Arkin decided to play hard-to-get. "Well, for starters, that would be murder, right? Technically?"
"You should do stand-up comedy, Nathaniel. Really, though. If you knew you’d be saving millions and millions of lives."
"Couldn’t you try to reason with him first?" Arkin asked with a silly expression.
"Reason. Like it’s your high school debate club?"
"Try to convince him of the errors of his beliefs. Maybe try to redirect him to non-genocidal pursuits. Get him to pour all that pissy zealousness into quilting or yoga. Better yet, get him a shrink and a 10,000-milligram-a-day Prozac prescription."
"I’m being serious, Nathaniel."
"Well, maybe I am too," Arkin said. And the more he thought about it, the more he realized he was being at least somewhat sincere. With the benefit of historical hindsight, he was sure he'd have taken sick pleasure in blowing Hitler's head off. But nobody could see into the future. And crazy as it sounded, maybe the devil could have been diverted.
"How could you possibly know someone’s destiny, and what they would become, with morally sufficient accuracy?" Arkin asked.
"We knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that McGill was a murderous psychopath who intended to time a bombing of the Holocaust Museum so that it went off when the building was packed with African American schoolchildren on field trips."
"That was different. We knew there was a certain, imminent threat because we’d been watching him for months. But I get the impression you and your group aren’t going to that sort of trouble before ordering assassinations."
"Then let’s say we can know based on psychological profile."
Arkin grinned. "Profile? Did I just land on another planet? Tell me you're joking." Sheffield didn't look amused. "So—what?—you ask every loudmouth psycho with a xenophobic agenda to take a Rorschach test. And then when they tell you the splotches look like a Belgian waffle, that means they’re destined to be a genocidal maniac, so you kill them?"
"The Hitlers and Stalins and McGills of the world have a lot more in common than you might believe."
"Uh-huh. Well look, I’ve read one too many reports from the FBI profiling unit to believe that so-called science is anything more than voodoo. And so have you."
"Let’s say you could really know."
"You can’t."
"But for the sake of argument, let’s just say—"
"Roland, Roland, Roland. Get real."
"But if you consider—"
"Roland, Hitler was an asshole, but not every asshole is a Hitler."
"What?"
"Nobody knew Hitler was going to be Hitler until he'd risen to power. But before he did, before he revealed his true nature, you'd have hardly been justified in killing him. Mens rea and actus reus. Criminal intent and a criminal act. You need both before you can even call someone a criminal. It's elementary criminal law."
Sheffield snorted. "Don't play your law school parlor games with me. You're honestly telling me you wouldn't have killed Hitler?"
"Before he'd done anything? No."
"Knowing what he would become? Knowing what he would do to your own family, Nathaniel? To your blood?"
"You can't know what someone will become. At best, you can make an educated guess. Somebody could have an experience that changes their perspective for the better. Or they could get psychiatric help—medicine or whatever—that rebalances their brain chemistry. Or they might simply have a heart attack or die in a car accident.
"If they die, they die. What's the difference?"
"Between them dying on their own versus you having your Canadian-Balkan psycho artist or some other triggerman murder them? Quit playing dumb."
Sheffield rose from his chair, his face flushed. He stared down at Arkin with nostrils flared. After a couple of deep breaths, he forced a laugh and sat back down. "You're baiting me. Or maybe it's just your anger rising to the surface again, which would be quite understandable. Yes, that's to be expected."
"Roland, how did Hitler become who he became? He wasn't born evil, was he? What was it that made him evil? Shouldn't that be what you target? Isn't that where our conversation was going before you went off on your clichéd Hitler hypothetical? I mean, you're trying to take the path of ultimate righteousness here, right? You're on, quote-unquote, humanity's side, right?"
"Whether or not he was an original source of evil hardly matters. And it's a question of practicality."
"The morality of what you do is a function of practicality. Of convenience. This is fascinating."
"What would you have us do? Kidnap the fledgling Hitlers from their far-flung bunkers and caves, and bring them bound and gagged down here for re-education? Camp Rationality?"
"That's what you're doing with me, isn't it?"
"First of all, you came to us. Second, you're starting camp a lot closer to our side of the philosophical mountain."
"Fair enough. But I imagine that in your version of the Hitler hypothetical, you're picturing him as an adult."
"So?"
"Hitler as an adult, with his stupid little moustache and his 'slap me' face, already spewing his toxic vitriol. But what if he were an infant, Roland? A helpless baby, swaddled and napping in his crib. What if he were a fetus? Would you still kill him in either of those scenarios?"
"Without hesitation."
"A napping baby, Roland? Really?"
"I'd smother it with no more remorse than if I were stepping on black widow eggs."
"You're just saying that for dramatic effect."
"No. I couldn't be more sincere."
"I refuse to believe you would let logic trample humanity like that."
"And I can't imagine anything more humane. Don't tell me you're starting to buy into all that superstitious nonsense about humans having souls that attach in the womb. You've never been religious."
"I don't know what I believe. But I refuse to believe that people are evil—or destined for evil—the moment they're conceived, or the moment they're born. And I know for a fact that nobody can see into the future such that they can know for certain whether someone is beyond help, or diversion, or redemption."
"Hell’s bells, Nathaniel. I can't believe what I'm hearing. Especially from someone whose own forebears were slaughtered by that maniac."
"Roland, who are you?"
"What?" he asked, visibly irritated.
"What does it mean to be human?"
Sheffield just stared, his mouth agape, his eyes turned to the wall, looking as if he were trying to remember where he'd left his car keys.
"Roland. Come back. What does it mean to be human?"
The only sign that Sheffield heard Arkin's question was a slight rise in the arch of his eyebrows. But he did not speak. As he sat there, he appeared, to Arkin's eyes, to shrink. To deflate. His shoulders slumped forward. He looked tired. At last, he muttered, "To be human is to fear death." Then he went quiet.
Arkin was furious with himself. He'd overplayed things, letting his true feelings run roughshod over his facade. Would Sheffield give up on him? How could Arkin back things up? How could he convince Sheffield that there was still hope for converting him to their cause? His mind went blank.
"Look, Roland, never mind. How about another game?"
*****
Sheffield did not appear for their chess game the following day, nor for any of the next five. Arkin took his usual exercise with his usual trio of guards, but was otherwise left alone.
FIFTY-FIVE
Six days after his confrontation with Sheffield, Arkin woke to the sound of the steel outer door slamming home and a gust of cold, outdoor morning air wafting over him, seeping through his thin blanket, making him shiver. He opened one bleary eye. On the other side of the bars, just beyond arm's reach, a long-haired figure with a gray Rasputin beard sat slumped in what appeared to be a motorized wheelchair. Still lying on his side on his cot, Arkin rubbed the blur from his eyes and took another look. Staring back at him through the bars, with his
head lolling oddly to one side, his pale and aged face shriveled and sagging but still recognizable, sat Father Collin Bryant.
Arkin sat up and stared in wonder, half thinking he was in the midst of another dream. Another hallucination. Bryant's body was greatly diminished, crumpled, having obviously been ravaged by some sort of degenerative disease. But it was him, no mistake.
Bryant sat silent, his thinned and atrophied lips frozen in an involuntary grin that revealed receded gums and long, graying teeth. His body was propped up by wide padded straps that held him fast to the back of the wheelchair. Arkin was shocked at how weak Bryant looked. He had only seen photos of him as a big, vigorous, youthful man and had always thought of him as an adversary of terrible power. It didn't help Bryant's appearance that he was clothed in a sickly green Chinese tunic suit reminiscent of Chairman Mao and cut several sizes too big for his shrunken, bony frame and scrawny neck.
The unease Arkin felt under Bryant's cold stare drove him to break the silence. "Father Bryant, I presume."
Bryant remained silent and nonresponsive, his dark twinkling eyes locked on Arkin's own as if he were staring clear through Arkin's mind, reading his thoughts. Then, the fingers of Bryant's right hand began tapping at a keypad attached to one of the arms of his wheelchair. A slow, emotionless, synthesized computer voice asked Arkin a question that made his blood run cold. "Are you afraid to die?"
The voice was flat. Dead. Devoid of any emphasis that would clue the listener in as to what constituted the beginning, end, or most important parts of any given statement. Each word was annunciated as if it stood alone and wasn't part of a greater phrase or sentence.
Afraid to die? Arkin took a deep breath, exhaling slowly through his nostrils before speaking. "Right now?"
"No. In general. Do you fear death?"
Arkin shrugged. "I suppose so."
"Why?"
Arkin thought about it. "I don't know."
"Yet if you were falling from a high bridge, you would instinctively grab for a railing or safety line, wouldn't you?"
"I should think so."
"So would all human beings of sound mind. How do you teach them not to?"
"Huh?"
"How do you teach them to go against instinct? It's impractical."
Bryant's lips never moved as the synthesizer spoke for him. His expression remained utterly unchanged.
"You and I have a lot in common. Did you know that? Like you, I was born to privilege. To a wealthy family. Like you, I had to confront death and loss as a young child. I also had an absentee father and suffered from the consequent emotional abandonment at a vulnerable age."
"You, me, and Osama bin Laden."
"In a way, you could say that death and emotional abandonment played a major part shaping the lens through which I view the world."
"I'm sorry."
Bryant closed his eyes for a moment, as if calling upon a reserve of energy before continuing. "When I was a priest, I had an epiphany. One day I woke up to realize that the essence of my role as a holy man was simply to quell people's fear of death. Everything else—the Biblical teachings, the counseling, the moral guidance—was secondary. What people were there for above all else—what they were desperately clinging to me for, whether they were consciously aware of it or not—was to have me help them manage their fear of death."
The hollow, synthesized voice seemed detached from Bryant. It was as if some omniscient presence was in the room telling Arkin a story of long ago.
"Death is, of course, part of the natural cycle of all organisms on Earth. But you are a member of the only species that is fully conscious of its mortality. A most terrible awareness."
"Yes."
"We do our best to cope with it. Some of us try to distract ourselves, lose ourselves in busywork, in entertainment, in the numbing haze of drugs or alcohol. Some of us pursue immortality via belief systems and symbols, drawing comfort and reassurance from religious faith in the existence of an afterlife. Some of us subconsciously strive for immortality through an insatiable quest for status, fame, wealth, power, control. By participating in things that are bigger than we are, or contributing to things of enduring meaning—great works, ideological movements, sporting events, war. These are the common mechanisms we use to kill the pain of our overwhelming existential anxieties. The pain of our fear."
"If you say so."
"To a degree, this fear has shaped who you've become as well, serving as a wellspring of your drive to high achievement. Your burning desire to prove yourself special in the universe. To live a life of lasting meaning."
"The point being?"
"The point being that, as you yourself mentioned to Roland, some of us are more sensitive and susceptible to our fear of death. And like addicts need their heroin, we need reassurance of immortality—immortality comfort—so badly that we'll do anything for it. We’ll believe in anything that quells our fear. We'll scratch, claw, burn, shoot, and kill. Worse, we'll do it all in organized groups, at the direction of charismatic madmen whose minds are deranged by their own profound fear. Master manipulators who promise to deliver us from evil. Who promise us salvation. Who promise us some form of immortality in exchange for our devotion to the cause, however many innocent lives may be destroyed by it. However likely it is that the cause may encompass our doom as a species."
Arkin poured himself a cup of water from his porcelain pitcher as he listened. Preachers gonna preach, he thought.
"The irony, of course, is that it is our very fear of death that is driving us toward death. Toward the death of our species. Toward our own extinction."
"And so, because of the threat they pose, as these manipulators—these hate-mongers—emerge from their cocoons or eggs or whatever, you blow their heads off with .50 caliber Serbian sniper rifles. In the name of moderation."
"As it was for so many, 9/11 was a wake-up call for me. I was profoundly disturbed by the madness of it. Yet I was also certain that it was, like so much other evil in the world, a consequence of the fear of death."
"But the 9/11 hijackers didn't fear death. They willingly killed themselves."
"Only because they believed their suicides guaranteed their immortality in a martyr's paradise. As we began to contemplate the significance and causes of the 9/11 attacks, Roland obtained a quantity of martyrdom videos that had been filmed by Islamist suicide bombers shortly before their respective missions. We sat and watched young man after young man, each one explaining his reasons for giving his life for his cause. And it was clear to me that each one of them was terrified. I could see it in their faces."
"They were planning to blow themselves to bits, imminently. That has to scare the piss out of you, even if you sincerely believe 72 virgins are waiting to welcome you to heaven."
"No. This was a different kind of fear. More profound. An existential fear that had been festering in them for years, slowly driving them into the arms of their manipulators, and, eventually, to their self-destruction."
"You're telling me you can discern different types of fear in people from watching them on low-budget video?"
"If there is one thing I learned to recognize in my time as a priest, it was different types of fear. There is fear of spiders and things that go bump in the night. There is fear of pain. And then there is fear of the end. Of nonexistence and nothingness. This very fear was the driving force that drove these simple, otherwise docile, even timid young men to their mad acts of terrorism. I was certain of it. It was the common thread. The one thing they all shared."
"You're the expert."
Bryant paused as though exhausted. "You are hamstrung by the fact that we have given up on nonviolent means to achieve our ends when you believe some such means may be viable."
"Hamstrung? Troubled, certainly."
"Are you familiar with Terror Management Theory, Nathaniel?"
"Should I be?"
"It notes the connection between our ability, as individuals, to cope with our fear of death and ou
r self-esteem."
"This is starting to make my head hurt."
"If we grow up feeling safe, loved, important, feeling as if our lives have real meaning, feeling that we're special in the universe, then we're better equipped to cope with the fear—what the high lords of Terror Management Theory refer to as death anxiety. Unfortunately, the opposite is true as well. Hence the Hitlers. The terrorists. But we can't intervene in the childhood of every potential psychopath. So, what do we do? Encourage this never-ending parade of deranged and extremely dangerous people to seek long-term psychotherapy as adults? Ridiculous."
"It would seem."
"Our enemy is not something we can readily defeat with nonviolent methods. In watching those martyrdom videos, recognizing death anxiety in the faces of suicide bombers, considering the tremendous wave of violence of September 2001, considering the political, religious, and weapons proliferation-related developments in the Middle East, North Korea, and elsewhere, we realized that the world was running out of time. That what our group was doing in the way of peaceful efforts, while undeniably good, was never going to suffice, that we were never going to change attitudes and thinking around the world in time to save it."
"So bold and radical action was needed."
"Bold, to be sure. But in using lethal force, we aren't altering vast swathes of society in any radical way. It's surgical. A fine-tuning."
"Fine-tuning?" Arkin felt his temperature rise. Bryant's politician-like use of sanitized phraseology struck a chord in him. "Like when you fine-tuned Pratt's head off? Fine-tuned his brains all over the wall in front of his kids as he blew them goodbye kisses while they sat eating pancakes?"
Arkin took several deep breaths through his nose and stared up at the ceiling. Wisely, Bryant gave him a moment of silence.
"I'm truly sorry about John Pratt."
Arkin had a burning urge to throw his water cup at Bryant's head. And though he knew it was an involuntary expression on Bryant's half-paralyzed face, it didn't help that the man seemed to be smirking. Nor did it help that the apology was delivered by a synthesized voice that was so emotionless as to sound mocking. Arkin fought to keep himself in check.
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