Authors: John Strauchs
“Analysis is paralysis! Analysis is paralysis!
He thought to himself. He kept saying it in his mind. He concentrated on being responsive to her. He had to stop analyzing
the moment. He had to quickly calm her anger. Once she started to vent, the opportunity
for reconciliation might be lost. He wanted her back. And for that to happen, he needed
to restore her self esteem. He strategized how to do it.
“There isn’t anything better at relaxing the spirit than music.”
He opened a desk
drawer and pulled out a soprano recorder. He waxed the cork joint and then fitted the
pieces together.
“Do you really think that this ruse is going to distract me? No way!” she said.
“Relax! Please!” he said.
“What is the harm?
Just a few minutes. Then we can
talk,” he said. “Give it a try. This is a beautiful recorder, isn’t it? It is a Stephan Blezinger made of fine European boxwood,” said Jared
“Fine. Fine,” said Jenny, “but just a few minutes, but then I don’t want any more
excuses from you. Then we talk. Right? You promise?”
The truth was that she wanted to be distracted. She wanted to lulled. She wanted
Jared. She always knew that. She was weakening already.
She turned to look at the recorder under the strong light of the desk lamp. The recorder was a work of art. It was certainly better than the plastic Yamaha she learned on.
He smiled. “I have no dishonorable intentions Miss Nilsson. Just lovely music.”
“
The son of a bitch was trying to seduce her--again
,” she thought.
That was not
going to happen.
But then again, why was she putting up with this silly game.
Did she
want to be seduced again? It’s not like she didn't understand what he was doing.
“I have to think for a moment. I haven’t read music since I was a little girl.”
“It will come back to you quicker than you can imagine. I’ll help you,” he said.
She closed her eyes and then opened them again as she stared at the notes. Jenny
dry fingered the recorder.
“I see you prefer the German fingering,” said Jared.
“Yes, German!”
She thought it was German.
She wasn’t really sure. She didn’t
know there was a nationality involved.
“Let’s give it a try.
You take the top.
There!” He pointed.
He took another recorder out of the drawer.
“This is also a Blezinger,” he said.
“Wow! May I see it?”
He handed it to Jenny. “It’s made of Santos Palisander—a kind of rosewood,”
said Jared.
“I didn’t realize they came in different sizes. The only recorder we had in high
school was like this one,” she said.
“This is a tenor recorder,” he said.
“It’s a work of art, Jared. I suppose you whittled it yourself.”
He ignored the taunt.
“Shall we?
It is an advanced piece but I know that you’re
up to it.”
Jenny felt intimated. Why did she go along with this?
“I am not going to let him humiliate me.”
She thought. She concentrated as hard
as she could. She put everything else out of her mind.
They started playing.
Jenny made it half way down the sheet and faltered, over
and over. She misread the same note three times in a row. Then she lost her place. She
missed her fingering. She rotated the barrel to line up with her fingers in a more comfortable way. The recorder was capable of soft, dulcet tones but it squealed and squeaked
horribly when a hole was only partially closed.
She intensified her focus. Jared’s playing was perfect. Each time she miscued, he
led them back to the beginning to start over. He was calm and patient. Jenny lost track of
time and lost sight of everything except the small black marks in front of her. Each time
she restarted she made it a little further down the page. It was coming back to her. She
had no sense of how many times they had restarted the piece. She grudgingly admitted to
herself that Jared was being very, very patient. And then…it happened.
They both played that entire sheet and she didn’t have a single misstep. Her eyes
welled up with tears. It was that beautiful. The brevity of it wasn’t a thought. For a few
fleeting minutes…or maybe it was seconds…she was a part of something almost ethereal.
She had created utter splendor. She had never before experienced that kind of creative
ecstasy. In her life she had never really played music before. She didn’t want it to stop.
The two recorders were in perfect synchronization. She felt the rush.
Jared glanced at Jenny.
It made him feel happy.
That didn’t happen often for
Jared. He had been in torment for days.
He sensed her joy and it made him feel good.
He wasn’t expecting it.
They started on the right hand sheet. She squeaked within a few notes of the new
page. The spell was broken, but it was alright. She put down the recorder.
“Was it seconds, minutes? It felt like hours,”
she thought.
“Jenny, don’t stop. You played magnificently. You can do it again. Beauty can be
frozen in time,” he said.
“Beauty frozen in time. Yes, I feel that. This is honestly the first time in my life
that I really played music. It was really music. I want to do it again some time, but right
now I want to quit while I am still ahead. It’s time to keep your promise, Jared.”
“Of course!” He gathered up the recorders and put them away.
“I am glad you convinced me into doing that, but now it’s my turn.
I want to
talk,” said Jenny.
“Then we shall talk,” he said.
She led him into his den.
She sat is his large sofa. She moved to one end. She
pulled a large cushion into her lap and curled her legs underneath. The cuffs of her pants
were still wet.
She didn’t like the feel of them.
She wanted to take them off, but she
knew she shouldn’t. She didn’t want to send the wrong signal. She waited until Jared sat
down beside her and she turned to face him.
He waited for her to start. She thought for a while.
She didn’t know where to
start.
“Who are you Jared?
Why couldn’t you be honest with me?
Why did I have to
learn who you are—what you are—from Father O’Connor—and others. I knew you were
a child prodigy—I guess you told me that yourself when we met—but you are obviously
so much more than that.
Why couldn’t you be honest with me? Who are you Jared and
what do I mean to you?”
Now Jared sat silent for a time, staring into the fire.
Jenny waited for him to
speak. When the waiting became too intense, she glanced away from him and stared into
the fire as well.
“This is difficult to explain,” said Jared.
“I’m just not smart enough to understand? Is that what you are trying to tell me?”
she said.
“Well, yes, that is part of it,” said Jared.
The hurt in Jenny’s eyes was palpable. That was not what she expected him to
say.
“Please hear me out. Let me explain what I mean,” he said.
“Go ahead,” said Jenny.
“You’ve probably heard this from O’Connor already, but let me put it in my
words. Some palaeoanthropologists, albeit not that many, have thought that human evolution was not uniform and gradual.
The eventual development of Homo sapiens about
400,000 years ago was not evolutionary as much as it was cataclysmic.
Millennia had
passed since the earliest ancestor, possibly Australopithecus ramidus, about 5 or 6 million
years ago, somehow acquired genetic developments that started the path toward modern
man. These were just a few new threads in the fabric of human evolution. Modern man,
Homo sapiens sapiens, developed not much longer than approximately 60,000 years ago,
although some suggest 130,000 years ago. Either date is so recent it hardly matters. That
is one-thousandth of a percent of the age of primates,” said Jared.
“This is very interesting, but what is your point.
I already heard all of this from
Father O’Connor,” said Jenny.
“Maybe you didn’t hear all of it. The point is that once every 100,000 years, perhaps every 500,000 years, or even every million years—it scarcely matters what the period is—an individual is born who represents a massive advancement in human intellect,
human physiology, or other development. It is an abrupt leap in evolution. It is a massive
leap. Contrary to conventional wisdom, evolution is not steady and gradual.
Evolution
remains largely unchanged for thousands of generations until another great leap occurs.
The leap begins in one generation; with one individual. Whether it was an aberration in
one individual’s DNA or his chromosomes were struck by cosmic rays, suddenly, human
evolution and development explodes and then remains largely unchanged again until the
next time a unique individual is born.” He continued.
“Most anthropologists have willfully ignored the obvious absence of any explanation why there is virtually no evidence of gradual and continuous development. They are
forever searching for the missing links. That is, of course, an impossibility because they
are searching for the skulls and bones of a handful of individuals hidden across the expanse of the entire planet. This inconsistency in data also led to the far-fetched theories of
debunked theorists like Erich von Däniken who, among many others, claimed that these
spikes in human development were the result of alien civilizations from other worlds experimenting with genetic engineering on our little world. Did you ever read
Chariots of
the Gods
?”
“No, but I saw a special about it on TV.
I thought he was discredited and convicted of something. He was a German,” said Jenny.
“He was Swiss and, yes, he was convicted of business fraud. He readily admitted
to fabricating evidence in an infamous NOVA TV program, but you’re missing the point.
The point is that alien tampering theories were concocted because everyone was searching for a rational explanation for the lack of evidence of continuous and gradual development of humans.
The simplest explanation is usually the most likely to be true…you
know, Occam’s Razor. The simplest explanation for occasional explosions in human development is the birth of a single individual with a radically new genetic code. The point
is…therefore…that I am one of those individuals. It’s that simple,” said Jared.
“You are a missing link,” said Jenny. “
This is B.S
.,” she thought.
“In a manner of speaking…yes. I was a freak of nature.
I guess freak is a bad
choice of words, but then again, it is technically accurate,” said Jared.
“Evolution is
based on mutations. Almost all mutations eventually prove to be either harmful or irrelevant, but a rare number are beneficial and an even rarer number of those are revolutionary. Let me give you a better sense of that. Our Milky Way galaxy moves through the
universe at high speeds and its arms spin within. When both movements are aligned, the
speed is about 160 miles per second,” said Jared.
Jenny thought that it was a little interesting. Father O’Connor hadn’t explained it
like this. She wasn’t sure how it related to her question, but it was interesting.
Jared continued. “Every 63 million years or so, the galaxy collides with what we
could call a gaseous cloud. The collision creates cosmic rays which, in turn, create ultraviolet—UV—radiation. Although cosmic rays could do the most damage in terms of capacity, it is the UV radiation that affects genetic materials the most. The amount of radiation is also greatly influenced by the position of the earth within the Milky Way. The
earth moves around inside our galaxy.
The closer we are to the edge, the greater the
damage to all living things.
And we don’t necessarily have to wait 63 million years for
each wave of mutations.
It’s happening all the time, albeit from shorter durations and
from weaker collisions with minor gaseous accumulations. As I said, most mutations are
not beneficial to mankind, but once in a great while, something spectacular occurs—a
megagenius is created.
No one can know what changes these individuals, male and female, may have precipitated over the history of humankind.
Speech may have started
from one nuclear megagenius family.
Perhaps they invented metal working, the Atlatl,
the bow and arrow, flint napping arrow points, weaving, writing, food preservation, farming, or what have you. These are very rare events that occurred over very long periods of
time.
The megageniuses that had progeny were probably extraordinarily rare; as rare as
they were in being created. Most of them probably died one way or another before they
could procreate. Many others were possibly killed by other early humans. Uniqueness is
not tolerated.
Others may have chosen not to have children.
Yet others may have committed suicide because they couldn’t fit into the world they were born into,” said Jared.
Jenny looked away when he mentioned suicide.
She knew he was suicidal.
It
was another secret that he tried to keep from her.
“So you are one of these megageniuses?” asked Jenny.
Jenny’s mind raced.
This wasn’t new information.
This was pretty much what
Father O’Connor told her about Jared, but it was important to Jenny to hear it from Jared.
“And you’re the smartest man on this planet and the smartest in the last million
years?” asked Jenny. She was very skeptical.
“That was rhetorical, wasn’t it? asked Jared.
“How fast can you read?” asked Jenny.
“I’ve never bothered to measure it.
Certainly, it must be several thousand words
per minute.”
She ignored that.
“So I am a cave woman as far as you’re concerned. How can
you bear to be around a primitive like me?” That was meant to hurt. It did! Jared knew it
would be difficult to convince her. The whole explanation was hard to swallow.
They were both silent after that. They didn’t look at each other.
Jared turned to her. “I love you Jenny.”
“How can you say that, Jared? How could you have been so dishonest with me
and say that? This is as pathetic as an old movie, the one where the prince doesn’t tell the
poor common girl that he is a prince. It sucked in the movies and it sucks now. I don’t
know if I believe any of what you are telling me, but if it’s true, why wouldn’t you have
told me this a long time ago.
Why did I have to get this stuff from Father O’Connor?”
she asked.
“I’m sorry. I really am.
I have never explained myself to anyone before. No one
in my entire life. Just you. That isn’t an excuse, but it is an explanation.”
“This isn’t about you being a prince.
If this is true, this is about you being some
kind of new species. I still don’t know who you are. Heck, I don’t know what you are,”
said Jenny.
“I am a man. I am a man who is in love with you. I want to spend the rest of my
life with you Jenny,” said Jared.
She began to cry quietly. He hugged her close.
He held her.
They didn’t speak
again for a long time.
She whispered. “I love you too, Jared. I love you so much it hurts. I don’t know
what to think,” she said.
He held her tighter and gently ran his fingers through her hair.
He said nothing.
This was Jenny’s time. He waited for her.
“You have to tell me everything about yourself. There can’t be any secrets. Nothing can be unsaid even if unasked. Think about what I should know and tell me, Jared. If
we are going to spend our lives together, I have to know who you are. And, don’t treat
me like a primitive. I may not be as intelligent as you obviously are, but I respect myself
and what I have accomplished.
And there’s something else…our relationship has to be
more than sex.
I couldn’t bear to be with you if I didn’t truly believe that you respected
who I am as a complete person.”