Those Most Distant In Likeness To Us Are Not Average

Danny was home, it was Friday, the phone rings, “Hey Danny the centurians are coming over for dinner, well minus the one that is in jail, I think you should come over.” “I can’t I am busy.” Danny wasn’t busy, Danny was never really busy, this was the problem, this was something that bothered Danny but even Danny did not know that it bothered him; he was never busy because the world did not much move him to be busy, and so he liked all activities to beg themselves upon him. “Danny come on it will be fun, besides Antoinette wants to see you.” “Ok, I will dispense with my busy-ness.”

Danny stopped over by his favorite wine store, he was as many well educated and cultured people involved in the fine art of selecting affordable wines. He browsed the section, same as he always had, and lightly with his eyes touched the more refined obsessions, finally settling between one of the three $10 dollar brands. And remembering that last time he went to Lauren’s they ran out, bought two bottles.

I don’t remember if in the previous book, or in this one, if we had introduced Habakkuk to Danny or the other way around, anyway we can introduce the two here but forgive the repetition if any, though you can forget you met someone and two people can forget that they met each other, and an author can equally forget who knows whom and why.

Lauren opens the door, always happy to see Danny, hug and a kiss on the cheek, Antoinette follows suit, and then comes the appropriate introduction to the centurians, Habakkuk looks at Danny but does nothing else, Danny might not even exist in the context of the world, Habakkuk has a problem acknowledging individuals, he is more likely to acknowledge histories and movements, entire societies but a person standing in front of him, has to act to be certified into his brain.

Father Trocin is more gregarious, “Danny the coroner fellow right?” Shaking his hand, “Yeap that’s me father.” There that was also part of Danny, resigned to his post, but equally amused by the moments, “you must be one of the centurians.” Trocin laughs, looks at Habakkuk with discreet concern, while responding, “what are those, anyway, centurians, old people perhaps.” Antoinette steps in to cuddle the uncomfortable moment, while handing out wine, “These guys have lots of world wisdom behind their thoughts, only centurians could be so wise.” They all laugh at the non-joke.

Trocin leads a toast, “to ruminating.”

Trocin realizes that they are all a little uncomfortable with Danny, so he decides to help Lauren and Antoinette by instituting the conversation, “Father Otto took his arrest rather well.”

Lauren, the most qualified to reply, “He practically insisted, he really was tired of the priest gig and considered being an inmate a change, but I don’t think he was looking forward to it, he confessed mostly out of boredom, he could have fought the charge and yet he didn’t.”

At that moment, Lauren spilled some wine on her pants, and little drops of red wine splattered across her pant leg. She thought, “I didn’t feel anything, if I hadn’t seen it happen my feelings wouldn’t have told me anything, what else am I missing? What if my clothes could feel like my flesh?” Images of the wind in the street, passing cars splashing dust, water droplets from air conditioners, the smells of people pouring through her porous clothes. “Incessant distraction.” Or so she thought.

Danny wanted to instigate something, “Well I am not sure that he is guilty of murder, but he certainly is guilty of manslaughter.”

At that point Loki cat was passing by, unable of course to comprehend the English language, he was still startled enough to pause and stare at Danny’s lips dig his tongue, whipping up the air, while his mouth cavity created vacuum tossed syllable waves that crashed into Loki’s ears in a very distasteful manner, “murder” “manslaughter”.

Trocin assaulted the idea, “O common haven’t you ever walked up to someone and scared them; he didn’t mean to kill him, Father Otto is a sensitive creature, he is always touching flowers as if they were part of his soul, which they are but that is a whole other story.”

Antoinette tasting her wine, “I have been reading Pravda, the Russian newspaper, on the Internet, and they recently reported a candidate for the presidency that carried a potted plant around as a representation of his soul. He even left it in a meeting once so as to be represented.”

They all laugh, Habakkuk stops laughing first, “Well it is not possible to disembody the soul into a plant, that is a lower ergio consummation than is humanly possible, but the plant does feel and absorbs soul expressions. So he might be misguided but not wholly wrong.”

Danny, “Well that doesn’t take away from the fact that Father Otto did “Boo” the archbishop into sublimation.”

Habakkuk, “Well yes, but the entire congregation wanted the guy dead, Timothy was walking around on borrowed time, a whisper would have killed him just as well, a chandelier might have fallen from the ceiling, a falling hammer from a construction site, or a mugger could have instigated his death; what Timothy had of a problem was that too many people had wished him death and the universe was trying to act out their combined massification of desire.”

Trocin added, “Yes, yes, we all know that already, just like it is obvious that even Timothy with his general disregard for everyone didn’t like it here, didn’t want to be here and was asking to be killed.”

Danny whose head had been raising back and forth between the speakers, “Obvious to you perhaps but not obvious to a coroner such as myself, in the evidence I did not see that he wanted to die nor that he had been literally murdered.”

Trocin, “Doctor, you’re a forensic pathologist, an experienced one at that, I am sure that you were looking for physical evidence of what was a metaphysical crime, hence the reason why there was no reason, and hence the aspect void which forbids forensic scientists from solving these types of crimes.”

Danny, “But all crimes leave evidence behind.”

Trocin, “Sure, so does this one, only it is not rational evidence based on cause and effect, it is not one person that wanted the archbishop dead, it was an entire congregation, friends, acquaintances, and even Timothy himself, with your logic you’re only going to find one reasonable suspect, Otto, and he is the least guilty, for the archbishop was going to die of a spider bite or the flu.”

Danny, “How can you prove that.’

Trocin, shrugging his expression, “I can’t, nor do I want to prove it, it would be senseless to prove it.”

Habakkuk, “Doctor you use evidence to solve crimes, the universe can always provide that, but it won’t solve the real reason for the murder. Just like it would be difficult to ascertain if Jesus was killed by the lack of interference from the Virgin Mother, Joseph that resented his existence, or if he was killed by the Romans, or if it was the Jews, or if it was that the Christians wanted him dead to have an immortal idol, or if it was that Jesus himself wanted to die and be seen as a martyr for humanity for masochistic glory. None of those things can be proven, they can be speculated upon, and yet what might be more real than that, is that while you are looking for a linear one track solution to why Christ died on the cross, the only real solution might be that all those people killed him, including himself, his parents and his god.”

Danny, somewhat smirking, “I am not a unreasonable man, I could agree with all that, but in this world people get killed for some very obvious reasons that have no bearing on mystic preconceptions, for instance; recently a man killed his daughter and himself, why, why, because he could not deal with a divorce, and recently a young Muslim girl killed herself because she was not allowed to continue with her studies by her traditionalist father. These crimes are clearly motivated by something very evident to us logicians.”

Habakkuk, feeling as if he needed a cigarette, “These are logical energies, you use them at a local level, it is how they manifest themselves through the agglomeration of something we call the ergio aggregate, that is, a desire mutilates itself if it is not being fulfilled to its maximum aspiration. The girl did not kill herself because she could not study, she could have left her father’s influence and gone on to study as many people have chosen to do when they are forced to act against their desires, but she didn’t leave him, why, because maybe it was just more than going to study, she wanted to kill herself, and her father gave her the perfect local excuse to do it, where she needed to reason it out, because she could not logically deal with her wish to die. A wish that may have arrived at her from some invalidation of her existence which she herself could not acknowledge; this because it could prove that she was many times more wrong than her father or because being oriented towards studying she didn’t want to do what you Doctor don’t want to do yourself and that is question the logic of logic.”

Antoinette ate a piece of cheese. Lauren continued to deconstruct herself, her clothes did not feel, clothes isolated her from her environment, a veil a tunic more so; her job was based on logic patterns, this was based on some local logic which the universe did not bother to obey, so she utters out loud, “So my investigations are pointless, what Danny does is pointless and we should just kill ourselves!”

Habakkuk, “But why kill yourself, life is so short, everything is going to kill you before you reach one hundred years of age, so why rush it, what difference does it make? buy some music, read a good novel, engorge yourself with the intensity and seriousness of a world where everything has a short fused, who cares about the belief, you can’t participate in the emancipation of your being from this perspective because you are what you already decided to be. The archbishop deigned himself as much as his parents deigned him, as much as the pope deigned him, and as much as then everyone worked to undeign him. There is no crime there, no one is guilty of anything. No one killed Timothy, in this world, your world view had to have someone kill him.”

Lauren, “No one should be punished then?”

Habakkuk, “Lauren you know Father Otto is a gentle creature, he is almost a saint, you don’t believe he killed anyone, but because your logic tells you that there have to be consequences, then to complete your linearity you are willing to accept that he is guilty, at least of manslaughter. Does that make you feel better? Do you feel better because generals say that there have to be nuclear weapons to safeguard our world?”

“No, it doesn’t make me feel better, but if Otto hadn’t come up from behind him and literally scared him to death he wouldn’t be dead now would he.”

Habakkuk, “Lauren he was going to die no matter what, Otto was just there at that moment.”

Trocin, “He is right, there was nothing Otto could have done to rescue him, the only thing Otto did, and mostly because he is a centurian was acknowledge that he was there and that nothing he did would change anything, including the actions that justice would take.”

Antoinette, always the quiet backbone of the universe, “well then it doesn’t matter what happens to Otto now, and Lauren can certainly worry less about solving her cases, and she could stay with me more. I think am a liking this helpless universe where everything we do is now not some individual choice but a joint venture in which we are all prisoners of each other and there is no way out.” She took a serious bite of her cheddar cheese, showing her fangs in the process.

Habakkuk understood too well what she was hinting at, “It is a wholly symbiotic relationship that tangles humanity, everyone is a parasite of everyone else, and the human subconscious executes the will of the whole whether we like averageness or not, it doesn’t matter, we are average. And it is that averageness that safeguards us from all the things in the universe that are most distant in likeness from us.”

Antoinette responded, “Maybe I am an idealist, maybe I am a purist, but you all give in to this humdrum banality of some disciplined cosmic will that somehow brings together all of our wants and fears and averages them out so as to produce the most cohesive results; and so Lauren and I what! We don’t matter, we are just part of the local constituency of a cosmic desire to love women and we ourselves don’t matter. No, that sounds trite, even if you tabulate the incessant number of algorithms that the cosmic would have to crunch to meek out an average of any given desire, and then to accumulate all of our desires over some modified constant so that we wouldn’t explode from the quartering incompatibles within our nature.”

Trocin, “The fiber doesn’t have to calculate, such an awful thing to say, it just does it, everything is instant, all cats are the same ergio desire manifested one cat lives because all cats live, you’ve seen one cat you’ve seen them all. And gratification is instant satisfaction, instant pay backs, there are no debts in the universe, the universe is trying to execute your desires but it doesn’t feel that it owes them to you, nor will it have fail if it dies in the process of executing them; see the universe doesn’t know it is executing your desires or an agglomeration of all the desires of all lesbians in the universe and somehow compacting them within the relationship that you and Lauren have. The universe doesn’t know you exist, it merely supposes your existence from the existence of the desire that is you.”

Danny, “I think I am really lost now.”

Habakkuk, “You are not lost Danny, it doesn’t make sense, it can not make sense, it is only logical in that it is not supposed to make sense. Things that make sense have a tiny form factor, they don’t go beyond contractual obligations, which can break apart as soon as someone doesn’t think they make sense. So just don’t try to make it comprehensible to your aspiring logic, just stay away from trying to fix it or neatly terminate the fuzzy loop in your mind.”

Trocin added, “The only way to be rational is to ignore the unexplainable.”

The evening came to a close, Danny was the last to leave, he walked with burdened shoulders. Antoinette hugged him, “Those shits, words don’t cost them nothing.”

That next Monday was the hearing to determine if Father Otto would go to trial.

At the hearing, presiding was Judith Priest, a very intelligent and highly respected and honored judge, who was known as heavy handed with sentences, a no nonsense attitude towards her work. She didn’t like fancy lawyers, from fancy law offices such as William, William and William and McMillan, that were constantly trouncing on the law with their creative scheming. She respected public defendants and district attorneys because they generally didn’t come from the well healed aspects of society, “you’re all street slugs like me.” She was fond of saying. And indeed she did come from a modest background, her father had been a mechanic at a Sears department store, practically his entire life, he resented that he had to provide all his own tools, had never traveled outside of Michigan and was enamored with beer, Coors, in particular, he didn’t think much of his wife, she was the cook, she didn’t do anything right, but neither did the rest of the world. It was trying to escape that beer drinking, TV enslaved father of hers, that she went on to get an education, and become the critical judge that her righteously opinioned father would have become had he had the opportunities she did or better said, lived in her times.

Judith Priest, sat there incredulous listening to the simpleness of the case as finally argued by the district attorney, “And so he came from behind,” pointing his fingers at the judge and emphatically so, “by his own admission your honor, assaulted the victim with a “scare tactic” a “Boo” that “quickly” ended the Archbishop’s life. In this way your honor was a life that had been dedicated to the service of god taken, in this way, in the ever to be expected silent and holy altar, sound broke in and startling uncovered a crime of priest against priest,” raising his hands way up in the air, “for it was known high and low that Father Otto did not like the archbishop, was not happy with the reviews that had been sent of his person to the Vatican, and so a crime was done within the house of the lord your honor.”

Your honor sat there silently for a while, everyone was waiting to hear her words, she had listened to Lauren call for leniency, that she felt it was an accident of the moment, Ogle had testified that he felt murder was murder no matter how it was done, maybe it was negligence and poor judgment but the fact was Timothy Wellington would still be alive if Father Otto hadn’t scared him to death. She had listened to Danny explain how the body’s adrenalin system works to raise the body into action when faced by a threat, and he carefully and even methodically explained how the spike effect is caused by a sudden event, and yet how it implies that the body almost responds but doesn’t and why the very similitude can be found in subjects dreaming.

After the long silence, she gazed intently at Father Otto, who had confessed and expected justice by his own admission, “…to be sent to prison for a crime that I did not premeditate but that I did commit as I was myself a witness.” Then she arrested the district attorney with her alert eyes, and commenced pounding away at the long drawn abyss of silence which she had so effectively created, “You are not Al Pacino, this is not a play, you are playing with peoples lives here, you are not Moses giving out the twelve commandments, your not even political material, you are not going to be president, I am going to make sure of that though I doubt I will have to do anything to prevent it. You don’t point your fingers at me! you don’t try to run for office in my courtroom, you will never again rouse all those fancy words in my courtroom to state your case, you will keep it simple so that the people can understand what you are saying and why you are saying it; I don’t care if you are boring enough to read the dictionary every night, it is my duty to make sure that your self imposed pomposity doesn’t wash all over the justice system that I highly respect and defend.” She pauses again, obviously understanding the effects that timing and voids have on us all, then she proceeds, “now why do you bring this case to me? Father Otto is not a criminal, he might be a bit naive but he ain’t no criminal, do you think he will commit this crime again?”

The district attorney touches his forehead to wipe off some nervous sweat, his palm returns to his coat pocket all wet, “It is possible your honor that he could scare someone else to death if pranks are proven to be part of his nature.”

Judge Priest remains quiet, looks at him, “do you really think that scaring people is part of his nature?”

“Your honor I can not make the assumption that he is not capable of committing the crime again, it would be improper of me, as district attorney, to risk the lives of our citizens based on the lack of impropriety in Father Trocin’s history, the man scared a fellow priest to death, he didn’t like him, he even said he did not mind that he had died, he hid the crime from the authorities and so obstructed justice, if I let myself think that this man is innocent he might do it again, or worse I might start to judge others that only commit one time crimes, “innocent” because they are not recalcitrant criminals; I beg you to remember your honor that justice is an example more than a punishment. We serve her best through preventive measures.”

“I see, so at some level you agree with me but you can’t really agree with me and you hope that I will agree with you for the sake of justice and your definition of preventive justice at that.”

“Your honor please, you are much better at psychological games than I am, please I am not going to try to convince you of anything, I am trying to make sure that you let these hearings proceed to trial by jury where this man’s peers will judge him rightly.”

Tapping her podium, “I see and you think you can find a jury objective enough to judge a priest, should it be conformed of all Catholics then?”

“No your honor of course not, that is not to say that Catholics would not equally have the capacity to judge him, but it should be a mixed jury, with other religious faiths included, Mormons, protestants, Jews, anyone that is willing to be objective including atheists.”

“Are you then saying that you believe that you will be able to convince such a jury of the guiltiness that you have assigned this man.”

At this point the DA was sweating so profusely that he was looking rather like an uncomfortable radish in a courtroom, and he lashed out, “You honor, with all d respect, am I the one on trial here today? Because I don’t think I am the one that we are here to judge your honor, and if it is me, then you are out of line.”

Judge Priest substantially irritated, her eyes so large as to gobble this man, “Al Pacino You will not make a scene in my courtroom, I don’t care how much you think of yourself and your case, I don’t care! Now compose yourself, I need to know if you are making an emotional case or if there are facts and objectives and facts! Truths are the only things that can judge this man guilty of murder or manslaughter. I am not going to suppose that you, as district attorney has his best intentions in mind; nor am I going to give myself the luxury of believing that his signed confession means that he is honest and that he comprehends the impact of his confession or the nature of his actions. Do you understand me!”

“Yes, your honor.”

“Are you a catholic!”

“No your honor I am not a catholic.”

“What religion are you then?”

“I am an atheist your honor.”

“Are you a practicing atheist?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you try to convince others that there isn’t a god, would you be convincing Father Otto that there wasn’t a god by showing that his god would put him in jail, that is what I mean!”

“No your honor, I don’t give it much thought, I don’t even have the time to practice it, if there is such a thing.”

“Then did you just commit perjury in front of this court by agreeing to tell the truth so help you god!”

“Your honor, I have every intention of telling the truth, swear it by god and the bible if you like, I wasn’t thinking of that, I was thinking that I was going to tell the truth no matter what, that’s what I swore to do.”

“Very well you may sit down.”

The district attorney takes his seat, drinks two glasses of water without taking into consideration that one of them belonged to his assistant next to him.

Judge Priest proceeds, “It is normal in these types of cases for the court to adjourn and to hand out its verdict through a communiqué, but I think too much damage that is unheralded can be accomplished by not coming to conclusions today. This court therefore prescribes that this case does not merit going to trial, better to save the taxpayers dollars for more grievous cases, that doesn’t mean that this court does not consider the circumstances surrounding archbishop Timothy Wellington’s death sad and misguided, but it merely means that they do not warrant the full extent that the law could place upon them, because of happenstance. Happenstance is not reason enough to apply the law. With that,” she intently and almost motherly looks at Father Otto, “I do recommend an immediate psychological review, and minimum three months of counseling, where you Father Otto, might be helped in coping with what must be an ordeal, complicated enough to require assistance outside the church.”

With those words she pounded the gavel to drown out any silence, and sternly noted, “this court is closed.”