Chapter 3

 

Lieutenant Fred Harris abruptly woke from a deeply troubled sleep; a bottomless, seemingly unending slumber, flooded with nightmarish dreams of pursuit, capture and ultimate death—his own. As the fog in his eyes gradually cleared, and the stupor still resident in his mind washed away, he repeated the first thing he mechanically did every morning upon rising—he stared angrily and uncertainly at the tiny metal monolith sitting on his dresser. 

It was not even remotely a monolith; he employed that term only in a sardonic context. 

 He recalled many years ago, in his high school creative writing class, he was shown a picture of NASA’s lunar module not too long after its magnificent technical creation. He was allowed thirty seconds of intense concentration to examine and mentally catalog all of its harsh unconventional features before it was taken away. He was then handed a blank paper and given five minutes to fully depict the indescribable thing. That was the entire exercise, just to describe the object, to give it substance and structure via the strength of words. After one minute passed, his mind had already sorted over a thicket of possible descriptions but Fred’s page remained blank, after three still unmarked, after five he received his first and only F in the class. In fact, he was a bright student, and that was the only F he ever received in any of his classes. During the fourth minute, he had put down his singular sarcastic answer to the problem—monolith. He selected that response out of sheer frustration because monolith was the opposite of what the thing looked like to him; and nothing whatsoever had come to mind. Although his instructor smiled broadly when he read Fred’s paper, he immediately scrawled a large bold F on the failed effort, together with the insulting words better luck next time. 

Fred never forgot the sting of that unpleasant experience. And now, many years later, he was looking at a goddamn tiny, squarish, stainless steel contraption containing several crevices of inconceivable purposes, with barely visible wires extending from all parts of its core like a newborn octopus flinging out its tentacles seeking to feel its first grasp and understanding of life. 

Fred remembered that his father once told him about a TV quiz show that took place during the mid 50’s. Celebrity contestants were asked to identify the functions of objects of various sizes, colors, composites, and shapes. The key was that the physical appearances of those objects provided absolutely no hint as to their functionality so it made them virtually impossible to identify. Since the home audience was notified of the object’s purpose on the TV screen, viewers enjoyed, from their vantage position of superior knowledge, watching the mindless verbal meanderings of the “experts” as they unsuccessfully attempted to unearth the right answer. The success rate of the celebrities, his dad said, was no higher than ten percent, which made the show even more appealing to the audience. They loved to see the “experts” fail. 

Fred figured no one would even begin to reach that threshold if they looked at his monolith, trying to sort out its purpose. Hell, he suddenly realized that, in his mind he was calling it his monolith; but the last thing he wanted to do was to claim ownership. For the moment he wanted its ownership rights to remain in limbo until he made a decision what the hell to do with it. He was just its temporary and transitional steward, nothing more. 

The longer Fred stared at the thing the greater his vacillation grew, and Fred hated to be indecisive. Fred’s former boss had often made caustic remarks about Fred’s inability to conclude his cases, to put that declarative period at the end of his sentences. However, Fred felt that in his job ethics were everything; and letting the innocent go free was infinitely more important than apprehending someone who just might be guilty. So Fred never felt any internal uneasiness when he took an exceedingly long time in solving his cases. But when Fred picked out a pair of new socks he didn’t give a damn if they were ten percent cotton and ninety percent wool or vice versa—even color didn’t matter, he just picked the first available socks he found in the sock aisle which matched his size, regardless of the myriad choices open to him. Fred often abandoned deep decision making in other parts of his personal life as well. 

So now, looking at the damn thing, he couldn’t decide what to do with it. He weighed his options—giving it up to the proper agency, destroying it, or having it medically used again. The last alternative made him visibly tremble when he pondered about it. His inability to decide forced him to continue with the unacceptable prolonged decision to do nothing. So for four years it had remained as a haunting presence on his dresser—the goddamn thing.