Sue Civil-Brown - The Life Of Reilly

Jack put his hands on his narrow hips. “I thought you had a poker game?”

Zed smiled. “Was just getting ready to leave.”

Right, Jack thought. And people complained about his curiosity.

Zed returned in thirty seconds with a carton of sour cream. “Keep what you don’t use,” he said. “Seeing as how I can get more when I buy more spuds.”

“Thank you,” Lynn said.

“Yeah, thanks,” Jack said. “Your game?”

“My game?” Zed blinked. “Oh, yeah, my game. Wouldn’t want somebody else to get at Hester first because I didn’t show. See ya later.”

After his footsteps vanished into the sound of the surf that was only a few blocks away, Lynn asked, “Does Hester know they’re playing for her?”

Jack reached for a spoon to use with the sour cream and passed both to Lynn. “Probably. There aren’t a lot of secrets around here.”

She nodded. “Makes sense.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “You think so?”

“Why not?” she asked. “Human attraction is largely random anyway. It’s a matter of pheromones—whether the other person smells like a viable reproductive partner. And we don’t even know it. At the most basic level, it’s about whether proteins in our brain are open or folded, a largely random function of precisely where the potentiality wave collapses into a point particle. So why not turn it over to the deal of a card?”

Jack looked at her, trying to find words. “Umm…”

She laughed. “Sorry. I go over the top sometimes.”

“It’s just that I’ve never heard love spoken of in such…cold terms.”

“Noooo,” she said. “It’s not cold at all. It’s quite beautiful, in fact. The universe deals to each of us in turn, random shuffling at the Planck scale, and yet we’re responsible for how we play every card we’re dealt. It’s a mathematical and ethical symphony beyond imagining.”

“Planck scale?” Jack asked, then shook his head. “Never mind. How’s the fish?”

“Fantastic! I don’t think I’ve ever had fish this fresh.”

“It came in on the boat this morning. One of the perks of living here.”

For a little while they were quiet, enjoying the food and the deepening tropical evening. As the last of the daylight faded, two citronella candles in clay pots provided the illumination. If there were any mosquitoes on the island, Lynne had yet to run into them, but the candles drew the attention of an equally successful pest: moths.

With her chin resting in her hand, she watched as Jack gently waved them away, saving them from death by fatal attraction. She couldn’t help but find it touching; surely he was the first person she’d ever met who actually cared what happened to a moth.

“These fellows,” he said as he waved them away, “are harmless, though not particularly pretty. It won’t be long though before the real butterflies start emerging. The colors are glorious.”

“That would make a great class project for my younger students.”

“Just don’t kill them to examine them.”

She sat up a little straighter. “Observation without interference?”

“Exactly,” he said. “You can catch them alive, look them over, then let them go.”

“You realize, of course, that observation without interference is not even theoretically possible,” she said. “Heisenberg? Schrödinger? Wave-particle duality? Double slit experiments? Any of this ring a bell?”

“Umm…you’ve gone into that other language again.”

“That was English,” Lynn said. “Well, Heisenberg and Schrödinger are German names, but still…it can’t come as a shock to you that we change the universe whenever we look at it.”

“When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you?” Jack asked.

“Well, that’s Friedrich Nietzsche. He was a philosopher, not a physicist.”

“Is there a difference anymore?”

Lynn smiled. “Touché. When we start to look at the most fundamental building blocks of the universe, we do tend to blur that line, don’t we?”

Jack shrugged. “I really couldn’t say. I don’t know all that much about it. But listening to you…well, I’m reminded of some of our more esoteric conversations back in seminary. How many angels really can dance on the head of a pin, and the like.”

Lynn felt the flush rise to her cheeks. Maybe it was the wine. Maybe it was the shock of a dinner invitation on the heels of Delphine’s visitation. “I’m sorry, Jack.”

He held up a hand. “No, don’t be sorry. I have to say, I’m fascinated. Truly.”

Fascinated. That was a word that could mean a lot of things. Some of them purely intellectual. Most of them not. The latter could be…dangerous. Very dangerous.

She sighed.

“Something wrong?”

Lynn shook her head. “Just tell me to hush when I start babbling about things that sound too weird.”

“On Treasure Island?” he asked with a wink. “Trying to define weird here is like stepping into a tar pit.”

“But—”

“Lynn,” he interrupted, “just be yourself. Don’t try to impress me, because you already have. And don’t try to play to my expectations, because I don’t have any. If I’d wanted to be surrounded by staid, ordinary, never-risk-looking-weird people, I’d have stayed in Connecticut.”

He waved his hand over the candles again, sending a few more moths back to the safety of the shadows. She took the opportunity to study him, really study him. She’d spent most of the evening avoiding directly looking at Jack except in brief glimpses. The interface of observer and observed was never more apparent than in human interaction. All her life, she’d had a strong tendency to watch people, to examine every movement, every facial tic, every shift of the eye or the posture, looking for cues to their thoughts. It had consistently made people uncomfortable, to the point where she’d trained herself not to look at people directly. That had grown into a shyness that had plagued her through childhood and into the present day.

Right now, however, she decided he was an attractive man. Person. Not a movie-star type, but handsome enough in a laid-back sort of way. His face seemed to want to smile, and laugh lines decorated the corners of his eyes and etched the edges of his mouth. The sun had bronzed him, nothing surprising here in the tropics, and left his brown hair streaked with blond. Almost a surfer look in a way, except his eyes held so much more depth.

That was when he realized she was staring at him. To her astonishment, he didn’t squirm. Instead, he smiled, revealing great teeth. “You look like you’ve never seen anyone push moths away from flames before.”

“I haven’t.”

He nodded. “I actually find it an interesting paradox. God gave most creatures a desire to live and the means of survival. Then we have the moth, who seems willing to immolate himself just to approach the light. One would think the heat would warn him off.”

“Not if he can’t feel it.”

He nodded. “Or…if the light is so beautiful the moth wants to approach at any cost.”

Instinctively, she looked into the candle flame. “It is beautiful.”

“And for the moth it is at once a desirable goal and a deadly trap.”

She glanced his way. “Are we talking metaphor here?”

“Why do people always think I’m speaking in parables?”

“Maybe because you’re a minister.”

He laughed at that. “Sorry, I was just marveling at one of nature’s oddities.”

“There certainly are a few of those. Although…”

She leaned on her elbows on the table. “Well, I shouldn’t I guess.”

“What?” he asked.

“The moths aren’t attracted to the flame.”

“Is that a fact?” His eyebrow lifted.