“Why does man make himself out to be so special?” he asked her.
She said nothing.
“Forget the fact that this planet-nay, this solar system-is so in- significantly small that we can’t even comprehend it. Try this. Imagine you’re on a huge beach. Imagine you pick up one tiny grain of sand. Just one. Then you look up and down this long beach that stretches in both directions as far as the eye can see. Do you think our entire solar system is as small as that grain of sand is to that beach in comparison to the universe?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, if you did, you’d be wrong. It is much, much smaller. Try this: Imagine you’re still holding that tiny grain of sand. Now not just the beach you are on, but all the beaches all over the planet, all of them, all down the coast of California and the East Coast from Maine down to Florida and on the Indian Ocean and off the coasts of Africa. Imagine all that sand, all those beaches everywhere in the world and now look at that grain of sand you’re holding and still,
Pietra said nothing.
“But forget that for a moment,” Nash went on, “because man is even insignificant here on this very planet. Let’s take this whole argument down to just earth for a moment, okay?”
She nodded.
“Do you realize that dinosaurs walked this planet longer than man?”
“Yes.”
“But that’s not all. That would be one thing that would show that man is not special-the fact that even on this infinitesimally small planet we haven’t even been kings the majority of the time. But take it a step farther-do you realize how much longer the dinosaurs ruled the earth than us? Two times? Five times? Ten times?”
She looked at him. “I don’t know.”
“Forty-four thousand times longer.” He was gesturing wildly now, lost in the bliss of his argument. “Think about that. Forty-four thousand times longer. That’s more than one hundred and twenty years for every single day. Can you even comprehend it? Do you think we will survive forty-four thousand times longer than we already have?”
“No,” she said.
Nash sat back. “We are nothing. Man. Nothing. Yet we feel as though we are special. We think we matter or that God considers us his favorites. What a laugh.”
In college, Nash studied John Locke’s state of nature-the idea that the best government is the least government because, put simply, it is closest to the state of nature, or what God intended. But in that state, we are animals. It is nonsense to think we are anything more. How silly to believe that man is above that and that love and friendship are anything but the ravings of a more intelligent mind, a mind that can see the futility and thus must invent ways to comfort and distract itself from it.
Was Nash the sane one for seeing the darkness-or were most people just self-delusional? And yet.
And yet for many years Nash had longed for normalcy.
He saw the carefree and craved it. He realized that he was way above average in intelligence. He was a straight-A student with nearly perfect SAT scores. He matriculated at Williams College, where he majored in philosophy-all the while trying to keep the crazy away. But the crazy wanted out.
So why not let it out?
There was in him some primitive instinct to protect his parents and siblings, but the rest of the world’s inhabitants did not matter to him. They were background scenery, props, nothing more. The truth was-a truth he understood early-he derived intense pleasure from harming others. He always had. He didn’t know why. Some people derive pleasure from a soft breeze or a warm hug or a victory shot in a basketball game. Nash derived it from ridding the planet of another inhabitant. He didn’t ask this for himself, but he saw it and sometimes he could fight it and sometimes he could not.
Then he met Cassandra.
It was like one of those science experiments that start with a clear liquid and then someone adds a small drop-a catalyst-to it and it changes everything. The color changes and the complexion changes and the texture changes. Corny as it sounds, Cassandra was that catalyst.
He saw her and she touched him and it transformed him.
He suddenly got it. He got love. He got hope and dreams and the idea of wanting to wake up and spend your life with another person. They met during their sophomore year at Williams. Cassandra was beautiful, but there was something more there. Every guy had a crush on her, though not really the fantasy-sexual kind you usually associate with college. With her awkward gait and knowing smile, Cassandra was the one you wanted to bring home. She was the one who made you think about buying a house and cutting your lawn and building a barbecue and wiping her brow when she gave birth to your child. You were wowed by her beauty, yes, but you were more wowed by her innate goodness. She was special and could do no harm and you instinctively knew it.
He’d seen a little of that in Reba Cordova, just a little, and there had been a pang when he had killed her, not much of one, but a pang. He thought about her husband, what he would have to go through now, because while he didn’t really care, Nash knew something about it.
Cassandra.
She had five brothers and they all adored her and her parents adored her and whenever you walked past her and she smiled at you, even if you were a stranger, you felt the pluck deep in your heart. Her family called her Cassie. Nash did not like that. She was Cassandra to him and he loved her and on the day he married her, he understood what people meant when they said you were “blessed.”
They came back to Williams for homecoming and reunions and they always stayed in North Adams at the Porches Inn. He could see her there, at that inn in the gray house, her head resting on his stomach as a recent song reminded him, her eyes on the ceiling, him stroking her hair as they talked about nothing and everything and that was how he saw her when he looked back now, how he pictured her- before she felt sick and they said it was cancer and they cut up his beautiful Cassandra and she died, just like every other insignificant organism on this tiny nothing of a planet.
Yes, Cassandra died and that was when he knew for certain that it was all a crock and a joke and once she was gone, Nash didn’t have the strength to worry about stopping the crazy anymore. There was no need. So he let the crazy out, all out, with a sudden flooding rush. And once it was out, there was no putting it back.
Her family tried to console him. They had “faith” and explained again that he had been “blessed” to have her at all and that she would be waiting for him in some beautiful place for all eternity. They needed it, he guessed. The family had already picked up after another tragedy-her oldest brother, Curtis, had been killed three years before in some sort of robbery gone bad-but at least, in that case, Curtis had lived a life of trouble. Cassandra had been crushed when her brother died, had cried for days until Nash wanted to let the crazy out just to find a way to ease her pain, but in the end, those who had faith could rationalize Curtis’s death. Faith let them explain it as part of some grand scheme.
But how do you explain losing someone as loving and warm as Cassandra?
You can’t. So her parents talked about the hereafter, but they didn’t really believe that. No one else did. Why cry at death if you believe that you will spend eternity in bliss? Why mourn the loss of someone when that person was now in a better place? Wasn’t that horribly selfish of you-keeping a loved one from someplace better? And if you did believe that you spent eternity in paradise with the loved one, there would never be anything to fear-life is not even one breath next to eternity.
You cry and mourn, Nash knew, because deep inside, you knew it was a crock.
Cassandra wasn’t with her brother Curtis, bathing in white light. What was left of her, what hadn’t been taken by the cancer and the chemo, was rotting away in the ground.
At the funeral, her family talked about fate and plans and all that nonsense too. That this had been his beloved’s fate-to live briefly, touch everyone who saw her, raise him to a wonderful height, let him drop to the ground with a splat. This has been his fate too. He wondered about that. Even when he was with her, there had been moments where containing his true nature-his honest, most godlike state of nature-had been difficult. Would he have been able to maintain the peace inside? Or had he been hardwired from day one to go back to the dark place and cause destruction, even if Cassandra had survived?
It was impossible to know. But either way this was his fate.
Pietra said, “She would have never said anything.”
He knew that she was talking about Reba.
“We don’t know that.”
Pietra looked out the side window.
“Eventually the police will get an ID on Marianne,” he said. “Or someone will realize that she’s missing. The police will look into it. They’ll talk to her friends. Reba would have told them then for certain.”
“You are sacrificing many lives.”
“Two so far.”
“And the survivors. Their lives are altered.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“You know why.”
“Are you going to claim Marianne started it?”
“Started is not the right word. She changed the dynamics.”
“So she dies?”
“She made a decision that altered and could potentially destroy lives.”
“So she dies?” Pietra repeated.
“All our decisions carry weight, Pietra. We all play God every day. When a woman buys a new pair of expensive shoes, she could have spent that same money feeding someone who was starving. In a sense, those shoes mean more to her than a life. We all kill to make our lives more comfortable. We don’t put it in those terms. But we do.”
She didn’t argue.
“What’s going on, Pietra?”
“Nothing. Forget it.”
“I promised Cassandra.”
“Yes. So you said.”
