Page 25 of Close Your Eyes and Count to 10

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MAVISALIAR

If you watch something on a screen and don’t see it with your own eyes, is it really happening?

Press Record.

Let other people decide if it’s real or not.

These days we never know, do we? What’s true and what isn’t?

Three figures emerge from an exterior hallway that leads to a glittering lap pool. The dim light dances on the surface of the water. The three move slowly, two of them struggling with the weight they’re carrying between them. Seen through this tiny rectangular screen, there are just shadows, all distinguishing features blacked out by the stormy sky.

One is slim, a woman, she moves out ahead. Says something. Her tone official, quietly commanding. The man closest to her is huge, tall and broad, muscular. The third is smaller, but lithe and quick on his feet, in shape, nimbler than the other man. They edge past the pool, knock against one of the loungers. A female voice cuts the darkness.

Be careful.

Then they move onto the grass and come to stand by the low stone wall.

The woman dumps her head in her hands, and the big man moves in to comfort her, her darkness disappearing into his. But she pushes him away. The third figure stands aloof, posture stiff. They all radiate a deep unhappiness, a kind of toxic sorrow.

What is evil?

Is evil doing something ? Or doing nothing ?

The woman speaks, the high wind whipping her words out to sea. The trees are starting to bend, and ripples move across the surface of the pool water. There’s a storm coming. A big one.

Nature knows how to clean house. It keeps trying, doesn’t it?

Mammoth hurricanes and cyclones, raging wildfires, a pandemic that kills millions, devastating earthquakes, tsunamis. Social media. Ha ha. That’s a joke—but not really. Has anything hurt us more? Has anything unstitched the fabric of our humanity more than the things that we have devised to entertain ourselves? Humankind destroys itself with brilliant creativity, but everything comes from mother earth, even technology. There’s nothing more brutally organic than the human mind and all its diabolical inventions.

The three just stand there for a moment. They look at their feet. They are statues. Frozen on the precipice. Finally, after long moments pass, the woman kneels beside the mound at their feet a moment and bows her head as if praying. Then she rises and nods.

The two men lift the load, heaving it with all their strength over the wall. The carpet unfurls and whatever was inside disappears over the edge. The wind is too loud to hear anything—a scream, a crash—but the skein of fabric flaps in the wind like a great flag.

They pull it in and fold it up into a square.

The big man crumbles. Even over the heavy wind, his wails can be heard.

The other two stand, unmoved.

What is the greater evil?

To commit a heinous act?

Or to do nothing at all?

The truth is rarely simple.

End recording.