Keshona Far Freedom Part 1

car."

  /

  He's gonna kill my chances with Millicent here.

  What chances? Tickle the keys a little. It can't hurt.

  Yes, it can. I'll try too hard to please everyone and it'll kill the rest of the evening.

  /

  "We'll set an empty beer mug on the piano and the rich among us can donate," the requester offered. Judging from his tone of voice, I gathered that my ill-suited suitor was a musician worth listening to.

  Samuel Lee looked at me through his thick lenses and I looked back at him through my daintier pair. Finally he said: "Not this time, Jim. I'm out of practice."

  "Aw, c'mon, man! We need a little music to drown out the Greek chorus."

  Samuel Lee heaved a theatrical sigh, and I thought he was going to change his mind. Now I wanted to hear him play, too.

  /

  Jim, don't you dare wink at me when I turn you down. You can probably recognize my puny attempt to just be near Miss DuPont.

  "Sorry, man. I gotta go. I have three classes to teach tomorrow."

  Yeah, he winked.

  /

  Several more people spoke up, trying to get Samuel Lee to play, and now I was almost angry that he wouldn't. I pushed my wheels hard, following him to the doorway. I still hadn't put on my coat. "I'd like to hear you," I said, as he donned his coat in the foyer.

  "I'm not a musician any longer," he said. "Anyway, it's a bad piano, even if it was in tune."

  "You must be good," I remarked, assuming he was. He had strong hands, almost elegant hands, now that I noticed.

  "I stopped playing seriously when I was thirteen."

  He had his coat on. I didn't. He sat down on the foyer bench and waited for me to get into my coat. He took his glasses off and squinted at the lenses. Without his glasses he wasn't bad looking at all. I wondered if he might be of Korean origin, not Chinese. I had a soft spot in my heart for Koreans. One of them had saved my dad's life.

  "Am I stopping you from doing something you like to do?" I asked.

  "Play for them? No. I used to think it would make me popular, but… not anymore."

  "You're Korean?"

  "Good guess. Son of immigrants."

  /

  And? You gotta keep it going, stud.

  Can you guarantee I won't say something stupid?

  /

  Now I wanted to have more conversation with Samuel Lee. There was something about him… I mean, a completely intellectual something. Or not. I needed to process him, find out if he was worth knowing, so I could forget about him and move on. Move on to what? Or to whom?

  "Did you have trouble with this group?" I asked, hooking a thumb in the direction of the other graduate assistants and post-docs.

  "I don't make friends easily," Samuel Lee replied. "I don't know that it's a racial thing. Maybe it's the clunky glasses."

  "Yeah, we're all too sophisticated and liberal to be ethnically prejudiced, but not so with glasses… and wheelchairs. I'll bet you were a classically-trained pianist, weren't you? A prodigy."

  /

  Holy cow, Batman, I think she digs me!

  A dangerous assumption, Robin. Cool it.

  /

  "I usually played the 'Lee Variations' on most classical pieces."

  "The Lee Variations?" I queried, missing its meaning.

  "My own adjustments to the music," he explained. "I was undisciplined and often played by ear without my glasses. I was just a kid. I hear you're an excellent mathematician."

  "Where did you hear that? I'd like to hear it, too." Actually, I didn't even know why I was back in school. All of my doctoral work now felt wrong or pointless. If I thought about it too much, it terrified me. "You're a post-doc, aren't you?" Let's talk about him, not me.

  /

  Yeah, probably a career post-doc.

  Is that how you're going to impress her, cowboy?

  Then let's talk about her, not me.

  /

  "I somehow managed to finagle my doctorate out of a lesser university which I won't name," he replied. "I think I got my position here because of my engineering degree. How did you-"

  "Engineering?" I prompted, stopping him from asking about me and my problems. I noticed Samuel Lee's tenseness, and if I correctly interpreted the symptom (and I am an expert on male urges), I was surprised to assume I was having such an effect on him.

  /

  What's this frown she's giving me?

  Bad news, dude. She's damn nice but ain't nothing going to come of her and you.

  /

  "My father wanted me to be an engineer," he explained. "My mother wanted me to be a pianist. I wanted to be an astronomer. I guess I'm all three but not too good at any of them. The real astronomers here find me useful when their equipment needs some engineering."

  OK. I had to admit that I was theoretically interested in Samuel Lee. Take away those big chunks of glass in front of his eyes, judge that he's strong enough to pick me up out of this chair, and feel the gentleness of his personality... Interesting. Maybe… Oh, nothing could ever come of this! He's too nice. I'm too… damaged.

  "I appreciate your offer to help me get out of this old building," I said without thinking. "This campus is full of obstacles to my new set of wheels."

  "New?" Samuel Lee queried, and squinted at my face, probably looking more closely at that big scar where my forehead hit the steering wheel.

  I started to slap the armrests of the wheelchair in frustration but managed to make fists and lower them slowly. "I traded a fairly new and shiny red Mustang for this thing I'm sitting in," I muttered quietly. I glanced up at the guy and looked away, unable to even know what kind of emotion was written on my face and not wanting to see his reaction to it.

  "Oh," he said.

  Amazingly, Samuel did not pursue the matter. I felt so grateful that I tried damned hard to put a smile on my face. "So, you get ideas," I said, wanting to make it plain to him that I didn't want to talk about my messed-up life.

  "I get questions," he replied.

  "And you want answers."

  "Mathematics is about getting answers," he said. "Math problems have exact answers. Science only has approximate answers, which always lead to more questions. So I like to say my job is about questions, about the pleasure of looking for more questions."

  "But you need math to make science work," I said.

  "The problem with that is, I think math answers get treated as science answers, especially if the math is elegant or if it becomes the only way to represent the answer. This comes, of course, from someone who has just confessed to not being good enough at math."

  "You're one of those who thinks no theory should ever graduate to the status of law," I said.

  "Nicely phrased," he said. "You can probably guess that all I have is a philosophy and no serious data to feed to any hypothesis."

  "What sort of astronomy do you do?" I inquired.

  "Galaxies and redshift."

  "You must have been a serious star-gazer in the past. Do you still like to do that?"

  "I'd like to be able to, but I don't have either the time or a dark enough sky around here. Also, I don't see nearly well enough to make it worth the effort." He took off his glasses again. They looked so heavy to me. "No, I see the universe better in my imagination. I wish I could help it all make sense. There's so much out there that begs explaining. Starting with gravity."

  "You don't like warped space?"

  "Don't get me started." He smiled again. It was a nice smile, innocent and perhaps reluctant. His words in opposition to Einstein were pretentious but maybe his smile was also a disclaimer. I was then shocked to realize that I would enjoy any flavor of smile from Samuel Lee. I suppose it was my fault that I made so few people smile for me.

  Now I was thinking I would test him. I was thinking I could like Samuel Lee. I could feel comfortable with him, with just a tiny bit of sexual tension to add interest. Very tiny. Get real, girl! I thought he was deeper than I was. Maybe I c
ould find more depth in myself, a depth that was different from what made me a mathematician. I hoped my physical condition wouldn't become a problem. I hoped my emotional condition wouldn't become a problem. The wreck, the surgery, the recovery, and the paralysis were still raw in my memory and in my life. I had hardly decided I wanted to go on living. And now I would be helplessly complicating my new life, adding Samuel Lee into it, even as I was struggling to nail down my doctorate.

  Should I get started with Samuel Lee?

  I had been oblivious to the junior faculty for a while but as I began putting on Dad's old fatigue jacket I noticed that too many of them seemed to have been watching Samuel and me. It made me feel like I might still be a player. Or were they fascinated by the mating ritual of the least likely pair in the species?

  /

  Damn, man! Was everyone watching me hit on Millicent?

  You're the man, man! Or else, she doesn't have good taste in men. Or…

  Shut up.

  /

  "I think I will," I said.

  "Will what?" he asked.

  1-07 Voices in the Wilderness

  "Hello, Samson."

  It was not Milly. It was a stranger. But he was alive. He was alive! Or was he? He felt... good? Good! Too good? It was not Milly. It was a stranger out there beyond his closed eyelids, above where he lay. He lay on what, where, why? He stirred, took a deeper breath, tried to decide if he wanted to open his eyes and see the stranger. Yes. Her voice was not Milly's but still seemed familiar. He peeked into the brightness above him and saw a dark face hovering there.

  "Hello," he replied. He opened his eyes wider as they adjusted to the glare.

  "I've already questioned you," the stranger said, "but you won't remember that."

  Samson struggled to sit up and as he did, he saw he was on the ground. He could see very well - with both