In the time of the 13th incarnation (part One)

I

I had finished watching the finale of season seven of Doctor Who, and, like any good fan, had wept. I hadn't wept like that since Adric died, actually. I surfed on to Facebook and found user comments. Some of them were lamenting the fact that it hadn't ended more tragically, more violently, that it was too predictable.

Did they even register the pain in the doctor's face, I wondered, when he lost Amy, in the moment of that final goodbye? Had they ever lost someone close to them? Where was their sympathy for the Doctor?

I had, of course, because I, in such a big way, had screwed up. But hey: I was just a 30 year old guy and Doctor Who fan, hence, a total loser, alone again on a Saturday night, just as I had been for the previous year. Now that the show was over, I felt a sense of closure, I supposed. The Doctor had lost Amelia Pond and Rory (actually, she had signed off 'Amelia Williams' for emphasis in her afterward to River's book, hadn't she?); I had lost…Amelia. Of this much, I was certain.

I was also certain that the Doctor had led me to Amelia in the first place. Let me explain.

I live in Florida. I was born and raised here. I went to school elsewhere, but I moved back for a job as a professor last year. After interviewing for the position near Orlando, on the plane back, I watched the first episode of the sixth season, "The Day of the Moon." And, for the first time in all my viewing, the TARDIS actually landed in Florida—at Cape Canaveral! I was amazed at the coincidence. The Doctor, naturally, would have to come here eventually, especially to Florida when the dreams of the space age were as new as a 1960's era Apollo rocket.

I watched the moonlight on the wing, thought of the dark space coast below as I flew over it, thought about the Doctor with the green lens flare around his sonic screwdriver in the Arizona night desert. There were endless possibilities. This was nothing short of destiny.

So, when I got the job, I was thrilled. Florida always seemed to me to be full of promise. Just stepping out into the airport, with the sunset pouring in through the windows flooding the terminal and the perfumed interiors, all the buildings new, was not like the cities of the Northeast, with their residue of use. Some kids ran off the plane before me, into the light of late afternoon, a pink light that passed through the palm fronds, over the tarmac, refracted through the glass of the terminal. I felt filled with an endless feeling of optimism!

The Doctor, I was certain, had led me here.

II

How quickly things changed. Within a little more than three months of arriving, I met her. I met her on an internet dating website. She liked my hair. She was a hairdresser. We were both big Doctor Who fans. I asked her what she thought the scariest episode was. She said "Midnight." I hadn't seen it, but heard it was good, that and an episode called… "Blink." Could I teach her anything about the show? What was my scariest episode? Ah, that was a good one. "Image of the Fendahl." Glow-in-the-dark skulls. I like everything you are saying, she said. We met, for the first time, at a lovely French café, in the evening not long before Christmas time. I was nearly an hour late. I had gone, unfortunately, to the wrong park in another city. I apologized copiously. She forgave me.

Our romance budded. The first time I went to her apartment I was immediately confronted by an enormous portrait of the Tenth Doctor, his eyebrow cocked skeptically (and, strangely, an equally large portrait of Robert Smith, complete with glow-in-the-dark eyes on the adjoining wall). We got sushi together, stayed at her place and watched some of the first season. I had never finished it. Graduate school got in the way. A million things got in the way. I had been too enthusiastic to ever watch "The Parting of Ways," you see, because Doctor Who, to me, had taken on a kind of religious dimension. I had to be ready to watch, and somehow…I never could watch, never felt ready enough, and thus could never really move on to subsequent seasons. It was too much to see it resurrected after watching it my youth, perhaps. Too intense, too magical somehow, because I felt that the Doctor was watching.

We also watched zombie movies and cuddled, as the T-shirt says. Made out on the couch. She stopped, and smoothed back my lapels of my grey corduroy jacket, as if gently smoothing out the contours of my mind.

She said I looked like Matt Smith, took pictures of me after straightening my hair and put them on the internet. She wanted me in a bowtie; how could I say no? She had various sonic screwdrivers and wanted to take a picture of me wielding one. I did so, shyly.

But I did things to sabotage our relationship. I was late, sometimes by a half hour, to pick her up. I didn't mean to be, I just have problems with time. Anyway, she still seemed to forgive me. We walked along the street, holding hands in Winter Park. She was openly holding hands with me and I could barely believe it. When it started to pour, we dashed through a rainstorm. We were soaked. We kissed, made out like bandits in the car.

After arriving back at her apartment, she casually remarked that the rain might was having an ill effect on her and we would have to cancel the concert we were going to. She had told me about her condition, and I agreed at first without protest. But something in me could not accept it. I had spent a lot (at least on my budget) for the show. I had been in relationships before where I felt used or rather she was so beautiful that I felt insecure that she might so casually disregard me. I scolded her. She should be more considerate. She bowed her head, dropped her eyes. Needless to say, I regretted my statement almost immediately. I saw her body seizing up. I rubbed her shoulders. I wanted to help. I lay with her on her bed. I registered her frustration, and her distress. I stayed with her that night. In retrospect, I realized that I was the one who disregarded her: why had I not taken steps to better understand her condition?

When we had sex for the first time and it was mind blowing. It was after watching a film about exorcism and it felt as though she were being exorcised. I remember the black satin sheets that are now emblazoned in my memory banks. But then a couple weeks later she left me alone for Valentine's Day. I wasn't sure how to interpret this. She sent me a text on Valentine's Day from Jacksonville where she was visiting friends saying she was thinking of becoming a Domme. This was just too much, too hot. I almost lost it. But I thought okay, sure, whatever you want.

Things had changed. When next I visited, we watched Bram Stoker's Dracula and had intense sex. Before we did, I don't know why I did this—partly to make her jealous in retribution for being left alone on Valentine's Day, partly because I felt guilty, partly because I didn't want to have anything between us and this was my way of opening up, of laying myself bare and revealing my flaws—I told her what I'd done the weekend after Valentine's Day.

Here's what I did. I figured if she was going to run off and leave me to visit with friends, then I would do the same. Prick love for pricking, that's what I say. So I travelled to Sarasota to visit some old friends, including one with whom I had had an intense emotional bond. Since we were visiting our two mutual friends who were married, she and I naturally fell back into a kind of closeness. We held hands on the beach, but I got paranoid when our friend started taking pictures of us with his new high-end camera. That night, after visiting, I drove her back home to her parents' house and stayed the night. In the morning, she came into the room I was sleeping in just after I woke up and I gave her a massage, admittedly, seminude. It felt wrong. Though I loved my friend, I missed Amelia. I wanted to go home.

Amelia was not pleased. Still, we fucked like rabbits. In the throes of passion, I declared that I'd been searching for her my whole life. It made sense: I was the Doctor, and she was River. Or Amy. One. Or both. I wasn't sure. I was just really turned on by the way she moved, and the way she looked at me.

The next day, she broke it off out of the blue. Via text.

I was caught totally off guard. I sat there at my desk at 5:56 pm frozen like a stone statue.

I realized that she had already broken it off the night before when we were in the bathtub after we had sex. In the tub, a lukewarm bath (this was the only temperature she could tolerate), I remember being tired, very tired, totally spent, from my move, from the job, from the sex and the emotional intensity brought on by the vampire movie. I was overwhelmed by my resemblance to the Doctor, her projection onto me, and mine onto her, of a Time Lady, the whole convergent constellation of our media. I just wanted to lie down next to her and feel at peace. I remember tenderly scooping the lukewarm water into my hands and pouring it over her naked body, over her flesh, shoulders and breasts, and she looked at me and told me we had to stop, we couldn't do this, that it was hurting her. She said that I was like a gray screen. After being so intimate, she looked at me and it was like there was just nothing there.

"You're very good at faking it, in public, at being social. But when it comes down to it, there's nothing there. You aren't really interested in me. You just wanted to fuck me." I heard the gray screen part. I had agreed with her as I rinsed her naked body, that I felt as though I were a computer that had just been rebooted—DOS prompt, that's what I had called it. But I had not heard the rest, about not doing this anymore and that it was hurting her, not until the next day, at 5:56 in the afternoon at my desk, via text, when time stopped and I turned to stone.

III

I had not moved from that spot all the way through summer, and, as we entered fall, all through the new season of Doctor Who. It was like my grief at her loss transported me to another world. Lamentations. Crying. Crying at the breakfast table alone, with the green tablecloth and clock, and the sunlight falling obliquely through the glass panes. Fearing every breath would be my last, I thought I might drown in every glass of water. Crying down on my knees in a cold shower, praying for forgiveness, bargaining with God for her return, asking the angels, Jesus, and the Doctor.

Yes, I asked the Doctor for help—as I assumed him to be an archangel, or perhaps a Bodhisattva, depending on faith, or both. I felt his hand on my shoulder as I wept. Most of all, I prayed to reverse the hurt that I had caused her, through my confession of infidelity, and by openly admitting that I wanted to control her, because I did in my darkest heart. I wanted to contain and control her. I was jealous, and she was asking me to open up to her, and I did—I told her everything that came into my head, everything good and bad, just to get it out. But I realized too late that to her, opening up was sharing history—pictures, telling me about past loves and experiences. She had been trying to communicate her experience to me with urgency and I didn't listen. I was the one who disregarded her, after all. I disregarded what she had to say as so much sentimentality. The past, history, was unimportant to me. What mattered was that we were together, and that I was able to unburden myself to her, of the entire contents of my head, all my light and darkness. None of that other stuff really mattered anymore. But she didn't see it that way.

Or, by saying I wanted to control and manipulate her, objectify her, I was, indeed, attempting to manipulate, to control, psychologically by mixing lies with truth. We were like Count Dooku and Ventress—but who was the apprentice, and who was the Master? Who would gain the upper hand remained to be seen. I had been hurt before, and so I was feeling insecure. This was how it manifested. She couldn't possibly love me, and so I needed to play games with her.

But these attempts all backfired. With a simple stroke of a few virtual keys, she dispatched me as Obi Wan dispatched the Sith on the fire planet. I found myself torn, broken, dismembered, badly burned, in need of a cybernetic suit.

More than that, I was simply mean. Mean for the sake of being mean—teasing her, even knowing how vulnerable she was. And I hadn't listened when she tried to urgently communicate a message of understanding. Why? Why, when she was so beautiful? I could only conclude that, in the brief chance I was given to show her I cared, I had squandered it by being arbitrarily cruel.

Thus, I prayed to the Doctor for forgiveness. Ha! Breaking a commandment, no less. Though perhaps the Doctor was an Archangel of some sort…or was he a gnostic demiurge?

Things became more complicated when she travelled to New York that spring and I happened to discover that Doctor Who was shooting in Central Park. I passed her this information. She attended to the shoot. I marveled. How did she know to show up in NYC just when Doctor Who was being shot? It boggled my mind. Ah, Amelia, with all of space and time at his fingertips, the Doctor decided to have a picnic in Central Park on the same weekend as you visited! Or, perhaps Amelia (my Amelia) had been playing with me all along. Was she really River Song? Was she a Time Lady, after all? Or perhaps Amy Pond? (Her name, after all, was coincidentally, Amelia.) Did that make me the Doctor? Did it make me Roary? I had actually run into Arthur Darvill once myself during an outtake shoot randomly in the East Village the previous year. This was while he was playing video games at a hot dog store, no less.

"What are you filming?" I inquired.

"Doctor Who," said the director, looking on as Arthur played his game.

I was dumbfounded. "That's my favorite show!" But I didn't even recognize the character, since I had been in graduate school and didn't have television. I confessed this to her.

"Well," she said, suddenly indignant, "you'll just have to catch up then." And then Arthur thanked them for the hotdog (the 'Chihuahua') and left.

Now Amelia was in Manhattan watching them shoot, perhaps meeting the cast herself! But there were rumors, however, that the Ponds were in danger. There were evil angels about. Someone would not survive. I wept. I prayed on my knees for Amelia to be happy, for me to let go, for her to forgive me, for me to forgive myself, for the Doctor to stop worrying about me and save Amy and Roary from the Angels!

He was with me. I knew it. A number of them were, a number of his incarnations. I could feel them supporting me through these dark hours and days. (Notably, the Tenth doctor was not there. He was cross with me for hurting Amelia and didn't think I deserved sympathy. Why the Eleventh Doctor came to my rescue, I could not be certain. Perhaps he had some purpose in mind…)

In any event, after a torturous summer and diminishing contact with Ameila, I eventually decided it was best to cut off all communication. That brings me to here, now. The fall season finale for season seven, as I write this. It was over. I registered the lamentations of the Doctor as my own, the cry of grief as Amy vanished, the TARDIS blue against the gray of the city—with the mist rising from the graves in the foreground like vespers, souls from glass vials, the city skyline in the background a reflection of those graves. (I had observed this scene myself once upon a time, while riding in a taxi on the way to LaGuardia on the BQE, in the early morning mist of New Year's Day—the buildings, like massive gravestones, I thought.)

TARDIS blue against the backdrop of gray city skyline in mist, gravestones, souls—gray screen.

The Angels. I shuddered.

Thus the season ended. Which was why it was so strange when I found myself in the TARDIS control room suddenly, face to face with the Eleventh Doctor himself.

IV

I was confronted with the Doctor, with my idol and my imaginary friend of many years. "What am I doing here?"

"Parasocial interaction," he enunciated, moving around the console. It was Matt Smith, after all. But he was wearing black—a long black jacket, over his normal attire. And the control room itself was different. It, too, was black, more resembling the earlier designs from the 1970's and 80's, of the Tom Baker and Peter Davison years. The octagonal console itself had returned, and the walls with their rows of circular depressions. But this was different now, because instead of white the surfaces, panels, of the console were alternately black and white. And the walls themselves were dark grey. The circular holes glowed with an inner whiteness. It seemed to me, like a checkered suit of a storm trooper from Star Wars, the plastic panels like their armor.

And all at once, it was different again. I watched it morph and change before my eyes, into the Victorian secondary TARDIS control room of the Tom Baker years. The walls were mahogany, but black this time. I watched the contours of the octagonal console melt into the small wooden console with the singular rings, the time cylinder, but silver, platinum now. I watched the walls melt into black wooden paneling, which reflected grimly from out of darkness.

"Mourning," I whispered, "that's how you express your grief."

"The TARDIS responds this way to my sadness. For having lost, my…only friend. My best friend. And alone again."

But with its dark colors, this was more like the Master's TARDIS, I thought. I shivered.

"New desktop theme," he smiled.

"What did you mean, parasocial interaction?"

"Well, you should know," he said. "You're a professor of media. Parasocial interaction, or the rather strange notion that people develop relationships with TV personalities—newscasters, East Enders. You get the point. You talk about television characters as if they are real people, about news anchors as though they were a friend of the family. Strange bunch, humans. So lonely, in many respects. Not unlike me, I suppose."

Here in the obsidian control room, I worried a little about the Doctor. How long had it been? It was only a few minutes for me. Perhaps he had been traveling alone for some time now. Years. Decades. Perhaps he had not heeded Amy's parting words, that he should never travel alone.

"I have travelled for centuries alone, without Amy," he said, reading my thoughts.

"You shouldn't have, you know. She told you that you need a companion. You need to travel with others. You lose site of yourself otherwise."

He stood now, by the TARDIS, and I could see he was wearing his normal tweed jacket, but it was covered with a black trench coat. And he wore a bright green bowtie, oddly, one that matched the shimmer of his screwdriver. He stood upright, which was an uncommon stance for the Eleventh Doctor. He stood upright and suddenly became very still.

Perhaps, if I had been true to myself all those years I could have been more recognizable to her. I meditated on that thought.

"You have a good heart. And you're compassionate. You are passionate, too. But you lost her. You lost Amelia. I did a lot of work to bring you two together. I trusted you with her, and you…"

"You brought us together? You did?"

"Does it confirm your suspicions? Weren't you reading the signs? Hidden messages in the TV programming. This is not a coincidence. And now that you have lost her, I'm sorry… I'm afraid can only do so much. The rest is up to you, and it's one of life's great tragedies, I suppose." And he looked away for an instant, and in that instant, I registered…a complex universe of emotion, some pain there, a little reflection.

"You helped me. Why?"

"Because you were drowning," he said. "In your sorrow, and your desire for her."

"Then you were there! It was you. I felt it. I felt your hand on my shoulder. You came when I called to you, when I—"

"Prayed for me? To me? What, do you think I am God?"

"They call you the Lonely God."

He was silent.

"I am not a God. I'm a Timelord. There's a difference."

"Then you're an angel of some sort, a…a Bodhisattva like they describe in Buddhism!"

He didn't answer.

"How and why am I here?" I approached him around the console. I walked right up to him and grasped him by the shoulders. "Why were you kind to me? Why did you even help me after what I've done?"

"Because, as I said," he spoke quietly, compassionately even, smiled a little, "you have a good heart after all. You may…not be the most trustworthy or decent individual. Thinking about some of the things you've done—and I know all about you—I must say that you are not my first pick for a companion. You can be cowardly and incredibly selfish. I mean, some of the things you said to her…And given her circumstances, too. You should be ashamed. Yes, I'll admit it. I thought perhaps I shouldn't help you. Perhaps I should let you die—wallow and drown in your own shallow self-pity. Perhaps, I thought, I should even kill you myself. I didn't know.

"You're worse than Turlough," he added. "I mean, really, really just…totally untrustworthy. Yes, I thought I might even kill you myself, ok? Because of what you did to her, to Amelia. She is very dear to me. And you, you were like a bull in a bloody China shop!"

"So it was true after all, she's—"

"Yes, she is River. And also Amy. It's complicated. Afterimages, aspects of their personalities. Like line spectra of diffracted light. They were the same…person, after all. Just like—"

"Just like I'm some sort of afterimage of you?"

"Time and space is a complicated thing. Have you ever heard of EPR phenomena? It's a consequence of quantum physics, and a pointed critique of quantum mechanics, I might add. So-called quantum non-locality.

"Two particles that are entangled will have states—spin, charm, strange—that are entangled. If you observe one here, on this side of the universe, then the other entangled particle, no matter how far, away—on the other side of the universe—will change its state. It will have the exact complimentary state. If this one is up, the other is down, and so on. It would be as if you were observing different colored balls, and when you opened the box and found one was white, the other would be definitely black, but not until you observed them! That means that both balls, both particles, are linked, must always compliment one another. That means that every possible observation is encoded in the particles—its almost as though they know how they will be observed! That's how Bohr would have explained it, yes! And it's regardless of where they are. They could be on the other side of the galaxy, the universe!"

"That's not possible."

"It's real. It's the way the universe functions." He flashed a grin. He wheeled back toward the console. "It's faster than light communication."

"Why are you telling me this? What's this got to do with Amy, with Amelia, with both of them? You still haven't told me how or why I am here."

"Parasocial interaction my dear boy!" He was calling me a boy, but ironically, he was now the younger man. "Parasocial interaction. In a universe with such vast expanses, that cannot even be traversed by light speed travel, where, beyond the incident light from stars not yet born, not yet known on earth, there is a Void, darkness, blackness, somehow, among it all we must communicate! And you are a Doctor of Communication, no? You should be able to follow. That is, faster than light communication, in media, in images, in dreams, and dream images. I am the Doctor, I have appeared here before you now, do you understand me."

"I don't understand."

"Well, go to the local library and check out some books by Stephen Hawking. You're a bright boy, you can figure it out."

"You're saying that parasocial interaction has something to do with the EPR paradox of faster than light travel."

"There we have it! Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, oldest trick in the book, so called 'spooky action at a distance' that Einstein never really liked all that much, gave him the willies. I know, I had to talk him down the night he figured it out, believe me that was no easy task—don't want to have to deal with a paranoid Einstein. It was in his library—"

"What do you mean by action at a distance?"

"He totally looked like he had cracked!"

"So somehow, your action halfway across the universe is affecting me?"

"Yes, that's it! Good work my boy! You have a budding physicist in you yet!"

"You're saying that you're able to travel here using signals that are faster than light!"

"Yes! Utilizing EPR technology I can use the TARDIS to access the parasocial interactions of humans, of screens, and also, reveries, imaginings. This is all taking place in a kind of imaginary space. I don't really exist. You're smart enough to know that. But you're also smart enough to know that it doesn't really make any difference, does it? I mean, just look at where you live: Disney World. Who can blame you for losing sense of the boundary between fantasy and reality!"

"So that's why this is all happening right after I watched the season finale? And that's why one minute I was in my living room eating a snack, and the next I was here, with you? EPR phenomenon. And Imaginary Space."

"Oh, come on. Do you really expect extra-terrestrials of sufficiently advanced technological capability to wait around using light-speed travel in order to visit? Especially when you're causing so much mischief? We use EPR phenomenon. Time Lords can surf quantum waves like it's nobody's business. We can reappear in your dreams, in your imagination, through your media systems—which are, after all, only the sum of a vast mass hallucination, of your collective dreaming—to reach you! The quantum states in your brain, collapsing, revealing—Me! Ta-da! We have reached you! And I even got you a girlfriend briefly for just vaguely resembling me, which is a great fete, two birds with one stone!"

"But you said the particles have to be entangled…"

"You've got to admit that getting you a girlfriend in the process was pretty brilliant."

"They have to be entangled!" I repeated. "That means that you would have had to originate them somehow."

"We are Time Lords, after all. And yes, we have been watching over humanity for a very, very long time."

"You really miss her, don't you," I said all at once. "A TARDIS in black bereavement is more like the Master's TARDIS, isn't it? You travelled alone too long. You should have listened to her."

He dropped his gaze, overcome with sadness, as I had been, all those many nights, weeping, shivering, praying—for him, for Amy and Roary, for her…

For an Angel to forgive my sin.

"Maybe I saw my own grief reflected in you. For all your faults, you are still good deep down, and…for all my brilliance, I still couldn't save Amy." He bit his lower lip, averted his gaze, hands gripping the console. "Now, you will come with me. For all your faults, as I said you are worse than Turlough even, less trustworthy, and not very brave, not even very compassionate—still, your heart is big. Somehow, within you, you are infinitely disappointing, and infinitely redeemable. Chaos in motion. For the time is coming. In the decades of my mourning, I felt myself slipping, you see. I felt, bitter. Bitter toward humanity. Like she said, avoiding Earth. It may be a while before I return. Especially to New York...

"I stood, silently, as silent and still as one of the weeping angels, mourning in the very spot where they disappeared, where she disappeared. My dear friend, my confidant who kept me honest, feeling myself growing grayer…knowing I would never see her again. In that moment, torn away so totally and completely.

"One morning, after River called me away again, called me back to the TARDIS, in the gray mist rising over the graveyard, and over the city, like haze over a forest, over treetops, I realized that I had to move forward. I had to return to the TARDIS. I let River pilot it. I was in no condition to do so. But a TARDIS always fares so much better in the competent hands of a Time Lady, after all…

"I had heard your cries, your pleas, well before that. Over the past year, crying out in a cold darkness, just like I heard…her calling to me. Your Amelia."

"My God," I muttered, "please tell me that my mourning was not too much of a burden, that being there for me did not prevent you from being able to save Amy."

He looked at me and smiled wistfully, "I have to believe that I could have saved her, just as you must believe that you had a chance with Amelia—your Amelia—and that you lost her. It is the tragedy of this life."

"I'm so sorry," I said.

"Certainly, you took up some of my time."

"You were very brave," I said. "For her, and for me. I was drowning, and you helped to rescue me."

"You were literally drowning," said the Doctor. "In the black Void of your sorrowful mind."

I felt puzzled. I looked at the Doctor. "I saw you," I said to him, "in that Void, in that darkness, holding back the pain and sorrow for me, selflessly. You could have drowned! Regeneration won't save you from drowning!"

"I have two hearts," he smiled. "And you were able to control your anger, and your frustration—with yourself, with her—and your loneliness, and the sorrow. In time, get it back under reign, just like when she smoothed your lapels, no?"

"Did you see that, too? Is there nothing you can't see, Doctor?"

"No. And I saw you two in the rain."

Time Lords are like Universal Surveillance, I thought. But I bit my tongue.

"You could have been more sensitive. When she relapsed."

I hung my head, dropped my gaze to the TARDIS floor.

He returned to his work at the TARDIS control panel. "Smoothing your ruffled heart, before you began the long, lonely task of putting yourself back in order, learning to conduct yourself with dignity. The dignity you scarred in her is reflected in your own lost face; but you're learning. You realized that, instead of wallowing, you should put your power into writing, into the power of your own voice. That Voice is everything, and it is the one thing that—for all your faults, redeems you, in her eyes, and in mine, and in your own. Your imagination.

"Besides, it's alright," he continued. "You were actually very brave, too, in your own way and…you were suffering. Bereaved, just as you could see I was. And I, after all, am kind. And so are you—despite your meanness, deep down. Which is why I need you—for a very dangerous mission. More dangerous than any that I have encountered in a long time. I need you now because something has gone dreadfully wrong with my time sequence, with one of my incarnations. I need you, because you have a good heart, deep down, and because you have a dark mind…"