SoC 2:4

A Tyranny of Numbers

 

C aitlin’s eyes were delicate and incandescent, like pieces of glass in the sun. Haunted, Will wondered what had happened to them, if they had shattered as completely as the rest of her.

Will had to change his tie; he had gotten vomit on it. He splashed his sallow face and pushed his lustrous hair behind his ears. Will dreaded seeing his uncle and aunt, “What does one say?” he wondered. He dreaded seeing Caitlin’s picture at the front of the church and he dreaded listening to people try to make sense of her death. Most of all, he dreaded his own emotion: Caitlin was his cousin, and nine years younger than him, but he felt he had to keep his tears discreet and his mourning mum. He was twenty-nine years old and thought he had no business drawing attention to himself, that that was the province of Caitlin’s parents, grandparents, sister, and close friends.

The church was only a year old. It was bright, with a soaring, white paneled ceiling and golden walls in the foyer. Will tried to divert his mind as he walked toward the front, through a thick cloud of despondency. He moved quickly. He thought of the groceries he needed to buy, and reminded himself to make a dental appointment, as he bent down to kiss Caitlin’s red oak casket. Of necessity, it was closed. He jerked his head past the picture of Caitlin. She had a full, tanned face and puckered crimson lips in that photo.

Will found his aunt and uncle in the first row. His uncle’s face was green and it looked dead, like a withered vegetable. His aunt was pallid, but in an angelic, peaceful way. She wore a cross around her neck and gripped a Bible tightly. Will whimpered as he hugged them. Lips pursed and forehead wrinkled, he shook his head sorrowfully and moved on. He kissed Zoë, Caitlin’s younger sister, on her peachy forehead but couldn’t look her in the face. His grandmother bowed her head. She stared vacantly, through cataract eyes, when Will kissed her on the cheeks. His grandfather breathed heavily through his mouth while Will kissed his gnarled, dusty cheeks. Will’s father had died three years earlier. He smiled warmly at his mother, sat beside her and held her brittle hands.

He would’ve preferred not to sit with his family:

“the larger a group,” he thought, “the greater its despair.”

Rather than listen to the crying, or to the priest, Will listened to his thoughts. He thought of running with his dog beneath the frosty midnight sky; he imagined going to Hilton Falls and lying on the rocks, indifferent to the ants on his arms.

“Give blood, sign-up as an organ donor,” Will caught himself thinking, and then realized that Caitlin was too close to his mind. To thwart himself, Will tried to think of ways to persuade people to donate to the agency he worked for.
He had made it through the first half of the funeral. But then Natalia began to speak, her eyes and nostrils billowing. Her black dress lay on her ruddy shoulders and brushed against her glossy shins.

Natalia swept her coffee coloured hair from her face. She gazed across the church, through a foggy swamp of hasty anger and began to speak: “As some of you may know, I was the one driving. It was a new car and I took a turn too quickly,” she said forthrightly. Will’s wilting head jolted upright. Natalia leaned on the podium to keep her balance. Natalia’s nose was charming and round, her lips elliptical. She began to speak:

“I apologize to each of you and I apologize to this entire world because Caitlin wanted to help people. She died and people whose lives she might’ve saved died too. Everyone here lost her and so did the people she was going to help feed and clothe. I lost my best friend and, somewhere, a poor boy lost his future teacher; an old lady lost her future nurse.”

She buried her head in her hands for a moment. But morose, intrepid and vulnerable, Natalia continued:

“I’ve tried to make sense of this. Caitlin died because of my mistake; but that’s an explanation, not an answer. All I can think is that maybe Caitlin died because she was incorruptible, too good for this world.” Her words sprinkled down like gentle dew from a towering tree; and it was

Natalia’s words that trickled down Will’s cheeks.
Natalia swallowed a hiccup in her sobs and nearly fell as she moved toward her seat. Will had never seen such grace.

Afterwards, friends and family gathered in the church banquet hall. The room was chalky and impersonal, like a high school cafeteria. Natalia placed a stack of paper beside the entrance. Will walked toward her cautiously. Natalia was pinning a flyer to the wall. It was for the blood donation clinic where Caitlin had volunteered. Will picked up one of the pieces of paper. It was a copy of an email Caitlin had written to encourage people to donate blood, organs and bone marrow.

He smiled and said, “I remember reading this.”

“Maybe now more people will give, having seen what happens when they don’t.”

Will swallowed melancholically and looked at Natalia’s red eyes. He hadn’t seen her since she was fifteen and she still had the same flushed cheeks, the same broad hips. But her face was much more doubtful than it had been.

“I want to thank you,” Will said, “for what you did for Caitlin.”

“Please,” Natalia said with a wince, turning away from him.

“I mean it,” he said, placing his hand tentatively on her shoulder.

She turned toward him fiercely. “I killed her,” she said quietly, her teeth clenched and her head falling.

Will put his hands gently on her hips. “You made a mistake.”

She looked up at him. “It wasn’t even your fault,” Will added.

“How can you say that?” she said angrily, breaking from his loose grip.

“Because everybody speeds. Everybody does careless things. And most of us get away with them. You’re a casualty of statistics. Remote goddamn statistics! People say numbers don’t discriminate, but they do. When someone gets cancer because a percentage has to justify itself, that’s discrimination. Numbers are tyrants! They make sure some people are rich and some people are poor, that some people get hit by lightning and some win the lottery.”

“But how can you thank me?” She asked, her lips trembling.

“Because that was the most beautiful thing anyone could do for her.”

“What, stumbling through a bunch of clichés?”

“They weren’t clichés. But even if they were, it wouldn’t have mattered. The beauty was in the valour, in the repentance.”

“I choked and almost fell over. Where’s the valour in that?”

“It’s in being oblivious to yourself. Your body tried to buckle but you ignored it, your head wanted to fall but you wouldn’t let it. And you did that because you wanted to pay tribute. Your beauty’s in your willingness to suffer.” Their eyes fused for a moment. Natalia’s were much harder than Caitlin’s but just as radiant. “And you did it publicly. You didn’t hide from the scornful. You put yourself out there, in front of their disapproving eyes.”

Will placed his hands on Natalia’s hips, much more fervently than before, and hugged her tightly.

***

A year later, Will pressed Natalia against a sediment wall at Hilton Falls and cut her back. The waterfall seeped placidly in the distance. They shivered when some of its water, carried by a gentle wind, fell upon their half-naked bodies. Natalia licked a drop off of Will’s freckled shoulder.

Afterwards, they lay naked beneath a sleeping bag.

“We don’t have to let numbers be such tyrants, you know,” Natalia said firmly.

“We give them too much power.”

“It’d take a lot to rein them in.”

“It begins with sight.”

“I suppose if we all had Caitlin’s eyes, it’d be much easier to pacify numbers.”

Natalia smiled, gazing at Will. Her eyes were much softer, more like sparkling grains of sand, than they were the day of the funeral. Will put his hand on Natalia’s back, bringing her close enough that he could kiss her smooth cheek. He felt the cool drop of blood on her back and, when he saw it on his finger, he knew that she bled for Caitlin and he loved Natalia for it.