The Night Walk Men Read Online Free Page B

off the ocean, He would tell you that a
lifetime is a beautiful, throbbing piece of work. Obsidion is a
lover of art, you already know this. But what you don’t know is
that He often speaks in riddles and in infinite loops. So you
should not be surprised that He would also tell you that real art
cannot be seen in real life. A life time is a beautiful thing. But a
Life, capital “L”, is nothing at all like true art. He would say
this to you without an ounce of self-righteousness, without a mote
of pretentiousness.
    And he would clarify. He
has clarified for me so I know. Life, He has said in my presence,
is not like art insomuch as art contains finality, absolution,
insomuch as art may contain meaning, depth. Insomuch as art may
have recurring motif or symbols that convey universal truth. Or
even characters with moral compunctions, conundrums and eventual
successes with such conundrums. In life, not in art , good rarely seems to
triumph over evil. Good does not always leave the table with all
the chips. Not in real life anyway.
    I believed what he told
me. And, in turn, you should believe what I tell you: there is no
real art. Real art only comes by accident. And there are no
accidents. Certainly, there are compromises. There are mistakes.
But there are no authentic accidents.
    I mean to say
this:
    You didn’t honestly
believe that train wreck in Bolivia was an accident, did you? Or
that landslide in Northern British Columbia? Or that red light that
made you late for work on a Monday morning? Everything happens for
a reason. Gabriela knows that now. And so should you.
    All’s fair. I told you I’d
have my turn. So let me ask you something further, since you’ve had
free reign to ask of me.
    What if, at the age of
fourteen in 1461, Christopher Columbus had died of Typhoid in Genoa
before ever setting foot on a boat?
    What if J. Robert
Oppenheimer had developed his throat cancer twenty years earlier
than his death in 1967 and perhaps one or two years before a single
atomic bomb fell on the Japanese city of Hiroshima?
    What if Louis Pasteur’s
parents had never met? Or, what if young Pasteur had stayed in the
Jura region of France and pursued his first love of art instead of
his second love of science?
    What if the rifle of
nineteen-year-old Slavic Nationalist Gavrilo Princip, had jammed,
not allowing two rounds to be fired on Archduke Franz Ferdinand and
his wife Sophie in 1914?
    On December 9th, 1980,
what if Mark David Chapman had given into his urges? What if he had
barged in on the gay couple having sex in his neighbouring hotel
room at the YMCA instead of waiting for John Lennon outside the
Dakota, his New York City apartment.
    Do you think any of that would have changed
anything else?
     
     
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    Yes. There are mistakes. A
mistake was in letting Braille the Raille live so long. He was a
hundred and nine, that’s too long, even for you. You wouldn’t know
what to do with that much time, you would go mad. And Braille, he
nearly did. Though he did a far sight better than most would have
done, I will argue that to the end.
    There are mistakes.
Gabriela’s parents taking her to Dow Lake by train, that was a
mistake. Gabriela and her brother almost not coming into this
world, that was a mistake. Gabriela falling into that long dark
tunnel filled with metal rails and crushed rock, that was a
mistake.
    But, likewise, Obsidion
ignoring his orders and letting her carry on, one could make a case
for that being a mistake too.
    No, Gabriela is not evil,
she surely has no bad intent. Letting her go on will not invoke a
third world war, don’t kid yourself. She will not grow to a bitter
and damaged sort who opens fire on a crowd of children (never!) nor
will she calculate the assassination of some Higher Up to change
the world order.
    If you want to keep
believing me, you should go right ahead. I can’t make promises but
I can tell you some things you probably didn’t know.
    I can tell you that, in
time,