The Aegis Solution (16 page)

"I guess."

"Now, and I want you to think about this, whichever way they choose is going to either hurt or
anger one set of parents."

"Because," Elias added, "both sets of parents will want their name to have the better placement."

"Exactly! So somebody's parents lose and somebody's win. Not only that, but either Johnnie or
Wendy is a winner – or loser – as well."

"That's true. They can't both get their way. One does, and the other gives in."

"Right! So now this young couple, just starting out, has a resentment brewing and one set of
ticked-off in-laws."

Laughing, Elias agreed, "Makes sense."

"Darn right it does. And then, what about the next generation?"

Elias held up his hands in surrender. "I get the picture."

"Do you? I mean, do you really see what I'm driving at here? We took a system, a custom, which
had been worked out long before we were born and had functioned perfectly for countless generations,
and we ruined it. Part of the beauty of the custom was that it worked without cluttering up people's lives
with details and extra names. The other important part of it was that it recognized the inherent tendency
of certain acts or decisions within a society to cause pain and hurt feelings – like picking a name – and
it removed that decision and made it a given…made it a custom dictated by people long dead. So there
wasn't anyone around to blame or get mad at. But if it becomes a decision made by a living, breathing
person, then everyone involved in the situation is watching to see which way he or she will choose.
Winners and losers!"

"I never thought about it that way. But what does that have to do with Aegis?"

Wilson paused and took a sip from his mug of tea. "Well, obviously it's a little different from the
name thing, but society had sorted out the whole suicide thing, too. Suicide is, or was, what it's supposed
to be."

"What's that?"

"Death," Wilson exclaimed. "It's supposed to be death, not this namby-pamby institution."

Although Elias agreed with Wilson, he wanted to hear what the man had to say. "You don't think
this was a good idea?"

"Nope. I don't. Let's talk about people who might consider suicide. Before, if people screwed up
their lives, they always knew they had the option of suicide. It was an unpleasant thought and a scary
one, but people always knew that no matter how bad things got, there was always that back door they
could slip out through.

"You know, Mr. Death, I bet you that if you could somehow remove the option of suicide from
the minds of people, the whole civilization would grind to a halt."

"Why is that?"

"People would be afraid to do anything…try anything risky. Suicide is the net under them while
they go on the high wire. Remove the net, and who would be stupid enough to go up there and learn
those tricks?"

"Makes sense," Elias concurred.

"Darn right it does. But the deal is, for the whole program to work, suicide has to be tough; it needs
to be scary and final. And what's more scary to people than the unknown? So they all need to be scared
to death, no pun intended…."

"None taken," Elias commented sarcastically.

"They all need to be scared to death to take that step. You know, what if they do go to hell when
they die? What if, after they die, there is just nothing? All that stuff. And what if killing themselves
would hurt like blazes?

"In other words, if that option of suicide is truly too horrible to fathom, people have to try harder
to get things right, to find a better solution. What I'm saying is that there needs to be a real deterrent,
or people would take the option if they stubbed their toes."

"That's what is happening out there now."

"I know," Wilson sighed. "I've been in here watching. Most of the people coming in aren't doing
it for the old reasons, not that all of the old ones were good ones. They're doing it for some of the most
ridiculous reasons I've ever heard. There was even a young girl who came here because her favorite actor
checked in."

"I heard about that."

"Yeah? Well, would she have done that if she knew he was dead?"

"No. Probably not. Maybe it happened, but I can't remember anyone committing suicide because
his or her favorite actor or singer did it."

"Me neither. But that's not what I meant."

"What…?"

"He was dead! Within minutes of walking through those spinning doors, they killed him."

"Who killed him?"

"Those punks. They did it for the fun of it. They were so happy to have this spoiled, privileged kid
just so they could beat the insides out of him. And then when she arrived, looking for her heartthrob,
well, I'm not even going to tell you what those animals did to her."

Elias shook his head. "Unbelievable."

"But, see, if we still did things the old way, she wouldn't have come and it wouldn't have happened.
She thought she was checking in at a hotel and was going to be able to make google-eyes at the star. She
probably thought she could move into one of the apartments here with him and they could live happily
ever after. If he had O.D.'d on sleeping pills, she would have felt bad. Might have even thought about
doing it herself, but she wouldn't have had any illusions about living in the hereafter with him!"

"I see what you mean."

"Of course you do. You're not an idiot. The point is, we've cheapened everything, even death."

"What do you mean ‘cheapened'?"

Wilson took another long sip on his tea as he collected his thoughts for another tirade. "You look
old enough to me to remember something pretty special."

"What's that?"

"Tearing open the plastic wrapper on an album."

"A record album?"

"Yes, a record album. I remember wanting to get a copy of ‘Peggy Sue' by Buddy Holly."

Elias nodded, encouraging him to continue.

"I took my allowance money from doing chores around the house and went to the Kresge on the
corner. That was before K-Mart. It was 1958, and I bought Buddy Holly's latest album, which had the
song on it. I cradled that album all the way home on my bike, ran inside the house, and sat down on the
floor in front of my record player. Then came the best part."

The old man grinned as his eyes conveyed the joy of this past memory. "I broke the plastic wrapper
with my fingernail, right at the opening of the jacket. Then I slid my finger to carefully slice that wrapper
open. Didn't want to tear it, you know."

Elias nodded.

"Darned if I didn't get a paper cut under my fingernail from the cardboard edge inside."

"Ouch!"

Wilson chuckled. "But it didn't matter. Careful not to get any blood on the inside liner – you know,
that paper sleeve inside – I pulled out the record, with the sleeve still on it. Then I set down the album
cover, gently took the record out of the sleeve, and put it on the turntable."

He looked piercingly at Elias. "You remember that smell? The smell of a new record?"

"Oh, yeah," Elias answered.

"Well, then I played it. And I played it and played it and played it. Boy, did I love that album. But
the point is the experience. The process. The ritual. We all had record collections, and you could tell a
lot about a fella by his records. Or a girl, for that matter."

"That's true."

"Do you think that all of the younger people around today prize any individual song that they have
crammed on their iPods, with the eight thousand other songs they've downloaded, as much as I prized
that album? I don't.

"Before I came to this place, I was sitting at a coffee shop and listening to a couple of younger guys
talking. From what I heard, they had downloaded, between the two of them, about three hundred songs
the night before. Three hundred! And most of them were downloaded onto their cell phones! I'll bet
there are some songs they have gotten that they'll never even listen to the rest of their lives, much less
care about the way I did that one album."

"You're probably right."

The man leaned forward, closing the gap between himself and Elias. "And it isn't just songs, either.
Look at pictures! With digital cameras, people come back from lunch with as many pictures as a man
and his wife used to take during an entire vacation. And books, too, with those cursed e-books."

This stranger obviously had no way of knowing how many times Elias had made the same
argument to his friends over the years. "Let me tell you something, Wilson. Do you have any idea how
I got here?"

Taken slightly aback by the question, Wilson ventured, "I assume by car."

"Only the last leg. Before that, I traveled from New Orleans to Tucson by train."

Elias' companion slapped him on the knee. "There you go. Traveling in a way that actually makes
you feel as though you've gone someplace."

"You got it."

Wilson dropped heavily back into his chair and sighed again. "But you know what, my friend?
Anybody listening to us no doubt thinks we're a couple of old fuddy-duddies for saying these things."

"I gave up," Elias mused, "trying to explain to my boss that just walking onto an airplane and a few
hours later stepping off, half the world away, gives us a skewed perspective on where we are and what
the world is really like."

"Don't I know it! You can't tell them though, can you?"

"No. You can't. But what you said, Wilson, about the other things and about suicide, makes a lot
of sense. I never thought of it that way."

"We're cheapening everything and we're making everything all about us, and future generations be
damned. The mind-set that causes us to fiddle with the way we name ourselves and our kids, without
even mentally extending it out one or two generations, is the same as letting the debt get so high. Either
we don't care or we somehow know that it's all going to end soon anyway, so what difference does it
make?"

Wilson turned away and stared out at the riot of plants and trees encircling the porch. Without
looking back at Elias and with a more subdued tone to his voice, he continued, "And television. Not
all that long ago there were only three channels to watch. Now there are hundreds. And most of it is
baloney. With the three, there was always something to watch, something you wanted to see. You could
watch I Love Lucy or What's My Line? or the fights, unless they were taken off for an Andy Williams
special" – he paused and smiled at some private memory – "but, seriously, you can search through the
choices delivered by the little black cable or satellite dish and usually not find a single thing you want
to waste your time on."

Returning his gaze to Elias, Wilson remarked, "You think I'm some crazy Luddite, don't you?"

Elias smiled and shook his head. "No, Wilson, I don't. As a matter of fact, I agree with you."

"So that makes us a couple of fools who can't deal with the fact that society has passed us by,
doesn't it?"

"No. It doesn't."

Wilson chuckled. "Of course you'd say that, Mr. Death. Fools and crazy people always think they're
fine. It's always everybody else who's gone 'round the bend."

Twisting around in his seat to face his host, Elias asked, "What's with this ‘Mr. Death' thing? Why
are you calling me that?"

"You're kidding, right?"

"No, I'm not."

"You don't know the historical significance of your own name?"

"Charon? The guide from the river Styx taking the souls across the river?"

"Yeah," Wilson said, still smiling. "But either your parents had no knowledge of history and just
liked the name, or they had a wicked sense of humor when they tagged you with Elias to go in front of
it."

"Saint Elias the Living?"

"See, you did know! Some believed that Elias was the only saint who didn't die. He hopped on his
fiery chariot and rode it to Heaven, body and all. Don't ya think that's a bit of an ironic name for
someone waltzing into this institution, which is nothing but a spit in the face of death?"

"Hadn't given it any thought."

Wilson snorted his opinion and said nothing. They both fell into a brief silence, listening to the
whirl of the wind. After a few minutes, Wilson began speaking, his voice so low Elias had to strain to
hear his words. "All this stuff…the names, songs, photographs, movies, and TV shows...if it were
merely the logical progression of things, it wouldn't bother me so much."

"What do you mean?" Elias asked, caught up in the old man's sudden change of mood, realizing
that the man he had been chatting with on the porch, until this minute, was a manufactured caricature,
and the true person was now revealing himself.

Wilson hesitated once again, and Elias suspected that he was not merely formulating his thoughts,
but rather was deciding whether to share them with a stranger. With a deep intake of breath, he
indicated the decision had been made. "What do you think I did for a living, before I retired…before
I checked in to this looney bin?"