The Fated Few

“What is your ideal picture of happiness?”

She pondered his question for several moments. The bustle of the restaurant droned on about her unnoticed. There were so many arbitrary and canned answers to this question, but none of them would fly with him. Nor her. This conversation, like most of their conversations, was a verbal buoy. Simply a superficial indicator of the real discussion they were having beneath the surface, without words. Rachael closed her eyes and tried to imagine it.

“I’m on a beach… in a little shack. I have my garden where I grow fruits and vegetables. I’ve bought solar panels that are just enough to run the refrigerator and the fan. A fishing pole and crab trap on the porch. I surf in the mornings. Write in the evenings. A quick swim before a short walk down the beach to the nearest bar for some dinner and drinks. I’m free. I’m happy.”

Caleb could almost see it from her description. He could hear the waves crashing in the distance. He could taste the fresh, clean vegetables busting with juice as he bit into it. Living off the land. A laugh of his son in the background. It was a beautiful idea. Maybe for some it could be done.

“When do we leave?” Caleb joked.

“Whenever you’re ready.” She retorted with a flirty grin.

Caleb held the image in his head for a moment longer before reluctantly letting it go and refocusing in the present. He sighed long and heavy.

“What If I gave you that?” Celeb started. Rachael leaned forward liking where this was heading so far. “It’s all setup. And next week, while you are packing a tiny bag filled only with bikinis and shorts…. Sneakers. It hits you.”

The waiter appeared with their next round of drinks. Caleb leaned back, admiring Cecconi’s dining room. It was a beautiful eatery that occupied the ground floor under the Soho House in Amsterdam. A large Skylight in the middle of the room above the bar let the last waning sunlight in. Flittering through the leafy vines that hung from the ceiling the rays of dying light came to rest gently on Rachael. It seemed to accentuate the exuberance in her eyes when she looked at Caleb.

“What hits me?” Rachael asked impatiently, brushing her hair back behind her. She sat like predator ready to pounce. He’d often called her ‘his lioness’. Her hair, when curly, shaped her face perfectly. But like everything they stated to each other, that was only the surface of it. The real reason was not said, because it didn’t need to be.

“You can cure cancer.”

“I can.”

“You can.”

Caleb looked at her confused face. Her adorable freckles still visible through the lightly brushed makeup. The deep color of her lipstick staining her sensual features.

“You realized in that moment, while packing for your happiness,” Caleb continued. “That, if you combined several different formulas and medications… treatments and what have you, that you… you’ve stumbled across a vaccine… a cure for cancer. What do you do?”

“Well I cure cancer, obviously. Then after I go”

“Ah but its not that simple, Is it? You must spend twelve, fourteen hours a day in the lab. Trying and re-trying. Testing and retesting. You barely sleep. You forget to eat until the growling pain in your stomach grows to an unignorable scream. Who knows how long it will take you?” Caleb tone took on an air of exasperation to dramatize the point, “Even once you’ve got it, the number of trials you must go through to get approval.” Caleb raised his eyebrows and blew air out of his noise knowingly. “Your picture of happiness gets further away from you, the more your moral responsibility grows.”

This is how Caleb spoke. In riddles and stories. Analogies and innuendo. She could understand how the average woman could find it frustrating. But Rachael wasn’t interested in the average, it thrilled her to speak like this. She was keen to participate in the storm of chaos and conflict that raged on inside of him. In his conversations that were layered atop several other conversations. Her answers needing to trickle down and fit in them all.

“What I spend weekends on my Island?” Rachael offered.

Caleb chuckled fervently.

“Weekends? Cancer kills 26,000 people a day. You have the cure and you’re going to take a day off?”

His meaning was clear.

“Even if you did manage to talk yourself into a day off, which I doubt you’d be able to do, would you really be ‘happy’ on that day? Knowing that your ‘happiness’ has caused 26,000 deaths? How could you relax? How could you ever be content on that beach?”

Rachael looked down at the table, nervously playing with a bit of crumbs that was left on the cloth after the waiter cleared the plates. She knew what he was referring to. It had nothing to do with Cancer or islands. He felt, he was destined to be unhappy. ‘The Fated Few’ he called them. He wasn’t a cynic. He believed most people could achieve happiness rather easily. Some could even maintain it. Yet, for a rare few, he felt it was simply not in the cards for them.

“You see for you, in this specific and admittedly extreme scenario, there is no happiness for you… Not as you imagined it, anyway. You have a moral obligation to act simply because you have been blessed with the capability to do so. Your greatest capability is not to yourself. It’s to others. Now while there are some who find happiness in that. It wasn’t what you just described.” He said knowingly locking eyes with her. “It wouldn’t be what I would I have described either.”

She looked longingly at him.

Caleb’s steady look floundered in the face of her vulnerability and he was compelled to look away. She was pure and honest… awe-inspiring from the inside out. Everything he wanted to be. She represented, to him, the best version of himself. But that version didn’t account for the world. For life. For his particular set of circumstances. His obligations would never allow him to rest. His capabilities too grand to consider failure. He owed too much morally; far too much for him to ever know happiness.

“Surely you must admit, even if only for this example, that some people are not destined for happiness. Is that not fair to say?” Caleb asked. He returned his gaze to her. Immediately marveling at the glow of her energy. It was as if everyone in the room was devoid of spark and she was the sole source radiance in the room. When she left Caleb wondered how they would read the menus. And when his duty called him to leave, tomorrow morning, Caleb wondered if he would ever see clearly again.

Rachael could see the war inside of his head. She wanted nothing more then to take his hand and lead him to a place not unlike the one she described. A place where it was just them and the sea. Rachael fully believed she could make him happy, and as he could her. But the truth, that she knew and actively pushed aside, is happiness isn’t real. It’s a term that we use to label a harmony in various levels of our consciousness. As such it can only exist, and most certainly only be sustained, from within. Unfortunate for her, within the man that sat across was an unrest that she could never reach; never quell. Obligations to others who were in greater need of his love than her.

She smiled. She knew where he wanted to be. In his heart, she knew where he was every second that he wasn’t in front of her. ‘Perhaps that’s enough,’ she thought. ‘Perhaps more than enough.’

“To the Fated Few.” She raised her glass in a cheer. She bit the inside of her cheek refusing to allow a single tear to fall. He didn’t need to see that. He didn’t need to feel more than he already did.

“The fated Few.” He echoed gently clinking his glass against hers.

Caleb gestured to the waiter for the bill. He hurriedly reached for his wallet. They were wasting magic.

The night was upon them, welcoming them. The moon illuminating their dance to the rhythm of fantasies un-held. Morning would bring the harsh awakening… if it came. Rachael wasn’t sure it would. She wasn’t convinced the world was cruel enough to allow this night to end.

They walked out into the crisp evening. The brisk air from the Singel canal slipped between them forcing them closer together to save warmth. Caleb realized he might have overlooked a fact regarding the Fated Few. Though it could never be sustained, there were moments, like this one, where he was happy.