The skeptic countered, “Luck is bound to turn up from time to time, and its appearance is bound to be noticed and rouse discussion.”
“Time to time is to put it mildly,” mused the other. “What turns up at the dinner table as often as rapacious chaos is uncanny luck. Yes, surviving a close scrape is dramatic when it occurs, and so it gets the lion’s share of attention, while the myriad bit players—any one of which may be a deal breaker—are too numerous to count in taking full measure of any bottleneck, its hazard, and our unlikely gamble. It’s not always pestilence and rocks tumbling from the sky, but impediments and mundanities of such fine gradation that they dwell in depths unreachable to either anticipatory reason or imagination. To use your language: It is the stuff that gets left out.”
“Perhaps I am too much a cynic in being unimpressed,” admitted the traveler.
Redolfo, swaying under the stiff pleats of his cape, took on the tone of a lecturer. “The cynic, I find, perpetually leaves out the less-than-cynical assessment of his own talents to denigrate and devalue everything else. It is more than blinkeredness that leads him to it: It is pride that demands he be right rather than thorough.”
“My view is more realist than true cynicism, I believe, although I cannot vouch for its thoroughness. However, can’t you see where I’m coming from? Paranoids have a deep appreciation for the uncanny, as well. They see design—personality—behind everything, be it a mislaid coat, or a coffee ring on a napkin. They take it all too personally.”
The man bracketed his larger point. “I cannot deny these criticisms. And yet the difference between a paranoid and, let us say, a brilliant detective, is that the latter man’s instincts produce useful results. It is a different application of the same skill set: A surgical scalpel in one man’s hands becomes a means to open junk mail for the other.”
“The ‘brilliant detective’ is more myth than fact,” argued the traveler. “Sherlock Holmes was a detective of the first rank, yet he was not made a genius by irreducible intelligence but by the conspired luck given him by his creator Arthur Conan Doyle to always be correct in his guesses.”
Redolfo agreed. “Being a painter, I am certain you appreciate the effect. Unseen, you apply patient layers of drab color in your lonely studio to get to those few brushstrokes of saturated hue that create your magical moment. It is not chance that it happens this way. Sherlock Holmes bemoaned how people dismissed his clever deductions once he explained his methodical process of arriving at them, and so by keeping others in the dark, he enhanced his reputation. By withholding a critical piece of information from the completed story, one is won over by the effect when it is finally presented. Good showmanship demands it.”
“You admit it is smoke and mirrors?”
The hypnotist rejected this characterization. “The genius of the storyteller, like the painter, is not simply completing an obvious picture by offering up its last piece. The genius is to choose the right moment and placement.”
“You see God resorting to trickery to impress people?”
“One should imagine God to be at least as clever a storyteller as Arthur Conan Doyle in holding back information.”
The skeptic leaned away, sizing up this proclamation. “If God is a magician seeking to exploit our lack of knowledge, doesn’t that portray Him as underhanded and manipulative? Are these behaviors in which God should be encouraged?”
“Being omniscient may be God’s best leverage in a world ruled by particle physics,” assessed the gentleman. “A magician does not violate the Laws of Nature. His genius is to confound expectation about them.”
“Your God is in danger of being so subtle that He is apt to be immaterial,” joked the other. “God would do better for Himself if He was out in the open. He would earn more respect if He played to our logic and not our gullible emotions.”
“Logic is indispensable,” conceded the hypnotist, “but it is emotion, for better or worse, that seeks meaning. So is emotion the defect and logic the perfection? Is it reason, or emotion, that marvels?”
“God shouldn’t be a showman on the sidewalk with conjuring tricks. It seems unbefitting.”
“What do you imagine His Occupation to be if not an artful trickster?”
The traveler raised an eyebrow like a casting reel. “Sly trickster is the role of the Devil. God should be more like Zeus, with unequivocal thunderbolts.”
The gentleman smiled dolefully. “‘O, it is excellent to have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.’”
“Are you quoting Sherlock Holmes?”
“Shakespeare.”
The patron gave no rejoinder.
The tuxedoed gentleman reigned in his gestures and speech proportionally, concentrating their effect. “Out of this swirling soup of differential equations, one composes summaries such as one finds in tidily edited plots, so that we may become immortal, for a moment, in being swept along by an enlarged idea:
Let us say one day an amethyst paperweight falls from a green lacquered table to strike your foot, and then, at a different place and time, the same thing happens. The coincidence is far stranger when the intimacy implied in it is considered: Only you, having this previous experience, would notice this: Only you would attach meaning. It is as if the structure-seeking mind and the value-positing heart collude in piecing together two events across a span of time, where there is no reason to remember the first set of obscure details in anticipation of experiencing a second occurrence of them. It is as if our unconscious brain keeps notes on crucial details it later connects at crucial junctures in our lives, even where we have no compelling reason to squirrel away some random details and not others.
Until that coincidence, you are convinced that life has no plot, and then, in supposing it, you are left to question its design on you. Every coincidence is demanded, and reality itself becomes a constellation of necessary coincidences. It is the genius of God—where in being removed from space, time, and even causality—to comprehend the placement of every consequence within a symphony of consequences.”
The speechifying impressed the listener, but as an audience he had no great commitment to playing Devil’s advocate.
The performer, breaking over the silent moment, affected the cadence of a carnival barker in asking, “Are you happy, sir?”
(With no reply being supplied, one was formulated.)
“When one is happy, one does not look for design where one lives in its residue. Adam sought design in The Tree of Knowledge, and found a serpent he could never release for fear it would bite him.”
The traveler fished around for a better clock and the pretense of a pressing matter, but the Great Redolfo spared him further inconvenience. He reached into his vest pocket to remove a slip of paper. “I am in the habit of handing out free tickets before a performance,” he explained. “If coincidence is the architect in our meeting, then it has placed you early in my path to receive one.”
The recipient looked over the offering suspiciously. “Why did you say, earlier in our discussion, that I sought forgiveness?”
The dark showman gently waved his wand. “That is a trick of my trade,” he confessed, “but I am no god.”
Just then, one of the costumed demons from the Krampus parade passed along the twilit sidewalk. He slowed and gestured with intimidation at the two men seen through the plate glass window. His horns resembled arteries stitched into his knurled brow, and his stare, plainly visible beneath the mask, was directed at the plainly dressed artist.
The object of the stare thought the threat infelicitous and misplaced. “Such antics are meant to frighten children,” he muttered.
Redolfo raised his hand with a soft laugh and the horned man-beast crept away.
“Do you know that fellow?” inquired the traveler.
The hypnotist, shrugging, said, “He is an actor, although I speak only broadly. He is someone of no personal acquaintance.”
The unsolicited scowl, though removed from the window, continued to disturb.
By now the gentleman’s reactions had disappeared behind his cloak. He turned toward the door and slipped on a pair of powder white gloves. “As for your visual difficulty,” he entered sympathetically, “vis medicatrix naturae.”
A bow sent him on his way, and he was too quickly another shadow on the darkening street.
The traveler did not know what to make of the unsolicited conversation, yet was ready to put it out of his mind. He could not leave the cafe before visiting the restroom, where a splash of water might aid in his reset.
An exhaust fan did not immediately intrude on his plan, but an occasional oscillation in its whirling blades changed its pitch peculiarly, such that, after a splash or two at the tap, the listener glanced in its direction over the commode. The plastic vent cover over the fan was noteworthy in that someone had taken an ink pen and scratched words into it. These read:
If it could be proved to you, what difference would it make?
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.