“Something’s not right,” agrees Sue beneath her breath.
She looks back up at the lady and speaks in that very specific, commanding tone Leo remembers so well from the nurses who took care of his grandmother. “We’ll be landing soon, sweetheart!” It is a voice designed to cut through confusion and impaired hearing. Leo hates it. He could never bear hearing his formidable grandmother spoken to as though she were a not-very-bright preschooler. “So if you want to use the bathroom, you probably should go now.”
The lady sighs. She turns to appraise Leo.
Leo says, “You’re telling us how and when we’re going to die?”
Later he will berate himself. He will think he should have followed Sue’s lead and shut her down, but his feelings are mixed up with memories of his beloved grandmother’s confused face and how he—Leo!—could make it smooth and peaceful when he went along with her delusions. He was better at it than his sisters. Those were the last gifts he gave her. He will do the same for this lady. It doesn’t matter what nonsense she is talking.
“Cause of death. Age of death,” says the lady. “It’s really very simple.”
“Sounds very simple,” agrees Leo. “Give it to me straight.”
The lady points her finger like a gun at the center of Leo’s forehead. Her hand is steady. “I expect workplace accident.” Her eyes are a pretty color: the soft blue of faded denim. They don’t look like crazy eyes. They look like sad, sensible, resigned eyes. “Age forty-three.”
Forty-three! Leo does not experience it as a shock—he is taking all this as seriously as he would a fortune cookie or a horoscope—but he does feel a jolt. Fortune cookies and horoscopes aren’t usually so specific. He turns forty-three in November.
“I’m going to die in a workplace accident? Might have to give up work then.”
Max chuckles appreciatively while Sue makes the kind of worried “tch” sound of a mother seeing her child doing something mildly risky.
“Fate won’t be fought,” says the lady. Her gaze glides past Leo as her forehead creases.
“Better get my affairs in order then!” Leo is playing for the crowd now. This particular jolly persona normally only kicks in after two drinks. This guy is not uptight! He never spirals! He doesn’t lie awake at night fretting about his utilization rate. No one accuses this guy of being a workaholic.
The lady doesn’t answer. Her face is a door slammed shut. She is done with him. She takes a deliberate step forward.
Leo twists in his seat to watch. She’s stopped at the very next row. Still close enough for him to touch.
“I expect.” She points at a young woman wearing giant headphones over a headscarf. “Disease of the urinary system. Age ninety-two.”
The woman unpeels one headphone away from her ear with her thumb. “I’m sorry?”
“Oh my word,” marvels Sue as she also cranes her neck to watch the lady, while Max shakes his head and Leo grins inanely like the relaxed, easygoing guy he is not and tries to ignore the sensation of someone gently but insistently pressing an ice cube to the base of his spine.
Chapter 5
I have been told I pointed at passengers while repeating these four words: “Fate won’t be fought.”
I was always taught that pointing is bad manners, so I was skeptical about this, until I saw the photo, the one that eventually appeared in the papers, where I was most definitely pointing, in a rather theatrical manner, as if I were playing King Lear.
Embarrassing.
I noticed my hair looked very nice in that photo.
Obviously that doesn’t excuse anything.
Anyhow, the phrase “fate won’t be fought” was my mother’s phrase, not mine. She was always saying things like that: You can’t escape destiny. It wasn’t meant to be. It was meant to be.
Supposedly that means she was a “determinist.”
Or so I was told by a bearded man at a dinner party in the summer of 1984. I do not remember his name, just his magnificent lush brown beard. He caressed it tenderly and often, as though it were a beloved pet curled up on his chest.
We were eating overcooked apricot chicken and undercooked brown rice in a blond-brick house in the northern Sydney suburb of Terrey Hills. It was a hot evening and our hosts had set up a rotating fan in the corner of the room. Every few seconds a violent gust of air whooshed back our hair so we resembled dogs with their heads stuck out of car windows and the bearded man’s beard flapped to the left like a patriotic flag.
It’s amusing, in retrospect, although as I recall, nobody laughed. We were young, so we took ourselves seriously.
I had accidentally shared a deeply personal story about my mother. I sometimes share personal stories when I’m nervous and drink too much and obviously both things are likely at dinner parties.
The story I shared prompted the bearded man to remark that my mother was “obviously a determinist,” as was he. Nobody knew what this meant, so he delivered a benevolent mini-lecture (he was a university lecturer, he enjoyed lecturing even more than the average man) while our hosts argued in bitter low voices over whether brown rice was meant to be that crunchy.
The idea of determinism, he said, is that everything that happens, and every decision or action you make, is “causally inevitable.” Why? Because everything is caused by something else: a preceding action, event, or situation.
Well. None of us knew what the heck he was talking about. He was ready for this. He made it simpler.
He said people can only act as they actually do. A murderer, for example, will inevitably murder because his childhood, his genes, his brain chemistry, his socioeconomic situation, his fear of rejection, the convenient proximity of a defenseless woman on a dark street corner, will all lead him, inevitably, to murder.
Someone said, quite passionately as I recall, as if we were speaking of a specific murder and not a hypothetical one, “But he chose to murder! He had free will!”
The bearded man said he himself was a “hard determinist” and therefore did not believe in free will. He had a grain of brown rice stuck between his two front teeth and nobody, not even his wife, pointed it out. Perhaps she thought it was causally inevitable.
This is what I wonder; this is what I would like to now ask the bearded man: If free will doesn’t exist, if all your decisions and actions are inevitable, are you still required to apologize for them?
Chapter 6
What the actual? The tendons in Sue O’Sullivan’s neck scream as she twists her head too fast to see what the crazy lady is doing now.
“Ow.” She faces the front again.
