“Unintended,” Leah repeated as a challenge, but Adis simply stared at her.
“Which brings up two issues,” I said interrupting their staring contest which had started to make me uncomfortable. “First, we are not truly the masters of our own destiny. You limit our options and choices. Second, your obdurate future has some holes. You, a nonhuman, are able to influence the future.”
Again, Adis drew a frustrated long breath. “It is possible for me to influence the future by limiting your options and choices, but you must acknowledge that your choices are limited from the moment you first draw breath. Every day your choices are limited by the decisions of others, by chance, by the weather. It is another one of the defining characteristics of the human condition. What I do can be viewed as another example of random fate.”
“Except it’s not random,” I answered.
“Without it, most of your species would not have survived the twentieth century.” He answered so fast that I’m sure he had set me up.
“So if I understand correctly,” Leah started after a long thoughtful moment, “you are saying that Mr. Sicko is just a human and therefore off-limits. He’s making his own decisions and no matter what those decisions are the universe is okay with them. But over here we have someone else, someone like you, who is running around burning church busses and getting crazy people to attack schools, which is why you get to run in and save the day. Is that about it?”
Adis hesitated. “That is one possibility.”
“Damn it,” Leah screamed. “Do you know it’s impossible to get a straight answer from you?”
“Yes I do,” Adis answered quickly. His levity did little to appease my wife.
“You know, I am getting tired of this shit.” I put my hand on hers and she tolerated it for exactly one second before she brushed away not just my hand but any attempt at nonverbal communication. “Don’t! I’m angry. Two of our friends are dead, two girls are missing! The bastard took our dog and is threatening to take our daughter, and you and this—” she made a dismissive gesture towards
Adis “—whatever you are, sit here calmly discussing philosophy.” She glared at me and then turned to glare at Adis. “If you know who this bastard is, or where he is, and don’t tell someone, even if that means violating your precious laws or pissing off the obdurate future, then you are responsible for whatever he does next!” Her finger jabbed the air in his direction. She was on her feet. Her face was a lovely shade of crimson and she was breathing as hard as our dog on a hot day.
It was my role to step in. I couldn’t let this devolve into a screaming argument, and we were at least halfway there. It is probably true that the behavior of all wives is different when their spouse is present, and my wife is not an exception (I know this sounds sexist, so to make everyone feel better I also believe that this truism applies to husbands). Leah had allowed her emotions to outpace her intellect because she had the luxury of knowing that when she went too far I would reel her in. If it had just been the two of them she would have put on her cold, calculating face and they would have had a cold, calculating conversation. “Leah, please, calm down. This isn’t helping.” She turned away from Adis, gave me a withering look and then, just like one of our children, threw her hands in the air, whispered, “Fine,” and stomped into the kitchen and began to pace.
I gave the air a moment to clear and then turned back to Adis. “So there are others like you?”
“There are others like me and others that are different,” he answered in his frustratingly cryptic manner.
“You know, I’m starting to see Leah’s point about straight answers,” I said.
“You are making the assumption that I have all the answers. I don’t. I do know that that there are beings similar to me and beings dissimilar to me. I have seen evidence of their handiwork, and there are times when I am called upon to address that handiwork.”
“So we are talking about beings that are . . .” I hesitated because I knew the next word would set off Leah. Adis had no such qualms.
“Evil. It’s Ok to say it out loud.” Adis smiled at me.
Leah has always had a fairly wide liberal streak, and to my mind a tendency to embrace moral relativism (unless of course her family is threatened). Evil is a word that precludes any possibility of redemption, and she has trouble with that concept. A small but significant part of my professional life is devoted to picking up the pieces after inexplicable, and unfathomable acts of violence. Evil by any other name. It does exist, and unlike Leah I don’t have the luxury of dismissing it as nothing more than a left wing punchline. After the Aurora, Colorado, shootings in 2012, a writer for The New Yorker, Rollo Romig, wrote an article titled ‘What Do We Mean By Evil?’ Anything I would say about evil he has already said so I would recommend finding the article and reading it.
“Evil?” She repeated with derision.
“As I was growing up, I tended to discount the idea as well. That all things were relative, that people just need to be understood. In time I found that even after being understood some people are simply evil, and that doesn’t change when you are on my side of the divide. Until now, the closest you have ever been to true evil is a phone call. When you come face-to-face with it you may rethink your position.”
That seemed to tame Leah for all of ten seconds. “Why don’t we get back to your handiwork? Tell us about Lee Harvey Oswald?” Leah asked—or, more appropriately, accused—from the kitchen.
It took me a few seconds to catch on to her reference. “The lanky seventeen-year-old in San Diego,” I said dumbly. I could feel Leah’s irritated look on my neck. This was what we in our family call a ‘unibrow moment.’ When Tom, our son was about eight, we took him to a theater to see Austin Powers—I don’t remember if this was the sequel or the original—and one of the characters is introduced as Uni Brow, and indeed she had one midline eyebrow. The theater chuckled and then became silent. About twenty seconds later, when it was dead quiet, Tom says in a voice that carried across the theater, “Oh, I get it. Unibrow!” The theater erupted in laughter and he has not lived it down since.
“That was a mistake on our part, and the world paid the price for it,” Adis admitted after he gave my epiphany a few moments of silence. If you are wondering, as I was, in 1957 a very young Lee Harvey Oswald was involved in a drunken altercation outside a San Diego bar. He was very nearly beaten to death and would have been, save for the involvement of an unidentified man.
“Where was the obdurate future then?” Leah’s voice was almost triumphant. “I thought that it was supposed to protect us from the likes of you?”
“That event should serve as a caution to all those who would act before thinking.” Adis said without ever really answering Leah’s question.
“So when shit happens do we look to you and those of your kind who act recklessly, or maybe to your evil boogiemen, or simply blame the obdurate future for not being obdurate enough? Or maybe because you forgot to realign the world’s chakras?” I feel I need to explain my wife’s aggressive and caustic behavior. In all the years we have been together, I have on very rare occasion been witness to this rather unattractive side of her personality. As a rule, she manages to hide it well, but the recent stress had begun to erode her control.
“No. Shit happens because the vast majority of time man keeps making shit happen,” Adis shot back. It was clear that Leah had touched a sore subject. “It’s not my role to stop it from happening.”
“Why? If you can see what is going on and have the power to change it, why don’t you?” Leah asked the ancient question of why bad things were allowed to happen. Of course, Adis had already explained why, but there was no way I was going to say that to Leah while her emotions were in overdrive.
“It is not my role to correct your mistakes,” Adis said pointedly. “In fact, it is not my role to protect you from mistakes not of your own making.” Those two sentences, spoken clearly and without a trace of emotion, completely changed my perspective of A
dis. He really wasn’t one of us.
“Then why are you here? It seems to me that your role should be finding your evil counterpart.” She had walked back into the family room and sat on the arm of our sofa, something I am not allowed to do. “In fact, didn’t you tell us that you didn’t see the bus fire coming? Why were you at the bridge?”
“To keep you safe,” he said, and then no one said anything for nearly a minute. “Why do you think he took your dog?”
If I could have turned to Leah I would have, but all I could do was blink at the whiplash-inducing shift in our conversation. “Why did he keep Nitrox alive?” I asked, completely perplexed. I will admit that I never once asked myself or anyone else why Mr. Sicko would kill the Dale’s small, eminently portable dog and take our large, eminently unportable dog. “Why did he keep Nitrox alive?” I repeated as I suddenly realized the importance of that question. In retrospect, it was such an obvious question, one that should have been asked days earlier.
Chapter Thirteen
The Unyielding Future Page 12