Some weeks later
Kris moved out with the rest of the group into the quad. The sun was still high in the afternoon sky, and it beat down its rays upon the good people of Sacred Heart with disapproval. Kris saw Maggie waiting for him on a bench and went to her. Her SAA meeting started a half-hour after Kris got out of his meeting, so they used the overlap time to connect and meet each other’s peers. Maggie met Kris halfway and kissed him on the cheek. “How’s things?” she asked as they made their way back to the throng.
Kris had a funny electric air about him, like an inventor who had been tinkering in his garage and had just accidentally invented a perpetual motion machine. He rubbed his hipster half-beard in a curious way, and had an unaccounted for pep in his step. “I want you to meet someone,” he said.
“Is this that Kamal guy?”
“ Yeah, Kamal. That’s right.”
“What is it with you and this guy? You can’t seem to get enough of him.”
“I don’t know. He’s just . . . he’s just really compelling to me.”
The two joined another couple and Kris introduced everyone all around. “Everyone, this is my good friend, Maggie. Maggie, this is Kamal Dahak and Tammy.” Kamal was a very thin, olive-skinned guy whose limbs seemed to have no joints when he moved; to Maggie he conjured up the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz. He wore a brown uniform shirt with name-patch and logo on it, identifying the wearer as an employee of the Kensington SPCA, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. He carried a backpack stuffed to capacity with books and journals. Tammy was a pretty-ish Mexican girl, a chola, with big hair and threadbare jenas that were frankly too tight for her shape. She wore a shell-pink camisole with spaghetti straps that showed off her brown shoulders and large rose tattoo. She had a pendant with a saint on it, for protection and prosperity. At the moment, Tammy was excited about something, and wide-eyed. Maggie felt like they had interrupted a magic trick.
Kamal was quick to engage Maggie. “A pleasure, dear,” he said melodramatically as he took her hand. Maggie was used to moving among strong-willed men, and in fact exercising authority of said men. As such, she had acquired an appreciation for a good handshake. And the cold-fish that Kamal offered was not a good handshake. Maggie couldn’t decide if he was a fop or merely a mad-scientist. Tammy chimed in, “Folks call Kamal The Oracle.”
“They used to call me The Oracle back in my drinking days. It was a joke. They would get me hammered on screwdrivers – hammered on screwdrivers, that’s funny! - and I would lose the ability to say anything other than the absolute truth. People would come to me for all sorts of advice: Should I quit my job? Will we make it as a couple? That sort of thing. You’re too needy and he’s emotionally selfish – no! You won’t make it!” Kamal took draw off of his cigarette like he was in a silent movie. “Now I’ve learned to only ever speak the absolute truth even when I’m sober.” Kamal put a hand up and fake-whispered a mock-secret to her, “Just don’t ever ask me if I like your new haircut. I can’t be helped. See, that’s the problem with Truth: people think they want it, but they really don’t. 9 times out of 10, it’s ugly. What people really want is for you to reaffirm whatever particular fiction they subscribe to, to validate their imagined place in the universe. And if you can reaffirm someone’s personal brand of the Cosmic Order, well, it makes ‘em feel just as warm and swaddled as if they were wrapped in their blankie. The problem comes when my story doesn’t match your story, yeah? Ever been to Jerusalem? Don’t get me started.”
Maggie settled on queer mad-scientist. “I see why Kris likes you so much now.”
“Oh, that’s just because he suspects that he might be adrift in an absurd world with no real meaning, and I keep affirming that suspicion.” He exhaled a plume of smoke at the sun, as if to say take that!
Kris sheepishly mumbled an objection to this summary, something about not thinking something-something adrift something-something appreciating meaningful dialogue, mumble mumble.
Tammy chimed in, “Oracle was about to tell our fortunes. Ain’t that right, Oracle?” Tammy smacked gum and smoked at the same time.
“That right, Kamal?” Maggie asked, “You tell fortunes.”
“We-ell,” he said devilishly, “not yours. We just met. But – you know – sure. Why not?”
Tammy was delighted with supernatural mystique of the idea, “Do me first, Kamal. Come on, man.”
“Ok, fine then.” The Oracle laid his hands upon Tammy’s head and closed his eyes, listening - listening to the faint murmur of the spirits, who, if you could divine their secret frequency, would gladly divulge the innermost secrets of a fool-mortal’s heart. Oracle swayed to an unheard rhythm. “Mmmmmm – yes. I see. I understand. I will tell her.” When Oracle opened his eyes, Tammy’s were wider than his own. “What?! Did you see something?” Tammy was half-joking around, half-genuinely freaked, the way we all were when we were younger and stayed up late into the night discussing UFO’s and the Book of Revelations and backward masking on Led Zeppelin albums, when we all played with the idea that only the thinnest of membranes stood between us and cosmic forces far beyond our control.
“I was told of the secret desires of your heart-of-hearts. I was told of a man,” the Oracle prophesied, “a beautiful, wonderful man – a man who will protect you and provide for you. And you are in love with this man. He has dark hair and dark eyes. He is strong, but sometimes violent. And he lives very near you. Your deepest desire, is that you want to marry him have many babies with this man.”
“You’re freakin’ crazy, man!” Tammy laughed, “How did you know that? I’m outta here, you got the devil in you, ese! Te reprendo en el nombre de la Santísima Madre Maria!” Tammy sought refuge in with another clique; Kris could see her gesticulating as she recounted the Oracle’s powers as a medium. “How did you do that?” Kris inquired, “I mean, I know it’s just a trick, but how did you hit her where she lives like that?”
“I used to have this professor,” he explained, “an art professor, this wacky German fella – blond hair, blue eyes, perfect race, and all that. So I would draw something, and it wouldn’t turn out looking anything like the model, and he would say,” Oracle quoted in a thick, caricatured German accent, “Do not imagine! Ob-serve! And that’s all it is really. Observe! ´ We think we know people, but we are only imagining that we do, we bring a lot of baggage into what we think they are, yeah? We have to turn off what we think we are seeing, stereotypes, bad breath, sexual attraction or revulsion, and just see people – things – simply for who or what they are. Yes? This guy is not a hero, he’s just good at numbers and has a nice suit. This chic is not an idiot, she just shops at different stores than me.”
Oracle rummaged through his pack and pulled out a composition book. The journal was exploding with magazine articles, flagged tabs and other papers with notes scrawled on them. “I mean, listen, it ain’t rocket science. The girl is in her sexual prime, her feathers are displayed for a mate, she comes from a big family: The girl wants to make babies, yeah? And not many folks in her circle own a car, so I’m quite that sure the object of her affection is some cute little vato from the block. Ergo: dark hair, dark eyes, handsome – certainly to her at least.”
“Nicely played,” Maggie conceded. He was bonkers, she thought, but she respected his technique. “What about Kris here? What’s his modus operandi?”
“Well, that’s easy:” Kamal laughed a wide open laugh that attracted the attention of some of the bystanders, “He’s in love with you, bo-peep.”
Kris sheepishly mumbled an objection to this summary, something about not thinking something-something in love with Maggie something-something appreciating just good friends, mumble mumble.
Maggie was unflappable, “Well, that’s a problem, because I am gay.”
“Oh gay-schmay,” Kamal said and whisked the notion away with a wave of his cigarette. “There is no ‘gay’ or ‘straight’. Which is to say - gay is just the planet’s way of dealing with overpopulation, yeah?”
Ok, now she was flappable, “I am trying to decide if I am profoundly offended right now or not. Which is to say – I am trying to decide if I kick you in your mouth right now or not.”
“You are not offended,” Kamal decided for her, “Because the statement is not offens-ive. It is a statement of fact, it is a Truth of Nature, and Nature, like Fact, is neither good nor bad. It simply is, like the rain – it falls on the good and the bad, yeah? It is only we humans, with our big, fat brains, and our silly abstract notions of morality who have the gall to hang qualitative descriptions on the basic truisms of the universe. Is it offensive, when a wolf eats a sheep? No. That’s what they do. But we – we project our notions of good and evil on to everything, don’t we? Even colors! Red, in Asian cultures, is the color of chastity, the color for brides. But here we think of red as the color of passion, sexuality. Not so good for daddy’s little daffodil. But the truth is red is just red, that’s all – just a color, no more, no less. Observe! That is all. There is no ‘good’ and ‘bad’, there is only cause and effect. Your sexuality, that you think you hold so dear, is neither good nor bad either, but merely the result of forces far greater than ourselves. We have no choice in the matter.” The Oracle began to clumsily thumb through his notebook. Articles within the crammed pages, seeing their opportunity, tried to escape.
“Okay,” Maggie retorted, “First of all: I am going to give you a free pass right now because you’re Kris’ friend, and you are apparently nuts as well. Secondly: Did we just step in to the Matrix, because you’re sort of blowing my mind right now, like right out my face. What does this have to do with anything? You’re a very interesting person, Kamal, I’ll give you that, but you’ve taken us from a childhood crush to natural selection in something like three moves. And I ain’t buyin’ what you’re sellin’.”
“Well, this is going to really fry your noodle, yeah? It’s all about emergence, my dear. Are you familiar?” Kamal hadn’t had a fresh subject in a while, and he was really getting geared up. “Ok, so where do I begin? – Emergence is like a group mind that arises when a group of similar organisms interact through seemingly totally independent actions!
“Take a flock of birds: they don’t have any general, no one is guiding the flock. But still, they move as one. They fly up from the tree as one, and they land in the tree as one. Or a school of fish, yeah? A school of fish. No general, but they move as a group – more importantly, yes? – they evade predators as a group! If no one fish is directing them, how do they know to get away from the –nom!nom!nom!” Kamal puppet-chomped at an imaginary school of minnows “– from the big hungry shark? They don’t have a shepherd telling them where to go. How do they do that? Group mind! You see?” He pointed to his temples with both index fingers, “Group mind.”
“Riiiight,” Maggie was ready for him to land this bird.
Oracle was a patient, if not excitable instructor, “The thing is, it’s that we – we people, humans – are just as much a part of Group Mind as anything else on this planet. We’re just responding to the subtle programming hard-wired into our dna. Just like the little fishies, they have a couple of key rules programmed into them: stay this far away from the other fishies, if I see a shark -turn hard! If I see another fishy turn hard then I need to turn hard too, because he probably just saw a hungry-hungry shark. We have some basic rules built into us as well, we just don’t know they’re there. But if we observe then we can see their fingerprints, the Big Pattern, yeah? The pattern of a city that grows spontaneously, the pattern of the stock market, the pattern of violent crimes that increase in the hot months.”
Even as he said this, a mischievous bead of sweat tickled its way down the small of Maggie’s back. “So what’s the point, Kamal? Bring it home for me.”
“Oh, there are so many points, mon ami. But for this conversation, let us agree that there are two: Firstly, we are all subject to the undetectable prodding of The Group Mind, which is to say free choice is negligible at best. We are not responsible for our actions any more than the bird that flies with its flock.” Kamal’s brow and neck were beaded with perspiration. He took a French hit from his cigarette, letting the smoke cascade from between his lips and then drinking it in through his nostrils. “Secondly, The Group Mind is without artifice. Which is to say, it is patently a-moral.”
“Alrighty then,” Maggie was happy to wrap this conversation up; her head had been full of puzzle jigs before she met Kamal, and the kaleidoscopic tour through his fractured world certainly didn’t help to add any clarity. “My meeting is about to start, so I need to jump. Kamal, it was a pleasure.”
Kamal bowed deeply from the waist, “Until next time, au chante’.”
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