Conspiracies

"Whatever—it's something everyone of them should memorize by heart, and then take to heart."

"How do you memorize a razor?" Jack said.

Abe stopped sawing at the muffin and stared at him. He raised the knife in his hand.

"Occam's Razor is not a cutting instrument. It's an aphorism. And it says, 'Entities ought not to be multiplied without necessity.'"

"Oh, well, I'm sure that will make everything clear to them. Just tell them, 'Necessity cannot be multiplied unless you're an entity,' or whatever you said, and all talk about antichrists and aliens and New World Orders and Otherness will be a thing of the past."

"Why do I bother?" Abe sighed, glancing heavenward. "Listen carefully to the alternate translation. 'It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer."

"Fewer what?"

"Assumptions. If you've got two or more possible solutions or explanations for a problem, the simplest, most direct one, the one that requires the fewest assumptions, tends to be correct one."

"The shortest distance between two points, in other words."

"Something like that. Let me illustrate: You and I are walking down a country road in Connecticut, and all of a sudden we hear lots of hoofbeats around the bend. When we reach the bend, however, whatever was making those hoofbeats is now out of sight, so we must make assumptions on what they could have been. What's the most logical assumption?"

Jack shrugged. "A horse, of course. What else?"

"What else, indeed. But I bet that some of your friends in Paella—"

"SESOUP."

"Whatever—would probably imagine a herd of zebras of wildebeests, am I right?"

"Or UN invaders on horseback ... or hoofed aliens ... or the legions of hell ... "

"That far out we won't go," Abe said. He'd finished slicing his muffin in half and was reaching for the bag with the margarine. "Wildebeests will serve fine. But you see my point? We're in the country in Connecticut where a lot of people keep horses. I should expect wildebeests? No. Horses require very few assumptions.

Wildebeests, however, require assumptions like someone has been importing the creatures and keeping their existence secret—I don't know about you, but I haven't seen any stories in the paper about a black market in wildebeests. So Occam's Razor demands we assume, until proven otherwise, that the noise was made by horses and—"

Abe had pulled the Smart Balance from the bag and was staring at it like a wino contemplating a bottle of O'Doul's.

"What on earth is this?

"It's a kind of margarine."

"Margarine? So? What happened to my Philly? Or my nicely salted Land o' Lakes?"

"This is supposed to be good for your heart."

Outwardly Jack remained casual, but inwardly he cringed, waiting for the explosion. This was sacred ground. Not counting a few friends like Jack, Abe didn't have a hell of a lot in his life beyond his business and his food.

Yeah, he had every right to eat himself into an early grave, but Jack had just as much a right to refuse to shorten that trip.

"My heart? Who should be worried about my heart?"

"You," Jack said.

"And I suppose this is a low-fat muffin?"

"No fat, actually."

Abe looked at him, his face reddening. "Since when do you worry about my heart for me?" Before Jack could answer, he added, "Maybe I should worry about my heart, and you should worry about yours."

"That would be fine if you seemed to give a damn, but—"

"So now my doctor you've become?"

"No," Jack said levelly. He was acutely uncomfortable with this role, but wasn't going to back down. "Just your friend. One who wants you around for a long time."

Abe stared down at the Smart Balance, and Jack waited for him to toss it across the store. But Abe surprised him. He flipped the lid, peeled back the seal, and dug his knife into the yellow contents.

"Well," he said with a sigh. "Since there's nothing else ... "

Jack felt his throat tighten as he watched Abe spread a glob on the muffin. He reached across the counter and clapped Abe on the shoulder.

"Thanks, Abe."

"You should be thanking me? For what? For poisoning myself maybe? Probably full of artificial ingredients. Long dead and in the grave I'll be from chemical preservatives and toxic dyes before my cholesterol even knows I'm gone."

He bit into his muffin, chewed thoughtfully for a moment, then swallowed. He picked up the container and stared at it.

"This I hate to say, but ... not bad."

"Keep this up," Jack said, "and maybe someday you'll die of nothing too."

They finished their muffins in silence.

"Nu?" Abe said finally. "You next look where for this missing lady?"

"That's the million-dollar question. I get dizzy and disoriented whenever I talk to these people. They've got an elaborate answer for everything except where Melanie Ehler might be." He shook his head. "Isn't life complicated enough without seeing a conspiracy behind everything? I mean, why is everybody so into conspiracies lately?"

"Lately?" Abe said. "What's lately about it? Conspiracy theories have been with us since humans could organize thought. What were the first religions but conspiracy theories."

"You mean like Olive's Satan and the Antichrist conspiring to take over America?"

"No. Long, long before the Bible was dreamt up. Cavemen I'm talking. Hut dwellers. Gods were created to make sense of the seeming randomness of nature and everyday life. Why did the lightning spare the tall tree but strike my hut and kill my wife and children? Why did it not rain during the growing season, and then pour after the meager harvest? Why was my child stillborn? Powerful supernatural beings explain it all very nicely, so early humans created a pantheon of cosmic kibitzers—a god of thunder, a god of trees, a god of wine, one for each aspect of the world that affected them—and imagined them conspiring against humanity. You think these Finnan Haddie people—"

"SESOUP."

"Whatever—you think their conspiracies are elaborate? Feh! Look at the old mythologies—Babylonian, Greek, Roman, Norse—so rife with divine plots, either against each other or against humans, your head will spin."

Jack nodded, remembering tales from Bullfinch's in high school. "The Trojan War, for instance."

"Right. Gods conspiring with gods, gods conspiring with humans, such a mess. But no matter how many entities we humans created, the purpose was the same: When something went wrong, we had an explanation. Bad things happened because a certain good deity was angry or displeased, or an evil deity was at work. We might be at the mercy of these entities, but at least we've ordered the randomness, we've appended a name to the darkness, we've created symmetry from chaos."

"Sort of like the old fairy tale thing that if you know someone's name you can control them."

"Control is the key. Once we identified the deity, we tried to control it—sacrifices, chants, dances, rituals anything you could dream up was tried. And sometimes certain actions did appear to work. If slaughtering a lamb at the vernal equinox seemed to convince the deity to bring rain for the growing season—or stop the recurrent floods that were plaguing the area—suddenly a lamb was not such a healthy thing to be."

"But dead lambs have no effect on El Nino."

"They can seem to if the timing is right. And I'm sure knowledge of El Nino would have done wonders for the lamb population. Still, we now have to wonder what causes El Nino."

"UFO exhaust," Jack said. "I have it on good authority."

"Then someone should inspect those things. Fit them with catalytic converters, at the very least."

"Could also be CIA solar mirrors."

"The CIA," Abe said, shaking his head. "I should have known. But the point is, the effect of thousands of years of accumulated knowledge is a general pushing back of the darkness. As we discover more and more non-supernatural explanations for the formerly inexplicable, the gods and demons recede. The magic goes away. But—a certain amount of randomness remains."