unlike the cities, the roads were dusty and the buildings were two or three stories at the most. Some were permanent brick constructions, while most of them had been thrown together out of wood. In contrast to the cities, horse drawn carriages were still common with very few combustibles, or horseless carriages, with troughs by the curbs to provide water for the parked horses. In a tavern close to the train station, he noticed the Ndanthan in a train conductor’s uniform walking dismissively past an Ndanthan settler towards the bar. Without saying a word, the conductor had expressed a commonly known attitude of the Ndanthans: One who does not wander is not an Ndanthan. However, the conductor did talk to Jing while they were both having drinks. When it came to discussing Jing’s situation, the conductor suggested that he could telegraph his cousin, who captained a freighter that frequently traveled across the ocean between Shusa and Alys City and back. Atosa was one place where people ran to, but many in the United Republic had also joined the Ndanthans in their ships and caravans.

Jing thanked the conductor for the offer and politely declined. However, he and the conductor continued to exchange telegrams for years. But it was the conversation he overheard from the genteel women in white that made him think about the Great Engine. He would go there, apply for a job as a coder, and take the job as a telegraph operator if that’s all they had to offer him. He met with the director, a woman who had once made punch rolls to code looms to work her way to telegraphing to coding the engines. In the interview, they bonded over their working-class experiences and the director had a good sense of Jing’s talent as a coder. She then got the telegram from the engineer who trained Jing to code, and it spoke highly of his skill in adaptability. Jing wasn’t searching for redemption, but he found a new life in the middle of nowhere.

to be continued…

There is a good friend of mine… I have to pause here. I don’t know how good a friend he is when I call him and he doesn’t return my calls. I asked him about it and he gave me this explanation that compels me to feel sorry for him: he is so busy, work is cutting his pay and increasing his workload,  it takes all of his emotional reserves to deal with people at work, and when he is home, he wants to tune everything out. As if this type of thing is unique to him. Another good friend of mine works with special ed students, especially autistic and other special needs students. As an educator who works with kids who constantly need his attention, he is drained. All my dealings with students at any level has also placed emotional demands on me. This so-called good friend of mine… he is not special. He is lucky enough to have a full-time job, even if things are fucked-up right now.

Now that I’ve talked smack about why he doesn’t call me back, here’s some more smack: he calls me up asking me “for a favor” because he’s going on vacation. When I listen to the voicemail, I wonder what it is. I call back this time and he actually answers the phone. We chat and the favor turns out to if I could record some shows. Unfortunately, I tell him, I do not have a DVR and that’s the truth. I catch up with most of my TV viewing through the on-demand channels or Hulu.

I suspect the TV show in question is Project Runway. As much as I enjoy the show, I just don’t consider it a life-or-death situation. Some time ago, when I was blogging recaps, I did. But my summer viewing has been about Dr. Who, True Blood, Being Human, and Mad Men, in that order.

Ignore me, call me when you’re drunk, and call me when you want to watch TV. And if I piss you off, what are you going to do? Not talk to me? Geez!

Somehow, we will wind up having a lunch where my friend will get mushy and say we should hang out more often. As long as there isn’t excess alcohol involved, it’s ok.

There are a few events that have found their way into MFA lore at the University. My housesitting adventure in Professor Joseph K’s home, complete with eating “magic cookies,” is one. After our fall-out, Professor K bitched about to any of his acolytes who happened to be nearby. I happened to have found out about it from Rosalyn’s husband, then husband at Rosalyn’s birthday party. Which now bring me to the other: To deflect attention from herself, Rosalyn has happily spread the cookie monster about me. Of course, Rosalyn’s falling down the stairs had many witnesses. There were the few who saw it first-hand and came directly to her aid, and then there were the other party-goers who found out within minutes. With so many people who knew about the fall, it was very hard for Rosalyn to live it down. And the program’s co-director had first-hand knowledge of it, since she was the party’s emcee.

What is an MFA program without a little heresay? The MFA welcome party was canceled and the reason was spread through the grapevine: The co-director said to Rosalyn that the party was canceled because of her infamous drunken fall down the stairs. Using 9/11 and the “spiritual wound” was bad enough, but this was a personal attack. Rosalyn, who was no pushover, did at least say a few things in her defense.

In pre-blog/MySpace/Facebook/Twitter era, some of us used social networking. On a Yahoo Groups board someone set up for our MFA program, Liza Radley and I expressed our anger over what happened to Rosalyn and the excuses used to pull the rug out from under a tradition. The same board was also used to organize several unsanctioned MFA “welcome parties.”

To give some credit to the program, a bland reception was held in the top-level courtyard of the University’s Humanities building, on the south side of the “H.” But a cheese-and-crackers operation in the afternoon of a school day isn’t quite the same as an evening everyone has set aside to meet each other. But the excuses were totally unnecessary.

I had the impression that the English Department wanted to end this whole party business. The year before, I heard from a friend that the department chair Dr. Muir was quite bitchy and garulous when he asked her for the funds to buy refreshments for the party. Perhaps it would be the last banal fall semester for a while and Dr. Muir just appeared unprofessional. My first semester in the program, however, was marked by September 11.

In years past, there was some idea that there would be a party and the date would be announced. The semester’s arriving class, however, had no idea. We were all horrified by the attacks, stressed out afterwards, and frightened by the developments that were rapidly happening on a national level. And life had to go on. We wrote our stories and poems and read them for the workshops, read literature for our classes, and worked at our jobs. We went back to some kind of normalcy, whether we liked it or not. There was, however, no sign that there’d be a party to welcome the new crop of writers and poets.

As part of that new group, I was disappointed. Were we unworthy of a welcome?

Rosalyn and I e-mailed one of the co-directors of the program about it. We both got responses that amounted to that it wasn’t going to happen. In the e-mail I got, the esteemed master poet said something about since there was this “great spiritual wound,” it didn’t seem appropriate for us to be throwing the party.

Using 9/11 as an excuse? This was definitely exploiting this event to do something that this director probably wanted to do in the first place. Cancelling the semester and giving all of us a sabbatical, a few months to heal, would have also been appropriate if we really want to measure the appropriateness of things based on how “spiritually wounded” we all were. Of course, we didn’t get that. So a party to help welcome our group was definitely a step for us to to move on.

After some effort, the efforts of those of us who lobbied for the party paid off. The retired English teacher-turned-professional student took on the role of hostess one more time. There was food and drink, and the program co-director welcomed us. We had an opportunity to come out into MFA society, and we got paired up with more senior classmates as our mentors. And everything was going well with wine-facilitated conversations in the kitchen and the living room until we all heard a thud come from the middle of the house.

At the bottom of the staircase that led from the living room to the basement floor, Rosalyn took a fall and bumped her head. There would be no more parties at the retired teacher’s house.

It’s a verb tense that’s used all the time by native speakers of English. There’s a goal, an expectation, some kind of deadline to meet implied. Here is the basic construction:

Subject + will + have + past participle
Example: Tomorrow, I will have completed all my paperwork.

Subject + be (am/is/are) + going to + have + past participle
Example: I am going to be finished with my project tomorrow.

Several years ago, I lived with someone who lived in the future tense. This guy, whom I’ll call Hartwig, never quite did anything in the present tense to accomplish the things he dreamt that he would have done at some point in the future. Now, it is past unreal conditional, most likely something he rarely or never accomplished. At the time when he talked about becoming a singer-songwriter, he was talking about something in the future, something he hoped to accomplish.

In the simple past, Hartwig talked about how he could write songs and how he could really work in a hook. Sheryl Crow, the Carpenters, and few others inspired him in this craft and he was talented, dammit! His only problem was that people held him back: his evil stepmother, his older brother, and several of his other relatives who blend together into composite villains. He left all these people behind in St. Louis, driving out to the promised land of Southern California, and he still felt these people held him back. Instead of sitting down with a tape recorder and some musical instruments, Hartwig was content to bitch and moan about these people. He talked about how he will be a famous person and they’ll all be sorry and be sweeteningly ingratiating to him.

Not while he sat on his duff and did nothing, they wouldn’t.

Hartwig’s problem was that he didn’t want to be a singer-songwriter. He wanted to have been a singer-songwriter. He wanted to have been famous. He wanted to have been a star and receive the adoration he craved from the family members who clearly didn’t love him back. He didn’t want to go through the process of writing songs, finding that bulk of them may not be that good or work at all, and then find some that might. This would mean that he’d have to fine tune them, to get them to play just right. That would take actual work.

The time he spent looking at hanging out at bars, looking at porn on my computer, and moaning about the people who held him back could have been spent actually working on songs. He did go out to karaoke bars and sang, hoping people would tell him that he was great. He was often surprised that they didn’t. No one at any bar likes those “pro” types when it comes to karaoke. A year so so after I kicked him out, American Idol took off. I don’t know if he ever auditioned, but it’s his type of show. I would have tuned in if he had been one of the contestants, just for the chance to hear Simon tell Hartwig that he was awful. Hartwig, it’s not too late, especially if the prematurely gray Taylor Hicks got a record deal out of it.

When I was in my late teens, early 20′s, I outlined goals for myself, some of them too fantastic, and some just a little out of reach. Before I got into the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, I played out the future in my daydreams: After I get out of fashion school, I will become a famous artist and I will have done lots of fantastic work before I turned 30. And, in my mental future perfect universe, I will have lived in San Francisco and/or New York City before I turned 30. When my professional goals turned away from the arts, I had some other future perfect goals such as, After the French degree is finished, I will have become a literary translator. I entertained a lot of these goal possibilities in my mind, most of it never realized. I have to admit I still do, though I try to keep it to myself and from interfering with my present reality.

When I was in my late 20′s, my mindset turned to the past unreal conditional. I bemoaned that I hadn’t done or become all the things I had hoped to. I hadn’t yet finished the BA degree at the time and I felt that I should have earned that PhD. I should have left the supermarket and found a job better suited to my intellect and talents. If I had only finished that degree at FIDM and so on. It got to a point where I friend of mine had to do an impromptu intervention when I got caught up in my self-pitying when we were out for coffee. He sharply told me that he thought I was a big baby and that I didn’t stop to think that other people had some real problems. While I didn’t care for what he said, it made think long and hard about whining over what could have been.

I have to admit I am still addicted to thinking in terms of the future perfect. There are certain things I will like to have accomplished in X amount of time. I wish I can say that I have learned to to live in the present and to work towards future goals. Having things done in the past perfect would be nice. Instead, I must live in the present progressive, also known as present continuous. I am learning how to live in the present and to work towards my goals.

Henry was a very smart critic and as drunk as the writers he interviewed, wrote about, hung out with, or all of the above. Actually, he was drunker than any of them. Think of Henry as the Keith Richards of the literature scholars.

Even inebriated. Henry was very sharp. When I took his class on science fiction, he taught while drunk off his arse. No doubt he kept a bottle or bottles of something to drink in his office. Don’t quote me on this. The University also had a pub on campus, so there were also legitimate means to drink and then go on to the next class. The University pub wasn’t his style, though. The strange thing was that he was still very lucid and his comments helped greatly in the understanding of those works. He slurred some words here and there, but he always stayed on line, whether in his lecture or in reading passages from the books.

Henry wore Hawaiian shirts and shorts for most of the year. I don’t ever remember seeing him wear a pair of pants. He only got a haircut every few months, but author photos from some books suggested that he previously had his hair cut just once a year. Drunk and unkempt, he did behave professionally. He did his work as a professor and he treated his students well.

There was something utterly perverse about a professor holding “bar hours.” Professor K, who tried to push perversity in his writing topics, classroom reading selections, and his assignments, often retired to his home and drank with very few students. Professor O’Donough’s weekly dive bar party was a place where students could continue conversations that got cut short by the end of the classes or his formal office hours, relax, and get to know each other and Henry and his wife, also a professor of American literature at the University. I don’t remember a majority of the hours, well, because I had quite a few drinks. And I never got as obnoxious as I did on Professor K’s office firewater.

In the middle of my graduate career, the “bar hours” became trendy. Classmates of mine who had no association with Professor O’Donough – they weren’t in his classes, doing thesis with him, alumni, or even writers he had a professional relationship with – figured going to the dive bar in the strip mall in the suburban border of the City was cool. I didn’t attend the bar hours during this period, though I’ve always been simultaneously amused and annoyed at the trendiness.

In my last year, in the fall, during my final semester of actual classes, I decided to go to “bar hours” with a longtime classmate I’ve known since my late undergraduate career, also someone who had some association with Henry O’Donough. I may have said hello to Henry and some other people. My memory’s not clear here. I’ll blame it on the beer. I remember this scene clearly: I saw Mindy Shatner with her University acronym-embroidered sweatshirt hanging out with some classmates, most likely students of Henry’s wife. She saw me, raised her chin at me to say “What’s up?” After my stint of being the TA of her creative writing class and dealing with her being rude and disruptive to the point of verbal assault, I wasn’t ready to forgive. After all, all of this happened in the spring semester before. I quietly turned away and decided to focus my attention on my beer and my friend. She would be invisible to me the rest of the night. It was the last time I attended “bar hours.”

Henry O’Donough had since retired. I missed his final “bar hours” party. I don’t know where I was nor do I remember what I was doing at the time. The things that he taught about reading science fiction and post-modern works took me time to learn. I continued to learn things long after being out of his course. I could have easily learned the wrong thing from him – that in order to be writerly or literary, getting drunk was the way to go. Honestly, I don’t think he even bought into that idea. He was simply someone who drank and one of those rare people who could work through their intoxication. I think of him from time to time and wonder how he’s doing. Fantastic, I hope.