The doctor stared at her.  Or, to be more accurate, she stared at a spot a couple inches to the left of her forehead.  Or, to be even more accurate, she started at something that was not in Simon Park Station at all.

“I just got off the graveyard shift at St. Gregory’s,” she replied, with all the emotion of a cardboard tube.  “A twelve-year-old kid came in.  He and his friends were playing by the train tracks.  His foot got stuck.  A train came.  We—we had to take his leg.”

“Oh.”  The obnoxious smile vanished.  Nightmares crept back into the old woman’s waking mind.

“No, they didn’t run,” the doctor continued, answering a question that had not been asked, at least not since she had gotten off the subway.  “They tried to save him.  I was going to either compliment them on their bravery or berate them for their stupidity, but I never saw them.  They went straight to the morgue.”

The doctor stood there for a while longer, her face full of silent horror (inside her head, presumably, it was not silent at all).  Eventually some instinctual urge must have convinced her to keep moving.  She walked awkwardly out of the station, as if she was overly-conscious of her legs.

The old woman remained suitably dumbstruck for a while, but she was able to move on much more quickly than the doctor would.  She told herself that nothing was going to get her down on that day, that it was the first day of the rest of her life, and whatever other positive platitudes she could think of.  Without the task of constantly asking for help to keep her busy, she chose to spend her time simply taking in the organically woven tapestry that was Simon Park Station.

She watched her home for the past seven-and-a-half months go through a morning ritual not entirely unlike her own.  Dragged to reluctant wakefulness at 5:19 sharp, it gradually became more and more active over the hours that followed.  Small-time merchants came down the steps, unlocked their stands, and began to aggressively peddle their remarkably cheap (both in terms of price and quality) merchandise.  A few more dead-eyed overnight shift people fell off the early Outbound trains, but soon the station was taken over by families.  Parents representing the full spectrum of eagerness were dragged by children who had been driven to the peak of hyperactivity by breakfast cereal, early-morning cartoons, and the promise of a visit to the zoo or the aquarium.  Finally, a flow of people getting off of trains developed to complement that of the ones getting on, and the place was truly in full swing.

God, she thought, this is so boring.

Since the woman was no expert observer of the human condition, she eventually fell to brooding.  She believed that her search was over, but what proof did she really have?  The kid had agreed to help her, but those were just words.  She had heard a lot of words during her time down there, and she had seen very little action.  And, just in case that wasn’t a big enough concern, there was always the matter of effectiveness.  He could try to help all he wanted, but would he be able to do it?  The trick with the squirrel had been surprisingly effective, but it didn’t instill her with a whole lot of confidence.

Maybe the doctor was right.  Maybe doom and gloom was the only appropriate outlook for a day like that.  If she had even one tiny shred of evidence to make her think that—

“Good morning,” said Peter, standing above her.

With the continent trapped in his jaws
Bonaparte sought to redo the laws
And long after he died
They would stretch far and wide
Influential his civil code was

Event: The Napoleonic Code goes into effect
Year: 1804
Learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleonic_code

Mrs. Miller lay dying in bed
Dr. Hess found a digest, which said
That by taking some mold
She could live to be old
Since that day, of germs we have less dread

Event: Orvan Hess and John Bumstead become the first doctors to successfully treat a patient using penicillin
Year: 1942
Learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillin

No KYPC this week.  The Wordsman is otherwise occupied.  Try not to despair.

Day 234:

The thunder of chugging wheels, the rush of wind through the tunnel, the screech of over-used brakes.

5:19.  Time to get up.

The woman in Simon Park Station had no use for alarm clocks, with their revolutionary ideas and rebellious ways.  She got up at the same time every day, except Sundays.  At 5:19 the first train rolled in, its awful noise undampened by the sounds of human activity, for at that time—and for several hours before that—she was the only human there.  They say that people can get used to even the most horrendous racket, that soldiers in the trenches learn to sleep through artillery barrages.  The old woman could never sleep through the arrival of the first Downtown-bound Green Line train of the day.

She had a morning routine, like we all do.  When the angry noise forced her eyelids open, she would first make sure the train was not coming straight for her, as it often did in her dreams.  Then she would glance at the still-closed stands, in the hope that the mere memory of coffee might help to keep her awake.  Then she would lay her head against the cold concrete of the pillar and fall immediately back to sleep, because there was nothing to do in Simon Park Station at 5:19 in the morning.  On weekdays, the first Downtown-bound train was a sparsely attended affair.  On Saturdays it was completely pointless, deserted, a ghost train (yet another image that she did not need invading her fragile subconscious).

The real wake-up call came about forty minutes later, when the first Outbound train came in from downtown.  The 5:19 was just a train.  The woman did not care about trains.  She was only interested in passengers.  Unlike the crack-of-dawn Inbound train, the super-early Outbounds usually produced a couple.  Sure enough, here came a woman in her early 30’s wearing scrubs.

Here we go again, the old woman thought.

“Don’t you feel . . .”

With a shock nearly as strong as if that dream train had finally collided with her frontal lobe, the events of the previous day came back to her.  The new strategy.  The slap.  The handcuffs.  The boy and the Beherrschunglied.  The extremely mediocre flute.  Freedom.  And most importantly . . .

“. . . will you agree to help me?”

“Sure.”

The old woman experienced the joy of the worker who has just looked up and realized that her shift ended five minutes ago.  She didn’t have to do this anymore.  Her call had been answered.

“Don’t you feel,” she started again, smiling more brightly than any normal human should at just after six on a Saturday morning, “that it’s going to be a beautiful day?”

After the near seismic shift that resulted in a TDiH poem being produced on Wednesday, we decided to stick with it, because hey, updating on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday seems to make a little more sense than Monday, Tuesday, and Friday. Apologies to Tuesday fans, but for now we’re sticking with hump day.

The phone name that we all know quite well
Is that of Alexander Graham Bell
Did he make his own way?
Or steal from Mr. Gray?
As is oft the case, it’s hard to tell

Event: Alexander Graham Bell receives a patent for the telephone
Year: 1876
Learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisha_Gray_and_Alexander_Bell_telephone_controversy

A. 命の木　B. 家政婦　C. 金玉　D. 芸術家　E. 子孫　F. 戦火の馬

G. パリの真夜中　H. 物凄く煩くて、有り得ないほど近い

And the Oscar for Technical Accuracy goes to . . .

Theoman, of course.  Not much of a shocker here.  Sure, he’s not perfect, and I certainly wouldn’t put him in charge of casting: he has an unfortunate tendency to hire artists to do all the cleaning work and to take on maids to design all his scenes.  Other than that, however, his record is solid.  Luckily for him, at KYPC, the Oscar for Technical Accuracy is awarded at the main event and not at that special separate nerd ceremony they always have for the technology stuff.

The award for Most Subjectivity goes to . . .

A(nother) Fan, surprising no one.  If movies are involved, you’d better believe he has an opinion and is willing to share it.  So what if his accuracy suffered because he was more concerned with badmouthing Tree of Life than he was with spotting it at A (supposedly his first runner up).  Oh wait . . . actually, his accuracy wasn’t half bad.  It wasn’t half good, either, but it was close.  Turns out that his knowledge isn’t limited to films he approves of, either.  He spotted Moneyball at C, The Descendants at E, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close at H.  And here’s a funny story about ELIC: this challenge was somewhat inspired by seeing a friend of mine looking up movie titles in Japanese in order to prepare a lesson for class.  I saw him looking at one and, reading only the beginning (“Extremely loud”), assumed this was a review of the movie rather than its title.  Though based on A(nother) Fan’s low opinion, perhaps it was both.

The moral of the story is: don’t simply rank things in the order they come to you.  While this system puts ELIC in its “proper” place, it also says that The Descendants is better than War Horse, The Help is better than The Artist, and Tree of Life is better than all of them.

The award for Most Easily Recognizable Answer goes to . . .

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.  Oh, the horror, it actually won something!  Not much of a surprise here, since the title has twice as many meaningful words as any of the others do.  Technically, everyone also got Moneyball correct, but we’re going to assume based on Shirley’s comments that she was more sure about ELIC.

Finally, the award for Best Original Screenplay goes to . . .

Shirley.  Whether or not she actually gets the answers right (this time she picked up as many correct answers as A(nother) Fan), we can always count on Shirley to give us the most detailed description of how she arrived at them.  She weaves a tale of deception and subterfuge at C, Moneyball.  She tells us how the life of a maid can be like a war at B, The Help.  She reminds us of John Williams’ powerful score with her reference to musical instruments at F, War Horse.  She . . . says something about horses that I don’t entirely understand at D, The Artist (can’t expect to catch every little detail in a silent movie, right?)  And she was the only one to mention anything about Ernest Hemingway at G, Midnight in Paris.

But hey, to me, you’re all winners.  And I actually mean that.  Anyone who’s played KYPC for as long as you folks have knows that three out of eight is nothing to sneeze at.

Still, awards aren’t everything.  There are other ways to judge a film’s value.  See if you can identify the top six films from the IMDB Top 250 List that were never nominated for Best Picture.

A. 新たなる希望　B. 暗闇の騎士　C. 七人の侍　D. 帝国の逆襲

E. 殴り合い会　F. 良い者と悪い者と醜い者

They walked over to what Peter considered the “entrance” but the woman could only think of as the “exit.”  The station was once again all but deserted—too late for most people coming home from work, too early for people to be heading back downtown for dinner.  While Peter scanned the area for anything unusual—trip wires, lasers, trick stones that trigger poison darts, ghosts—the woman retreated about twenty steps.  Then, with a “Here goes nothing,” she raced toward the staircase as fast as she could.  Peter was shocked by her speed.  And, for approximately four seconds, that was the only shocking thing about the run.

Most people think that Newton invented physics—or, if not him, the Greeks—but humans have always understood physics to a certain extent.  Nowhere is this fact more obvious than in our instinctual reactions when we see something violate the laws of nature.  One instant, Peter saw the old woman barreling forward with at least enough momentum to knock over a fruit cart.  The next instant, she was standing perfectly still.  In between, she had struck . . . nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  The whole thing lasted less than a second, but it still gave Peter a headache, and thirty seconds later he was still trying to figure out what had made her stop.

“You see?” she said, dizzier than when she had been doing her victory dance.  The woman appeared dazed but uninjured (another fact that made Peter’s brain wince).  “So,” she said loopily, “should we get started?”

“Not tonight.”  All good things must come to an end; Peter was hoping the same was true of bad things.  Though it seemed to be ending on a high note, he could not recall a worse day, at least not in the past five or six years.

“Okay.  Go home and get some sleep.  You don’t look so good,” she said, pointing about a foot to the right of where Peter was standing.

After he left, the woman returned to her pillar and sat down, adopting a position not that different from the one she had been trapped in for so many hours.  She let out a sigh of relief that had nothing to do with physical discomfort.  The search was over.  She wasn’t excited, exactly—seven-and-a-half months of waiting will do that to you—but she felt . . . something.  She felt like she was reading a series of books, and the first had been fascinating, but the second was a struggle to get through.  But she read the whole thing, driven on by the promise of wonder suggested by Book 1.  Now she sat there, staring at the cover of Book 3, unsure of what to expect when she turned the first page . . .

Peter walked up the stairs, crossed the street, opened the door to his apartment building, and realized that Rocky was still following him.  Since the woman had given him no helpful advice on how to end the effects of the song, he just shouted, “Be free!”  A fellow resident, on his way out, saw this curious communication and stared, but Peter didn’t notice.  He was too busy watching his former servant dash across the street and return to his unnatural habitat.

He took the elevator up, barely having enough energy to push the buttons.  He unlocked his door, pushed it open with the weight of his body, stumbled through the kitchen, and somehow managed to collapse on his bed before he simply collapsed.  He sank immediately into blissful, refreshing sleep.

Less than an hour later he was woken up by a telephone call from his mother, who demanded to know: 1. Why he wasn’t at dinner when he said he would be, and 2. Whether he knew anything about what had happened to her flute.

There is a certain day that only comes along once every four years . . . except not when the year is a multiple of 100 . . . except yes when it is a multiple of 400. Anyway, we here at the Wordsman feel it would be wrong to deprive readers of the chance to learn about this day and its fabulous history, so, rather than wait for it to appear on a Tuesday, we are breaking tradition and producing the first ever Wednesday This Day in History!

Well no wonder it never can end
On a cursed day this strip was first penned
Though to read it is pain
It runs ‘gain and again
And to Judgment Day it may extend

Event: The Family Circus (originally The Family Circle) debuts
Year: 1960
Learn more (but don’t say I didn’t warn you): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Family_Circus

Once a peasant with naught to his name
This poor outlaw a monarch became
He was Liu Bang, but now
He’s the Emperor Gao
China never would be quite the same

Event: Liu Bang (also known as Gao or Gaozu) is proclaimed first Emperor of the Han Dynasty
Year: 202 BC
Learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Gaozu_of_Han