Zarathud Could Not Find His Certainty in the Lot Behind the 24-Hour Pharmacy

It was 3 a.m. on Syaday, the 5th of Confusion, and I was in the lot behind the 24-hour pharmacy because the pharmacy was open but I was not buying anything. Some lots are like that. Open all night, for no one. The kind of place where the lights stay on out of habit, like a man who keeps clearing his throat in an empty room.

A single sodium lamp worked. The other four did not. I want to be honest about the count, because the count turned out to matter.

He was on his hands and knees in the one good light, patting the asphalt with both palms, the way you search for a dropped contact lens or a tooth.

I knew him at once, the way you know things at 3 a.m. — without evidence and beyond appeal. Zarathud. The hermit. The apostle who renounced. The old monk from the Principia who heard the Sacred Chao laugh and laughed back, who looked at everything he had been certain of and let it fall out of his hands on purpose.

He did not look up. He said, "I had it right here."

What He Had Lost

"Had what?" I asked.

"My certainty." He kept patting the ground. "I set it down. Eleven hundred years ago, give or take. I was so sure of throwing it away. That was the last thing I was sure about. I have been looking for the sureness of the unsureness ever since, and I cannot find the edge of it anywhere. You don't get to be certain you've stopped being certain. That's the whole trick. Nobody tells you that part."

I said the lamp above us was the only one still working.

"Is it," he said. Not a question. He was the patron, I realized, of the moment the question mark falls off the end of the sentence and rolls under the car.

"There were five," I offered. "Lamps. Now there is one."

"So four went dark and you noticed the one." He sat back on his heels. Under the sodium light his face was every color and no color, the way faces are under those lamps. "That's not the Law of Fives. That's just you, counting in the dark, deciding the dark means something. Which" — and here something almost cruel, almost tender, crossed him — "it does. It does mean something. It means you were counting. Write that down. You'll get it wrong."

The Thing He Found

He found something then. I heard the small scrape of it.

He held it up between two fingers into the light, and it was a bottle cap, dented, ordinary, from a soda nobody makes anymore. He turned it like a relic. On the underside, where the prizes used to be printed, it said, in letters too small to be fair: KALLISTI — and under that, Sorry, Not A Winner. Please Play Again.

"There," he breathed, with enormous relief. "There it is."

"That's not your certainty," I said. "That's litter."

"I know," he said, and he was beaming now, beaming like a man who had walked eleven hundred years to be told Not A Winner by a piece of garbage and find it the funniest, kindest thing the universe had ever said to him. "I know. Isn't it perfect? I came all this way to find I'd been right to lose it. The only thing worth being sure of is that I was right to stop. And I can't even be sure of that. And that's the prize. That's the whole prize. Please Play Again."

Then he laughed — the laugh from the book, the one the Chao taught him — and the sound knocked the second lamp back on, and the third, and I turned to count them, and when I turned back the lot was empty and open and lit for no one, all five lamps burning, and on the asphalt where he'd knelt there was a bottle cap, which I did not pick up, because some things you leave for the next person who is open all night for no reason.

I drove home. I am still not sure I should have. That, I am told, is the point.

Hail Eris. Lose it on purpose. Please play again.