Moral Hazards

Peter Bell felt the wind whipping about him as he stood, tips of his shoes peeking over the edge of the roof, silk necktie flailing weakly at his face. He looked down at the road below, a dozen stories below, at the body there, at the rivulets running across the pavement like red ink.

There was a tear in one eye, but Peter told himself he felt no sadness, only satisfaction. Another soul saved. It was just the wind. He wiped the tear away with a flick of his little finger, then folded up the rectangle of white paper and stuffed it into the inside pocket of his jacket.

The pedestrian crowd eddied around the body, unhesitating, as brisk as the stock market, moving with the velocity of money. Jumpers these days elicited neither horror nor anguish--there were too many now, their motives too plain--but rather a kind of jaded indifference. Only one or two passersby glanced idly upwards.

Peter waved down. He doubted they could see.

What dreadful accounting a leap like that must have taken, back before, what despairing economics would conclude the only thing life had in bottomless supply was pain, that each wrong was a debt that would never be repaid, that life itself was a liability. They knew better now, knew the value of each falsehood or injury, could calculate with exacting precision what each life was worth.

It was a cold decision now. What finally shoved them off the edge these days was not despair, but the invisible hand of the market. One way to clear your accounts, wipe out your debts and make a quick exit from the business of living.

The clatter of feet behind him, hands on his elbows and shoulders, guiding, insisting him away from the precipice.

“It’s okay,” he reassured them with a smile. “I’m fine, really.” He gave them each a business card: Peter Bell – Indulgences.

He was fine. Everything was fine. Really.

The card met the usual looks of distaste and calculation. Curiosity too, wondering what had burdened the dead man’s soul, and more to the point, how much it had cost to unburden it. Peter could already guess which ones would call or text him, later, when they were alone, depositing their digital confessions, wiping clean their moral balance sheets.

For this was the truth that Peter carried in his pocket, sharp-edged like a crisp sheet of paper: If there is a merciful god, then all things are permitted.

Peter took the stairs back down to ground level, not the elevator. Needed to feel something solid under his feet. He’d known the man, if only professionally: An indulgence salesman, like himself. There but for the grace, and all that.

Twelve stories didn’t sound so far to fall, but Peter gave up counting the steps after a hundred.

He stopped at one landing, pulled out his phone and flicked through the contacts. Adam, Christian, David, Elijah, Faith. Gabriela. His finger hesitated over the name. Then stabbed down. Switching the phone off. He stuffed it back into his pocket.

The crowd had thinned to a trickle by the time Peter reached the ground floor, making their way towards the business district. A horn honked, loud and shrill nearby, making him jump.

He turned and walked hurriedly in the other direction, against the flow, shouldering around busy briefcases before descending the steps down into the earth, into the subway station. He didn’t drive any more, not since, well. Not for a long time.

It was a long walk, but not too taxing. Worth it to avoid the businessmen, who were wealthy enough to be truly dangerous. You never knew if today was the day some stockbroker decided to trade his future for a sniper rifle and the ultimate golden parachute.

Another change. The safest parts of the city were the slums. Even stealing was a luxury the poor couldn’t afford.

He passed through the metal detectors at the station without incident. On the subway, he forgave a young boy for stealing a comic book, a mother for wishing her terminally ill mother-in-law would die. Two more slips of white paper joined their mate inside his jacket, and his wallet sat a little heavier in his pocket.

Indulgences. Guilt wiped clean at very reasonable rates. It was an old, medieval practice enjoying a veritable renaissance in the new economy. Something for the well-to-do to buy when they hadn’t done quite so well: Each piece of paper represented a sin forgiven, sentences in purgatory commuted.

Provided you could pay the price.

The restaurant was in a converted church--there were a lot of them now, the market for their traditional use now being somewhat shrunken--soaring arches propped up by fluted columns and bubbly good humor, a steady trade in borrowed jokes and feigned interest carried out beneath low-hanging lanterns and in between clinked glasses of imported beer.

Peter watched Gabriela over the top of his glass, now half-empty. In contrast to the surplus of merriment around them, their table was as quiet and still as a boardroom facing bankruptcy. A pool of quiet amid the conversational ouroboros. Gabriela ran her finger around the rim of her wine glass, tracing a slender, silver halo.

“You’re rather quiet tonight,” she said. “Something you need to get off your chest?”

He smiled thinly, and sighed. “It’s been a day.”

“Aren’t they all?” She looked at him speculatively. “You’re thinking about California again, aren’t you?”

Gabriela was a good friend, had been for, oh, longer than he could remember. She knew him, uncannily well sometimes. She was right; the guy on the building, the other salesman, had made Peter think, had taken him down into warehouses of dusty history he’d rather have left undisturbed, their shelves bulging with regret, compounded by time and guilt.

He’d traced Highway 1 on its winding, twisting way south along the coast. Peter had been driving. He had, hadn’t he?

Peter lined up the blunt, plastic cutlery on his plate, wishing his thoughts could be as dull, or else for a knife sharp enough to cut them free, like the silverware restaurants used to give you. Memories like counterfeit tears stung his eyes.

“Just tired,” he said. “Guess I failed this little stress test.”

A waiter drifted by and pointedly refilled their water glasses, silently urging them to go. Peter gave the man a bland smile. Why not? It cost him nothing.

“How about you? Keeping busy?”

“Things are quiet now, but I expect they’ll pick up soon.” Gabriela’s finger was back to its endless Mobius progression, a narrow line creasing her forehead. “You’re not nearly so good at pretending as you think, you know.” Her voice concerned. “You of all people can’t go on like this, Pete. Encouraging their misery, charging them rent for it, as though the whole world owes you an apology for what happened.”

“The job helps.”

“Oh, I know how much it helps; I’ve seen the receipts.” Gabriela snorted and shook her head. “I know why you keep at it, too. There’s one person you want to sell an indulgence to, but He’s not going to ask for one, Pete.”

“That’s blas--”

“Then sell me an ‘I’m sorry’ note and you can forgive that, too.” Gabriela tossed her napkin onto the table, and pushed her wooden chair back. The legs squeaked on the floor, like tires on wet pavement. Like a child’s finger bones clawing at his spine. “Look, Pete, I’m going to be away for a bit. A work thing. Take some time, think about what I said, okay?”

“I will.” Peter told her retreating back, fingers around his drink.

“I will,” he told the bottom of his glass.

Peter stepped out into the night air, coat tucked under one arm, the past wrapped snugly in the embrace of alcohol. Unearned respite, perhaps, but he’ll worry about that debt when tomorrow morning made it due.

He let the drinks and the evening crowd carry him along, buoyed by this artificial euphoria, slaloming among the chest-high bollards that separated the pedestrians from the traffic, up to the steel gate at a crosswalk.

The lights changed and he started across, muzzily amused when a car screeched to a halt in front of him. It was low and sleek, its side entirely taken over by a mural of a leaping whale, with a large dent in the front fender. Peter wondered how the driver had gotten it to screech when there were half a dozen mandatory technologies that prevented you from going fast enough or close enough to anything to allow it.

A window wound down, revealing the driver and the sobering black muzzle of a gun aimed straight at Peter. He fumbled for his wallet, stammering gibberish promises, impossible IOUs.

“Get in.”

Peter got in. And was slammed to the back of his seat as the car rocketed away from the intersection.

The driver was short, young, curly black hair, unshaven. Eyes oscillating between Peter in the windscreen, steering wheel clutched in two sweaty hands that jerked it erratically around sedate sedans and self-driving buses, their proximity alarms blaring and slamming them to a halt as the sports car tore past. Too young to afford this machine, Peter thought, too young for all the bribes it must have taken to strip all the safeties from it. Someone’s son, perhaps, or else some crypto-currency speculator.

“You sell indulgences?”

That was a question that could go one of two ways, Peter knew. Was this someone looking to buy, or someone looking to pay back? Either way, the man was spending far too much time eyeing Peter, for too little watching the road. “What does it matter?” he hedged.

“Yes or No.”

The pistol was dumped carelessly in the space between the two seats, on top of a small, brown leather bag, forgotten. Peter briefly considered picking it up, but what did he know about guns? Be more likely to shoot himself than scare the driver.

The car fishtailed around a corner, Peter’s side coming uncomfortably close to the steel tree-trunk bollards lining the road.

“Yes, I do,” he gambled. “You want to pull over, maybe we can talk about what you need.”

“Can’t do that, can’t do that,” he man was swinging his head wildly from side to side, the car veering sharply with each shake. “Can’t do that. Need you to sell me one now. Sell me one now. Now. Debts all coming due. He’s calling them in. All of ‘em.”

“Sure man, sure, whatever you need,” Peter fumbled in his coat pocket, looking for a scrap of paper, anything to write on. A nut, Peter bet, best idea would be to give him what he wanted and get out. He slammed his eyes shut as they passed inches in front of a mirror-silver bus. Found something. The indulgence, the jumper’s. Peter turned it over, pressed it to his knee and pulled out a pen. “Whatever you need.”

“How much do I need to tell you?”

“Well, your name. The category.”

“Details?”

“No. No details.”

“Marlowe. William Marlowe, with an ‘e’. It was an accident.”

“Like I said, no details required.”

“I hit a kid, okay? A goddamn kid.”

“Okay.” It was okay. It was. He should say no. Accidents happened. He should say no. “Okay.” Peter tried to remember how letters were formed, the stock market squiggles of the M and W, tried to remember how abstract lines added together to make words and sentences. Memories rebounding now, flooding his brain into chaos. This was a different accident, a different kid, he told himself. He should say no. This accident was nothing to do with him. “Okay.”

“We good?”

No. No, he was pretty far from good. “Yeah.” Thrusting the paper in front of the man’s face. “We’re great.”

The car started to slow, the man’s face transformed into a look of beatific peace. “How much?”

“Fifty K,” Peter blurted. There were charts, tables, great volumes of actuarial science behind the value of a life, but he was damned if he could remember a single one of them. He had no idea.

“There’s a hundred in the bag,” nodding down to the brown leather satchel between the seats. “Take it.” The car skidded to a halt on a darkened street, no other cars in sight, traffic sensors on either side hooting in alarm as they stopped in the middle of the road. The man picked up the gun, waving it in Peter’s direction. “Take it and get out.” Still smiling. A man at demented peace with the world. “Now.”

Peter grabbed the bag and fumbled for the door latch, half-tumbling from the car and skinning his palms on the asphalt. He twisted to look behind, half-expecting a gunshot that never came. He rubbed his hands on his pant legs, partly to relieve the pain, partly to get them clean.

“Enjoy it while you can,” the man called, yanking shut the door, yelling out the open window. “He’s calling all his debts due. It’ll be your turn soon.”

“Well, bless my soul, if it isn’t Peter Bell.”

Peter found his hand being pumped by a smiling man in a black suit, black waistcoat, deep purple tie. A freckled, ginger-haired man, bearded. Cigar held in the other hand. A smile that was all teeth. “Heavens, this is my lucky day. Big fan of your work, Pete.”

For a moment, Peter could think of nothing to say. His hand, still pinkly-skinned, was starting to hurt. “You are?”

“Christ, yes. That jumper on Queen Street? And then that banker’s kid? Beautiful work, just beautiful.”

“That isn’t the usual reaction.”

“Oh hell’s bells, people just don’t know what’s good for them, do they?” The hand clasped around his own was tugging insistently now, the cigar jammed into the corner of the man’s mouth as the other hand gripped Peter by the elbow. He felt himself being slowly propelled towards the patio of a nearby bar. “You’ll let me buy you a drink. Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

The rest of the tables were empty. A blank-faced waitress took their order.

“My friend here will have a blue angel. A red devil for me,” he flashed his grin again.

“I don’t drink,” Peter protested, but the woman was already gone.

“What’s the harm, Pete?” The red-haired man leaned back in his chair, puffing on the cigar. “Indulge yourself.” He exhaled, then breathed the smoke in through his nose.

Peter watched the slow circulation of carcinogens in the silence that followed. The waitress seemed in no hurry to return with the drinks. Peter pushed his chair back scraping on the patio stones. “Look, I should be--”

“California still got you all busted up, huh?”

Peter froze, half out of his chair. He sat down. The man’s eyes crinkled at the corners with merriment, an eyebrow cocked in expectation.

Peter suddenly felt hot. Maybe it was the sun, reflecting off everything, the metal table, the chair, the railing of the patio, like he was an insect under a magnifying glass. “How do you …” He swallowed. Where was the damn waitress with the drinks? Where was anybody? The bearish growl of traffic was gone, the tramp of feet bulling through the noontime sun, gone. “Did Gabriela send you?”

The man chuckled, shaking his head with mock pity. “Oh Pete. We just know, you know?”

“No. I have no idea.” It seemed as though the world had shrunk just to encompass the two of them, everything else around melted into an indistinct molasses smear by the heat emanating from all around him. Peter remembered what the crazed man in the sports car had said, about debts becoming due. “He tried to warn me, the other night. He was running from you, wasn’t he?”

The red-haired man batted his eyes innocently. “The wicked flee where none pursueth.” He hunched forward, suddenly serious. “Cards on the table time, Pete. Full disclosure. Bumping into you wasn’t an accident. Fact is, Pete, I want to cut you a deal. You’ve got debts, too, just like the kid, but I’m not here to collect. I could use a guy like you. I’d like to offer you a job.”

“I already have one.”

“Sure, sure, sure,” nodding and dismissing at the same time. “Long hours, no retirement plan, a boss from hell. This job is killing you and you know it. Jesus Pete, there are alternatives.”

When did it get so hot? Peter undid the top button on his shirt, reached two fingers in to loosen the collar. “Alternatives?” he repeated. “What do you mean?”

The other held his gaze, head tilted to one side. He took a long haul on the cigar, red halo blazing greedily. Peter recognized the expression. It was the one he used when marks played dumb. “C’mon Pete …”

Peter felt himself shaking his head reflexively, unable to form the words.

“Don’t pretend to be so shocked,” chided the other. “Good lord, you practically work for us already. Those little inky scraps of paper are enabling every vice, sin and crime people have ever thought of. Can you honestly say you’ve never thought about working for the competition?”

“The competition,” Peter whispered. “No. No, I sell redemption, not damnation.”

The man snorted and rolled his eyes. “Please, Pete, sin isn’t the problem anymore. Look around you: It’s forgiveness that’s fucking things up.”

“I do good work.” He nodded, that made him feel better, more confident. “We’re flawed beings, without forgiveness we’d all be doomed.”

“Ah, but that’s the thing, Pete. Divine forgiveness is crowding out the more human variety. It’s merging with reflection, remorse, responsibility even. No room to doubt that what you’re doing is forgivable when you have a little piece of paper saying yes, it absolutely, positively is. It’s elastic, too; the higher the supply of forgiveness, the higher the demand.”

“More people sinning? Isn’t that what you want?”

“Are you kidding me? Post-scarcity salvation is precisely what we do not want,” the man threw up his hands in theatrical despair. “I’ll be frank: We can’t compete with unlimited mercy. Your guy has a monopoly. Soaking up all the excess evil you folks have sloshing around, every last drop of wrath, greed, envy, gluttony, sloth, pride, and lust too, the very grossest of your domestic products.”

“And guilt?” He couldn’t help it. A wet and winding road, the crunch of metal, the shattering of glass, a mother’s scream. Himself the victim and perpetrator both, the victim of chance and the one who’d actually been at the wheel.

“It was an accident, right Pete?”

“It was.” It was, he told himself, it was. Half believing it, half not. Feelings were never as simple and straightforward as words on white paper or the arithmetic of business, they merged and spawned new subsidiaries: accusatory self-loathing, fury at being made to feel self-loathing, shame that such feeling was justified, all co-existing in uneasy equilibrium. “It was an accident.”

“If you say so. How do you forgive something like that? How do you forgive yourself?”

As to the first, the answer was simple: With a black pen and a paper across your knee, in the passenger seat of a speeding sports car. As to the second, the answer was: You didn’t. These days, you didn’t have to. “It was, though,” he heard himself say aloud. “It was forgiven.” Loathed himself for saying it. “I won’t help you damn anyone.” Knowing he himself had done precisely that, and aware of how feeble it sounded.

“Who said anything about that? All we want is a level playing field, my boy. No guarantees, no free lunches, just each man and their conscience. That’s fair, isn’t it?”

“Is it?” Peter was trapped. Caught between wanting a clear conscience and not wanting to be the kind of person who needed to clear their conscience, between the self that insisted he had done nothing wrong and the self that knew he had, and that craved absolution. He could give it up, give it all up, but that would mean admitting his work was a mistake, a fraud, that he still had to pay for that instant in his life, on a misty seaside road all those years ago.

Tear off the bandage, and risk finding it was all that held you together.

“It is. It is fair,” Peter nodded, and felt the world give way beneath him. His own voice seemed to come from very high above him. He closed his eyes and felt himself falling, falling, falling through mist and fog, back down towards that bend in the road. And snapped them open before he hit. “But I can’t. I can’t do it.”

The man sat back in his chair, with a rueful smile, as though he’d expected Peter to say that. He reached into his jacket with two long fingers, and placed something on the table in front of Peter. A familiar white square of paper. “Well Pete, if you won’t work for us, then I was kind of hoping we could buy you out.”

They’d cuffed him to his seat for the flight to California. Well, of course. The stewards had cuffed everyone. Best not to leave flight safety to the mercy of strangers; crashes did terrible things to the airline’s bottom line. Fabric-lined cuffs up in Business Class, rather than the plastic zip ties in Economy, but still.

The airport rental had a GPS, a speed limiter, automatic braking if you got close to anything, lane-keeping sensors that would take over the steering wheel if you drifted too far, and a kill switch that allowed the agency to shut the engine off remotely. Peter had to slow the car to a stop and have a two-minute conversation with a rental agency operator before the car would let him pull off onto the shoulder near a sharp turn just south of Carmel.

Peter stepped out into an early dawn fog rising from the ocean. The crashing waves reached him dimly from the bottom of the cliffs below, the cyclical boom and bust of surf pounding on the shore. He had to search through the filmy haze for the stone vase and its long-withered flowers, nestled against one of the guardrail posts.

He knelt beside it, and brushed away the small dunes of sand that had collected about its base. Fumbled blindly in his pocket and took out the paper the man at the bar had given him.

“What are you doing here?”

He turned at the sound of the voice. Gabriela was there, a vague silhouette wreathed in feathers of fog, hands stuck deep into the pockets of a long white coat.

He held up the paper. It fluttered like a dove in the cool wind. “Come to pay my debt,” he said.

Gabriela huffed once, a sharp exhalation of breath. “We’ve been through this. It doesn’t mean anything, Peter,” she said tiredly. “It’s just paper.”

Peter nodded. “Maybe,” he turned, lifted up the vase and placed the indulgence under it. “Didn’t sell this one, though. I bought it.” Still facing the vase and the guardrail, wiping the sand from his hands on his pant legs. “Paid everything I have. I’m done, I quit. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? I’m getting out.” He stood, looking at the guardrail, and beyond it, the dark, endless sea. Took a step forward, one leg over the guardrail, then the other. “Made a deal with someone. Don’t expect you to understand.”

When her answer came, her voice sounded hollow. Far away.

“And why do you think we would oppose him in this?”

Peter turned back, frowning. “What did you …” Trying to puzzle through the meaning of her words.

“He wants you dead, we would rather you live, but on one point we are agreed: This ends now Peter,” she went on, her voice echoing strangely in the fog, coming from all around him, as harsh and jagged as the stones below. “Wealth is not a substitute for conscience, and atonement with the expectation of reward is not real atonement. Mercy is a gift, not something that can be earned.”

The words buffeted him like the wind. Peter felt his hand slipping on the mist-wet rail. He looked down. “Why bother then? Why try at all?” His back still to her. The blue-black waves beckoning to him.

“It matters that you care enough to try.” Gabriela’s voice softened. “It might not all be suffering. Who knows, Peter? No promises.”

When he turned and looked up again, she was gone. He was alone. There was only swirling mist, and a blurry silhouette flying far overhead.

He stood at the edge of the cliff for a long time, clinging to the guardrail, looking down at the half-hidden waves and jagged rocks, wondering if he was going to jump. Wondering if he wasn’t.

As he waited, the rising sun warmed the air, and the mist thinned and faded into nothing. As it had done on countless other days, as it would do again, with or without him standing there. The blank canvas of the sky offered no answers, and the sun shone down as equally on Peter as anyone else.

He looked down at the vase, at its pathetic portfolio of flowers, and whispered: “I’m sorry.” He took a deep breath. “I made a mistake, and I’m sorry.”

The vase said nothing.

He climbed back over the guardrail, beeped the remote to unlock the doors, got into the rental. Took him ages to get back. It was a long road, and he didn’t really remember the way.