Everett

A discussion about fate.

"Sam, I refuse to believe in fate."

The room was a friendly sort of shadowy.  People filled it, filled it with their voices and their feelings and their lives.  Some of them lived here, some lived with only a tiny piece of it woven into the outsides of their lives, and most lived to varying degrees somewhere in the middle.  The wooden bar gleamed and reflected the polished high tops and elegant tall swivel chairs

"I would have thought predestination would be more comfortable than the alternative.  Or is that specifically why you refuse, that you can't ever let yourself take the easy path, particularly when it is the morally marshy one?"

People ended up here, one way or another.  So many stories, so many flavors, and yet they all had this place in common. This one a pirate, that one bureaucrat, this one a farmer, that one lived in a broken down trailer, this one always caught up in melancholy, that one explored the outer reaches of space.  Each one the hero of their own story, and yet we were here, all characters in someone else's story.

"You don't understand at all.  There is nothing comforting about knowing your story has already been written and that you have to live through what something unknowable has planned out for you.  Haven't you ever looked at what stories people are being forced to live through?  How could you want that to have been planned for us, why would you want someone to want us to suffer that way?"

I found him fascinating.  His slightly grizzled chin paired oddly with his youthful mien.  A sort of life seemed to burst out of him, and his salted, thinning hair looked out of place atop eyes the color of the unreachable horizon where sky touches sea.

"I imagine I'm supposed to say something along the lines of 'Oh, but suffering is how we learn to be true people', or some such nonsense. Tell me how your position is not merely a self-affirming rejection of the easy path."

I was baiting him, I know.  But I heard in him a story, and I was hoping he'd let it escape him a little.  Under his youthful, boisterous skin--not to say that that skin was in any way a lie, it was as truly him as what it was hiding--he had a eternal, deep sadness. But what was is it? A life of struggles, bringing himself up by his bootstraps?  An old war-wound of the mind?  A regret, a choice he would have made some other way?

"I'm telling you, there IS no easy path, not if you really think about it."

I looked down at my glass.  The liquid in it had an almost acrid tang.  Social lubricant in easily imbibable format.  Everyone here had stories.  Everett had more than most.  He was always telling them, and he told more the more lubricant he'd been plied with.  He was a fair few sheets in at this point, and I'd made the mistake of trying to keep up with him.

My silence seemed to bait him more than my words had.  Honestly, that was the better tack anyway.  The lubricant had made me over-confident, and I'd forgotten that he talked better if left to talk at his own pace.

"I'll tell you, Sam, about a girl I met once.  Woman, really.  Same age as my daughter.  She believed in all sorts of things.  She believed the stars could tell you things if you learned how to listen, she believed that no one who died ever really left us, she believed that the things that needed to happen happened when they needed to.  And you'd look into her deep green eyes, and you'd believe it too.

"She came out of nowhere, she really took us all by storm.  No one had ever really met anyone like her before.  She walked like a sailor, and talked like a scientist, and took the world by the tail and reshaped it to suit her.  She made everyone feel as though she existed just for them.  She'd been everywhere, had done everything, and was somehow as naive and as new to everything as a baby.  You'd watch her experience our old, mundane world that had us so jaded, and here she was living it like it was brand new and fascinating and worthy of wonder.

"You could relax around her.  There was something about her that made things ok.  Like she could feel you right down to your soul, and she thought you were bright and wonderful.  She understood me in a way that made me feel that no one had ever understood me before.  We were so different in so many ways, but it felt sometimes like we were the same person."

He fell silent, lost in the reverie of his retelling, staring blankly into his cup of lubricant.  The aching sorrow welled up in him and filled him so completely that it started leaking out.  I watched him, unable to bring myself to break that silence, to shake him out of the grip of that wave of emotion.

"What claim could I have had on her?"  

The words were nearly what someone less in tune with the raw ravages of the human psyche might call a sob.

"Everyone was drawn to her, and here I was, with a wife and two grown children, and she would look at me like I was some grand adventurer hero out of a story.  And when she smiled--"

A deep, sharply indrawn breath punctuated his sentence like a high-concept technicolor surround-sound comma.

"--she smiled like she truly meant it.  If she smiled at you for being friendly, you truly felt that she thought you were an excellent person for being friendly.  If she laughed with joy to see the horizon sliding past on the other side of miles of dancing waves, you'd look around and wonder what long-lost love she was seeing for the first time in years.  And when she smiled at you for the simple reason that she enjoyed being with you..."

The melancholy punctuated that sentence, giving it a breathy, indecisive, oddly definite end.  The end deepened, and I began to worry that he wasn't going to get to the heart of this story tonight.  How could I bear to wait to hear the rest now?  But then he suddenly looked up, his horizon colored eyes catching and holding mine, piercing me and pinning me in place with their intensity.

"We raced together, she and I.  Sometimes on my boat, sometimes on hers.  Racing solidified the world, took away all those things you were trying not to think about.  When we were on a boat, all of those things between us didn't matter.  It would be the six of us or the two of us, and every moment was sharp and beautiful.  The best races were the long ones.  Actually, the short ones were good too.  I don't know, they were all the best times of my life."

He looked away from me, down into his glass of lubricant, and started singing something under his breath:

    "Who's the one who makes you happy
    Or maybe, who's the one that's always on your mind"
Looking back up at me, he continued, as though he hadn't paused at all.

"The short races felt like they were filled with sunlight.  Just an evening on the water, made perfect by that little bit of challenge.  Every one of us on the boat moved like some choreographed movie scene.  It was like we were one organism, the boat and us.  There were issues sometimes, yelling sometimes.  Little frustrations as things didn't go quite as perfectly as we wanted. I won't even tell you how many winch handles we lost over the side"

He chuckled and grinned broadly at me, inviting me to share a joke I didn't understand.

"But the long races, that was something else entirely. Long races take a different mentality.  The boring parts get more boring, and the hard parts get more intense.  When it was a full crew, we became a family.  Little squabbles, maybe, but nothing that anyone would let get in the way of the unity we definitely had.  We were all brothers in misery, driven on to the same goal.  The world tastes different when you are days and nights at sea, you know.  You wake up on a boat, and the smell, the certainty, it's become part of you.  It was the only true home I ever had."

He stared out the enormous windows that circled the building, like an opulent necklace on a rich woman's neck.  He was looking at his boat, I knew.  I could tell by how his soul seemed to fly out of himself, and the draw he felt so strongly seemed to draw me too.

"She loved that boat just as much as I did.  She made it seem like it was the first taste of freedom she'd ever had.  When it was just her and me on that boat, it felt like no one else existed, no one else needed to exist.  If there were a heaven, that's what it would be like: me and her and the boat and the sea."

His gaze darkened, and he glanced fitfully around the dimly lit room, taking in all the people stuffed into all the corners.  They were all talking to each other, some animatedly, some drunkenly, some both.  For a moment, the wood seemed less warm, and the conversations all felt almost menacing.

"They said we were sleeping together.  They all were thinking it.  You can't have a man and a woman on a boat if they're not sleeping together, I guess.  Goddamn busybody nosy idiots, all of them."  A smile flickered across his face, like a glancing sunbeam. "She never cared what people thought.  She'd stare them down if they tried to say it to her, and she'd walk bold as brass through all the whispers.  She was like that in the rain, too.  Just stride straight on through as though it were a sunny day."

He stared out the windows again, but somehow I knew it wasn't his boat he was seeing.  He swirled his mug of lubricant pensively, and then all at once drained the rest of it.  Setting the empty cup down, he turned to face me and the words just started to pour out of him.

"Imagine you were in a love story, in a world where there were soul mates.  Imagine you had one, and you and she were fated to always find each other, always love each other.  Such a beautiful image, right?  Can't you see how people would just love to trust in love, the eternal rightness of that feeling?  But imagine, in this world where you have a soul mate, what if you find each other too late?  You lived your life without her, and one day she appears.  But you, you lived without her, you didn't know you were supposed to wait, how could you wait, what sort of wasted life would that have been, quietly waiting in a corner, talking to no one, not living?  So you have long since promised yourself to someone else, and the two of you have had a good life together.  But your soul mate is here now, and now you know she exists, but you can never love her, you can never hold her.  What sort of tortuous existence would that be?  What sort of awful someone would fate you to learn you had someone who fit you so completely, and then to have to learn how to live without her?

"So, no, Sam.  I don't believe in fate.  I refuse to believe in fate.  I refuse to believe that anyone could ever be that cruel.  Because I know she couldn't believe anyone could be that cruel, even someone with the power to control fate.  She always saw the best in people, believed in them, loved them for trying.  So, I have to do the same."

Author's Note

I'm open to suggestions on format. This was an experimental piece, and I welcome any input.