He's Dead, Jim: Ballad of a Redshirt

There was a significant gap, or so I grew up believing, between our ages, my brother and me.  It kept growing, the older we got, seeming less when we were younger, more, later.  When he successfully enrolled in the fleet, I was still in high school, and he was already aboard the flagship as I continued my education at Coon Prep, counting down the days to graduation.  And he just kept stealing all the attention, up to and including the day we were informed of his death.

     My name’s Donny Silo.  It seems crass, even to me, still living down a relic of an imagined rivalry, to continue thinking of it that way, given what happened, and my attempts to make sense of it.  I continued chasing him, right into the fleet, doggedly pursuing the same path, never failing to mention my ambition to serve aboard the flagship, always hearing all about my big brother, never feeling worthy, never having found out anything about his actual service, until the day I was given the assignment.  Well, both of them, including the red shirt.

     Red shirt, as in security.  Engineers and communications also wore red shirts, while command wore yellow, and the sciences blue.  My red shirt could’ve come up with any number of duties, but mostly it was waiting around to be needed, waiting and listening.  Everyone talked about my brother.  Not the captain, not the doctor, and certainly not the alien (I don’t mean to sound xenophobic or anything, but aboard that ship, while I was there, anyway, everyone else was human, and it was just the one alien, and the way I heard it, even he was half-human, though you wouldn’t know it by how he behaved), not the holy trinity of elites aboard…But everyone else?  They loved my brother.  He was a legend.

     He was also, as I believe I’ve already stated, quite dead. 

     All the security officers volunteered for missions aboard this ship.  They were eager, I guess, to share time with the trinity, desperate to prove they were worthy to be there, too, just as brave, or maybe even more brave, than even the captain, who didn’t need to expose himself to so much danger, so much unknown, to the mysteries of space, and all the variables of civilization we were meant to explore, along with the stars, and yet kept doing so, every chance he got.

     A lot of security personnel chased this dream to their deaths, my brother among them.  There was a legend that the doctor had grown so inured to this constant stream of death he merely stated the fact and they all moved on, until the mission was completed, enemy conquered, friend made, the fleet once again made safe for the future of humanity (and everyone else).

     The rest of the crew wasn’t so resilient, I guess.  They came up with all manner of explanations, and there were memorials to all the fallen, and my brother was prominent among them.  This time it wasn’t just me; in the mess hall even when I wasn’t there they talked about him, and I’d hear about it in the corridors, in the lifts, in the sickbay, the armory…everywhere.  No, the big three didn’t think much about him, but everyone else did. 

     And it had nothing at all to do with how he died, or his willingness to volunteer, although he’d racked up an impressive forty-seven missions in his time, including the last one. 

     No, he treated everyone with respect, with dignity, he took others under his wing, even when his mood was dark, which apparently had been often, or so it seemed, and he was difficult to be around…He never stopped taking the job seriously, though, and when he was gone, they all knew because suddenly there was so much more work to do…A hole to fill, a void.

     Tough shoes.  I wasn’t up for it, and nobody expected me to, either, but they were happy to see me, because I was his brother, and for a little while it was easier to forget what they’d lost.

     The longer I stuck around, the more I saw past the illusion, found my real brother, the one I’d never allowed myself to meet, the one they never talked about.  Most of his missions were grunt work, no danger at all.  He’d merely showed up.  He was easy to take for granted, until he wasn’t there anymore.  They didn’t miss him; they missed him taking up the slack.  Well, honestly, that ended up how I viewed it, anyway.

     It didn’t seem so glamourous anymore, this flagship.  Oh, don’t get me wrong.  I applaud the heroics of the captain, and his best friends, I see what they contribute, what they mean to the fleet, to everyone, to all the people who will probably never even hear of him, even though to those who work under him, he’s inescapable.  Ask anyone in my hometown, they’ll remember my brother as well as anyone who ever met him, but the captain?  Not a chance. 

     Which is how I’m going to try and start thinking about it.  In the end, you have the friends you make, but you will always have your family.

     I started putting my name up for missions.  I’d avoided it, afraid I’d meet the same fate, how my brother died, all those faces up on the wall, the ones the officers in the other colors never even think about, or so it seems.

     The alien, when I boarded the shuttle, asked me some questions about the mission, nothing personal (although even with his friends he never seemed overly involved, except to acknowledge the implied intimacy, the only thing he shared with the doctor, the name they used to refer to the captain, which no one else did), and I checked my equipment, just to look busy, and when we landed on the surface of the planet for this assignment, I headed out immediately on my own, which I thought of as taking initiative, but was really what all the red shirts do. 

     And I walked around, took scans, secured perimeters…and that was it.  I never saw the big trio, until it was time to head back, and I listened to their banter, and that was it.

     At the debrief, they never so much as called on me, and I was a bit player, and I wondered, for the first time, if that was how my brother felt, which I had never before considered.

     Actually, it was kind of comforting.

     Then I waited to do it all over again.  I didn’t plan on putting my name up for the next one, or maybe I would simply be assigned, and anyway, it didn’t matter.  I headed to sickbay for the obligatory post-mission physical.  The doctor was there, and while he didn’t take charge of my examination, he nodded in my general direction, and when it was over, stopped by and asked why I looked so familiar, and I muttered my brother’s name, and he paused a moment, dropped his head, and then looked me in the eye.  He didn’t have to say anything.

     In that moment I found peace.

Wonder Woman: For the Man Who Had Everything…

Steve Trevor grew up without a mother.

In fact, even both his grandmothers had been dead before he was ever born. He had no aunts, no nieces, and certainly no sisters…He inhabited, in some respects, fully a man’s world.

In school, his good looks made him popular with girls, but he always kept aloof from them. He fled to the army life in an era when there were few enough women serving in the United States military. He lost himself in the fraternal life, had never known anything else. 

Then one day he crashed a plane into Themiscyra, Paradise Island. Home of the Amazons, where no man had ever stepped foot. And he met Diana.

Meaning, you understand, their story was parallel. Steve, when he brought Diana to Man’s World, where she became known as Wonder Woman, was quickly overshadowed. Diana herself never forgot him, but the rest of the world did. She considered them soulmates. He was made liaison, a token gesture. If there was a romance, it was never consummated. They never married. They never fought, either, never danced around the exact terms of their relationship, hopelessly intertwined, something they both just understood, the hole they had both plugged in their lives, the exact missing shape.

Wonder Woman became inescapable. Steve followed in her shadow. He never put on a costume. He was never accepted by her family, never welcomed as part of it. He became an outsider in both worlds. He wasn’t even welcome in her heroic community.

He never resented this for a single moment. 

You might find this hard to believe, I know. Somewhere in that heart surely lurked a chauvinist. Where did his story go, in his most private thoughts? Where might his deepest yearning have gone? Could he really understand, let alone accept, this woman suddenly thrust into his life?

For the man who’d had everything, only to discover, in a sudden shocking revolution, what he’d missed, his eyes filled with…wonder. Not at the idea. But Diana herself, so full of power, and also, so…humble. Because of Steve, thrust into the world, learning all of that, so much of it…alien to her. Learning what men were like…and what women were, in Man’s World. And wanting it to function as well as, well, Paradise.

And Steve, who had grown up in a world without women, to integrate the idea in the most perfect way possible. He couldn’t ask for anything more. 

Star Trek: "A Eugenics War Story"

He was living in a hovel by the sea.  

If he'd thought about it, probably he'd be living in a hovel by the sea regardless of the wars, because he lived in a poor country, a country unlucky enough to be unlucky in the first place and then on top of that one of the countries that had been overrun by the supermen.

The supermen swarmed much of the world without anyone much noticing.  Much of the world doesn't care about much of the world, the misfortunes that plague other nations, especially if there isn't much in the way of public interest, some angle that provokes sympathy for reasons other than the plight of people actually trying to live there.  This made it easy for the supermen to show up and take power.  No one cared.  They appeared like warlords, in many of them, and as such were little different from what had been happening for many hundreds of years anyway, and only those at the top of those populations had any clue what was happening, and there was surely plenty of talk in those circles, though the boy didn't exist in such circles.  To those circles he didn't exist at all, of course.  In the hovel by the sea he could at least catch fish to sustain himself, though trying to find markets where he might sell excess catch was always a problem, even before the supermen.

In those countries where the supermen had sufficient international clout, some claim to territory in a neighboring nation, or perhaps merely inconvenient residents within their own, they were noticed well enough, but the relationships between the supermen were hidden for a long time, although even those who lived in hovels in those countries, were privy to the truth.  It's hard to escape the truth when it's important to you.  Difficult to do anything about it, but what else is there to talk about?

So for years he lived under the regime of one of the supermen, and when the wars began and he found even his hovel was good enough to be caught in the crossfire, the boy would slip onto his boat into the sea and sometimes wonder if he should even bother finding harbor again, if such a thing would even be possible, later.

Then the wars ended and all the supermen were rounded up, and the boy did return to his hovel, and on the whole, found that it wasn't so different from how he'd left it.  Well, it was a hovel.  Hard to get much worse.  He resumed his life, such as it was, and tried to find markets for his fish.

One day, in the village square he overheard a conversation about the fate of the supermen.  Someone claimed they were going to be sent into space.  Sent into space!  In his country there had never even been a glimmer of a hint of a space program.  Very far from it!  Somehow this hadn't prevented one of the supermen from claiming it, and yet, the result of that usurpation had granted this man a ticket that was unimaginable to anyone living in the country, where advanced science was something that maybe looked like a water filtration system or plumbing in the village just beyond wherever you personally happened to be at any given time.

He kept listening.  He wasn't entirely ignorant, nor illiterate, though good material was scarce, along with everything else.  He imagined the supermen being sent to a colony, where they would probably establish a beachhead and send envoys back to Earth for reconquest...

No, no, the speaker said, someone else having thought about the same objection.  They would be placed in suspended animation.  

Huh.  Well.  He didn't know how to process that.  The conversation around him circled around the idea that it was a virtual death sentence, without the willingness to admit it, without the will to carry it out.  Given what the state of the space program was in even the most advanced countries, anyone undertaking deep space journeys was hardly likely, even if they were supermen, to emerge from it in a state to do much about it, even if they woke up somewhere along the journey on their own.

If they did?  He made his way home, thinking about it.  They'd be up there, among the stars, for many years, and they'd never even know time was passing.  If they did wake up?  They'd finally know what it was like to live in a hovel by the sea.

Yes, they'd learn that much.  He considered it a perfect irony.  And he thought no more about it.  

Holy Days - Easter

She kept asking herself throughout the night, on Thursday, on Friday, did they believe? Did they believe he was the messiah? 

And as much as it hurt, Mary had to admit, of course not. That was the whole point. Even the disciples hadn’t believed. Not really. Not even Peter. John? Had John believed? At least he’d been there. In the end.

And she asked herself, all over again. Had she? 

Since she had first been told. Yes. Yes, she had believed. It had been a terrible burden. She’d known, all his life. She’d known how it would end.

For the world, his death was just another crucifixion, just another dead messiah. It was easier to end the story that way. Everyone was happy, then. Everyone would forget. That was how it always went. The day they died, that was always difficult, but then, there was always so much company.

She wondered what motivated them. Why so many boasted in the streets. It was a deep yearning, of course, an ancient one, and a horrible burden of a tradition. Their people had escaped from bondage many times. But the world always set another trap.

She’d known. She’d known from the start. And even if she hadn’t, he spoke openly of it, eventually, and eventually even in terms others would understand. It did not blunt watching it play out. Watching him torn. Watching him pierced. Watching him. Die.

Listening to him. She had spent his lifetime listening to him. To the end. To the very end. He’d always had something to say. She always had the time to listen. He spoke to her, from up there. He spoke to John. He spoke to others. He allowed himself to grieve. For him it was a moment he was experiencing for the first time, too, despite a lifetime of anticipation.

She wondered how she still managed tears. Watching it. Holding his body, later, when it had been taken down. While she waited, his body in the tomb. One night. Two nights.

Then this morning. She wasn’t among those he appeared to. That burden, among others, he had passed on to John. Perhaps that’s what he’d meant. Perhaps he knew that if she saw him, again, she would never be able to let go again. She had spent his lifetime giving him to the world. It seemed too much. Because no one had seen him the way she did. 

She waited, still. She waited to see him. She knew she could wait the rest of her life, and she wouldn’t. But she had lived with anticipation before.

She had her faith. It sustained her.

Holy Days - Saturday: An Easter Tale

By then he was dead. 

Some things, perhaps most things, are on a relative scale. Joseph’s doubts about Mary, his difficulty accepting the circumstances of her pregnancy, of needing to be persuaded by the visit of an angel in a dream, none of this should project an image of a man who was in any way unworthy to raise Jesus. In another age, in another context, a fictional one, Joseph is Jonathan Kent, adoptive father to Superman. 

Superman, Clark Kent, is often depicted as gaining his moral character from Pa Kent. Jesus didn’t find his character through Joseph. What he learned was how to be a man.

His mother, Mary, spent her life encouraging him, believing in him, knowing all the while the destiny that awaited him, in this world, in this life. She was, and Joseph was, firmly rooted in this world, this life. This is what they knew. Mary had extraordinary faith. Joseph, meanwhile, was the first model of what a good life could look like.

In those days it was usual for the husband to be older than the wife. Joseph was in his thirties, and Mary not yet in her twenties. This is to say, Joseph was established in his practice, as a carpenter, when Jesus was born, when they made the journey to Bethlehem.

When Jesus was a boy, Joseph was approaching middle age. When Jesus approached his thirties, Joseph was, for that time, an old man.

He had already done everything he could for his son. He led a life of quiet dignity. Joseph didn’t understand the larger concepts of faith any better than anyone; he knew them as well as Mary, certainly, whose faith was less informed by temple worship than in her son, in his destiny. 

Joseph saw how wise his son was. He didn’t try to understand it himself. In fact it was something they never really talked about. They spent their time together in idle chatter, Joseph about the many people he knew, Jesus often quietly, or sharing mutual jokes. They had an easy camaraderie that maybe wasn’t easy to see. It wasn’t for others, anyway. Maybe Joseph took it for granted. He wasn’t alive when his son went out. Perhaps his death was necessary for it to happen. They shared the work together, until it was time for different work.

Time didn’t have as much meaning, in the place where Joseph found himself, after dying. At some point he found himself face to face with his son again.

They didn’t say anything. Jesus hugged him. Joseph tried to understand what he saw in his son’s face. It wasn’t the face he remembered. It wasn’t so much older. But it was sadder. It was also filled with a kind of joy Joseph couldn’t begin to describe. It reminded him of the face his son had had when he was a boy, when he had been found after lingering in the temple. That had been the day everything had changed, when the whole family knew, for the first time, what lay ahead. That is to say, when Joseph knew his son understood his destiny for the first time.

Joseph hugged his son in return. He didn’t want to let go. Not again. Jesus gave him a gentle smile.

Then he was gone.

Holy Days - Good Friday: An Easter Tale

He was an old man, then. He’d been the oldest of them, all those years earlier. He’d known about the Hebrew culture, had studied it somewhat extensively, out of idle academic curiosity. That was why he’d chosen myrrh, then. He’d been led to believe they were going to find a king. He’d chosen it so they could anoint him.

Today, he was a much older man. His bones ached. It hurt to move much at all, and so he was content, most days to not move much at all. Today, though, Balthasar thought about other things. It was early, yet, still very early in the morning. But he’d received news. 

They’d found themselves talking about the old days, this week, revisiting that journey, all those years ago, the baby they’d found in a stable, whom they’d paid homage, even in such a state, to whom they’d given their gifts, the gold, the frankincense, and yes, the myrrh. They’d all had a sense of foreboding. Nothing they’d seen, no signs. They’d heard the rumors of the authorities in Jerusalem.

It’s not true, what they said even in those days, that no one talked about the man, that he existed in a vacuum, that his life was unremarkable in his lifetime. There are remarkable people you treasure whom no one would think to record for posterity. That will always be true. The scale shifts. The everyday kindnesses that are so easy to take for granted, the wisdom that comes from sources outside traditional roles. These are things that can leave a profound impact on the world. They called Balthasar a wiseman, but he thought, he hoped, you didn’t need to be one to understand such things. He knew he was wrong about that. He knew that was the true distinction.

This man had made an impact, and he had inspired fear, not because he led an insurrection, either against Rome or his own people. No, never anything like that. Those are the things that wind up being recorded. They don’t talk about love, about compassion, the things so many people yearn for, so easy to ignore, why they’re so precious.

But that was what had happened to the man. All through the night he’d been undergoing a trial. He’d been arrested. Outside, in the worlds untouched by the circles within Jerusalem, it had quickly become a scandal. Word reached Balthasar quickly, much more quickly than the distance should have allowed. He was worlds away, in so many ways. None of this should have concerned him, and yet it had, many years ago, and even a wiseman couldn’t really have appreciated, then, the implications, so seemingly regional, irrelevant.

The man was going to die. He was going to be executed. He would be long dead before Balthasar could muster himself to undertake another journey. The Romans were a bit too predictable. The authorities there knew how these things worked, all too well. They’d conspired to rid themselves of a pest, who had threatened their peace of mind, their complacency, a man who had dared gather the lost flocks of their society and given them hope. He would end up on a cross. The landscape had begun to look naked, Balthasar was told, if there weren’t at least a few of those about on any given day.

No, he hadn’t considered the myrrh for its other applications. He’d gone in search of a king. Depending on how long it took the man to die, if somehow his family still had the myrrh, it would be used for something very different, before this day was done.

Balthasar found himself ashamed. Ashamed for humanity. Ashamed for his own weakness. Weakness in body, now. Weakness in spirit. Then. Weakness in spirit even this week. They had all undergone a journey when this man was born. They hadn’t bothered, when they knew he would die. No one had. He would die alone. He deserved so much better.

He felt very old. He still didn’t understand faith.

Holy Days - Thursday: An Easter Tale

In those days he had been young, and when he looked back, now, he felt he must have been a child, and he could still remember his elders in the fields, with him, except they were old men, now, and he was in charge, and had been for years, and struggled to remember when it had been any different. When you’re a shepherd you know how your day’s going to go. There’s not much mystery.

There had been, that night, all those years ago, that star shining so brightly, and the angel…Later, he’d told himself he’d imagined it, dreamed it. Anything but admit that it had really happened. Alone, or alone now among those who had experienced it, it was easy to pretend. It had been a lifetime ago.

Anyway, he still occupied the same fields, still there in Bethlehem. Today he was asked to sell one of his sheep. The request came from people he’d been hearing about the last few years, people who had been traveling about, a network, agitated people. It wasn’t hard to find the like. Everyone was agitated these days. No one was happy about the Romans. If he kept to himself, paid his taxes, he’d found he didn’t have to worry about it too much. 

Why someone would want one of his sheep over in Jerusalem, he couldn’t say. Seemed like a lot of bother. He assumed it was for the Passover, but it was a little early, and they’d seemed to be in a rush. “The master needs it now,” they’d said, “He’s in a rush. Never seen him like it.”

There were a lot of masters about, but the one spoken about had tended to inspire a different response. Normally he inspired calm. The shepherd knew these people. These were common people, for the most part, some of them important fishermen from Galilee, sure, who operated in circles similar to his, but who had spent their lives in the same daily fashion as him, busy about their work, hardly the like to change the world. In normal times, anyway. These weren’t normal times.

And this was not a normal day. He wondered. What was so different? What so urgent? 

There was something in the air. A desperation. Something was going to happen. The authorities were frequently given to sudden gestures, to assure the population of who was in control, to solidify their position. These things followed patterns. Troublemakers were rounded up. The shepherd wondered if the master’s luck had run out. 

All that was someone else’s problem. He tended his flock. He sold sheep. The urgency, though. These people. They seemed frightened. This was a movement of common stock. No one usually bothered to include men such as him in important affairs. His fields had been occupied by these people, though. He’d watched from a distance, too far away to hear, but surprised at the level of calm as the crowds listened. 

He decided he’d ask around, in a few days. He led a simple life. But he could involve himself in something like this.