” “I—I am, I’m just, I’m a little surprised.” “For God’s sake, I didn’t plan
it this way,” she said, her voice rising above the blare of a boarding announcement. “I know—” “It’s not like this has been a whole lot of fun for me.” “I know. I’m sorry.” “Shit . . .” “I’m sorry.” She was crying again. “Mina—” “I thought you’d be happy.” “I am.” “You don’t sound happy.” “It’s surprise. That’s what you’re hearing. But, but—but a good kind of surprise.” My right temple had begun to hammer, the room to effervesce. I shook my head hard to clear it. “Think of it like this, it’s like someone jumping out of your birthday cake. It’s surprising, but you’re happy to be surprised, once the, the”—pain; spinning; I shook my head again—“the initial
shock wears off. See? Listen: I’m happy. Don’t I sound happy?” “No.” “This is the sound of me happy. Really, really happy.” Silence. “Hello?” I said. “Yeah.” She blew her nose again. “My mother already knew something was up when she saw the necklace.” I felt equally queasy and pleased. “You wore it.” “Of course I didn’t wear it. She was going through my drawers.” “You’re joking.” “Nope.” “That’s absurd.” “Yup.” “You’re a grown woman.” “That’s never stopped her before. Why are you surprised by this; I’ve told you how it works.” Woozily snapping my head back and forth. “... I guess.” “Anyway, she was right, wasn’t she? I had something to hide, and she found it.” Somewhere in there, I could sense an accusation: I had set her up. And yet here she was, crying on my shoulder. The whole scene was very Yasmina, and far too fraught for me to work through on the spot, what with ninety-eight percent of my brain busy chasing other paranoias. I heard her talking about her parents. I said, “I’m sure if you explain—” She made an impatient noise. “Did you hear what I said?” “. . . uhhy—” “I’m out of the family. Okay? Do you get it now? Do you see?” “I, I’m sure that isn’t true.” “It doesn’t matter whether it’s true. What matters is that she said it.” Silence. A scratchy voice called for group three to Boston. “That’s me,” she said. “You’ll feel better when you’ve slept,” I said, as much to myself as to her. She sniffled. “Whatever.” Silence. “Okay, then,” I said. “Get some rest, I’ll see you soon.” “Wait ... Joseph. ?” Silence. She said, “Can I come stay with you?” Impossible. I couldn’t have her here, not with so much left to clean up. Not when I had policemen dropping round for tea. Not with a bloody carpet rolled up and tucked in the corner of my office. No, it was impossible; the only question was how to tell her that without setting her off. “Please,” she said. “I can’t be alone.” “Of course,” I mumbled. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you so much.” I offered to meet her at Logan. “It’s too early. I’ll take a cab.” “You remember where it is.” “I think so.” “Number forty-nine. It’s the last one on the block.” “I remember.” “I’ll leave the porch light on.” “Okay,” she said. “Thank you.” I said nothing. “I’m sorry it’s so early,” she said. “I’ll be awake,” I said. SHE NEVER WAS a light traveler, Yasmina, and I tried not to let on how much my back hurt as I humped up the front porch with her bags. I had reinjured myself the previous evening. Stuck without a car—all the rental agencies in Boston close at nine P.M., along with everything else—I’d gone on foot, a hundred awkward, floppy pounds’ worth of library carpet laid across my neck, staggering along through the twenty-degree weather, losing my footing and falling and righting myself and staggering on. I’d managed to make it about two miles, arriving at a vacant lot near the Museum of Science, where I unburdened myself and limped homeward, soaked and freezing and aching from stem to stern, my sole consolation that the late hour had made for few witnesses. “I’m sorry,” Yasmina kept saying. We stood in the entry hall, wiping our feet. I told her to stop apologizing. “I am.” “It’s fine.” “I’m such a mess.” “No.” “I’m sorry.” “It’s fine.” “I am.” “It’s fine, Yasmina.” I settled her bags on the landing. When I turned toward her she was coming toward me, one hand out. “Did you get in a fight?” “Ha ha,” I said, ducking away. “Please. I tripped.” “It looks like it hurts.” “I’m fine. You must be hungry.” In the kitchen she sat warming her hands over a mug of tea. “Would you mind closing the window?” she asked. I complied. “Thank you.... Aren’t you cold with it open?” “It tends to get stuffy in here.” “I can see my breath,” she said. Actually, I still felt overheated, but I wanted to make her comfortable enough to mask the fact that I was supremely uncomfortable having her there. I offered her toast. “This is fine, thanks.” “Say the word.” “Thank you.” I started to fix myself breakfast. I wasn’t hungry, but it had to be done. “My mother left me a voicemail,” she said. “And?” “They’re cutting me off.” Silence. “That’s abominable,” I said. “I’m going to have to give up my apartment.” Silence, pregnant. I smiled sickly, opened my arms in invitation. “Are you sure?” “... of course.” “Thank you.” Her face greened. “So much.” I pulled her chair close and held her against me, shushing her. For some reason her crying was making me very agitated. “I mean it. It’d be so easy for you to laugh at me. You’re such a good person.” “Shhh.” “I’ll pay you rent.” “Don’t be ridiculous.” “I mean it. I’ll do the cooking. I’ll learn to cook.” “Stop it. Please.” “I’ll find another place as soon as I can. I’ll start looking next week....” I stroked her head, trying to soothe her, but she kept on talking nonsense, making promises she could never keep, crying all the while. She recalled the cruel things her aunt had said to her. She talked about Pedram: poor, guileless Pedram, whom she never wanted to hurt but who—her sister told her—hadn’t eaten in days, he was so depressed. She had humiliated herself, disgraced her family name. I didn’t know, couldn’t know, what it was like, the way people talked, the rumors, the importance of reputation. Nobody would ever forget, not after that scene, the threats and imprecations. She would be a laughingstock. She could never go home again. I wanted to be sympathetic, I did. I knew she needed me. But I couldn’t bear the sound of her just then, and I would have given anything for her to be quiet. I told her everything would be fine. Still she wept; still she talked. Hush, I said, hush. But she wouldn’t, no matter what I said or did, and finally I had to kiss her. Truth be told, I wasn’t feeling up to it, but it was the best way—the only way, really—to get her to stop making noise.
THE FREE-WILL PROBLEM is as old as philosophy itself, the debate around it just as fierce as it was two thousand years ago. More so, perhaps, for as our world grows increasingly known, quantified, mechanized, and constrained—technology gripping us tighter every day, science daily smoothing the contours of reality—people seem to feel correspondingly eager to prove that human beings are the exception to the rule, that we are not preprogrammed but free. Broadly speaking, two things must be true for us to be free in a meaningful way. We must be the originators of our own actions (i.e., we cannot merely be the next in a series of falling dominos). And the future must be “open” (i.e., we must be able to affect its outcome in a significant way). It turns out that these conditions are related, and rather difficult to fulfill. They butt up, hard, against the concept of determinism, which is (again, broadly speaking) the idea that there can be only one physically possible future. Why this should be so is not simple to explain, but suffice it here to state that the question has taken many forms over the years, and is vexed in the extreme. The obvious contradiction between an omniscient deity and man’s freedom to obey or disobey him, for example, has driven many from the Church, or at least to the rear pews. In their modern incarnation, deterministic theories tend to rely on the laws of nature as the determinant—these being a more comfortable topic of conversation than God for philosophers, who are, as a general rule, an impious bunch. Why is it important for us to be free? Picture a world in which there is no free will. In such a world, is anyone truly culpable for anything? If I am not the cause of my actions, it is irrational to hold me responsible for their consequences. Fro
m that, it would seem to follow that two of our most cherished concepts—right and wrong—are illusory, and that the main thing keeping us from a stupendously ugly existence, a chaotic and violent hell on earth, is a flimsy bit of self-delusion. In response, some declare that we are not in fact free, and ought to abandon the idea entirely. Nietzsche, for example, labels metaphysical free will the province of the “half-educated.” But this kind of hard determinism is rare. Most moral philosophers are in fact compatibilists, acknowledging the strength of determinism but unwilling to relinquish the notion that we can be free. They want to eat their cake etc., and their proposed solutions in pursuit of this end run the gamut from hardheaded and rigorous to obscure and positively finger-wiggling. Lots of semantic games get played; lots of tinkering gets done with the meaning of “free,” “determined,” “choose,” “cause.” One detects in the compatibilist literature a kind of desperation, borne of the fear that our own powers of reason have condemned us to a world in which morality cannot be stably grounded. Whether free will is real or incoherent, though, one point is beyond dispute: we feel free. The sensation of acting freely is integral to our consciousness. Fire off every objection in the book and it still won’t die. I raise my arm and I feel as though I am the author of this movement. I write these words, and they seem to come from deep within me. By extension, we cannot help but view others as responsible, logic be damned. This is the position of the British philosopher P. F. Strawson. Imputing responsibility, he argues, is as much part of our humanness as walking upright, and we’d be foolish to deny it. Whether we are actually
free is less important than whether we can step outside the house without getting stabbed to death. Strawson’s theory is considered an important one in the history of the free-will debate, revolutionary at the time of its publication, in 1962, and still compellingly practical. It does, however, feel like a bit of an avoidance tactic, in that it dismisses the fundamental ontological question of whether free will exists by saying, “Who cares?” The premise of the entire philosophical inquiry is that such questions bear asking—indeed, demand it. It was at this point that my new dissertation took up the reins. In the three days between my visit from the police and Yasmina’s return to Cambridge, I was able to produce thirty pages of material, almost the entire introduction. With progress that rapid, it didn’t matter to me that my argument was a bit outmoded. (How could it not be? After all, the first draft dated to 1955—remarkably, seven years before Strawson himself.) What mattered was that I could be done by springtime. I even had a title—An A Priori Defense of Ontological Free Will
—though I was thinking of shortening it, as it came off a little ungainly in translation from the German. THOSE WERE TRYING DAYS. It was hard enough acting normal around Yasmina without having to wonder if she would come barging into my office and catch me in the act, Alma’s thesis open on the desk and my German-English dictionary in my lap. Since I was sleeping so poorly anyway, I began dragging myself out of bed at two in the morning, knees jellied, mind roaring like a fireplace; I would crash downstairs to the office and type away until I heard creaking overhead, Yasmina performing her morning ablutions. Then I would close up shop, make breakfast, and twiddle my thumbs until she had left for work. I would pass the rest of the day napping, working, and forcing down food, at six o’clock rising to greet her return with false cheer and reheated market suppers. I knew that she knew that something was wrong. I barely spent any time in bed; I was tetchy and curt; I yawned constantly and looked more cadaverous by the day. The scratches below my eye had begun to throb all the time, such that I ceased to notice, the rhythm becoming as imperceptible to me as my own heartbeat. I sponged the site and applied concealer; it took four bandages to cover the length of the wounds. Still I sensed her studying me fretfully, wearily, much as one regards another’s misbehaving child, held in check by etiquette but nevertheless wishing to make one’s disapproval known; and I got in the habit of angling my face away from her when she entered the room. Once she started to ask was I sure I was all right, and I snapped back at her that of course I was, I was extremely busy, I was preoccupied, I had a lot on my mind, didn’t I? From her shocked expression I could tell that I had responded with disproportionate force, and I began making a conscious effort to monitor the level of my voice, to proofread my thoughts before they came out of my mouth. It didn’t matter, though, because from there on out she said nothing more, at least with respect to prodding me about my health. I suppose she assumed I was on a hot streak—I was, sort of—and that some degree of moodiness had to be excused. Great minds cannot be expected to abide by social convention, everyone knows that. So she resumed speaking only of herself, perhaps aiming to divert me from whatever it was that was so evidently troubling me. Either that or she found her own problems too absorbing to devote further thought to mine. I could only hope that she would continue to let me be. It frightened me to imagine what I’d say if pressed. As it was, I could barely keep myself in check. The urge to confess clawed at me always, the words roiling in my gut, climbing up the back of my throat, ready to vomit out at the slightest provocation. I did not trust myself and would have felt much safer alone. But she was there, seemingly to stay. Within days of moving in, she began negotiating her way out of her lease, and a week later, we borrowed Drew’s car and used it to move over the bulk of her possessions, everything save the large pieces of furniture. The house, my house, once so beautifully spare, so perfectly balanced, filled up with her things. Her art occupied the television room. Her clothes invaded my closet. In the kitchen went her stage-V espresso machine, along with the pots and pans that had once been the tools of my trade. Though she assured me that she would get rid of anything I didn’t want, all signs indicated otherwise. I girded myself for an onslaught of redecorating. “Can I ask you a question?” I hurriedly turned the thesis facedown, swiveled around in my office chair. “Yes?” “I seem to remember a carpet in the upstairs bedroom.” “... right.” “Did you do something with it?” I paused. “I moved it to the library.” “That’s what I thought. Cause the one in there isn’t the one I remember, either.” “That one, I had to get rid of it.” “What? Why?” “It ... it got a cigarette burn. It had a hole in it.” “When did that happen?” “During the party. Also a wine stain.” I spread my hands to show her how big. “I don’t remember that.” “You’re probably just not remembering.” “Okay, but I still don’t see why you had to throw it away. Those are fixable problems, and it was a beautiful carpet. Wasn’t there a pair of chairs, too?” “I didn’t want to deal with the hassle. And I didn’t throw it away, I sold it.” “The chairs, too?” “Those, they’re being cleaned.” “I don’t understand why you would bother with one but not the—” “Look,” I said, “I’m in the middle of work.” “Oh. Sorry.” She shut the door. A few nights later she buttonholed me on my way to the kitchen. “Can I talk to you about something for a minute?” “... all right.” She led me to the living room. “It’s the curtains.” “Curtains.” “I told you before that the front of the house needs more light. I mean, honestly. You can’t prefer it the way it is.” “It doesn’t bother me.” “It’s like a crypt. The eyestrain alone is going to kill me.” “I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. “Read someplace else.” “Where?” “The kitchen. Upstairs. I don’t know. Buy a lamp. I’ll buy you one.” “The light’s not the only thing, it’s like arctic in here. Look at this,” she said, tugging at her scarf. “This is indoors.” “That’s why I put the heater in the TV room.” “I can’t spend all my time up there.” “I really don’t know what to tell you. The system is old; it was like this when I moved in here.” “Can I at least get someone to give us an estimate?” “It’s not something I want to spend money on.” “It doesn’t cost anything to get an estimate.” “There’s no point in getting an estimate if I know—” “But you don’t know,” she said. “That’s why you need an estimate. ” “I know
—” “Please don’t get upset.” “I’m not getting upset.” “Ok
ay,” she said. “But, I mean.” Silence. “What,” I said. “Can we finish talking about the curtains?” “I thought we were finished.” “Just, hear me out. That’s not going to cost more than a couple hundred dollars. Think about it: wouldn’t it be nicer than the blackouts? Restoration Hardware makes a toile, it’s kind of creamy—” “Will you please leave it alone.” “I can’t understand what you’re—” “I don’t want people looking in.” “Who would be looking in?” “Anyone.” “Joseph. Seriously, you really ... but—but—wait. You’re getting upset again.” “I’m not getting upset.” “I can see you getting upset.” “Mina.” I pressed my fist against my mouth, and a vein of fire coursed up the side of my face. “I don’t w—I can’t deal with this right now. I’ve got work to do, I’m not feeling my best—” “What’s wrong?” “Nothing. Nothing’s wrong. Would you please excuse me, please.” “Joseph—” I locked my door and sat motionless at my desk, listening for the sound of her retreat upstairs. What was she getting at? Why that line of questioning? Why so many questions about the chairs, the carpet? Did she know something? Was she trying to smoke me out? I told myself to be rational: she wanted to put her stamp on the place. Still, if she kept it up I’d surely crack. I’d never been good at what most people consider small talk, and now it felt deadly. If she kept harping ... For a moment I considered ending things with her. But how could I? After so many months, I had earned her back. That was what I had wanted. I was supposed to be happy. And grateful. And she had supported me for two years, no questions asked. And yet there I was, contemplating throwing her into the street. After what she had just been through, what she had sacrificed—for me. On balance, I thought, it would be easier on both of us if she just went away. In the window I saw my reflection. The area under my eye was florid, shiny, like I’d slept too long in one position.
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