Topic 25: How far would you go to get something you really wanted?
To want is to hope, and vice versa. Now that there is actually a chance of not spending the next years – centuries – entombed, I find myself completely reluctant to consider what I want or hope for, beyond fresh air and daylight. Sometimes, when the latest effort at digging has exhausted me, I even wonder whether I should wish for either. There isn’t just imprisonment here. There is safety.
I never knew such reluctance before. On the contrary, I rather wanted too much, and what I wanted increasingly turned out to be mutually exclusive. Judy Barnett once asked me how far I would go to get what I want, and I told her that this was entirely the wrong question.
“Lack of courage or means aside,” I said, “you will not find anyone who is not prepared to do everything they can to get what they want. The true challenge consists of figuring out one’s priorities.”
I still believe this to be true. Jack, now, Jack was always consistent in this regard. He wanted Sydney to be safe and happy more than he wanted anything else, and he was prepared to do absolutely anything to achieve this aim. Of course, there were other things he wanted as well, but nothing in the same degree.
I, on the other hand, was divided. Or I still am. Perhaps this is why I am increasingly ambiguous about the prospect of liberty.
There is a man in this world who carries many of my memories, and who believed, for a while, that he was myself. At times, he still believes it. At times, I wonder. He was broken and mad the last time I saw him, but then again, I had conversations with my dead daughter, and at times, I still believe I see her. Perhaps I, too, am a copy, and am imperfect one at that, full of wishes not my own. It would explain why I keep achieving what I want and then manage to ruin it.
Or perhaps it is success and happiness that are fatal to me. It was easy to choose Emily over the Alliance when her life was at stake. There was no question of what I wanted most during those months; it was her, always her. Yet once we were reunited, and I had achieved all I had set out to do – once we were safe, and the Alliance gone – I could not be content, and I started my quest for Rambaldi again. When Sark in one of his less inspired moments chose to show up with the late Lauren Reed and she demanded that I should subject Nadia to a final dose of Rambaldi’s fluid, when it was Nadia’s life at stake and a gun pointed at my head, it seemed so clear that it was my daughter I wanted most of all. During all those months she spent in her coma, wasting away, there was never even a question to me of what I wanted most. I wanted to see her conscious again, alive, and happy, and I was prepared to do anything to achieve this. Anything at all.
The moment when I failed her came after all of this had come to pass, and not before. She lived. Her sanity was restored. I had even seen her happy again, with her sister and her niece. The hold those amateurish ursurpers who called themselves Prophet Five had over me was gone. It should have been more than enough for the rest of my days. But I watched Nadia with Sydney and Isabelle, and then I returned to APO, had a brief conversation with Jack which incidentally turned out to be the last one we were ever to have before everything shattered, and realized what I felt was not the happiness and relief I always thought I would feel, but utter and complete emptiness.
It should have been everything, and I had done everything to make it come true: Nadia alive and happy. Sydney and Jack both reconciled to me. All current threats dealt with, and nothing that one could not reasonably expect to manage in the near future. As with Emily on the Philippines, it should have been everything.
Perhaps it was. Perhaps everything is too much to bear, if you do not die immediately after. Perhaps that is what the Greeks meant when they coined that overused phrase. Call no man happy until he is dead.
I sat at my desk at APO, and the sensation of emptiness increased until at last I had identified the cause, to a degree. All niceties aside, there was no purpose to my existence anymore. Nadia did not need me, not really. During the time we had spent together since she awoke, she had been distinctly uncomfortable, and why not? It had been my fault, after all, that she had had to endure this coma to begin with. Jack and Sydney might have needed me at various points of their lives, no matter what they had claimed to the contrary, but not now. What I truly was at APO was a charity case. And, strange as it may seem for a man who founded one of the world’s hugest charity organizations, I truly despised that idea.
There was, of course, something else I had always wanted. The one unfulfilled wish. The one pushed back and put aside so I could save Nadia. And I had never felt empty pursuing that particular goal, had I?
There was no harm in doing so now, I thought. Not when all other things are for the best for everyone.
And so I unearthed what I had not looked upon for almost eighteen months. I saw his writing again, and the mysteries in their intricacy, and the emptiness started to ebb away. In retrospect, that was when I failed Nadia, as much as the later moment when she tried to throw Rambaldi’s work into the fire and I pushed her aside to save it. If I had been content, if I had not been so greedy, if I had truly learned from the past….
How far would I go to get what I want? To an old garage, to a box that should never have been opened again. And from it sprang my daughter dead, at my hands, for the third and final time.
Pandora, in that story that keeps pushing itself on my mind these days, shut her box after all the evils of the world had escaped, and kept the last. This last thing what she kept, grace and evil at the same time, was hope.
I don’t want to start hoping again, and yet I do. As soon as my hopes will have form, they will become goals. Whatever else they will be, at least two of them will be irreconcilable and yet longed for with an almost equal passion.
If my life has nothing else, it has a pattern.