Orientation Read Online Free PDF Page B

and the ocean’s salt taste inside his mouth. He runs, fleet and swift, the balls of his feet barely disturbing the sand and leaving no trail for anyone to follow.
    III.
    They were on a blind date, arranged by a friend she worked with whose husband knew him. They had been chatting in the wine bar, waiting for a table at a popular Italian café that did not take reservations. They had been waiting over an hour, but neither of them seemed to mind, and their patience was rewarded with an intimate table, tucked into an alcove whose windows looked out on a lovely lantern-lit garden. There were long waits between menus and ordering, between salads and entrées, but they both seemed to relish the leisurely pace, which allowed the conversation to carom pleasantly from subject to subject. This was her favorite part of a date, its first few hours, when the pretense of best behavior held sway and the blemishes of individual personality had yet to appear. So things were going well. But after they ordered dessert, the subject of movies came up.
    She told him about an old western she had just seen. The previous week she had been laid up with a stomach flu, unable to move or eat for days, and she watched TV the whole time. The hero was a cavalry officer, and throughout the movie he had been shooting Indians out of their saddles without batting an eye. But when he had to kill his lame horse, the hero—one of those archetypal western stoics—became hesitant and dewy-eyed.
    “His name was Ol’ Blue,” she said. “Or Ol’ Buck. The horse, I mean. And damn if I didn’t start crying. It’s nothing to watch people in a movie die, but when the horse gets it, I’m all weepy. Isn’t that awful?”
    “Not so awful,” her date said. “The Indians were the bad guys. You were supposed to not care. That’s how they made movies back then.”
    She nodded. “It still bothers me, though. People can die by the dozen, but it only gets to me when a horse or a dog is caught in the cross fire. You know what I mean?”
    “I do.” He leaned toward her. “I do know what you mean. But you see, dogs are innocent. People deserve to get it. The bad ones, anyway.”
    “I know,” she said. The flame of a candle flickered on the table between them. She watched the light play on his face. “Sometimes I worry that I’m hardened to it. Watching human beings die while munching on popcorn.”
    “I don’t think that would be possible with you,” he said. “To be hardened, I mean.”
    She twirled her wineglass, looked into it, and smiled. A comfy silence arose. Dinnerware clattered quietly around them. A siren in the distance rose and fell, rose and fell.
    “But then,” he said, “that would depend on the human being, wouldn’t it?”
    She asked him what he meant. Before answering, he reached for the wine bottle, topped off her glass, and refilled his own. He leaned back in his chair.
    “Let’s say you’re in a room,” he said. “In one corner there’s a dog, and in the other corner a man. A man who has killed without remorse.” He sipped from his glass. She waited, her mouth slightly open.
    “You have a gun,” he said. “Which one do you kill? The dog? Or the man?”
    She thought a moment. “That would depend on the dog,” she said. “If it was one of those yippy little lapdogs? I’d plug the pooch!” She laughed.
    Her blind date smiled. He carefully set his wineglass on the table. “Seriously, though. Which one would you shoot?”
    She sipped from her glass, held it close. “Well, then. I wouldn’t shoot either one. I would … abstain. That’s it! I would abstain.”
    “But you have to shoot one.” He leaned forward. “That’s the scenario. You have the gun. One of them has to die.”
    “I see,” she said. Here we go, she thought. The fork in the road. The diverging path. She looked out the alcove window. Moths pitched madly at the lanterns outside.
    “In that case,” she said, “if we have an animal and a human being,