by Dan Simmons
Death was real. It was unavoidable. We all knew it and pretended to accept it but nobody believed it. I didn’t. Death was something we put off in our minds the way we contrived not to think about scheduled trips to the dentist or the resumption of school after a summer of freedom. Something might come up to change things…events would postpone the dental appointment…there would be other vacations.
But death was it. I lowered my forehead to my knees, stared at my sneakers, and tried to breathe.
One of the days of the week I was tripping blithely through would someday be the day. The day on which I died. It had to be one of those seven days. Which one? Saturday? It didn’t seem fair to die on a Saturday. Sunday? Monday? Tuesday? Wednesday? Wednesday…my favorite TV show, “Man Into Space” with William Lundigan, was on Wednesday evening. Thursday? Friday?
The warehouse and our administrative battalion HQ were on the opposite side of the airfield from the civilian and military terminal complexes. The outward bound C-130’s and C-5A’s would taxi away from the main hangar area, cross the head of the main runway as if they were ready to fly out, and then taxi over to our side of the field where they’d load up with their real cargo.
The Tan Son Nhut warehouse was always very hot. The steel transport boxes were supposed to be hermetically sealed, airtight, but the air was always heavy with the sweet smell of decay. It reminded me of the renderer’s truck that used to come by on the evening streets of Elmwood.
Years after I came back from Vietnam, I began to think of the place as just another accident, as if the entire U.S.A. had been a Ford Fairlane or Buick Regal and Vietnam just a wall or tree that had gotten in the way when the driver’s attention was elsewhere. Or maybe it was a DUI-related wreck. Who cares now? Minor damage. Hell, everybody knows that we kill as many Americans on the highway each year as we managed to obliterate in almost a decade of effort in Vietnam. Only we don’t erect black walls to commemorate the highway victims. Or bring all the bodies to a single warehouse.
That night in Elmwood twelve years before PSF-1, I sat for a while until the sense of having been belted in the solar plexus faded and went away. But the sense of something having changed forever did not fade.
Eventually, I rose, dusted off my jeans, rubbed my aching arms, and walked the rest of the way to the last Free Show of the summer.
Riding the chair lift toward the beginning of our second slide, Caroline said, “Daddy, do you believe in God?”
“Mmm?” I said. I’d been watching the dark cumulus appearing and building above Peak 8.
“Do you believe in God? Mommy doesn’t, I don’t think, but Carrie down the street does.”
I cleared my throat. I’d rehearsed my answer to this dreaded question so many times in the past few years that my prepared answer, if printed in full, could have served as a curriculum for a semester-long philosophy course with a comparative religion course thrown in. “No,” I said to Caroline, “I guess I don’t.”
Caroline nodded. We were nearing the end of the lift ride. “I guess I don’t either, at least from what Carrie says about God, but sometimes I think about it.”
“About God?”
“Not exactly,” said Caroline. “But about how if there’s no God then there’s no heaven and if there’s no heaven…then where’s Scout?”
We were approaching the unloading platform. The male teenaged attendant was busy talking to two female teenaged attendants. “Here,” I said to Caroline as we approached the tricky part, “give me your hand. Don’t let go.”
There was no claim, but let’s treat it as if there were. Call the family Family X. Mr. and Mrs. X, a son five-and-a-half, and a daughter not quite four.
The move from Indianapolis to Oregon was good for Mr. and Mrs. X. The father was becoming an independent adjustor after years of working for a large company. The mother was going to use her new degree to teach at a local college rather than in public schools. The kids were looking forward to a bigger yard, woods nearby, a lake in the neighborhood, new friends, all the things kids look forward to.
The new house was in a suburb of Portland called Lake Oswego and both house and suburb were beautiful. The yard was landscaped, rain-forest lush, and a delight after the years of Colorado near-desert. There was a small building behind the main house where Mr. X was going to have his office. He never used it.
As with all accidents, a change in any one of a hundred small decisions could have avoided it. As with all accidents, nothing did.
Mr. X was busy in the house with the movers but took time to tell the kids they could play in the lower garden area of the backyard but to stay away from the moving van. Mrs. X was in the bedroom at the far end of the house, supervising the unpacking. She said later that she thought the children were in the front yard.
On his previous load, one of the movers had taken out the son’s new bicycle and left it in the driveway. The boy had just received a twenty-inch bike because he had worn out his sixteen-incher. The boy was made for wheels. Friends said that the boy had his father’s eyes and hair. But his headlong courage was his own.
The two children came up out of the lower garden area and the boy saw his new two-wheeler waiting for him just beyond the stoop. He ran for it at the same instant the driver backed the van up—just a yard or so—to get a better angle for moving the piano in.
It was Caroline’s screaming that told me something was wrong. When I first came out, I thought something had happened to the driver—he was on his knees by the side of the truck, sobbing almost hysterically. Caroline was silent by then, but I followed the path of her horrified gaze and saw what had happened.
Scout had not been run over. The rear of the truck had barely connected, or so it seemed for a moment until I felt the terrible softness under his hair at the base of his skull. I lifted him without thinking, turned toward the house, then turned away as if I was going to run down the driveway and carry him all the way to the hospital. I held him while Kay came closer, saw how serious it was, ran in to call the authorities, and then came back out to brush the hair off his face while I stood there holding him. I was still holding him, rocking him, when the ambulance arrived.
I remember that Kay put her arm around the driver at one point as if he were the one who needed consoling. For a second I hated her for doing that. I still do.
The moving company’s insurance carrier later offered a cash settlement. Money changed hands. As if it mattered.
“Can I do down by myself?”
“I’m not sure, kiddo. You have to pull back very hard to slow the sled down once it gets going. I’m not sure you’re strong enough to do it by yourself.”
“Please, Daddy. I’ll be careful.”
“Let me think a second, Caroline.”
“Okay, let’s keep it moving,” called the kid at the head of the Slide. There was no one behind us. I noticed for the first time that the chair lift had stopped bringing people up, probably because of the dark clouds massing over the mountain.
“Daddy?”
“All right.” I lifted her into the blue sled. She looked very small in it.
I pulled an orange sled into the trough for myself and clambered in. The attendant went through his bored litany and tapped Caroline on the back. She looked back once, pressed the stick forward, and began moving down the steep incline. Too late, I realized that I should have gone in front of her, to slow her down if things got out of control.
My heart pounding, I leaned forward and followed her.
When I was in the clinic, I’d have the same dream almost every night. Perhaps it was the medication.
I would dream that I was in front of a class teaching geometry, pointing to a diagram painted on a red wall. The diagram was of an inverted cone. I pointed to the circle at the top of the cone. “The diameter is in units of potential,” I said. “The circumference in units of available choices. At birth both are nearly infinite.”
I ran my pointer down the outside of the cone in a descending spiral.
“Imagine,” I said, “that the vertical distance is comprised of units of time which also correspond to the units of choice in the dwindling circumference. As time passes, as an increasing number of choices is made, it is obvious that a nearly infinite number of alternate choices are thus eliminated.”
The pointer would descend, spiraling down the outside of the cone. “Please note,” I would say, “how the rapid descent through time and the increasingly smaller set of choices bring one here.” I tap the lowest point of the cone. “Time left—zero. Choices remaining—zero. Potential from which to draw—zero.” I pause. “It is, of course, a diagram of life.”
The students nod and busily scribble their notes. All the students are Scout. Every one.
Caroline isn’t using her brake very much. We are going down much faster than we did the first time. I shout for her to slow down. Lightning flashes somewhere behind us. The thunder is almost lost under the roar of our sleds. I try to catch up.
She is going much too fast.
A lot of unexplained single-vehicle highway deaths are suicides. Police put “unexplained” or “lost control” or “possible insect in vehicle caused driver to lose control” but I suspect that more often than not it’s a combination of high speed, a bridge abutment, and the sudden knowledge of opportunity. Homicide is also popular. Quite a few of Prairie Midland’s messier files were cases of vehicular homicide that couldn’t be proved.
My last file in Oregon was a possible Orange File case about a woman who’d followed her husband to his girlfriend’s house, waited all night, then trailed him to work. When he left the building for lunch, she roared across the parking lot and two lanes of traffic to run him down with her 1987 Taurus.
The husband was more wary than most. He saw her coming and jumped back through the revolving doors. His wife couldn’t stop the Taurus before it smashed into the wall.
Neither our insured nor his wife were injured. The lawsuit came from a forty-six-year-old computer programmer working in the basement office below. One of the bricks from the wall the driver destroyed fell through the acoustical tile and klonked the programmer right on the forehead. He’s asking for $1.2 million. If the trial goes to jury, he’ll probably get a good chunk of it. Those who say America will never go socialist overlook the fact that our legal system has already discovered a way to rearrange the wealth in this country.
For the first few months it wasn’t too bad—Caroline needed me at least when she woke screaming in the night—but eventually I knew I had to leave.
I’d follow her to school in the morning even though I wasn’t living at home any longer. Sometimes I would sit in the park across the street and look at the windows of her classroom, trying to catch a glimpse of the top of her head. I’d greet her at the end of each day and walk her home, returning later with my car to watch the house from across the street. Sometimes I would come back to stay a few days, a week, but I knew how impossible it was to really protect them while I was there. To see what’s going on you have to be outside, close but outside.
Caroline and I are the only ones on the Alpine Slide. She isn’t slowing so I try to speed up to catch her. There is nothing I can really do. We are on separate sleds. But if she crashes, if she flies off, if she goes sliding up and over the wall, I have to be right there to follow her.
She looks back when we come rushing out of a stand of aspen trees, their leaves shimmering against the black backdrop of sky. I shout at her to slow down, knowing even as I do so that my words have been lost in the wind.
Not long before things really came unraveled for me, I went to one of Kay’s faculty parties. I’d never really liked most of her public school teaching colleagues. I liked her college colleagues even less.
This night some asshole in the regulation uniform of a tweed sportscoat with leather patches at the elbows asked me what business I was in and I said, “Entropy.”
“Interesting,” said the asshole, twitching his granny glasses. “I teach physics. Perhaps our interests overlap.”
“I doubt it,” I said. I’d had several double Scotches since I’d arrived at the party but I felt nothing. I said, “I only get involved when entropy’s out of its bed at midnight.”
A second asshole, one I vaguely recognized as Kay’s department chair, joined the conversation without being invited. “What an interesting phrase,” he said, his accent making me think of someone from Brooklyn who’d spent years in England. “Is it yours?”
“Uh-uh,” I said, delighted to show these guys up. “Shakespeare’s.” I’d heard the phrase in some Shakespearean play I’d attended when I was in college and it had stuck with me. I was certain it was Shakespeare.
“Oh, I doubt that,” said asshole number two, laughing politely.
“Doubt it all you want,” I snapped, suddenly angry. “Shakespeare wrote it. I can’t help it if you don’t know the classics.”
The physics guy adjusted his glasses. His voice was soft but I was sure that I could hear the smugness underneath. “It’s a neat phrase,” he said, “but it doesn’t seem likely that Shakespeare coined it. Entropy really wasn’t a concept in the sixteenth century.”
“Could it have been another word, perhaps?” asked the English department asshole.
“Or another playwright?” said the physics man.
“It was Shakespeare,” I said, trying to think of a truly witty, college faculty-level zinger to leave them with. I settled for throwing my Scotch glass on the floor and stalking from the room.
I spent about four months reading through Shakespeare’s plays, starting with Hamlet and Macbeth—ones that I remembered attending for courses I was taking—and then going through the others. I discovered something interesting. There was tragedy in most of his so-called comedies and definitely comedy—no matter how brief—in the worst of his tragedies.
I finally found it. The line was from King Henry IV. Part I, Act II, Line 328. Only it read—“What doth gravity out of his bed at midnight?”
Well, I figured as philosophically as I could, the hell with it.
We are less than halfway down the Slide and Caroline shows no signs of slowing.
We bank high around curves, slam onto straightaways, and ride higher into even sharper curves. It is like tobogganing on concrete.
Our velocity increases as we go lower. I dread the last part.
The Orange File was born back in Indianapolis when I pulled the Johnson file and a few others and couldn’t find a file folder for them. Some temporary secretary—I think it was Gwen—had ordered some absurd orange folders, so I retrieved one from the waste basket and slid the file in my drawer.
It’s very thick now.
Two weeks ago, before I left Oregon to give things one more try in Colorado, two cars were going opposite directions on a narrow county road near the coast. Thick fog rolls in. No center stripe. Guy driving the southbound ’88 BMW decides to roll his window down and stick his head out for a better view just as the guy in the northbound ’87 Audi decides to do the same thing…
Last week Tom called with the claim file of a dentist named Dr. Dick who’d take his mistress for a long lunch-hour ride in his brand-new Jag convertible, leather interior…
Shit.
Most accidents are like the one Caroline and I just missed yesterday. Broken glass gleaming in the light of flares. Possessions scattered across a hillside. Glimpses of bodies under sheets or still caught in a vice of twisted metal or lying impossibly contorted among the weeds. More blood than you can imagine. There’d been so little blood with Scout. I noticed that as I held him, reassured myself with that fact even as he cooled in my arms.
Caroline is going very, very fast, but I’m heavier and I catch up. The front of my sled almost touches the back of hers. She is very intent upon what she is doing, caught up in the ecstasy of controlled speed. She concentrates very intensely on the coming curve. As we rocket around it, the front of my sled inches from the back of hers, I see that she is smiling, cheeks flushed.
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br /> Accidents are like death. Waiting for us everywhere. Inevitable. Unavoidable. Plan as we might, they defy our planning.
But I’m beginning to see that there is a difference between gravity and entropy. The contents of the Orange File are all true, but the Orange File is a lie. My lie.
“Hi, Daddy!” Caroline takes a second look over her shoulder and waves, then returns her attention to the control stick, preparing for the next series of curves. It has been a long time since I’ve seen her this happy.
I wave back when she isn’t looking and pull back on the stick, slowing slightly. The distance between her sled and mine widens.
A bunch of brain-dead fundamentalists are picketing and pamphleteering the high school near where Kay and Caroline live. Where I may be living soon. Last year, Kay says, it was for hiring “secular humanists.” This year it’s because some science teacher worked up enough conviction in his profession to tell the kids that all research suggests that life on this Earth is an accident, that if you take a kettle of primordial soup and shake it enough, shock it enough, even freeze it enough, you get organic compounds. Allow these compounds to suffer random accidents long enough and you get life.
That’s life with a capital L.
The fundamentalists are outraged that something as sacred and important as Life could be an accident. They want it to be a result of a command, a plan, a blueprint, a simple, orderly, well-engineered, easily understood project designed by a deity who, like Kay’s dad, would figure all tolerances and fudge them by a safety factor of five or ten.
Well, fuck them. Accidents happen. We’re one of them. But our loving each other’s not an accident. Nor our enjoyment of the days we have together. Nor our anxieties for each other and our fear of sharp edges when our children learn to walk.
But, like Scout, sometimes we have to be brave and hurl ourselves headfirst into space, knowing that someone we love will be there to catch us if they can.