a short story
I've been working on a lot of things lately. But this isn't one of them. This is something I started yesterday while I was in Mr. Donut with some time to kill, and finished just now.
Uncertainty
It was a chilly morning in January when a banker named Milton allowed his eyes a moment of restful unfocussedness, staring off toward the bland gray sky outside his sixty-third-story office window, and immediately became aware that as he walked back to his car that evening he would slip on a patch of black ice and break his arm. He found this so alarming that he immediately set about convincing himself it was not true.
He succeeded merely in putting it out of his head, so that when he felt with horror the improbable rotation of his un-limber middle-aged body, sensed the incongruous collision between gritty ice and pinstriped wool, he could almost have let out the sigh of one who has just been called out of the waiting room for a very unpleasant dental procedure.
Hereafter, evidence of his prescience began to accumulate, mostly in trivial matters. Once, for instance, he saw a woman carrying a baby in the super market and knew immediately that the child would spill the contents of the bottle it carried (which it did). If he went for a walk, he might be presented with the images of a few strangers he would pass on the way. He often knew the weather.
In all these cases, Milton experienced knowledge in the proper sense, not the sort of everyday hunch over which people exclaim "I knew it!" There seemed to be no common element in what he foresaw except that it came true, and that its coming true was never a surprise. After a month he accepted this completely.
As might be expected, he enjoyed his new gift, and did not tell anyone about it. One evening, after a few drinks, he considered mentioning it to a friend-but suddenly knew he would not. He laughed to himself and shook his head, and forgot about it.
His predictions were almost never about himself or any event over which he had control. He often thought about his broken arm, which was still in its cast. He could have stayed at the office, or invented some pretext to ask a colleague for a lift home, and thereby avoid walking to his own car. But he had not.
Then again, what if the prediction itself had altered his behavior slightly, perhaps indirectly causing him to take a different path to his car-a path that crossed the fateful ice-so that the prophecy had lead to its own fulfillment, as was common (and, he had always thought, silly) in Greek mythology?
He determined that the next chance he had, he would ensure that a prediction failed to come true. The easiest way would be to wait until he "knew" what he himself would do, and then do the opposite.
His first opportunity came that March, on a rainy weekday morning when traffic was particularly bad, and the cup of coffee he'd had with breakfast seemed to be unusually anxious to evacuate his bladder. When the prediction came, he could only chuckle at its deviousness. Half an hour later he pulled into the parking lot, and as he hobbled to the restroom, he rolled his eyes and said out loud, "You win."
In April, after a week in which both his work and social lives had been unusually demanding, Milton decided to treat himself to a quiet dinner alone, but could not decide what he wanted. Then he knew where he would eat-a quiet rooftop bistro he had used to visit with an ex-girlfriend, which he had since forgotten about. He could sit outside-it was a bright half moon, and a few stars were even visible. It was such an appealing thought that he decided to conduct his test another time. There was, after all, plenty of time.
It went on like this for several months; what he foresaw about himself tended to be things he wanted or had to do. He still enjoyed his gift tremendously, but this aspect began to irritate him.
There was one other undesirable facet of his clairvoyance: he was sometimes shown unpleasant things, even death. On one hand, he was often able to stop these things, in which case he predicted not the event itself, but its prevention. Once, by asking a man for the time, Milton kept him from meeting a woman who would otherwise have changed his life dramatically, leading eventually to his suicide (of course the man, a stranger, never knew this). Milton was extremely gratified to be able to help several other people in similar ways. On the other hand, when he saw death or disaster itself, he knew that nothing would be able to prevent it, and this was terribly depressing.
His two complaints-seeing inevitable tragedies, and failing to prove any of his prophecies wrong-both resulted from a simple fact: he was not made aware of contingencies. He was, in fact, exactly like those Greek prophets who saw a partial but certain future, and one in which the prophecy itself might have played a role.
This was difficult for Milton to accept, and he resolved at least not to take it for granted. But when he resolved to go further out of his way to break the next prophecy he could, even at cost to himself, he simply stopped having prophecies he could break. Now almost the only time he ever knew anything about his own future was when he would save the lives of others.
Several years passed in this way. But being largely spared knowledge of his own future, Milton considered that he had reached a sort of truce with his gift, and never once regretted having it. The unhappy affairs of which he knew-death, heartbreak, sickness, financial ruin-weighed on him and made him in some ways a more sober person.
Then, one February, he was invited to attend a conference in London. Shortly after his flight began its long journey through the tranquil sky above the clouds that covered the Atlantic Ocean, he discovered that a woman he had been dating for several months was driving home from a cocktail party. She was just slightly drunk, but drunk enough. She was about to die.
Milton immediately used the in-air phone to call her, but there was no answer. Thirty agonizing hours later, he arrived back in New York. It was impossible to know the exact time of the accident. It had been either just before or just after his call.
After this, he began to know his own future again. He accepted this knowledge, as he predicted he would. The more he accepted it and followed his predictions, the more frequent they became, until it was sometimes difficult to differentiate between these predictions and his ordinary thoughts. His predictions also showed increasingly passive behavior. One day he awoke with the knowledge that he would not leave bed that day, even to call in sick to work.
But for the most part he managed to hold himself together. Both his personal and professional lives suffered, but people assumed this was due to grief over the woman This was seen as a little unbecoming. They had, after all, only been going out only for a few months at the time of the accident. That had been not long after annual reports, hadn't it? It was September already. But then, some people had always been deeply affected by death. Who could criticize Milton for being one of them? Besides, he still did good work.
One clear, cold morning that month he ate breakfast in a cafe. As he ate, he noticed a very attractive woman, significantly younger than he was, who he sometimes saw in his office building. She was sitting directly in his line of sight, and he allowed himself to admire her for a moment-just a moment, nothing lecherous. But she noticed him staring, and embarrassedly he jerked his eyes away from her and put his head down.
But he realized that he would look again at the woman, and this time he would stare at her shamelessly, with no regard whatsoever for her discomfort, until she stood up abruptly and walked out of the cafe. As a direct result (where his prescience was concerned, Milton saw all results as direct), she would be one of those killed when an airplane collided with their building half an hour from now.
There was nothing sexual in the way Milton looked at the woman now. He had never treated the deaths he foresaw as abstractions, but nor had they ever confronted him so directly. He had desired this woman, but she would die. Therefore she would die. Therefore he could not look away. Therefore she would die.
Milton stayed in the cafe until the firefighters evacuated him. Then he went home and climbed to the roof of his apartment block. The deceptively empty blue sky reeled crazily above him. He sat on the low wall surrounding flat roof, but did not look down; the invisible currents and eddies of air comprised by the sky gently pushed his clothing to and fro, and carried from behind him a faint chemical smoke.
He knew he would remain sitting here for a very long time, until that sky sent him down as well. How long would he wait?
Hours passed, and finally the sun began to set. He turned around. His office was gone. "What am I waiting for?" he asked himself. He got down off the wall and returned to his apartment.
Uncertainty
It was a chilly morning in January when a banker named Milton allowed his eyes a moment of restful unfocussedness, staring off toward the bland gray sky outside his sixty-third-story office window, and immediately became aware that as he walked back to his car that evening he would slip on a patch of black ice and break his arm. He found this so alarming that he immediately set about convincing himself it was not true.
He succeeded merely in putting it out of his head, so that when he felt with horror the improbable rotation of his un-limber middle-aged body, sensed the incongruous collision between gritty ice and pinstriped wool, he could almost have let out the sigh of one who has just been called out of the waiting room for a very unpleasant dental procedure.
Hereafter, evidence of his prescience began to accumulate, mostly in trivial matters. Once, for instance, he saw a woman carrying a baby in the super market and knew immediately that the child would spill the contents of the bottle it carried (which it did). If he went for a walk, he might be presented with the images of a few strangers he would pass on the way. He often knew the weather.
In all these cases, Milton experienced knowledge in the proper sense, not the sort of everyday hunch over which people exclaim "I knew it!" There seemed to be no common element in what he foresaw except that it came true, and that its coming true was never a surprise. After a month he accepted this completely.
As might be expected, he enjoyed his new gift, and did not tell anyone about it. One evening, after a few drinks, he considered mentioning it to a friend-but suddenly knew he would not. He laughed to himself and shook his head, and forgot about it.
His predictions were almost never about himself or any event over which he had control. He often thought about his broken arm, which was still in its cast. He could have stayed at the office, or invented some pretext to ask a colleague for a lift home, and thereby avoid walking to his own car. But he had not.
Then again, what if the prediction itself had altered his behavior slightly, perhaps indirectly causing him to take a different path to his car-a path that crossed the fateful ice-so that the prophecy had lead to its own fulfillment, as was common (and, he had always thought, silly) in Greek mythology?
He determined that the next chance he had, he would ensure that a prediction failed to come true. The easiest way would be to wait until he "knew" what he himself would do, and then do the opposite.
His first opportunity came that March, on a rainy weekday morning when traffic was particularly bad, and the cup of coffee he'd had with breakfast seemed to be unusually anxious to evacuate his bladder. When the prediction came, he could only chuckle at its deviousness. Half an hour later he pulled into the parking lot, and as he hobbled to the restroom, he rolled his eyes and said out loud, "You win."
In April, after a week in which both his work and social lives had been unusually demanding, Milton decided to treat himself to a quiet dinner alone, but could not decide what he wanted. Then he knew where he would eat-a quiet rooftop bistro he had used to visit with an ex-girlfriend, which he had since forgotten about. He could sit outside-it was a bright half moon, and a few stars were even visible. It was such an appealing thought that he decided to conduct his test another time. There was, after all, plenty of time.
It went on like this for several months; what he foresaw about himself tended to be things he wanted or had to do. He still enjoyed his gift tremendously, but this aspect began to irritate him.
There was one other undesirable facet of his clairvoyance: he was sometimes shown unpleasant things, even death. On one hand, he was often able to stop these things, in which case he predicted not the event itself, but its prevention. Once, by asking a man for the time, Milton kept him from meeting a woman who would otherwise have changed his life dramatically, leading eventually to his suicide (of course the man, a stranger, never knew this). Milton was extremely gratified to be able to help several other people in similar ways. On the other hand, when he saw death or disaster itself, he knew that nothing would be able to prevent it, and this was terribly depressing.
His two complaints-seeing inevitable tragedies, and failing to prove any of his prophecies wrong-both resulted from a simple fact: he was not made aware of contingencies. He was, in fact, exactly like those Greek prophets who saw a partial but certain future, and one in which the prophecy itself might have played a role.
This was difficult for Milton to accept, and he resolved at least not to take it for granted. But when he resolved to go further out of his way to break the next prophecy he could, even at cost to himself, he simply stopped having prophecies he could break. Now almost the only time he ever knew anything about his own future was when he would save the lives of others.
Several years passed in this way. But being largely spared knowledge of his own future, Milton considered that he had reached a sort of truce with his gift, and never once regretted having it. The unhappy affairs of which he knew-death, heartbreak, sickness, financial ruin-weighed on him and made him in some ways a more sober person.
Then, one February, he was invited to attend a conference in London. Shortly after his flight began its long journey through the tranquil sky above the clouds that covered the Atlantic Ocean, he discovered that a woman he had been dating for several months was driving home from a cocktail party. She was just slightly drunk, but drunk enough. She was about to die.
Milton immediately used the in-air phone to call her, but there was no answer. Thirty agonizing hours later, he arrived back in New York. It was impossible to know the exact time of the accident. It had been either just before or just after his call.
After this, he began to know his own future again. He accepted this knowledge, as he predicted he would. The more he accepted it and followed his predictions, the more frequent they became, until it was sometimes difficult to differentiate between these predictions and his ordinary thoughts. His predictions also showed increasingly passive behavior. One day he awoke with the knowledge that he would not leave bed that day, even to call in sick to work.
But for the most part he managed to hold himself together. Both his personal and professional lives suffered, but people assumed this was due to grief over the woman This was seen as a little unbecoming. They had, after all, only been going out only for a few months at the time of the accident. That had been not long after annual reports, hadn't it? It was September already. But then, some people had always been deeply affected by death. Who could criticize Milton for being one of them? Besides, he still did good work.
One clear, cold morning that month he ate breakfast in a cafe. As he ate, he noticed a very attractive woman, significantly younger than he was, who he sometimes saw in his office building. She was sitting directly in his line of sight, and he allowed himself to admire her for a moment-just a moment, nothing lecherous. But she noticed him staring, and embarrassedly he jerked his eyes away from her and put his head down.
But he realized that he would look again at the woman, and this time he would stare at her shamelessly, with no regard whatsoever for her discomfort, until she stood up abruptly and walked out of the cafe. As a direct result (where his prescience was concerned, Milton saw all results as direct), she would be one of those killed when an airplane collided with their building half an hour from now.
There was nothing sexual in the way Milton looked at the woman now. He had never treated the deaths he foresaw as abstractions, but nor had they ever confronted him so directly. He had desired this woman, but she would die. Therefore she would die. Therefore he could not look away. Therefore she would die.
Milton stayed in the cafe until the firefighters evacuated him. Then he went home and climbed to the roof of his apartment block. The deceptively empty blue sky reeled crazily above him. He sat on the low wall surrounding flat roof, but did not look down; the invisible currents and eddies of air comprised by the sky gently pushed his clothing to and fro, and carried from behind him a faint chemical smoke.
He knew he would remain sitting here for a very long time, until that sky sent him down as well. How long would he wait?
Hours passed, and finally the sun began to set. He turned around. His office was gone. "What am I waiting for?" he asked himself. He got down off the wall and returned to his apartment.