The Devil's Fate

by Massimo Russo

  felt it thudding through the beat of the jingle. Then he had switched off the phone, tucked it into his jacket pocket and tried to relax. He had taken stock of the sight before him and realized he was scared stiff. The pictures that had flashed through his mind traveled at the speed of light. He was amazed that his first thought was of his mother. She had been dead for too long to be able to mould her son and point him in the right direction. He had remembered how poor they were and how, despite everything, he had always managed to bring a smile to her face. He had promised her that one day they would be rich. “I’ll do it, Mom, don’t you worry about anything. I’ll buy you a house so big that you’ll have to hire a car to get from the kitchen to the bathroom.”

  He had been overwhelmed by sorrow, in spite of all that money before his eyes. Maybe his mother had been watching him and feeling less than proud of him. He had done nothing to deserve being given the briefcase. Finally, he had decided to do what he always did in similar situations: stifle his qualms and leave them to wander, lost and alone, across his mind. Ignoring them was the only way to stop them existing. He could hardly deny that he had sometimes been ashamed of his behavior, but he believed that survival, in times when “conscience” was classified under “memories”, was inextricably linked to the ability to smother pangs of guilt. At times, he had felt alone in a crowd of people who didn’t know that feelings of unity even existed. Society was geared to producing profits, not to feeling truly alive. He had thought of the words he had written in order to leave some trace of his presence on earth. He had wondered whether someone, some day, would understand them.

  Alone.

  The thought compressed between desire and weariness. I imagine desire, but can’t understand where it comes from. I wait meekly, unable to anchor a sense of awareness, taking hope from the idea of meeting someone.

  Nothing.

  I still remember everything.

  Sound, light, silence, consciousness.

  Yes, consciousness... how better to understand being alive?

  What better way of attracting reality?

  I countermand every order, but the setting stays the same.

  Only black, only a shadow between the white pages of memory that takes the space it needs to be able to understand.

  Without light there is no life; you will merely be a second that has lived the infinity of time, without being seen...

  Alone.

  A flash cuts through the darkness, but it’s only the hope of beginning to see.

  I intend to, but I don’t grasp. I imagine, but in vain.

  I collect the pages of the past to remind the future that it really does exist.

  Alone, like every other thing that has realized how a second may be marvelous when combined with the idea of not being alone.

  He had locked his thoughts in a corner of his mind, in the hope that he wouldn’t have to venture there again, and had closed the case containing sufficient money to allow him to vanish without a trace. He would set off with Julia for a world where he would find all he had lost, hoping that he still could.

  But then, he had hesitated. A doubt had stopped him short. Did he really want to be with her? Or was it just the anxiety brought on by the situation? And what if the problem arose again once they had left? Was he really sure he wanted to try again? He thought about the conversation he had had with his mirror image. He could do anything he wanted with all that money. All his daydreams could come true, the ones that were already happening in the parallel world behind the glass. And he could do it now. He could disappear before anyone noticed the error. Because he was positive it was an error. That money wasn’t meant for him, but for some dork who had made a two-million-dollar mistake. He had pondered for a minute, but in the end had decided to disappear. And there was no room for anyone else. Too risky. Too many questions to answer. Too many problems to solve. You didn’t find money like that just lying around. Another Julia though, of course. He was aware of the stain on his soul. But the money would probably remove that too.

  It was growing dark to match his mood. The city seemed more chaotic than usual. He decided to hail a taxi and set his plan in motion. He would need a car to leave his old life behind, and surely the cab driver would know where the nearest car hire firm was. The man who was rich thanks to his own merits flashed into his mind. He was almost tempted to turn around and start looking for him, to give him what rightly belonged to him. But in that case, he would have to return the money. He certainly couldn’t afford to linger near the bank in case they realized their mistake and started searching for him to get the swag back. He felt like a fugitive. All things considered, he deemed it better to vanish for the time being. The hunt could wait. He looked around for the unmistakable yellow bodywork and caught sight of a woman on the opposite side of the street who was hurrying somewhere she shouldn’t have been going. It was Julia, striding briskly along, wearing clothes that couldn’t possibly have been hers.

  “Julia!”

  His voice was drowned by the clamor of city traffic and she didn’t hear him. She disappeared down the steps to the subway. Norman dodged across the road, heedless of the danger of being mown down by a car whose horn blared to remind him there was an underpass. On the opposite sidewalk, Norman stopped briefly to wonder what he was doing. A moment ago, he had resolved to turn his back on everything, and now he was risking his life to chase after the person he had decided to betray. The thing that struck him as strange was the way she was walking, and he ran after her, intent on finding out whether something had upset her. After all, his feelings for her had been real and he had to ask her why she had submitted his book without his consent. He ran towards the tunnel and down the stairs, keeping watch for a red coat. He caught sight of her and began to close the gap between them. At that moment, the train arrived and Julia got on. Norman was still about a hundred yards away and wouldn’t have had enough time to reach her carriage before the doors hissed shut, so he jumped into the one closest to him, triggered by the same wild urgency that had forced him through the throng in the corridor. He had only walked through two carriages towards hers when the train stopped, and from the corner of his eye he saw the red coat climbing the stairs towards the exit. He leapt off the train in the nick of time.

  “Julia! Stop!”

  The rumble of the departing train muffled his shout. He rushed towards the exit, but the crush of people slowed him down. He took his phone out of his pocket and dialed Julia’s number, but he got the same message as before: the person could not take his call. He charged up the steps and saw the red coat turn the corner of the street to the left. He yelled again, but the thunder of a pneumatic drill opposite swallowed his shouts as if they were flies. He skirted the tramp squatting on the sidewalk; he could have sworn it was the same man he had given his change to earlier, but there was no time to find out. He had to get past the sea of people moving in an orderly manner along the street if he wanted to catch up with Julia. He turned the corner and stopped dead in his tracks, shocked by what he saw. He might as well throw himself under the bus hurtling towards him, or let himself be knifed by a robber who knew what was in the case he was carrying. The woman he had loved, the woman who had inspired him to plumb the depths of those human feelings locked in the infinity of time for words of eternal love, was gazing into the eyes of another man.

  The intensity of that look demonstrated yet again that the irony of fate had repaid him in kind for his earlier decision to cut all ties with his present life. Julia stroked the man’s lips lovingly, as if she had known him for ever. Arm in arm, they stepped inside the hotel behind them. Norman stood frozen to the spot for several minutes. All the tender moments he had spent with the woman he considered a goddess flashed before his eyes, the woman he had given a piece of his life to every evening, for whom he had written out one of his dreams every morning.

  “Julia! Why?”

  His phone ringing took him by surprise; it was perfect timing to say the least. He thought it might be J
ulia; perhaps the red coat belonged to someone who resembled her. Perhaps his mind was re-setting the equation, presenting him with the bill for the evil thoughts of earlier. But the voice on the other end of the line was not the one he had hoped to hear.

  “Hello, Mr. Lae. Why are you looking so pale? You shouldn’t be too surprised.”

  “Who’s speaking?”

  “Only five minutes ago, you’d made up your mind to leave that woman, and now you’re upset because she’s in the arms of another man.”

  “How on earth do you know...?”

  “The public gardens are five minutes away. I’ll be waiting for you. We’ll have a nice chat. I’ll be wearing a purple scarf.”

  “That’s it! I have no intention of...”

  “Julia won’t be coming out for a couple of hours; there’ll be time enough for you to go back and wait for her.”

  The conversation ended as abruptly as it had begun. The ground had been sheared from under Norman’s feet again. He stared at the city around him as it continued its usual mad dash towards a destination that no longer needed to be found and whose outcome was pre-determined. Everyone’s life was in the clutches of banality, each one gone astray in the pursuit of his or her dreams in a society that had no time to live them. The meaning of life had been lost, if it had ever existed. The real and only purpose nowadays was to be seen, thus restricting life to personal appearance. Every single human life could be summed up in a simple sentence: “I lived because I was seen, even if no one wanted to listen to me.” All that mattered to people was being featured on the cover of a newspaper or on television in order to leave their mark. Nobody cared why they were photographed or invited to appear on television. Nobody would remember their words, except for those who still hoped to be able to change the system. But everybody would remember the smiling face captured by the camera lens.

  Norman recalled all the discussions he had taken part in at university on life in today’s society. He remembered only too well all the disagreements he had had with his third year lecturer, and he had respected her highly even though they had never shared the same ideas.

  “Lae, I don’t believe this conversation will ever lead to a mutually acceptable solution.”

  “Mrs. Lewis, when you understand that my reasoning is the only one possible, your mind will find peace, you’ll see.”

  “How can you even think that economics is the worst way of finding happiness? How can you even consider the fact that the two are linked? Your argument doesn’t hold water.”

  “Try looking at it from another perspective and emphasizing within the whole what is joined together and what stands alone. Economics unites humanity, true. No other force has been able to do that and no other ever will. But the flip side of the coin, like an equation trying to balance itself, is that the only thing that makes this power unique is the fact of being able to wield it. An individual is never happy about having to work; he only does it in the hope that one day he’ll get to be on the other side of the fence, telling others to do what he’s now being told to do. But that way, he’ll spend his whole life grubbing for profit, looking for a get-out that will raise him to the throne of the chosen few who, in his mind, will be the only ones worthy of living life, and casting aside all the pleasures and emotions he was taught to recognize during the brief period he was pure, before being catapulted into the machine we call economics.”

  “And don’t you think that once this hypothetical individual has reached his goal, everything will fall into place and he’ll find peace and happiness?”

  “That’s the whole point. His entire life will be dedicated to the pursuit of success instead of happiness. And even if someone did manage to succeed early enough in life to enjoy the rest, the theory only applies to one person. It falls apart if we include every single individual.”

  “So you reckon that one man in a thousand will manage to be happy? How do you plan to solve the problem?”

  “By substituting love for economics. Happiness is always tied to an emotion and the queen of all emotions can only be love. Love for a woman, a fellow human being, a job, nature. If we do something for money, we don’t care about the means, only the end that will bring a profit, a prize. However, if we did something only for love, then we would care about everything that surrounds us, whether spiritual or physical. Our happiness would be inextricably bound to the happiness of another person, or to a job that fulfills us, or to the things our planet makes us see or feel simply by looking at it. In that context, time wouldn’t matter and neither, by default, would profit. Do you really believe that the maxim “time is money” was coined in a moment of madness? It was invented by the same people who created the greatest power of all, namely economics.”

  “And what would you do with the people who didn’t agree with your way of thinking? Put them in prison? Torture them? How could you explain love to them if the only thing that matters to them is money and, consequently, according to you, indifference and hate? And if you had to hurt them in order to convert them to your idea of absolute love, wouldn’t that clash with your entire theory? How can you create love without killing off hate?”

  He had been looking for an answer to that question all his life. Until the day he had decided to postpone his search to a more suitable moment, whilst relaxing on his yacht off some coast, perhaps, sipping at a fruit drink. And thanks to postponing it indefinitely, he now found himself stuck in a crowd, holding a case he considered sacred, ready to abandon all the good he had sought, but convinced nevertheless of being completely different from everyone else. Suddenly, he realized that he was part of a multitude of people who knew absolutely nothing about what he was looking for. No matter. His life was changing. He held the passport to the kind of happiness he had always wanted; he would buy the answer to the damned question. His head cleared. His mind applauded the thought of a victory he was already savoring. A feeling of freedom accompanied him towards his pre-ordained goal. All he had to do was give in to his desire to go and leave the uncontemplatable behind. But as with all unsolvable situations that try to find a solution in reason, Norman’s thoughts were again interrupted and cast into the future.

  Granted, he might well live a dream, but he would most certainly recall the moment when he made up his mind to leave everything behind; his conscience was therefore taking him back to the precise point in time where he no longer wanted to be, namely, exactly where he was. It may have been the lessons learned from his experiences or simply his nature, but something was telling him to check the impulses that had brought him to that particular moment. He would never be able to forgive himself if he didn’t, even with all that money. Maybe that someone in the park might be able to help him.

  Chapter 10

  “Three, two, one, goooo!” Paul loved watching his son play on the swings. It was one of the few times when he managed to understand his purpose in life. Making someone happy is a difficult task for anyone. Attempting it with someone who lacks the cognitive capacities of others is like scaling the highest mountain in the world completely naked. But he never complained. He accepted what life offered without making a fuss. He believed in fate more than God. When his son was born, he had known perfectly well how hard it would be to spend each day with him and never be able to look him in the eye. But he hadn’t cared. He and his wife, Celine, were happy anyway with their autistic child; they loved him to bits and he had given them great joy. His aptitude for numbers was exceptional. There wasn’t a mathematical problem he couldn’t solve. When he was agitated, they made him sit at the table with a math book he could talk to while he ate his favorite food: bread spread with chocolate.

  The door bell rang. Paul put the newspaper on the table and heaved himself out of the comfortable chair on the verandah. He wasn’t fond of visitors, especially those who came unannounced. Celine was in the shower, so it was up to him to see who it was. Standing outside the door were two men in jackets and ties and dark glasses. One thing he had learned in life was that you s
hould never trust anyone wearing shades. Eyes and their expressions are what make a first impression on people, and as far as he was concerned, the shades were a barrier and a sign of bad manners. It was like trying to be invisible, like spying on someone without wanting to be seen. He was reluctant to open the door, but good manners had been systematically drummed into him from an early age by his parents.

  “Good morning. We work for the Institute of Mathematical Sciences. We’d like to speak to your son.”

  That introduction was worse than their appearance. He had met many people at the institutes where he had taken his son to participate in competitions, but no one had ever dressed or behaved like that, and in any case, everyone knew about his son’s condition. His diffidence made the tone of his voice sound grimmer than a threat.

  “My son can’t be spoken to. It’s patently obvious that you two aren’t teachers, so don’t give me any school bullshit.”

  They were crushed by embarrassment, as if a boulder had landed on them from the top of a mountain.

  “OK, we’ll get straight to the point. We’d like to offer him a great opportunity.”

  “Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear. My son is very ill and there’s no way he can distinguish one kind of opportunity from another. Try telling me and I’ll see if I can help you.”

  The two men exchanged glances and then the older one continued.