Midway: Chapter 15

  It’s not fair.  I didn’t ask for this.  I fought so hard against if for so long…  I want to stop but I can’t help myself.  Oh god if you believe nothing else believe I would stop if I could.  I’m no fool, I know what I’m doing to these boys, I can see it in their eyes!  But damn me seeing that is part of why I do it…  It’s about control, about power… I didn’t always understand that, but I do now… 

  I hate myself.  I hate what I do, if I had one iota of courage or integrity I would have killed myself long ago, I would have put myself out of their misery.  But I don’t.  I can’t… I’m as unable to do that as I am to stop.

  How can there be two sides to me?  How can there be a part of me that finds such awful terrible joy in what I do, and simultaneously a part of me that loathes myself to the very core of my being not just for the terrible things I do, but for taking such terrible pleasure in it…

  Why couldn’t just one of them have seen through my threats and told on me…

  Why must I have gotten away with it for so long…

  It’s just not fair…

   

  Within Maharet’s quarters, the sound of the door tone pierced the silence.  It was late at night and she was in her nightgown, sitting in her living room drinking tea while taking a brief break from reading.  She was in the middle of a novel recommended to her by her daughter Dhika, something written over a hundred and fifty years ago on Earth.  It was the book ‘Green Mars’ by Kim Stanley Robinson, which she was enjoying so far and could see why her daughter liked it so much.  It was part of a trilogy about the colonization, settlement, and terraforming of Mars.  Dhika said that reading it lighted her imagination about what it might be like for their descendants arriving on Haven having to establish a toehold on an alien world.  Beyond this though, the books gave a rich description of the planet Mars itself, a world for which all they had were descriptions and representations.  Much like Earth…

  It was several hours after the fateful transmission party.  After so much initial confusion and dismay over the transmission which never came, the leaders of their community worked at smoothing over the panic and eventually got everyone to go home unsatisfied.  This took as much effort as any of them had to devote to the issue for the night.  They left Gamma telescope pointed at Earth overnight at least, in case the transmission came late.   It was dangerous to leave any of them exposed for long periods of time, but there was a collective sense that the transmission would naturally only come immediately after they retracted the last telescope.  Maharet herself was now trying to indulge in a little escapism before facing the true and ultimate consequences of their current situation in the morning.  Only one person would show up at her door at this hour unannounced, and especially on a night like tonight.

  “Come in Johannes,” she called out as she activated access to her door with a thought.  The door opened, and there was Johannes, looking positively awful.  He appeared thoroughly drained, both physically and emotionally, as though he had just run a marathon while simultaneously taking the hardest examination ever, and having his heart broken by the love of his life, and all at the same time.  Maharet got up to greet him and when she saw the state he was in she rushed over, her long bone white hair trailing behind her like a wraith.

  “I’m sorry Mahr… I know it was… what a stupid idea… thanks for stopping us…”  He was drunk.   Not incoherently so, but noticeably slurring his words.

  “Oh Joh, you stink!”  Maharet chuckled, now amused by his state, having realized that it was self-inflicted and that he’d be fine.  “Were you drinking that terrible moonshine again?”

  “Well what the hell else am I supposed to drink…”  Johannes drank, but rarely.  When he did, he tended to drink too much, which is why it was not very common.  He was smart enough to view one night of drinking as a multi-day project requiring a couple days after the fact to recover from it, at least in his case.

  “Come in and sit down, my poor dear… now what exactly are you apologizing for?”

  “What??  You really have to ask?  For that… stupid idea Ana and I had to show those images!   Of course we should have just done interviews…  I’ve always been drawn to the big dramatic spectacle though…”   He flailed his arms in a grandiose manner to accentuate ‘big’ and ‘dramatic.’

  Maharet gave a sympathetic half smile and reassured him in her own way, “Yes dear, it was an incredibly stupid idea… but it never actually happened so no harm was done.  I stopped you in time!”  She jested as she gave him a soft push.  He almost fell over as a result, so she led him over to the couch in her living room and he promptly fell down onto it.  She then sat down beside him.

  “No harm…” Johannes muttered, losing himself in his thoughts.  “You know… I’ve been reading his journal.”

  “That must be awful,” Maharet offered, knowing whose journal he was referring to.

  “Yeah well, yeah but not how… not in the way you might think.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, curious and a little concerned for him.

  “I feel sorry for him… Isn’t that crazy?” he asked, looking at her.   “Isn’t that just like, totally bat shit fucking crazy??”  He gestured his exasperation with his hands.

  “Tell me why,” she encouraged.   She hadn’t expected this from him.

  “Well he did awful, terrible… unspeakable things, but… but he didn’t choose to have the compulsions which drove him to it.  He himself was tortured by it Mahr… I, I didn’t expect that.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked again.

  “Well… it’s pretty clear from his journals that he realized pretty early on that he had these perverse urge like… like, late teens early twenties early on.  But he only started acting on them in his early fifties!  Mahr he fought against those urges for almost thirty fucking years, thirty years!  It makes me wonder how many other people could have held out even that long…

  “Like I said… there’s no excusing what he did of course, but… well like I said, he never chose to have those urges in the first place.  I’m horrified to think that… that it could have just as easily have been me born that way… through no fault of my own, or anybody else’s fault for that matter, just… whoops!   Shit happens!”

  “Makes you wonder how responsible any of us are… for anything we do, doesn’t it?”  Maharet suggested, contemplating what Johannes was trying to express.

  “Exactly.  I mean, doesn’t he deserve exactly as much credit for the thirty years he fought against it as he does blamefor the twenty he couldn’t fight it anymore?”

  “Either all of the credit and all of the blame… or none of either,” Maharet suggested.

  “That’s what I mean…  That’s what I’m saying,” Johannes confirmed.  “I didn’t expect this when I started looking into it… nobody’s guilty.  Nobody’s innocent.  …everyone’s guilty and everyone’s innocent.  It’s all so damned confusing…”

  “I can only imagine…”

  “You saw those images right?”

  “Yes I did.”

  “How, I mean, what…”  He wasn’t entirely sure what he was trying to express, but he eventually found his mental footing again.  “Don’t tell anybody but… it really scares me that someone onboard could do that.  Not just do that… but then to just go on with their life as though… as though everything was normal!”

  “It shouldn’t be that hard for you to understand, should it?   I mean, you’re a forensic psychologist right?  You should be familiar with that kind of stuff, shouldn’t you?”

  “Familiar sure… but it’s one thing to read about this stuff on Earth when it’s all so distant and removed, all so… academic.  It’s something else altogether to have actually smelled the blood… and to know I may walk past this person who did such a thing every single day…”  Johannes sighed heavily.  “You know, Mahr… when I first saw that scene I wondered, how could somebody be that evil?”

  “And now?” she asked, sitting up somewhat straighter to get a little more invested in the conversation.

  “And now… well, now nothing seems so black and white anymore.”

  “Well, you know as well as I do the perils of binary thinking, of framing things in black and white, as good and evil… it’s just intellectual laziness.”

  “Yeah, but it’s damn satisfying if you can get away with it… it makes the universe such a neat and tidy place doesn’t it?” he said with exasperation.

  “But you of all people should know better, I mean… you’ve studied this kind of stuff right?”

  “It’s one thing to know on an intellectual level that ‘evil’ is just a lazy shorthand for extreme human behaviour that is abhorrent to the overwhelming majority.  I know this in a… detached sense, that nobody is evil or good and that everybody just acts according to their interests…”

  “But…”

  “But it’s something else entirely to actually incorporate that understanding into my experience of the world, to not see evil with my instinct driven human brain when I remember the murder scene or think about the abuse which precipitated it!”

  “Well the thing is Johannes, for there to be an ‘evil’ in the abstract, there’d have to be a ‘good’ in the abstract, some sort of absolute good, a universal moral truth, and there isn’t any such thing.”

  “I thought there was…” he muttered sullenly, and in a low voice.

  “Oh?” 

  “The mission… I used to think it represented absolute good, the totality of what is good about humanity and a rejection of everything bad about it…”

  “I can understand that.”

  “You’ve never felt that way?” he asked.

  “About the mission?   Somewhat… but not in any… absolute sense, no.”

  “And, I thought murder was certainly an absolute evil!  How could that not be the case??”

  “You really want an answer?” she inquired.

  “I think I do, please…” he answered.

  “Well the truth is… the rightness or wrongness of killing is entirely dependent on who’s doing the killing and… well, who’s getting killed.”

  “Okay, I’m going to need you to explain that statement.  I can feel its truth on some level but at this point I think I really need to understand it.”

  “Well,” she sighed, collecting her thoughts, “a revulsion against murder in general is a premise which is written into our evolved psychology because we’re communal animals, and wanton murder is anti-social at best.  It’s just a premise though, a starting position from which we can then rationalize the killing we want to do.  Killing is wrong, unless someone is about to kill you and the only way to stay alive is to kill them first, or unless somebody has something you need to survive or just really really want, and you can’t get it any other way.   Killing is wrong unless you are enraged, and just really need to kill somebody in order to satisfy your more primitive urges, or unless that guy from the next tribe killed your father and your culture demands revenge.”

  “Or unless he repeatedly raped you as a child and you just can’t take the injustice of his continued existence anymore…”

  Maharet didn’t know how to respond to that.  It was in line with her point, but she hadn’t intended for the conversation to lead to such a literal example.  “What ‘unless’’ a person uses,” she continued, trying to keep the conversation more abstract than literal, “is subjective to their experience and the culture they come from.   All morality works that way, with premises coming from our emotional moral intuition, and with exceptions to those general rules overlaid on top of them, fabricated by our intellect in order to explain away our behaviour to ourselves after the fact.”

  “I… believe, that killing that man was wrong, whatever the motive, whatever the justification.  And yet… it feels so justified on some level,” Johannes admitted.

  “And that right there is why the law codes of Earth were always so convoluted; they started from simple premises, and then over the centuries accumulated ever more exceptions to those premises without ever removing any.

  “Our moral decision making is based on a hierarchy of concern,” Maharet continued, “the visceral, the emotional, the rational…  We have visceral autonomic reactions rooted in the ancient reptilian part of our brains which is entirely self-concerned with our immediate needs like food, water, sex… fight or flight…  Then on top of that we have our more recent mammalian brain which is where our emotions are seated and centred.  This allows for an emotional dimension to those visceral reactions and allows for moderators like guilt about sex, or shame about fleeing, or revulsion about your crime scene.  This is the level in which our morality is situated.

  “It’s positive stuff too though, like when you eat ice cream and are delighted.  You see your grandchildren playing and you are satisfied.   These are feelings, not thoughts.  It’s the top layer, our neocortex, the part of our brain that is distinctly human, which allows us to have rational thought about those emotional reactions, which tries to infer a pattern out of the chaos of our feelings.  What is uniquely human is our ability to simulate the future, and to project the consequences of choices we make in the present, and override the emotional decision making process if we choose to… and if we’re able to.  It allows us to project how we will feel in the future about the choices we make in the present, and whether or not we will be able to live with ourselves and the choices we make, or if we’ll condemn ourselves to guilt and self-loathing.”

  “Mahr…”

  “Yes Joh?”

  “I can’t keep my eyes open… can I stay with you tonight?”  Johannes’ head was in Maharet’s lap and she’d been idly stroking his hair as she got lost in her train of thought, staring off into space through her suite window in the floor.

  “Of course, my dear.  Come, I’ll take you to bed.”  She stood, and held out her arms to pull him up off of the couch.  He grabbed her arms, and together they managed to get him onto his feet.  He put his arm around her shoulder and with her arm around his waist, together they made their way into her bedroom, and down onto her bed.  They laid down together, very close in both body and spirit.

  Maharet’s husband had died several years ago due to a serendipitous blood clot in his brain stem; he was dead within minutes.  Before Johannes’ wife’s death, the two couples had been a close foursome of friends, and in the last two years since it had been just Johannes and Maharet, they had become even closer over their mutual losses, but there was a line neither of them was ever comfortable crossing.  In both of their minds, they still belonged to their deceased spouses.

  She lay on her back looking up at the ceiling and stroking his hair again.  She loved the feeling of hair between her fingers, whether her own, Johannes’, or Dhika’s when she was young and sat in her lap… or her late husband’s.  Maharet’s thoughts were lost in the nether world of moral philosophy, where part of her quaternary education had been spent.  With his arms wrapped around her, and the sound of his voice muffled by having buried his face into her, Johannes softly muttered with a last ounce of waking defiance, “why did she do it, Mahr…  I never understood it…  With everything that’s going on now, it’s my every other thought again…  Why did she kill herself?  What could have possibly made her feel…”

  “I don’t know Johannes,” she softly replied, “I wish I knew and that I could tell you…  I wish we could have understood and helped her…  We’re not going to figure it out tonight though, my dear.  Right now it’s just time to go to sleep.”  And so he did.  And not too long after that, so did she.