Casual Choices

by Tom Corbett

  “I could hardly wait,” added Cate. “Did I say anything at that moment? I cannot recall now.”

  “Neither can I except I knew those would be a very long twenty-four hours,” contributed Meena as she giggled a bit. “I had some wonderful imaginings that night.”

  Usha laughed. “Hell, I am having some wonderful fantasies right now. Oops, that was brave.”

  It was Rachel that Josh glanced toward. Her eyes were shut; her lips seemed to tremor ever so slightly. What was she thinking? Josh wondered. This was supposed to be a dull week, a ritual milestone to be endured as one transitioned toward the so-called golden years. But it now was spinning away from anything he could control with his wit. Those around him seemed to be changing as he watched. How did he feel about that? He wasn’t sure. He liked his life for the most part, it had become known and predictable. He could sleepwalk through the days, reflecting an oft-stated insight of his…life was mostly a set of prescribed scripts that demanded little thought and less effort. He glanced in Rachel’s direction again. He could see she was engaged in some internal struggle. He knew what it was; he just could not guess at the resolution. She was no longer the bouncing kid following behind him, lapping up both his wisdom and his BS. Now she was a mature, successful woman perhaps on the cusp of discovering something basic about herself. Somehow, up until now, she had followed him on an ill-considered path. She had cut herself off from life, from others. She had become too self- contained. Did he see a tear in her eye? Maybe neither of them could hide from life anymore.

  Sometime later, they pulled into Whistler. It was that awkward period after the ski season and before the summer tourist mobs showed up in force. The crowds were light.

  “This does looks lovely,” Rachel observed as they walked into the main village square. She had pushed her private struggle that Josh noticed aside and tried to engage with the group.

  Whistler was a lovely destination. It had the boutique shops and upscale restaurants that the well-heeled enjoyed. It was nestled on a niche at the top of the world. Craggy peaks surrounded them while the air was fresh and smelled pure. You could not but feel alive. Still, Josh thought it had grown way too big, with much of the charm he recalled from his initial visits sacrificed to developer’s greed. Now, big chain retail outlets were forcing out the smaller shops. The local establishments were still there, but you needed to know where to look.

  “Cate, do you remember where David’s Tea House is?” When she nodded, Josh went on. “Why don’t you bring the group over there. There are plenty of shops in that area. I’ll wait for Connie here and join you.”

  About twenty minutes later, Josh noticed her pale green Prius pull into the main parking area where they had agreed to meet.

  “What took you so long? I thought you had gotten lost.”

  “No, they wanted to stop and enjoy the scenery, take some pictures.”

  Josh smiled. Just like your average tourists. As they headed off to join the others, Connie maneuvered her way next to Josh and whispered, “We had a fascinating discussion on the way up. They talked a lot about the investigation, the pressures they were under to give you up, and things along those lines. You know, sometimes paranoia is justified because people really are after you. Get them to talk about this.” Then the two rejoined the group.

  As with all groups with varied interests, they decided to meet at a given time and place. Josh asked Peter, Carla, and Morris to join him for lunch. He took them to an Indian restaurant that he knew would not be crowded and where they could spend time talking. It occurred to Josh that all he was eating this week was Indian fare.

  “You know,” Carla said at one point, “there is a real cute blouse I saw on the way over. After we finish, I want to look at it again.”

  There was a pause before the men broke into laughter. “From warrior Valkyrie to purveyor of designer clothes.” Josh smiled.

  “Oh shush, assholes,” she retorted. “You guys don’t look as if you’re going to mount any barricades soon.”

  “I don’t know.” Josh chuckled. “I was going to start the revolution after tea this afternoon. “You fellows with me?” Peter and Morris indicated they were game.

  “Oh, bite me,” Carla responded.

  “Now that’s the Carla I remember.” Then Josh turned serious. “Connie mentioned that you guys were talking about the old days in the car. Okay, let me ask straight out. There are things about what happened when the arrests and trials took place that remained a mystery. The thing is, why didn’t I go to prison? I waited and waited. Nothing happened.”

  There was a long silence, but Josh waited. He needed to know this; he had obsessed for years about this mystery.

  Peter spoke up. “Well, it was a close-run thing. Chuck Olson was never a fan of yours. He was one of those rigid patriots who saw Reds behind every tree. But the more I think on it, Kit very likely was on his case after your romantic disaster with her. His venom toward you seemed to increase exponentially with time. He was always an ambitious prick. Damn, I think I’ve called him a prick so many times I sometimes think that’s his real name,” Favulli smiled at some private bit of humor. “Anyways, you may recall that he and I eventually were on a joint terrorist task force when I joined the bureau right after law school. By then, the war was winding down, and fears of a domestic uprising were on the wane. I think the Vietnam stuff was circling the drain as an issue, people wanted to forget about it, so they put me as the new guy on it. But Mr. Prick was still after you, he kept your name on this list of active persons-of-interest. When I read the files about your group, I understood what character, personal courage, were all about.”

  “Sorry?” Josh was afraid he might stop.

  “Character, Josh!” Peter hesitated as he sorted things out. “I guess no one ever told you. Well, after all this time, you should know something that apparently we all kept a secret.” He took a deep breath. “Olson was after you like a pit bull. But the evidence against you was circumstantial. Most of the hard evidence was gathered after you headed north. Olson thought he was so close. He just needed one person to flip on you to get a warrant and start extradition procedures. Get a couple of friends to flip, and a conviction was a snap. He went through them all. Helen was a good bet, but she was so lawyered up with high-price talent that with her family’s connections, she was in for a sweetheart deal without flipping. Besides, he would still need a second. In any case, she didn’t have much direct knowledge of your, shall we say, crimes against humanity except maybe for that arson bit, and no one knew about that one or it fell through the cracks. You guys weren’t the only wannabe revolutionaries running around so it was sometimes hard to pin the blame on specific individuals for some stuff. Anyways, our vendetta guy moved on to the rest of the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.”

  “Hey,” Morris complained, “I resent that remark even if it is true.”

  Peter went on. “The bottom line, Josh, is that Carla, Mo, and Bob didn’t sell you out. My guess now is that he felt Helen was in the bag but needed that second. He went back to the others several times. He promised lighter sentences during their trials. Even when they were in prison, he would offer promises of early release. All they had to do was give you up. They didn’t.”

  Josh was dumbstruck. He looked at Carla and Mo, neither of whom looked at him directly. “Why, in god’s name why? Think about it, I ran out on you. When crunch time came, I fled. You know I thought you hated me. You know I did. That is why I almost crapped in my pants when I saw you in the audience yesterday.”

  “It is complicated,” Mo said quietly. “As I mentioned, I was conflicted at first. I hated what you did, but I never stopped loving you.”

  “I still can’t…” Josh could not finish the sentence. He could not get over how much Morris had changed. His intensity and fervor were gone. He was quiet, reflective, soft-spoken. He hadn’t decided which Mo he preferred, but he was leaning toward the current version. Mellowness is a good thing later in life. Obsession i
s a vice best enjoyed by the young.

  “Josh, you simply saw reality earlier than we did. We were spiraling downhill, losing all perspective. You’re leaving, if nothing else, slowed us up. If you had been around and endorsed our, what shall I say, adventures, I for one quickly would have been out of control. We were young, we all needed support from the peers we respected. We would feed off one another. Who knows, we probably would have killed people or at least did things that led to such horrific results. I had more passion back then, but you were always the analytical one. Your level head held you back, and that was a blessing. Besides, I owed you. You saved me from those Irish toughs, remember?”

  Carla spoke up. “We all had our reasons. All jokes aside, I was a wild woman back then. I talked like a trucker and, frankly, could be rather out of control in bed. But that wasn’t me. Not really. I acted as I thought a revolutionary should. Oh, my passions against the war and injustice were real enough. They are still there, just more proportional to the way the world works. The thing was, deep down, I liked you. I admired you. I never said it back then—it would have been way too sentimental. But you were a role model for me. I wanted to be like Josh when I grew up. There was no way I would give you up. We, all of us, were one. Even though you were in another country, I knew we were still in your heart. That was my story at the time. Sometimes, in my cell, I wondered, had my doubts. In the end, I kept true. Now I know it was true, you were worth admiring. Besides, Olson was a slimy prick. I probably would not have flipped on Jeffrey Dahmer to help- out that monstrous creep. Talking about Olson, not the cannibal guy.”

  “Over time,” Morris added, “Peter would get in touch and fill us in on your life. It was a comfort to know you were doing well, that you were shaping minds and policies in substantive ways. Of course, even though we were not in touch, each of us decided that we were not going to give our favorite prick the time of day. I agree with my lovely wife on that one.”

  “Hah,” Peter laughed aloud. “I have my favorite Mr. Prick story.”

  “Do tell,” Carla encouraged.

  “He asked me to stay after a meeting one day. By now, things were winding down and he still had not flipped anyone and he was getting desperate. Besides, people were forgetting the old battles, more willing to forgive things. But not Mr. Righteous. He started in on me. ‘Favulli, you are holding out on me. You know what that bastard Connelly was up to back then. Hell, I always thought you might be guilty yourself. I think you’re protecting him. I know you go way back, all of you guys from that Mick neighborhood had one another’s back.’ It didn’t help when I pointed out that Josh and I were from different tribes, that the Micks and the Wops hated one another. He thought all ethnic working-class types looked the same, and he definitely did not like being told he was wrong.”

  “No doubt,” Josh inserted. “He would have been with the Know- Nothings back in the 1850s leading the attack on Irish immigrants.”

  Peter continued. “He was in a lather, rather foaming at the mouth. He accused me of hiding or destroying evidence, of not helping to flip you guys, and of abetting the ultimate miscreant to escape to Canada. I recall his face turning bright red as he built to a crescendo as he screamed that he would bury me, ruin my career, and have me chucked in the pokey. I think that poor guy had anger management issues.”

  “No shit,” Morris said. “How did you respond?”

  “He wanted a confrontation, which is what I would not give him. I yawned in his face and told him that I was a busy man. As I walked out the door, I yelled back that he should get in touch when he had actual evidence of my wrongdoing. Until then, he could stay out of my fucking face. Good thing I did not know about all your misdeeds back then. I might have been conflicted or at least worried. But now our old friend is enjoying the fruits of a long career pursuing phantom threats to our country. He was a paranoid fuck. I believe he has a retirement home in Naples where he can consort with all the other right-wingers and greedy geezers.”

  “I…I…,” Josh didn’t know where to go next.

  “Forget it, okay” Morris insisted. “We were just glad that we all did not suffer for our youthful transgressions. And by the way, your life trajectory has motivated the rest of us. If a pitiful screwup like you could make it, there was hope for all.” Everyone chuckled and the tension evaporated. “You know, we all made big decisions back then without really thinking about the consequences. They were so casual, really. It was remarkable when you think about it. But not the decision about whether to flip on you. Those consequences were pushed right into our faces. Yeah, we knew the costs and it was worth it.”

  Peter summed it up, mostly for himself. “You were a lucky bastard, Josh. I think Olson finally was convincing his colleagues that it was worth nailing your ass and go for extradition. They wanted to get him off their backs, he was such a pain. But Carter set a different tone in his presidency. He was a real Christian…into forgiveness. Besides, people were looking for reconciliation, didn’t want to think about the war anymore. It had become a painful memory. Hell, we got our asses handed to us by a 3rd world country. Priorities had changed. It must have burned Chuck’s ass.”

  Josh rubbed his face with his hands. “I wonder what we have learned from all this. Our actions may have been ill advised, but we were not wrong. What if we faced something similar today, if some maniac got the White House and went off the deep end? Would we act any differently?”

  Morris was the first to respond. “There is a counterfactual I hope to avoid. I’m too old and tired to confront evil again. But I will say one thing. Like you, Josh, I see that struggle between the analytical side and our emotional side. Our analytical superiority enabled us to quickly identify flaws in what was presented to us as a rationale for an essentially insupportable foreign policy. We could connect the dots with lightning speed and easily were able to spot where their causal explanations fell apart. It was infuriating to be told that you were too immature or lacked the capacity to understand complex matters. That pushed me over the edge—my personal vice of youth was excess hubris.”

  Josh noted. “Except, as we acknowledged earlier, we were intellectually superior. I suffer from the impostor syndrome as much as the next man. And sometimes I did wonder if the other side were right, that we were the ones foolishly pursuing false dreams and illusions in the way Don Quixote had. Perhaps we were tilting at windmills. But as I became one of those adults, the person inside rooms making public policy, I came to two conclusions. Yes, the world is more complex on the inside than from the outside. And more importantly, we were right—we were goddamn smart. Nam was a colossal mistake. Apartheid was an unacceptable evil. A society where women enjoyed equal opportunity and rights is a stronger society. And the list goes on. Our fault was not being ambitious enough. The war was a horrific side show.”

  “What strikes me,” Carla added, “is that we are missing one critical dimension. Analytics and emotions are important, but so is one’s moral compass. It is more like a trinity of inputs into our calculations.”

  “A bit like the ego, id, and superego,” Peter added.

  “Yes, good analogy. For a G-man, your kinda smart,” enthused Carla with a smile. “Ego can be analytics, id is emotion, and superego is the moral compass. It strikes me that individuals have different combinations of these factors. Evangelicals probably have high, but rigid moral compasses, but they are low on analytics. Tea party types are like evangelicals but have a very high emotional content. So, they would be high on a rigid but highly skewed moral system combined with a pathetic ability to connect the dots and easily swayed by emotional arguments. We would have to play with this, but it might work.”

  “I miss these discussions, how I miss them,” Peter complained. “At the bureau, we talked about sports and sex until they got too many damn female agents. Then all the guys would take long potty breaks instead.”

  “Face it, G-man,” Morris said. “You would never be able to keep up with us. You would lose too much time recover
ing from all the beatings Carla gave you for being such a sexist pig.” Peter smiled as he gave Morris the finger, but his old friend had already moved on to his next point. “One more thing disappointed me from those days. The kids who became involved right behind us mouthed the words and sentiments, but they did not understand. It was like someone handed them a script…off the pigs and power to the people.”

  “The first thing the people would have done is to throw their sorry asses in jail,” Josh added.

  Morris agreed. “No shit. The point is that these kids did not go through the hard process of figuring things on their own. Everyone must figure things out for themselves. You cannot get by just borrowing slogans from those who have gone before you.”

  Everyone assented.

  Josh then spoke up. “One thing is clear to me. What has been going on in the US disgusts me. You heard my spiel of growing inequality and declining opportunity. You would think that people would be outraged. Some are, of course. They are, however, the educated elite who, for the most part, are doing rather well. Those suffering the most are the most likely to remain complacent. They vote against their self-interests all the time. Reason is the part of the human experience to which Obama appeals. He is high on analytics, but the important thing is that people like him on an intuitive, emotional level. In short, he has cross-over appeal.”

  Josh paused to consider his next point. “Obama has a personal appeal, but maybe not the kind of broader, ideological message that will fire up progressives. He suggests it, but his instincts are centrist. On that broader level, liberals respond to reason and rationality. They like science and numbers. They believe that evidence-based policy making can make the world just a little better. But conservatives appeal to the emotional level. They tell people what they should fear and whom to blame. They focus on primal emotions, the id if you will, and never get beyond palatable nostrums that any thinking person should reject out of hand. Take health care financing for example. We have by far the most expensive system in the world yet our health outcomes are average at best compared to our peer countries. And how does the American electorate deal with this outrage? They punish the very people who try to help them. Look at what happened to the Dems in Congress in 1994 and what they face this fall. They are going to lose Congress again, mark my words. Obamacare is going to torpedo the Dems in 2010.”