Not Your Daughter's Vampire

By Kyle Roesler

Robert Gillespie, a failed entrepreneur-turned-consultant, can’t believe what he’s hearing from Alec Carson, a young-looking environmental studies professor in Schenectady, New York. Robert had recently solved a facial recognition issue for a client where Alec was a false positive for Albert Einstein. Robert doesn’t initially find much Einsteinian about Alec, but after they are approached by Kevin, an agent for a shadowy organization called the Association, Alec begins to tell Robert about his 2,500 year history as a studious, mankind-helping vampire during which he has been known as Socrates, Aristotle, da Vinci and Einstein. Is Alec telling the truth, or is he as warped as a backyard pool table? Either way, Not Your Daughter’s Vampire will revamp your ideas of the undead.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kyle Roesler
• Release date: Apr 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215059173

Kyle Roesler

Kyle G. Roesler, who used to write using the pseudonym Mary Jane, began his writing career as a columnist for "The Muddraker", the student-run newspaper at Harvey Mudd College. He then spent a number of years writing screenplays before turning his attention to writing novels. He published "Fate" in 2001 and "Saba" in 2009.

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NOT YOUR DAUGHTER’S VAMPIRE

by

Kyle G. Roesler

SMASHWORDS EDITION

PUBLISHED BY:

Kyle G. Roesler on Smashwords

Copyright: © 2023 by Kyle G. Roesler

ISBN: 9798215059173

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

Cover design by: Kyle G. Roesler

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2 – Friday (29 Oct 2021) Part 1

Chapter 3 – Friday (29 Oct 2021) Part 2

Chapter 4 – Robert

Chapter 5 – Friday (29 Oct 2021) Part 3

Chapter 6 – Kevin

Chapter 7 – Friday (29 Oct 2021) Part 4

Chapter 8 – Friday (29 Oct 2021) Part 5

Chapter 9 – Kevin

Chapter 10 – Saturday (30 October 2021) Part 1

Chapter 11 – Saturday (30 October 2021) Part 2

Chapter 12 – April 1901

Chapter 13 – Saturday (30 October 2021) Part 3

Chapter 14 – 505 BCE

Chapter 15 – Saturday (30 October 2021) Part 4

Chapter 16 – Saturday (30 October 2021) Part 5

Chapter 17 – 500 BCE

Chapter 18 – Saturday (30 October 2021) Part 6

Chapter 19 - Kevin

Chapter 20 – Saturday (30 October 2021) Part 7

Chapter 21 – Saturday (30 October 2021) Part 8

Chapter 22 – 440 BCE

Chapter 23 – Saturday (30 October 2021) Part 9

Chapter 24 – Saturday (30 October 2021) Part 10

Chapter 25 – Saturday (30 October 2021) Part 11

Chapter 26 – 195 BCE

Chapter 27 – Saturday (30 October 2021) Part 12

Chapter 28 – Kevin

Chapter 29 – Sunday (31 October 2021) Part 1

Chapter 30 – 1304 CE

Chapter 31 – Sunday (31 October 2021) Part 2

Chapter 32 – Sunday (31 October 2021) Part 3

Chapter 33 – 1503 CE

Chapter 34 – Sunday (31 October 2021) Part 4

Chapter 35 – Sunday (31 October 2021) Part 5

Chapter 36 – Monday (1 November 2021) Part 1

Chapter 37 – Monday (1 November 2021) Part 2

Chapter 38 – March 1921

Chapter 39 – Monday (1 November 2021) Part 3

Chapter 40 – Tuesday (2 November 2021) Part 1

Chapter 41 – Tuesday (2 November 2021) Part 2

Chapter 42 – Thursday (4 November 2021)

Fact vs Fiction

Acknowledgments

References

Book Club Discussion Topics

About the Author

Book_Club_Discussion_Questions

About_the_Author

SAMPLE CHAPTER FROM Mentioned in Dispatches

Epigraph

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Arthur C. Clarke’s First Law

Among the many factors which prevent me from knowing are the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life.

Protagoras, early Sophist and Philosopher in Ancient Greece.

Dedication

To my friend William. I miss you.

Chapter 1

It never should have happened – the odds against were astronomical. But, happen it did. A subtle shift in the DNA of one member of a tribe of not-quite-human, not-quite-ape creatures caused him to lose the ability to procreate, seemingly dooming his ability to influence the future. But, this pre-Neanderthal just kept living year after year, generation after generation. In his tribe’s proto-language, this misfit of biology was called the Variant Man Person.

Confusion eventually led to fear and the Variant Man Person was driven away from his tribe. He sensed he needed the life-giving blood of his kind to survive; but, what could he offer in return? He thought about what his tribe needed; since winter had begun and a cold, dark night engulfed him, he decided a source of heat would be most appreciated. His mind, quick and nimble, soon found a solution and he returned to his tribe the next night carrying a thick branch of a tree high above his head. Somehow, the Variant Man Person had made the tree hot and bright and crackling with energy. He stood at the edge of the home clearing, swinging the branch back and forth, both terrifying and fascinating his kin.

The tribe’s chief got the message: take me back and you can share in my invention. Send me away and I’ll end all of your lives right now. The chief made the only decision he could: he welcomed back the Variant Man Person and a symbiotic relationship was born out of necessity and under the threat of violence, a relationship that continued as history dawned and the hideously awkward name of this genetic abnormality was shortened to vampire.

Chapter 2 – Friday (29 Oct 2021) Part 1

I awoke with a throbbing in my head so raw and spectacular that my first thought for the day was, Be still my beating heart. My temples were being stabbed by a spiked ball on a chain, my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth by stale beer and rancid whiskey, I was wearing yesterday’s or the day before’s clothes and I couldn’t identify where I was.

Though it felt like a huge mistake, I forced open my eyes. The white-hot sun made me recoil like Bela Lugosi, my right forearm flinching upward to cover my face. That sunlight crashing in on me from all directions convinced me I was not sleeping in my own bed. Unwilling to open my eyes again, I employed my other senses instead: I smelled fried food and motor oil, my knee bumped into something round when moved, and I heard cars zipping past my left ear. I was sleeping in my car. Again.

As my eyelids were too thin to block out the sun, I bent forward in my reclined driver’s seat and balanced my forehead atop the steering wheel. The pressure from the weight of my head soothed my agony noticeably so I maintained that delicate balance as I hoped and prayed for sleep, or death, whatever. I wondered what time it was but decided I didn’t care enough to check.

Once my head ramped down to a six on the Richter scale, I tried to think back to the previous evening to piece together what exactly had brought me here. When those memories proved inaccessible, I thought back even further. I could remember driving to Troy, New York, from a Starbucks in Schenectady late yesterday afternoon. OK, so I drove to Troy and…

Nope. I got nothin’. The only thing running through my mind was a line from a poem I had memorized as a boy, There are strange things done in the midnight sun… And that was all I had there. Interesting, but far from useful.

RPI. I suddenly remembered that yesterday I had driven straight to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute from Schenectady. RPI, the alma mater of me, Robert Gillespie, has been a shimmering beacon of learning in Troy since 1824 of the Common Era (CE). They loved to crow about being the oldest technological university in the English-speaking world and the oldest in the Western Hemisphere – take that, MIT and Caltech. Vague memories from last night assaulted me, students and faculty and alumni breaking bread and seat-shouting at each other, trying to establish our cleverness with brevity. I remembered a furry professor sneering at my proposed cure for global warming (blow up cars with more than four cylinders with the owners still inside) and two infantile-looking students prodding me for more stories of my days running a tech startup in the Wild West of the 1990s. I remembered being pleasantly buzzed but not drunk; those campus events don’t even serve wine so that physiological state must have been induced by something I brought with me. I mean, I knew I had been drinking because I was talking to people I barely knew at a social gathering; that don’t happen stone-cold sober, baby, I’m sorry but it just does not.

But, whatever the blab and blah fest was at school, it didn’t adequately explain how I ended up here. Why would I have stayed in Troy instead of returning to my drab, lifeless apartment in Schenectady?

My foggy mind released the right memory at the right time and suddenly three words made my current state of affairs totally make sense: drunken chess boxing.

Chess boxing is a sport with a glorious history all the way back to at least 2003. The rules are simple: rounds alternate chess and boxing and a full match is eleven rounds. Each player gets nine minutes on their chess timer. So, you play a three-minute round of chess, then the board, table and chairs are removed from the ring and you box for three minutes. This alternation continues until there is a victor in chess, a knockout or TKO in boxing, or someone loses by running out of time on their chess timer.

Drunken chess boxing is the same, but each piece is a shot glass. You lose a piece, you take a shot. The club I compete at uses beer in the pawns and very cheap whiskey in the eight aristocratic pieces in an effort to limit your alcohol intake.

All forms of chess boxing attracted intellectual rebels. I mean, sure, your average idiot could chess box, but they would lose a lot of matches to the Scholar’s Mate (one of several ways to beat your opponent in four moves in chess) before anyone hit anyone. So, in my experience, drunken chess boxers are competent enough in chess to get into some serious drinking and pummeling of heads.

My missing memories kept trickling in. I remembered I’d fought a Russian woman who was bigger, stronger and smarter than me – and likely had more testosterone in her veins, too. I fought in borrowed gear and my boxers and T-Shirt. I felt good about the first round of chess, though exactly who moved what to where was fuzzy in my head. I distinctly remembered just having beer on my breath as we started round two, the first boxing round, meaning I had only sacrificed pawns at that point. But, as has oft been said, everyone has a plan until they get hit. Well, Irena (Yes! That was her name) hit hard, her jabs propelling my boxing gloves back into my face. I was thus distracted when her vicious right-handed upper-cut to my gut knocked the wind out of me. I dropped my guard and her left glove smacked me on the bridge of my nose, causing me to see my blood on the canvas.

That was enough of that! I danced away from Irena, but she just kept smacking me. Since running away wasn’t helping, I rushed into a clinch, my head resting between her ample breasts. That was the best hug I’d had from a woman in weeks, even considering that she kept jabbing my kidneys. Alas, the referee separated us; the dude just was not a romantic. I kept my guard up and danced even as I panted and sweated with the effort. The bell allowed me to relax. All drunken chess boxers know that Saved by the Bell, is not just the name of a sitcom.

Chess resumed and Irena, who seriously knew how to play, and I traded some material. My hazy memory was I claimed the better position on the board, so it felt like my, concentrate on the chess, survive the boxing, strategy was on point. In the next round of boxing, I kept myself protected and Irena was wearing herself out chasing me and throwing punches at the air. In the third chess round (round 5 overall), I had a breakthrough: I took her queen in a trade for one of my bishops. Victory looked assured, but I had forgotten one crucial factor: the change of self-perception brought about by sufficient quantities of alcohol. The beer and rotgut whiskey in my stomach came up with a new strategy for the boxing rounds and fast-tracked this update to my brain: screw the chess, knock this chick out as soon as you lace on the gloves again. Don’t run; stand and fight!

That was some seriously dipshitty advice. My brain, what little bit of it was still online, protested mildly but no dissent could cool my ethyl alcohol-fueled bravado. When the bell rang for round 6, I rushed forward, faked a body shot with my left and unleashed my best right-handed haymaker into Irena’s jaw.

Her chipped incisor gleamed in the bright lights as she smiled a crooked little smile and casually smashed her right fist into my glass chin.

Boom, I was down. I may have tried to stand sometime while the ridiculously blurry ref chanted ascending integers at me, but I’m not sure. I am sure the ref reached ten, ending what could have been a triumphant checkmate had I avoided a toe-to-toe boxing confrontation. As Irena pranced around the ring happily, I was helped up and drank the remaining lousy whiskey from my chess pieces before stumbling back to the locker room.

Hey, there is no excuse for wasting alcohol, even the questionable stuff.

From that point on, the rest of the evening was very, very unfocused. I didn’t remember getting dressed, but I am dressed now. Unfortunately, blacked-out evenings often ended with mornings like this. There was nothing to do about it right then but try to sleep through the pain for a few more seconds, minutes or hours and see what tomorrow – today – brought.

Of course, I might have something on my schedule right now. I awkwardly fished my smartphone out of my pants pocket and opened my eyes just enough to check the time: 9:59 A. M. My thumb brought up the calendar app.

Ah, great. A 10:00 A. M. in-person meeting at my third-favorite Starbucks in Schenectady.

I inventoried my symptoms: headache, sporadic memory loss and some associated nausea, but no lack of coordination, ringing in my ears or excessive fatigue. I self-diagnosed a raging hangover but not a concussion, which was good news. I flipped down the visor to get my sunglasses and accidentally saw myself in the rearview mirror. I was skinny as a school boy because I often forgot to eat. Alas, as I’d hit fifty a few years ago, an unbiased observer would probably see me as an emaciated old man. My skin was whiter than the Pillsbury Dough Boy’s because I avoided the sun like a plague, my hair was black but seasoned with more and more gray each year and my dark eyes stared out of a face that annoyingly still broke out with acne atop my age lines. When I smiled, when there was something to smile about, I managed to blend those iffy ingredients into a decent soufflé, but finding reasons to smile oft proved to be problematic. Today, I augmented my normally questionable appearance with bloodshot eyes, a bruised chin and a crematorium pallor. It wouldn’t take an Einstein to figure out I had had a rough night last night. I lowered my eyes and carefully put on my sunglasses.

I started my 2003 Honda Accord and pointed it WNW on Highway 2W. I called my client, already late and knowing I was 30 minutes away from Schenectady.

You’re late, Janus Eriksson barked.

Yes, I’m ever so sorry, Mr. Eriksson. I am on my way and will be pulling into the parking lot any minute now.

Yeah, I’ll believe that when I see it, he replied.

I’m so sorry, I really am, but my tardiness couldn’t be helped this morning. I had just finished a breakfast meeting in Troy and started back to S-Town when I noticed an absolutely cherry 1965 Ford Galaxie 500/LTD stopped on the shoulder of Highway 2W with a grandmotherly woman sporting impeccable blow-dried silver hair and half glasses sliding down her nose trying to change the left rear tire, her legs out in the driving lane. Well, I couldn’t let her be stuck there all day, or let her lose a foot to a distracted dipshit in a continent-sized SUV, and I had plenty of time, so I pulled over and offered to help. I managed to get four of the lug nuts off but that last bastard was frozen, I mean, tight as a chastity belt on Brittany Spears. I waved down three truckers before I found one with WD-40, but once I sprayed on that magic elixir the lug nut turned just like butter and…

Stop, just stop, Janus interrupted. I don’t believe a word you’re saying.

Why not? I asked, genuinely curious. I prided myself on spinning a good yarn when explaining what I was doing when drunk and wondered where I had gone wrong today.

Well, for one thing, I don’t see your piece-of-shit Honda pulling into this parking lot even though you said you’d be arriving, ‘any second now.’ I had actually said any minute now, which should have bought me sixty times the forgiveness of arriving any second now, but I let it pass. For two, you told me a similarly elaborate story about the traffic jam caused by a mother duck and her six fluff-ball ducklings when you failed to show up for our last meeting. Hard-to-verify bullshit might earn you forgiveness once, but never twice.

This interaction was headed south fast and, honestly, I couldn’t afford a loss of business right then. I respect you too much to argue about any of this, Janus, I told him. Though I was speeding and weaving in and out of traffic while shouting at my phone, I was still at least twenty minutes away. I tried the last arrow in my quiver. So, let’s do this remotely. How can I help you, Janus? You want to lower your IT costs, right?

Janus initially seemed uninterested in engaging, too angry with me to proceed logically. I didn’t blame him; I’d feel the same in his shoes. But, he had a problem to solve, so he finally said, Yes, that’s right. This pandemic has made me reconsider how we do business. My employees like working from home. The only thing that requires an office is my data center and a room for shipping and receiving.

And you’d like to jettison the data center. Let me ask you something; how sensitive do you consider the data you currently store on-site?

I could almost hear J. shrug over the phone as he replied, Not very sensitive.

"So, you wouldn’t mind everything you’ve ever said or done or every piece of information any client has ever entrusted you with appearing on the front page of the Albany Times Union."

That got his attention. No, I don’t think that would be beneficial to business.

Then you need to make sure your security plan is on point before we migrate any of your operations to a public cloud like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. There are ways to keep your data secure, but padlocking every access point is challenging. So, I’d like to bring in a top-notch security expert I’ve worked with in the past, Mike Wendler.

That sounds expensive.

Naw, he owes me a favor, I am sure we can find rates that aren’t too terrifying.

Can’t I just do a hybrid cloud? Doesn’t that provide better security?

Oh, you have done your homework, Janus! I like it.

I hear it has all the advantages of the cloud and of having your own data center.

Yup, it does – and all the disadvantages, too. The salesmen usually gloss over that part. Even a microscopic data center needs IT guys to back it up or just hold its hand. And, any interface with a public cloud is a security challenge. If Mike can lock out the looters, eliminating your data center entirely is where big cost savings can come from. Of course, it all depends on your business: how much would an enterprise software outage cost you? How thick is your skin while waiting for outages to be fixed? It’s like calling up the cable company and telling them your TV is out; that’s all you can do until it comes back. You just have to weigh cost vs. convenience, risk vs. reward. Let me get Mike on the line; hang on a sec, Janus.

Before Janus could protest, I put him on hold and dialed Mike. I had stopped driving like a maniac so I could instead drive my phone and car at the same time. Though Mike was annoyed I just assumed he wasn’t busy, he wasn’t busy so joined our call. Within ten minutes Janus decided he was OK with the limitations of a pure cloud solution because of the tasty cost savings over having servers and a full IT staff. By the time Janus hung up, he had nearly forgotten we were ever supposed to meet in person.

I arrived at Starbucks six minutes later. Not the Starbucks where I was supposed to meet Janus; no, walking in while he was walking out would quite possibly undo the goodwill I’d just worked so hard to engender. Instead, I had driven to my second-favorite Starbucks, and the most convenient Starbucks when arriving from Troy. I parked in front of two deciduous trees showing off their brightest russets and golds, grabbed my face mask from the turn signal stalk and quickly crossed the parking lot. I fell back into an old high school habit of not swinging my arms when I walked. I felt it saved me energy, energy I needed for cognition or at least breathing and maintaining my body temperature; why waste energy on something as silly as swinging my arms? Though, these days I generally did swing my arms when I walked. I conformed to peer pressure because this girl I dated in college, Kumiko, told me that I’d never get laid walking around without swinging my arms. She didn’t use those precise words, but that was indeed her point. I generally have swung my arms for procreative purposes ever since.

Kumiko still lived in Schenectady with our two sons, Matthew in grad school and Austin in middle school. Swinging my arms certainly had its pluses (courtship, foolin’ around, marriage, progeny) and minuses (divorce, alimony, child support). All because I gave in to the social convention of walking with unkempt arms to appease a woman.

There was no line inside Starbucks, thank God. I needed caffeine and I needed it fast. Hi, Robert; the usual? Sheila asked me.

Yes, please.

I could remember a few months ago when Sheila was still a barista-in-training. I’d walked in looking similarly disheveled, beat up and hung over and saw a pleasant mix of horror, shock and concern on her face. Today she registered no surprise at all; I was bruised and smelled like the dumpster behind a bar and this familiar stranger didn’t notice anything unusual. That was probably a hint I should rethink the trajectory of my life. But, there were other things to think about right then. I paid for my gourmet coffee, tipped liberally, and had a huge paper cup of steamy-beany bravado in my hands in short order.

I selected the most isolated table available, both for virus and embarrassment reasons, and plugged in my phone. I was grateful to be here; Starbucks shutting down during the pandemic derailed my professional life. I have always done my consulting work at Starbucks, with no office or secretary or other luxuries. Starbucks was where I held business meetings, saw people, engaged in proto-conversations (Hi! Yo.) and hit on age-inappropriate women, therefore reducing my crushing loneliness by a gram or two. Suddenly, all that was taken from me. For a week, I haunted the parking lot of my favorite Starbucks, trying to wedge the professional and psychological benefits of sitting in a Starbucks into the front seat of my car. It didn’t really cut it. I had to start the car and endure a 30-minute drive-thru line each time I wanted another cup of the devil’s bean. I saw people, sure: people flashing by in their cars. Once or twice I noticed another lonely-looking guy doing what I was doing. That didn’t make me feel any better; seeing my behavior mirrored by another merely emphasized its creepiness.

And drinking coffee non-stop without access to a bathroom was a recipe for disaster.

I had to make my stand in my crappy apartment, ordering an espresso machine and fancy beans I couldn’t afford from Amazon. It was a Band-Aid applied with precision to a severed artery, but it kept me technically alive until things creaked back open.

Ah, the good old days. While musing about the first great pandemic of my lifetime, I’d nearly finished my cup of costly coffee. I browsed headlines on my phone. I checked the weather forecast on my phone. I played multiple games of Free Cell on my phone. I checked my schedule on my phone and saw: nothing. Well, nearly nothing. Nothing profitable, anyhow. My calendar for the remains of the day consisted of one item: attend a lecture by a Union College professor of Environmental Studies at 3:00 P. M. I intended to attend only if I had nothing better to do, and that was the state I found myself in, assuming no clients texted in the next 270 minutes. I only wanted to attend because the professor’s face was tagged as a match for someone famous when I was conducting machine learning recently; not a very strong reason to go, but, you know, it was a reason. I was ready to join the four-person line for a second venti when Sheila stopped by my table and silently replaced my empty. Her eyes briefly met mine, 33% full of horror, shock and concern; she wasn’t quite as inured as I had imagined. I thanked her back as she returned to the counter.

I then checked my text and voice messages. I know, I know, I should have done that first; text and voice messages are from the real people in my life, they deserve the first shot at my attention, but being real people they brought stress and depression as often as joy and light. So, I preferred to be a voyeur into the lives and politics and scientific achievements of people I’ve never met to interacting with my friends and relatives. I found that I had text messages from Austin and Ninette. I read the lone text from Austin, my thirteen-year-old son: Dad, don’t forget my science fair on Nov 4 at 3, you promised to come and see the results of our experiment on growing plants with no dirt! I responded with a thumbs-up emoji, shocked to find that I had reduced my role in my son’s life to being an emoji parent. Poor Austin; the result of Kumiko and my last attempt at a reconciliation. Oops. I then looked at the texts from Ninette in chronological order:

At 8:00 P. M. my time last night: Hey, what you up to this evening?

Then, an hour later: If you text back soon, I’ll describe in great detail what I’m wearing. Or, more precisely, not wearing.

Then, thirty minutes after that: So, are you in jail, the hospital or sleeping it off in your car?

Damn, the woman knew me, too well for my sake or hers. Ninette Marsden and I had met online on Reddit, finding ourselves enamored with one another’s caustic posts about the idiots on Reddit. I was still enamored of her, but maybe that was because she lived in Albuquerque, distance masking her faults and annoying traits. We had a text-ationship; we’d met in real life twice last summer on neutral turf. Odds were she would tire of my unconventional ways and means sooner rather than later; after all, she was an intelligent woman, she would read the writing on the wall before I even realized I had written it.

So, why did I like her? Well, she was awfully cute, very smart and she hadn’t gotten sick of me yet. That was a tough combination of traits to beat.

I texted back that I had become carried away reading about ultracapacitors last evening and didn’t see her texts until now, sorry, so sorry. I had only a few illusions that she might believe any of the words that I texted her. I wasn’t surprised she didn’t respond; Ninette worked at Sandia National Lab, where she did things that she couldn’t tell me about or else she would get to kill me. When at work, she was separated from her phone for security reasons. I couldn’t conceive of pausing the most important relationship in my life for 8+ hours a day for any reason, but for our country’s sake, I was glad someone else could.

Chapter 3 – Friday (29 Oct 2021) Part 2

Nott Memorial Hall was the most distinctive building not just on Union College’s leafy campus but in all of Schenectady. It was a hexadecagonal (sixteen-sided) building, meaning it was a straight-line construction equivalent of a circular building. Google informed me it was constructed in the High Victorian Gothic Architectural style, the main features of which were bright and various colors, a variety of textures and not being chintzy on the Gothic details. In the case of The Nott, it appeared Gothic details meant the large stained glass window panes, copper-looking window frames in the cupula and mosaic tiles on the roof. Several cups of strong coffee and stopping at home for a shower and a change of clothes had improved my outlook on the world and I had more of a smirk than a grimace on my lips as I slid my ever-present face mask up over my nose and opened the heavy doors to join the gathering crowd inside.

The Gaudi-esque exterior of the building didn’t prepare me for the simple elegance of the interior. There were delicate lattice works in steel or iron keeping those on the layered full-circle balconies from falling to their demise, but generally the whole space was a wide-open cylinder resplendent with salmon-colored walls. The floor was a beautiful geometric marble mosaic but I could see little of it because the organizer of this discussion had placed a hundred chairs on the main level facing a large flat-panel TV and a slender lectern. I made a slow meander around the room as students and faculty clustered in clumps to discuss the issues of the day: the weather, the upcoming weekend of NFL, NBA and NHL games, their Halloween plans or the difficulty of finding parking on campus. Five minutes before the presentation start time, I selected a seat in the back row behind some dude I guessed must be on the Union College basketball or volleyball team so I was inconspicuously tucked into the crowd. I peered around the large head in front of me and got my first direct