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"Do you have a death wish?" asks Father Grindgrad.
According to the Health Utopians I do.
"I'm not talking about that. It wasn't enough that you've criticized the democratic process or people's television and reading habits. It's not enough that you don't give the people what they want. Now you attack the judicial system, especially the hallowed process of trial by jury, which dates to Henry II of England. And when do you do this? Just when you're going to trial!"
I might get the form of judgment I'm wishing for.
"Should I brace myself next for an attack on religion?"
Organized religion or popular religious beliefs in general?
Father Grindgrad, who believes in the presses more than religious pull, leaves in tears but returns an hour later and tells the Sardine:
"You've a medieval mind. You want to return to the Middle Ages."
The symptoms of medievalism are everywhere, but most are religious in nature: the search for belief and transcendence--from the New Age to Fundamentalist junk. On the other hand, returning to the Middle Ages would put me in a mindset on par with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church.
"I had an inkling of your medieval mind from the first Pun Pal column and all that stuff about Gaul and Charlemagne. Now barbarian trial by ordeal! I suppose you prefer herb medicines and folk cures instead of the medical techniques available from your doctor."
It's true that the further our society goes out on the technological limb, the more precarious our spiritual situation will become. Millennial movements and the apocalypse crowd will capitalize on spiritual vulnerabilities as much as doctors capitalize on the fear of death. But I don't think we have ever stopped being medieval. I'm merely suggesting that we shouldn't flatly reject all that was medieval.
"Of course, I'm only reflecting some of things the Logged-In Public has expressed to me privately. Frankly, they're a bit disgusted. Not because you rejected their idea for turning Sardine columns into a book, but at your general attitude. Right now, they're lining up outside the courthouse waiting for your trial."
[Knowing this, the Sardine might delay the trial for a few more columns. Maybe they'll get drenched in a rainstorm.]
I left the Father and would finish this column in peace at the local bar. Maybe McNulty could lift my spirits and restore the particle of faith I had once in humanity.
Joe T. was bartending. Oedipus Rex was sitting beside a younger woman who wore a white toga like his own. Joe finally came over to me after I had waited five minutes.
"Sorry, Sard, I was talking to Rexy's daughter."
And his sister!
"I don't really want to get into that." He paused. "Not bad looking, don't you think?"
What Joe T. was really asking: is she pretty enough for him to be seen with her in public? When women spoke to Joe, he immediately assumed they were interested in him and his body. A five or ten minute conversation, as he just had, convinced Joe she was in love with him, which was the first and probably most important component for Joe to fall in love with the woman.
Ignoring Joe's entreaty, I asked where McNulty was.
"He hasn't come in yet. It's only seven o'clock."
Only seven. That meant that McNulty had only awakened a few hours ago. I had mentioned previously that he had many, many drinks during the night out. Last call and leaving the bar did not end his drinking night. When he returned home, he stayed up most of the night reading seven or eight books lying around his den and bathroom. He usually poured himself three to five beers that served as chasers for the two or three glasses of a butterscotch liqueur.
It was a mystery how he remembered what he had read during the evening, and he remembered most of it, let alone how he managed to stay awake until sunrise. His wife, Honey, had long resigned herself to these extended drinking bouts, which had become more frequent since McNulty had retired.
"He should be dead," cried a Health Utopia official sitting several chairs from the Sardine, "or he's doing the best he can to kill himself."
On the contrary, I thought that McNulty stayed awake so late because he equated going to sleep, anymore, with dying! He might have been building up to this reading/ drinking binge for the last thirty years, but he was always the kind of guy who felt his mortality. He had regular checkups and was vigilante about his health--the reason he hasn't received a citation from the health authorities. What the health people didn't know was that McNulty laughs when he's told these activities will kill him. Why should he stop at the age of seventy? How else is he going to entertain himself in these last years? What's he saving himself for? Does he want to live to ninety-five and be in a perfectly decrepit state and shipped to a nursing home to die completely cutoff from life? Besides, most of the people he had grown up with were dead or fighting some form of cancer. Each night, late at night, he took to beer and butterscotch and books and consciously stared death down.
Now we had to put up with his late awakenings, which were a pain in the ass when you wanted check on something with him during the daylight hours.
Also, I had to answer Joe's question. For a moment, he had gone back to Oedipus's daughter; Oedipus moved his head around helplessly listening to Joe's hitting on Antigone. While on one level he was impressed by Joe's tragic track record, Oedipus might wish he had another set of eyes to poke out should Joe ever take Antigone on a date. Maybe he could discourage Joe by talking up the daughter/sister angle.
"Don't you think she's good looking?" Joe asked again. "I think she likes me."
I wondered had he met her before.
"No. Do you think I should ask her out?"
Joe tried to convince himself he was in love by playing out his fears rhetorically, especially his fear of rejection. He didn't really want my advice so much as my reassurance for what he was planning to do. But hadn't I heard Joe say that he didn't like Greek women because they were too. . . ?
"I hadn't really met one in person. It's true I don't like much hair on a woman, especially in the armpits. But that Antigone has a nice body and. . .she doesn't seem too hairy, does she?"
I couldn't tell from where I was sitting.
"I was thinking it was about time to start thinking about settling down."
Thus, Joe had expressed his personal death wish. A death wish on this relationship. He didn't want to get married but thought that if he had the idea first it would act as a spell against her having the same idea. Personally, I figured that any women who dated Joe T. for any length of time had her own death wish.
The Sardine's essays, articles, and stories have appeared around the Internet in the last few years at 3 A.M., Facets, Eclectica magazine, Fiction Funhouse, The Fiction Warehouse, 5_trope, and several film journals. Who and what he is probably will be revealed at various points through the articles appearing at this site. The first fifteen installments of his saga can be viewed at the old Unlikely Stories.