A House of Cards

September 06, 1969 At this very moment, the world is in the process of converting energies. This was the pearl of wisdom that came to me in those wee hours between midnight and dawn when all of the truth, mysteries, and questions of life and the universe are revealed to us mere mortals. In other words: I couldn’t sleep. In the morning I would be moving into my room at Wolbach Hall, officially on my own for the first time in my life, and in a few days, a few, short, days, I’d be starting my first year of college at Radcliffe. I was excited! The first days of school were always exciting to me and I’d been waiting for this particular first day for a very long time. As long as I could remember I’d wanted to attend Harvard, walk the Square, take study breaks along the Charles, swap ideas with the most preeminent minds in the country, and finally I was here! Okay…so maybe Radcliffe wasn’t exactly Harvard, but that was merely geography. On Monday I wasn’t just starting another year of school, I was starting the first day of my future. Who wouldn’t be excited about that? Unfortunately it wasn’t excitement that was keeping me up; it was images of a past that would never convert into a future. He didn’t even turn around. I switched on the lamp beside my bed and located my composition book from the last spot that it'd been before I’d made an attempt at sleep. At the moment it was brand new, nearly empty, the pages fresh, white, and ready to receive the many mysteries of the world. So far, though, the only thing that had been written in it was the one question that my philosophy teacher, Dr. Geiger, had started and ended the summer term on: What is duty? All summer long we’d discussed ethics in the modern arena. We discussed the shifting movements the country was currently going through: the War, the Woman’s Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the Labor Movement, and all term he questioned, “What is duty?” He had posed the question to us as if it were the most important one we’d ever be asked; as if the answer were life and death. “Oh, but it is,” Professor Geiger would insist passionately. “Eichmann claimed that he was only going to work every morning; that he was only doing his duty. The slaughter of 11. Million. People.” He would say slowly, each word its own sentence. “As merely the course of duty. Boys grow from playing with toy guns to becoming toy soldiers, convinced that they must serve their duty in order to become real men.” Professor Geiger had lost two brothers during the War: one had enlisted willingly the day he’d turned 18, and the other had been drafted and died in a bar fight the night before he was supposed to be shipped out. They’d died within several months of each other while he was in college busy obtaining his degree. “It is a matter of life and death,” he’d repeat with more gravity, meeting each of our eyes. Now, underneath that one, solitary, question, I wrote an oversimplified answer: Duty is doing what you are morally obligated to do. What is obligation, then? I mused. Do we have a social responsibility, a social conscious? When should social responsibility evoke civil disobedience? If we are merely acting on that which we should be doing morally are we really being disobedient? Is doing what you should do morality, or is it just complicity? Those that are complicit do what they’re told to do, when they’re told to do it: they are potential until they are called to motion. That sentence, particularly the word ‘potential’, brought me out of my current string of musings. As long as I can remember, people have told me that I had the potential to do anything I put my mind to, that I held promise. It used to make me feel proud whenever I heard that, but then I’d taken my first physics class and it made me forever hate that word. Potential energy is merely energy that exists, at rest. Potential, then, is only the capability of mobility, not the actual movement. Potential is a wedge. I am not potential energy, I wrote, I am kinetic, and as such I will not wait until my back is against the wall before I act! I decided to make that my mission statement for the upcoming school year: Energy! I turned the page and wrote that word down at the very top of my notebook, wondering if a one word mission statement was too perfunctory. I wrote down ‘perfunctory’ beside the word ‘energy’. Perfunctory =. I yawned through my laugh, wishing that there was a clock nearby. I knew that it had to be late. I’d been up for hours as it was, and I could barely keep my eyes open. I was mentally and physically drained, yet I wasn’t quite tired enough to not see images that didn’t exist when I closed my eyes. Like Derek in a tux. He’d look amazing, immaculate, dashing even. It’d be one of those rare times when he was all dressed up, starched and pressed with no sawdust or paint, no pencil stuck behind his ear. His cheeks would be red with that blush that he couldn’t help showing, and his face would be transformed by the force of his smile. Derek had one of those smiles that fully complemented his face; completed it like the last and most important puzzle piece of the jig-saw. Usually it didn’t take much to put that smile on his face, and of course he would be wearing a smile on this day. What was a wedding without a smile? Men always smiled; it was a moment of triumph for them, wasn’t it, and Derek was nothing without my smile. Only…he wouldn’t be smiling at me. The woman who met him at the end of the aisle wouldn’t be me, it wouldn’t be my face that he gazed endlessly upon, and after they exchanged vows, it wouldn’t be my forever that they disappeared off into. In this vision, he wouldn’t even look back as he disappeared into that future, the way he hadn’t looked back at the train depot to see me standing on the platform, watching him walk away: kinetic energy moving away from potential. As I’d stood there and watched, I couldn’t help thinking that if life were like the movie pictures, my fiancé wouldn’t have been boarding a train taking him back home to Alabama. The only reason he’d be getting on that train without me would be because he had to, because of circumstances beyond his control. If this were on the silver screen, he would have been dressed in army fatigues, his hair would be the buzz cut they issued when he was drafted, and his train would be taking him to Fort Dix before he was shipped overseas to secure for all the freedoms of liberty, to save the world from tyranny and communism. In that image I would have stood on the platform and watched, my dress billowing around me as tears poured resolutely from my eyes. He’d square his shoulders with the weight of the knowledge that the only reason he was leaving me was because his responsibility to me dictated that he had to make sure that I could live in a better world; because real Americans didn’t run from their obligations. Before he disappeared, though, he would pause in his stride, turn back to me and scoop me up into his arms, and as the symphony swelled tragically, he’d deliver one last pan-around-kiss before he jogged away. My two best girlfriends, Susie and Jane probably, would be there for me to cry into their arms as I watched his train disappear into the horizon, and they would have just the right words to tell me to make me feel better, to make me feel more proud then abandoned. If this were a movie picture, his ring would still be on my finger, and not balled up in his fist at the bottom of his pocket, keeping company with the lint.