Rape the gifted girls so the species might flourish.
It didn’t take much of a leap at all to conclude with Nietzsche: “Whoever must be a creator in good and evil, verily, he must first be an annihilator and break values. Thus the highest evil belongs to the highest goodness: but this is creative.”
Compulsory sterilization for mental patients, a la Woodrow Wilson’s polices in 1907. Genocide. Aborting kids with Down syndrome or cystic fibrosis. Physician-assisted suicide. Eugenics.
Why not?
Given the assertions of naturalism, all of this was logical, of course, but even most of the ardent naturalistic evolutionists she came across were reticent to go all the way down the eugenics road.
In fact, most of them were, ironically, strong advocates for social justice and medical advances, which, considering their assumptions about human origins, didn’t really make any sense.
But she actually gave those authors a lot of credit though, because even if they weren’t intellectually honest to their premises about human nature, they were honest to their hearts.
To the shell of good.
Because they knew what all people know-what even Hobbes, Huxley, Freud, and Dawkins knew-that some things are right and some are wrong, regardless of how beneficial or detrimental those things might be to our evolution as a species. Compassion trumps torture because compassion is good and torture is bad. Period.
But not everyone would be courageous enough to be that honest.
Nietzsche for example.
Or Hitler.
And that was the thing.
All it would take was the right person wielding the argument to the right people-She noticed the time.
1:56.
Dang.
Patrick was picking her up, like, any minute.
As much as she wanted to read more, she totally needed to get going.
She returned the books to the research librarian’s desk and hurried outside.
89
Tessa was waiting for me when I pulled up to the steps of the Library of Congress.
“How was your day?” I asked as she climbed into the car.
“I didn’t find what I was looking for. You?”
“No. Not yet.”
“How about that? We actually have something in common.”
Changing the subject, she told me she was starved, and since we still had a few minutes before we needed to be at Missy Schuel’s office, I drove toward food.
Up until then I hadn’t told Tessa about the meeting at 3:30, but now I explained that after we grabbed something to eat we were going to meet with the lawyer and then head over to a custody meeting with Paul Lansing’s lawyers.
She listened with uncharacteristic silence. When I was done and she finally spoke, her voice was edged with anger. “Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”
I’d anticipated her question. “I knew that if I told you, you’d worry about it all morning. I couldn’t come up with any good reason to ruin your day, so I waited. Trust me, I wasn’t playing games with you, I was just trying to keep you from being upset.”
She was quiet. “But you actually want me to come along?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“You deserve to be present. It’s your future we’re talking about.”
A pause. “It’s yours too.”
I wasn’t sure how to reply to that. “Yes. It is.”
It was a long time before she responded. “Thanks.” After a The Bishop moment she sighed. “This whole thing with Paul, I gotta say, I’m kind of annoyed at you.”
“Because I didn’t tell you?”
“No, because you took me to see him in Wyoming in the first place.”
“Hang on, you’re the one who wanted to meet him. I just agreed that you had a right to know who-”
“I know. I changed my mind. That’s why it’s your fault.”
“You changed your mind and that’s why it’s my fault.”
“Yes. It’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind and then blame someone else if things don’t work out.” She’d lent a lightness to her tone that told me she wasn’t really angry after all.
“I don’t think that’s exactly how the saying goes.”
“It’s the twenty-first-century version.”
“You just made that up.”
“Maybe.”
A moment passed, and her tone turned serious again. “You’re a good dad, Patrick. Seriously. I mean that.”
“Don’t worry. Things will work out.”
“No, I mean, whatever happens-” she began, but I didn’t want to hear her say anything more.
“Don’t worry,” I repeated.
She didn’t reply.
We grabbed a quick, very late lunch, and headed to Missy Schuel’s office.
90
7 hours left…
2:29 p.m. She had no idea how long she’d been straining against her bonds, yanking, yanking, trying to get free, but slowly, over time, more and more dirt had tipped from her back and loosened around her limbs. And now, as she wrenched her arm to the side as hard as she could, Riah’s arm nudged a little bit to the left. She yanked again. It moved more. Then she jerked her whole body as hard as she could, back and forth, again and again, and all at once, with a thick, solid squish, Riah Everson’s rotting left arm broke free from her body. For a moment she lay in stunned disbelief. Maybe God had given her an answer after all. Maybe. Maybe. Awkwardly, frantically, she smacked the corpse’s limb against the ground until the horrible thing cracked at the wrist and fell from the leather strap. And her right arm was free. Though the angle was working against her, she grabbed the arm and tried to fling it to the side. It took three tries, but at last she got it out of the shallow grave, giving her own arm more room to move. Then she got rid of the corpse’s hand. From the position her betrayer had left her in, it wasn’t easy to undo the gag, but at last she managed. Immediately, she gulped in a mouthful of sour air. The Dotracaine had worn off, and she vomited as she gasped for breath, but still, with the gag gone, she felt a rush of hope. She twisted her arm toward her head, reaching for the strap around her neck.
We arrived at Missy’s office.
Considering her hesitancy to have me attend the custody meeting, I’d expected her to be reluctant to have Tessa there as well, but if she didn’t like the idea, she hid it well. As soon as I introduced Tessa to her, Missy returned the diary. “I can only imagine how special this must be to you.”
“Yes, it is,” Tessa replied.
Missy took some time explaining that reading the diary had helped her better formulate the things she wanted to emphasize in the meeting today.
“I’ll draw attention to the brief nature of Paul Lansing’s relationship with Christie,” she said. “It was a short-lived love affair that lasted less than a month.” She nodded toward me. “During the last few months of your wife’s life, and ever since then, you’ve been Tessa’s caregiver-that’s more than twenty times longer than Paul even knew her mother.”
“That’s a good point.” Tessa let her eyes bounce from me to Missy as if she were looking for support. “That’ll help.”
“Yes, I think it will,” Missy said. “Also, Paul corresponded with your mother long after their relationship ended, yet never mentioned you or tried to find out if you were alive, so I believe we can show that he-”
Tessa shook her head, the reassurance gone. “I already went through all this with him. He’ll just say he thought Mom went ahead with the abortion.”
“Perhaps, but we’ll show that if he could find her, he could certainly have found you, or at least found out that Christie had delivered her baby. She never took any steps to keep it a secret from people, did she? That you were her daughter?”
“No. Never.”
I felt a shot of optimism.
Missy was the real deal.