The Rule of Nine Read Online Free Page B

age,” said Nick.
    â€œIt was.”
    The two men had known each other for almost half a century. Their paths had crossed and careers intertwined so many times that Root could not begin to count them. He often wondered how it happened that two people following such different courses could end up on the same trajectory, as if they were touched by some stellar fate.
    Nick had graduated from Berkeley. Josh was a senior at San Francisco State. They met at an antiwar demonstration during Vietnam, and in the months that followed sucked down enough tear gas and tossed enough bricks to form a kind of bond that usually coalesces only in the heat of battle.
    After that Nick went on to law school at Yale. Josh graduated and then seemed to drop out of life. He disappeared for more than three years. It was what Josh came to remember as “his dark time.” He talked to no one about it, not even his friends. That he was able to pull himself out of it, resume a normal life, and come so far in the decades that followed was an absolute wonder. It seemed that he had gone off the track and somehow, as if by magic, had wandered back. Still, he often saw himself as a failure. The demons of his youth continued to haunt him. Only now they appeared distorted by the contradictions in his life and the looming horizon of death.
    â€œDo you ever wish we could go back to the time?” said Josh. “You know, the smell of tear gas in the morning.”
    â€œAre you kidding?” said Nick. He laughed.
    â€œYou don’t miss the sense of commitment—the crusade?”
    Nick thought about it for a second. “It had its place, but the moment has passed.”
    â€œYou’re wrong. That moment never passes. The world is what we make of it. And we never lose our ability to change it for the better until we lose our grip on life.”
    â€œYou were always more ambitious,” said Nick. “I gave up trying to warp the world a long time ago.”
    â€œI know,” said Josh. It was a major disappointment. Nick believed that radical thought was something you outgrew, like toys in an abandoned sandbox. To Josh it was a core element of his being, as essential as breathing.
    â€œWe’ve both been pretty damn lucky,” said Josh. “What is it they say? ‘It’s better to be lucky than good.’”
    â€œWe’ve had this conversation before. Don’t sell yourself short,” said Nick. “You are where you are because of talent. Otherwise you wouldn’t have survived as long as you have.”
    â€œI know. Luck is only as good as what you do with it,” said Root. Still, there was no way to get around the fact that his career rested on the pillar of an accident.
    In the years after pulling himself together, Josh got a job teaching at a small college near Portland, Oregon. The problem was he was bored. He hated it. He talked endlessly about changing the political system. He often went on a rant at faculty meetings. He had failed to change the system from the outside and now all he did, it seemed, was complain. When one of the other faculty members laughed at him and told him he should run for office, Root filed papers in a bid for a seat in Congress. For months it was the standing joke on campus.
    Josh found himself up against a seven-term incumbent from a solid Democratic district in the party primary. His opponent was so invincible that the Republicans didn’t even bother to field a candidate in the general election. As far as they were concerned, the man was anointed.
    Then two weeks before the primary, political fortune ran its errant fingers through the golden locks of Joshua Root. The incumbent did a face plant into his chicken Kiev at a fund-raiser in Portland. The man died of his heart attack before the peas had run off his plate.
    As the only surviving candidate on the primary ballot, and with no opposition in the general election, Josh found himself with a ticket to