Page 8 of Here One Moment

Embarrassing.

I noticed my hair looked very nice in that photo.

Obviously that doesn’t excuse anything.

Anyhow, the phrase “fate won’t be fought” was my mother’s phrase, not mine. She was always saying things like that: You can’t escape destiny. It wasn’t meant to be. It was meant to be.

Supposedly that means she was a “determinist.”

Or so I was told by a bearded man at a dinner party in the summer of 1984. I do not remember his name, just his magnificent lush brown beard. He caressed it tenderly and often, as though it were a beloved pet curled up on his chest.

We were eating overcooked apricot chicken and undercooked brown rice in a blond-brick house in the northern Sydney suburb of Terrey Hills. It was a hot evening and our hosts had set up a rotating fan in the corner of the room. Every few seconds a violent gust of air whooshed back our hair so we resembled dogs with their heads stuck out of car windows and the bearded man’s beard flapped to the left like a patriotic flag.

It’s amusing, in retrospect, although as I recall, nobody laughed. We were young, so we took ourselves seriously.

I had accidentally shared a deeply personal story about my mother. I sometimes share personal stories when I’m nervous and drink too much and obviously both things are likely at dinner parties.

The story I shared prompted the bearded man to remark that my mother was “obviously a determinist,” as was he. Nobody knew what this meant, so he delivered a benevolent mini-lecture (he was a university lecturer, he enjoyed lecturing even more than the average man) while our hosts argued in bitter low voices over whether brown rice was meant to be that crunchy.

The idea of determinism, he said, is that everything that happens, and every decision or action you make, is “causally inevitable.” Why? Because everything is caused by something else: a preceding action, event, or situation.

Well. None of us knew what the heck he was talking about. He was ready for this. He made it simpler.

He said people can only act as they actually do. A murderer, for example, will inevitably murder because his childhood, his genes, his brain chemistry, his socioeconomic situation, his fear of rejection, the convenient proximity of a defenseless woman on a dark street corner, will all lead him, inevitably, to murder.

Someone said, quite passionately as I recall, as if we were speaking of a specific murder and not a hypothetical one, “But he chose to murder! He had free will!”

The bearded man said he himself was a “hard determinist” and therefore did not believe in free will. He had a grain of brown rice stuck between his two front teeth and nobody, not even his wife, pointed it out. Perhaps she thought it was causally inevitable.

This is what I wonder; this is what I would like to now ask the bearded man: If free will doesn’t exist, if all your decisions and actions are inevitable, are you still required to apologize for them?

Chapter 6

What the actual? The tendons in Sue O’Sullivan’s neck scream as she twists her head too fast to see what the crazy lady is doing now.

“Ow.” She faces the front again.

Sue is an emergency room nurse, a mother of five adult sons, and a grandmother of three beautiful little girls and four beautiful little boys. She is the sort of person who regularly says, “Heard it all, seen it all” because she has heard and seen it all, but this is the first time a stranger on a plane has calmly informed her she only has three years to live.

She wouldn’t have lasted long in her line of work if she took words to heart. She deals with angry, violent, distressed, drunk, high, and psychotic people every day. They spit terrible insults at her, along with the occasional sexually charged death threat. Water off a duck’s back. Sticks and stones.

She is, however, feeling the most foolish desire to run after this lady and demand another prediction, please. A nicer prediction.

Sue’s plan is to retire at sixty-six, not to die at sixty-six.

She and Max have never left Australia before. Sue hasn’t seen it all. She hasn’t seen a damned thing! A whole planet of castles and cathedrals, paintings and sculptures, mountains and oceans waits to be seen and admired by Sue and Max O’Sullivan. They’re feeling especially positive right now about their future travel prospects because if they can so successfully drive a camper van around Tasmania, why not drive one around France? Why not Italy? They can drive on the wrong side of the road! They’re pretty sure they can!

And now she hears there will be no trip because she is very shortly going to get very sick with pancreatic cancer.

The bad one. They’re all bad, but that one is really bad. Hard to catch early. Outcomes are not great.

It’s not true, of course, but it’s a chilling reminder that people with plans get sick. Specialists hand out cruel diagnoses every single day. Things that happen to other people can also happen to her.

“I think she’s doing predictions for the whole plane,” says the man in the aisle seat beside her. He turns to face Sue and she meets his eyes for the first time. It’s as though she has suddenly become a real person to him. He’s been an annoying seatmate up until now: wriggling and jiggling like a toddler, tapping his fingers on his thighs, avoiding all eye contact and making it very clear he is very important and very late (yes, Mr. Important Man, we’re all late!) and therefore not up for achat.

“Should we call a flight attendant?” Sue asks him, always best to keep Mr. Important Men feeling important by asking for their opinions.

“Maybe?” says the man, at the same time as Max says irritably, “Just ignore her.”

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