Cell put down his drink. “Say what you have to say.”
Ran put down the joint and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “We’ve known each other a long time, Marcel.”
“True.”
“We’ve been something in each other’s lives.”
“Okay.”
“There was a time I believe you cared for me, and I know there was when I did for you.”
“I’m not disputing anything you’ve said so far.”
“I don’t have the credibility to preach. I’m as flawed a human being as God probably ever made, Marcel, but I still think relationships come with obligations. If I haven’t always been the best at keeping mine, I came down here to turn over a new leaf, and however it may look to anybody else, I’m trying the best way I know how. I have a wife upstairs, Marcel. We’ve been married nineteen years. I have two small children sleeping in their beds. I’m asking you to put yourself in my shoes, Cell.”
“Like you did for me?”
“Didn’t I?” said Ran. “If I didn’t, I’m sorry. I apologize, Marcel. I’m trying now. And sitting here beside you, trying, I think I see someone who’d be desperately unhappy if another man came between him and his family, between him and his wife. I’m torn up about what’s happening, Cell. I’m putting my cards on the table and reaching out to you as an old friend, as another man, as a human being, because in my heart, Cell, I believe that what we have in common is greater than our differences, and I think, in your heart, you know it, too.”
“I don’t need you to tell me what I know.”
“You know,” said Ransom, firm.
“So what if I do?” Cell said. “So what if what we have in common, deep down, is greater than our differences, Ran, but it’s so deep that, on a daily basis, it has no practical effect, whereas the differences are right there on the surface, hot and vexed? The truth is, I didn’t create your problems, the ones you’re mired in now, and I don’t have a solution to a single one. What you really want is for me to put my happiness aside to rescue you from the unhappiness you’ve caused yourself, and why should I do that for you, Ran? Why should I do that to Claire or to myself? It isn’t going to happen, and I’m not going to sit here and let you bait me into getting involved in more of your bad dramas.”
“That’s right,” said Ransom, sitting back. “I understand, Marcel. You want to withdraw from me, to disentwine and disengage and sever the connection and tell yourself, ‘That Ransom Hill, he’s so retrograde, such a redneck fuckup, he’s not really human in the same way I am or Claire is. So, we don’t have to treat him according to that old notion, the Golden Rule’—remember that one?—‘as we’d wish to be treated in his place. It doesn’t matter how much pain we make him feel.’ But isn’t that where your hurt comes from, Cell, that once upon a time someone did that very thing to you and yours?”
“Listen, Ransom—”
“No, you listen to me, Marcel. When I’m finished, you can talk. Once upon a time I screwed you. Tonight, Claire asked for your seventeen-point-five apiece, and I agreed. If that’s what it takes to make it right, so be it. That’s the one specific wrong that I’m aware I ever did you. The year you toured with RHB, you were making seventy-five or eighty grand when that was serious money. You had a nice apartment with a river view. I know you’re carrying some hurt around, but you know, Cell, sitting here, face-to-face and man-to-man, you know in your heart of hearts that if we took the sum of all your days on earth and weighed them in the scales beside the sum of mine, it wouldn’t even be a contest, you’re the happier and more blessed between us two. So what more can I do for you? What more do you want? I think I’ve gone as far as I can go. I’m not threatening you, I’m just laying down my cards. I think we’ve reached the line, Marcel. Here it is, right here.” And Ransom drew it on the sofa now, down the middle.
“Yes, black people were oppressed, and I regret it, Cell,” he said. “If any of my forebears profited from slavery, I don’t see how. But I still wish for your sake, and Shan’s, and her mother’s, and everyone’s that history had come down differently. It didn’t, though. The Indians were oppressed as well. They went through genocide. So did the Jews and Palestinians. A long time ago, in England, my people, the Saxons, got their asses kicked by the Norman French, who used to draw and quarter them for stealing deer to feed their raggedy-ass kids. The Romans enslaved the tribes in ancient Gaul, and the Visigoths sacked Rome and led them out in chains. History is full of insults and injustice, and it’s no comfort to you, but one day being a black man in America won’t mean any more to your descendants than being a Saxon means to me. I think that day is coming soon, Marcel. It may not be in your lifetime. Just like one day they’ll have a cure for my disease, and I won’t live to see it either, Cell, which is why I feel I know, a little bit, what it is to stand inside a black man’s shoes. My particular form of slavery is biochemical, it’s in my brain.”
“It’s not the same,” said Cell.
“Why not?”
“No one did that to you, Ran. No human being or group of human beings exploited you for their self-interest or deprived you of your liberty or caused your suffering through malice.”
“Maybe not,” Ran said, “but, sitting here, staring into your eyes,
