Pho-To Contest

David O’Halleran, 38, tells Barbara Zanjicek, 84, that few things in life can be said for certain. Words are, by their definition, too passing a thing to hold onto, much less count on. I can promise you, he says, that your health will hold out, strong and steady, until an altogether pleasant evening when you pass on peacefully in your sleep. Would you believe me? Of course not. You’d be foolish to do so. You’re weighing the words of some man sitting across from you at a table against your whole life; a life lived through the tumult of the 20th century and filled with trips to the drug store, the supermarket, the hospital.

We hope with words. We act, we build, we control with money and transaction. Hm? Well, cold isn’t the first term I’d use, Mrs. Zanjicek. I’d prefer solid. He pulls out a handful of quarters. Metal can be cold but I can build a shelter for my family out of it, either with tin sheets or by giving its paper equivalent to the folks over at Lowe’s. Either way, however, you can’t deny its potency. Compared to hopeful words, anyway.

He calls a server girl over, hands her the quarters and requests a paper. She comes back and gives him the Times. See? Now perhaps I can’t be sure that I’ll like anything in today’s paper, but I can be sure that it’s mine. I’ve ensured that anything in here that I might want to know is now available to me. And I’d rather have more news than I want than not have the news that I need.
Barbara thinks and David leans back. He likes that people at nearby tables could think that he’s her son, sitting across from his elderly mother and conversing. The stereotypical totems of his trade, the scuffed briefcase and the health-disaster brochures and the desperate cologne of need, these are waders and training wheels. He’s a swimmer in the English Channel. He’s biking the Tour de France. He needs naught but himself, he thinks, when Mrs. Zanjicek stands up.

No, I’m afraid I didn’t experience the depression. He reminds her of his age. He assures her that he didn’t ever mean that money is the world’s only certainty, but it’s all automatic now. He knows that she’ll soon leave and that there won’t be a sale. This is acceptable. Lesser men quail at rebuffs, forget their own mantra. But all aspects of insurance are matters of uncertain turnout, and this can not be forgotten at the point of sale, else the whole philosophy be built upon sand. Yes. This is all part of a larger wheel, David thinks, and he feels so good that he lifts his hand to order a coffee. Thinks he’ll stay a while. But his eyes settle not on the waitress. Instead, they fix on an old windbreakered man approaching the cafe’s window.

Of course, he can’t be certain of the old man’s identity, beneath a baseball cap and thirty more years, but here might be the birth of David’s philosophy, out there on the sidewalk.
At eight years old, the law had told David’s mother that there was no way to prove with any certainty that this man had done anything to her son. It was too unlikely, their relationship too limited and random. Any ire David might have had at that verdict had been gone by the time he was fourteen, whereupon he’d decided that the life of a boy who wasn’t really sure what had happened was infinitely preferable to the life of a boy to whom certain things had definitely been done.

Abandoning his paper, David rushes for the restroom. He doesn’t stop when he bumps into the serving girl, he only mumbles something as he continues to surge for that precious men’s room door, an opaque barrier that can protect him from a never-forgotten glance, an eyebrow raised just so, that could instantly cause a life built upon the certain-ness of uncertainty to come crashing down.