The Shadow Knows Read online

  *Cambridge*

  Lightning over the water is the description given by the I-Ching of the conditions before transition. He tried to picture the image in his mind, frame it with the details of his own situation, and he wondered if his being born under the sign of Pisces, the fish that could move in two opposing directions simultaneously, made the image any more appropriate for him. Perhaps, but the notion alone of imminence, of the charged and beautiful and frightening nature of potential playing dramatically yet somehow symbiotically over the placid surface of the present -- this alone was enough to ponder as he sipped his beer reflectively, but there were other things to sort out as well.

  Talya had brought up one of them only a few days earlier. His wife awoke the morning after her thirty-fifth birthday with a mild hangover and he made the domestic mistake of trying to engage her in conversation before she’d had her second cup of coffee. The previous evening’s celebration had been very pleasant but he had his own after-effects to contend with and he was doing little more than testing the limits of noise his head could withstand when he asked her how it felt to be past the Biblical half-way mark.

  “We’ve all crossed thresholds we don’t care to brag about. And please -- not so loud.” Her smile was friendly but somewhat pained.

  In those early years he’d crossed his own thresholds and thought little about them, but that was to be expected. He’d gotten angry listening to a conservative Republican during the Eisenhower-Kennedy changeover who said that a little righteous anger really brings out the best in the American personality and that getting mad in a constructive way is good for the soul and the country; a few years later his anger had turned to cynical resignation. He’d once attended a university whose motto was Freedom With Responsibility and he’d decided that whatever his life’s work would be, it would be honorable work; less than two years later he’d taken the life of another human being. For as long as he could remember thinking about it he had actively rejected the idea that most rebels are looking for a better conformity; somewhere, at some point he could hardly locate much less define precisely, he’d become a living example of its validity. He had always assumed that he understood what the responsibility of free will meant -- that you took responsibility for your actions, accepted the pain along with the pleasure, paid the price of being human -- but lately he wondered if somewhere along the way there hadn’t been a dangerous and insidiously gradual failure of will on his part, a major sea change of the soul that had somehow gone unrecorded in the weather, the natural landscape, and the various external trappings of his life. He’d always intended to live as he felt he was meant to, actively, meaningfully, with principles; whether he’d left that behind as well was, at present, a matter of his serious and constant conjecture.