Dual chimneys: owned by a storyteller. Neoclassical symmetry: an atheist.

Matt scanned the road, accidentally reading each neighbor’s thoughts as the car rolled by. Their opinions were embodied in the designs of their homes, proving to Matt that there was nothing so permanent as a stubborn idea.

Water filtration tank: a sign of both a conspiracy theorist and a nonconformist. He’s probably an idiot, too.

What about Trent? Matt ground his teeth and thought about his brother. Is Trent an idiot? He’s a nonconformist, for sure. Probably he’s both.

Some solar panels on two of the rooftops gleamed down at him. Matt was putting money aside so he could purchase his own array next year. It was his way of showing his neighbors how a real progressive acts. My house won’t look as conceited as the solar panel activists’ in this neighborhood.

It’s hard for your ideas to keep pace with the times. Alternative energy wasn’t important when Matt’s house was built, so he couldn’t have known to plan for it. And that wasn’t the biggest deficiency of his house. It was just the biggest one that he could afford to address. The whole structure was built on a foundation of patriarchy that he didn’t like trying to defend. He had ditches running along the property, which made it harder to talk with the neighbors. The front façade was flanked by imposing white porch columns. The sturdy columns lent a welcome touch of traditionalism. But Matt worried that they looked vaguely racist in the dark. He couldn’t fix those big problems, so he had to learn to live with them. Everybody knew about flaws in their home that they worked around. Everyone wished that their home, and therefore their life, could be more modern.

Matt drove slower and slower until he finally pulled over and walked out onto the median. This is how I can make a difference. In the manicured grass, a parade of campaign signs endorsed Ron Starr for congressman. Matt walked down the row and plucked them up. The soggy ground was leaving mud on his toes. It was annoying, and it made the signs seem more human, even aggressive. Matt didn’t have to feel guilty about uprooting them anymore. He dumped them into his car. Somebody honked, but Matt didn’t look into the traffic. The signs had been no more welcome than if pollution were killing the grass.

For the rest of the drive, Matt didn’t see anywhere to get rid of the signs. Anyway, I don’t have to hide anything from Trent. If he wants to pry, then that’s his own personal problem. Matt buzzed himself through the gate onto Trent’s driveway. A construction dumpster next to the house looked like a perfect place to deposit his stolen load.

While everyone else worked around their home’s flaws, Trent was an exception. He didn’t have to tolerate anything he didn’t love. Trent earned money as easily as breathing. Six months ago, Trent was remodeling his home with expansive windows. He had heard that social networks made privacy obsolete, and he decided he would believe it. He opened the front of his home with a full view to and from the street. Any passerby could watch him take his coffee. Recently, it was said that subtle privacy rules lived on in social networks after all, because people were careful to distinguish between strangers and friends and best friends. Trent was willing to believe that instead. The picture windows were removed, and an ongoing construction project was creating an expansive porch in their place, so Trent could live in view of the public when he wanted. Every time he got interested in a paradigm shift, he had the capital to chase after it. Meanwhile, Matt was stuck with his traditional closed house. If he wanted to participate in a blog or an online clique, he would be tightening his belt for years, to install his own public porch.

Trent lumbered off of his porch bench. He noticed the stack of trashed signs in the car’s back seat right away. He greeted Matt by congratulating, “I can’t believe you’re campaigning for Starr!”

Matt felt more acid in his smile than he had intended. “No, I’m not. Really. I pulled these up out of the ground on my way here.”

Trent leaned in to examine the back seat. “I should march you back there and make you set them back up.”

“Starr deserves it,” Matt deflected, and left for the porch.

Trent chased after him and chided, “You’re such a communist. Starr is going to win, and you’re going to waste your vote on someone who loves lawyers and hates America.”

Am I normally this touchy? wondered Matt. “I’m voting for Willow, even though he’s an idiot! You shouldn’t gloat. You’ll be sorry when Starr is in Congress and the country starts another war.” Jim Willow was a pacifist and an independent candidate who was predicted to win a 5% sliver of the vote. Ron Starr, his polar opposite, was a popular war hawk. According to Matt, he believed that foreign languages were a tool of the devil.

It was hard for your ideas to keep pace with the times: Matt would prefer to kick Jim Willow as soon as vote for him, but that wasn’t the way Matt’s house was shaped. When his house was new, there had been an unconnected mother-in-law apartment on the property. During the Vietnam era, he had built a bridge between the apartment and the main structure, as a gesture of peace. Because of that, Matt was stuck, decades older, voting for a pacifist. The peacenik architecture would ensure that his allegiance belonged to a radical like Jim Willow. Matt’s ideology during the sixties had been set in stone. Ideas like that could be a prison. But my friends have told me how freethinkers are always bridge builders.

Trent pressed on, “If you would go tear down your ridiculous bridge, and then add some patriotic cornice work, then you would be a Starr supporter too.” Matt thought about all the money that this suggestion would cost, and he felt his throat constrict. His hands and head weighed down his shoulders.

Matt stared across the street at the scaffolded husk of a new building taking shape. The owner was named Logan, and he lived inside, even though there was only a gaping hole where the roof should be. Charred remains of the old house still laid in the side yard. The fire had started in the den. Logan had been reading philosophy in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Then a transformative new perspective hit him like a bolt of lightning. His cigarette fell from his lips and ignited the library. The straight lines of the house’s frame were burned down to the foundation. Trent eventually remarked that Logan had been playing with fire, because no one should allow dangerous books like that in their home. Logan’s tastes were so changed that the new house he was erecting was defined by organic curves, a water feature, and an aversion to right angles. He was still exploring the ramifications of his ideas, hence the lack of a roof. There were a dozen ways that he might finish off the structure, so he waited to build it until he knew which design would complement his floor plan. In the meantime, Logan lived the life of a nomad, meekly exposed to all the elements and likewise the sharp barbs of his conservative critics. Matt felt that it was a burden just to watch this senseless sacrifice. Logan’s original home and his original philosophies had been beautiful, and Logan was foolhardy to have discarded them.

Trent complained, “The problem you’ll always have with your house is that you aren’t willing to make the changes that you know are right.”

The word “always” fell around Matt like a demolition. The improvement projects never end. Decades from now, I’ll still be fighting with the latest trends. All my time and money are falling into a black hole that doesn’t reward me back.

“You don’t even understand how hard it is to suddenly change your life like that,” erupted Matt. “You’ve been out of touch ever since you came into money, and no one gave you any common sense to go with it. I’d have to get some paper routes on the side just to have a chance at paying for my dream home. And what’s the most I could hope for? I could end up like you, shifting walls around more often than a funhouse. Or I could end up like Logan, living out in the rain because a traditional roof isn’t attractive enough.

“I don’t even like who I’ve become now! I’ve been dreading the election. I get defensive whenever someone argues with me about politics. My neighbors think it’s my fault there are ditches between our yards, just because my budget can’t help repair them. Then I’ve got to deal with your impossible standards. Who’s to say whether my plans are even moving me in the right direction?” Trent looked scared, just like when they argued as children. He shrugged. Matt caught his breath. “Our opinions take too much work to change. It’s time I started spending my energy on something more worthwhile. No more lost causes for me.”

Matt squared his shoulders. “I may not be able to afford an army of carpenters, but I deserve to be happy. From now on, I’m not doing any more introspection or remodeling. Right or wrong, I’ve always been safe and warm in my house, and I’m going to choose to be happy with it forever. I’m rich at heart, because I don’t need money to be comfortable with my life exactly the way it already is.”

Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.

Many of Jesus’ teachings were meant not to be understood. His parables were famous for disguising more than they revealed. I believe that hidden meanings are a pattern that is required of all Gospel teachings.

Life is full of hard truths. You can’t be a mature person unless you have learned a lot of pain and misery. The paradox is that God wants us to be mature, but he will only bestow on us love and joy. The resolution of this paradox is the doctrine of the adversary, which has been around since the Garden of Eden. God allows an adversary to introduce us to the pain and misery that God himself will not create.

The Gospel intends to teach people how to turn sorrow into joy, and it does that by teaching about the joy but not about the sorrow. The teachings only make sense to people who are already familiar with sorrow. An innocent person (as Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden) is incapable of comprehending either hard truths or Gospel doctrine. For that reason, someone can hear the same Gospel messages their entire life, and then suddenly understand a new meaning in them as soon as they have been prepared by negative experiences.

Parables like those in the Bible presuppose the presence of opposition but don’t educate us in it. The messages of the parables are hidden to the innocent. The way to unlock their meanings is to interpret them through the lens of personal injury and injustice.

Every inspiring lesson should follow that pattern. It should teach about God’s love and joy. The message will only be appreciated by those who need it, and it will be enigmatic to the rest. Teachers should not take it upon themselves to inflict fear or to exercise negative influences on their students, because that would be doing the work of the Devil, even if their intention is to help them appreciate mysteries of the Gospel. Instead, teachers ought to be patient for everyone to be exposed to their own hard lessons naturally when the time is right. (Sunday School teachers eschew this advice more often than you might think; the offending lesson is frequently a question that starts out, “Do you really believe that…”).

The way to progress through life is to attend both of earth’s Two Schools. First, learn about pain and misery, through the power of the adversary. (Hopefully this happens by accident and not by seeking out evil influences). Second, learn to appreciate the Gospel teachings that can dispel the pain and misery. Then repeat.

So the best way to drive like a transporter is to observe the speed limit. You can tell yourself that you’re driving like an action hero would–an action hero that is lying low. You’re showing that you’ve got the extra discipline it takes to perform at that level.

My wife and I used to be in the habit of driving exactly the speed limit, without exceeding it by even a fraction. We used to say that we were being superheros. The irony was fun for us.

I kept it up awhile because it turns out that I like the feeling of obeying the speed limit. There is real peace in knowing that you don’t have to be on the lookout for a cop.

If you wanted, you could draw a similar diagram that represents the plan as taught by other religions. The following is a Catholic chart of the Plan of Salvation. The soul must attain a state of grace, and then it is destined to go to Heaven when it dies. A soul that dies in a state of sin will go to Hell.

Along the same lines, the following is a simplified Hindu chart of the Plan of Salvation. The soul, which has always existed, reincarnates over and over, achieving higher stations in life, until attaining Moksha, which is liberation and oneness with Brahman.

Now permit me to follow a tangent. Each of those three religions has their own works of scripture, just as they have their own ways of choosing scripture. The Hindu canon contains an assortment of ancient texts, including a sacred body called the Smriti. An example of one of those works is the Bhagavad Gita. The present form of the Gita was the result of many revisions. Wikipedia says, “The entire epic went through a lengthy process of accumulation and redaction during roughly the 5th century BCE to the 5th century CE.” Eventually the revisions were complete, and the Gita is now believed to contain eternal truth. Other Hindu texts, such as the Puranas, were also incrementally refined over several centuries.

In the Catholic Church, doctrines are decreed by the Pope, sometimes after a decision by an Ecumenical Council. Such decrees are infallible. Anyone who doesn’t accept the dogma is a heretic and is subject to punishment. Before an official decree, the doctrines may be debated, but after a decree there is no more room for doubt.

The Mormon way to find truth involves personal communion with the Holy Ghost. A sermon in Alma 32 described how truths are learned through experimentation. By the results of the experiment, one can find different degrees of enlightenment. First, a truth that is part of the Gospel is a saving truth. Second, a piece of good advice that is not Gospel is less important, but is still an honorable truth. Third, a mere fact that has no saving power is what I call a trivial truth. Last, we occasionally encounter a falsehood, which is a complete lack of truth.

The Plan of Salvation diagrams for different religions mirror their respective methods for identifying truth. In other words, the way a religion judges souls is similar to the way it judges ideas. I know of only one scripture that hints at such a relationship between souls and truth; it’s a cryptic verse in D&C 93 that equates intelligence with truth:

All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence.

To take this analogy a little further, it seems that Judgement eventually comes both to truths and to souls. Mormonism holds that some truths are fundamental, saving truths. Those become stepping stones for learning more truths, and so on forever. Likewise, Mormonism holds that righteous souls live forever in the Celestial Kingdom and enjoy eternal increase.

There lies the answer to my question about why the Plan of Salvation is taught so prominently: it is a roadmap for finding the truth. Religions teach their respective Plans of Salvation as a subtle tool to help people internalize the rules for judging truth. Because of that, the diagrams don’t merely explain what happens after death, because the diagrams also change the way people view everyone and every idea around them. Teaching about ideas by allegorically teaching about heaven is rhetorically more effective than teaching about ideas directly. The Plan of Salvation is one of the most powerful teachings for altering behavior, in any religion.

It’s curious that symbolically our souls and our ideas share so much in common. I wonder if that means that we should consider our own lives to be embodiments of eternal truths. A person’s actions are expressions of that person’s individual truth. The influence of a person’s life proves the power of that truth. Such a truth would be too complex to define in a single sentence, but it could be defined by an entire life’s work. Each person’s truth would be unique, although it would be related to surrounding truths. Honesty and integrity could be defined by how faithful a person’s actions are to their essential truth.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if your entire life represented one grand truth? What if the purpose of your life were to learn what that truth is, and to live by it?

I have come to a different understanding. Hovering beings shining light, a miraculous ascension, to touch scarred hands and feet or to have my own ears ring with the sound of divinity’s voice is no longer the sign that I have become a good and faithful servant. Rather my new goal is to live a regular faithful life.

I do not think that the prophets have to see Christ to be a special witness of him. Nor do I believe that I have failed to live worthily if I never in this life stand in the presence of the Savior. I do not seek for signs or miracles, I only desire to strengthen my faith.

Christ used the same means of communication with God as we do. He prayed. Christ, in my belief, didn’t know that what he was setting out to do with his suffering in Gethsemane and his crucifixion would really result in the salvation of mankind. But he did believe in it. He had faith.

I have found that my own faith is far stronger than my physical senses. I could see, hear and touch evidence disputing the restored gospel or Christ’s role as the Son of God and Savior of the world but the witness of the Holy Ghost is a resilient force.

I can see the Savior in other’s actions. I can hear his voice as I study the words of the prophets and follow the spirit. When my life comes to an end I will know that each day I did the small acts of faith I ascended a little closer to heaven. So for now I’ll just keep working on that.

Instructions for tomb raiding, number 1: Act first, think later.

My first dig was for Mom. Hopefully she was glad to be receiving visits still, in her bungalow underground. Even if the dearly departed would have preferred privacy, I didn’t feel like I had much of a choice. I just dug and dug, and I didn’t dare stop, because when my hands stopped, my mind might start working. I worried what an angel on my shoulder would say. I was a little disappointed in myself for not being overcome with remorse. At the same time, I was a little proud that I wasn’t on the couch like an average guy, watching celebrities bare their teeth for reality TV. I focused on mustering up some sadness, to convince myself that I was still a good person.

Mom had been the strongest link between me and the rest of civilization. When I was an infant and my brother was two, my father ran off. Mom used to say that he returned to the zoo. I knew no other relatives. We had started fresh in Los Angeles after the divorce.

The glow from my phone showed me where to pry up the coffin’s lid. The corners of my smile involuntarily twisted upwards towards my ears. Even before this plan had stained my imagination, I had luckily ordered a “green” coffin, not a regular locked-down vault that looked like it was fortified against a zombie invasion. Did I have a devil on one shoulder protecting me but nothing on the other side? Lightheartedness is not an attractive quality in anybody who is kneeling at an open grave, opening a pocket knife. I was greeted by Mom’s ample balding forehead. Hi, Momma. I’m going to help you lose a tiny bit of weight. The next task probably would have been easier with a steak knife.

Instructions for tomb raiding, number 2: Do it for the right reasons.

Mom had been killed at the hospital, pure and simple. No, I couldn’t prove it was the hospital’s fault. It’s impossible to get doctors to brag about their malpractice hijinks. I was acting on a feeling, but it was a strong one—the kind that you follow into a cemetery in the middle of the night.

Mom had euphemistically called the hospital trip a “Club MD,” and she was sweetly reluctant to tell us what she was having done, explaining that her only goal was to end up naked with a doctor. She fell asleep for surgery and then: exit stage heaven. The death certificate declared she was taken by SUNDS, which is the adult flavor of SIDS. I had learned that less than five women per year fall victim. That sounded suspicious. It wasn’t like our family to accept anything so silently. I’d always pictured that she would live to be an ornery ninety, and then one day she’d mix up the gas and the brake, and dive into the YMCA swimming pool without ever leaving her car. Lately I’d been picturing her anesthesiologist, Dr. Palance, daydreaming about a yacht upgrade, carelessly injecting bouncing air bubbles along with Mom’s medication, until the air pressure exploded a heart valve. There was nobody alive who would tell me whether something like that happened, but I had a hunch that a Machine of Death could help. Mom never took the test while she was alive, so I was going to figure out her death prediction however I could. All I was asking for was a little card that said, “MEDICAL MANSLAUGHTER.” I’d wait for the machine to confirm my suspicions before planning what the doctors’ punishment would be.

Instructions for tomb raiding, number 3: You don’t fail until you stop trying.

I had butterflies like on a first date when I carried my baggie of flesh to the Machine of Death booth. I closed the curtains as far as they would go, and then some. When I shoved my spoonful of shoulder meat into the machine, I didn’t get an answer back. There wasn’t enough blood in the sample to get a reading. The machine wasn’t motivated to generate a death prediction for a cocktail of formaldehyde and ethanol.

Instructions for tomb raiding, number 4: Carve a thick steak right off the butt.

I’m indebted to a mortician for that gem. He thought I was a nice guy who was aspiring to study medicine. He thought that my interest in corpses was healthy. He got excited and asked if I wanted to see something interesting, and moments later I was applying denture cream to some bone shards so he could fasten them into the top of a cracked skull. I admit that I fantasized they were the remains of Dr. Palance. (One of his trust fund buddies caught him kicking golf balls off the green, and attacked him with a sand wedge).

We discussed how a body lies on its back while preservatives are forced into its hidden cavities. The pressure does a pretty complete job of cleaning out the arteries above the waist. Mom wouldn’t have felt guilty about scarfing fast food mystery meats if she had known how quickly an embalmer was going to fix her arterial plaque. But the weight resting on the buttocks usually prevents the cheeks from absorbing a full dose. So if you want to find a drop of real blood, you go check out the behind. Slice off a generous chunk so you don’t come up short like I had the first time.

Instructions for tomb raiding, number 5: Practice makes perfect.

Performing my second dig felt like watching a horror movie that had been remade with a bigger budget. I ordered a dark lantern online. I unfurled a tarp, so that I could remove the dirt without smothering the lawn. I did a stellar job digging. Even if Mom appreciated it, she wore the same impatient look on her face. She smelled like one of her trucker ex-boyfriends. I had to drag her all the way out to the surface this time. Sorry, Momma. Would you forgive me if I took up cooking, like you always hoped I would? I bought a blender the next day. The first recipe was not for eating: Mom’s fat soaked with saline. I noticed for the first time how creepy the sound is that a blender makes. The resulting protein shake contained the blood I needed. Don’t let yourself worry too much about whether I got the blender thoroughly cleaned up because I don’t cook often enough for it to make a difference.

Instructions for tomb raiding, number 6: You’re not alone.

By then I had done a ton of research about postmortem raids, as they were called. The scariest thing about people is how you can always find someone on the Internet who is way more depraved than you. One newsletter catered to professionals who recover death predictions from the dead. At first, I was insulted that the going rate was only $250 per order. Later I wondered whether the spare cash might be worth it.

I found crowds of postmortem paparazzi, especially here in Los Angeles, where the arid climate curbs decay. The online forums reported on Dr. Kevorkian’s death prediction: “CARDIAC ARREST, NO ASSISTANCE NEEDED.” Eartha Kitt’s postmortem read, “HOLIDAY BLOWOUT,” which makes sense when you know that she died on Christmas Day of colon problems. Michael Jackson’s heart was stopped by a combination of drugs, so there were stories that his card said, “DANGEROUS REMIX,” and competing claims that it was, “LACK OF RHYTHM,” but critics warned that these were all hoaxes, because his body was entombed in thick concrete. I noticed that no one had researched Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman yet, so I made a mental note to look for them sometime.

Instructions for tomb raiding, number 7: Fortune favors the bold.

I returned to the Machine of Death, victorious. The machine drank deep from my pink oblations. It spat out a white card. With my fingers shaking, it took me three tries to turn it over without dropping it. Its block letters screamed, “MALPRACTICE DURING ANESTHESIA FOR NEOVAGINAL REJUVENATION.” The machine became my new hero when I discovered the outright blame against Dr. Palance. The card alone wouldn’t hold up in court, but with this running start I could interview experts and amass research. Or maybe I could take a shortcut and hide a venomous spider in his car. I would need to find out what the other words meant. Mom’s shyness about the operation was now explained, since it was related to something sexual.

Instructions for tomb raiding, number 8: Beware the secrets of the dead.

With my fuzzy vision and pounding head, I didn’t dare try to count the beer cans on the bathroom floor next to me. My research had felt like a scavenger hunt in Hell. The bombshell was that a neovagina is different from a natural-born vagina, because a neovagina is surgically constructed during a male-to-female sex reassignment. Years ago, Mom had traded salami for roast beef! I scoured newspaper clippings and old photos to figure out what that meant. The evidence finally convinced me that Mom was my biological father. From the family history that I could piece together, Mom had undergone the sex change either right before or right after my biological mother ran off, (back to the zoo, as Mom used to say). The latest operation was meant to retouch her aging girl parts. I wondered why Mom could confide in me about the time she got sloshed and naked at a Cyndi Lauper concert, but she never talked about her switch. Whenever my eyes were closed, my imagination replayed the moment that I had pried up the coffin lid. This time my attention was arrested by Mom’s comically large mouth and masculine upper lip, not by the black mold spreading across her cheeks.

My older brother Simon was active in an Apostolic Pentecostal church. He had once even composed a sermon on the sin of cross-dressing. I hadn’t noticed Mom’s reaction, but in retrospect she probably didn’t shout, “Hallelujah, Lord!” I guessed that Mom might not like Simon to ever find out, and anyway, I knew that I didn’t want to be the one to bear the man-mother message. I didn’t plan on ever digging up Mom again, at least in the figurative sense. I dropped the idea of challenging the hospital in court.

Instructions for tomb raiding, number 9: Bury your problems and move on.

There was a different way to take my revenge. I left an envelope on Dr. Palance’s doorstep containing Mom’s death prediction and the demand, “Bring $10,000 cash to Ironhitch Cemetery, Friday at midnight.” I arrived two hours early and for one last time I opened the hole above Mom. Dr. Palance sidled up right on schedule. We didn’t talk, because as soon as he was within reach, I chopped the shovel down on top of him with my full weight. Then I squeezed him into the box with Mom. She finally got to sleep with a doctor. As dirt covered the pair, my chest started feeling heavy. After the earth was replaced, I accidentally paid my last respects by vomiting hot dog onto the grave. Hopefully Dr. Palance didn’t have a roll of money in his jeans because it was too late when I remembered the blackmail. The way I see it now, the money represented my virtue, which was lost to me forever, if it had ever existed in the first place.

Instructions for tomb raiding, number 10: You might as well cash in on your demons.

Regular life was boring after those raw hours in the cemetery. I kept having dreams about being trapped in a stifling traffic jam, until I dug an escape tunnel to the ocean, finding some rolls of cash along the way. My cure for the nightmares and for the boredom was to offer my services in the classifieds. Every week I’d exhume another stranger. Eventually I was established enough to join a trade association, but unfortunately the other members are mostly sickos. We like to say that our business is underground. I even pioneered a method to recover predictions when the deceased is encased in concrete. (I bring a masonry drill bit that’s 500 mm longer than the concrete thickness. Clients don’t need to know what the extra reach is for.)

Are you interested in learning the death prediction of someone you’ve lost, by any chance? Do you have $250? Then you don’t have to get your hands dirty. Here’s my business card: “St. Lazarus Grief Therapy & Gravedigging.” And don’t worry about me. As long as my hands stay busy with a shovel, I can still keep my mind from working.

“Power corrupts, to a point. Somebody said that absolute power corrupts absolutely. But he didn’t have any idea what he was talking about.” Mr. Seher watched his own hands gesticulating. “It’s the desire for more power that corrupts. So once you hold complete, absolute power in your hands, you don’t feel driven by your old appetites for fame or money. Every temptation is beneath you except the need to prepare the world for when you’re gone.” In the dim light, Mr. Seher’s gray hair and the whites of his eyes hovered in his chair. Below them hung a sagging downward smile. Folds of furrowed skin stretched out of his jacket from the collar and cuffs. His eyes were alert to the point of not blinking.

I preferred to steer clear of politics. With some resignation, I asked, “Am I going to find out that you have a messiah complex?”

The energy of those eyes seemed to hold the rest of the pile together. “If I cared what you thought, I would have avoided the subject. The truth is, I have been some people’s messiah. It’s been an enormous burden to me. I know that I’ve done things no one else has done.” His tone dared me to belittle this remark.

Every month I wrote a Community piece in the Courier Times, to celebrate an unsung local citizen. The paper had found someone who was about to turn one hundred and who had willed his property to a Livengrin rehab center. He lived next door to it in an overgrown hermitage. The editors loved to feature people in the sunset of life. I knew that there were only two types of subjects. I volunteered for these jobs because I loved meeting the first type: he would be an affectionate retiree. He would spin tales of true love and true loss. We would grin at each other and feel that Tuesdays with Morrie catharsis. He would offer warm advice, reinforcing the moral that the key to happiness was just to keep living life the way you already were. If the old guy played his part right, you would watch how the years slowly compelled him to recede in on himself, until by the end of the interview you had to remind yourself that this was someone who hadn’t already died peacefully in his sleep.

Instead, I was stuck for two hours with the other type. That’s the kind of person who rekindles my disdain for the forgotten outcasts of society. He’s a dinosaur who manages to get more outspoken every year, even though his opinions get less appealing. He doesn’t bother to protect the feelings of the younger generations. He stretches the truth to get attention. I was going to spend the interview trying to figure out why I was so eager to disregard this man, and trying to convince myself that it wasn’t because I was looking at the spitting image of my future self.

Practice had taught me that the best policy was to ignore the stuff I didn’t want to hear. I could stick to the script until my host took the hint. “Our readers are going to be thrilled to hear your history. Why don’t you tell me a story about something that changed your life?”

Mr. Seher grimaced at my posing but then chuckled as a memory emerged. He was resting in a high back, overstuffed armchair. Its psychedelic paisley upholstery was well past its prime. With every tremor it creaked like it held the weight of the world. The boxy room was heavily draped in powerful red hues, although in the twilight everything had turned to black. The walls further hid behind shelves and then stacks of crumbling books and newspapers. He reminisced, “When I was a young man, I had an overpowering fear of fire. I lived in a prairie home where the wildfires could be dangerous. In the summer of 1954, during a heavy drought, the fields started burning. Everything we owned was vulnerable. My family tried to light small fires all around our house, to create a scorched barrier that the larger fire wouldn’t cross. It should have terrified me, but the close contact with the fires restored my confidence. By working with back-fires I conquered my fear that day.

“That was also the last day that I was afraid I would die. Soon I had acquired the perfect means to learn about my death. I knew what the future held for all my friends too.” I caught him getting confused in his story. The first Death Machines were introduced only ten years ago. Mr. Seher didn’t learn how he would die until he was elderly.

“Not long afterwards, I took a friend aside with some news. I encouraged him to be especially alert the following day. He was fated to meet the love of his life. He took my advice to heart. I later learned that anxiety kept him up the entire night. The next day he was both alert and miserable. His expectations were his worst enemy. When he met his future wife, he froze stone cold, so she mocked him, and then he returned insults. Cruelest of all was the irony, because they despised each other initially. It would have been a cherished memory if I had never been involved.

“I wish that were the only time I spoiled an auspicious occasion. Whether I tried to meddle with love or sickness or chance, I was thwarted by the intervention of cunning Irony.” He spoke of Irony as if referring to a houseguest. I could imagine how it had appeared to him in palpable form, first in nightmares and eventually every day.

A sympathetic smile was my response to Mr. Seher’s odd confession. Unfortunately, he took that to mean that he could get away with spouting more philosophy. “Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have God’s job?” Maybe I had put ideas into his head by mentioning a messiah complex. At a hundred years old, I guess I couldn’t expect him to stay focused like an adult. “You might have the desire to help everybody in the world, and you would even have the means, but it would be horribly complicated to get right. People make it ridiculously hard to give them help. It’s as if someone constructs mazes to protect their weaknesses. If I hadn’t tried to improve on my friend’s relationship, then he and his wife would have been more satisfied.”

I thought I could frame the discussion by observing, “You’re tackling the problem of religion: to explain why God exists but he can’t fix our problems in the obvious ways we expect. So tell me what you think God would do.”

“Well, speaking for myself again, I knew it was tricky to interfere with fate. But there was one problem that I couldn’t ignore. Finding a solution was worth navigating the maze.” A normal person could never have taken himself this seriously. “The future was a time of fear. I saw it growing like a disease until the whole race, all our children’s children, eked out their stunted lives. And the Death Machine was the antidote.”

A smarter man than I would admit that my script had unraveled, but I didn’t give up. “Interesting! Can you share your death prediction?”

“I can show you where the first Death Machine came from.” Unbidden, he pointed to a silver jewelry box on his side table. It had the curious aspect of an artifact that belonged in either the distant past or the distant future.

“So it came from your pill box,” I ventured, hoping desperately that he wasn’t going to describe how the box was a gift from a big green comic book character.

“If ever Man was given a gift from God, that was it,” he pronounced, while he looked on the case as affectionately as if it were a boon companion. I made a mental note about the frailty of the human condition, and how the tiniest mental imbalance could mean the difference between sanity and hysteria. “It may not be much to look at. But I spend all my time savoring its influence. That’s the Oracle.

“The Oracle reveals the future and it reveals the past. I’ve immersed myself in it so deeply that I’m intimately familiar with the whole timeline of humanity. You know, humans haven’t changed much over the past 10,000 years, much less the past 500. But do you know the one thing that made all of us different from our ancestors?

“In contrast to ancient times, modern man harbored an unhealthy attitude towards death. This only changed with the Death Machines. If you plucked a Neolithic man from his surroundings and transplanted him here, you could teach him to read or use the telephone. But he would never have understood our former inability to accept death. It’s the reason we kept our armies of psychologists so busy. You saw our morbidity in video games. You also saw it in the heroic measures that doctors took to preserve life. And juxtapose that with the abysmal quality of life that some of those patients experienced afterwards. The hospital was a place of survival more than a place of wellness. Meanwhile, lawmakers wasted fortunes on protecting people from themselves. You saw yourself how, up until ten years ago, those priorities had become a canker, worse than any physical maladies.” I thought about how much our idea of health had changed since the Death Machines appeared. Within that short period, society had recovered from the cancers cataloged by Mr. Seher. It was surprising that I hadn’t noticed it earlier. The human obsession with death, once taken for granted, now felt unmistakably disturbing. “I saw the future myself. We were destined to become paralyzed by extreme caution. Our existences were shadows of what we were capable of. Our trajectory was so misguided that we faced a self-inflicted extinction.”

As Mr. Seher’s ideas filled up the room, the walls looked unreasonably cozy around us. The house had an air of being grateful to shelter this passionate man. I had stopped keeping track of whether we were talking about psychology, politics or religion. Out of generosity, I reminded myself that his rants still made sense to him, if not to me. Besides, I caught the glimmer of a method in this madness.

Mr. Seher continued, “You would think that if one prophesied of great opportunities for people, then they would live better and happier than before. But I observed how that fox, Irony, ensured that the opposite was true. The more natural reaction was to cling harder to life, and appreciate it less. We are a morbid species.

“So the only solution, however improbable, was the opposite. You had to put people face to face with Death. You had to dress him up as a clown, so to speak, and trot him out onstage. Ironically, that showed the foolishness of attempting to beat Death at games. A person holding a death prediction had the chance to defy his neurosis. That’s how we rediscovered the resiliency that makes us so proud. That insight became my masterwork. The inevitability of death was the cause of our sickness, and so it became our vaccination.”

I was unsure whether this argument was a paradox or a hoax. My overactive imagination painted a picture of Mr. Seher as he portrayed himself. He was standing sentry outside his hermitage. Tall black flames raged in all directions, representing the destiny of the world. Mr. Seher took fire in his own hands, and laid it down in a protective ring. “You’re telling me that the Death Machines ward off the fear of death? So if they ever got banned, the result would be a catastrophic regression of our maturity.”

“The machines were only needed as provisional therapy. They could stop working now, and their effect would never diminish. We have had a successful turning point. This is the generation when humanity learned how to confront Death.”

The only thing that would have been more enjoyable is if I had been certain who was laughing at whom. “So to get your plan to work, you remote-controlled machines that could disseminate all the predictions. You ran a kind of perverted factory that supplied Death to the consumer.” At the risk of harassing an innocent man who was trying to spin tales, I challenged him about the technicalities. “Everyone has been trying to figure out how the machines are controlled.”

“An electronic uplink from the machines to the Oracle would have been too obvious. I required something mysterious. If you reverse-engineer a Death Machine, you’ll see that it apparently chooses each word of each message at random.” That much was true. The Death Machines had been dissected down to their smallest components in search of the ghost in the machine. Mr. Seher’s skeletal fingers fumbled for something in his chest pocket. “But probability works in my favor. I’m going to flip this coin. You would say that there’s a 50% chance it will land heads. I, on the other hand, already checked my future, so I say that there’s a 100% chance that it will land heads.” He tossed a penny towards me. Forgive me, but at that moment I surrendered to the delusion that I was conversing with the true creator of the Death Machines. In my fantasy, Mr. Seher’s fingertips were present in every molecule in the air. They manipulated the spinning coin, guiding it to its destiny. When the coin stopped, I studied its face as if it were the key to my future. Heads!

Mr. Seher explained, “Someone who knows all outcomes can see through the probability clouds. When I manufacture a Death Machine, I know its future, including all its test subjects. I can tell whether a machine’s configuration is going to randomly produce all the correct messages. Then I only keep the ones that come up heads exactly when they are supposed to. The failures get recycled. I’m like the zookeeper trying to train an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters. At least one monkey is going to write the script I’m looking for. I handpick that one from among the limitless possibilities. Those choice selections represent the only Death Machines that ever appeared in public.”

I appreciated the fact that it wasn’t necessary to draw blood for the test, so the red spot on your finger only served to remind you of your mortality. But trying to harness a torrent of random chaos was preposterous. “That’s too many interdependent coin flips being done over and over. You can’t get every one right for a machine’s entire future, can you?”

Mr. Seher looked bored with this rebuttal. “The success rate is vanishingly small, I’ll grant. But an average computer can peruse the work of a trillion monkeys per second. Frankly, I’m surprised you think that’s the hard part about constructing a Death Machine.” I knew he was right. My grasp on the distinction between technology and magic was increasingly tenuous.

Mr. Seher treated me to some history. I had noticed that he liked the sound of his own voice. “It’s a modernized interpretation of the age-old practice of consulting the Fates by casting lots. Even the priests in the Old Testament carried two mystical stones. When they needed an answer to a prayer, they picked a stone blindly. The white stone is what we would call heads and the black stone meant tails. You could say it was random, but you could just as soon say that the system assured the correct outcome. One of my private eccentricities is that I consider myself to be an Israelite priest of the digital order.” I imagined Mr. Seher surrounded by roaring fires again, only this time he was wearing a black sacerdotal robe inlaid with blinking lights. From his chest pocket he produced a magical sheet of paper covered with macabre monkeys and coins. He found the coin he wanted and kissed it. The coin danced off the sheet, skyward, where it wound the smoke into a kaleidoscope of colored knots. The fire obeyed the coin and the coin obeyed Mr. Seher. Mr. Seher signed a blessing, transforming the innermost ring of flames into soft-smelling incense.

I reeled my thoughts back down into the room. Mr. Seher warned, “I have all the luxuries of foresight. I can be intensely deliberate. Even this unexceptional-looking house was chosen because of a special future that suits my needs perfectly.

“It’s no accident that the death predictions were vague. If they described the specific circumstances of the future as I saw them, it would only encourage a false sense of control. The ambiguous predictions reminded everyone that Death could visit at any moment. The machine captured that old-world sense of irony in death—captured it and made Irony my servant, in fact. The stronger Irony’s influence was felt in the death predictions, the more extensive was the healing. The time was over for that fox to sabotage my efforts to improve the future.” I sensed Death and Irony’s spectral forms listening at the keyholes of this haunted house. Only the Oracle’s protective strength kept us safe.

“How do you keep up with writing all the prophecies?”

“I was able to start that job decades before I made the Death Machines public. The first ones were the most important because they made the largest impact. But I was no perfectionist. I put far less effort into the last million messages. Whenever someone wasted my time by trying to test a cow, I just wrote it off as, ‘MADE INTO DELICIOUS CHEESEBURGER.’” I knew that wasn’t really true, but he sounded capable of it. Mr. Seher laughed unabashedly. I saw him making zero effort to rein in his merriment. It prompted me to consider whether a prophet should be allowed to joke.

I tried to locate the fine line between genius and madness. Mr. Seher probably wasn’t as lucid as when he was young. Maybe that was even advantageous. In many languages the words for prophesying and raving were the same. The Delphic oracle didn’t attempt predictions until she had inhaled a sufficient amount of the temple’s hallucinogenic vapors. Mr. Seher presumably had access to a pill box full of medications that could serve the same purpose. Great men and women were expected to act crazy, not sober. I saw that my job was not to question, but rather to absorb the unique ideas wafting through the room.

“Did you ever choose a word to describe your own death?”

Mr. Seher slowly massaged his temples. “Everywhere I look, I see the results of my own influence. The future of the world is covered with my fingerprints. Seeing my handiwork in every direction eventually started to repulse me. I want to escape it. And I’m so tired. I’d love to know that life will continue noisily on after I have felt Death’s gentle embrace. My prediction describes exactly how I want to die: ‘FORGOTTEN.’” Mr. Seher commanded such a large, heavy presence that there was barely enough room for both of us, as if I were sharing his coffin, his fate.

He was a mentor who made it possible to look forward to being forgotten. “If I print a news story about you, it will be a poor way to fulfill that wish.”

“You can publish the story if you want. I summoned you for a different reason though.” Had I been summoned? I could no longer recall what brought me here. Mr. Seher reached for the jewelry box on his side table. His fingers faltered when he tried to grasp it. I leaned in and picked it up. It was far lighter than he had made it appear. Mr. Seher strained to lift his arm back into his lap. “I’d like your help. It’s about the twenty-five-year time capsule that your newspaper is sponsoring. I’d like you to please take the Oracle to be included. It still has valuable lessons for you. I guess that succession is the last thing on my bucket list.”

The box felt ordinary against my skin. I studied the ornamental filigree. Engraved in Gothic script was the melodious incantation, “Doctrina et Veritas.” My hand obeyed a subconscious desire to dart forward and open the lid, ignoring all decorum. Inside the box I expected to find the portal to a world untouched by time. Even when I lowered my expectations, I hoped to see an intractable digital device with colored blinking lights. The true contents prompted the pit of my stomach to sink back to earth. An everyday penny lay on a bed of LSD blotters. The only means Mr. Seher had of telling the future was to get high and flip a coin. His grand truths were vulgar drug-induced ravings. He never created anything as noteworthy as a Death Machine. The sudden difference between us was that his mind was addled enough to believe his own story. My cheeks flushed with shame for his misspent, lonely life.

Meanwhile, the magical power that had filled the room was receding. In my peripheral vision I saw the walls acquire an unfamiliar spaciousness. When I noticed Mr. Seher again, I knew instinctively that he was dead. There was nothing in his chair that suggested anything other than peaceful rest. Death and Irony had prevailed, and the hermitage wouldn’t be rid of those spirits without a fiery double exorcism. In the stillness I mourned that Mr. Seher’s tantalizing explanations were not realistic enough to be credible. The curtain had been pulled back on the Death Machines, revealing their inner workings. Then the curtain was pulled back too far, and the conjurer proved to be an entertaining charlatan.

The following day was MOD-Day—the day all the Machines of Death unexpectedly stopped. The news was dominated by speculations why. Pundits briefly debated whether the existing predictions were still valid. My lingering resentment was appeased when I learned that Mr. Seher’s hermitage was destroyed on the same day. It succeeded in getting struck by two bolts of lightning. The firetrap consumed the old man’s entire estate in its metamorphosis from wood to ashes.

I couldn’t condone sending Mr. Seher’s cache of drugs to the future, but part of me still wanted to accommodate his dying request. I decided on a gesture of which I knew he would approve. I resolved to borrow the coin from the box and flip for it: heads to entomb it in the time capsule, tails to dispose of it.

In the chaos of those weeks, my story on Mr. Seher never ran. I guess it would have been possible to resurrect it on a slow news day later on. But life kept interfering. In the end I admit I forgot. Within a few years I was no longer reminded of Mr. Seher at all, even when I reread my own death prediction: “FORGOTTEN.”

Seed Money

Suppose that the markets have been consistently earning 8% annually. Then one year there is a -50% crash. After that the markets return to their consistent 8% returns. The chart below shows how two investors would fare. Both start with the same $10,000 stake. The first was 20 at the time of the crash and the other was 59.

The young investor lost half of his equity right away. Fortunately, there was plenty of time to make it back up. In the ensuing years, that portfolio grew by 2,000%. But since the seed money was reduced, the effects of that initial bear market were compounded over the next four decades. The final portfolio value was identical to the portfolio that lost 50% in its final year. Either way, whether the portfolio earns 2,000% first and then loses 50% at the end, or loses 50% at the beginning and then earns 2,000% afterwards, the investor retires with the same $100,000. The technical explanation is that “compounding is commutative.”

If someone advises you that you should hold a straight equity portfolio for the first 20 years of your career and then switch to more reliable bonds for the next 20 years, remind them of commutativity. Explain that your expected return would be the same as if you held the bonds for the first 20 years and then straight equities for the next 20 years. If you are going to change your asset allocation over time, the order of which portfolio you hold first is irrelevant. Young investors should only plan on becoming more conservative over time if they also believe it makes good sense to start conservative and get more aggressive every year until retirement.

Efficient Frontier

This argument is meant to appeal to the mathematicians. Every environment contains an efficient frontier, and the goal of portfolio management is to stay on the frontier. It’s easy to construct one portfolio that is aggressive and one that is conservative, although both are on the frontier. Suppose an investor held each portfolio, one at a time, for a certain number of years. The cumulative risk and return would be equal to the averages of those of the two portfolios. Graphically, the average would be a point midway between the two portfolios. Since the efficient frontier is a convex curve, the average itself would not be on the frontier. The investor’s cumulative lifetime portfolio would not be as efficient as if it had been consistently aggressive, or consistently conservative, or a consistent combination of the two.

Human Capital

An intuitive counter-argument exists. Over a lifetime, most people will save thousands of dollars from their steady income. So if they were to lose all their money at 20 years old, they could still recover by putting aside more savings in the future. A market crash would be more devastating at 60 years old when people can’t produce as much capital. This is a sound objection that ought to be factored into the model.

A young person with $10,000 savings and a $100 monthly savings plan actually commands about $25,000 in assets, if you count the present-day value of the expected savings. The $15,000 of expected savings could be risky, depending on how steady the income is. So the other $10,000 might need to be placed in assets that offset that volatility. If the income is reliable, then the accessible $10,000 could be placed in straight equities as an offset. At retirement, the same person would have $500,000 of investments and no more expected savings. Since the accessible investments are no longer offsetting anything, they would be allocated differently than before.

The human capital argument should not be interpreted to mean that a person’s overall portfolio grows more conservative over time. It means that a rational investor will target a consistent risk profile at all ages. As part of a holistic strategy, the value of human capital should be included in the portfolio. An investor who understands the value of consistency will be able to retire with larger and safer investments.

Advice #2: If you want to catch a girl’s eye, it’s important to make a big first impression. It’s less important to make a good first impression. Just make it a big one.