"It's not…"
"It is!" I yelled. "But let's put that aside for a moment. Suppose I do as you ask and steal other people's thoughts in order to capitalize upon them. We've already discovered that fucking around with fate can have disastrous consequences. You're asking me to potentially increase those consequences tenfold. How many lives could I screw up by doing that? How many people throughout history could I potentially fuck over?"
"Bill," She said carefully. "You would be helping yourself and your family by doing it. You wouldn't be hurting anybody you knew."
"Anybody I knew." I repeated softly.
"Right." Tracy agreed.
Fighting to keep my eyes on the road to avoid glaring at my sister and to keep my voice level to keep from scaring her too badly, I said, "Tracy, when I was a paramedic I worked for a corporation. A large, faceless corporation that was based on the East Coast. They owned ambulance companies all over the United States, in damn near every state. And do you know what their prime motivation was? Do you know what was behind every decision they made?"
"Money obviously." She said, not getting me.
"Right." I nodded. "Money. Legal tender. The almighty dollar. That was what they were all about, that was their focus. Capitalism at it's finest, right?"
She shrugged. "That's what everything is all about."
"Uh huh." I nodded. "It is. But you see, I was the poor slob on the bottom end of the pile, the poor slob that was just trying to scratch out a living in this huge corporation. A worker bee. And like a worker bee I was expendable.
"I watched what happens when some group of people or some individual is only looking out for itself. I watched what happens when someone said to themselves, 'nobody I know is getting hurt' and then signed a piece of paperwork that laid off thousands of people that he would never have to look at. I saw many of my friends lose their jobs and have their lives destroyed, saw them have to go on welfare and unemployment, saw them lose their houses, their spouses even, because some fucking bean counter in corporate headquarters decided that the company wasn't making enough profit in the Pacific Northwest division. They would have to have a 'reduction in force', or they would say that 'positions needed to be eliminated'. They were rich fucks up in some office building in New York throwing around euphemisms about firing people so they could show a few extra bucks on the stockholder report."
"Bill… I…"
"I've been on the wrong end of what you're saying Tracy." I told her. "I used to think about people that sat in office buildings, making decisions based on money that would ultimately destroy people's lives. You know what I used to think about them?"
"What?" She asked quietly.
"I used to tell myself that they'd sold their souls. That they'd given up morality completely in order to be able to do what they do and sleep at night. I used to swear that there was no way I could ever do such a thing."
I looked over at her. "What you are asking me to do amounts to selling my soul Tracy. I would be taking something from someone else in order to further my own cause. I will not do that. I'll invest in stocks that I know are going to go up and I'll make money off of that. Sure, those companies are doing all of the things that I've just described to their employees. But I won't be involved in that. I will never have to knowingly destroy other people in order to get ahead. Maybe that doesn't qualify me as a saint, but at least I won't be selling my soul, do you understand?"
She looked at me for a long moment, her eyes soft and maybe showing a touch of shame. Finally she nodded. "I understand Bill. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have brought that up."
But I wondered if she really understood. Somehow I didn't think she did.
Argument with Tracy aside, the Christmas break of 1983 ranks up there as one of the most enjoyable two weeks of either of my lives. I was in love and my love was being returned. It was the initial, realization stage of love, the time of discovery, a time that comes very rarely in a person's lifetime, never for some. It was a time that had never occurred in my previous life.
Nina and I saw each other whenever we could, doing whatever struck our fancy. We went Christmas shopping together, holding hands as we walked through the crowded mall. We went to movies together, cuddling against each other and occasionally sharing a kiss. We sat for hours sometimes just talking, reveling in the friendship that we shared and that we'd almost lost, just enjoying being together.
More than ever I looked forward to seeing her. More than ever I felt the pang of withdrawal when she could not make it over during the day or if she could not arrange to talk to me on the phone. These feelings were almost foreign to me, surprising in their power and depth. Nina made me realize how foolish I'd been in my previous life to ever think that I'd really been in love.
Even the feelings I once had for Lisa, my ex-wife, paled in comparison. Nina made me realize what a farce our relationship had been, how it had been a drastic mistake from the very beginning. Had I really ever thought I'd loved her?
Lisa and I had met when I'd responded to a call for a fall in a grocery store in South Spokane. Paramedics are automatically cynical of fall calls in grocery stores or other places of business. Usually what you find when you get there is someone who has accidentally or even deliberately come crashing to the ground and is seeing dollar signs in their eyes from a future law suit against the business.
Such was my attitude upon entering the Raley's store that afternoon. What I'd found however was not a fat welfare recipient with visions of a six figure settlement, but an attractive stocker who had gotten her ankle caught in a ladder while putting fresh merchandise on the shelf. She had fallen, twisting the ankle into an unnatural position. She was dark haired, dark eyed, and beautiful. Being the visually stimulated person I was back then, I was immediately intrigued by her, imagining what that body looked like under her uniform. I began my exam of her, coming to a medical conclusion in less than a second. Her ankle was swollen and angulated to the left. She was obviously in pain. Her face was scrunched up and beads of sweat were standing out on her forehead. Broken tibia and fibula. Nasty and painful but not lethal or crippling.
Paramedics often measure a person's personality traits by their pain tolerance. When a person whines and moans about a simple little cut on the finger, behaving as if someone had rammed a hot poker up his or her ass, that person is judged to be of poor character. But when a person has an obviously fractured bone and declines an offer of morphine to help ease it and even offers to drive themselves to the hospital as Lisa did that day, that person is judged to be someone to reckon with. I sat in the back of the ambulance with her that day admiring her character, and her looks. This was my first mistake, rating my future wife by the black and white standards of my cynical profession.
There are of course ethical rules against asking patients out on dates. That extends to taking phone numbers, names, or any other personal information from the paperwork for later use. However if a paramedic on lunch break should happen to choose a certain grocery store to buy his deli sandwiches, a certain grocery store where a certain stocker was now working as a checker in order to keep off her broken ankle, there are no ethical concerns in that situation. Over the next month I bought deli sandwiches for lunch every day. I bought them until I was so sick of them that I would drop them in the garbage can on the way out of the store and then head for Taco Bell or McDonalds. I always chose the line that Lisa was checking, no matter how many people were in it, no matter how empty the other lines were.