A moment.
Drying off on Egyptian cotton, someone eyes him, naked, triggering self-conscious circuits on a cirrus afternoon. Thirty-odd years of pondering blameworthiness coalesce, prompting a thought that people will believe just about anything, or is it absolutely anything when it comes to other people? While his hands rummage for deodorant in a sports bag, his brain sifts images, testing beliefs about belief as an engine powering judgments about judgment.
Mind’s eye I.
He could say his mate is ill. He could disclose that the person he loves above all else in the world is dying and add that the terminal diagnosis is prostate cancer to see if amendment encourages understanding, empathy, something else. In himself, from others.
After crossing the parking lot to a mid-size crossover parked some distance from other vehicles, he snugs the seat belt. His eyelids close, weighted.
Mind’s eye II.
Bas-relief carvings return sunlight and shadow to advantage from two arched, wooden doors that swing open at angles. He envisions walking down the center aisle as Bach’s Passacaglia in C Minor concludes, turning to face a congregation he knows and does not know, voice uneven as moisture glosses baby blues and a shudder unhinges his six-foot-three frame. Watching him, hearing him, are friends and neighbors, people that good people call good, struggling to rebound from organ spasms, reluctant airways.
He rehearses the quickest route to a pharmacy that sells a case with lock and key ideal for syringes and a vial. Plus pills round and oblong for good measure. He can leave the case on a nightstand, key to one side and contents exposed, options of last resort for the ill and tormented to embrace at arms reach. A solution to the solution? The truth is complex, he suspects, while questioning whether it is possible to elucidate a necessary truth about actual lovers judged unnatural, suffering real afflictions or faltering emotionally. An understanding outside himself and within: what would knowledge be like?
In the unimagined world.
After the usual 10-kilometer run on a treadmill equipped with too many bells and whistles, he showers and dries off on an oversize Egyptian cotton towel supplied gratis by the upscale health club—or ostensibly gratis. In the locker room, he spots someone eyeing him, naked. That is how it started.
This is how it ends.
He drives home to embrace his real love and wife of eight years, kiss his daughter, and cradle the baby just turned two months. He is hale, revered, and curious enough to invoke a thought experiment regarding a bridge between beliefs about the world and moral judgment about people, or a chasm. Because he knows he does not know but still wants to know, he flashes again on the disenfranchised, minorities, homeless, illegals, wondering if judgment (from within, without) is a manifestation of belief (e.g., judge not) or whether a gulf separates the two (burn in hell). He notices sunshine outside and takes the family for an outing to the neighborhood playground, a walk a world away.