Fic: Observations, Ch 256
Time passes.
It passes in minutes, inches, bullets, however you want to count it.
Turbolift doors open and close, the transporter beams people up and down, the Enterprise goes in and out of warp. Like the muddy waters of the Mississippi churning from the Great Lakes down to New Orleans, time ripples and pools, forms eddies, erodes the red clay banks, carves down rock with inexorable patience. We go from mission to mission, planet to planet, jumping between stars and rifts, measuring the passing stardates in lightyears, parsecs, the minutes relative to inches, the inches relative to the speed of light, the light like a name burning in darkness.
I don’t know how they do it. Jim and Spock, I don’t know how they do it.
Any psychologist worth their salt will tell you that trauma’s an experience in repetition. One trauma dredges up everything that’s happened before no matter how unrelated it might seem, no matter the time or distance. Emotions’ve got a long memory of their own.
Now, I’m a surgeon, not a psychologist. I know the basics of the subject matter-comes with the territory of being Chief Medical Officer-and I can give that test, use Starfleet’s official psychological wellness chart as well as any other monkey. But I’m not trained in psychotherapy. I don’t know the treatments you give to patients with serious mental illnesses. I deal with bodies more than brains and when I deal with brains, I use a laser scalpel.
I’ve seen the way bodies can come back from the most outrageous injuries. Take Sulu. C7, an incomplete spinal cord injury, major damage to the anterior cord. For weeks, he couldn’t bend his fingers, let alone move his legs. We had him in diapers, he couldn’t control his own bowel movements. Taught him how to use a catheter, I had to perform multiple painful surgeries to stitch his spine back together. Chris put him through the most grueling physical therapy sessions she knew. His body went to hell and back, and then to hell again while we tried to figure out the right mix of drugs to minimize his chronic pain, manage his muscle spasms. There was that one time we almost lost him. Autonomic dysreflexia, brought on by a urinary tract infection.
He took it all in stride.
Or Nyota. Stabbed six times in that nightmare case when Scotty was possessed. They brought her to me, lung punctured in two places, drowning in her own blood, hydrochloric acid seeping from the hole in her stomach. It was as bad a mess as I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot. I used every trick I had to keep her stable, pushed her body and technology to its limits to bring her back. Let me tell you something-that woman’s a fighter. She sure as hell was not about to go gentle into that goddamn night. It made my job a little easier. I think Jim rubbed off on her, she was so anxious to get back to that communications station on the bridge.
I think Jim’s rubbed off on everyone.
As amazing as her recovery was, you find the measure of her character in the fact that she and Scotty are still together, still going strong. Despite the terror and the trauma and the nightmares I know they both had-and probably still have-you can find them in the weirdest corners of the ship, snuggled up together and trading dirty jokes. It makes Keenser go misty eyed.
Any doctor worth their salt will tell you that not all hurts are visible. Hell, any person can tell you that. Experiences shape us, change us, whether by one punch to the gut like a sledgehammer busting up marble, or a series of scratches, nibbles, little things that gnaw away irrevocably. It’s the way things are, the way things have been, the way they’ll always be. To some extent, we have no control over how life shapes us, we’ve got no idea where the hammer’s going to fall next. No one has control over every aspect of their existence, and I’m not sure it’d be a good thing if we did. I sure as hell wouldn’t be here today if everything had gone the way I wanted. I’d be a different person. Would I be better for it? Would I be worse? I’ve got no idea.
We might not be able to predict the shit that this universe throws at us-Spock’s pretty big on that, with his ten thousand probabilities-and sometimes we get hit with the biggest blackest storm anyone could ever imagine. That’s not a reason to give up. That’s not a reason to stop living. You find that when the hammer hits the anvil, you’re the anvil. You get knocked around and beat up, but in the end it’s the hammer that breaks, and the anvil remains. People’re stronger than they think they are. They want to live more than they know they do.
Pavel Andreyevich Chekov, age 20. Not seventeen anymore. You wouldn’t know it from his age, you wouldn’t know it from his face, but that boy has been through a lot. More than most men might see in a lifetime. He comes into Sickbay more than anyone else not because he’s wounded or riddled with holes, but to visit. I see him sometimes pause before he goes to the biobed, his face unreadable. I watch him shrug and go forward. Hear him say in that matter-of-fact tone of his that it was Russians who ‘inwented’ bubblegum. He’s never talked about what exactly happened to his brother-not even to Sulu-except that one time I had him on the operating table and he said, loopy and slurring, that his brother always told him not to play Dostoevsky, and how that brother ended up joining Starfleet anyway.
“He was always searching for something. Ya nye znayu, nashol li on ili nyet. Iskal istinu v’universitetye, i potom... Stars. He died in Klingon firefight and never told me if he is finding justice in the stars. You know, doctor? The keptan and Mr. Spock, they are like my brother. They are my brothers.”
I’ve seen the look on his face when either Jim or Spock is laid up in Sickbay. And Sulu.
Don’t even get me started about Scotty. Ever since he was taken over by Redjac, the man hasn’t been the same. It’s impossible to be the same, after something like that. He’s still a clown, he’s still pulling crazy stunts in engineering that have Jim pulling his hair in amusement and worry. But waking up to see your lover bleeding in the streets, your captain almost dead, and you covered in their blood, holding the dagger in your hand? Spock, Chris and I still haven’t told him about what happened in the courtroom, and we never will. Those files are sealed, confidential, no one’s ever going to get their hands on them. Scotty meets with Chris regularly, to talk and process everything. He and Nyota take time to be good to each other.
I’ll admit to being jealous. That’s what I wanted to have with my wife, before everything went to pieces.
Sometimes I catch Chris looking at Nyota and Scotty too, the grey in her eyes painfully bright. She doesn’t talk about it. I wonder how long it’ll be before she lets herself take that risk again.
Then there’s Jim and Spock.
Honest to God, I don’t know how they do it. Any other person in either of their shoes would’ve crumbled to dust. The things they’ve faced, the sheer amount of trauma they’ve been through? How Jim manages to smile every shift is beyond me. How Spock’s able to rebuild his world-I have no idea. Everyone can see it, how each shift is a battle.
A fight, a fire, a sorrow, a struggle.
A name, a light, a laugh, a memory.
A masterpiece.
Let me tell you a story about an artist and his master work. It’s short.
Michelangelo carved David out of a block of used marble. Some artist had already taken a chunk out of it and then decided, he couldn’t use it. Decided it was ruined. No one else wanted to use it because the dimensions were weird to begin with. It was too thin-if you look at David head on, you can see how skinny the original slab must’ve been. Too thin, and a chunk missing. That’s how David started out.
But in those imperfections, the sculptor saw his vision. Around that gaping hole, he formed David’s body, he chiseled out the bend of his waist. You can’t see it, the original gap. It’s part of negative space now. And in the thinness of the marble, you can see David ready, poised to take down Goliath with a cool confidence and the assurance of his victory. You’d never guess that perfect form was made from a defective piece of stone.
Life grinds us down. It wears us away. Time passes, years pass, youth fades, the feeling that you’re invincible slips away. Sometimes reality wages a hard war, sometimes you just want to give up and lay down your arms. Go quietly, go peacefully. Go easily.
I don’t know what separates a good person from a great one. I don’t know if anyone is truly great in this universe. They’ve immortalized Jim and Spock, they’ve made them into symbols and celebrities. They see something in their lives that’s compelling, a culmination of all that’s good and right and true. They see the masterpiece, David standing tall and serene, an expression of humanity, beauty-whatever you want to call it.
Do they see the negative space? Do they know that David was born from a defect? Maybe a series of defects, an unintended chink here, an accidental crack there. Working, tapping away until the statue finally emerges, defined by the space that surrounds it, the borders made of stone.
But that can’t be all. Negative space shapes the statue, but doesn’t define it. If it were just a matter of sculpting, David would merely stand, a dumb statue. He’s made of stone. But you look at him straight in the eye and try to tell me that piece of marble doesn’t take a life of its own. You tell me the adrenaline running in his veins doesn’t look more real than the real thing. He doesn’t look like David, he looks like David. An ideal and a man, bones of rock and flesh of stone. Immortal, capturing a single moment right before battle, before the outcome is known. We know he’s going to win. It’s a classic story. But David doesn’t know. He’s writing his own story as he lives it. Facing Goliath without apology.
Then who’s the sculptor? Who’s the writer of this grand narrative? Some higher power? We’ve met a lot of higher powers, evolved energy beings and the like. As far as I can tell, none of them have created anything half so complex as any one of the people that serve aboard this ship. I’d rather have Michelangelo as God than some fool like Trelane or those Organians meddling around with the universe.
Who’s the artist, who’s the writer?
Us, of course. Who else would it be? We sculpt our own lives even as life sculpts us, we write our own stories even as time passes. I watch Spock reorder his universe and I’m amazed by how thorough he is. How relentlessly he examines and reexamines and reconsiders everything under the sun. He wears Jim out sometimes, with all his thinking. Jim wears him out with his constant movement. They clash and grind against each other, plate tectonics smashing into volcanoes and earthquakes.
I’ve seen a lot of different kinds of love. I feel like I went through practically all the varieties with my wife, from dating to the engagement to the wedding and honeymoon, and to the end.
But Jim and Spock.
I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a love like this. Not sure I’ll ever see one like it again. It’s practically inhuman. Unattainable. Built in and in spite of the circumstances that surround them.
Time passes, like the muddy waters of the Mississippi going from the Great Lakes down to New Orleans.
Turbolift doors open and close, the transporter beams people up and down, the Enterprise goes in and out of warp. We go from mission to mission, planet to planet, jumping between stars and rifts, measuring the passing stardates in lightyears, parsecs, the minutes relative to inches, the inches relative to the speed of light, the light like a name burning in darkness.
Time passes, life hammering away at the anvil, chiseling away at the marble, over and over, trauma experienced as repetition, grinding away to dust and masterpiece, to death and immortality, some rising to greatness, others falling by the wayside. When everything seems to be too much and you’re tempted to glide easily into the darkness, remember-masterpieces are born from defects, defects can become a masterpiece. You find that when the hammer hits the anvil, you’re the anvil. In the end it’s the hammer that breaks, and the anvil remains.
I don’t know how they do it. Jim and Spock, I don’t know how they do it. But people’re stronger than they think they are. They want to live more than they know they do.
Time passes.
There’s a lot of things about life and love I don’t understand. But let me tell you one more story and I’ll be done here.
A student once asked their instructor, “Teacher, is hope a rational thing?”
The instructor answered, “I don’t know if it’s a rational thing.”
The student looked away.
“But I know it’s a necessary thing.”
Time passes.