"Nine-one-one, please state the nature of your emergency."
"Um, hi, there's a black man going up and down the street, knocking on doors. He has a grey hoodie, and a baseball cap, and a backpack on one shoulder. I think he's looking for a place to rob."
"What's your address ma'am?"
"We're gonna get robbed! Send someone! Hurry!"
...
The address she gave was on New Haven Drive, a dead-end street in a 20-year old suburban neighborhood, full of modest, single-family homes. Most of the owners were retirees or empty-nesters, who had bought homes there when their families were young. All of the owners were white and middle-aged, members or former members of the local medical and high-tech communities.
The black man in question was hardly a "man", more like a "young man." He was six feet tall, but he didn't even tip 160 pounds on the scale. He was indeed going up and down the street, knocking on doors. At one house in the middle of the street, one of the white retirees answered the door.
"Yesssss???"
"Hello sir, my name is Anthon Williams, I'm with the high school marching band, and I'm selling candy bars to raise money for our competitions this season."
One eyebrow went up. "Marching band? What do you play?"
"Trombone, sir! Well, right now I'm second chair second trombone, because I'm just a freshman, but I want to challenge for first trombone before the end of the season."
That eyebrow went down, and the other eyebrow went up. "Who's your band director?"
"It's Mr. Hoffman. He's an old German guy. Well, not old old, but old enough to be my dad. We make fun of his accent sometimes, but he's good—"
The sound of a siren in the distance got gradually louder. The homeowner looked up the street, saw nobody, but knew that a black-and-white car would come around the corner any minute. He made a quick decision. He stepped back, opened the door, and waggled his finger at the kid. "Come in the house, quickly."
Startled, the young man obeyed. Sure enough, a police car raced up the street, coming to a stop across the street, just as the older man was closing the door. Behind the door, in the entry, the two strangers stood looking at each other.
"Kid, you're guilty of fundraising while black. That's not a crime. In fact, it's actually a pretty brave thing to do. But one person in this neighborhood thinks it's a capital offense. Let me see what's going on. You stay right here."
The old man opened the door and stood on the threshold. Across the street, he could see the police officer conferring with a pudgy, middle-aged woman with dyed black hair. The old man couldn't make out the words she was saying, but the agitated tone of her voice carried clearly. When she finished speaking, she reached out and pointed her finger at him, across the street.
The policeman looked at where she was pointing, then started across the street. Thinking fast, the old man said to the boy, "Come with me. I need to explain a couple of things to the officer." The boy followed him down the front steps, to the sidewalk and the curb, where they met the policeman. The older man stuck out his hand, introduced himself, and asked the same question everyone asks a cop: "Is there a problem, officer?"
The policeman looked from the old man to the young man and back again, and said, "We got a report of a black man attempting to burglarize this neighborhood."
The older man stood a little straighter, got a sour look on his face, and asked with a note of disdain, "Did you get that report from Catherine Rogers?"
"I can't tell you that."
"Oh, come on, officer, it's a matter of public record."
"Well then, you can come down to the police station and look it up later today."
"If you got it from Catherine Rogers, then I would suggest you don't give it an ounce of credibility."
The old man put his hand on the boy's backpack and pushed him forward a step. By this time, several of the neighbors had come out of their houses and were coming closer, wanting to hear the conversation.
"Officer, this is Antwon Williams—"
"Anthon," muttered the boy.
"—a freshman in the Fisher High School marching band, and he's selling candy bars to raise money for the marching band season. He's well within his rights to do this, as canvassing door-to-door by public school students is legal under the city statutes."
The officer cut him off with a half-wave. Then he turned to the boy and asked, "What kind of candy bars?"
"I've got milk chocolate," he started tremulously, "dark chocolate, chocolate with almonds, white chocolate with macadamia nuts," his presentation warmed up as he went on, "raspberry chocolate, cherry chocolate, salted caramel with dark chocolate, and hazelnut white nougat milk chocolate!" he finished triumphantly.
"Let me see them," the officer said in a businesslike voice.
The young man dropped to one knee, slid his backpack from his shoulder, opened it and pulled out an assortment of candy bars as evidence.
"How much do they cost?"
"Four dollars each."
The officer whistled quietly. "How many do you have in your bag?"
"A hundred and sixty."
"Wow. Where did you get them?"
"The band boosters handed them out this morning. You can check with Mr. Hoffman!" he added nervously, worried that the officer didn't believe him.
The officer reached behind him, where he kept his handcuffs. The boy's eyes went wide with fright, and the dozen or more spectators held their breath. The officer paused, held out his other hand with the palm facing the boy, and said, "Relax, kid. It's not what you think." He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, took a twenty-dollar bill out of the wallet, and said, "Can I have five?"
The air on the street changed instantly, as fear and anxiety were replaced by relief and enthusiasm. The boy's protector pulled two twenties out of his wallet and said, "I want ten." Suddenly, everyone's wallet was open. The crowd grew as other people were coming outside and walking up the street. One lady asked, "Will you take a check?"
As the boy responded "Yes ma'am, as long as it's made out to 'FHS Band'," the old man and the officer looked at each other and shared a nod and a quiet smile.
Within ten minutes, the boy's backpack was empty and his pockets were full of cash and checks worth over $600. As the neighbors drifted back to their houses, the officer, the boy and the old man stood together, across the street from the patrol car. The policeman reached into his breast pocket, pulled out two business cards, and gave one to each of them. To the boy, he said, "Now, if you need anything, or if you get into trouble on the way home, you call me, okay?"
They all shook hands. Then the boy floated, almost danced, up the street. The policeman got back into his car, made a radio call, and slowly drove away. The old man turned and went back into his home. And across the street, a dumpy-looking woman with dyed black hair peered out through the front curtains, a look of disappointment and outrage on her face.
...
"Nine-one-one, please state the nature of your emergency."
"Um, hi, that black man is back in our neighborhood. He's blocking traffic on our street and disturbing the peace. He's making a horrible racket!"
"What's your address ma'am?"
Across town, on New Haven Drive, a young black man in a high school band uniform marched smartly down the middle of the street, lustily belting out a John Phillip Sousa march on a trombone. When he reached the end of the street, he lowered his trombone. He blew a few blasts from a whistle as he performed an about-face in perfect form, then raised his trombone to his lips and resumed playing as he started back up the street.
"We are aware of the situation. There's an officer at the scene, ma'am."
At the head of the street sat a black-and-white patrol car, its red-and-blue lights flashing, almost in time with the music. A policeman leaned against the front-left fender, arms folded across his chest, smiling as he watched the young musician march towards him. In the back seat of the patrol car was an open trombone case.
A "ROAD CLOSED" sign sat in the middle of the street next to the patrol car, but its words had been changed to "THANK YOU, NEW HAVEN DRIVE."
"Oh, yes, ma'am. The gentleman has a duly-authorized parade permit. The officer is there to keep the streets safe for members of the community, especially high school students and band members. Have a nice day, ma'am."
The dispatcher disconnected the call and removed her headset. She swiveled around slowly in her chair, tore the wrapper off the end of a salted-caramel-and-dark-chocolate candy bar, twirled it in a salute to the other occupants of the command center, and took a big bite.
Sunday, August 25, 2019
Saturday, December 1, 2018
The first mission to Proxima Centauri b
Be forewarned: this story may not exactly match the scientific facts. I read a cool article about Proxima Centauri b, and this story is based on that article. But I can't find the article right now, and my muse is screaming at me to write the story. I've checked my facts against other sources, and they look solid. But in case they aren't, I take my cue from the Prezzynited States, who never lets the facts get in the way of a good story.
Proxima Centauri b was discovered in 2016. It was a planet a whole lot like earth, orbiting in the habitable zone of a red dwarf called Proxima Centauri. Proxima Centauri itself was involved in a slow and intricate dance with a double star called Alpha Centauri, and for the next few thousand years, they would be the closest stars to Earth. Proxima was the closest of the three, hence its silly name.
The three stars were in the constellation Centaurus, visible only in the southern hemisphere. To the naked eye, the Alpha Centauri twins appeared as one bright star, the brightest star in the constellation; hence, they received the designation Alpha. Proxima, being a red dwarf, was not even visible to the naked eye. Astronomers had discovered it in 1915 by very carefully examining photographic plates.
The planet was discovered by astronomers using the radial-velocity method of planet-hunting. It was given the designation "b" because, in exoplanetary exploration, "a" is always reserved for the parent star.
Being only four light-years away from earth, Proxima b excited the imagination of amateur space explorers all over the world. Three billionaires, two of whom happened to own rocket companies, decided to pool their fortunes and sponsor a take-pictures-and-return mission to Proxima b.
Warp drive and hyperdrive were still just science fiction when they got started on it. They approached the directors at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, with bags of money and their crazy idea. JPL did a preliminary design and came back to the billionaires with a schedule and a price tag, and the billionaires said, "Okay, let's do it."
And so, after seven years of design, construction and testing, two unmanned probes were launched atop giant rockets from a spaceport in Odessa, Texas. By the time the conventional rockets burned out, the pair were aiming for a rendezvous with Jupiter, and then with Saturn, counting on a slingshot boost from the gas giants to augment their ion drives and give them enough velocity to escape the Sun's gravitational pull and follow their ancient brethren out into deep space, directly towards Proxima b.
The two probes were named Lewis and Clark. The first probe, Lewis, was larger and heavier. It contained more instruments and had a more powerful computer. It would be used on the journey to take pictures of the Centauri trio, solve the four-body problem involving three stars and one planet, calculate a navigation solution, and transmit the solution and some of the star pictures to the second probe, Clark. As the pair approached Proxima Centauri, Lewis would do an extensive analysis of the star (or stars, if the Alpha twins were in the right place), transmit its data to Clark, and then go shooting past, in the general direction of the Andromeda galaxy.
The second probe, Clark, was lighter than Lewis. Its instrument suite included cameras and filters, a gravitometer, a magnetometer, and not much else. Its computer wasn't as powerful as Lewis' computer, which is why they would travel in formation, never more than a hundred kilometers apart, all the way to the Centauri cluster. But while the bigger, heavier Lewis would continue in a straight line, Clark would use the navigation solution downloaded from Lewis to swing in a tight parabola around Proxima Centauri, then buzz the planet Proxima b, taking pictures like a mad tourist, and then fly home.
Instead of a massive instrument cluster, the largest part of Clark's payload was a nonvolatile memory bank. Constructed of copper and cobalt, its memory density was somewhere between a 1990s-era hard disk and a 2020s-era flash memory, but it was indestructible: once it was written, the only thing that could erase it was an oxidizing flame hot enough to melt the alloy. Not even a fiery re-entry through Earth's atmosphere could damage it. And that was the plan.
Although there was a throttle on the ion engines, they were designed to run at full blast for up to 80 years. Mission planners had calculated that it would take Lewis and Clark 38 years to reach the Centauri cluster, and another 38 years for Clark to complete its solo trip home. By then, the billionaires would be long dead, as would the scientists at JPL who built the probes, and their children. It would be up to the grandchildren of the billionaires and the rocket scientists to welcome Clark home.
* * *
Like a fisherman's wife waiting on her balcony, a small and select group of astroscientists waited for Clark's return. The billionaires had commissioned a radiotelescope near Montevideo, Uruguay, to do nothing but stare at Proxima Centauri for 80 years. They had endowed a whole department at JPL to stand vigil. For the first ten years, the radiotelescopes would call out "Marco" to the heavens, and the probes would reply with their "Polo" responses. As the years passed and the ion drives pushed the probes faster and farther, the interval between "Marco" and "Polo" became longer, and the signals became fainter, until finally, when the interval was 2.3 years, the explorers were more than halfway to their destination, and their signals were too faint to pick up anymore. The department at JPL shrank to one endowed chair.
Lewis and Clark were on their own. If things went according to plan, Lewis would never be heard from again. But the dish would keep calling "Marco" to the heavens. And a succession of interns at JPL would sit at a desk, working on their intern projects, which would include babysitting the waterfall display which would one day signal the return of the interstellar fisherman.
* * *
Math! I needed to put this here so I could keep my dates straight
2016 - Proxima b descovered
2028 - Lewis and Clark launched
2038 - radio contact lost with Clark
2066 - Clark reaches Proxima b, but humans have no way of knowing
2094 - radio contact reacquired with Clark
2104 - Clark returns
* * *
In 2094, JPL was still around. It was still ostensibly a research laboratory, as it had been in the days of the old NASA, but now it was making good money, sending unmanned spacecraft scooting along the convoluted pathways of the Interplanetary Transport Network, and parking its deep-space communications relays in the same solar orbits as Mars, Jupiter, and the inner edge of the Kuiper Belt. But the billionaires' endowed chair for the Proxima b Watch was still there, and in the summer of 2094 it was manned by an intern, a bored aero/astro student who, once a week, connected with the dish in Montevideo, ran the diagnostics that ensured the system was still working, stared at the waterfall display for an hour, and then gave up and went back to more interesting work.
Then, one day, there was a blip.
Twenty years earlier, in 2074, another intern (who, by sheer coincidence, was this bored aero/astro student's mother) had mounted a big red incandescent light bulb on a pole, and screwed the pole to the side of the Proxima b Watch desk. She had added a few lines to the Watch program so that the light would blink if the dish in Montevideo detected a "Polo" signal. Since then, the computer running the Watch program had been replaced several times, but the red light was still there, still in good working condition - and it had never blinked.
So in 2094, our bored intern was sitting at her desk, calculating trajectories for the mining equipment JPL was going to ship for Ganymede, when suddenly, the red light turned on.
The reactive, instinctive part of her brain caused her to look at it in annoyance, assuming that it was a malfunction.
Then the slower, more deliberate part of her brain announced that the Watch program had never malfunctioned before. She opened the waterfall display.
And there was a blip, right where the Polo signal belonged. She screamed. Clark was coming home.
* * *
As on the outward journey, the signal was very faint - but it was strong enough for the JPL scientists to calculate that Clark was still over 2 light-years away, and even at its amazing approach speed, it would be another ten years before it got to earth.
But there was a problem. The probe was going so fast that it would shoot past the earth, past the sun, and right out the other side of the solar system. They had to find a way to slow it down, and either capture it in space or crash it onto Earth, someplace where they could find it.
The old mission documents were dug up, dusted off, and the math rechecked. According to the documents, the re-entry was all preprogrammed. Clark would flip, end for end, about the time it crossed the Kuiper belt, so that its ion engine, still firing full blast, would act as a retro-rocket. About the time it crossed the orbit of Mars, it would be crawling along at Earth-capture velocity. However, the JPL scientists reached out and reprogrammed Clark's reentry sequence, so that as long as the Earth was in the right place, Clark would slip into orbit around it, and space technicians could pull it out of the sky and gently carry it the rest of the way home, instead of following the original mission plan and letting it crash clumsily into the planet.
* * *
Finally, in 2104, Clark was perched in a clean room at JPL. Its leading surfaces were pocked and pitted from the space dust that had smashed against it, like bugs on a cosmic windshield, as it had flown through space at 74 million miles per hour. Compared with modern unmanned space vehicles, it was an antique. The JPL scientists looked at it and wondered how it had ever managed to stay aloft, it was so primitive - so heavy - so ungainly. The fact that it had performed flawlessly, continuously, for its full 76 years, left them in awe of the skills of their forefathers.
The copper-cobalt memory was reverently extracted from the chassis. The scientists looked upon it the way their grandfathers had looked upon Thomas Edison's wax phonograph cylinders, knowing that in this ancient storage device were the first close-up pictures of another world.
It contained more than that, however. Lewis and Clark had kept a careful log of more than just pictures, and Clark had faithfully brought it all home. Connected to a modern computer, the memory bank gave up its secrets, and hour by hour, day by day, the world was amazed by the new data that streamed from Pasadena.
Lewis had taken enough photos of the dance between the three stars for scientists to put together a time-lapse animation of it. Lewis had gotten photos of the surfaces of all three stars, pocked with sunspots and laced with ribbons and arches of incandescent gas. Lewis' spectophotometric analysis of the stars had confirmed some theories, blasted other theories, and given astrophysicists a lot more to chew on - the first close-up photos of another star, times three!
As astronomers pored over Lewis' images, they discovered that Proxima b had siblings, and so Proxima Centauri c, d, e, f, and g were added to the family. Two were rocks, and three were gas giants whose orbits were strongly influenced by the Alpha twins.
Lewis had fed Clark navigation data so exact that Clark had passed within 200 miles of the planet Proxima b's surface - a near-collision. Clark's stereoscopic cameras had taken pictures at a prodigious rate. Its radar and its magnetometer had mapped three fourths of the planet in its single flyby. Its spectrophotometer had detected some sort of red-light photosynthesis on the surface, and its mass spectrometer had captured a few stray molecules from the planet's atmosphere: heavy in CO2, O2 and argon.
Proxima b is tidally locked with its star, meaning that the same side always faces the star, just like earth's moon. But the dark side is not really "dark", since the Alpha Centauri twins light up the dark side for half of every planetary day. Clark was therefore able to get some pictures of the dark side, a mosaic of starlit twilight and classic inky blackness.
Some of the JPL staff were disappointed that, while there were clear signs of plant life on the sunny side, there was no sign of animal life anywhere, or of the artificial light that would serve as a sure sign of animal life or an advanced civilization. One technician posted a sign above his desk, saying: "Fermi is still right."
* * *
And that was the end of the first Proxima b expedition. Launched in the hiatus following the first International Space Station, it ended during the heyday of the planetary mining period, when robotic mining colonies were operating profitably around the solar system. Like a wagon train pulling into a modern city with skyscrapers and electric lights, Lewis and Clark were the bridge between two different eras of space exploration.
POSTSCRIPT: In January 2020, scientists announced that they had found a second planet orbiting Proxima Centauri. I could add this to the story, but I won't.
Proxima Centauri b was discovered in 2016. It was a planet a whole lot like earth, orbiting in the habitable zone of a red dwarf called Proxima Centauri. Proxima Centauri itself was involved in a slow and intricate dance with a double star called Alpha Centauri, and for the next few thousand years, they would be the closest stars to Earth. Proxima was the closest of the three, hence its silly name.
The three stars were in the constellation Centaurus, visible only in the southern hemisphere. To the naked eye, the Alpha Centauri twins appeared as one bright star, the brightest star in the constellation; hence, they received the designation Alpha. Proxima, being a red dwarf, was not even visible to the naked eye. Astronomers had discovered it in 1915 by very carefully examining photographic plates.
The planet was discovered by astronomers using the radial-velocity method of planet-hunting. It was given the designation "b" because, in exoplanetary exploration, "a" is always reserved for the parent star.
Being only four light-years away from earth, Proxima b excited the imagination of amateur space explorers all over the world. Three billionaires, two of whom happened to own rocket companies, decided to pool their fortunes and sponsor a take-pictures-and-return mission to Proxima b.
Warp drive and hyperdrive were still just science fiction when they got started on it. They approached the directors at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, with bags of money and their crazy idea. JPL did a preliminary design and came back to the billionaires with a schedule and a price tag, and the billionaires said, "Okay, let's do it."
And so, after seven years of design, construction and testing, two unmanned probes were launched atop giant rockets from a spaceport in Odessa, Texas. By the time the conventional rockets burned out, the pair were aiming for a rendezvous with Jupiter, and then with Saturn, counting on a slingshot boost from the gas giants to augment their ion drives and give them enough velocity to escape the Sun's gravitational pull and follow their ancient brethren out into deep space, directly towards Proxima b.
The two probes were named Lewis and Clark. The first probe, Lewis, was larger and heavier. It contained more instruments and had a more powerful computer. It would be used on the journey to take pictures of the Centauri trio, solve the four-body problem involving three stars and one planet, calculate a navigation solution, and transmit the solution and some of the star pictures to the second probe, Clark. As the pair approached Proxima Centauri, Lewis would do an extensive analysis of the star (or stars, if the Alpha twins were in the right place), transmit its data to Clark, and then go shooting past, in the general direction of the Andromeda galaxy.
The second probe, Clark, was lighter than Lewis. Its instrument suite included cameras and filters, a gravitometer, a magnetometer, and not much else. Its computer wasn't as powerful as Lewis' computer, which is why they would travel in formation, never more than a hundred kilometers apart, all the way to the Centauri cluster. But while the bigger, heavier Lewis would continue in a straight line, Clark would use the navigation solution downloaded from Lewis to swing in a tight parabola around Proxima Centauri, then buzz the planet Proxima b, taking pictures like a mad tourist, and then fly home.
Instead of a massive instrument cluster, the largest part of Clark's payload was a nonvolatile memory bank. Constructed of copper and cobalt, its memory density was somewhere between a 1990s-era hard disk and a 2020s-era flash memory, but it was indestructible: once it was written, the only thing that could erase it was an oxidizing flame hot enough to melt the alloy. Not even a fiery re-entry through Earth's atmosphere could damage it. And that was the plan.
Although there was a throttle on the ion engines, they were designed to run at full blast for up to 80 years. Mission planners had calculated that it would take Lewis and Clark 38 years to reach the Centauri cluster, and another 38 years for Clark to complete its solo trip home. By then, the billionaires would be long dead, as would the scientists at JPL who built the probes, and their children. It would be up to the grandchildren of the billionaires and the rocket scientists to welcome Clark home.
* * *
Like a fisherman's wife waiting on her balcony, a small and select group of astroscientists waited for Clark's return. The billionaires had commissioned a radiotelescope near Montevideo, Uruguay, to do nothing but stare at Proxima Centauri for 80 years. They had endowed a whole department at JPL to stand vigil. For the first ten years, the radiotelescopes would call out "Marco" to the heavens, and the probes would reply with their "Polo" responses. As the years passed and the ion drives pushed the probes faster and farther, the interval between "Marco" and "Polo" became longer, and the signals became fainter, until finally, when the interval was 2.3 years, the explorers were more than halfway to their destination, and their signals were too faint to pick up anymore. The department at JPL shrank to one endowed chair.
Lewis and Clark were on their own. If things went according to plan, Lewis would never be heard from again. But the dish would keep calling "Marco" to the heavens. And a succession of interns at JPL would sit at a desk, working on their intern projects, which would include babysitting the waterfall display which would one day signal the return of the interstellar fisherman.
* * *
Math! I needed to put this here so I could keep my dates straight
2016 - Proxima b descovered
2028 - Lewis and Clark launched
2038 - radio contact lost with Clark
2066 - Clark reaches Proxima b, but humans have no way of knowing
2094 - radio contact reacquired with Clark
2104 - Clark returns
* * *
In 2094, JPL was still around. It was still ostensibly a research laboratory, as it had been in the days of the old NASA, but now it was making good money, sending unmanned spacecraft scooting along the convoluted pathways of the Interplanetary Transport Network, and parking its deep-space communications relays in the same solar orbits as Mars, Jupiter, and the inner edge of the Kuiper Belt. But the billionaires' endowed chair for the Proxima b Watch was still there, and in the summer of 2094 it was manned by an intern, a bored aero/astro student who, once a week, connected with the dish in Montevideo, ran the diagnostics that ensured the system was still working, stared at the waterfall display for an hour, and then gave up and went back to more interesting work.
Then, one day, there was a blip.
Twenty years earlier, in 2074, another intern (who, by sheer coincidence, was this bored aero/astro student's mother) had mounted a big red incandescent light bulb on a pole, and screwed the pole to the side of the Proxima b Watch desk. She had added a few lines to the Watch program so that the light would blink if the dish in Montevideo detected a "Polo" signal. Since then, the computer running the Watch program had been replaced several times, but the red light was still there, still in good working condition - and it had never blinked.
So in 2094, our bored intern was sitting at her desk, calculating trajectories for the mining equipment JPL was going to ship for Ganymede, when suddenly, the red light turned on.
The reactive, instinctive part of her brain caused her to look at it in annoyance, assuming that it was a malfunction.
Then the slower, more deliberate part of her brain announced that the Watch program had never malfunctioned before. She opened the waterfall display.
And there was a blip, right where the Polo signal belonged. She screamed. Clark was coming home.
* * *
As on the outward journey, the signal was very faint - but it was strong enough for the JPL scientists to calculate that Clark was still over 2 light-years away, and even at its amazing approach speed, it would be another ten years before it got to earth.
But there was a problem. The probe was going so fast that it would shoot past the earth, past the sun, and right out the other side of the solar system. They had to find a way to slow it down, and either capture it in space or crash it onto Earth, someplace where they could find it.
The old mission documents were dug up, dusted off, and the math rechecked. According to the documents, the re-entry was all preprogrammed. Clark would flip, end for end, about the time it crossed the Kuiper belt, so that its ion engine, still firing full blast, would act as a retro-rocket. About the time it crossed the orbit of Mars, it would be crawling along at Earth-capture velocity. However, the JPL scientists reached out and reprogrammed Clark's reentry sequence, so that as long as the Earth was in the right place, Clark would slip into orbit around it, and space technicians could pull it out of the sky and gently carry it the rest of the way home, instead of following the original mission plan and letting it crash clumsily into the planet.
* * *
Finally, in 2104, Clark was perched in a clean room at JPL. Its leading surfaces were pocked and pitted from the space dust that had smashed against it, like bugs on a cosmic windshield, as it had flown through space at 74 million miles per hour. Compared with modern unmanned space vehicles, it was an antique. The JPL scientists looked at it and wondered how it had ever managed to stay aloft, it was so primitive - so heavy - so ungainly. The fact that it had performed flawlessly, continuously, for its full 76 years, left them in awe of the skills of their forefathers.
The copper-cobalt memory was reverently extracted from the chassis. The scientists looked upon it the way their grandfathers had looked upon Thomas Edison's wax phonograph cylinders, knowing that in this ancient storage device were the first close-up pictures of another world.
It contained more than that, however. Lewis and Clark had kept a careful log of more than just pictures, and Clark had faithfully brought it all home. Connected to a modern computer, the memory bank gave up its secrets, and hour by hour, day by day, the world was amazed by the new data that streamed from Pasadena.
Lewis had taken enough photos of the dance between the three stars for scientists to put together a time-lapse animation of it. Lewis had gotten photos of the surfaces of all three stars, pocked with sunspots and laced with ribbons and arches of incandescent gas. Lewis' spectophotometric analysis of the stars had confirmed some theories, blasted other theories, and given astrophysicists a lot more to chew on - the first close-up photos of another star, times three!
As astronomers pored over Lewis' images, they discovered that Proxima b had siblings, and so Proxima Centauri c, d, e, f, and g were added to the family. Two were rocks, and three were gas giants whose orbits were strongly influenced by the Alpha twins.
Lewis had fed Clark navigation data so exact that Clark had passed within 200 miles of the planet Proxima b's surface - a near-collision. Clark's stereoscopic cameras had taken pictures at a prodigious rate. Its radar and its magnetometer had mapped three fourths of the planet in its single flyby. Its spectrophotometer had detected some sort of red-light photosynthesis on the surface, and its mass spectrometer had captured a few stray molecules from the planet's atmosphere: heavy in CO2, O2 and argon.
Proxima b is tidally locked with its star, meaning that the same side always faces the star, just like earth's moon. But the dark side is not really "dark", since the Alpha Centauri twins light up the dark side for half of every planetary day. Clark was therefore able to get some pictures of the dark side, a mosaic of starlit twilight and classic inky blackness.
Some of the JPL staff were disappointed that, while there were clear signs of plant life on the sunny side, there was no sign of animal life anywhere, or of the artificial light that would serve as a sure sign of animal life or an advanced civilization. One technician posted a sign above his desk, saying: "Fermi is still right."
* * *
And that was the end of the first Proxima b expedition. Launched in the hiatus following the first International Space Station, it ended during the heyday of the planetary mining period, when robotic mining colonies were operating profitably around the solar system. Like a wagon train pulling into a modern city with skyscrapers and electric lights, Lewis and Clark were the bridge between two different eras of space exploration.
POSTSCRIPT: In January 2020, scientists announced that they had found a second planet orbiting Proxima Centauri. I could add this to the story, but I won't.
Saturday, July 21, 2018
How to tell if you're too fat: a rule of thumb
Look: I'm not judging fat people, okay? Some very cool people also happen to be fat. It doesn't make them any less cool. So DON'T use this rule of thumb to judge other people. Only use it to judge yourself.
Here's the rule of thumb.
Get buck naked, like in the shower. Stand up straight. Now bend your neck and tip your head down, so your chin is touching your chest. Look straight down.
CHICKS: If your belly sticks out further than your tits, you're too fat.
DUDES: If you can't see your (relaxed) dick cuz your belly is in the way, you're too fat.
This works for all body types, and all sizes and shapes. All of the exceptions you can think of? They don't matter. If this rule of thumb tells you you're too fat, and you disagree, then go try the Body Mass Index (BMI) Calculator at http://www.bmi-calculator.net/. It'll tell you the same thing - every time.
Here's the rule of thumb.
Get buck naked, like in the shower. Stand up straight. Now bend your neck and tip your head down, so your chin is touching your chest. Look straight down.
CHICKS: If your belly sticks out further than your tits, you're too fat.
DUDES: If you can't see your (relaxed) dick cuz your belly is in the way, you're too fat.
This works for all body types, and all sizes and shapes. All of the exceptions you can think of? They don't matter. If this rule of thumb tells you you're too fat, and you disagree, then go try the Body Mass Index (BMI) Calculator at http://www.bmi-calculator.net/. It'll tell you the same thing - every time.
Monday, March 5, 2018
Still another warning to women: Stop telling him what to do all the time!
Hello ladies!
Here I am again, with some more helpful advice on dealing with men.
I'm sure there's a man in your life who, for whatever reason, is very important to you. Maybe you're related to him. Or maybe you're in love with him. Or maybe, for some other reason, you find yourself emotionally invested in his life.
In his success, if you will.
Therefore, you feel justified in telling him what to do.
I don't mean dropping subtle hints, because you've already tried that and it doesn't work.
I don't mean gentle nudges, because you've tried that and it doesn't work, either.
And I don't mean crafty manipulation.
I mean outright telling him to do this, and to do that.
And sometimes getting frustrated with him, and yelling at him to do this or that.
Have you ever wondered how he got so far in life without your help?
The stereotypical view of adult males is that they're shallow, shortsighted, self-centered, superficial, and — oh, yes — forgetful. They need a woman's help to find their car keys, straighten their tie, decide what to do tomorrow, and decide what to do for the rest of their life.
Do you know who created that stereotype? Stereotypical women did. Do you know who believes in that stereotype, and who perpetuates it? You do.
You know, most men are deep thinkers. They just gave up trying to tell you what they were thinking, because you wouldn't listen. Or you wouldn't believe them. Or you belittled what they had to say. Or you tried to make it all about you.
Likewise, most men don't make decisions on the spur of the moment. They put a lot of thought into their decisions, weighing options carefully. They know that, whatever decision they make, it's going to make somebody unhappy. This causes them untold agony, which they must bury and keep hidden, and just move on with their decisions.
They shouldn't have to justify their choices to you. Why do you make them do that? They get enough of that shit at work. Who made you their off-the-clock bosses?
Moreover, when you ask them why, and they tell you why, their explanation (or justification, if you'd rather) isn't good enough for you. You keep wanting to go deeper and deeper and deeper. You don't know when to stop. Eventually, he realizes that no answer he can give you will be satisfactory, and so he stops wasting his time trying. He shuts up.
Let's put the shoe on the other foot for a paragraph. These men respect you and they (well, most of them) support you in the things you choose to do. Some of them even love you, unconditionally. They will go out of their way to make things easier for you and to make you successful. Why in hell can't you do the same thing for them?
Now take a step back and look at the Long View. These men have been making their own decisions for years: getting up on time, getting themselves dressed, going to the bathroom all by themselves, pouring their own breakfast cereal, getting a driver's license, registering for college classes, applying for graduation, hunting down jobs, buying cars and houses — and they did it all without your help.
1. Give the man some credit for having a brain.
2. Tell me why you think that the man needs you to tell him what to do.
Now, granted, there are some men who can't seem to do anything without a woman behind them, pointing them in the right direction. But do you know what would happen to one of those men if that woman stopped helping him? After a few moments of confusion and disorientation, he would figure it out himself! He'd be ecstatic! He'd be truly happy for the first time in his life.
Oh, he may need you, all right. Everybody needs somebody in their corner, somebody to support them, to build them up, and to cheer them on. That's what he needs you for.
Not to try to run his life for him, like every other woman in his life has been trying to do for years.
Here I am again, with some more helpful advice on dealing with men.
I'm sure there's a man in your life who, for whatever reason, is very important to you. Maybe you're related to him. Or maybe you're in love with him. Or maybe, for some other reason, you find yourself emotionally invested in his life.
In his success, if you will.
Therefore, you feel justified in telling him what to do.
I don't mean dropping subtle hints, because you've already tried that and it doesn't work.
I don't mean gentle nudges, because you've tried that and it doesn't work, either.
And I don't mean crafty manipulation.
I mean outright telling him to do this, and to do that.
And sometimes getting frustrated with him, and yelling at him to do this or that.
Have you ever wondered how he got so far in life without your help?
The stereotypical view of adult males is that they're shallow, shortsighted, self-centered, superficial, and — oh, yes — forgetful. They need a woman's help to find their car keys, straighten their tie, decide what to do tomorrow, and decide what to do for the rest of their life.
Do you know who created that stereotype? Stereotypical women did. Do you know who believes in that stereotype, and who perpetuates it? You do.
You know, most men are deep thinkers. They just gave up trying to tell you what they were thinking, because you wouldn't listen. Or you wouldn't believe them. Or you belittled what they had to say. Or you tried to make it all about you.
Likewise, most men don't make decisions on the spur of the moment. They put a lot of thought into their decisions, weighing options carefully. They know that, whatever decision they make, it's going to make somebody unhappy. This causes them untold agony, which they must bury and keep hidden, and just move on with their decisions.
They shouldn't have to justify their choices to you. Why do you make them do that? They get enough of that shit at work. Who made you their off-the-clock bosses?
Moreover, when you ask them why, and they tell you why, their explanation (or justification, if you'd rather) isn't good enough for you. You keep wanting to go deeper and deeper and deeper. You don't know when to stop. Eventually, he realizes that no answer he can give you will be satisfactory, and so he stops wasting his time trying. He shuts up.
Let's put the shoe on the other foot for a paragraph. These men respect you and they (well, most of them) support you in the things you choose to do. Some of them even love you, unconditionally. They will go out of their way to make things easier for you and to make you successful. Why in hell can't you do the same thing for them?
Now take a step back and look at the Long View. These men have been making their own decisions for years: getting up on time, getting themselves dressed, going to the bathroom all by themselves, pouring their own breakfast cereal, getting a driver's license, registering for college classes, applying for graduation, hunting down jobs, buying cars and houses — and they did it all without your help.
1. Give the man some credit for having a brain.
2. Tell me why you think that the man needs you to tell him what to do.
Now, granted, there are some men who can't seem to do anything without a woman behind them, pointing them in the right direction. But do you know what would happen to one of those men if that woman stopped helping him? After a few moments of confusion and disorientation, he would figure it out himself! He'd be ecstatic! He'd be truly happy for the first time in his life.
Oh, he may need you, all right. Everybody needs somebody in their corner, somebody to support them, to build them up, and to cheer them on. That's what he needs you for.
Not to try to run his life for him, like every other woman in his life has been trying to do for years.
Thursday, October 5, 2017
Philanthropy, chapter 2
Tonya sat nervously across the small table from Dennis Franks. Reverend Billy sat to her left. She sipped nervously at the grande frappucino latte Franks had bought for her. Reverend Bill was sipping a bottle of mineral water, and Franks thoroughly enjoyed his latte. He had bought the same kind as Tonya, in an attempt to make her feel at ease.
But his mannerisms were those of a businessman with a task to accomplish. He didn't waste a lot of time beating around the bush.
Reverend Billy was also there to put her at ease, and to provide moral support.
"It ain't often that a rich white man comes into south side Atlanta to have coffee wid' a black girl." She looked at her coffee cup as they spoke, stealing occasional furtive glances at him.
"Yeah, well," he said, sipping at his latte, "I've never done it before. Reverend, you ever seen it happen?"
Reverend Billy wasn't as quick on the draw as his two companions. He just looked blankly from one to the other.
"So," said Tonya, "why are you here, Mista Rich White Man?"
"First of all," responded Frank, "I don't want to hear any bullshit about white man's guilt or southern shame or white privilege. If you start throwing that around, then I'm out of here and you can finish that latte by yourself."
"I didn't --"
"No, but you were going to. I'm not here because of that. You're a smart girl. You graduated from Douglass High with a 3.43 grade-point average. You ran for three years on the cross-country and track teams, and lettered every year. You were on the debate team your sophomore and junior years. And you were in the National Honor Society for four years. You were planning to go to college. What happened?"
Tonya swirled the coffee in her half-empty cup and answered in a flat voice, still not looking at Franks. "I was gonna go to Yale or Harvard. You know, Ivy League schools. I had the grades to do it. My teachers loved me, and the counselors thought I was gonna be a real feather in their cap. Then, the week before school started my senior year, a boy talked me into sleepin' wid'im. He said he was wearing a condom, but I didn't see one. Anyway, before Homecoming came around, I found out I was pregnant.
"I talked to Reverend Billy about what to do. He convinced me not to get an abortion. I didn't want to give up the baby, so I decided to keep it. Because I was pregnant, I dropped out of running. And I was so busy trying to get ready for the baby and keep my grades up, that I had to quit debate. I wasn't gonna quit high school, though. That's the one thing I didn't quit."
She sighed, took a sip, and continued. "Little Sarah was born the week before graduation. I almost couldn't walk across the stage to get my diploma, but nothin' was gonna stop me. But after that, I had to take care of my baby, so I got a job at Waffle House and I been workin' there ever since. My mama watches the baby while I'm at work, but she's an alcoholic and so sometimes I get home and the baby's in the same diaper she was wearing when I left."
She sighed again. "Ain't no way I can go to college with that kind of life hangin' round my neck."
"Where's the father?" Franks asked quietly.
"You mean the sperm donor?" she retorted angrily. "Last I heard, he was hustlin' something down on the Gulf Coast. I ain't seen him since graduation. He tried to sleep with me again after a graduation party, but I told him, number one, I'm still healin', and number two, don't you remember what happened the last time we did that? He was never a boyfriend, just a boy." Her voice trailed off into sadness.
"So, are you planning to work at Waffle House for the rest of your life?"
"Yes, unless I can get a job at Denny's instead." She looked up at him through her eyebrows, smiling at her little joke.
Franks smiled softly in reply. Then he took a long drag on his latte and said, "What if you could get a second chance at going to college?"
She snorted softly. "Do I look like I got a fairy godmother?" she asked her coffee cup.
"You might. I have a proposal for you. Have you ever heard of the Pinecone Foundation?"
Franks waited for a response and, not getting one, continued. "In a forest fire, all of the trees are burned and die, right? Well, the heat from the forest fire causes pine cones to open up, and their seeds drop out and get buried in the ash on the forest floor. Then the next spring, after lying there and soaking up water all winter, they sprout and grow into new trees. It's like the forest gets a second chance.
"The Pinecone Foundation exists to give kids like you a second chance. Tell me: what were you going to study at Yale or Harvard?"
"Accounting," she muttered to her cup.
"They told me you were good at math. How were you going to pay for your education?"
"A lotta hard work." She chuckled sadly, even though it wasn't really a joke.
"I don't think you can work enough in four years to pay for those schools."
"Yeah well, it's all a mute point now. I ain't goin' anywhere." She leaned back in her chair and fixed him with a look of despair and apathy.
"Moot point," he said.
"What?"
"Moot point, not mute. It's a legal term. It means something that's fake, or something that doesn't matter anymore."
"It sure doesn't."
He caught the wit in the reply. "You've got a sharp mind. An accounting degree from Yale would serve you well. You could get a job as a CPA anywhere. Or you could go to business school, get an MBA, and get a job as a junior executive somewhere."
"Somewhere, like where?"
"How about Procter & Gamble, in Cincinnati?"
Her eyes sparkled. "Ooh! I ain't never been to Cincinnati!" Then the sparkle died, and she slumped in her chair again. "And I ain't never gonna get there, either."
He leaned forward, putting his elbows on the table. Although she hadn't looked at him much, his eyes had never left her during the entire conversation. Reverend Billy sat on the side, content to be a spectator in this exchange.
"I want - the Foundation wants - to pay for your schooling. We will pay for tuition, books, Internet access, rent, utilities, groceries, diapers for your little one, day care, a computer, even a cellphone. We'll even pay for you to come home and visit on the holidays, if you want."
Skeptical, Tonya asked, "What do I gotta do in return?"
"Get accepted. Pass all your classes. Graduate. And be a good mama to your baby. That's all."
"Uh-huh. And do you get to be my sugar daddy? Do I have to sleep with you?"
Franks smiled. He wasn't offended; in fact, he had been expecting this question. He shook his head and said, "You get your own two-bedroom apartment. The only person you have to sleep with is your own little girl."
"I ain't never had my own apartment. Hell, I ain't never even had my own bed."
"I'll introduce you to Charmaine. She's 25, and she works at the foundation. She'll teach you how to cook, and clean your own apartment, do your laundry, and do your grocery shopping - in fact, she'll go shopping with you until think you can handle it on your own. She'll take you clothes shopping before school starts, because you're going to need a new wardrobe."
Tonya's eyes started to glaze over, as she allowed herself to believe this was true. "Wait - wait. There has to be a catch. Nobody's this generous - not to a total stranger, and def'nit'ly not to a black girl wid' a baby from the South Side."
Franks stared at her, not moving. Then he asked, "So, is that a yes or a no?"
She looked to the preacher: "Reverend Billy?"
"Remember what Cuba Gooding Junior said."
She furrowed her brow, thinking hard. "What? 'Show me the money'?" She laughed, but the laughter was a mix of puzzlement and crazy hope. "Mista Franks, show me the money."
He smiled and waggled his eyebrows. "First, you get accepted at a school. Then I'll show you the money." He watched the crazy hope fade away. "Yes or no?"
Franks was rather disappointed. He had been expecting a more positive reaction. Tonya swirled her empty cup slowly on the table in front of her. "If I say yes, what happens?"
"Well, applying for college is hard work. So we'll help you do that. Tomorrow morning at 9, Charmaine will pick you up and bring you to the office. You can bring your baby if you want. We have several secretaries who are grandmothers, and they will fuss over her for hours. They'll pass her back and forth, and you won't have to worry about her for a minute. You and Charmaine can sit at a computer, decide which schools to apply to, and fill in the applications."
He paused, then said, "It'll take more than one day. You might need to quit your job."
"But I can't do that!" Tonya exclaimed.
"Nonsense. Getting into school is now your full-time job."
"But I need the money!"
"Tonya, let's talk for a minute about want versus need. Yes, you need the money. But do you want to go to college?"
"Well yeah, but I can't quit just for a couple of days of applyin', and then weeks of waitin'! What if they say no? Then I got no school and no job!"
Franks smiled gently. "You still don't understand. That's okay. You will have the money. We'll give you $120 for every day you spend at the Foundation, researching schools and filling out applications. We will pay you $120 for every day that you are out with Charmaine or someone else, buying clothes and supplies, and learning how to drive."
"Drive?"
"Well, if you're going to be independent, you're going to need a car."
The girl gasped.
"And if there's still time left over, we will offer you a job at the Foundation. We have a lot of work you can do."
Her eyes started filling with tears, and then she blinked them back. Her lower lip started to quiver, so she bit it. She stared at the logo on the coffee cup she was holding, as if it were the most important thing in the universe.
"So, yes or no?"
"I really don't have to sleep witcha?"
"Really."
She glanced at Reverend Billy. He finally spoke.
"Girl, what are you waiting for? Why are you even questioning this? Think of little Sarah! Don't you want something better for her? Think of all the dreams you had in high school, the ones you gave up on. What if you could make all those dreams come true after all?"
He continued, "Do you know how much MONEY they're offering you? This is tens of thousands - a couple hundred thousand - dollars! And all you have to do is be good, and do what you do best! Don't be a fool, girl! Say yes to the man."
Tonya looked past Franks and fixed her gaze on the windows on the other side of the coffee shop. Her eyes started filling with tears again, and this time she didn't blink them away. Her lower lip trembled, her chin seemed to disappear, and her eyes got lost in the flood of tears that poured down her cheeks and on to the table top. Unashamed, she sat there, shoulders convulsing as she wept silently, having realized what was being offered and the changes it would bring.
Franks didn't move. To move would have broken the spell.
Reverend Billy, taking his cue from Franks, didn't move either. When he started getting fidgety, he played Four Tops songs in his mind, taking care not to hum aloud. He had finished "Ain't No Woman (Like the One I've Got)" and was halfway through "Yesterday's Dreams" when Tonya's sobbing subsided, she dried her eyes and the table with a Starbucks napkin, and looked Dennis Franks in the eye.
"Yes," she said faintly.
One side of Franks' mouth smiled. "You're sure?"
She took a deep breath, smiled a huge smile, and almost shouted, "Yes!"
Then the other half of his mouth smiled. "Charmaine will pick you up at 9 tomorrow morning. Don't be late." He stood up, shook Reverend Billy's hand, and stuck his hand out for Tonya to shake. She looked at his hand, then slowly stood up, wrapped her arms around him and embraced him tightly.
She let go of him and whispered, "Thank you." He smiled at her once more, then turned and walked out the door.
But his mannerisms were those of a businessman with a task to accomplish. He didn't waste a lot of time beating around the bush.
Reverend Billy was also there to put her at ease, and to provide moral support.
"It ain't often that a rich white man comes into south side Atlanta to have coffee wid' a black girl." She looked at her coffee cup as they spoke, stealing occasional furtive glances at him.
"Yeah, well," he said, sipping at his latte, "I've never done it before. Reverend, you ever seen it happen?"
Reverend Billy wasn't as quick on the draw as his two companions. He just looked blankly from one to the other.
"So," said Tonya, "why are you here, Mista Rich White Man?"
"First of all," responded Frank, "I don't want to hear any bullshit about white man's guilt or southern shame or white privilege. If you start throwing that around, then I'm out of here and you can finish that latte by yourself."
"I didn't --"
"No, but you were going to. I'm not here because of that. You're a smart girl. You graduated from Douglass High with a 3.43 grade-point average. You ran for three years on the cross-country and track teams, and lettered every year. You were on the debate team your sophomore and junior years. And you were in the National Honor Society for four years. You were planning to go to college. What happened?"
Tonya swirled the coffee in her half-empty cup and answered in a flat voice, still not looking at Franks. "I was gonna go to Yale or Harvard. You know, Ivy League schools. I had the grades to do it. My teachers loved me, and the counselors thought I was gonna be a real feather in their cap. Then, the week before school started my senior year, a boy talked me into sleepin' wid'im. He said he was wearing a condom, but I didn't see one. Anyway, before Homecoming came around, I found out I was pregnant.
"I talked to Reverend Billy about what to do. He convinced me not to get an abortion. I didn't want to give up the baby, so I decided to keep it. Because I was pregnant, I dropped out of running. And I was so busy trying to get ready for the baby and keep my grades up, that I had to quit debate. I wasn't gonna quit high school, though. That's the one thing I didn't quit."
She sighed, took a sip, and continued. "Little Sarah was born the week before graduation. I almost couldn't walk across the stage to get my diploma, but nothin' was gonna stop me. But after that, I had to take care of my baby, so I got a job at Waffle House and I been workin' there ever since. My mama watches the baby while I'm at work, but she's an alcoholic and so sometimes I get home and the baby's in the same diaper she was wearing when I left."
She sighed again. "Ain't no way I can go to college with that kind of life hangin' round my neck."
"Where's the father?" Franks asked quietly.
"You mean the sperm donor?" she retorted angrily. "Last I heard, he was hustlin' something down on the Gulf Coast. I ain't seen him since graduation. He tried to sleep with me again after a graduation party, but I told him, number one, I'm still healin', and number two, don't you remember what happened the last time we did that? He was never a boyfriend, just a boy." Her voice trailed off into sadness.
"So, are you planning to work at Waffle House for the rest of your life?"
"Yes, unless I can get a job at Denny's instead." She looked up at him through her eyebrows, smiling at her little joke.
Franks smiled softly in reply. Then he took a long drag on his latte and said, "What if you could get a second chance at going to college?"
She snorted softly. "Do I look like I got a fairy godmother?" she asked her coffee cup.
"You might. I have a proposal for you. Have you ever heard of the Pinecone Foundation?"
Franks waited for a response and, not getting one, continued. "In a forest fire, all of the trees are burned and die, right? Well, the heat from the forest fire causes pine cones to open up, and their seeds drop out and get buried in the ash on the forest floor. Then the next spring, after lying there and soaking up water all winter, they sprout and grow into new trees. It's like the forest gets a second chance.
"The Pinecone Foundation exists to give kids like you a second chance. Tell me: what were you going to study at Yale or Harvard?"
"Accounting," she muttered to her cup.
"They told me you were good at math. How were you going to pay for your education?"
"A lotta hard work." She chuckled sadly, even though it wasn't really a joke.
"I don't think you can work enough in four years to pay for those schools."
"Yeah well, it's all a mute point now. I ain't goin' anywhere." She leaned back in her chair and fixed him with a look of despair and apathy.
"Moot point," he said.
"What?"
"Moot point, not mute. It's a legal term. It means something that's fake, or something that doesn't matter anymore."
"It sure doesn't."
He caught the wit in the reply. "You've got a sharp mind. An accounting degree from Yale would serve you well. You could get a job as a CPA anywhere. Or you could go to business school, get an MBA, and get a job as a junior executive somewhere."
"Somewhere, like where?"
"How about Procter & Gamble, in Cincinnati?"
Her eyes sparkled. "Ooh! I ain't never been to Cincinnati!" Then the sparkle died, and she slumped in her chair again. "And I ain't never gonna get there, either."
He leaned forward, putting his elbows on the table. Although she hadn't looked at him much, his eyes had never left her during the entire conversation. Reverend Billy sat on the side, content to be a spectator in this exchange.
"I want - the Foundation wants - to pay for your schooling. We will pay for tuition, books, Internet access, rent, utilities, groceries, diapers for your little one, day care, a computer, even a cellphone. We'll even pay for you to come home and visit on the holidays, if you want."
Skeptical, Tonya asked, "What do I gotta do in return?"
"Get accepted. Pass all your classes. Graduate. And be a good mama to your baby. That's all."
"Uh-huh. And do you get to be my sugar daddy? Do I have to sleep with you?"
Franks smiled. He wasn't offended; in fact, he had been expecting this question. He shook his head and said, "You get your own two-bedroom apartment. The only person you have to sleep with is your own little girl."
"I ain't never had my own apartment. Hell, I ain't never even had my own bed."
"I'll introduce you to Charmaine. She's 25, and she works at the foundation. She'll teach you how to cook, and clean your own apartment, do your laundry, and do your grocery shopping - in fact, she'll go shopping with you until think you can handle it on your own. She'll take you clothes shopping before school starts, because you're going to need a new wardrobe."
Tonya's eyes started to glaze over, as she allowed herself to believe this was true. "Wait - wait. There has to be a catch. Nobody's this generous - not to a total stranger, and def'nit'ly not to a black girl wid' a baby from the South Side."
Franks stared at her, not moving. Then he asked, "So, is that a yes or a no?"
She looked to the preacher: "Reverend Billy?"
"Remember what Cuba Gooding Junior said."
She furrowed her brow, thinking hard. "What? 'Show me the money'?" She laughed, but the laughter was a mix of puzzlement and crazy hope. "Mista Franks, show me the money."
He smiled and waggled his eyebrows. "First, you get accepted at a school. Then I'll show you the money." He watched the crazy hope fade away. "Yes or no?"
Franks was rather disappointed. He had been expecting a more positive reaction. Tonya swirled her empty cup slowly on the table in front of her. "If I say yes, what happens?"
"Well, applying for college is hard work. So we'll help you do that. Tomorrow morning at 9, Charmaine will pick you up and bring you to the office. You can bring your baby if you want. We have several secretaries who are grandmothers, and they will fuss over her for hours. They'll pass her back and forth, and you won't have to worry about her for a minute. You and Charmaine can sit at a computer, decide which schools to apply to, and fill in the applications."
He paused, then said, "It'll take more than one day. You might need to quit your job."
"But I can't do that!" Tonya exclaimed.
"Nonsense. Getting into school is now your full-time job."
"But I need the money!"
"Tonya, let's talk for a minute about want versus need. Yes, you need the money. But do you want to go to college?"
"Well yeah, but I can't quit just for a couple of days of applyin', and then weeks of waitin'! What if they say no? Then I got no school and no job!"
Franks smiled gently. "You still don't understand. That's okay. You will have the money. We'll give you $120 for every day you spend at the Foundation, researching schools and filling out applications. We will pay you $120 for every day that you are out with Charmaine or someone else, buying clothes and supplies, and learning how to drive."
"Drive?"
"Well, if you're going to be independent, you're going to need a car."
The girl gasped.
"And if there's still time left over, we will offer you a job at the Foundation. We have a lot of work you can do."
Her eyes started filling with tears, and then she blinked them back. Her lower lip started to quiver, so she bit it. She stared at the logo on the coffee cup she was holding, as if it were the most important thing in the universe.
"So, yes or no?"
"I really don't have to sleep witcha?"
"Really."
She glanced at Reverend Billy. He finally spoke.
"Girl, what are you waiting for? Why are you even questioning this? Think of little Sarah! Don't you want something better for her? Think of all the dreams you had in high school, the ones you gave up on. What if you could make all those dreams come true after all?"
He continued, "Do you know how much MONEY they're offering you? This is tens of thousands - a couple hundred thousand - dollars! And all you have to do is be good, and do what you do best! Don't be a fool, girl! Say yes to the man."
Tonya looked past Franks and fixed her gaze on the windows on the other side of the coffee shop. Her eyes started filling with tears again, and this time she didn't blink them away. Her lower lip trembled, her chin seemed to disappear, and her eyes got lost in the flood of tears that poured down her cheeks and on to the table top. Unashamed, she sat there, shoulders convulsing as she wept silently, having realized what was being offered and the changes it would bring.
Franks didn't move. To move would have broken the spell.
Reverend Billy, taking his cue from Franks, didn't move either. When he started getting fidgety, he played Four Tops songs in his mind, taking care not to hum aloud. He had finished "Ain't No Woman (Like the One I've Got)" and was halfway through "Yesterday's Dreams" when Tonya's sobbing subsided, she dried her eyes and the table with a Starbucks napkin, and looked Dennis Franks in the eye.
"Yes," she said faintly.
One side of Franks' mouth smiled. "You're sure?"
She took a deep breath, smiled a huge smile, and almost shouted, "Yes!"
Then the other half of his mouth smiled. "Charmaine will pick you up at 9 tomorrow morning. Don't be late." He stood up, shook Reverend Billy's hand, and stuck his hand out for Tonya to shake. She looked at his hand, then slowly stood up, wrapped her arms around him and embraced him tightly.
She let go of him and whispered, "Thank you." He smiled at her once more, then turned and walked out the door.
Philanthropy, chapter 1
David Franks looked around the table. Everyone else looked very uncomfortable, despite his efforts to put them at ease. They were picking at their lunches, even though they had all ordered delicious items off the menu - and he was picking up the tab.
His guests were the principal at Frederick Douglass High School, three of the counselors from the school, the chairs of the mathematics, science and English departments, and the Reverend Billy Brown, from the Mount Olive Baptist Church.
"So," he began in the modern fashion, "as I told you all on the phone or in email, I represent a charitable foundation that exists to help single mothers break the poverty cycle. I need your help finding a candidate for a scholarship." That evoked a mix of reactions from his guests. Some of them made excited "ooh" noises at the prospect that one of their young charges might be eligible for a scholarship. Some of them rolled their eyes, muttering, "We've heard this one before." And two of them, including the Reverend Billy, started to get angry.
Reverend Billy spoke up first. "Wait a minute. You come down into black Atlanta, loaded down with your white man's guilt and a lotta white man's money, to try to lift some of our black sistas out of their lives of misery? You don't think we can do that ourselves? We are a community. We don't need you!"
The principal said "Shh! Reverend Billy, let's hear what the man has to say" - but one of the counselors muttered "Amen, Reverend."
Franks had expected this reaction, and he had already decided to use the nuclear option to deal with it. "Okay." He said. "I'll find another school that can help the Foundation spend its money - maybe up in Powder Springs. Lunch is on me. You stay here and enjoy it. I'll pay the bill on my way out the door." He picked up his phone and his tablet and stood up, pushing his chair back.
Before he could take a step, the women in the group were hissing at the Reverend to "keep your mouth shut" and to "let the man talk", while the principal half-rose from his chair at the other end of the long table, reaching towards Franks and saying "W-w-wait, don't go yet. The rest of us want to hear what you have to say."
Franks froze, and silently looked deep into the eyes of everyone at the table. He had already determined that if he saw antagonism or opposition in any of them, he would in fact leave. After a long 60 seconds, he sat down again.
"Now, then. Twenty-five percent of your students drop out every year. This is not the fault of the school; I understand that. Of those twenty-five percent, half of them are girls who are teen mothers. Ten to twenty percent of the girls who graduate in any given year are either pregnant or already have children. Many of these graduates and dropouts are girls who were planning to go to college, but because of the challenges of teen motherhood, they are forced to abandon that dream.
"When they drop out, they are still officially your responsibility. Unofficially, you already have enough to do, just keeping the roof on the school, and therefore many of these girls fall through the cracks. When they graduate, they are officially no longer your responsibility. However, most of them graduate totally unprepared to raise a child or get a job --"
The counselors started to protest.
"-- in spite of all of your admirable efforts to train them and prepare them for the Real World."
The counselors were mollified.
"I need your help. The Foundation wants to start something new. We are prepared to offer a full four-year experience at a nationally-ranked college or university to a single mother. If, after two years, it looks like she is making progress, we will make the same offer to two more single mothers - and two years later, to four more single mothers, doubling it every year until our accountants tell us that we are at the limit of the Foundation's endowment.
"The problem is, a white man prowling around in a black neighborhood, looking for and asking about single mothers, is asking for trouble --"
This brought smiles to all of the faces at the table. Some of them tried not to smile, but their mouths betrayed them.
" -- so I need your help identifying likely candidates. At this point, I'm not interested in academic qualifications, extracurricular activities, or any of the usual bullshit." He leaned forward, placing his palms on the table. "I'm interested in any girl who was college-bound, who could have made it, who deserved a shot but had to give it up for the baby. Those are my criteria."
One of the counselors interjected, "Then you're looking for someone who's no longer at our school."
Franks nodded. "That's right. You probably thought I was going to ask about your current student body. No, I'm asking for your help because you know all of the former students."
The Reverend Billy Brown spoke up, thoughtfully this time, "So why am I here?"
"Reverend Billy," said Franks, "you know these kids on a personal level. You know their families. You know their situations. You may be more acquainted than these educators with some likely candidates."
The math department chair spoke up. "Who decides who gets this scholarship?"
"The Foundation decides," was Franks' reply. "It's their money, and so they get to decide how to spend it. There is no application process. There is no bureaucratic waiting period. What I need from you is names. Right now. If you don't like these terms, then I'll just go up the road to McEachern High School and see if there's some upper-middle-class white girl who got herself in trouble and who needs a little help."
Franks stood silent once more. Speechless, the group looked around at each other, and then they started talking animatedly. In less than ten minutes they had come up with a list of over 20 girls' names, whittled it down to four, and then they spent the next 30 minutes telling Franks everything they were permitted to tell about the girls, their high school careers, their families, and their current situations.
His guests were the principal at Frederick Douglass High School, three of the counselors from the school, the chairs of the mathematics, science and English departments, and the Reverend Billy Brown, from the Mount Olive Baptist Church.
"So," he began in the modern fashion, "as I told you all on the phone or in email, I represent a charitable foundation that exists to help single mothers break the poverty cycle. I need your help finding a candidate for a scholarship." That evoked a mix of reactions from his guests. Some of them made excited "ooh" noises at the prospect that one of their young charges might be eligible for a scholarship. Some of them rolled their eyes, muttering, "We've heard this one before." And two of them, including the Reverend Billy, started to get angry.
Reverend Billy spoke up first. "Wait a minute. You come down into black Atlanta, loaded down with your white man's guilt and a lotta white man's money, to try to lift some of our black sistas out of their lives of misery? You don't think we can do that ourselves? We are a community. We don't need you!"
The principal said "Shh! Reverend Billy, let's hear what the man has to say" - but one of the counselors muttered "Amen, Reverend."
Franks had expected this reaction, and he had already decided to use the nuclear option to deal with it. "Okay." He said. "I'll find another school that can help the Foundation spend its money - maybe up in Powder Springs. Lunch is on me. You stay here and enjoy it. I'll pay the bill on my way out the door." He picked up his phone and his tablet and stood up, pushing his chair back.
Before he could take a step, the women in the group were hissing at the Reverend to "keep your mouth shut" and to "let the man talk", while the principal half-rose from his chair at the other end of the long table, reaching towards Franks and saying "W-w-wait, don't go yet. The rest of us want to hear what you have to say."
Franks froze, and silently looked deep into the eyes of everyone at the table. He had already determined that if he saw antagonism or opposition in any of them, he would in fact leave. After a long 60 seconds, he sat down again.
"Now, then. Twenty-five percent of your students drop out every year. This is not the fault of the school; I understand that. Of those twenty-five percent, half of them are girls who are teen mothers. Ten to twenty percent of the girls who graduate in any given year are either pregnant or already have children. Many of these graduates and dropouts are girls who were planning to go to college, but because of the challenges of teen motherhood, they are forced to abandon that dream.
"When they drop out, they are still officially your responsibility. Unofficially, you already have enough to do, just keeping the roof on the school, and therefore many of these girls fall through the cracks. When they graduate, they are officially no longer your responsibility. However, most of them graduate totally unprepared to raise a child or get a job --"
The counselors started to protest.
"-- in spite of all of your admirable efforts to train them and prepare them for the Real World."
The counselors were mollified.
"I need your help. The Foundation wants to start something new. We are prepared to offer a full four-year experience at a nationally-ranked college or university to a single mother. If, after two years, it looks like she is making progress, we will make the same offer to two more single mothers - and two years later, to four more single mothers, doubling it every year until our accountants tell us that we are at the limit of the Foundation's endowment.
"The problem is, a white man prowling around in a black neighborhood, looking for and asking about single mothers, is asking for trouble --"
This brought smiles to all of the faces at the table. Some of them tried not to smile, but their mouths betrayed them.
" -- so I need your help identifying likely candidates. At this point, I'm not interested in academic qualifications, extracurricular activities, or any of the usual bullshit." He leaned forward, placing his palms on the table. "I'm interested in any girl who was college-bound, who could have made it, who deserved a shot but had to give it up for the baby. Those are my criteria."
One of the counselors interjected, "Then you're looking for someone who's no longer at our school."
Franks nodded. "That's right. You probably thought I was going to ask about your current student body. No, I'm asking for your help because you know all of the former students."
The Reverend Billy Brown spoke up, thoughtfully this time, "So why am I here?"
"Reverend Billy," said Franks, "you know these kids on a personal level. You know their families. You know their situations. You may be more acquainted than these educators with some likely candidates."
The math department chair spoke up. "Who decides who gets this scholarship?"
"The Foundation decides," was Franks' reply. "It's their money, and so they get to decide how to spend it. There is no application process. There is no bureaucratic waiting period. What I need from you is names. Right now. If you don't like these terms, then I'll just go up the road to McEachern High School and see if there's some upper-middle-class white girl who got herself in trouble and who needs a little help."
Franks stood silent once more. Speechless, the group looked around at each other, and then they started talking animatedly. In less than ten minutes they had come up with a list of over 20 girls' names, whittled it down to four, and then they spent the next 30 minutes telling Franks everything they were permitted to tell about the girls, their high school careers, their families, and their current situations.
Restraining Order
She was studying at her desk when a movement outside the window caught her eye. She looked up to see a blue Kia parking at the end of the driveway.
Her blood went cold, and her heart clenched - the fight-or-flight reaction. It happened every time he showed up in her life.
She hadn't felt it that first Sunday, when he introduced himself, all smiles and charm. But an hour later, she had had her first sense of it when he had barged into a conversation she was having with her best friends, as if he were already part of the group and there was something between him and her.
There was was nothing between him and her - nothing except aggressive pursuit on his side, and fear and fleeing on her side. He used to text her constantly, and call her at odd hours, even though she told him not to. She put an end to that by blocking his number. Then he would text and call her friends, asking them to deliver messages to her, until they learned to block his number too.
He friended her on Facebook, and then filled her feed with bogus declarations of gratitude for their real-life friendship, compliments about her looks, and suggestive come-ons. She ended up unfriending him, blocking him, and reporting him to Facebook. She went through her feed and deleted everything he had ever written. Some of her friends also unfriended him and blocked him, but not all of them - so he could still keep tabs on her by stalking those unblocked friends.
Somehow he found out her class schedule, and he would wait for her outside the classroom. If she came out surrounded by a group of friends, which she did increasingly often, as physical protection, he would somehow force his way into the circle, try to hook his arm in hers or wrap his arm around her, and steer her out of the circle. More than once, her friends had to trip him or almost wrestle with him to break his hold - and he still tagged along.
If she studied late, and went to the parking garage after dark, he would be standing next to her car, waiting for her. He would engage her in conversation, and wouldn't stop until she said, "Um, I have to go ...", got in the car, and drove away. Sometimes he managed to maneuver in front of the driver's door, so she couldn't unlock or open it. Whenever that happened, she would walk over to the passenger door, get in that way, and crawl across the console. It was awkward and embarrassing, but he didn't seem to notice - or care. But she would shake all the way home, her eyes scanning the rear-view mirror.
When she and her friends went to the gym, he would be over on the weight machines, flexing and eyeing her.
She told her professors about him, and she reported him to campus security, but he hadn't done anything illegal (yet), so they couldn't do anything. Basically, they told her "You're a big girl; you deal with it."
She hadn't really wanted to go to the school's fall social, but her friends had talked her into it, and there was a good local band playing, so she had given in. The entire floor of the sports arena had been turned into an old-fashioned harvest festival, with bobbing for apples, fresh hot donuts and cider, pumpkin carving contests, everything but Halloween costumes. The Halloween party would be in another three weeks, but she wasn't planning on going.
She parked her car and walked in. As she entered the gym, her friend Liz caught her and gave her the customary I'm-glad-you're-here squeal and hug. But they hadn't gotten past the folded-up bleachers when she got a text from Alli: "Carl spotted you. RUN!!!" Her blood froze, her heart clenched, and her face twisted into a mask of fear.
Liz asked, "What's wrong?" She turned and showed Liz the text. Liz pushed her towards the door, and said in that faux-calm voice that some people are gifted with: "Go. I'll stop him." She didn't move. Liz turned towards the gym and saw him, running through the crowd, about halfway across the arena floor. "Go! Now! Here he comes!"
Instantly, the adrenaline hit, and she flew out the door and sprinted to her car. She got in, locked the door, started the car and put it in Reverse. Before she could start moving, there was a rattling of her door handle and then fists pounding on her window, and a man's voice shouting "Stop! I need to talk to you!"
Without looking at him, she shook her head vehemently and stomped on the gas, kicking up dirt and grass as the car jumped backwards. As she shifted to Drive, she was secretly hoping that he would jump in the way, to try to stop her in one direction or the other, so she could run over him. But he didn't. She did see him running after her, yelling something she couldn't hear.
She was aware that her purse was still wrapped around her, and that her seat belt was still undone, but she was too busy concentrating on getting away, and trying to see the dark roads through her freely flowing tears. She thought someone was following her, but if they were, they stopped about eight miles from home, so she wrote it off as paranoia.
She called her favorite uncle to ask for his advice. He lived 2100 miles away, but sometimes when she talked to him, it was like he was right next door. And she felt more comfortable talking to him about some things than even her parents.
After she hung up, she still couldn't sleep. So she stayed up all night, drinking hot chocolate and watching chick flicks. Her body finally gave out at 5 in the morning.
After three hours of sleep, she took her uncle's advice and called the police department. After they explained her options to her, she showered, dressed, and drove to the main office. A desk officer, a cross between a kindly grandmother and Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman, sat with her and helped her fill out the paperwork for a restraining order. Then they went next door to the judge's office, where the judge approved it.
She drove home, feeling relieved, like she finally had some control over her life again. But there was one little problem, a problem which sat like a persistent remnant of an ice cube, in her heart. Her address was on the restraining order. So if he hadn't already figured out where she lived, he knew now.
So when his car appeared in her cul-de-sac three days later, all of that fear came rushing back. At first, she thought, Why did I even bother getting that restraining order? Then, just as her uncle had told her, she started getting mad. How dare he run my life like this? Who does he think he is, making me run away like a scared bunny all the time? Is he too dense to take no for an answer? I guess it's time for me to enforce my own restraining order.
When she had gotten home from the police department, she had done like Kevin in Home Alone, and inventoried her house for anything that would work as a weapon. In her dad's workshop in the garage, she had found a couple of sledgehammers. She had swung them around, and decided that she could handle the one with the long yellow handle and the 8-pound head. She had also found a Boy Scout machete. Did the Boy Scouts really have machetes? Her dad said that he had gotten it when he was a kid, and yes, it had been in the Scout catalog for several years.
Her uncle had suggested that she figure out some offensive and defensive moves with the hammer, and so she had snuck down to the basement and gotten sweaty swinging it around and trying stuff on her dad's punching bag.
Her silly uncle called it "Hammer Fu". That made her smile.
When the doorbell started ringing, she jumped up out of her chair and ran downstairs, managing to hide herself from view. She heard him rattle the doorknob and then start knocking loudly on the door. Just before she stepped into the garage, she heard him yell "Katrina! Come on out, we need to talk!" For a moment, she felt a shiver of fear, but then anger pushed the fear aside.
She had had enough.
In the garage, she dialed 911, gave her name and address, and said in one of those frighteningly calm voices, "There's a man outside my house, trying to get in. He's not my boyfriend, he's a stalker. I have a restraining order. I'm afraid he's going to hurt me. Please send help." Then, without disconnecting the call, she stuffed the phone in her bra so that the microphone was free. She grabbed the machete off the workbench and stuck it in her waistband along her spine, then picked up the sledgehammer and stepped out the door on the side of the house.
She was pissed.
Holding the hammer in both hands like she intended to use it, she marched around the side of the house and along the far side of the driveway, eyes focused on the Kia, but very aware of Carl's location. He was still pounding on the door, yelling "Katrina! Katrina! Come on, you owe this to me!"
I don't owe you anything.
She wasn't hiding from him, but he was so focused on the door that he didn't know she was outside until he heard the sound of breaking glass. He spun around to see her winding up for a second blow on his windshield. He ran towards the car, yelling, "Katrina! Stop it!" as the hammer came down.
He was too late to stop the third blow. The head of the hammer cracked the unbreakable plastic headlight cover on the right side into three pieces, and then without stopping, shattered the xenon bulbs of his right headlight assembly. He grabbed her right arm and yelled "Stop it!"
That's assault, right there.
She said exactly what her uncle had told her to say. She had been practicing it for two days. "Ow! Let go of me! You're hurting me!"
As she said it, she spun to the right, backswinging the hammer, and struck him full-force on the wrist. The hammerhead compressed his blood vessels, his tendons, and most importantly, the nerves in his carpal tunnel, causing his hand to go numb and breaking his grip instantly. It was his turn to say "Ow!"
Now they were facing each other. In less time than it takes to describe it, she shifted her grip so that she was holding the hammer vertical, with the head down, both hands together near the butt of the handle, and she drove it straight down, into his instep, focused on literally driving his foot into the pavement.
Hammer Fu.
She didn't think she broke any bones, but she definitely damaged soft tissue, and the foot was instantly too painful to use. He hopped on one foot, and reached out to grab her arms to steady himself. She instantly shifted her grip on the hammer, holding it horizontally and backwards. The head was in her right hand, behind her hip. Her left hand held the handle, with the butt pointed at his stomach. She stepped forward, driving the handle deep into his solar plexus.
Sometimes the best defense is a good offense.
He fell against the car, grunting and moaning inarticulately. She used that time to walk around him towards the other headlight. As she wound up to hit it, she remembered her uncle's advice and yelled, "You're not supposed to be here!" WHAM! "You're violating a restraining order! You attacked me!" POW! After two hits, the headlight was gone, and the underlying metal was mangled.
Leaning on the hood, he maneuvered around the front of the car towards her. She moved to the back of the car. She felt a twinge of guilt, looking at the taillight LEDs, but then the anger shoved the guilt aside. As the taillight assembly disintegrated under the hammer's blow, she yelled, "Get in your car and get out of here!"
He held onto the driver's door handle, balancing on one foot, still gasping for breath, but otherwise not moving. What was he waiting for? Was he trying to think of what to say next? Or his next move?
Keep moving, girl.
"Now, asshole!" The hammerhead went into the driver's side door, inches from his kneecap. Then she threw the sledgehammer aside, reached behind her, and pulled out the machete. "If you don't leave, your tires get it next."
Asshole.
Nobody had ever heard Katrina say a word like "asshole" before. She was so clean and pure, "stupid" was probably the fiercest word anybody had ever heard her say. It startled her as much as it startled him - but it had the desired effect. He pulled open the door and dived in, started the car and put it in Reverse. For just an instant, time stopped.
Gee, this feels familiar. Except last time, that was me and this was him.
She pounded loudly on his window with the machete's handle - just for fun. Without looking at her, he twisted the steering wheel and stomped on the gas, the tires squealing and laying twin black stripes on the pavement as the car spun around. But she didn't run after him as he shifted into Drive and raced out of the cul-de-sac and down the street. Instead, she stood and watched as a police car, lights flashing, cut in front of him, just a block away.
She heard a voice from her bra saying "Hello? Hello? Ma'am? Are you okay?" Breathing heavily, she reached in, pulled out her phone, and put it to her ear. "Yes, I'm okay now."
That's how I enforce a restraining order.
Her blood went cold, and her heart clenched - the fight-or-flight reaction. It happened every time he showed up in her life.
She hadn't felt it that first Sunday, when he introduced himself, all smiles and charm. But an hour later, she had had her first sense of it when he had barged into a conversation she was having with her best friends, as if he were already part of the group and there was something between him and her.
There was was nothing between him and her - nothing except aggressive pursuit on his side, and fear and fleeing on her side. He used to text her constantly, and call her at odd hours, even though she told him not to. She put an end to that by blocking his number. Then he would text and call her friends, asking them to deliver messages to her, until they learned to block his number too.
He friended her on Facebook, and then filled her feed with bogus declarations of gratitude for their real-life friendship, compliments about her looks, and suggestive come-ons. She ended up unfriending him, blocking him, and reporting him to Facebook. She went through her feed and deleted everything he had ever written. Some of her friends also unfriended him and blocked him, but not all of them - so he could still keep tabs on her by stalking those unblocked friends.
Somehow he found out her class schedule, and he would wait for her outside the classroom. If she came out surrounded by a group of friends, which she did increasingly often, as physical protection, he would somehow force his way into the circle, try to hook his arm in hers or wrap his arm around her, and steer her out of the circle. More than once, her friends had to trip him or almost wrestle with him to break his hold - and he still tagged along.
If she studied late, and went to the parking garage after dark, he would be standing next to her car, waiting for her. He would engage her in conversation, and wouldn't stop until she said, "Um, I have to go ...", got in the car, and drove away. Sometimes he managed to maneuver in front of the driver's door, so she couldn't unlock or open it. Whenever that happened, she would walk over to the passenger door, get in that way, and crawl across the console. It was awkward and embarrassing, but he didn't seem to notice - or care. But she would shake all the way home, her eyes scanning the rear-view mirror.
When she and her friends went to the gym, he would be over on the weight machines, flexing and eyeing her.
She told her professors about him, and she reported him to campus security, but he hadn't done anything illegal (yet), so they couldn't do anything. Basically, they told her "You're a big girl; you deal with it."
She hadn't really wanted to go to the school's fall social, but her friends had talked her into it, and there was a good local band playing, so she had given in. The entire floor of the sports arena had been turned into an old-fashioned harvest festival, with bobbing for apples, fresh hot donuts and cider, pumpkin carving contests, everything but Halloween costumes. The Halloween party would be in another three weeks, but she wasn't planning on going.
She parked her car and walked in. As she entered the gym, her friend Liz caught her and gave her the customary I'm-glad-you're-here squeal and hug. But they hadn't gotten past the folded-up bleachers when she got a text from Alli: "Carl spotted you. RUN!!!" Her blood froze, her heart clenched, and her face twisted into a mask of fear.
Liz asked, "What's wrong?" She turned and showed Liz the text. Liz pushed her towards the door, and said in that faux-calm voice that some people are gifted with: "Go. I'll stop him." She didn't move. Liz turned towards the gym and saw him, running through the crowd, about halfway across the arena floor. "Go! Now! Here he comes!"
Instantly, the adrenaline hit, and she flew out the door and sprinted to her car. She got in, locked the door, started the car and put it in Reverse. Before she could start moving, there was a rattling of her door handle and then fists pounding on her window, and a man's voice shouting "Stop! I need to talk to you!"
Without looking at him, she shook her head vehemently and stomped on the gas, kicking up dirt and grass as the car jumped backwards. As she shifted to Drive, she was secretly hoping that he would jump in the way, to try to stop her in one direction or the other, so she could run over him. But he didn't. She did see him running after her, yelling something she couldn't hear.
She was aware that her purse was still wrapped around her, and that her seat belt was still undone, but she was too busy concentrating on getting away, and trying to see the dark roads through her freely flowing tears. She thought someone was following her, but if they were, they stopped about eight miles from home, so she wrote it off as paranoia.
She called her favorite uncle to ask for his advice. He lived 2100 miles away, but sometimes when she talked to him, it was like he was right next door. And she felt more comfortable talking to him about some things than even her parents.
After she hung up, she still couldn't sleep. So she stayed up all night, drinking hot chocolate and watching chick flicks. Her body finally gave out at 5 in the morning.
After three hours of sleep, she took her uncle's advice and called the police department. After they explained her options to her, she showered, dressed, and drove to the main office. A desk officer, a cross between a kindly grandmother and Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman, sat with her and helped her fill out the paperwork for a restraining order. Then they went next door to the judge's office, where the judge approved it.
She drove home, feeling relieved, like she finally had some control over her life again. But there was one little problem, a problem which sat like a persistent remnant of an ice cube, in her heart. Her address was on the restraining order. So if he hadn't already figured out where she lived, he knew now.
So when his car appeared in her cul-de-sac three days later, all of that fear came rushing back. At first, she thought, Why did I even bother getting that restraining order? Then, just as her uncle had told her, she started getting mad. How dare he run my life like this? Who does he think he is, making me run away like a scared bunny all the time? Is he too dense to take no for an answer? I guess it's time for me to enforce my own restraining order.
When she had gotten home from the police department, she had done like Kevin in Home Alone, and inventoried her house for anything that would work as a weapon. In her dad's workshop in the garage, she had found a couple of sledgehammers. She had swung them around, and decided that she could handle the one with the long yellow handle and the 8-pound head. She had also found a Boy Scout machete. Did the Boy Scouts really have machetes? Her dad said that he had gotten it when he was a kid, and yes, it had been in the Scout catalog for several years.
Her uncle had suggested that she figure out some offensive and defensive moves with the hammer, and so she had snuck down to the basement and gotten sweaty swinging it around and trying stuff on her dad's punching bag.
Her silly uncle called it "Hammer Fu". That made her smile.
When the doorbell started ringing, she jumped up out of her chair and ran downstairs, managing to hide herself from view. She heard him rattle the doorknob and then start knocking loudly on the door. Just before she stepped into the garage, she heard him yell "Katrina! Come on out, we need to talk!" For a moment, she felt a shiver of fear, but then anger pushed the fear aside.
She had had enough.
In the garage, she dialed 911, gave her name and address, and said in one of those frighteningly calm voices, "There's a man outside my house, trying to get in. He's not my boyfriend, he's a stalker. I have a restraining order. I'm afraid he's going to hurt me. Please send help." Then, without disconnecting the call, she stuffed the phone in her bra so that the microphone was free. She grabbed the machete off the workbench and stuck it in her waistband along her spine, then picked up the sledgehammer and stepped out the door on the side of the house.
She was pissed.
Holding the hammer in both hands like she intended to use it, she marched around the side of the house and along the far side of the driveway, eyes focused on the Kia, but very aware of Carl's location. He was still pounding on the door, yelling "Katrina! Katrina! Come on, you owe this to me!"
I don't owe you anything.
She wasn't hiding from him, but he was so focused on the door that he didn't know she was outside until he heard the sound of breaking glass. He spun around to see her winding up for a second blow on his windshield. He ran towards the car, yelling, "Katrina! Stop it!" as the hammer came down.
He was too late to stop the third blow. The head of the hammer cracked the unbreakable plastic headlight cover on the right side into three pieces, and then without stopping, shattered the xenon bulbs of his right headlight assembly. He grabbed her right arm and yelled "Stop it!"
That's assault, right there.
She said exactly what her uncle had told her to say. She had been practicing it for two days. "Ow! Let go of me! You're hurting me!"
As she said it, she spun to the right, backswinging the hammer, and struck him full-force on the wrist. The hammerhead compressed his blood vessels, his tendons, and most importantly, the nerves in his carpal tunnel, causing his hand to go numb and breaking his grip instantly. It was his turn to say "Ow!"
Now they were facing each other. In less time than it takes to describe it, she shifted her grip so that she was holding the hammer vertical, with the head down, both hands together near the butt of the handle, and she drove it straight down, into his instep, focused on literally driving his foot into the pavement.
Hammer Fu.
She didn't think she broke any bones, but she definitely damaged soft tissue, and the foot was instantly too painful to use. He hopped on one foot, and reached out to grab her arms to steady himself. She instantly shifted her grip on the hammer, holding it horizontally and backwards. The head was in her right hand, behind her hip. Her left hand held the handle, with the butt pointed at his stomach. She stepped forward, driving the handle deep into his solar plexus.
Sometimes the best defense is a good offense.
He fell against the car, grunting and moaning inarticulately. She used that time to walk around him towards the other headlight. As she wound up to hit it, she remembered her uncle's advice and yelled, "You're not supposed to be here!" WHAM! "You're violating a restraining order! You attacked me!" POW! After two hits, the headlight was gone, and the underlying metal was mangled.
Leaning on the hood, he maneuvered around the front of the car towards her. She moved to the back of the car. She felt a twinge of guilt, looking at the taillight LEDs, but then the anger shoved the guilt aside. As the taillight assembly disintegrated under the hammer's blow, she yelled, "Get in your car and get out of here!"
He held onto the driver's door handle, balancing on one foot, still gasping for breath, but otherwise not moving. What was he waiting for? Was he trying to think of what to say next? Or his next move?
Keep moving, girl.
"Now, asshole!" The hammerhead went into the driver's side door, inches from his kneecap. Then she threw the sledgehammer aside, reached behind her, and pulled out the machete. "If you don't leave, your tires get it next."
Asshole.
Nobody had ever heard Katrina say a word like "asshole" before. She was so clean and pure, "stupid" was probably the fiercest word anybody had ever heard her say. It startled her as much as it startled him - but it had the desired effect. He pulled open the door and dived in, started the car and put it in Reverse. For just an instant, time stopped.
Gee, this feels familiar. Except last time, that was me and this was him.
She pounded loudly on his window with the machete's handle - just for fun. Without looking at her, he twisted the steering wheel and stomped on the gas, the tires squealing and laying twin black stripes on the pavement as the car spun around. But she didn't run after him as he shifted into Drive and raced out of the cul-de-sac and down the street. Instead, she stood and watched as a police car, lights flashing, cut in front of him, just a block away.
She heard a voice from her bra saying "Hello? Hello? Ma'am? Are you okay?" Breathing heavily, she reached in, pulled out her phone, and put it to her ear. "Yes, I'm okay now."
That's how I enforce a restraining order.
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