The Executor Part 30

"You're joking."

"Nope."

"That's absurd."

"Yup."

"You're a grown woman."

"That's never stopped her before. Why are you surprised by this; I've told you how it works."

Woozily snapping my head back and forth. "... I guess."

"Anyway, she was right, wasn't she? I had something to hide, and she found it."

Somewhere in there, I could sense an accusation: I had set her up. And yet here she was, crying on my shoulder. The whole scene was very Yasmina, and far too fraught for me to work through on the spot, what with ninety-eight percent of my brain busy chasing other paranoias. I heard her talking about her parents.

I said, "I'm sure if you explain-"

She made an impatient noise. "Did you hear what I said?"

". . . uhhy-"

"I'm out of the family. Okay? Do you get it now? Do you see?"

"I, I'm sure that isn't true."

"It doesn't matter whether it's true. What matters is that she said it."

Silence.

A scratchy voice called for group three to Boston.

"That's me," she said.

"You'll feel better when you've slept," I said, as much to myself as to her.

She sniffled. "Whatever."

Silence.

"Okay, then," I said. "Get some rest, I'll see you soon."

"Wait ... Joseph. ?"

Silence.

She said, "Can I come stay with you?"

Impossible. I couldn't have her here, not with so much left to clean up. Not when I had policemen dropping round for tea. Not with a b.l.o.o.d.y carpet rolled up and tucked in the corner of my office. No, it was impossible; the only question was how to tell her that without setting her off.

"Please," she said. "I can't be alone."

"Of course," I mumbled.

"Thank you," she said. "Thank you so much."

I offered to meet her at Logan.

"It's too early. I'll take a cab."

"You remember where it is."

"I think so."

"Number forty-nine. It's the last one on the block."

"I remember."

"I'll leave the porch light on."

"Okay," she said. "Thank you."

I said nothing.

"I'm sorry it's so early," she said.

"I'll be awake," I said.

SHE NEVER WAS a light traveler, Yasmina, and I tried not to let on how much my back hurt as I humped up the front porch with her bags. I had reinjured myself the previous evening. Stuck without a car-all the rental agencies in Boston close at nine P.M., along with everything else-I'd gone on foot, a hundred awkward, floppy pounds' worth of library carpet laid across my neck, staggering along through the twenty-degree weather, losing my footing and falling and righting myself and staggering on. I'd managed to make it about two miles, arriving at a vacant lot near the Museum of Science, where I unburdened myself and limped homeward, soaked and freezing and aching from stem to stern, my sole consolation that the late hour had made for few witnesses.

"I'm sorry," Yasmina kept saying.

We stood in the entry hall, wiping our feet.

I told her to stop apologizing.

"I am."

"It's fine."

"I'm such a mess."

"No."

"I'm sorry."

"It's fine."

"I am."

"It's fine, Yasmina."

I settled her bags on the landing. When I turned toward her she was coming toward me, one hand out.

"Did you get in a fight?"

"Ha ha," I said, ducking away. "Please. I tripped."

"It looks like it hurts."

"I'm fine. You must be hungry."

In the kitchen she sat warming her hands over a mug of tea.

"Would you mind closing the window?" she asked.

I complied.

"Thank you.... Aren't you cold with it open?"

"It tends to get stuffy in here."

"I can see my breath," she said.

Actually, I still felt overheated, but I wanted to make her comfortable enough to mask the fact that I was supremely uncomfortable having her there. I offered her toast.

"This is fine, thanks."

"Say the word."

"Thank you."

I started to fix myself breakfast. I wasn't hungry, but it had to be done.

"My mother left me a voicemail," she said.

"And?"

"They're cutting me off."

Silence.

"That's abominable," I said.

"I'm going to have to give up my apartment."

Silence, pregnant.

I smiled sickly, opened my arms in invitation.

"Are you sure?"

"... of course."

"Thank you." Her face greened. "So much."

I pulled her chair close and held her against me, shushing her. For some reason her crying was making me very agitated.

"I mean it. It'd be so easy for you to laugh at me. You're such a good person."

"Shhh."

"I'll pay you rent."

"Don't be ridiculous."

"I mean it. I'll do the cooking. I'll learn to cook."

"Stop it. Please."

"I'll find another place as soon as I can. I'll start looking next week...."

I stroked her head, trying to soothe her, but she kept on talking nonsense, making promises she could never keep, crying all the while. She recalled the cruel things her aunt had said to her. She talked about Pedram: poor, guileless Pedram, whom she never wanted to hurt but who-her sister told her-hadn't eaten in days, he was so depressed. She had humiliated herself, disgraced her family name. I didn't know, couldn't know, what it was like, the way people talked, the rumors, the importance of reputation. n.o.body would ever forget, not after that scene, the threats and imprecations. She would be a laughingstock. She could never go home again. I wanted to be sympathetic, I did. I knew she needed me. But I couldn't bear the sound of her just then, and I would have given anything for her to be quiet. I told her everything would be fine. Still she wept; still she talked. Hush, I said, hush. But she wouldn't, no matter what I said or did, and finally I had to kiss her. Truth be told, I wasn't feeling up to it, but it was the best way-the only way, really-to get her to stop making noise.

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THE FREE-WILL PROBLEM is as old as philosophy itself, the debate around it just as fierce as it was two thousand years ago. More so, perhaps, for as our world grows increasingly known, quantified, mechanized, and constrained-technology gripping us tighter every day, science daily smoothing the contours of reality-people seem to feel correspondingly eager to prove that human beings are the exception to the rule, that we are not preprogrammed but free.

Broadly speaking, two things must be true for us to be free in a meaningful way. We must be the originators of our own actions (i.e., we cannot merely be the next in a series of falling dominos). And the future must be "open" (i.e., we must be able to affect its outcome in a significant way).

It turns out that these conditions are related, and rather difficult to fulfill. They b.u.t.t up, hard, against the concept of determinism, which is (again, broadly speaking) the idea that there can be only one physically possible future. Why this should be so is not simple to explain, but suffice it here to state that the question has taken many forms over the years, and is vexed in the extreme. The obvious contradiction between an omniscient deity and man's freedom to obey or disobey him, for example, has driven many from the Church, or at least to the rear pews. In their modern incarnation, deterministic theories tend to rely on the laws of nature as the determinant-these being a more comfortable topic of conversation than G.o.d for philosophers, who are, as a general rule, an impious bunch.

Why is it important for us to be free? Picture a world in which there is no free will. In such a world, is anyone truly culpable for anything? If I am not the cause of my actions, it is irrational to hold me responsible for their consequences. From that, it would seem to follow that two of our most cherished concepts-right and wrong-are illusory, and that the main thing keeping us from a stupendously ugly existence, a chaotic and violent h.e.l.l on earth, is a flimsy bit of self-delusion.

In response, some declare that we are not in fact free, and ought to abandon the idea entirely. Nietzsche, for example, labels metaphysical free will the province of the "half-educated." But this kind of hard determinism is rare. Most moral philosophers are in fact compatibilists, acknowledging the strength of determinism but unwilling to relinquish the notion that we can be free. They want to eat their cake etc., and their proposed solutions in pursuit of this end run the gamut from hardheaded and rigorous to obscure and positively finger-wiggling. Lots of semantic games get played; lots of tinkering gets done with the meaning of "free," "determined," "choose," "cause." One detects in the compatibilist literature a kind of desperation, borne of the fear that our own powers of reason have condemned us to a world in which morality cannot be stably grounded.

Whether free will is real or incoherent, though, one point is beyond dispute: we feel free. The sensation of acting freely is integral to our consciousness. Fire off every objection in the book and it still won't die. I raise my arm and I feel as though I am the author of this movement. I write these words, and they seem to come from deep within me. By extension, we cannot help but view others as responsible, logic be d.a.m.ned. This is the position of the British philosopher P. F. Strawson. Imputing responsibility, he argues, is as much part of our humanness as walking upright, and we'd be foolish to deny it. Whether we are actually actually free is less important than whether we can step outside the house without getting stabbed to death. Strawson's theory is considered an important one in the history of the free-will debate, revolutionary at the time of its publication, in 1962, and still compellingly practical. It does, however, feel like a bit of an avoidance tactic, in that it dismisses the fundamental ontological question of whether free will exists by saying, "Who cares?" The premise of the entire philosophical inquiry is that such questions bear asking-indeed, demand it. free is less important than whether we can step outside the house without getting stabbed to death. Strawson's theory is considered an important one in the history of the free-will debate, revolutionary at the time of its publication, in 1962, and still compellingly practical. It does, however, feel like a bit of an avoidance tactic, in that it dismisses the fundamental ontological question of whether free will exists by saying, "Who cares?" The premise of the entire philosophical inquiry is that such questions bear asking-indeed, demand it.

It was at this point that my new dissertation took up the reins.

In the three days between my visit from the police and Yasmina's return to Cambridge, I was able to produce thirty pages of material, almost the entire introduction. With progress that rapid, it didn't matter to me that my argument was a bit outmoded. (How could it not be? After all, the first draft dated to 1955-remarkably, seven years before Strawson himself.) What mattered was that I could be done by springtime. I even had a t.i.tle-An A Priori Defense of Ontological Free Will-though I was thinking of shortening it, as it came off a little ungainly in translation from the German.