Vote

“Don’t blame me! I didn’t know!”, the loud voice pleaded. Sarah awoke with a start, her eyes wide open and the windowsill alarm clock, just inches from her face, showing 1:33 AM. The voice she heard was sharp and tense, and seemed surely to be coming from someone in her room

She quickly took in the entirety of her tiny studio apartment, night-lighted from a streetlamp near her apartment building. She saw no one. She got up and went to the door, seeing that it was still bolted as she had checked it before going to bed. She next looked into her three small closets… a coat/shoe closet by the door, a clothes/storage closet and a utility closet… all empty. A quick glance through her open bathroom door revealed that it, too, was vacant.

Stumped, she returned to sit on her daybed, relieved at seeing nobody hiding below it. She couldn’t understand it. Hers was a third-floor walk-up that had no window coverings… the evergreen trees outside her building providing sufficient privacy while still allowing plenty of sunlight for the many plants that shared her space. She now sat, clearly alone in her room, and yet she had heard that voice. Her screened windows were open to the night air, so maybe, she thought… maybe the voice had come from an adjacent apartment, or possibly from the ground outside. But it sounded much closer.

She took a sip of carbonated water from the plastic bottle on the floor by her bed, and lay back down… troubled and now wide awake. She had hit the sack at about 10:15 PM, following the limited actual news part of the 10 o’clock news, dead tired after an exhausting Wednesday at work. Maybe the voice was actually a dream, but it seemed so real. After tossing and turning restlessly, she finally fell back asleep, and when the alarm sounded at 6:15 AM, she was up and at it as usual, with only a moment’s pause to wonder again what that voice was all about… the one that had stolen an hour of her sleep.

She didn’t give it much thought in the ensuing days… just occasionally when her mind would wander to the nagging mystery of that voice. Sarah’s daily routine was engaging, and hours at the office always flew like eagles. Sundays were reserved for a long workout before showering, seeing people, going places, shopping, reading, or sometimes just relaxing. On the other six days, she would start her day with only half-an hour on the elliptical, shower, grab a bite, and head to the office at about 8 AM. Usually, she would work through the day with only a chug of ultra-filtered high-protein skim milk for lunch, and generally start back for home at about 6 PM, to cook dinner and do chores over Chopin, Tom Waits, Mahler, Puccini, or the Rolling Stones, before watching the news and crashing. 

Sarah’s daily commute was predictably 35 minutes, which gave her downtime in the morning to plan specifics of her day, and in the evening to review the day’s wins and setbacks… losses weren’t allowed. She found her work exciting, challenging and quite financially rewarding, with her many and varied clients providing a full complement of social interaction. But at workday’s end, she always loved stepping back into the beauty and privacy of her little studio apartment, every square inch of her small pad immaculate and sparsely but meticulously appointed, just so. Her road bike hung on one wall as quirky art, but doubled on sunny summer Sundays to deliver long-haul, high-dopamine pleasure. Her beautiful plants were her soulmates. They were happy, she was happy, and life was good. The one dark cloud in Sarah’s world was the damned news.

She felt compelled to watch the 10 o’clock news, but she didn’t like it. She grimaced at the irony that not liking it was exactly why she felt compelled to watch it. The vast majority of the “hard” news came in the first 15 minutes, laced with opinionated innuendo, and heavily filtered to suit the network’s politically correct agenda. It was mostly heartbreaking stuff, all touted, ad nauseam, as “breaking” news.  

The pap following the first segment was generally a combination of mostly meaningless weather reports that usually everyone either already knew or could surmise by looking out their window or sticking their head out their door, and then by a mix of rehashed old news, trivial fluff and “me too” pandering. Invariably, Sarah hit the “off” switch at 10:15.

So, why did she bother watching it at all? A sense of guilt, she supposed, guilt from coasting along through life, independent and happy as a clam, while all this crap was going on… lying politician parasites of all banners preaching at every turn, over a steady stream of rapes and murders, mostly unsolved with no leads, and an endless variety of other violent crimes, almost all perpetrated by males unwilling to harness their testosterone-fed aggressions.

On the Monday night following the “voice”, Sarah climbed into bed at her usual 10:15 PM, after the latest round of bad news, the weight of which having turned sour the “good fatigue” she had earned during her workday. She wearily tossed and turned for half an hour, finally reaching out to her nightstand to start “Sketches of Spain” … the Miles Davis gift of cozy brilliance often queued up on her cheap CD player. It did the job, and a couple of hours later her room was silent until she was pulled abruptly from sleep by the same voice that she had heard last Wednesday… more urgent and even louder this time, “It is NOT my fault! I didn’t know!”

The clock showed 12:31 AM, as her eyes quickly scanned her apartment. But she knew that they would find no one. What the hell was going on? That voice was too loud to be coming from outside her apartment, nor was there anyone in her apartment… hmm… besides herself. Could it have been her own voice? It had sounded so anxious… possibly even frightened. Had Sarah Cantor been talking in her sleep, and if so, to whom?

She hadn’t been dreaming… or at least she had no awareness of having been dreaming. No, it was a voice… her own voice. But what didn’t she know? For what could she be blamed? What wasn’t her fault? She had no clue, but waking herself by yelling in the middle of the night had to stop. She reached for her cell phone, and sent a text to her mentor and friend, Joan Allen: “Joanie, it’s Sarah… could you meet me for lunch at 12 noon tomorrow… Mel’s Place?” She knew that Joan would be asleep and not see her text until morning, but she felt better having taken at least some action to get to the bottom of this.

Joan had been Sarah’s first and only boss, for fifteen years, until selling the business to Sarah and retiring a few years earlier, pursuant to a leveraged buyout arrangement that had recently been fully paid-off with that final, sweet payment. The two close friends clinked glasses of champagne to toast the occasion.  They had grown close despite their age difference…. Sarah now 42 and Joan 66. 

Joan’s retirement passion was travel, and it quickly became their shared passion, taking extended trips at least semiannually. With abundant free time in retirement, Joan enjoyed doing all the planning and reservations work, and besides their travels together, they usually met for lunch monthly… often planning or reviewing their travels. Their friendship had come to resemble a sort of savory stew with mother-daughter, twin sister, and close pal accents.

As Sarah expected, Joan’s return text popped onto Sarah’s cell phone even before she had left for work the next morning, “Sure, Babe… can’t wait… see you then”.

Mel’s Place was busy, but as Sarah entered, she spotted Joan at their favorite table, nestled in a corner window. Sarah had called the owner, Melody Sofios, to reserve that table, which afforded them a great street view and some privacy. Mel’s was small but otherwise a typical Greek-owned restaurant… clean and bright, the food simple but consistently good, standard dishes, with long-time staff always pleasant. Melody gave Sarah a big hug and escorted her to the corner table, where Joan had jumped up to greet her. The two pals embraced and gabbed with Mel for a minute, before taking their seats.

They settled in at the smallish two-top, surrounded behind the two chairs by floor plants that rose to fill much of the corner’s spacious floor-to-ceiling window. They finished their catch-up small talk before asking Mel for their respective favorites. Mel hadn’t even offered them menus, already knowing what they’d want… Sarah’s perfect tuna salad sandwich, with crisp celery and chopped scallion accenting firm tuna salad and a wedge of iceberg lettuce on toasted light rye (no extra mayo), Joan’s perfect Reuben sandwich with a heap of corned beef, creamy melted Swiss and a bit of kraut on toasted light rye (no dressing).

It was less than half an hour before their empty plates were cleared and Joan asked, “So, Sar, I had a sense this morning when I saw your night-owl text, that you had something special to ask or tell me… am I right?”

“You know me like a book, Joanie… yes, it’s definitely something to both tell, and more importantly to ask you, but I’m guessing that it’s probably not something that will turn out to be particularly special. In fact, it’s a mystery that makes me feel a little scared, like there’s some ominous threat lurking out there, or in here”, Sarah replied, pointing her right forefinger at her own right temple.

Joan’s expression darkened with motherly concern, as she reached across the small table and took Sarah’s left hand into both of her own, “Tell me, Babe, what is it?”

Sarah’s right hand then came down to cover Joan’s hands, as she replied, “That’s just it… I don’t know.” Sarah then went on to describe the events of the two awakenings just days apart, and the strange words that had apparently come from her own mouth… words whose meanings she didn’t know and spoken to whom she didn’t know, but words that were unnerving, to say the least.

“So,”, Joan summarized, “the voice was apparently your own, and it was talking to either someone else or possibly to yourself, accusing you of something bad that either you did or caused, but you can’t think of anything bad that you did or caused?”

“Exactly. I don’t think that I have hurt anyone. I haven’t lied to anyone. I haven’t stolen anything or committed any other crime. I’m now a sole practitioner living and working alone, and I can’t think of any client, family member or acquaintance whom I’ve neglected, offended, or whatever. And yet my subconscious self seems to know something that my conscious self does not, and I’m afraid, Joanie. Can you help me figure this out?”

“Of course, Sarah. We can figure this out, just like we’ve been able to solve business problems over the years. Let’s do what we always have done in the past… set up a meeting for Sunday, 1 PM in the War Room. We leave the War Room only when we’ve figured it out!”

For several seconds, their hands remained entangled, their eyes remained locked, and strong… yet somewhat teary. They stood and embraced, Sarah handed the check and cash to Mel on their way out as they all said their goodbyes, and the two friends departed the restaurant in separate directions.

At the scheduled hour on Sunday, Joan opened the door, even before Sarah could reach for the doorbell. Joan’s home was a typical brick bungalow… five steps up from street level were the living room, adjacent dining room, kitchen, bath, and bedroom. Upstairs were two bedrooms and a bath, and in the basement were a storage room, another bathroom… and the large War Room. 

They had always called the home-office in Joan’s basement the War Room, as she had throughout her career always used it for special meetings to resolve major issues, as well as to review progress and set annual plans. Right out of college, Sarah had been Joan’s first and last hire and the only other person ever invited to the War Room, and Joan had been Sarah’s only boss. The War Room was bright from windows at the tops of the two exterior walls, and a dry-erase whiteboard consumed all of one interior wall. As the two women entered the room, Joan said, “You know the drill, Sarah. It’s been a few years since we did this, but we’ll get this problem figured out before we leave here today.”

On the white board, Joan had written 3 questions in bold black lettering:

“1. To whom were you talking? 

 2. What didn’t you know?

 3. What isn’t your fault that you could be blamed for?”

Sarah was pumped to be back in the War Room. It had never failed them before, and she was certain that it would provide them the answers again this time. Since leaving Mel’s Place the previous Tuesday, she had been working on the mystery, in preparation for this meeting. She had come to the conclusion that whatever the mystery was, it must have something to do with the only dark cloud in her otherwise blue sky… the 10 o’clock news.

As they approached the whiteboard, Sarah stopped and said, “Joanie, it’s got something to do with what’s in my heart… with what’s been eating me up every night as I watch the damned news. I’m absolutely torn apart. You know how I hate Trump. He’s such a bully, so crude, so arrogant, such a sophomoric child-like braggart when he’s in a fight, I could never even begin to think of voting for him.”

“I know, Babe,” Joan replied. “We’ve talked about this stuff endlessly, and whereas you torment yourself with watching the news, I just tune it out. Politics and politicians disgust both of us, but you keep crashing back into it, while I simply turn it all off. I don’t watch the news, I don’t vote… I just ignore it. I keep telling you, we’ve got dough… we’ll be good either way. But you torture yourself every night with that damned news… yes, of course Biden and Harris are destroying our country, while Trump is a despicable lout, so the answer is to stop tormenting yourself, and do what I do… drop out. We have enough money to be ok no matter what, so just ignore all that crap like I do. You drive yourself nuts with this stuff, and now it’s got you talking to yourself and blaming yourself … for what?”

Joan’s pitch was nearly hysterical, tears welling up in her eyes, as Sarah turned to her and screamed, “I know… I know… I know… we’ve been through this a million times, but I can’t help it,” rivers flooding from her blazing eyes. “I can’t go on just living the good life and taking nice vacations to France and Tokyo and wherever, while women your age are being slammed to the concrete by asshole men who steal their purses and kick them in their heads, and while women my age are being carjacked and their daughters raped and murdered … all while Biden-Harris ply us with their ‘equity’ and ‘fairness’ platitudes. Biden-Harris, in their first days in office, destroyed our border defenses, inviting millions upon millions of military-age men to pour in from all over the planet, many of them criminals descending like crazed buzzards on a dying calf, with our citizens’ blood and flesh dripping from their teeth, and inviting the free flow of fentanyl across our borders to kill and enslave hundreds of thousands of our people. Biden-Harris are the same people who in their first days in office gratuitously announced the stifling of our fossil fuel drilling, fracking and pipeline development, sending energy prices soaring and igniting inflation that has subsequently crippled our middle class people and suffocated our poor people struggling to even get food on their tables, while at the same time further enriching Saudi Arabia to continue its treatment of women as mere cattle, and while enriching previously broke Iran to fund Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist atrocities against Israel citizens and then hide behind the skirts of hundreds of thousands of dying and displaced Palestinians as Israel tries to snuff out the terrorists and rescue its hostages, and while enriching previously broke Russia to invade and destroy Ukraine, displacing millions of women and children and killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of others who did not flee. And that’s not even to mention Biden-Harris’ innumerable premeditated breaches of our Constitutional protections, as they tamper with our elections by suppressing free speech in our social media and use their so-called justice system to phony up charges against their political enemies, while committing willful blindness to the real crimes of their pals, and by selective student loan payoffs without Congressional authorization, even after the Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional, and by instituting catch and release and no-bail 'justice’ policies for violent criminals who then roam free to rape and plunder again and again.”

By the time Sarah had finished that diatribe, she was on her knees, sobbing.  Joan, also in tears, cried out, “So what do we do? Do I vote again, when I said I would never? Do we vote for Trump, when we said we would never?”

Their eyes locked, and Sarah replied, “I realize now that the voice I heard was saying ‘yes’. We didn’t know in 2020 what we know now, but now we do. We may hate him, but he’s our only hope. We can reap only what we sow, and our vote is our seed.”