Asshole Ch. 02

While the airplane was queuing for a turn on O'Hare runway behind five others, the stewards and stewardesses began to take the stage for their live safety show, complete with seat belt extenders and colorful yellow masks with surgical tubing. Becky suddenly realized where she was in the crook of Stefan's arm and with both her hands on his chest pushed herself away. She lowered the armrest and leaned against the open cabin window.

"Kate would kick my ass." She paused. "How come you never liked me? I mean for Mark. As his wife. You never talked to me. You still haven't. I talk to you and you say you'll look into it, whatever 'it' 'it' might be, but you never ask about me or Erika. You took the God-Father job, but we never see you."

She looked down at her hands. "What about all that shit about looking after her spiritual growth, guidance and development?"

Stefan leaned away from her, eyeing her like a pestilence in a petri dish. He looked up at the stewardess who smartly clipped and then un-clipped her lap belt extension to show the passengers how they work. The stewardess, "Shelly" on her badge, smiled at him for paying attention.

He looked back at her. "Well, you know, as a follower of Christ, I'm never sure how to behave around the murderers of our Heavenly Father's only son." He looked at her in earnest.

"Fuck you! Jesus was a Jew, just like me and just like his murderers." She smiled down at her lap when he laughed at her. "In Judaism, we're all the sons and daughters of God. And since he was a Jew himself, I can see how you'd get confused thinking he was the only one since he's the only Jew to whom you Christians pay attention to spiritually. You're happy having the rest of us in Hollywood or working your banks. You keep up that attitude and me and my folk just might do it again next time he pops by. No. Really. Stefan. What the fuck. Why wasn't I ever good enough?" She had leaned forward in her seat and the left side of her face was leaning on the seat in front of her, her hands clasped in her lap.

He looked up again at the stewardess, Shelly, as she scowled behind her mask and demonstrating a gentle "tug" to start the flow of oxygen.

His eyes still on Shelly's performance, he uncrossed his legs and leaned forward in his seat, elbows to knees and clasped his hands like hers. "I guess I never knew what to make of you. You were always kind of a bitch. And with Mark, well, being Mark. I didn't know what to make of it, so I just had to stay away before I... Sometimes I try to fix things that aren't broken."

He looked at Becky again when Shelly put the inflation tube of her vest in her mouth, demonstrating what to do if the automatic canisters fail to inflate the vest subsequent to a water landing. Offhandedly he said, "Water landing is a happy way to say 'Crash.'" Shelly heard him and hit him with the vest she'd just removed.

"Have you ever looked at a thing from which the sum of its parts all looks fine, but when you look at the actual parts it doesn't make sense to you that they would ever be viable as the building blocks of that fine thing?" he asked.

She sat back and looked at him oddly. "You realize that you've just described a healthy organism with a disease, right?"

"Yeah, I do."

She waited a while. "So you think I'm a disease to a healthy marriage?"

"No, I think you're both the disease and the result was a healthy organism. Sort of like how patients with MS can get anti-inflammatory relief from having been infected with a parasite. You're both fucked up. I just have a bad case of foot in mouth and knew to leave well enough alone before I tried fixing one thing while jeopardising the other." She turned away from him, sat back and looked out the window, moving her left elbow to the arm rest and pinching her lower lip as she thought about what he'd said.

He sat back too as the plane began to make the last turn before gathering speed to lift off.

+----+

Stefan woke up when his tray table dropped. Two airplane bottles of scotch accompanied a short cup of ice on the tray as he tried pushing himself up from a slouch and trying to stretch at the same time. He heard Becky laughing next to him.

"Fucking Kate fell in love with that face waking up every morning?" She poured a small bottle of red wine into a cup like that which Stefan had for his ice.

"You would do well to have the courtesy to leave the kind, lovely and gracious Mrs. Martin out of this until she may defend herself" he replied curtly.

"And we were just starting to get along so well. Why'd you have to go and pull your dick out?" She crossed her arms and looked at the window. The shades were down on all windows she could reach.

"I'm getting to be an old man. Old habits die hard and I just woke up. Thanks so much for the drink. I'm surprised you remembered."

"I remembered a conversation where you spoke of the fine attributes of barley based whiskey and how corn based whiskey reminded you of cheese pizza flavored vomit with bourbon sauce."

He snickered.

She pushed up her tray table and lifted the armrest again. This time she crossed her legs in the seat facing him. "OK. Enough mystery. What. Do. You. Think. You. Know." She lifted her wine to her lips as she said the last.

Stefan looked at his ice and decided that both bottles should dilute evenly. After he poured, he kept looking at the drink and started, "Mark is probably the craziest person I think I've ever met."

+----+

"He wasn't crazy like a college fraternity pledge or Evil Knievil. I mean he was full on UFO's and conspiracies and secret underground bunkers with drugs in the water, Stay Pufft Marshmallow Man is after us crazy." He sipped his whiskey and looked at her.

She didn't move. Her eyes imploring him to go on. She didn't look at all shocked by his statement so far.

"So, 1989. I can't even tell you why, but somehow we wound up getting assigned to the same dorm room at seminary. He's in Spiritual Studies, I'm in Linguistic Anthropology for our vocational studies.

"And we really suck together. I'm constantly badgering him about his organizational skills, how he can't remember anything, slovenliness, mood swings, I was like his cheer coach wife!" he laughed. "He's bitching at me because I can't find a place to stop - I think of two plus two equals four but I start thinking about all the different ways to have two plus two and can't stop. That's an exaggeration, but I'd like to impress upon you that I've got an attention disorder.

"So eventually, we're both assigned to this project to try to develop the "Q" gospel. It's a German idea about 'Quelle,' or 'Source.' The Mark gospel came first, but the Matthew gospel and the Luke gospels both came from Mark and have features not contained in the gospel of Mark. Those features must have come from another source, "Q" because of elements Matthew and Luke share but can't be found in Mark. We got as far as we could with existing sources which were already translated, but eventually our research fell short. The sources we were working with were already translated from the originals. We decided we'd see if we could go to the source again, the 'Quelle' as it were." He looked at her to make sure she was following.

She translated, "So Matthew and Luke both had some definite parts of Mark but they had additional bits from some other place in common, like they were both children of Mark but had DNA from another parent. You both were trying to pick out the additional bits. You wanted to recreate the other parent."

He agreed. "Yes!"

"So what did this have to do with my Mark?" she asked, frustrated.

He sipped his drink again, holding it in his mouth, steadying himself for the comforting burning that he knew he'd be rewarded with after swallowing the dry but sweet malted liquor.

"It gets kinda complicated, but in 1995, we wound up going to the Vatican archives to view those sources. Mark always had to work hard to remember things, but if he practiced them over and over, he'd master the concepts and tasks. I was one of those savants that had a photographic memory. Maybe photographic isn't the best way to describe it. I can memorize patterns. They could be muscle, ocular, oral, really anything that can be trained to be repeated. I was really good at picking up things like languages, music and texts. Mark was always the guy to apply things I knew for interpretation. I'm miserable at interpretation. I'm like a recorder. I can play anything I hear, but I can't, say, reinterpret Swan Lake as a reggae music if I hadn't heard Madness do it first.

"When we got to the Vatican archives, he started watching me compare the original texts to translations and figuring out how I'd take patterns and apply them to the contextual matching between different languages. My wife will say, 'doncha know' at the end of a sentence, but it's rhetorical to when someone actually asks, 'Don't you know?'

"Anyway, Mark had been messing around the last few years with programming and had started learning Perl to do text manipulation. After watching how I was making associations, he started creating a program to do the matching with natural language. He was hoping we could take the original language testaments from the archives and let the computer compare them to the canonical gospels to find matches or even deviations.

"The problem with the work we were doing at the archives was that we couldn't take scanners or computers into the archives. That was fine by us, since we had me to record the pages to memory. As we got through the archives, it was getting apparent that some of the vernacular was going to need experts to have the grammar match correctly. Long story short, we open sourced the application and started seeking other linguistic experts to help fill in our gaps."

Becky was getting frustrated. "What in the fuck does this have to do with Mark running off?"

The second beverage service was starting to come around. He ordered another round. "I've got a captive audience. We still have a few hours to burn while I tell my tale. Maybe I'll even decide that I like you." He chuckled. Becky was fuming. She pulled her feed up and hugged her knees to herself and pretended to be ignoring him.

"So 18 months into the project, we had pretty much hand digitized all of the original canonical gospels and the collection of other independently attested sources. It was then that we came upon a collection that we hadn't been through." Stefan was getting excited now.

He freshened his drink after the beverage service passed again. Becky ignored the small bottle of wine he'd purchased and glared at him.

"What we found was a story about a man who's birth was heralded divinely to his mother. Supernatural signs and visitors accompanied his birth. Growing up, the boy was a precocious student and challenged the philosophers and religious teachers of his day. As an adult, he preached the shedding of material possessions and performed miracles such as the healing of the sick, the raising of the dead, you know, messianic things. Challenging the authorities of the day, he was killed and days later, ascended into heaven and returned to earth, resurrected." He paused and looked at her.

"Right. You're talking about Jesus. Why should it surprise you that you found a text about Jesus in the Vatican archives?" she asked tersely.

"No, this man was Apolonias of Tyanna. He was a Greek. There's some pages of Philostratus available in the public domain, but here we'd found the complete text. We spent the next two months finishing up entering the text into the computer. I was good for about ten pages a day with total recall, so we finished up right after New Years in 1997. Mark fucking freaked when we finished and I think he had a crisis of faith. When we started running it through the grammar engine, the similarities between Apolonius and Jesus, sorted through by publishing date, if you will, made us realize that the followers of each were going tit for tat about their accomplishments for the three decades after their deaths. It was a playground 'My Messiah's bigger than your Messiah' game only these were learned men. Very few people at that time could write prose."

Becky was looking more interested. A head bob from her let him know he should continue.

Stefan looked a little embarrassed. "We went out drinking that night to figure out what to do with the new research. We were pretty loaded when we reached an agreement that we should include this in our final work, we wound up getting these tattoos." He took the shoe off his left foot and showed Becky his ankle. It looked like a script "V."

"That's the same tattoo Mark had! He never told me why he got it! What does the 'V' mean?" she looked a little bewildered now. "He always said he found a coupon for it when I asked him what it meant."

Stefan laughed at that. His drink was diluting fast so he took a big gulp. "I've never even told Kate about this before. It's really an upside down 'A', but the ink is kinda fading now after all these years. It's sort of a nod to Apollonius being the mythological doppelganger of Jesus. A mirrored 'A' would look the same as an 'A', so we put it on upside down.

"So on with the story. I always had the idea that Mark had a little bit of a paranoid streak but after finding out that he was a 27 year old who's life had been spent in pursuit of enlightenment from the writings and testament of a band of rogue followers, he got pretty withdrawn.

"He looked on the Church as having committed an offense of truth by hiding these documents and others that we came across. Not all shared the same breadth of history as we found with Jesus or Apolonius but there were other documents of other prophets claiming similar divine callings and circumstances as those two. The world settled on Jesus, but to Mark it was a conspiracy.

"I had to spend more and more time on finishing the research myself as he had withdrawn into himself. The bishop that was to determine Mark's vocation after our studies concluded noticed his withdrawal. I guess they had a meeting where Mark confessed his misgivings. The bishop told Mark, 'You understand that you can't be allowed to publish this research.' Mark disappeared that night. He took nothing with him other than his travelling papers and the clothes on his back."

"Fuck." Becky sat back and opened the airline bottle of wine. She didn't even pour it into the plastic cup. She just pulled right from the bottle and wiped her bottom lip with her sleeve.

"Now you've endeared yourself to me!" he laughed.

"Thanks. But... So... He's pulled this shit before? How did you know he left and someone didn't force him to leave?" she asked.

"I didn't make my vocation either. I left before the summer of '97. I did manage a degree from Notre Dame, but I left Mishawaka and moved to Indianapolis. I started working at an ISP start-up. Even though linguistic anthropology doesn't provide a lot of job opportunities, Mark and I were now known in the open source community so I was able to get a job. They used a lot of open source software, so my name was known to the sysadmins. We started a foundation for the software and that's when I met Kent. He was a lawyer with the Free Software Foundation and he helped get me setup and funded. I put Mark on the board, even though we couldn't find him. Not a trace. No passport usage, nothing.

"The newspaper company that owns the Indianapolis Times and some other large market newspapers bought the ISP in 1999 and contributed to the foundation. We applied for and were granted patents on the work Mark did and copyrighted the contributions of the volunteers and Mark's source code. Mostly it was for protection against our getting sued from the larger software houses. Everyone was trying to get into the translation game then, but we were way ahead with contextual grammar matching instead of just replacing one word from the source language with another from the target language.

"We had 180 languages and dialects accounted for in the database and they were constantly updating the existing data. With the foundation protected and running with volunteer editors, I went to Ireland for my first real vacation in years."

"Where you met your wife" interrupted Becky.

"And found Mark!"

"Go on." Becky took another pull from her bottle.

"So I was backpacking around Ireland and wound up on a small peninsula between Cork and Waterford. I spent a couple days there at a youth hostel and one night a guy came up to me in the tavern and started asking me questions about where I was from, what I studied, what was my business there. After some problems I had in Northern Ireland on that trip, I was pretty used to that sort of interrogation. I knew not to lie about any of it. He seemed to warm up to me and then left for a little while. He came back about two hours later with Mark in tow.

"Apparently, Mark had seen me in town and thought I was still with the church and was looking for him. He'd been working at an oyster farm and was packing to run when his boss found him and got him to wait until he figured out who was after him.

"Mark had been using his Vatican passport that he'd kept when he had run off. They never expire, you're just expected to give them back when your work is finished.

"He told me about how he perceived what the bishop told him as a threat against his life and he panicked. Once he got to Ireland, he never touched a phone, used a computer or even listened to the radio. He read some newspapers if they were left around, but other than that he had no contact with anyone but the local folk.

"I spent two days there and finally convinced him to come back with me and let him know about the work we were doing with his software. He actually seemed to soften in front of me when he finally believed that there was no threat to his life. His eyes lost their agitation and I thought he was going to fall asleep right then.

"We got back around June of 1999 and he started right back at the foundation with me. We started building an interface to integrate another project that converted digital recordings to text for translation and returning back an audio file of the translation.

"He went on vacation in March of 2000 when that work finally went into beta. He bought a '65 split window bus to take with him. He called it 'Emily.' He had trouble with emissions on it, so we got it to pass by detuning it and put a fleet plate on it so it wouldn't have to be renewed again.

"The last I heard of Emily, he abandoned it to storage in Flagstaff when the motor seized and kept going on his bike."

"And that's when I met him" she sighed.

"And now you have the floor. How did two fucked up people like you fall in love?" he asked.