The Prisoner - Carlos J. Cortes [153]
Russo looked good—still as helpless as a newborn, but with a seething resolve to speak. Halfway through one of their long conversations, Floyd had mashed the tip of a banana and given him a tiny morsel on the tip of a spoon. Russo had kept the mush in his mouth for an inordinately long time, shifting it from right to left, his eyes narrowed as if in a trance. Later he offered a weak smile before mouthing a single word: “Ambrosia.”
Laurel reached for Floyd’s hand. “We can live only one day at a time, and a day is all we have.”
“I meant—”
“I know. You meant us, and that requires time—time we don’t have. Yet. We’re strangers. How long have we known each other? Four days? Five?”
“Six.” Floyd put a hand around her shoulder and drew her closer. “I know all about the acceleration of emotional processes in the presence of impending doom.”
“I know you do, and I’ve done my best to exorcise any thoughts of continuity from my mind. I don’t want to engage in pyrrhic dreaming exercises about what might be, when chances are we’ll be dead tomorrow.”
“But dreaming marks the difference between us and other creatures in the cosmos.”
“You got it,” Russo said.
They both turned toward the couch where Russo lay. He’d removed his dark glasses and was looking at them with remarkably bright eyes.
“Why does a blade of grass push its way through scorched earth in the middle of a battlefield? Chances are it will be obliterated by the next blast, but it will still try. We’re not that different from any other creature except we can imagine, dream, and hope. Emotions are what keep us alive.”
Laurel stood up and padded to Russo to fluff up a cushion under his head and offer him a drink of juice. “It’s very bad manners to eavesdrop on other people’s conversations.”
“Then you should keep the volume down.” He sucked on the straw and attempted a smile. “But you’re right inasmuch as it makes little sense to plan certain things around the unknown. You’re nice people, and the species is rare, probably heading for extinction. Later, if there’s time to be had, you should spend it learning about each other.”
“What would you do if there were time?”
Russo smiled. “Here we go again, daydreaming.”
“That’s one of the things we do best as a species,” Floyd said. “Please don’t tell me you’ve not given a second’s consideration to the possibility of winning.”
“Touché. If by the fickle hand of fate we pulled through, I would attempt to set up the machinery to oversee the hibernation system.”
“Revenge?” Floyd asked.
“Not at all. The past is gone and the future has not happened yet, hence we cannot travel to either, or undo it, or recover any part of it save through dreaming. To seek redress would serve no purpose. Laurel spoke about pyrrhic dreaming, and vengeance would be indeed a pyrrhic exercise.”
Laurel caught the odd glimmer in Russo’s eye and turned to Floyd in time to spot his frown.
“By pyrrhic you mean pointless?”
“I’m sorry.” Russo chuckled. “This is the problem of our era—to append imaginary meanings to the things we don’t understand instead of simply asking for an explanation. Pyrrhus was a Spartan king who won a battle against the Greeks at the cost of losing his entire army. Pyrrhic means a bitter victory: a victory won at such great cost to the victor that it is tantamount to a defeat.”
Floyd nodded. “You have a point. We find it difficult to simply ask for an explanation of something we don’t grasp. In my job, I know from the halfhearted nods I get from patients or their families that they don’t understand anything of what I’m saying, yet they seldom ask me to clarify.”
“Do you like your job?” Russo asked.
Laurel turned to Floyd. It was a question she’d often thought of asking him and never had.
“I can help people.”
“You’re sidestepping the question,” Russo said.
“I keep forgetting you’re a lawyer. Yes, I like my job. I only hope that more resources will be allocated to basic research on the mechanics of hibernation.