by
Michael DeStefano
Two travelers came from a distance, from opposite directions, to a rocky ridge overlooking a raging sea. A lighthouse stood several hundred feet off a rocky coastline. It still functioned, which surprised them.
Rex Hadley was a mathematician; Miles Halladay, an evolutionary biologist. For days—or was it weeks—Rex and Miles had reached a point when time and space tend to team up and play tricks; each had trekked over fluctuating terrain: deep ravines, rambling hillsides, green pastures that stretched unimpeded to the horizon, and hard cityscapes stubborn to change. Knapsacks strapped to their backs held intellectual property that had long since lost its relevance. Nevertheless, they guarded the contents of their packs as though it were material worthy of a time capsule.
When they began their respective journeys, neither Rex nor Miles had planned to bury their packs in the hope that what they contained would enlighten a generation born years beyond their deaths; each was an optimist who believed they had embarked on a pilgrimage that would lead them to a society still receptive to old wisdoms that once guided civilization. But the days had grown shorter, and the nights longer. What’s more, Rex and Miles had visited every known culture and charted civilization, were greeted with rejection, and neither had the foresight to bring along a shovel. What they had in their packs would die with them.
“The Enlightenment was a European initiative,” they were repeatedly told. “Why should an entire world align itself with the ancestral wisdom of only one place?”
“Every great idea begins with a majority of one,” Rex and Miles had submitted at each stop along their respective journeys. “And if everyone benefits, why should the origins of an idea matter?” But the nights were getting longer for a world growing increasingly accustomed to living in darkness.
As they came upon the rock that overlooked the sea, a glint of recognition flashed in each man’s eye. Yet until today, Rex Hadley and Miles Halladay had never crossed paths. But kindred spirits need not have had history to know and understand one another. As they neared the rock, each took a moment to examine the other’s weathered complexion, shaped by the road and the life of a road-weary itinerant.
“I just happened to be in the neighborhood,” Rex said.
Rex’s brand of irony was like music to Miles’s ear. He grinned broadly despite grieving for a world that long ago had abandoned its sense of humor. “Me too,” he said.
Next, Miles and Rex both sighed as they gazed down at a persistent sea crashing into a rocky coastline; the violent collision sent sprays of water that died before reaching the cliff.
An irresistible force meeting an immovable object is an eternal paradox. But nature is indefatigable; she repeats herself over and over again ad infinitum, and thus the sea crashes, ebbs, gathers its strength for another charge, and crashes into rocks as old as time itself. Neither grows weary. The billionth wave was no less enthusiastic than the first, and the rocks remain an ever-accommodating destination.
For a period, Rex and Miles stood and watched the process in silence. Not because it was beautiful. Not because it was wondrous. But because it was reliable. Waves crashing into rocks, like many of nature’s collaborative aspects, mark a fusion of science and insanity: It offers no standard deviation, and yet its captive audience is everyone who has ever lived. And thus it wasn’t the potential for variation that kept Rex and Miles enraptured—their respective disciplines taught them that a lifetime isn’t long enough to detect evolution—it was the concept that, while humanity may stray, there exist universal constants and precepts that could beckon their return.
“Did you intend to end up here?” Rex asked Miles.
“I’m not sure I had intentions other than walking until I ran out of room, or encountered a fellow traveler,” Miles replied. “And now here I am, having killed two birds with one stone. Guess it’s my lucky day.”
“Looks like we’ve got company,” said Rex, pointing to a lighthouse still in operation. “It used to be a job for a loner. Lord knows what sort of wretched soul would banish himself to a tower off a coastline nowadays. Incidentally, I’m Rex Hadley, in case anyone was wanting to know.”
Miles couldn’t resist the rhetorical question: “Were you a comic, Rex?”
“Quite the opposite,” Rex replied. “I was, am, a mathematician. Unfortunately, numbers can do many things except the one thing that 21st-century intellectuals and politicians needed then to do: Lie. What’s more, numbers aren’t particularly adept at coddling feelings or tilting facts to support ideologies irrespective of where they originated. That’s not to suggest that the world didn’t always appreciate a good warm and fuzzy bedtime story, but we reached a point where it wanted nothing but, and I remained a stubborn old sonofabitch who couldn’t abide.”
“Don’t feel too sorry for yourself, Rex,” Miles began. “No sooner had you received your unceremonious eviction from polite society than I was right behind you… shouted into silence and then pushed out the back door. I’m Miles Halladay, by the way. I like to think I’m still an evolutionary biologist. But irrespective of who or what I believe I am, it won’t change the fact that I symbolize the baby that got thrown out with the bathwater, or the mirror that kept reminding the wicked witch of the truth.”
And so there stood two men on a rock overlooking an angry sea, staring at a lighthouse at the end of the world; two souls who walked holes in their shoes because it would have sickened them to align with the theories that formed postmodernism; two road-weary souls who don’t know the meaning of the word surrender.
“It’s a funny thing,” Rex began, deciding that sitting on the rock was more comfortable than standing, “I was never a man of faith nor had I any religious conviction.”
“But…,” Miles said, urging Rex to finish his thought, even though he could finish it himself.
“If a species as susceptible as ours is gonna smirk at the concept of the Omnipresent and get rid of five thousand years of revealed wisdom, it had better be damn careful about what it replaces it with.”
No sooner had Miles sat beside Rex and added to his lament than they spotted a figure exiting the lighthouse. Now erect, they watched the figure untie a rowboat, nimbly take hold of the oars, and steer it ashore. Several hundred feet down the coastline, where the rocky terrain ended and gravel and silt began, marked the destination. The figure dragged the boat far enough inland so that there was no danger of the sea claiming it, then located a path. Before long, the figure ascended to where he revealed himself to be a man, bald, spectacled, petite, and with an asexual affect that made him suitable for his job.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” he called out when well within earshot of Rex and Miles. “I was beginning to think you were never gonna show.”
“You were expecting us?” Miles incredulously intoned.
“Of course I was,” the man replied.
“And you are…” Rex demanded to know.
“The name’s Rex Hadley,” the man readily chirped.
“I beg your pardon,” Rex said, clearly not amused.
“If you prefer,” the man began as one might when offering an accommodation, “you can call me Miles Halladay.”
Frothing with suspicion, Miles asked, “How do you know our names? And more importantly, neither Rex nor I trekked all this way to be greeted by a trickster.”
“My dear sir,” the man said to Miles. “I’m afraid you don’t understand. I am you.” Shifting his gaze toward Rex, he said, “And also you. In fact, I have had many names. Why, just in the last century alone, I’ve gone by the names Bernard Marx, John the Savage, Winston Smith, Howard Roark, and John Galt. In other centuries, you might have known me as Thomas Moore, Socrates, Tommaso Campanella, or Nathaniel Hawthorne.”
“Sir,” cried the mathematician, “are you purposely talking in riddles? Because I promise you—and I’m confident that I may speak for my companion—we are in no mood.”
“I assure you that my intention was not to trouble you with a puzzle, as you have walked a great distance. I promise I shall speak with more clarity. But first things first,” the man said before reaching into his pack for a bottle of aged Macallan Scotch and three glasses. “We must toast your arrival.”
The spirit had restorative powers; each sip melted away a leg of an exhausting journey. Finally, the man said, “There’s a line that encircles the middle of our Earth. I’m not referring to the equator or the prime meridian; it’s an abstract line called ‘the median.’ Since the beginning of recorded history, thirty percent of the population has been below the line; thirty percent has hovered above it; and thirty percent has made the median their home. However, as my grandfather used to say, ‘A funny thing happened on the way to the forum.’ With each passing century, we crept closer and closer to the median until finally the median became the initiative, a magnet for every two-legged organism, and Heaven help you if you didn’t grab it firmly and with both hands. Of course, I don’t have to remind either of you two gentlemen of the consequences of a world that rejects maximal expertise and competence. Anyway, the ‘equality of outcomes’ initiative couldn’t have occurred without a giant assist from a technological boom that reduced populations to mindless minions and dutiful compliers. But I would be remiss to lay it all at the feet of a boom that did manage to bring some benefits; other factors also mattered. For example, I remember how you all thought that political correctness, in its infancy, was cute—nothing with which to concern yourselves. But then you took your eye off the ball. Before you knew it, that adorable infant grew into an unruly teen whose agenda was to hasten a moral panic and meltdown around every race, social issue, and form of justice. When it reached adulthood, the entire corpus of human history was paraded before a glare so harsh that it made it impossible to reconcile the fact that history is complicated because those who lived through it were complicated. And trust me, gentlemen, there will be no swift reckoning for a world consumed by the notion that the past, in totality, made a collective victim of the future. The work will be hard. Perhaps even impossible…”
“…And you expect us to do this work?” the evolutionary biologist interjected.
The man narrowed his gaze. For one so slight in stature, he looked uniquely menacing. Then he told Rex and Miles, “Many of the world’s greatest achievements began with a society of two. But fear not, gentlemen; other brave souls will break free and find their way to this summit: Galileo, Columbus, Curie, Orwell. They won’t bear those names, naturally, but you’ll recognize them nonetheless.”
“Where are you off to?” Rex and Miles called to the man. Desperation resonated in their entreaty, for they had many questions.
“Back to work,” the man replied as though nothing could be plainer.
“You haven’t told us your name,” Rex and Miles reminded the man.
The man stopped and pivoted. His mouth creased into an ironic smirk. Then he said, “I’m the man in the lighthouse at the end of the world.”
“Wait,” Rex and Miles called. “You forgot your glass.”
“No, I didn’t,” the man said, then pointed into the distance.
When Rex and Miles turned, they saw a figure emerging in the twilight dim.
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