“I really am asking about your motivation,” she says. “Use that brain nobody values. Why?”
In fact, it’s a good question. He remembers there were times in the past when she helped him to see something, often right under his nose. He looks around the cabin. He’s still embarrassed, despite her assurances. He looks some more. He tries merely to see. A bunch of fun-loving primates traveling to see other primates in their in-group. So they can go together to watch sublimated in-group/out-group warfare on a field, or spend time enjoying virtual worlds with endings manipulated in order to give them an illusory but pleasing sense of justice and order. He looks out the window at the beautiful bright world, the only world for life. He looks out at apocalyptic climate change. The Mediocrity Principle dictates that it’s highly unlikely, given the span of time humans have existed on the planet, that he would just happen to live during the years when humans trigger a mass extinction event. Yet it seems increasingly probable.
His motivation? An actor’s term. He remembers Saskia told him once about an acting workshop that involved repeating a phrase over and over until you lulled yourself out of rational thought and opened yourself up to instinctive feeling. “The teacher,” she reported, “was always saying to the students, ‘Get out of your head,’ and I thought of you. You would be terrible at it.”
Maybe he says it because he’s sleep-deprived. He says it to his knees, which he only now notices are uncomfortable, jammed against the back of the seat in front of him. “I guess . . . I guess I’ve wondered a little bit, all these years, why you ended our relationship.”
She doesn’t say anything.
“I’m not blaming you. I’ve just wondered from time to time what the reasons were.”
More silence. He doesn’t look at her.
He plows on. “I wonder sometimes whether it was a mistake that we didn’t try harder to understand each other. Something my parents never did.” Now he gives her a longer time to respond. But she still says nothing. “I realize it’s ridiculous that I feel this way, since we were hardly together in the first place. But you asked.”
Finally, she says, “I’m sorry, I need to go to the bathroom again.”
“Right.” He lets her up. He waits for her in the aisle, but then the cart comes back through, this time collecting Styrofoam cups, so he returns to his seat. He shouldn’t have spoken. Another social occasion mishandled.
She returns. They perform the awkward shuffle so that she can sit. “I know you don’t watch a lot of movies,” she says, “but by any chance have you seen Serendipity?”
“No.”
“It’s your standard rom-com. The male lead, played by John Cusack, has the usual rom-com bro, who he can go drink beer with and trade funny or rueful lines about women and life. But the unusual thing about Serendipity is that the bro, played by Jeremy Piven, majored in Stoic philosophy in college, so he’s always quoting Epictetus to Cusack. It’s actually a brilliant idea, because a rom-com, until the end, is mainly about disappointment and longing and obstacles so severe they seem like malign Fate. You know, ‘the course of true love never did run smooth,’ and so on. What I’m saying is,” and here she puts her hand on Mark’s, “you need a friend like that. Not just anyone to talk to, but someone versed in the Stoics. It’s actually occurred to me before that you might like Epictetus. He’s not doing that head-banging epistemological stuff, he’s concerned with ethics and happiness, very down-to-earth and usable.”
“I could just read Epictetus,” Mark says. “I don’t need a friend to quote him to me.”
“No, you need a friend.”
Mark doesn’t say anything.
“And you also need Epictetus. There’s even a scene in Serendipity that takes place on a plane, I can’t remember where it is in the plot, but Cusack is quixotically flying somewhere to search for his fated mate, and he’s having doubts, so the quote Piven gives him is, ‘If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.’”
Mark finally looks at her. She took her hand away a while ago. “How do you remember that?”
“Like I said, I’m an actor. I’ve also been rereading Epictetus lately. You can read the whole Handbook in an hour, it’s like twenty-five pages.”
“Okay.” Mark feels deflated. What did he expect? He also feels a welter of things he can’t process right now. He also can’t think of anything to say. Which is probably best. This is why he hates talking to people. (He’s dimly aware that it’s not a good sign that he hates talking to people.) He remembers something his mother used to say, when his father tried to explain himself: “You’ve already done enough damage.” He retrieves his book from the seat pocket in front of him. “I think I’ll read this for a while,” he says.
Saskia gets out her own book. It’s almost as unwieldy as his. “Lucky Per,” she says, showing it to him. “Great Danish novel, terrible translation. We’ll be a couple of weirdos, reading in the last row.”
Mark doesn’t answer. He tries to concentrate, can’t, pretends. Half an hour later, the plane begins its descent toward Copenhagen. The baby, which he still can’t see, starts to cry.
Sunday, February 21, 2016
She didn’t know ferries came this small. There would be just enough room for one car, if she and the other passenger jumped overboard. Thirty-five seconds after the scheduled time of 3:00 p.m. it pulls away from the quaint half-timbered town and throbs down the channel toward open water. The motor hums an 80-herz E. Temperature in the upper 30s, a cloudy sky with a crawling blob of blue far to the south. She’ll reach the island by four. The Danish flag on the halyard snaps and flutters in totally convincing fashion.
She remembers
