First, Last, Everything

June 8,2017

Perhaps authenticity is just a license to be cruel, she thought. As Oscar Wilde had said, “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” Over this muddled inner discourse, the shrill blare of the fire alarm maneuvered through the warm stale air with the dispatch of a tugboat, reaching Alethea’s consciousness and propelling it back to the stage where she sat.

Diane, an old friend and colleague of Thea’s, had been speaking when the alarm sounded. She calmly directed the audience to the exits over the rising voices of panic as the crowd surged, a sluggish river of rising panic. Thea automatically began to mentally report the scene before her. That’s what she did; a correspondent of international renown, she was reluctantly onstage to accept the 2017 lifetime achievement award for journalistic excellence. “Lifetime achievement” sounded so final. Alethea hoped there was still time.

As a child, Thea had watched on television as the fire hoses and dogs were turned on civil rights protestors; She had cried over their screams and wondered how anyone could photograph such evil rather than jump in to help the victims. She grew to understand the greater good that came from illuminating injustice and informing the public… more good than one person could possibly do by acting alone. She had built a life around the premise that speaking the truth trumped individual acts of goodness. Was she wrong?

Driven by the alarm and without a thought for Diane, Thea walked toward the wings looking about for the exit sign. Her approach to both life and career had been as direct, and remarkably similar. Ignoring the undistinguished majority, Thea felt most righteously alive when trumpeting the heroics of the oppressed and reviling the monsters who opposed them. The narratives of these ambitious lives often seemed blissfully black and white, like the newsprint and ink they became. Perhaps personal relationships required a different palette with multiple shades of gray.

Barry White softly crooned "You're the First, the Last, My Everything", while scented candles flickered. In their beginning, before the wedding and children, they lay together savoring the languid afterglow of new love. Eagerly reaching out to deepen their relationship, she had sought a mental link and asked his favorite author (would it be Faulkner? Vonnegut?). Surprised, she had laughed carelessly at his professed love for the Fred Saberhagen Berserker novels. A casual knife scars. The collateral damage of authenticity.

Alethea had reached the point in life where she spent more time questioning than celebrating her past. A childhood defined by secrets and abandonments had forged an early allegiance to evidenced reality. Facts were trustworthy; people were not. She had eventually concluded that most people don’t seek the truth; they seek validation. With age and experience, she could better understand that desire. Untempered honesty has a very specific target market. Few can afford it.

© 2017 Joan Cichon   All Rights Reserved