Chapter 6: Venture No Further

This is a bit out of order but it makes sense to put this scene here. Maybe five months after Nan arrived on the Despair, Grievous was sent on some dumb mission to infiltrate Kamino and steal Jango Fett's DNA. Asajj Ventress went with him. Grievous lost a battle with Obi Wan and made his ignominious escape with Ventress in a small pod. They got instructions to travel back to the Despair in the pod to avoid the Republic. Neither was thrilled at the idea of spending six hours together in a small space. They did not talk about the failed mission and Ventress would probably have been fine with no conversation at all, except Grievous was used to having Nan to chat with now.

"So…seen any good movies lately?" He asked.

The look Ventress gave him said it all, but he ignored her and said, "Have you seen the one where a Jedi teenager gets sent to another universe where they don't have the Force and he has to go to a regular high school like a normal kid? He has such a hard time fitting in! Then he falls in love with a regular girl just as he finds out how to get back to our world. What do you think he chooses to do? But I won't spoil it for you."[1]

"My dear general, loquaciousness does not suit you considering how little knowledge you possess," said Ventress.

He didn't rise to the bait but said, "Fine, let's listen to the radio instead."

He turned on the radio, which was playing a hit song by the band called "Sith's Demise." Needless to say, none of their songs had anything to do with Sith or their possible destruction. The songs were mostly about break-ups, the opposite of break-ups, fame, and drug-induced experiences. Ventress was not interested and turned off the radio with the Force.

Grievous turned it back on.

She turned it off, etc., etc., until Ventress completely broke the radio.

"You know, this is why you don't have any…"

Grievous was about to say "friends" when Ventress broke his voice simulator with the Force. With immense effort and the loss of several screws and bolts from underneath his chin, Grievous managed to croak out one more word.

"Bitch."

Grievous resolved to get revenge and challenged Ventress to a duel once he got his voice back. Dooku was supportive of the duel since it allowed his minions to train without him having to lift a lightsaber. He warned Grievous that Ventress was probably stronger than him and perhaps he should learn a few new moves before the duel.

Nan suggested Grievous get a third pair of arms. He'd tried it once before and chopped himself into pieces. Nan knew of a guy on Taia who worked on brain interface technology. Grievous could control six arms with this tech if he practiced a little. It would be really easy to install because Grievous already had an advanced silico-neural network and the new tech could just be plugged in. But the General didn't want some gadget in his brain. He was basically all gadget except his brain, he didn't want to go through a singularity.

"That's really not how it works," said Nan.

Grievous met up with Ventress for the duel at Dooku's house. They exchanged a few insults, nothing fancy. Then they fought at close quarters for a few minutes. Dooku yawned and ordered a drink. Nan took notes to make it look like she was working. Dooku yelled a few suggestions at either Ventress or Grievous, since he didn't care which of them won. He was already considering what to do with Ventress. If she lost, that showed she was not competent enough to work for him. If she won, it meant she was too dangerous to keep around. Ventress was not aware that it was a lose-lose situation for her.

"Plant your feet, Grievous!" Dooku yelled. "How many times do I have to tell you that you can easily overbalance in that position!" And, "He's a droid, Ventress! You can't hurt him with a kick! Now, if you had kicked him before I told him to plant his feet, you may have knocked him over."

Grievous had just gotten an advantage and pressed Ventress toward the wall with all four of his lightsabers. He knocked one of her lightsabers to the other side of the room. Nan got overexcited and yelled, "Yeah, give it to her! Fuck her up! Fuck her!"

"Bit too much there," said Dooku to her.

Ventress regained her stance and seemed to fight twice as fast as before. She used the Force to get back her second lightsaber. Nan couldn't follow the action anymore. Ventress jumped over Grievous' head back and forth, somehow avoiding the lightsabers that he spun perilously close to her feet. She suddenly smashed one of her blades through one of his arms. Her face broke into a smile but was wiped away just as quickly. As Dooku had just told her, Grievous had no pain receptors in his limbs (though he had touch receptors). She had put her lightsaber so cleanly through the center of his palm that not all the fingers were destroyed. He brought it down to the shaft and grabbed her hand, then threw her up. While she was in the air, he slashed apart her lightsabers and had one at her throat when she fell.

"Say it," he said.

"Say what?" She asked.

"Say that I'm clever, resourceful, and extremely talented."

"I'd rather die."

"Well done, General," said Dooku. "If only you could fight like that against the Jedi."

Ventress got revenge on Grievous a few weeks later by putting some poison in his eye drops. He eyes swelled and he was blind for four days. Nan tried to find an antiserum and discovered the poison was from some shrub on Dathomir, which is how they realized it was Ventress. They got revenge too. One night Ventress came home to Dooku's house to find a raging birthday party for her. Dooku was going to arrive any minute and she tried to get the clowns, musicians, and strippers to leave. This took a lot of shoving and yelling and one of the strippers got too close for comfort. Then Ventress had to clean up the cake, confetti, booze, and vomit. Just when she thought she was done, she noticed a giant painting on a wall behind a curtain. It was Pin the Tail on the Dooku, with Count Dooku's head pasted onto the head of an ass. Luckily the Count was late that night or he would have found her scrubbing the wall. Ventress did not get revenge on Nan and the General for this prank. She silently let them know that they had won with respect to annoyance and stupidity.

Many months later, there was some confrontation with the Jedi and Dooku came back whistling and pleased with himself. He revealed that he had left Ventress to die. The old Grievous would have applauded him and had a party on the occasion of the witch's death but he was not like that anymore. Besides, as it soon became known, Ventress was not dead. A long time ago, she had been beaten up by Anakin and Dooku collected her unconscious body. He had a tracking device/vitals monitor surgically placed on her body without telling her, because, you know, he's such a fan of personal privacy. He remembered about this tracking device and found it somewhere in his house. It showed that she was hiding out on some cave planet and still very much alive. He was so angry that he blew a table out a window.

Nan and Grievous were not around when this happened, or they would surely have been tossed out the window too. Grievous was in the medical ward because Nan decided she wanted to know what his face looked like without the metal armor. Since just asking was out of the question, she bought a cream pie and sat around with it until he showed up and asked if she planned to eat all 50,000 of those calories by herself.

"I'm going to share with you," she said.

He figured out what she meant a second too late and the cream pie was in his face. It went deep into the spaces between his eyes and his face shield.

"Now see, this wouldn't have happened if you got glass put over your eyes like I suggested," said Nan, thinking she was safe because he couldn't see. But he had her by the throat anyway and carried her downstairs, ignoring her wriggling and cursing. He went into the laundry room[2] and found a tub full of soapy water. In she went, howling. He threw in a bag of Admiral Trench's sweaters (from back when he had eight limbs) and used Nan as a sponge for a good five minutes before she finally escaped.

Only after he'd gone to the medical ward to have his face cleaned up did Nan explain that the pie was not just a random act of violence but her plan to see what his face looked like.

"Now that you've seen it, what do you think?" He asked.

"Have you ever seen a Hutt's colonoscopy?" Asked Nan. "Trust me, all 200 feet of that thing are like a glittering rainbow compared to your face!"

Dooku called, pissed as anything, yelling about Ventress and a tracking device. He wanted Grievous to take two others and go finish her off. Dooku had already picked the other two. It would be Commander Drichal, whom we've met before, and Lieutenant Jasco.[3]

"Why can't Dooku go himself?" Asked Nan.

"I think he doesn't want to give Ventress the satisfaction of being killed by him personally," said Grievous. "Either that, or he's too busy trimming his beard and drinking sherry."

They eyed each other, wondering if the other had just had the same thought.

"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" Asked Grievous.

"I'm thinking about having a glass of sherry but also that we should rescue Ventress."

"Exactly. So we could really rub it in her face! And I plan to call her a damsel in distress. Can you imagine how pissed she'll be?"

"Yeah, but how are we going to pull this off? We've got to take dumb and dumber with us."

"If only we could knock them out somehow without them realizing what happened…"

"I've got just the thing!"

Nan ran off to her room and came back with a disk. She explained that a few years ago, she got to know a neurologist who called himself Dr. Psychosis. He wanted to create a "harmless weapon" that could stop people in their tracks. He filmed a short movie and encoded the pixels with subliminal messages that engender feelings of calm, happiness, euphoria, and contentment in subjects to such an extent that they can't stop watching even if they're being chopped to bits.[4]

"He insisted on filming something with actual content," said Nan. "He even hired one actress, an art major from some nearby university. I told him he could just encode the message into a car commercial or a recording of senate proceedings. It should only work on the weak-minded, like Jedi mind tricks. We should be fine watching it. I think."

They found a viewing screen and put on the movie. It started with scenes of a starship flying through space. A voice said, "Space: the final…" The voice stuttered on the word "final" and didn't say what the final thing was. Then there was a family on Christmas Day gathered around a tree. Christmas is not celebrated in the Star Wars universe, so I don't know what Dr. Psychosis was smoking (and neither did he) when he wrote this scene. Upon closer examination, none of the three children were actually kids. One of them was Nan. Another two were reluctant undergrads.

"Surprise, I'm a huge movie star!" Said Nan.

In the movie, Nan opened a sparkly gift that contained a parking ticket wrapped in cotton. She looked at it with illimitable joy (an expression achieved only with whatever Dr. Psychosis was smoking). The second child opened a gift that had nothing at all in it and also smiled idiotically. The third gift held a pair of false teeth. Again, the "child's" delight seemed inappropriate. The father was a cardboard cutout of a cartoon detective. The mother was the only real actress. She sat behind the curtains next to the Christmas tree, her face turned toward the window.

In the next scene, the mother and a guy Nan identified as Dr. Psychosis (Zygerrian, oddly enough) were in a restaurant inside a cavern covered in jewels. Amethyst crystals sparkled outside the window, going up the walls. The tables and chairs also glittered with jewels and gold. The table decoration looked like something that dreams are made of. It threw off so many sparks that Grievous could not even tell what it was. The mother, who must not have been a mother yet since this was going back in time, wore a veil. Dr. Psychosis got down on one knee and proposed to her with a diamond ring. It seemed superfluous, surrounded by greater gems.

The next scene showed the woman's graduation from college. The same surly undergrads, Dr. Psychosis, and Nan went up to get their diplomas from a podium. They wore traditional black robes. The woman wore nothing but a veil. Grievous shot a look at Nan and she shrugged.

"I can only imagine how often 'ol Dr. Psych jerked off to his own movie," she said. "I just don't know how he convinced that woman to do it."

The woman went behind a podium (which hid her naked body) and recited a list of nonsense. "Pincushion, fairytale, distribution, life, Africa, daddy longlegs, medulla, parallelogram." In the next scene, she was just a baby in her mother's arms. Or rather, she played her mother (still veiled) and Nan said the baby was just a big squirt bottle wrapped in a blanket. Dr. Psychosis and she smiled tenderly at the baby for a good two minutes. The veil was thin enough this time to see the woman's mouth, though not her eyes. They continued smiling even when the squirt bottle slipped out of the blanket.

The movie ended with the images of space and that same voice still unable to say what is final.

"For a movie that is supposed to give people feelings of contentment and euphoria, that is a real downer," said Grievous.

"The content is irrelevant," said Nan. "It's all in the pixels."

"Is it? What happened to him, anyway?"

"Suicide from overdose. He fell in love with that actress and she married someone else. He was also clinically depressed and came from a broken family, had medical school debt, chronic back pain, and couldn't get over his fear of the number 23. He never got around to showing the Separatist army the movie and left it for me when he died."

Somewhat disheartened by the story, Grievous called Jasco and Drichal and chose a good ship with a big viewing screen. He put the disk on a loop. Nan hid in the back. Jasco and Drichal arrived and Grievous informed them of particulars only when they were out in space. They needed to have enough memories of the trip to be able to fill in the gaps (though Nan and Grievous had not decided yet how to do that) so he was forced to listen to them the whole time. Drichal mostly talked about gambling. Jasco was on the bloodthirsty side and kept asking Grievous for tips on fighting Ventress. It was a long ride.

Ventress was hiding out in an area nicknamed The Impassable Asteroid Field. She was not too far in, so it was somewhat passable. Drichal and Jasco put on spacesuits. Grievous landed the ship next to the cave where Ventress was supposed to be hiding. There was an old building inside the cave that still had functional life support. It had once been a mining station. Grievous told Jasco and Drichal that he needed them to see a video about fighting in spacesuits (such a video did exist) before he could let them off the ship. They protested that they'd seen it but he planted their asses in front of the TV and turned on the movie. They shut up and stared at the screen like droids.

Nan came out and congratulated Dr. Psychosis. She put on a spacesuit and Grievous put on some goggles and an oxygen tank. They entered the cave and walked to the building, forgetting that Ventress was not exactly expecting them to be coming with good intentions. She shot at them from a blaster attached to the side of the building. A shot barely missed the General's gas tank.

"Oh shit!" Said Nan.

"Oh shit is right, get behind me," said Grievous. He turned on a lightsaber (he almost forgot them. Seriously, did he think he was going to a birthday party?) and deflected the blasts. Quickly enough, he shot a blast back at the gun and destroyed it. The busted old building did not have any more defenses. Nan ran to the door and hacked the security system. They went into the antechamber and the outside door hissed closed. Then they went into the building. Grievous looked at the tracking device and indicated that they should go upstairs. He crept up carefully, expecting an angry Ventress to come barreling down at him. But nothing happened and they made it to the second floor. They went toward the only lit room and discovered why Ventress hadn't kept attacking them. She was too injured. She still had her lightsabers out but clearly expected a short fight to the death, since she was lying down.

"So the big man wouldn't come to finish me off and sent his trained monkey and gerbil after me," she said. "That's just fine. I'll leave a few nicks on your armor to remember me."

"Hate to break it to you, but we come in peace," said Nan.

Ventress completely ignored her and used the Force to send a box flying at Grievous. He smashed it into the wall. She threw a lightsaber at him. He caught it. She tried to get up but the effort made her fall back again.

"Do your worst," she said.

Nan sighed and pulled out a filthy rag.

"White flag, we surrender. You've beaten us with your fierceness!"

"I honestly do not want you two screwing with me before you kill me," said Ventress. "That nonsense with the clowns was bad enough. Being murdered by you is disgraceful."

"How do we make her believe that we don't want to kill her?" Asked Nan.

"I guess we just don't kill her, and every minute we don't, she'll believe us more," said Grievous.

"But she thinks we're screwing with her," said Nan.

"Yeah, I can see why she would think that."

Then Nan got an idea and showed Ventress live footage of Drichal and Jasco staring at the movie. Nan explained what the movie was and that they were using it to help Ventress escape. Ventress watched the footage for a long time. Finally she said, "All right, there is only one thing that will make me believe you are really here to help me. Grievous, I want you to say it."

"Say what?" He asked, though he knew.

"Say that I'm clever, resourceful, and extremely talented."

He grumbled to himself, then said, "Fine, you're a clever, resourceful, and extremely talented…damsel in distress."

He and Nan laughed though Ventress sent another box at them. It was actually their idiotic laughter that convinced her they were sincere. She had never heard villains laugh like that, indeed, had never laughed like that herself. She had never laughed except to gloat or cow her enemies.

"We have to remove the tracking device," said Nan.

Ventress realized Dooku had implanted one on her and looked at her arms and legs.

"It will be in your stomach fat and don't! I said don't cut it out just yet," said Nan. "That thing measures your body temperature. If you cut it out with a lightsaber, it will first sense the blade's heat, then suddenly go cold. We want Dooku to thing you really died. Grievous, heat up this pan."

Nan had everything ready and put a piece of meat on a pan. She stuck a thermometer in it and stuck another one in Ventress' stomach near the device, after anesthetizing the area. Then she cut a slit next to the device and quickly transferred it into the heated meat. She left the meat to cool in a corner so it would appear as though Ventress died and her body went cold. Ventress frowned at the image and wondered if that would happen for real sooner rather than later.

"We have to get going now, damsel," said Grievous. "I'll carry you and we'll put your stuff on this hovercart."

"Uh, no. I'll sit on the hovercart and you carry my stuff. Where are we going?"

"Taia, to S3F," said Nan. "My fellow scientists tell me they have made strides with a memory-alteration device. We have to make Drichal and Jasco think there was some battle but we can't let you use the Force on them. Dooku would recognize it. Also, the doctors at S3F can fix up your injuries."

"Those scientists eat out of the palm of Dooku's hand. Why would they help me without telling him?"

"How good are you are memorizing useless gibberish?"

"On Dathomir, the walls were covered in ancient writing. I had to memorize it all before I even knew what it meant. I didn't stay there long enough to find out but I still remember it."

Nan whispered something into her ear and said it was the formula for a special broth that would keep alive a strain of cells that created a deadly, untraceable poison. The scientists had been trying to get Nan's secret formula for years but she always knew she'd need leverage.

"How did you get here, anyway?" Asked Grievous as they transported Ventress down. They didn't want to pull a spacesuit on her and risk jarring her so Grievous moved the ship closer to the door and got some sticky material to make a seal between the ship and the door. It took a while and Nan was little help. Ventress said she had stolen a ship from a big Republic repair shop. The ship wasn't in great condition and she was seen, but she managed to lose her pursuers. The ship barely lasted long enough to get to this asteroid and she crash-landed, opening up old wounds and creating new ones.

Grievous opened the ship's door once he'd made a good seal, they brought in Ventress, and removed the seal. This took some time. Nan asked Ventress to recite some of the stuff that had been written in the Dathomir temples. She said the language was similar to one she knew and the content of the writing didn't seem interesting. It was just a history of the Night Sisters.

"Was there writing on the walls of the crapper?" Asked Nan.

Ventress rolled her eyes. Grievous got in the driver's seat and led them out of the cave. Ventress called out but Grievous knew an ambush when he saw it and veered up and over the big asteroid with the cave.

"That's the Republic!" He said.

"I must have been tracked after all!" Said Ventress.

There was no way out. The Republic blocked their exit from the asteroid field and they had taken a stealth ship that did not have the firepower to blast their way out. Luckily, it was not a standard Separatist ship but something they'd pinched from the Republic and refurbished. Grievous hoped the Republic suspected they were pirates. He flew into the asteroid field until he could go no further. The Republic followed. Grievous hoped there would be no Jedi aboard but Kit Fisto hailed them.

"Turn around and identify yourselves!" He said. "We know you robbed one of our facilities. You need to pay for what you stole, if that is all you are hiding."

"He knows I'm here," said Ventress. "He wouldn't be here otherwise. They wouldn't send a Jedi after a pirate."

"He doesn't know for sure," said Nan and sent a text message before anyone could stop her. She wrote, "Guys, seriously, give us like ten minutes to discuss. You could use that time to read the paper in the crapper or something."

"Very professional," said Ventress sarcastically, but unprofessional was exactly what Kit Fisto wasn't expecting. After a pause he said they could have ten minutes.

Nan and Grievous exchanged glances and the General said, "We have to keep her from thinking about you-know-what."

"What?" Asked Ventress.

"How if we die now, she won't have time to grow in some hair and will have to be buried in a wig," said Nan.

"What's the matter with you?" Said Ventress. "What am I really not supposed to think about?"

"If you think about it Kit will find out who you are!" Said Nan. She and Grievous knew that Force-sensitive people could sense each other.

"I know how to make myself impermeable to the Force. I was not born yesterday. Focusing on pain is helpful and I happen to be in a lot of that, so do either of you dimwits have a plan or do we have to give ourselves up to the Republic? We'll all be executed."

Grievous looked at the asteroids in front of them. Ventress snorted.

"Don't even think about it, blockhead," she said. "Even Anakin Skywalker could not fly through The Impassable Asteroid Field. You've already dented the ship. Anakin tried to use the Force to guide him but if he hadn't been wearing a spacesuit, he would have suffocated when he crashed. And he was piloting ships since he was a little child!"

Jasco and Drichal started mumbling because the movie had been on so long that the screen went to screensaver. Grievous knocked them out with a few thumps to the head. He continued to look wistfully at the asteroid field while Nan and Ventress discussed more realistic options, such as hiding Nan in a box and having her set them free later. But they had no idea what things would be like once the Jedi discovered who they were. Kit Fisto would probably sense Nan.

"What about that tech you mentioned a while ago?" Asked Grievous. "The program that you said could help me operate six arms. Do you have it on you?"

"You couldn't fly through that asteroid field if you had the wisdom of every Jedi that ever lived!" Said Ventress.

"But this isn't about wisdom. This is about computing," said Grievous.

Nan had the program on her tablet but she needed extra time to transfer it to a disk that could be interfaced with the General's circuits. Ventress laughed, though it hurt, and said they were mad. Completely mad! Since when did cowardly General Grievous, who often hid while his entire army got destroyed, have the guts to take on a certain death sort of situation?

"But do you agree that this is our only option?" He asked. "It's either certain death in the asteroid field or a heinously boring trial by the Republic, where all the Jedi will laugh at us, followed by death."

"Let's just get it over with."

Nan sent Kit another message: "Listen, we need another ten minutes to convince our crazy captain not to fly through the asteroid field. We're trying to download that video of Skywalker busting his ass but the holonet is so slow out here. Smiley face."

In the Republic ship, Kit Fisto said, "At least we know General Grievous is not in there. I was starting to think it might be him since it's the sort of ship he likes, but he'd never consider anything so dangerous."

They were granted more time. Nan sprayed some disinfectant around the cabin and removed a few panels from the back of Grievous' head. Ventress got a glimpse of pale brain matter and wires. She had been calm when Nan cut her stomach but now she felt dinner coming back up.

"I can't believe you did this to yourself," she said. "It's an abomination to Nature."

"I had no choice. I would have been completely paralyzed otherwise," said Grievous.

"That's not true. Dooku told me that with several years of surgeries and physical therapy, you would have been all right. You chose this. You turned your back on what Nature gave you and decided to rely on technology that is certain to fail you in the end."

"This is a fascinating conversation and I'm sure that some other day, I'd be happy to argue with you, but I'm about to fly our asses through asteroids hell-bent on crushing us."

"What do you think, Nan?" Asked Ventress. "You come from a forest or something, I've heard. Don't you think Grievous betrayed the natural order of things?"

"I think it's cool how he can open a can of beer with one hand," said Nan.

"Speaking of personal choice," said Grievous, "I kind of feel bad that dumb and dumber don't get a say in their fate. They might not get executed by the Republic."

"They chose the wrong side," said Ventress coldly.

Nan finished up with the disk and closed the panel. She asked the General if he felt any different.

"Perhaps I do," he said. "Do you have around 20 knives on this ship?"

Ventress had a few and Nan had a plastic knife from her lamb over rice. Then she remembered that Jasco had throwing stars and Grievous took them out.

"Why do you want…" began Nan but Grievous threw the stars at her and pinned her to the wall, such that the stars outlined her perfectly with not a single one cutting her. He took the wheel. Ventress insisted on sitting up so she could see her death approaching. Nan tied down Jasco, Drichal, and buckled up herself. Then they were off.

They remembered little of what happened. Grievous confessed that he couldn't remember the path they'd followed or how he managed at all, really. The program worked in that it used his skill and knowledge of flying combined with its predictive power to get them through the asteroid field. There were many sharp turns and loop-de-loops. Ventress regretted sitting up. Nan bit her tongue. Jasco dreamed of an amusement park ride.

"It was kind of exhilarating," said Grievous on their way to Taia. "The program communicated with the ships sensors wirelessly and I knew that information without having to look down. I felt like I was part of the ship."

"I'm glad you had fun risking our lives," said Ventress.

They got her to Taia uneventfully and the scientists promised to help out in exchange for the culture ingredients. Ventress didn't thank Nan and Grievous. They hadn't expected her to. The last thing she said to them was, "I don't even want to know how all this happened," and she waved her hand over them.

Jasco and Drichal had some memories of a vague battle implanted in their heads, one where they got knocked out when Ventress' ship exploded. Nan put burn marks on their spacesuits to make it convincing. Of course, the story was full of holes and Dooku didn't believe much of it, especially when Grievous said he flew through The Impassable Asteroid Field. Dooku laughed very hard and said he knew Grievous was lying but he didn't care, he believed Ventress was dead, at least.

Grievous soon had the chip removed because Nan admitted that it had been tested on Kevin (he hadn't actually agreed to brain surgery but he didn't complain, being knocked out) and after a few weeks, Kevin started trying to strangle himself. He wasn't strong enough and his neck was too thick so they laughed at him for a week before removing it. Possibly, the strangling was the chip's way of getting Kevin to stop eating artery-clogging fast food, since it only happened at mealtime.

Footnotes

[1] Grievous had not actually watched this movie, he only read the review. He was just screwing with Ventress.

[2] From the days before the droid armies. Obviously droids don't need laundry, but the Separatists still had enough organic personnel (admirals, commanders, etc.) frequenting the Despair to require occasional clothes washing. I've already had a footnote about the laundry room, haven't I? That one was funnier.

[3] Have I ever mentioned that I have no idea how the army ranking system goes? A commander is, I think, higher up than a lieutenant. Then what's a captain? Or is that navy terminology? It's not the same as Star Trek, anyway.

[4] One summer, I decided to read a very long book. I considered Thomas Mann's The Buddenbrooks or Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace but finally settled on David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. I made the wrong choice.