disclaimer: if you see them on tv, they do not belong to me.

rating: T (violence, language)

summary: In this whirling madness of the world, you search for a place to begin, a Point A.

pairing: hint of mac/stella

Boy King
author: Jo C.

Two days before the assassination of Robert Kennedy, you got stuck on the A line. In the midst of the typical subway chaos of shuffling feet, senior citizen passes, and “no cash rebate” tokens, the evening rush swept you onto a train.

Close to four decades later, you don’t remember as much of it as you would like. A uniformed police officer had found you, and a babysitter got fired that night, but the details of the incident had flown away with the roar of the subway train, carrying with it all the memories you once had of your childhood on its hasty journey to Point B.

It’s one in the morning now, and the old man with the saxophone is still serenading passers-by. You linger nearby with your hands deep in your coat pockets, listen to a rendition of a Charlie Parker piece before dropping spare change into his instrument case. The old man gives you a nod in appreciation as the low rumble of an approaching train begins to drown out his efforts; the brakes shriek against the rails, and the high-pitched squeal lends an awkward harmonic note.

The doors of the last car fold open, and you step inside and find a seat towards the back – not that anyone’s fighting you: you’re alone. You sink down, loosen your tie before allowing your eyes to close.

The train jerks to life, and you feel the laws of physics acting on your body. The world blurs around you.

Consider a subway train that has to travel 2500 meters between two stations. The train leaves the first station and accelerates at 1.0 m/s2 for 500 meters, then travels at a constant velocity, then decelerates at -1.0 m/s2 over the final 500 meters until it stops at the next station. Find the train’s maximum speed and the total travel time between the two stations.

You remember your high school classroom with your mustached teacher, Mr. Berman, trying to teach centrifugal force to a group of students who didn’t give a shit, who were waiting for summer vacation to arrive, who were blasting too-loud music into their brains with their clunky Sony Walkmans. He tried to teach the importance of physics, and he would always say, over and over, “Veneziano’s String Theory: everything is connected. Everything is connected. You just have to find out how.”

But even this memory is worth very little to you; you can’t even recall any other details except for the thick stench of dead cats wafting from a Bio lab down the hall. You shake it out of your head.

You do have one other memory of school though: a sickening October morning, and it was a few months after you had gotten lost in the subway station under the heart of Brooklyn.

You were sitting next to your classmate and closest friend, Ben, near the front of the bus, comparing your arithmetic workbooks and quickly copying each others’ wrong answers before the bus left the stop. It seemed like every other typical day: the sixth grade boys were setting pencils (or whatever else they could get their hands on) on fire in the back rows, the girls were showing off to each other their lousy paintings for art class, the wanna-be cool kids were hopelessly trying to impress the cool kids, and Ben was bent over his workbook in the middle of scrawling down the answer to question number eight on page 23 when a hand grabbed a fistful of his fair hair.

The whole bus paused in its activity and watched in paralyzed horror and shock as Ben’s mother started hammering curse words at him, started beating him in the aisle.

Ben didn’t cry; in fact, he barely made a sound, but Lindsey Piper, a kindergartener from Ms. Hensel’s class, began to bawl, and you with your mouth slightly opened had tears filling your own eyes. Your breath was stuck in your throat, burning your lungs.

He was dragged off the bus, his mother’s hand tight around his upper arm to keep him from collapsing on the street, and you had to kneel on the dirty brown seat because you were still too short to see out the window when you were sitting. Nobody said anything, and it was silent save Lindsey Piper’s waning sniffles and the bus’s rusty engine on idle, but the pounding of your heartbeat was hurting your ears.

After a moment, the bus driver, the old, graying Mr. Hannigan, who was wearing the same look of disbelief, turned to you and said softly and gently, “Sit down, Boy,” and you were driven away.

Ben didn’t show up at school, and he didn’t show up at the bus stop again.

The amount of energy released from the explosion of one ton of TNT, one billion calories, is 4.2 x 109 joules. One ton of TNT can leave a destructive radius of approximately 92 meters, approximately 300 feet.

Then, suddenly, fifteen years later, fifteen years older, it was another sickening October morning on another continent: October 23rd, 1983.

Except it wasn’t the one ton of TNT out of your college textbook; it was six tons of TNT in front of your eyes, and in the middle of rubble, dead Marines, and a hatred you would later recognize, you didn’t understand the strange and disgusting mercy that had allowed you to continue to be alive when everyone around you was gone.

You lowered yourself to the ground, two feet away from where you had thrown up, and five feet (and way too close) to the dust that was just beginning to settle over the debris and over your heart, and you sat there very still and very silent with the dry, sticky combination of white sand and crimson blood on the palms of your hands.

The subway train jolts, screeches, as it slows to Canal and 6th Avenue, and you look up as a young man in a suit steps inside the car. He sets down his expensive briefcase, trying to juggle his keys, a thick folder of files, and a cup of coffee while yelling into his cell phone.

”Listen,” he says, “I was with a client – yes, that’s what I said: I was with a client – well, I’m sorry if that’s how you see it, but I can’t have – what? – fine – fine – Listen, can we discuss this when I get home? – I’ll be home in fifteen minutes, so can we not discuss it then? – god, you do this every time – I – no, I meant that – you know what? We’re not doing this now. I’ll be home in fifteen minutes. Good bye.” He snaps his phone shut.

You find yourself staring at him in a quiet, reminiscent pity.

If the speed of a roller coaster car is 20 m/s at the top of a 20 meter loop, and 30 m/s at the bottom. What is the car’s average angular acceleration if it takes 1.6 seconds to go from the top to the bottom? What is the minimum speed you must have at the top of a 20 meter roller coaster loop in order to keep the wheels on the track?

It was barely five thirty in the morning, and you were already up, searching around in the darkness of twilight for a tie that would match your shirt. You fumbled through the closet, desperately trying not to wake Claire who was still in bed, and you came across something that caught your eye on the back shelf, half-concealed behind one of her shirts.

It was a belt – thick, black, leather: a man’s belt. You squinted at it, then looked down at your waist. It wasn’t yours; you were wearing yours. You took it out, ran a thumb over the notches and over the creases where the leather had been worn down from use.

The words rang in your ears: What is the minimum speed you must have in order to keep the wheels on the track?

It wasn’t surprise or anger that was boiling up, but just a terrible, aching sadness – one that you had already been carrying around for a few months now though you didn’t know. No words came to your lips, but just a soft, quiet sigh as you tucked the belt back into the closet behind her shirt.

You removed the tie you wanted from its hook and slowly put it on. You slid into your jacket, dropped your phone, keys, badge into your pockets, and you were ready to head out when Claire’s voice stopped you at the door.

”Mac?”

You turned back slightly. “Yeah?”

She sat up in bed, and in the faint sunrise appearing over the horizon, you saw the glow of her hair and the blush of her cheeks. “You leaving already? It’s not even six yet.”

”A body floated up on the East River,” you said.

”Oh. I didn’t hear the phone.”

”I have to go.”

”C’mere.”

You pushed aside the bed sheets and sat down on the edge of the mattress. She kissed you lightly on the lips, and you closed your eyes. Even in the early daylight, the moment tasted like a horrible, clichéd ending to a movie that started out with hope and vision.

She adjusted your tie and smiled, blind to your disaffection, and maybe she was used to that already. “Have a good day,” she whispered against your mouth.

You said nothing as you left.

Then, the following Tuesday came. The axis of your world tilted, the wheels flew off the track, and your life careened to the broken pavement. Your head swam with panic.

If a Boeing 767 with a mass of 1.8 x 105 kilograms crashes into a 417 meter tall building, of 110 floors, at a velocity of 750 kilometers per hour, how many people will die?

(You heard Sergeant Denmore’s voice yelling at you to get up, Taylor, get up, and then Ben’s mother, screaming obscenities in the background of the sound of your blood pulsing through your veins, but the chaos on the street, the chaos in your heart eventually drowned out all sounds save the sonic blast of fear echoing in your head.)

You sat in the front pew of the church long after the service was over, and in your unvoiced anguish, you thought about returning to Chicago where things like this didn’t happen, but the memory of Claire’s laughter was awful, and Chicago would remind you even more of her, and fuck, when did it get this way? When did Mercy decide to single you out and leave you in your grief to a world where you only saw the blood-red pain of people around you?

Hesitant footsteps approached, the clicking of heels bouncing around the empty sanctuary.

You turned in your seat and found Stella Bonasera sitting in the last pew. There were no words exchanged for hours, and you stayed there in your separate rows until late into the night. She took you home to a painfully empty apartment, and the only thing she said, even as she was leaving, was a simple, “Good night, Mac,” before she locked the front door behind her.

From a window four stories above the street, you watched as she got back into her car. You didn’t hear the engine turn on even after ten minutes, and you eventually fell asleep on the couch, but when you woke up at dawn, the car was still there, having yet to move an inch.

You returned to work two days later, and you felt that guilt-soaked pity hanging in the air every time someone talked to you, avoiding direct eye contact, handing you their empty condolences (“God, I heard, I am so sorry”) and saying nice things about your wife (“She was a great person”). Stella didn’t do that though.

Stella still smiled at you the same way and still laughed all too obnoxiously around you and still picked fights with you because maybe she knew that you still had a steadfast soldier within you that was still surviving, somehow. Stella never even brought up the subject, and you were silently grateful for that because you always knew, even though you hadn’t yet, that you could only break down in front of her.

You didn’t break down though, didn’t break down exactly; you disintegrated instead, slowly, into a person you didn’t know, into a stranger that rode the train like a strange, underground chariot of ancient memories, and now, here you are, at that same subway station under Brooklyn four decades ago: Lafayette and Fulton.

You walk up to the street, a familiar street, and as you scan the neighborhood, you suspect you’ve known this city since its very creation because it pulses in your veins. It’s impossible to get lost, but still, in this whirling madness of the world, you search for a place to begin, a Point A.

The apartment building is a few blocks away, but by the time you reach it, you feel like you’ve lived a lifetime, or a few, and your blood is hot with experience. You scale the flights of steps two at a time, and it’s been awhile since you’ve been here. At the top of the stairs, you stop and stare down the long hallway.

Her heart: the second door on your left.

You knock softly, and it only takes her a few moments to appear. She looks sleepy and confused.

You stand there wordlessly, and you’re not the Mac Taylor she knows, the soldier, the detective, the widower. You are, instead, the little boy who got lost in the subway station one summer, the little boy who sat by himself on the bus, the little boy who was sent to another continent, the little boy who knows how to shoot a gun.

”Mac? Is everything all right?”

You are the boy who has seen too much, in your few years, of blood, pain, death.

”Stella, may I come in?”

end—
April 2005.