“Look,” she said, thinking it over. “You grew up in Nepal, right? And I grew up in Ireland. In both places there was a lot of political violence. Which really means murder, right? Murder and all that follows murder. Fear, grief, anger, revenge, all that. The damage never goes away, I can tell you that, and you probably already know it. And then the better murderers in these murder contests tend to take over in the end. It’s not at all clear it has ever done any good in the world at all.”
Badim wagged his head side to side, not agreeing with her.
“What?” she cried. “You know it’s true! The damage has been tremendous!”
He sighed. “And yet,” he said. “What was the damage before? And did doing some of these things lessen the damage overall? This is what is never clear.”
“So what has this black wing of yours done!” she exclaimed, suddenly frightened.
“I really can’t say.” He saw her face, temporized. “Possibly some coal plants have experienced problems. They’ve had to go offline, and the investment crowd has seen that and understood that they won’t ever be good investments again. In a sense you could say that worked.”
“How do you mean worked?”
“The plants stayed shut, and solar’s gotten another investment boost. And new coal plant construction worldwide is down eighty percent since these things started happening.”
“That could be because of the Indians shifting to solar.”
“Yes.”
“Has anyone been hurt or killed?”
“Not on purpose.”
“Has anyone been terrorized?”
“You mean scared away from burning carbon?”
“Yes.”
“I think it might be good if that had happened, don’t you?”
“But how?”
“Well, you know. What really scares people is financial.”
“What really scares people is being fucking kidnapped!”
“Granted. Threat of violence. Although access to their money, if people get cut off from that, they are definitely scared.”
“Fuck. So you’re playing the god game.”
“Excuse me?”
“Playing god. Putting people through experiences they think are real, then seeing what they do.”
“Maybe. But it wouldn’t be just to see what they do. It would be to make them change.”
“So you terrorize them!”
“Well, but terrorism means killing innocent people to scare other innocent people into doing what you want. That’s what it means today, right? It isn’t just boo in the dark.”
“No, I suppose not. But you scare people. You use intimidation.”
“If we had, it might be a good thing. It might be doing the needful. As you were pointing out yourself, I think.”
She nodded. She remembered the young man from the night before. He had scared her, no doubt about it. On purpose. To get her attention. In fact he had had to calm her down a little, maybe, just to get started, so that she would better take in what he had wanted so desperately to convey to her. He had wanted her to pay close attention to what he was saying, so that she wouldn’t forget it. A mammal never forgets a bad scare; and they were mammals. And indeed she would not be forgetting.
“I just had that done to me,” she said. “That man wanted to scare me.”
“It sounds like it.”
“It worked,” she said, looking at him.
He looked back, letting her think that over.
She considered it. She felt like her stomach was going to implode.
“All right,” she said. “Look. I want to know what’s going on. I’ll lie if it comes to that, or take the hit if need be. But I want to know.”
“Do you really?”
“I do. You have to promise me you’ll tell me. Do you promise?”
For a long time he didn’t speak. He looked out at the city, then at the ground. Finally: “All right,” he said. “I’ll tell you what you need to know.”
“Everything!”
“No.”
“Yes!”
“No.” He looked her in the eye. “I can’t tell you everything. Because look: there might be some people who deserve to be killed.”
She stared at him. The sandwich inside her was getting trash-compacted, it felt like; it would be better if she could just throw it up.
Finally she said, “Maybe I can help you to focus this program better than it is now. I know some things now that I didn’t yesterday.”
“I’m truly sorry about that.”
“Don’t be. They’re things I should have known all along.”
“Maybe.”
She thought it over. “Fuck!”
“I know.”
“But … Well, we have to do something. Something more than we’ve been doing.”
“I think maybe so.”
“Because right now we’re losing.”
“It’s a fight. That’s for sure.”
28
The Hebrew tradition speaks of those hidden good people who keep the world from falling apart, the Tzadikim Nistarim, the hidden righteous ones. In some versions they are thirty-six in number, and thus are called the Lamed-Vav Tzadikim, the thirty-six righteous ones. Sometimes this belief is connected with the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, and God’s promise that if he could be shown even fifty good men in these cities (and then ten, and then one) he would spare them from destruction. Other accounts refer the idea to the Talmud and its frequent references to hidden anonymous good actors. The hidden quality of the nistarim is important; they are ordinary people, who emerge and act when needed to save their people, then sink back into anonymity as soon as their task is accomplished. When the stories emphasize that they are thirty-six in number, it is always included in the story that they have been scattered across the Earth by the Jewish diaspora, and have no idea who the others are. Indeed they usually don’t know that they themselves are one of the thirty-six, as they are always exemplars of humility, anavah. So if anyone were to proclaim himself to be one of the Lamed-Vav , this would be proof that actually he was not. The Lamed-Vav are generally too modest to believe they could be one of these special actors. And yet this doesn’t keep them from being effective when the moment comes. They live their lives like everyone else, and then, when the crucial moment comes, they act.
If there are other secret actors influencing human history,
