Suddenly, with one mighty bound, it was a dark and stormy night! Hold
on a moment… How did that sentence end up in this story? I always pick clichés
out of a text before I publish it with a special fork designed for the task.
This one in fact: Ψ. Any isolated cliché that resists forking can be destroyed
by reversing its polarity; but that’s easier said than done. More often than
not, attempting to reverse the polarity of a cliché is like trying to get magma
out of a heart…
Thornton Excelsior finally
stabbed himself in the back once too often. Not with a fork but metaphorically.
He has absolutely no loyalty to his future self, feels no empathy at all for
the Thornton of tomorrow, his chronological successor, in the same way that his
previous self, the Thornton of yesterday had no loyalty to the Thornton of
today. He regards his future self as a being completely separate from himself,
as little more than an unlovable neighbour.
This doesn’t mean that he
ever bears him malice: he simply has no particular interest in that fellow’s
welfare. “I don’t care about the man I’ll be tomorrow,” he would say, “and why
should I? Does he care about me? Of course not!” And so he lived
in a manner that might be regarded as reckless or irresponsible but which in
truth was perfectly consistent with reason and logic. For we aren’t the
same person tomorrow as we are today: this is real philosophy.
Everything about us that
makes us what we are is mutable and transient. Our atoms, memories, location in
spacetime: all are subject to constant change. Thornton Excelsior was no
exception. But he acted in accordance with this insight, rather than simply
acknowledging it as an intellectual fact that had nothing to do with his daily
routine. Whenever he considered his situation in the world he realised it was
the fault of a stranger, an unfriendly individual.
And that individual was his
previous self, the Thornton of yesterday, who had unloaded onto him, the
innocent Thornton of today, all the worries and responsibilities that he should
have dealt with himself. Why should the Thornton of the present accept this
burden? It was nothing to do with him. And so he too would pass it on: to the
fellow in the following day who shared his name and identity but wasn’t really
him, the Thornton of tomorrow, an unsuspecting fool.
In this manner, Thornton
kept putting things off.
Unpaid bills, awkward
confrontations, relationship problems: they were passed onto him from someone
else, his earlier self, even though he never asked for them and didn’t want
them. It was only fair that he, in turn, pass them on again, to his later self,
also a separate individual. Otherwise he would be taking responsibility for
issues that weren’t his. And the moment he did that, he would become a
pushover, a fall guy or patsy for all the prior Thorntons.
And yet he knew that one day
it would be impossible to pass the buck further. The very last Thornton in the
sequence, the Thornton who was living through the final day of his life,
wouldn’t have anyone else to unload the accumulated burden onto. He would be
forced to sort it all out himself. Poor fellow! But why should the Thornton of
today care about that? The Thornton of that final day didn’t care about him.
Unreciprocated sympathy is degrading.
But something had gone wrong.
It turned out that the Thornton of today was the last one after all: this was
the final day of his life. He was dying rapidly. Extreme old age was the cause,
and the stress of worrying about dealing with all the problems that had been
put off until now made a tangible pain in his chest, a clenched fist that
throbbed and burned inside him, a displaced hand of doom. Those other Thorntons
were traitors, ganging up on him!
He considered his
predicament frantically but carefully.
There was only one way for
him to avoid the accumulated responsibility and that was to stay alive until
the next day. It was almost eleven o’clock, one hour to midnight. If he could
only survive those sixty odd minutes, his present self would be safe and free:
the Thornton of tomorrow would have to deal with the crisis, not him. With
grasping fingers he picked up the telephone and dialled the local hospital. “I
need a doctor! Send him immediately to my sickbed!”
“No doctors are available at
such short notice, unless…”
“I am a man of great wealth
and dubious taste. I can pay millions, do you hear? Millions! But he must be an
ethical doctor. Ethical. This is very important. Your best ethical
doctor!”
“Very well. We will send him
by powerful motorbike.”
And so they did, bless them.
The doctor arrived five
minutes later; he pulled off his goggles and hastened to Thornton’s side,
checking the dying man’s pulse, respiration, blood pressure and bank account.
“Are you an ethical doctor?” mumbled Thornton during this process. “I once had
dealings with two members of the medical profession, a pair of rogues, Vaughan
and Frazer they were called, and they were most unethical. I don’t need
the kind of attention doctors like that can offer me. What are you?”
The newcomer stood erect and
saluted smartly. “I am Dr Heelsnap Pinktoes, the most ethical doctor this side
of bashful modesty. No doctor in history has been quite so ethical.”
Thornton was satisfied. He
explained his predicament and bewailed the landslide of tasks and
responsibilities that had crashed down onto him from the past. Then he
indicated the clock on the bedside table, uttered the words, “Until midnight!”
and fell back exhausted on the pillows. Dr Pinktoes clucked his tongue, opened
his medical bag and pulled out a contraption that resembled the collision of a
thousand giant metal spiders. “Will that thing really prolong my life?” rasped
Thornton.
“Prolong your life?” Dr
Pinktoes was bewildered. “I don’t know anything about such matters. I don’t
deal with health but with ethics. I’m an ethical doctor, which is what you
asked for.”
“Yes, but…” Thornton was too
weak to protest properly.
Dr Pinktoes lowered the
contraption onto his patient’s bare chest. It adhered there, held firm by some
strong electromagnetic or gravitational field. The multiple mechanical arms
uncurled: they were extendable tentacles. A control was adjusted and the device
hummed.
“The circuitry has been
attuned to the frequency of your soul. These arms are operated by thought
alone. Use them wisely.”
“But my health…” wheezed
Thornton.
Dr Pinktoes answered primly,
“I am not here to fix your health but to cure your ethics. I am an ethical
doctor. There is no time to lose: you know what needs to be done. I suggest you
do it.”
Thornton grimaced. Then he
made a decision. The arms waved like the legs of an inverted beetle. Suddenly
they speared through the open window, diverged out into the world, reached over
houses, snaked out of the city and over the moors and oceans to other cities,
entered rooms and offices. They paid unpaid bills, soothed mistreated
girlfriends, cleaned dirty dishes in sinks, picked up dropped litter, wrote
letters to neglected friends. An entire lifetime of deferred tasks. And then—
The clock struck midnight.
Thornton Excelsior was dead.
Thirty thousand previous
Thorntons, one for each day of his life, stared hard from the past at this moment. Then they pointed at the corpse and laughed, billowing the mists of time.
“I can’t believe he fell for
it. What a loser!”
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