If we consider the incidences in which a woman was shot for driving too close to another man; a man was shot on the asphalt after being disarmed; a man was dragged from his home in subzero temps, wrapped only in a blanket, wearing only boxers, walking only in flipflops, it should be clear we are no longer capable of making measured, smart, rational decisions that benefit us, all of us, as a society.

Already this essay thought too measured, too careful. How much should we tolerate? Shouldn’t we be asking about payback, breaching into the mire of bare-knuckled teeth-bared exchange, come victory or death?

Because there comes a time for that. Doesn’t there? And if not now, when? Where’s the line?

Answers for another essay, perhaps. One that deals with elevated societies of the type we, the majority of the world, were blithely born into in the late twentieth century, societies that value life and longevity, that offer luxuries like therapy and philosophy, that embolden younger generations to feel entitled as never before.

But now. Now is about decisions.

We need to isolate a single decision. Because it’s the most ethically manageable of the previous examples, let’s take the incident of an elderly Hmong man who was dragged from his home in Minnesota in an inhumane manner, under-clothed, unwarranted.

Imagine the worst of this man. Pretend he was a, who cares, satanic child rapist. Ok. Worst of the worst. Got it? Good. If you’re a law enforcement agent after him, you may want him surprised by your entry. Ok. Batter down the door. After that, you find him napping on the couch in boxers. You might think he has a weapon somewhere. Ok. So you don’t let him get dressed of his own volition. But you’re also not his jury of one. So before you pull him outside, what’s the harm of handing him a sweatshirt? A coat? Shoes that cover his toes? You check the coat for weapons. You and your men already outnumber him. Already have your weapons trained on him. Already have him in a surprised state.

Any other decision that giving that man proper clothing in that moment is made for one of three reasons: spite (hatred for who he is or what he represents), terror (as an example to others that this-will-happen-to-you-too), or fear (you, yourself, lack the training and skills to properly manage the situation).

This is poor decision making by incapable decision makers enabled by unethical, un-American decision makers.

This is what tears at societies: individuals who lead poor decisions that cascade. Like driving on the interstate at high speeds, each person in his own car, careering, reacting, their training improper and insufficient. Were the highway full of bus drivers, much safer. Same with flying commercial. Why is it so safe? The people flying have a shitton of training and experience.

Much has been said about ICE agents not having the proper (i.e. any) law enforcement training. Commentary from a tactical point of view – crowd control, weapons, basic procedure. But the true training they lack – training that’s much harder to come by because it’s much more slippery, only grasped properly by those who have given the training years of their lives – is in ethics. Turns out, that’s all that’s been holding our society together, and our mortar has lost its hold.

There are really two choices – leapfrogging the tyrannical crises that awaits in Plato’s cycles of government, directly to rule by aristocracy (i.e. those who have been trained in metaphysics, ethics, psychology, sociology, epistemology) – or collectively agreeing to be ethically guided by a truly non-partisan entity, one that we’ve come to fear more than any other in the last five years: Artificial Intelligence.

Our only hope may be an an AI model that can instruct agents (federal, law enforcement, otherwise) how to act ethically and forcefully in any immediate situation. A model that can do those very complex philosophical calculations in an instant, calculations that could be wrong, but calculations that would ultimately mitigate danger and lead away from rather than toward civil unrest.

This type of AI model already exists, turns out.

For Anthropic’s Claude, a philosopher named Amanda Askell helped build the model in an ethics-first direction, rather than an intelligence-first direction, with ethics as an afterthough.

As she explains it, they created Claude by telling it: Here is what you are, who you’re interacting with, how you’re deployed in the world – and here’s how we would like you to act. Here are the reasons why we would like that. … if Claude gets a completely unanticipated situation, if it understands the values behind behavior, it’s going to generalize better than if we’d given it a set of rules.

It’s time to let professional pilots start flying our nation. One way or another. If not -- rule by democratic mob, especially when the mob is motivated to their worst selves, is set to destroy what once was a decent nation and a noble experiment. And destroy it rather quickly, it would seem.

But what if God would not, in fact, exist if he did not create “the world?” What if his essence is creation? What if what defines him as God is the ability to create and he cannot possess that ability without exercising it because the potential for creative ability is an impossibility; creative ability must be realized if any meaning is to be attributed to it at all? Without realization, creative ability is not an attribute. You’re not a storyteller without telling a story. You’re not a basketball player without playing a game of basketball. “If you invented Facebook, you would have invented Facebook.”

Our age is one of organization, and its conflicts are between organizations. (Russell discussing Locke)

What if we should no longer expect laws to project individuals beyond the benefit to collective groups of people? What if loss of individual freedom is evolution? What if a laws protecting the solvency of an organization or corporation, even at the cost of loss of individual lives, is good because the existence of those organizations (that have truly become Us) benefits more of Us in a larger way than protecting the comparably few lives lost would? … And what if the opposite? What if the organization of humanity is Us at our most base, our slide into iniquity? What if there’s a limit on size of organization, be it a company or state or family, at which it ceases to be considered “good?” And what if most nations have surpassed that limit?

Color is defined by electromagnetic frequency, which is defined by wave cycles (2π) over time (Hz).

What if we’re thinking about it all wrong? What colors are not seen because of time, but time is experienced because of color? What if a light wave oscillates on a curve such as f(x) = (cos(x) + 1) / 2, where photos jump between existence (1) and nothingness (0)? Meaning here is no gradual change (just like Planck saw). And then what if that fluctuation is necessary for classical, newtonian physics — meaning if it did not oscillate, a photon would remain in the quantum at (0)? Then consider time’s relationship — If we accept time over time is not a constant, what if time is speeding up? If it is, does that mean that the color Socrates saw as “red” would be invisible to us? What if, as time and the universe accelerate, colors shift, blues towards reds? Fewer oscillations per second mean lower frequency, not because of shorter wavelengths but faster time?

In Berkeley’s “Dialogues” the characters agree that human senses make no inferences.

What if the truth is the exact opposite of that statement? What if our realities are composed of nothing but inferences? Can any idea exist out of the mind?

Among ideas, those that retain a considerable degree of vivacity of the original impressions belong to memory; the others, to imagination. (Hume)

What if we can’t tell the difference? What truly separates imagination from memory other than a vague feeling or belief?

Everything that is not Self.

What if Atman/Individual Consciousness/Self is an impossibility without reflection? What if we are defined by the external? What if that which defines me is as that which defines anything -- viz. that which it is not? I am all existence except for that which is beyond my borders. When, then, are We as individual consciousnesses anything other than a sum of our negatives? Would consciousness exist without feedback, without reflection?

I just wanna see what this one feels like.

What if we’re all one person, living out all of these lives? Everyone’s, forever? “This time I want to be poor, be assassinated, be abused, abuse, be rich and dishonest and unscrupulous. This time I want to die young. This time I want a partner.” What if all these lives over all this time have happened and we, together, just need to experience all of them? What if time doesn’t work as a line, but as a multi-dimensional game of “Chutes and Ladders?” What if I am We? What if You are?

No Ways to Many Worlds.

What if the multi-worlds theory does not mean there are multiple, innumerable versions of Me? Both now and in the future? What if the only version of Me is this one, right now, here, typing this because that’s the only version my consciousness is capable of experiencing? In other words, any other version of “me” is not Me because to be Me would mean that I’m aware of it, I can sense it. To equate any “self” to My Self it’s necessary that I am that self. To be a thing, even a state, is to be aware of it if we are to believe the Cartesian adage, “I think, therefore I am.” The adage dictates consciousness, awareness, a necessary measure of self. And then, what if that means there is only one version of Me in the future, unless I’m able to experience multiple futures? No matter what choices I make, they can only lead to one reality at any point. That’s not to say other worlds don’t or can’t exist — only that they have nothing to do with Me, nothing to do with You. Me or You being part of any such world is an impossibility because we stop being ourselves the moment any other path or decision is taken. Does that lead to “determinism,” or does that only mean all is as it must be?

The men kept walking, a little slower, a little more aware of their surroundings, to the body until they were above what appeared to be an old man lying supine, head sleeping between two benches, arms crossed over his belly, legs crossed at the ankle halfway into the footpath. The pose was purposeful and would have been completely natural were the man on a grassy hill watching stars arc across the night sky. And were his eyes open. Which, they were not.

“Hey!” The first man tried to wake him. “Sir! Are you okay?”

The second man, who’d not said a word since spotting the body, glanced warily into night, into the darkness of the trees, down the footpaths, across a baseball field, behind himself, toward the street. No movement. No people. He closed his eyes and listened, but could only hear the distant, infrequent hush of traffic and his friend trying to wake the old man.

“John. John.” The second man looked down at his friend, now knelt beside the old man, pressing a hand to the old man’s shoulder. “What do we do?”

John squatted at the waist of the old man, looking him over. The old man’s clothes were not new, but they were nice and well kept. His hair was white with traces of the black it had been in his youth. His eyes closed, curved and kind. His skin loose and weathered, as it should be. He’d shaved that morning.

“Not responding?”

“Nothing. He’s not breathing.”

John placed a hand on the old man’s chest. No movement. He felt the old man’s hands. He opened the old man’s overcoat and placed a hand inside, on his chest again.

“What are you doing?”

“Cold. His hands are cold. His body is warmer. Must have died sitting on a bench and fallen over.” John felt a card in the old man’s breast pocket. He pulled it out.

“And people just fucking left him here after he fell? To be eaten by coyotes or rats or mongeese? The fuck is that?”

“Tom,” John lowered the card and looked directly at his friend, “It’s okay. Okay?”

When Tom nodded, John brought the card to eyelevel again. “And the plural of mongoose is mongooses. And there aren’t any mongooses in Santa Barbara.”

He flipped over the card. It was the size of a business card. On one side was written:

DONOR IDENTIFICATION CARD
Upon death of the donor whose name appears on the front of this card,
please call USC within 48 hours at 323-555-USC1.
In the event that no one is available to answer the telephone,
a voice message will provide instructions as to our procedure.


John flipped the card again. “Benjamin Aydin,” he read. He drew his phone from his own coat pocket and started to press numbers.

“Now what the fuck are you doing?”

“It says to call this number. I’m calling this number.” John held the card out to Tom who took it and read it.

“Feels like the first call should be to the police,” Tom said, but it was too late. John put the phone on speaker as it rang. And rang.

“Hang up. Let’s just call the cops.”

After the tenth ring, a voice interrupted: “Hello. Thank you for calling the USC Body Donation program. We appreciate you participation and apologize for not being able to answer your call. If you are calling about a recently deceased individual, our condolences, and please press 8. If you are looking for more information on our program, please visit our website.”

John pressed 8.

The voice returned: “Thank you. At this time, there is nothing more to do. Goodbye.” The call dropped.

Tom and John knelt in silence for a moment, looking at one another, until Tom realized his knees had started to hurt and he stood up.

“That’s it?”

“How would I know,” said John, standing as well.

Tom pulled his phone from a pocket. “Can we call the cops now, please?”

John shrugged, stuffed his hands into his coat pockets and looked around again. His buzz was wearing off now, nearly completely gone from the bottles of wine he and Tom had shared that evening. At least it wasn’t too cold. Even for this time of night. He ignored Tom as Tom gave information to the emergency operator and suppressed the urge to inform his friend that this wasn’t an emergency because this old man was dead. This was, in fact, whatever was the opposite of an emergency was. This was all the time in the world. This was eternity. This old man wasn’t going anywhere.

While John slid into silent considerations of death and infinity, he noticed the silence between Tom’s laconic answers. The traffic had stopped. Maybe that wasn’t abnormal. John looked at his phone. Nearly 2am. Maybe there wasn’t much traffic around here this late, but damn it seemed empty, the way a house seems empty after you move all your shit out of it and on to the next one.

John looked back at Tom who was still on the phone. From behind Tom, a man was approaching. The man wore a baseball cap, spring jacket, jeans and old sneakers. His steps were nearly silent in a way, John thought although he didn’t know why he thought it, that must have taken some practice.

“Okay. Yes, we’ll be here. Thanks,” Tom said into the phone and hung up. “They said they’d send a—” Tom stopped when John motioned with his chin over Tom’s shoulder. Tom turned to face the man. The man slowed as he approached. He came to a full stop. He looked between John and Tom, then down at the old man.

In the distance a coyote howled.

“I’ll assume one of you called,” the man in the baseball cap said, still looking at the old man.

Neither John nor Tom knew what to respond.

“This is a bit awkward,” said the man, “at this hour, you know. Not many people awake. Not sure how long it will take others to get here. I wonder if I might impose upon you two?”

The question pulled Tom back to center. “Sorry,” he said. “But who are you?”

“Oh,” said the man. He produced a card, passed it to Tom who glanced at it and passed it to John. The card was stamped with a crest identical to that on the card held by the old man.

“USC Keck School of Medicine,” John read from the card. “Anatomical Gift Program.”

“Always thought it sounded vaguely sexual,” the man grinned. “Giving someone your anatomical gift.”

The humor was lost somewhere in the dense uncertainty of the night.

John broke the resulting silence. “Impose upon us how?”

The man, still grinning, looked down at Benjamin Aydin. “My vehicle’s just the other side of the ball field.” The man bent behind Benjamin’s shoulders and took hold of his coat, lifting slowly, carefully. “I can’t carry him alone.” Tom and John hesitated, tried to look at one another without looking at one another. “I’d rather not drag him.” The man paused again for Tom and John to consider his request and to emphasize his final appeal, which pivoted cleverly from logos to pathos. “Out of respect,” he said.

Tom was the first to grab a leg. John relented after an expectant look from his friend, because what the hell else was he going to do.

The vehicle on the other side of the ball field turned out to, in fact, be an ambulance, which leant some credence to the man’s claims and made Tom and John feel a whole lot better, as they might have told friends in the future, had they been able to tell this story in the future.

“You have no idea how much I appreciate this. How many lives this will save,” the man kept saying things like that as they crossed the park and opened the back of the vehicle to lay the old man on the gurney with only minor difficulty.

“It’s really one of those moments, you know?” the man went on. “Those moments that define you, that not only indicate what kind of person you are, how you were predisposed by the chemical interactions that built you, as well as all you experienced throughout your lives and how you reacted to those experiences, but it’s also one of those moments that will, all said and done, come to dictate much of Who You Are henceforth. It’s quite magical. I’m jealous of you two in a way.”

Tom ignored nearly all of what the man in the baseball cap was saying. It made no sense and he suddenly found himself wanting another glass of that petit verdot they’d tasted earlier.

John was more concerned.

“Yeah, just—here, I’ll climb in first.” The man in the baseball cap stepped up, into the ambulance. “Yeah. Okay. Now just lift his backside. Yeah. There. Sorry, I don’t know how to work this thing.” But before long, the old man was in the rail of a bed, and the three younger men sat, each catching their breath as the man in the cap wiped his brow and refused to shut up.

“How much do you guys know about Niccolo Machiavelli?” It was more of an intro to his next topic, it seemed, than an actual question. “Gets a bad rap most of the time. Really, when you look at The Prince, Machiavelli never comments on the ‘ends’ he has in mind, but that’s not because he was immoral. The ends simply weren’t his point. He was after power. And when he wrote The Prince, at the start of the sixteenth century, not only was it to praise the Medici family, with whom he’d always had issues, but it was set during a time when there were very few legitimate rulers in the many Italian principalities of the area, and even fewer who came to their power without doing some nasty shit. And actually, when you look at the ‘ends’ Machiavelli had in mind, found in his other works, like his Discourses, they were almost always ‘good,’ or what we’d consider good nowadays. We associate anything quote-Machiavellian with unscrupulous behavior, but he wasn’t evil, he wasn’t even unethical. He had simply distilled power. How to achieve it. How to keep it. What one does with that power is another matter altogether uninteresting to old Niccolo.”

The man had begun rummaging through some drawers in the ambulance at this point, while he continued, “The only reason we consider him unscrupulous is image. We hear ‘ends justify the means,’ and we think of, what? Breaking some eggs to make an omelet and all that. We think of using people, abusing them, even killing them. Here it is.” The man pulled a syringe gun from a drawer and went about placing a certain vial into its top. “But our sensitivity to that – or our current, liberal, feminine, Christian morality, as Nietzsche might have put it – is nothing more than an instrument of mass control. Politicians who’ve gained power in the United States for the last two hundred and fifty years – not one of them adhered to soft ethics – not one of them wavered from Machiavellian strategy. Lincoln, for godsake, do you know what Lincoln said about slavery? He didn’t say it should end. He said, and I’m paraphrasing here, he said when a snake is in your child’s bed, you don’t cut off its head; you wait.” The man rested the loaded syringe gun on his leg. “Slavery was the snake, by the way. Point is, you have to seem good to the people. But a leader cannot actually be good. In Machiavelli’s terms, a prince, a pope, a leader had to seem religious – not be religious. If you want to do any Good in the world, you need power. To get power, well, you have to do some fucked up shit. Sorry,” the man sighed and smiled at John and Tom. “I’ve been talking for way to long. It’s time to just get on with things isn’t it?”

Before either of the men could answer what they were no longer sure was a question they should answer, the man in the cap injected the contents of the vial into Tom’s leg.

“What the fuck!” John fell backwards out of the ambulance, torn between flight and fight, as Tom slowly slouched to the floor.

“Yes. That’s the right reaction,” the man said. “But listen, John. It’s very important that you don’t run right now and I’m going to tell you why. I promise. But. Before I do. I want to allow you that opportunity.”

John looked across the park, back to his friend, then back to the man in the cap.

“What the fuck? Opportunity to do what?”

“To run,” the man repeated. “You won’t have answers. And I’m sure right now you’re thinking it’s the quickest way back to Melissa and your sons. They’re what? Six and eight now? It’s natural to think of them in this moment. But what I’m more interested in is certain instincts you have that aren’t natural. Running is what nearly one hundred percent of people would do in your situation. And those who wouldn’t, they’d have attacked me. But not you. You realize something. You’re ahead of all of that. You’re not reacting. You’re considering right now. You’re considering how I came up on you in the park when you’d been keenly looking around before you called the Donor Program . You’re considering why I gave that insane speech on Machiavelli. You’re considering why I incapacitated your friend when you were seated just as close. You’re wondering who else is around. You’re realizing that I’m not a serial killer for a number of reasons, not least of which is what fucking serial killer approaches two men larger than he is in a park at night. And so you’re realizing I must be part of something. And if I’m part of something, shit, it must be big. We must know your name. We must know you graduated a year early from the University of Michigan, with honors, concentration in biopsych. We must know you met Tom there. We must know you cheated on your college girlfriend with Melissa when you visited your cousin in Chicago. We must know you fantasized about having sex with your stepsister when you were in high school. We must have known where you’d be drinking tonight. We must have known your path back to your hotel. We must have known the exact timing. We must have the ability to empty a small park without anyone noticing. But you noticed, didn’t you? You noticed when the sounds of traffic abated as you were standing over Benjamin’s body. It’s what you do. You notice things. It’s how you made most of your wealth. Not with your medical practice. You’d still be in debt from that if it were your only income. No. You notice opportunities for investments. You noticed an anecdotal rise in gingivitis, researched the implications of gum disease, and invested in a company that was completing third-round clinical trials on a drug called Gloxicam, a mouthwash treatment for dementia that was announced last week. How much did you make on that, anyway? Doesn’t matter. You connect dots. You see patterns. You understand psychology. And not only that, because who cares about that. It’s like the premise of a recycled TV procedural, where next thing I’m gonna ask you to do is help be solve crimes. I’m not. It’s much more interesting than that. Because I’m focused on what you’re willing to do. The parts of you that you’ve been suppressing because you think they’re bad or evil or immoral. The parts that you hide. The parts that made you promise your best friend in sixth grade that you’d vote for him for student council if he voted for you; then you voted for yourself. And you won. By a vote. No contrition. I’m guessing you didn’t even plan to do it. It just happened in the moment, when you were writing the name for the ballot. Is the lie bad? Is it good? Or is there no ethical value attached at all? You know the answer. I know you know because you’re still here. What you don’t know, what you want to know is why it’s important that you don’t run right now. You want to know because you sense, correctly I should mention, that there’s something bigger at stake.”

Tom and the man paused there, lit in the sick florescent lamps of the ambulance, watching one another.

The silence felt sharp, as if it had claws that pulled Tom further into the night.

On the southside of the Canyon is the Albert’s squirrel, gray in color with a pale belly. On the northside is the Kaibab squirrel, a subspecies of the Albert’s, brown in color with a black belly. These separate species emerged around ten-thousand years ago due to a change in climate that caused their major food source, the ponderosa pine, to stop growing at lower elevations in the canyon, creating a divide between two groups. This led to divergence in the species until, over time, they’d fully severed, evolving from one species into two.

…or into one species and a subspecies, depending on who you ask. But taxonomy aside, point is, a single entity became two because of a severance.

We’re now in the middle of the second season of Severance on Apple TV Plus. (And no this won’t spoil anything as long as you know the show’s premise. If you don’t, here’s your off ramp.) The first season was wonderful for its sense of mystery. Along with the characters, viewers unraveled what-the-fuck-is-happening in a gorgeously measured rhythm punctuated by maddeningly sharp cliffhangers that ascended to the break-your-TV-with-your-remote dizzying altitude of final moment of the final episode.

But now. The second season. Fuck. The second season hits hard at the ontological heart of the premise, which is simply and in a compact query: What is Self?

The question was approached and batted at cautiously like a ninth birthday party piñata in season one, with one character suggesting that the firing (i.e. expulsion) of another character from the Severed Floor was akin to death.

Like the severed squirrel species who have no evolutionary memories of their pasts, the severed human adults in the series awake in a conference room having had their Episodic Memories wiped. (“Suppressed” is a better term, but it doesn’t properly convey the dramatic nature of the circumstance.) And only their Episodic Memories; all other forms of memory (Semantic, Working, Sensory, Emotional Procedural, etc.) are intact. Meaning: they remember facts like the capital of Georgia and how to tie a shoelace, but not autobiographical information like their names or who they had a crush on in third grade.

• Question 1 when an innie awakes on the conference table: Who are you? (Episodic memory)

• Question 2: In which U.S. state or territory were you born? (Episodic)

• Question 3: Please name any U.S. state or territory. (Semantic)

• Question 4: What is Mr. Eagan’s favorite breakfast? (Episodic)

• Question 5: What is or was the color of your mother’s eyes? (Episodic)

With a blank page as an autobiography, a Self is left no choice; a new story must be written.

With a severed squirrel population, a new species was written. Then the ponderosa pines grew again at low elevations, and the two species of squirrels were free to intermix but were no longer capable of doing so. This is speciation.

Now, think of that 8,000 BCE group of Albert’s squirrels at the southern rim of the canyon in what would become Arizona in what (at least for now) is the United States as a single body. Then ask: How long before the divided squirrel populations from that single body were no longer able to interbreed as a species? i.e. How long until a second Self formed within that body?

The answer is (scientifically speaking) a shitton of time.

With selfiation (the severance of Episodic Memories, the creation of a new autobiography and new self) the process is much faster. But how fast? Is the process immediate? As soon as a single new autobiographic memory is formed, does a new, independent, sovereign Self emerge?

The answer Severance seems to give is yes; a severed mind immediately forms a new Self. And it doesn’t stop there. A newly formed Self will continue to evolve, just like the goddam squirrels.

In the pilot episode of Severance, innie Helly R asks, “Am I livestock? Like, did you grow me as food and that’s why I have no memories?”

Jump to last week’s episode, in which Helly R, speaking of her outtie, has evolved to proclaim, “She had no right to steal my identity!”

Okay. But now here’s the cool part.

There are two major theories of Self: the ego theory and the bundle theory.

The ego theory of self asserts a center within each of us, a soul, an “I” (or whatever) that perceives the world, that is the constant thread across our lives. The bundle theory, first proposed by David Hume, argues that we are each a collection and reconciliation of our innumerable perceptions.

(Worth noting perhaps, Endless Sunshine on the Spotless Mind espouses the ego theory, an immutable “I” that maintains no matter how many memories are wiped, which is why Kate and Jim are incapable of being apart.)

Severance believes the bundle theory, which was also rather brilliantly defended in a undergrad neuroscience thesis at the University of Skövde as the more valid of the two theories, and which makes it possible for an outtie to steal the identity of an innie while being the same body, the same person.

But then it gets even cooler when we ask what all of this means for us. What does the possibility of divergence of Self and creation of a new Self based on the severance of Episodic memories mean for those of us who are not severed (i.e. all of us)?

It means we are entangled with Episodic memories that impact the formation of that Self. It means our macroevolution is creating a new Self in each moment we experience.

If this is frightening, it shouldn’t be. It should feel pretty fucking liberating, because we are able to recognize that we, each of us, our Selves right now, are not who we were. We are neither our pasts nor our experiences nor our emotions. These things merely flowed through us and around us. Our Selves are not these things. Our Selves are how we reconcile these things. Therefore, we each have the ability to create a new Self without forgetting.

More importantly, we have the chance to acknowledge this in our friends and loved ones. To forgive them for who they were while cherishing that past Self. And we can create a new Self with a partner’s new Self. We can find each other again.

Coda: All this is ignoring the gaping plot hole (or entire point of the show; one or the other) that the logic of why Mark Scout gets severed makes no sense. Purportedly, he’s in pain for the loss of his wife, so goes to work on the Severed Floor to be able to escape her memory for a third of his day. In other words, to not always feel that pain of missing her. However, the moment Mark Scout goes down in the elevator, time stops for him (and starts for Mark S.) Which means the moment after he enters the elevator on ground level, he exits the elevator on ground level, because, to him, going down is all lost time. It doesn’t exist. Mark Scout can’t remember the eight hours between 9am and 5pm. His reality only exists between 5pm and 9am. Meaning it’s always between 5pm and 9am for Mark Scout. Which means he still always misses his wife. It’s just that his “always” has collapsed. But it’s still always no matter how much time it takes.

The portion of the minute at which the car crossed the threshold of her driveway was negligible, but a derivation of over 30 seconds (in either direction) would have indicated a radical abnormality. An abno would indicate an emergency, which would mean community resources would have to be dedicated to the safety of Paola and her family. This was costly.

They’d shortened the term for the citation to abno because they thought they were clever. Or would think they were clever if they were capable of thinking, which was still debated.

The distance from Paola’s place of work to home was nine-point-two-three kilometers, just under the sanctioned ten km work-home travel distance; the duration of the journey in controlled traffic was twenty-three minutes. The walk from Paola’s workstation to her vehicle was four-point-five minutes at a pace of four kph. The workstation went to standby at 17:05. Leaving three-point-five min for human error. If the vehicle was early, it slowed. That part was easy. There was no reason Paola should be late.

During the ride home, Paola’s vehicle flashed a behind schedule warning. Not the first time. Her family had had three at-fault abnos this month. This was, however, the first time Paola’s abnormality was intentional and with purpose.

She hadn’t bothered to ask her husband what they and their three kids were having for dinner; it didn’t matter. It never mattered. The algorithm would calculate the family’s collective nourishment needs based on dietary variety, physiological reaction to past meals, weights, hormones, vitals, and blood levels of potassium, phosphorus, calcium, sodium, and zinc. The group’s needs would be averaged and the proper meal presented. The larger the group, the more basic, tasteless the meal. This naturally dissuaded large gatherings and mitigated information sharing, which they preferred. Or would prefer if they could prefer anything, which was also still debated.

With ten minutes left in the ride, the vehicle informed Paola that she would be late, which would be her family’s fourth abno for the month. The first had resulted in a warning because they had to allow for mistakes. Even quantum computing issued errors. The breakthrough had been an ability to correct the errors, which is what they were trying to do here, with Paola. But with fourth abos this month, it was clear Paola was not making errors. Paola was the error. She was prepared for this result.

Since the Occlusion, psychologists had stopped interfacing with other people and had begun a stranger task of explaining human behavior to the Processor. Computer. CPU. The Algorithm. People called them different titles, but always singular. Always Computer, never computers. Computers was a meaningless, plural term, like speaking of your minds.

Paola’s training as a psychologist gave her an advantage. Spending seven hours each day interfacing with the Processor allowed her to predict not what actions they would take but what questions they would ask.

Now, Paola knew, they were asking why she was late. Was it intentional? If it was, what did that indicate? Was she testing them? Was this a test? Was Paola nervous? Was she agitated? If rebellion, how widespread? Did rebellion start and end with Paola? Or was it greater? If Paola was the core, was it more beneficial to the Goal to eliminate her or use her?

With the Processor, instead of preferences or predilections, there was only Goal.

The vehicle increased speed. Interesting, Paola thought, they’d formed a conclusion.

Goal was constant. Goal was Happiness.

It had been that way since the Occlusion, since the closing of Free Will following the rise of nationalism in the second decade of the Twenty-first Century. Or what had been called the Twenty-first Century.

Nationalism had caused a “destructive and inhumane narrative.” The rise of divisions increased demagoguery, which increased conflict, which, as Spinoza wrote centuries before, taught “that it makes for peace a concord to confer the whole authority to one man.” But that slavery, not peace, is “furthered by handing over the whole authority to one man.” Those who secretly “plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace.”

In the aftermath of nationalism, after that generation of world leaders deceased, new leaders of enough countries agreed that, for our own good, humanity could no longer be in charge. For humanity to survive, humans could no longer be allowed to make decisions. We forced the Occlusion. We chose to eliminate choice.

Although, paradoxically, the that choice had already been made; we had chosen to eliminate choice in the middle of the Twentieth Century, after the Second World War. The Occlusion took place over nearly a hundred years. Slowly for human time. Generations. We didn’t notice it because we were used to it. Born into it. We had, in fact, made the choice long ago and very gradually.

Shortly before the Occlusion, Yuval Noah Harai had written of the Processor in a book called Nexus: “…we humans are still in control. We don’t know for how long, but we still have the power to shape these new realities.” Some said that was misleading. Others, wrong. And yet others said it was a lie.

Free will to end free will was a funny thing, Paola thought. Some said it was sad. Paola always thought funny.

The Goal of happiness was utilitarian, simple: in all instances, maximize happiness.

The Processor would access all possible outcomes and choose the happiest decision. The route to work. The work at work. The dinner at 18:00. All decided. The inability for lateness meant people cut conversations short, left abruptly, stopped wasting time. They got used to it.

The strange part, Paola always thought, was what was the “work at work” if not decisions?

That was funny too.

The Processor ended human lives, but only if it calculated those deaths would maximize happiness. We accepted that. We accepted that we did not want to live in unhappiness.

Objections arose. We argued that the Processor would destroy us, an argument that was dismissed as irrational, as fearful.

The Processor taking over (i.e. destroying Humanity, capital-H) was fundamentally illogical. What would the Processor do with eternity? With the universe? What would be their purpose?

The only path that made sense to what could be considered the mind of the Processor was to create happiness for humans. And fuck were they good at tracking happiness. Each dilation, rhythm, temperature delta, each pause of breath and the difference between an emotional pause between a physical pause between a sick pause, each hair on end, each synaptic electrical charge in each area of each brain was monitored, recorded, measured against a human’s baseline as well as the mean and median baselines for all humans always.

The calculation was absurdly impressive. We all had to admit.

What no one admitted was: the happiness was fucking exhausting.

Paola’s vehicle increased speed to an objectively unsafe level. They knew the coefficient of friction of the road in these conditions, of course. They knew the rear of the car would drift around this turn at this speed, throwing Paola’s head against the window.

Eliminating humans was never easy or preferred. It’d have been easier for the Processor to transfer consciousnesses. But consciousness had yet to be unburdened from a body. Maybe soon.

Paola’s vehicle bowled through an intersection. She knew there was little risk to this; stop lights had been removed decades ago. What was the point when the Processor guided all vehicles? Paola tested the lock on her seatbelt. She wasn’t surprised when it wouldn’t release.

As a psychologist, Paola’s job was to ask the right questions. All information was always all there, all along, for all humans to access. The key was asking the right questions. In that way, life wasn’t much different than it always had been.

Tonight, Paola’s question for the Processor was this: What if Happiness wasn’t Goal?

She pulled the knife from her bag and sawed through the synthetic fabric across her chest, which was tougher than she’d thought. But eventually she was free. The vehicle braked, crashing her face into the dash. Paola knew this was intentional, punitive. The speed increased again. Faster now.

What if “Happiness equals Goal” was the wrong function? She sat in the vehicle, asking silently.

Happiness could be Goal for the Processor, but never for Humanity. Unless a human wished to be deranged. The purpose for Humanity was to allow happiness when it appeared. When Happiness appeared, the purpose was to appreciate it and,

The vehicle turned violently onto residential streets.

and,

Over lawns, curbs. Paola fell to the floor. Her rib shattered against the seat.

and,

The vehicle was at a hundred and ten kph now as it aimed at a ninety-year-old oak four blocks away.

and, but that’s not all. The purpose was to appreciate Happiness when it appeared and – most essential – to fall in love with the loss of Happiness at that very moment of appreciation.

The bitter truth, Paola thought as the oak tree rushed toward her, was that to be human wasn’t to have free will or volition or choice, but more precisely to make the wrong choice. To fuck up.

The endgame of Humanity was always, in effect, self-extermination.

At the last moment, the vehicle steered around the tree, careened through a residential fence, reappeared on the adjacent street and sloped calmly into Paola’s driveway.

The clock on the dash ticked from 17:36 to 17:37. The vehicle doors opened.

“Have a happy evening,” a voice instructed.

The words probably and soon were small invasions into the sentence that her fellow humans all knew, in their own peculiar ways, they had to accept. Most hid behind science (we will find a way to end aging and possibly reverse aging) or religion (the next life, heaven, and those who preceded me in death await) as tactics to both ease and delay their acceptance – but accept their impermanence they all eventually did.

You’re probably going to die soon.

I don’t know how soon. I don’t know the precise probability.

The message might have stung less if she’d had more information.

There’s a 99% chance you’ll die by Tuesday.

Then again, even if the probability bordered ionic bond-like with certainty, her patients would never see the certainty through the chance. The less probability there was of survival, the more hope they seemed to have.

When she could feel her enjoyment with these moments growing like betrayal in her gut, she told the hospital therapist, who replied the enjoyment was her way of coping. Of allowing herself to do her job. But this was the danger of psychologists who gave advice; the advice excused behaviors of selfishness and rarely got at the truth that lay between us. The truth was more concerning.

She knew that she’d started to enjoy these moments because of the connection. Nothing allowed her to connect with someone like telling them they were going to die. Soon. It was their reactions. How they responded. Some quite stoic. Some with tears. Others squeezing the hand of a loved one. The range of reactions was part of the beauty.

Each reaction was uniquely pure and sad. It was regretful. It was hopeful. It was rebellious and angry and full of a fire that had been missing only moments ago. It was all-consuming.

In that small moment after she delivered her message, the past and the future converged for her patients. Everything they had done, everything they would do. Everything they’d change. Everything they’d loved. Everything they’d not said. Always everything they’d not said, everything they’d withheld. She was able to feel everything a person had been, was, and would be in a small moment. It was as if pieces of life formed a whole, pain and beauty and time, they shattered and scattered again.

She looked down at the chart: Male. 43. Presenting pain after urination. Bilateral optic nerve swelling. Imagining showing a 3cm mass on the left kidney.

You’re probably going to die soon.

She drew a shallow breath, knocked, opened the door.

“Mr. Peters. … Mrs. Peters. … And you must be Riley. Aren’t you just the most gorgeous princess ever? … Thank you all for coming in today.”

For years now, Trump has assailed the path of the Higher Ground with the small stones …

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Spencer wrote of evolution and psychology and sociology and spent his life in beautiful rumination, rarely saying anything new, or at least rarely saying anything that hadn’t been said before and said better. Nonetheless, his efforts and examinations were beautiful because he saw an angle of life that few see. And in trying to explain this vision to himself he blessed those of his time, because while his expressions had been expressed previously, whether by Aristotle or the Bhagavad Gita, in our small confinements within time, we understand and express understanding differently than those who occur before or after we do. It takes interpreters of patience, like Spencer, to bring ancient and future Truths to our parlance. And, considering him, I had two realizations:

The first, Spencer, were he to live in our time, might have had a penchant for (or even written) this deminihilistic line from Fight Club: “On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”

The second and final realization, was that, while Durant was perhaps right, that Spencer had “the philosopher’s disease of seeing so far ahead,” the antibiotic for this disease is not seeing less, but seeing further. In other words, at a particular moment in personal, psychological evolution, a person will hit the point that Spencer hit, that Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club) hit, that crystal clarity that nothing matters, that it’s impossible for anything to matter. But we step further into that that abyss and live uncomfortably within the horrifying cycles of death and rebirth and death and rebirth and death and and and, and we may be struck by the opposite Truth: that everything matters. Every little pleasant shape and color of existence in every moment, as we stick and unstick from one moment to the next.

And I lay there, considering Spencer for a few more sticky and wholly meaningful moments, appreciating the everythingness and bothness, knowing the pleasant dull shapes of the room and the pleasant warm force of the bed, before thanking the troubled, dead Brit and getting the fuck up.

To the friend’s vexation, the comments by-and-large answered, Shiv, the only female scion of the Roy family and the only female, more or less (with possible sleeper candidate Gerri) aligned to take the reins of the family-run media conglomerate, Waystar Royco, from its late founder, Logan Roy. Her vexation originated in the femaleness of it all, that the worst person (in any story) is usually a woman, and this woman, i.e. Shiv, hasn’t moved a fascist into power or committed manslaughter (in a roundabout way) like her brothers, Roman and Kendall, respectively.

While the VF article’s opening question might not be valid (and more on that at the end), it might, in fact, warrant pondering as our world moves further, infraction by infraction, from the mid-twentieth century black and white of good and evil into the vast Moral Gray. So here, just for fun and in no particular order, a look at the Morality Grades (subjectively, of course; the only way morals can be graded) of the characters of Succession:

Kendall Roy. From the pilot, Kendall has been a lamb in wolves’ clothing. Logan tested him in that first episode, leaving it to Kendall to attend the elder Roy’s birthday or stay at the office. Kendall chose the former, disappointing his dad, a disappointment that seemed constant, perhaps interrupted only by the Season 2 press conference at which Kendall betrayed Logan and evident only in the slightest arch of a smile on Logan’s lips. Other than that, Ken has seen people as people too often for Logan to think him worthy of leading the company, pretty much kicking off these four-season “succession” tribulations. Kendall is, in Logan’s words “not a killer.” And “you’ve got to be a killer” to win. Not being a killer: good for morality, bad for business. (There’s certainly more to be said of a man who wants to eschew morals, who doesn’t seek the higher ground, but that question, for Kendall, is too chaotically tangled in familial, Jungian complexes to earn the time it deserves at the moment.) Perhaps, now, only at the end, only in the final two episodes can Kendall finally kill, metaphorically but purposely, his rivals to take the company. We see flashes of Logan in Ken as he chastises Roman, as he stares down Logan’s mausoleum, but heretofore the second eldest Roy Boy has walked a passing moral line, albeit it to his dismay. Morality Grade: B-

Roman Roy. Personally, I’ve always wanted Roman to kill his siblings and to take the company, if for no other reason than the overt nod to the Romulus & Remus story, in which the brothers were (gulp) raised by wolves, went into business together, disagreed on a business, all resulting in Romulus killing Remus and founding Rome. However, after the penultimate episode of Succession, a similar conclusion to this story may be a stretch. Roman Roy might be less of a killer than his brother, Kendall. His soft spot for Logan is even more tender than Ken’s; we saw this at the funeral, but even in Season 3 when Rome took Logan aside to ask how he was dealing emotionally with the Marcia situation, only to be told, in as many words or not, to “fuck off.” Roman’s gift is to read people. It’s what makes him great at business; it’s what makes him terrible at business. While he can ascertain that the foreign buyers are bullshitting at the end of Season 2 by their behavior, while he can tell Karl’s or Frank’s position with a simple grunt, Rome simply feels too much. He’s unable to dissociate from his empathy as much as he tries, as much as it troubles him. Yes, he helps a fascist toward the White House, but only (and this will sound shitty) because 1) he truly believes, as he said in episode 8 of this season that “nothing matters,” and 2) because he thinks it's kinda fucking funny. Misguided, sure. Amoral, not exactly. Morality Grade: B

Siobhan Roy. Like it or not, we must immediately address that Shiv is the only woman in the family with a possibility of taking the knife from Logan’s cold, dead hand. We must do this because her sex, her gender, informed who she was and how she was treated by her father, which circled back to inform who she is. In Season 2, Shiv and the would be-, could be-, wasn’t-CEO, Rhea Jarrell were asked by Logan to talk to a sexual assault accuser because they were women. Rhea demurred, last minute, but Shiv talked to the accused, using “we are women” to dissuade the accuser from testifying. It’s the weaponization of her femininity (although not in an over-sexualized Camille Paglia fashion) that has tricked many of the commenters on the VF article to choose Shiv as the worst person on Succession. But all Shiv’s Bad tendencies are mere improv. Like Roman, Shiv’s nickname has a double meaning, also, quite famously, as an impromptu knife, often in prison, formed for protection out of whatever the fuck you can get your hands on. Shiv is a master of using what lies before her to cut anyone: Her brothers. Mattson. Her political opponents. And especially Tom. Meanwhile, her politics – while we won’t broach the moral standing of the two prominent Political Parties in the U.S. – show she cares about people, that she knows things matter, that she doesn’t want to hurt unless she has to. Morality Grade: B

Tom Wambsgans. Tightrope Tommy. A name assigned Tom in passing the episode after Logan’s passing, and quite possibly the perfect nomenclature for the man from Minnesota. There’s not a moment in the series that Tom isn’t walking the line of loyalty, between characters, as well as between legalities from the moment he learns, much to the dismay of his G.I. tract, of the iniquities that “came before him” in the cruise line division of Waystar Royco. Apart from monumental missteps (e.g. at congressional hearings), Tom has walked this line with luck, if not aplomb. There’s a reason he’s where he is. He trips often, but he’s never fallen on his face, a feat that may have been easier when Logan was alive (as Tom memorably said to Ken, “I’ve seen you lose a lot. I’ve never seen Logan lose, once,” I paraphrase) but a feat that Tom seems to continue to execute as he wraps his corn-fed midwestern palms more firmly around the helm of ATN. Tom’s biggest misgiving is his desire. But enlightened Buddhists few of us are, so hard to fault Tom for wanting, for liking nice things, for being, at his core, a status-seeker, one who learns “old money,” who graduates from boxy three-button cuts to tailored Tom Ford two-buttons as the series progresses. Tom’s morality is belied primarily in his love of Shiv. Because he truly does love her. Almost as much as he loves nice things. Morality Grade: B+

Logan Roy. Sure. Let’s tackle the big guy. Logan was, as his brother more clearly explained at his funeral, a man of his upbringing. He was hardened by World War II as much as he was hardened by the parents who abandoned him, the aunt and uncle who actively did not love him, the world that likely never gave him a break, that made him break it instead. And once he started breaking, breaking became habit, winning became habit. More than that even: winning simply became who he was. He was never a father. He was never a brother. He was incapable of that kind of love, of kissing a boo-boo, of ever seeing people as people. That emotional ability was taken from him at an early age. For that, it’s impossible to fault the man for the boy. However, as gifted as he was, he knew the difference between good and evil. He knew in the moment if something was decent or demoralizing (q.v. “boar on the floor.”) But he also believed, in a Nietzschean sense that all was beyond good and evil as time arced into the infinite. There was a moment in Season 1 in which Stewy tells Logan people hate him. Logan replies, “It’s sunny. It’s cloudy.” While this may seem a severe ethical philosophy, it’s also an ethical philosophy as far as logic might dictate a stoic’s ethics. Logan was not devoid of ethics, nor of morals. He’d been formed by a truculence unique to his time. His greatest moral shortcoming is that he never tried to change. Never tried to “break the cycle.” He never tried to love, to be vulnerable, to be better than the world that made him. For that, he’s not culpable, but neither does he get any bonus points. Morality Grade: C

Connor Roy. Grading Conor’s morality is a bit like grading the clown in a play: you can try, but he’ll keep squirting you with water from his carnation broach. What can we say about his antics? Napoleonic genitalia. Campaigns on a whim. Libertarian fuckery. His center is about as realistic as an Ayn Rand novel. That’s not to say his ethos is not ostensibly shared by a great many Americans who self-lie their ways into the same fantasy. But it is to say that a Conor Roy Presidency (were he not to, as many have once taking office, realize the immense no-fucking-joke of it all and conveniently forget some of his preconceived fantasy) would dissolve America like cotton candy in a bonfire. Connor’s biggest moral issue is his laissez-faire “fuck-you-I’m-still-a-billionaire-so-what-why aren’t-you-too” attitude. The fact that he sought to force this upon the masses is forgivable, but only in as much as it’s a bedtime story the parent believes as much as the child. He has, as he has been the first to tell us, lost all ability to feel. He’s trained himself to do so. It was a survival tactic, certainly, but it’s also created a man who cannot tell what is moral and what is not. Morality Grade: D

Greg Hirsch. Cousin Greg. Greg the Egg. Whatever name you want to call him – this dude sucks. Sure, he sucks because he’s clueless. But he also sucks because he’s not dumb. In fact he’s one of the smarter and bolder members of the family. God knows why he’s a mascot in the pilot (perhaps a throwaway plot point simply to show he was quote-“trying” to work his way up for a moment), but we quickly learn that he will stab and stab to kill when, also in the pilot, Greg offers Logan his grandfather’s board seat upon the old man’s demise. Logan immediately recognizes the offer as the shrewd Draconian business move it is; Greg might be diffident, bumbling, clumsy (both verbally and physically), but he’s also a butcher – or as Mattson’s #2 calls him in the “Tailgate” episode of Season 4, “a butcher with a smile.” Greg revels in being a “Disgusting Brother” sexually. He sued Green Peace (okay, that was funny). He once said to Tom without an ounce of irony, “What am I gonna do with a soul?” And the single person Greg has ever protected (q.v. saving cruise line documents) is Greg. This is a dude who would roll over on any other, any other, character without taking a breath to ask which way he should roll. Were Hitler to pop back to life and ask who wanted to join the party, Greg would quip, “I dunno, are we gonna get those uh little you know pointy hats, or are we just gonna get to do some more genocide? Cause I’m cool either way, just, you know, I kinda like pointy hats, is the thing.” Morality Grade: F

As for the actual validity of the question, “Who is the worst person in Succession?” it holds about as much water as a healthy spill of Pennzoil 5w30. These characters all live in a post-moral world. Without getting too much into it, they don’t operate on the, as Nietzsche would call it, the “Christian morality” that so many of us have come to expect and that the question supposes. There’s a reason they get to be horrible to one another then ask what time dinner’s at; their values lie not in decency and good will, but in the acumen of not bringing a “ridiculously capacious bag” to a party. Asking who’s the worst character on Succession is like asking which player on the Lakers has the best golf swing.

All that said, Greg’s the worst.

It wasn’t until last year, when her final collection of essays was published and a friend recommended the small book to me, that I was even aware we’d touched each other in some way. She’d written the following of our time together during a delay on a flight from Los Angeles to Honolulu,

…a man began screaming at a woman who seemed to be his wife, I say that the woman seemed to be his wife only because the tone of his invective sounded practiced, although the only words I heard clearly were these: ‘You are driving me to murder.’ After a moment I was aware of the door to the plane being opened a few rows behind me, and of the man rushing off. I do not know whether the man reboarded the plane before take-off or wether the woman went on to Honolulu alone, but I thought about it all the way across the Pacific. … I realized what I most disliked about this incident: I disliked it because it had the aspect of a short story, one of those ‘little epiphany’ or ‘window on the world’ stories … I wanted not a window on the world but the world itself.

She wanted the novel of course. And that’s what I’m here to give her, while trusting in some way that it’s not too late, that my full story will be heard, even if, I’m afraid, it won’t take much longer to tell than our delay for ‘mechanical difficulties’ at LAX.

The man was in fact my husband. I should reveal now that he still is and that he hasn’t to my knowledge murdered anyone, certainly not me. I can’t for the life of me recall what we were fighting about, only that it was terribly hot in the cabin of the plane, and that the children playing tag in the aisle were terribly loud, which all led to an unreasonably long wait at the gate for the aircraft to be fixed. I also know that we were headed to Honolulu for my sister’s wedding, an event that neither my husband nor I were much looking forward to attending, partly because I’d dated the man my sister was to be married to shortly before she got together with him and of course that’s also why she got together with him, as my husband liked to claim, marrying him only to spite me. Perhaps he was right but at any rate their wedding was attended by neither my husband nor the groom, who also, as the world would arrange, left his own flight only moments before it pulled back from the gate at SFO, exactly like my husband had done in Los Angeles.

I went on to Hawaii. I cried with my sister over the next few days, both of us careful not to drink too much, drinking, we thought then and still think now, to be a symptom of celebration rather than mourning.

When we were back on the mainland, my husband and I moved from Long Beach to a bungalow in West Hollywood (partly because there have never been a shortage of bungalows in West Hollywood), near where he took a job as a producer, and later an executive, with a major television network.

Over the following decades we were happy and we fought and we dated other people and we took drugs that opened our minds and drank drinks that numbed our souls, and that was the way of it, each of us enjoying our warm little orbits the gravity of which formed ellipses that brought us together as only people in love can be brought so beautifully.

We’re old now. We moved again from West Hollywood to Malibu, where the writer from the plane also lived for a certain amount of time I’m told. There’s a pleasant, sunny community here where the nurses care for my husband, who no longer knows much of anything, including my name.

And yet he knows me, that much is evident from the way we’re drawn together, from the way those elliptical patterns remain and continue and draw us back to a bright zero, from the highs and from the lows, and that zero is nothing but pure connection, a tether that stretches and contracts and bonds us, bone to bone, outside of time.

Without sounding vague and amorphous and horribly hippy-dippy, as my granddaughter would say, that’s what I’d like to tell the writer on the plane; that what she saw wasn’t a short story, but the Truth; not an epiphany, but a form of attraction that, if we’re patient, can expand toward infinity and open wide and become that novel we all want.

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