Circumvention

Originally written Saturday, December 17, 2005 (continued)

“Oh, didn’t I tell you? My sister lives about an hour away from here. She has the biggest house, so our parents are coming out from Rochester for Christmas. I was raised Catholic this time around. I’ve been Catholic so many times I feel like I’ll be entering the priesthood in a generation or two.”

“Yeah, right! You couldn’t handle the priesthood. I seem to remember once upon a time your thing for priests didn’t have much to do with being one.”

“Yeah, well, you can insert randy priest joke here if you want, just as long as it’s not the, um, you know—child molesting kind.”

“No. No child molesting. Wouldn’t think of it. Closeted, self-denying fellow brother of the order molesting, on the other hand….” Sexuality is a strange thing with transitives. Their very being challenges the idea that desires are purely biological or purely a choice, since the lines between body and soul are not always easy to discern. There are too many factors at play in each rebirth to make assumptions about anyone in particular, but most are fairly flexible. What I’ll say for the moment is that Charlotte liked men… a lot. Richard likes women… a lot. However, I’ve also known transitives—as I think I’ve mentioned briefly before—who were so deeply in love with each other that they found ways to reunite, rebirth after rebirth, to spend successive lives together regardless of their respective sexes and other bodily characteristics that might compromise compatibility in more mundane situations. I've known others with an attraction to one particular sex that carried with them from one rebirth to the next, regardless of their own bodily makeup.

As an aside, and I mention it only because it came up and because you may now be wondering, child molesting is not about desire but about power. Thus, no matter how flexible one’s sexuality is from one generation to another, the likelihood that someone will suddenly become a pedophile who previously was not is not part of the same construction. But I digress….

And I continued. “So, sister’s for Christmas. Didja see her for Thanksgiving, too?”

“Yeah, actually, she and her kids and her husband came by here for dinner. What about you? Holiday plans?”

“I’m going to California to see college friends for a week or so. Get out of this bitter cold.”

“Ohh, lucky you. Send me postcards?”

“Sure. Postcards from the beautifully gentrified suburban San Fernando Valley. You got it. Did your sister’s family stay long enough for you to show them around? See your work? Anything?”

“Nah, her boy plays football in high school. They had to be back the next day for a big game. So it was came, ate, left for them.”

“Hm. How are things that time of year at the museum anyway? Get busy cuz people are off? See more traffic the couple of days before the holiday?” All that stupid family stuff just to get to the one day I cared about.

“Not that much more, but we were switching exhibits that week so I was working late hours, then just coming home and crashing. Honestly, cooking Thanksgiving dinner for six ended up being relaxing compared to that.” In other words, his only alibi would be others at the museum itself, and only for the first part of the night. And speaking of relaxing, he had ordered an additional glass of wine in the midst of all of this, on top of the bottle we’d already split. While three large glasses on a full stomach was hardly going to impair his judgment, I did notice a subtle change in his demeanor as a little bit of tension left his neck and shoulders. Figuring I’d drawn out of him all the information about the night of the 22nd that I could reasonably expect, and guessing I might continue to have the upper hand if Richard were still too nervous to bring it up himself, I entered the next phase of inquiry.

“So Rick, I hate to change the subject so abruptly,” which wasn’t altogether true, as I was more than happy to, “but you wanted to get together for a reason, right?’

“Um, yeah, I did.” He was evidently caught off-guard. Inadvertently, I’d lulled him into a comfortable frame of mind and then shaken him clear out of it. “The, um, the things the vampire stole from the museum.”

“Yeah. Any news about those?”

“Well, not those, exactly. I’ve been asking around from people from dancing about him to see if I can find out where to find him. A couple of people say they know him, but they don’t know where he lives.”

My gosh, why hadn’t I thought of that? I could contact my student from this past quarter whom I saw speaking to Moshe at the dance two weeks ago, just to grill her for information about what he was like prior to his estimated time of immortalization. Richard was continuing as, with my divided attention, I ruminated over ways to make such queries sound casual:

“So, um, I haven’t been able to get that stuff back. But I’ve been going through some related archived stuff from the same region and period. I’m not getting very far, but I have a professional contact at U. of I. that might be able to help.” The university he’d referred to is about two hours from here.

“Well, that’s better than nothing. I’m not sure I really want outside people being dragged into this thing, but…”

“Oh, you don’t have to worry about Roger. All he knows is I have research to do. It’s a perfectly normal thing.” By this time, he was rubbing his hand over his smooth, bare scalp. I’d seen him do it absent-mindedly before, but right now he was doing it repeatedly, almost compulsively. It registered as a nervous tic.

The events of this day to be continued...