25 March 1979, New York, Midtown Manhattan
He remembered that night very clearly, years, decades later, as if it was a particularly vivid dream. He remembered it not just for what had happened – or rather had not happened - but also because it snowed that evening, and this was so unusual in late March in New York City that people talked about the strange weather for weeks afterwards. He recalled articles in respected newspapers, where respected journalists quoted even more respected scientists wondering about the climate. Climate change, they speculated. A new Ice Age perhaps. The glaciers would come bearing down from the north, as they have always done through the eons and entomb everything around under billions of tons of ice. Frozen water would slowly topple, crush, and pulverise into dust all that was familiar to him; the Empire State he could just glimpse from the window, his office, the little deli on the corner where he always got his first coffee of the day, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty that had once shone her torch at him, beckoning him to the shore.
But he had little faith in respected scientists, respected newspapers and respected journalists. He had little faith in men, all of them. That way he was never disappointed.
And yet the snow kept falling that night late in March; God’s beautiful dandruff, glimmering under the streetlight outside the window.
“I beg you to reconsider,” the man across the desk spoke in a hushed, almost reverential tone. He was sitting uncomfortably on the edge of the chair, his fur coat still on, hands nervously clutching the rim of a grey fedora.
Reconsider, he thought. Words; they made the impossible seem possible, and the possible easy. What an alchemy. But in the end they were just words. A fraud.
“No. That can’t happen,” he said slowly, looking away, at the outside, past the snow and the pale glow of lights, into the darkness. “It won’t happen. I won’t do it.”
The other man’s head dropped to his chest, as if he was praying silently. Finally he whispered: “You are the last one. If not you, then it will have to be... him...“
“Then so be it,” he thought that his words were like snowflakes too, swirling out of his mouth, cold and wind-borne, vanishing almost as soon as uttered. “They’d made their decision then, and I made mine. They all have to live with the consequences.” As I have to, he felt like adding, but let it go.
“But they are all dead now, may God Almighty rest their souls,” the man shook his head and crossed himself, “and it is us-” he stressed the word “-who will now have to live with the consequences.”
He turned his head to face his guest, but the man still wouldn’t look him in the face, over-awed by the moment, or maybe uncomfortable pleading with the one so long departed.
“What’s done is done,” he said. “Besides, I am not Jesus Christ.” A wry smile creased his tight lips. “Do you think I could rise from the dead? Even if I wanted to?”
There was no answer to that. His guest merely crossed himself again, as if frightened by the mild blasphemy of his host.
The snow kept falling, and that night was the last chance to change things, maybe even try to make them right. Straighten the crooked path, so that it led back to... Where? Home? But it was no good; too late. Or maybe it was just his pride, the neck that would not bend to anyone or anything, man or God – or fate - before or now or ever.
Regardless, his answer remained the same.
It was all of this – that night, that snow, that conversation – that swirled in his last thoughts before he closed his eyes, at the end, almost half a lifetime later. The road not taken. And yet, he was dying in peace. He smiled at the irony.
Photo by Aditya Vyas on Unsplash
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