The Pandora Effect

by Olivia Darnell

  “That would be an admirable accomplishment,” he said. “I believe that any man would be very lucky to have an attentive wife. Especially a beautiful one. I’m surprised that you are not married already.”

  “It’s not because I don’t want to be.” She looked down at the desk top. “But my fiancée is in no hurry to make the commitment. But, don’t get me wrong. He loves me, of course. It’s just that his mother... well, we don’t get along. I shouldn’t keep you. I believe we are already in hot water. The man at the store? The one in the blue suit? That was my fiancée, Sam Morris.”

  “Oh, I see,” he said as if surprised by the news. “Would he be Samuel Jr., Mildred Morris’ son?”

  “Yes,” she said shortly.

  “What a lovely pair of spies they made,” he laughed.

  “You aren’t worried?” She asked in disbelief.

  “Worried? About what?” He asked. “I should think they both have some explaining to do, don’t you?”

  Maureen actually laughed too. He was perfectly right.

  Louis Parks sat at the gleaming mahogany table in the Aligers dining room with her cell phone lying in front of him. He was waiting for Bobby Greene to return his phone call.

  Reggie sat on the carpet playing with a rubbery, wiggly ball. Apparently the koosh ball he remembered Joanne Parker saying she had sold to Mr. Aliger. A large Siamese cat chased the ball when he rolled it and he giggled and laughed as he chased the cat and the ball around the floor.

  Angelica sat across the table from him sipping her coffee, watching him from her dark eyes. He could barely think.

  “Ahem,” he cleared his throat and picked up his coffee cup. It was the best coffee he’d ever had. “Is something on your mind, Mrs. Aliger?” He asked abruptly and almost spilled the coffee in shock at his own words.

  “Yes, a great many things are on my mind,” she said levelly. “But would you allow me to ask you something personal?”

  Louis almost choked on the coffee again, but managed to catch himself.

  “Sure, go ahead.” He felt something was wrong, as if she were about to accuse him of something terrible.

  “What were you and Julia doing last night?” She asked.

  “When?!” He sputtered guiltily.

  “After you left us,” she said. “You were in the street.”

  Louis’ face turned a deep shade of red.

  “Were you... dancing in the moonlight?” She continued.

  Busted! “Yeah,” he admitted slowly.

  “Are you angry with me for asking?” She frowned. “Your face is red.”

  “No, I’m not mad.” He looked up at the ceiling. “I guess I’m embarrassed. It was kind of silly, but Julia was... well, she hasn’t been herself lately and I didn’t want to disappoint her.”

  “Embarrassed. I see,” she said and nodded. “It’s very hard to tell the difference. So you really didn’t want anyone to see you?”

  “Not really,” he shook his head and tried some more of the coffee. “We used to do that when we were kids. It was just the moon, I guess.”

  “The moon made you dance in the street?” She raised both eyebrows.

  “Not the moon,” he said and shifted uncomfortably in the chair. If he were Perry Aliger, he would show her all about dancing in the moonlight. “See, I used to take Julia down to the creek. There’s this big sandbar down there. It’s real pretty when the moon is full and we’d set out the radio and dance barefooted in the sand. It was my idea of bein’ romantic, I guess.”

  “I fail to see the connection between the moon and romance,” she said thoughtfully. “But then I really don’t understand the concept of romance.”

  “Aw, you’re puttin’ me on, Mrs. Aliger!” He blurted. “You’re a beautiful lady and Mr. Aliger is probably the most romantic guy I’ve ever seen! I mean... not that I look at romantic men... I mean, I’ve heard him quotin’ poetry and stuff. Women like that sort of thing. I was never good at that kind of stuff. He looks like something out of a fairy tale or something. I mean... surely he romanced you at some time or another...” his voice trailed off and he felt stupid. He couldn’t believe what he was saying.

  “So what you are saying is that in your opinion, Perry would be the ideal husband?” She seemed totally unaffected by his statements.

  “Golly, no! I mean, hell! I don’t know what I mean,” Louis tripped over his tongue. “I wouldn’t know that at all. I mean, he seems to have all the right stuff as they say. How else could he have caught you in the first place? You didn’t order him from a mail order catalogue or vice versa, did you?”

  Louis laughed nervously as Angelica looked at him blandly.

  “Peregrin came highly recommended,” she told him. “I suppose he has many good qualities from the standpoint of making a good husband. Yes, I see what you mean. Of course.” Her facial expression changed as if she suddenly realized just how strange the conversation was.

  “But,” she continued “I just fail to see why men put so much emphasis on romance and physical attraction.”

  Louis picked up the coffee cup and drained it as if it were a shot of whiskey and wished it was. If she was trying to pick him up, it was the strangest seduction he had ever witnessed... but it might work.

  “I don’t know, Mrs. Aliger,” he said smiling. “I guess it’s just in our jeans, pardon the pun.” Louis had always heard the opposite complaint from men.

  “Genes!” She snapped her fingers. “I think that may be the answer I’ve been searching for. I will have to look into that.”

  She stood up suddenly as if she had just remembered something important. His feathers, which he had been preening, fell.

  Louis stood as well, taking her action to be a cue for his departure. She was as strange as her husband and it seemed they were made for each other.

  “Well,” he said “I’d best be goin’ on down to the station. I have some reports to do. I’ll run by Bobby’s house and leave a note for him and the boy’s granny just in case. Talk to his Aunt Rita.”

  “That should do.” She smiled at him.

  Louis started toward the door and then turned to look back at her in puzzlement. Something was just not right.

  “Just where is Mr. Aliger?” He asked bluntly.

  “I’m not sure,” she told him.

  “Are you and him havin’ some kind of trouble I can help you with?” He asked hesitantly. He wanted to leave and at the same time, the situation was so intriguing he couldn’t seem to tear himself away.

  “But you already have,” she answered brightly.

  “Are you sure?” He frowned at her.

  “Well, there is one other thing.” She glanced at Reggie who was still involved in his play with the cat. “Do you read, Louis? The words of others. Do you study... the thoughts of others?”

  “Well, I can’t say that I study them, but I do read a bit,” he said.

  “Is it important to you to know what other people are thinking?” She tilted her head to one side. “Or perhaps the word might be the ‘feelings’ of others? Do you think the questions of the eternal soul and the connecting forces of the universe could be answered in the minds of men, but not put directly into words? Do you think that it is possible that some people could exist without a soul?”

  Louis stood perfectly still letting her words wash over him... drowning him. Her questions had come too rapidly for him to begin to answer and they ran together except for the last one. He should have left when he had the chance, he thought...the thought of someone existing without a soul sent an involuntary shudder through him from head to foot.

  “Let me backtrack.” She looked at him steadily. “Do you believe in the eternal soul at all?”

  “Of course,” he answered quickly.

  “Then do you think it is possible that the universe could be interconnected? That the all-pervading soul of the universe can be separated into two opposing forces: good and evil? That the basic good of the universe could be slowly degrading and givi
ng way to the evil? That the evil could be growing stronger, spreading and threatening to envelope the infrastructure of the basic good to the point of suppressing or even destroying it in its entirety?”

  “I don’t know what to say, Mrs. Aliger,” he told her truthfully. “Some people think evil is taking over the whole world. I’d like to think that it will never completely overcome all the good there is still out there.”

  “But do you think people can exist in a souless state?” She asked the same question again. Was she talking about her husband? Did she believe he had no soul? Was he dealing with some kind of supernatural force here just like the horror movies he’d seen at the theatre? All sorts of ominous questions flew through his confused mind. The face of Mike Padgett flashed in front of him. Was this why Mike had such a strange feeling about Peregrin Aliger?

  “I just think maybe there are too many people in the world and not enough good to go around,” he said after a pause.

  “Too many people,” she repeated his words. “And where do you suppose they all came from?”

  “People?” He asked in surprise. “Where do people come from?”

  “Yes, do you think there should be a finite number of people in the world?” She asked.

  “Well, yes, maybe.” He frowned and wondered what she was getting at. “It would be nice if there were just so many and no more and that some way we could all live together forever and improve ourselves in the positive direction. But then there would be no children and then there would be no reason to have... for people to... well, it would take a lot out of life, I guess.”

  “An interesting thought,” she nodded. “But why would the lack of children take something from life?”

  “Uh, well...” He felt his face turning red again. His brain was beginning to tickle itself. He hadn’t had to think so much in years. “I suppose it goes back to my statement about genes. That is, I mean, I guess it would be nice to just sit on a mountain top all day and have profound thoughts and not have to worry about workin’ or eatin’ or dyin’ but that just isn’t my idea of what life is all about. I like to do things myself. Evil is what makes the good good. How would we be able to appreciate the good things if we didn’t have nothin’ bad to compare it to? But the whole point, I guess, of physical attraction between men and women is to have children. If I had to choose between a world of peace and eternal life and one without physical love, I might just choose the world the way it is now,” he said with some degree of finality.

  Angelica seemed to take a pause to consider his words.

  “Peregrin says that procreation is not the goal of all physical contact between men and women,” she said after a moment. “It seems that you would agree with him. He somehow equates physical attraction and contact between the sexes to love. If that is the case, then love could still exist even without the eventual production of children. As you must know, Louis, even now children do not result from every physical act of this sort of love as you and he call it.”

  “Maybe that’s my religion gettin’ in the way,” he heard himself say. He could not imagine how they could be having this sort of conversation. He felt totally guilty almost as if they had just thrown each other down on the carpet and made mad passionate physical contact as she called it. “I mean I was raised Catholic and you’re supposed to always leave the possibility of creating life open.”

  “What you are saying is that without color we have no need for eyes?” She asked. “If color did not exist and everything was reduced to black and white and shades in between, would we not still need our eyes?”

  Louis was totally confused by her analogy. His brain threatened to shut down altogether.

  “I suppose that is true,” he said though he did not know exactly what he was agreeing with.

  Angelica sensed his confusion and continued “Just because children are a by-product of physical attraction, it does not necessarily follow that the attraction would not exist without children. Color is a by-product of light produced merely by differences in the length between the peaks of the light waves. Different wavelengths, different colors. There are many wavelengths that cannot be perceived by the human eye, but it does not mean that they don’t exist or shouldn’t exist. It is the same with the soul. We may not be able to perceive the soul with our senses, but it exists none-the-less. When we say that life cannot exist without the soul, we are also saying that the soul cannot exist without life. Since we have no physical proof to show that the soul exists, we cannot say that life cannot exist without the soul, nor can we say that the soul cannot exist without life. If one accepts that the soul exists, then one must also accept that it is possible that, should all life in the universe be extinguished, the soul would continue to exist. If one does not accept this possibility, then one does not truly accept the existence of the soul because the whole basis of the soul is founded in its immortality. Hence if all life is extinguished, the soul must live on. Now, here is the question of questions. Are there many different souls or is there just one contiguous soul? If the soul is one contiguous entity, then we are all one and the same. Good and evil, one and the same. All is relevant only to the objective viewpoint.”

  “Whoa, Betsy!” Louis said inanely when she finally slowed down and stopped. “You’ve lost me entirely. Are you tryin’ to say that there is only one soul and that we all share it?”

  “Cosmically speaking,” she nodded. “The differences between you and I are so miniscule on the universal scale, we are virtually identical even in the physical sense. We are one and the same.”

  Louis could think of nothing to say. Fortunately, he thought. He stood staring at her and then rubbed the bridge of his nose where his headache was increasing.

  “What I am trying to say is that universally speaking,” she tried once more “everything is relative to everything else. Take the speed of light for instance. If the speed of light is the fastest speed at which anything in the physical universe can travel, then something somewhere must be perfectly motionless. And there is where the conflict arises. Notice that I said physical universe. As far as we know, there is nothing in the physical universe that does not move. From the tiniest quanta to the greatest galactic super-clusters, everything is in motion. Therefore we must look to the metaphysical universe for the answer. We must conceive of the inconceivable.”

  “You mean like blackholes?” Louis said hopefully. Blackholes were the most inconceivable things Louis had ever tried to think about.

  “No, no,” she said in exasperation. “Blackholes are certainly peculiar objects, but they are not inconceivable.”

  “But what does all this have to do with your husband?” Louis matched her exasperation. He had been totally wrong! She wasn’t trying to pick him up, she was trying to teach him quantum mechanics.

  She sighed and leaned against the counter.

  “Nothing and everything,” she said. “Tell me, Louis, are you physically attracted to me?”

  Louis felt as if he would pass out from the strain of trying to keep up with the ebb and flow of the conversation.

  “Well...” He glanced around, but Reggie had disappeared down the hallway. “Yes, I am, but I would never...”

  “You would never what?” A male voice startled them when Louis’s courage failed him.

  Angelica turned toward the stairs leading up from the Gift Shop and Louis froze in shocked silence. Things could not possibly get any worse at that moment.

  Perry Aliger stood at the top of the stairs. He leaned against the railing with his arms folded across his chest. It was impossible to tell how long he had been standing there. “Please continue. This is a most fascinating conversation. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything quite like it.”

  Louis was visibly shaken, but Perry did not seem the least bit angry. He actually smiled at them, he wore that same damnable expression of amusement Louis was growing to hate.

  "I really need to be going," Louis mumbled and pulled futilely on his belt as if he might be able to
pull himself physically from the scene.

  “What a shame it had to end,” Perry shook his head and pushed himself off the railing. “You really shouldn’t keep Sgt. Parks, Angelica. The rain has arrived and his window is down.”

  Louis felt that his window was not the only thing that was down.

  “Oh! Well, in that case, I’d better get goin' in a jiffy,” Louis said quickly and went to the door to let himself out into the pouring rain.

  By the time he got to his car and rolled up the window, he was soaking wet, cold and shivering from the rain and the near disaster. He cursed himself and his ancestors all the way back to his great-great-grandfather for being fucking born.

  Mike Padgett found Joanne Parker in her usual perch at the desk in the Texaco’s office going over her never-ending stack of receipts and register tapes. He walked into the office without knocking and sat backwards on the chair in front of the desk.

  “What’s up Mike?” She glanced up at him. “Off early?”

  “Off for good,” he said glumly.

  “What?” She looked up at him and laid down her pencil.

  “I got the boot today,” he said. “And next week more will get it, but I wasn’t the only one. Thirteen today.”

  “I’m real sorry to hear that,” she told him sincerely.

  “Knew it was comin’,” he made a wry face. “They been talkin’ about it for weeks.”

  “That’s too bad. Whatcha gonna do?”

  “Go on over to Carrollton, I guess and look for something. Get with Bobby Greene and see if I can get hired on. Maybe something’ll come up.”

  “I’m sure it will,” she told him. “I see ads on TV all the time for cross country drivers.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Mike nodded. “I just wisht I was a expert mechanic like Chris. Now there’s a good occupation. Them new cars is always breakin’ down and needin’ fixed.”

  “Yeah, that’s the truth,” Joanne agreed. “How’s Carla takin’ it?”

  “She don’t know yet,” he said. “She’s at work. She ain’t gonna take it too good, I can tell you. We can’t live off what she makes. I’m just glad we ain’t go no kids to take care of.”