The Greater Good
Photo: Karan Madhok
Short story: ‘AX09 reminded Otto of all things that he hated about the job. All that craving for power had ultimately led to complete powerlessness. The lack of free will. The helplessness of being a puppet in someone else’s hands.’
The first thing that Otto noticed as he stepped into the room was that everything was white: the stark walls, the mellow lights, the metal bed and its sheets, the uniforms of the doctors and nurses, the plastic curtains separating the beds, and even the odd tables and chairs placed adjacent to the beds.
After scanning the room for a few minutes, Otto’s eyes rested on the burly man on the bed next to the huge windows. The man appeared to be sleeping, but he had a deep-set frown on his face, which appeared more pronounced by the thick moustache cupping his upper lip.
Otto knew very little about this man. He’d had a long day and hadn’t had enough time to do his research. He hadn’t even had the time to learn the man’s name. He knew just two things: This was case No. AX09, and that this man had a problem with his heart valve that could turn out to be fatal—if not for some divine intervention.
And that’s exactly why Otto was here. To intervene.
He was yet to figure out how.
The “how” was what made his job interesting. When he was young, Otto had believed that he would only have to wave a wand or flash a powerful blinding light to change things. But Zay, his father, had laughed at his naivete and explained to him that it wasn’t that simple. “This isn’t the movies…this is real,” Zay had said. “You’ve to work hard to align the stars in someone’s favour.”
“But how do we do that?”
“You get creative,” Zay had added with a mischievous smile.
Now seated on a foldable steel chair with his eyes fixed on the man in the bed, Otto was mulling over discovering such a creative solution when he heard the rustle of the curtain behind him. It occurred to him that this room was probably being shared by another patient.
He made a quick turn that startled a pair of droopy eyes into retreat. A petite girl in an oversized hospital gown stood tentatively, peeking from behind the curtain. Otto stared back for a whole minute when the realization dawned on him.
“You can see me?” Otto asked the pale figure.
“Of course, I can,” she seemed offended.
“Interesting,” Otto murmured.
“What’s interesting about it?” The feeble voice gave away her weak effort to put on an air of confidence.
Otto ignored the question. “What’s your name?” he asked instead.
“Rue.”
“How old are you?”
“Six.”
“You seem small for a six-year-old.”
“Yeah, people say that all the time,” Rue said, but she didn’t seem offended or defensive this time.
Otto extended his right hand to Rue. “Open it,” he said.
“How did you know I love mango candies?” Rue giggled. She grabbed a candy from Otto and flicked it into her mouth.
The Gods sometimes watched with amusement how the humans fought over who the more powerful God was, not realizing they were all just different Chief Gods, chosen at different points of time.
Suddenly, Rue’s eyes didn’t look so drained out anymore, and even her pallid face seemed to gain a bit of colour.
The moustache man hadn’t moved in an hour. Otto made the best use of the time though, chitchatting with Rue. The yummy candies in the hospital cafeteria, the acrid smell of the room, wizards and angels in her favourite book, the insufferable Maths teacher who made her school life hell, her friend Jake who was too scared of blood to visit hospitals, but still came to meet her every weekend for the past three months, her mother who sometimes shed a tear when she believed Rue was asleep—Rue had something to say about everything and everyone.
This was refreshing to Otto, who hardly got to talk in his line of work. And no one has ever been able to see him before. He didn’t know why Rue could see him. He would probably have to ask someone in the bureau. Some other time.
For now, Otto was content watching Rue make a futile attempt to touch her scrunched nose with her tongue.
Otto knew that he had been slacking off with AX09, and if he had any doubts about his work output, the Chief’s outburst that morning put it to rest. The Chief was certaintly unhappy with how slow the case was moving. And when Otto couldn’t answer even the simplest questions about the case—he still had no clue of the man’s name—the Chief was furious.
Come to think of it, Zay—Otto’s father—would have been even more appalled than the Chief by Otto’s casual attitude to work. Zay had once had the reputation as one of the most conscientious figures in the bureau. It was by observing his father at work, with wide-eyed fascination since he was little, that encouraged Otto to join the bureau in the first place. The Bureau of Gods.
The bureau had an elaborate administrative system to keep the universe and its many galaxies running. Thousands of Gods managed different planets and geographies and worked under the close watch of the Chief God.
And once every thousand years, a new Chief God was elected.
The Gods sometimes watched with amusement how the humans fought over who the more powerful God was, not realizing they were all just different Chief Gods, chosen at different points of time.
Did they really think that a single Chief God could be running the universe over billions of years? some of the Gods wondered. Didn’t they realize how exhausting that would be?
Otto had once asked Zay why the bureau’s administrators couldn’t simply get into the heads of the humans and explain these things to them.
“Well…that’s free will, and it falls under the scope of non-interferables,” Zay had explained. “There are things we can control and influence, and there are others that we need to just let play on their own. That’s the law.”
“Wouldn’t everything be simpler if we could?”
“Would it, though?” Zay had asked in return. Otto was left more confused than before.
Studying AX09’s case left Otto with a headache. Scenes from the man’s life were flashing in and out of the memory ball for the past hour, and nothing about that was pleasant.
A six-year-old boy sneaked to the crib, where his sister lay. The baby girl’s face lit up immediately, deepening her dimples. But soon, the dimples turned into the contortion of a loud cry. No one noticed the boy’s tiny fingers managing a quick pinch on the rosy skin.
The chilly winter breeze creeped into the man’s skin despite the heavy black jacket. With the coffin descended into the ground and all the prayers said, people queued up to talk to the tall woman at the front. “Condolences,” they whispered, holding her hands.
As the crowd thinned, the man in the jacket walked over to the woman.
“I know what you’re doing,” he said.
She looked at him, quizzically.
“They should be offering their condolences to me, not you. I’m the elder one,” he seethed in anger.
“You haven’t come to meet dad in the last ten years. Not even when he was sick. So, why’d you expect such a thing?”
“I know what you’re doing,” he said, again.
“What am I doing?”
“You’re trying to take away all his money,” he spoke in a repressed tone. “Don’t think for a minute that I won’t contest his will.”
Tears rolled down her eyes. She opened her mouth slightly, as if debating whether to say anything at all.
“I can’t do this today,” she said in a muffled voice, ambling along to her car.
Panting for breath, a young woman rushed to the bathroom and locked the door from inside. Her hands trembled as she tried to dial the emergency three digits on her phone. Her husband’s continuous loud knock against the door didn’t make it any easier. For a brief moment, her eyes landed on the mirror against the wall. The black eye and the finger marks on her cheek brought in a resolve that she could never find before. “Please help…,” she cried on the phone as an operator picked up.
Otto had always believed that he had the best job in the universe. The sheer power to transform someone’s life was everything that he had yearned for. When he was finally selected to work in the bureau, Otto had not an iota of doubt that he belonged there.
But ten years in the bureau had left him disillusioned.
The disillusionment first began showing up in the little things, creeping in slowly like a silent shadow. Otto would wake up in the morning after a long sleep and still feel tired. He would forget to smile for days altogether. Errors would crop up in his work. Sometimes, he would get his cases mixed up, and sometimes he would struggle to finish even one or two cases in a month. When he finally managed to finish a case, he didn’t experience joy or fulfilment as he had in the initial years at work.
AX09 reminded Otto of all things that he hated about the job. All that craving for power had ultimately led to complete powerlessness. The lack of free will. The helplessness of being a puppet in someone else’s hands.
Otto continued to visit the moustachioed man every day at the same time. The man never opened his eyes, and so Otto would just sit and play with Rue. Sometimes, Rue’s parents would be in the room, and Otto would try to shush her. But Rue didn’t seem to care, and strangely, neither did her parents.
Did they think the kid was talking to herself? Otto wondered.
Soon, Otto ceased caring, too.
It wasn’t a good sign that this was the second time in a month that Otto had to meet with the Chief.
“I hear you’re refusing to help AX09,” said the Chief.
Otto nodded. “He doesn’t deserve our help.”
The Chief looked impatient. “Otto, I didn’t think I’ve to remind you of our laws. We don’t decide who does or doesn’t. It’s the Luck Ball that does, and we’ve to go with whoever it chooses.”
“But, why? When the laws don’t make sense, we’ve got to question them, don’t we?”
“The laws have been around for billions of years, and they’ve been working well for a reason. As Gods, we can’t bring our personal prejudices…imagine the chaos that can cause.”
“I’d like to help a child named Rue, instead,” Otto sputtered.
“What do you mean, instead? Has that child been chosen by the Luck Ball?”
“No.”
The Chief paused, taking this in.
“Seems like you’ve a decision to make,” he said looking straight at Otto.
Otto sat with his eyes closed, thinking how he ended up at this strange crossroad. He wondered what his father would advise now.
“Are you Death?” Rue interrupted Otto’s train of thoughts.
“What?”
“My friend Jake says the reason I can see you, and others can’t, is because you are Death. You’ve come to take me away.”
Zay would never break the laws.
Otto also considered what his friend Mo would say. Mo and Otto had been together at the God university. Mo was a natural genius. You throw anything at him, and he wouldn’t flinch. Astronomy, quantum physics, interspatial dynamics, structural chemistry, literature…nothing fazed him. At times, Otto found it frustrating that he had to work twice as hard as Mo, to perform as well as Mo did. And yet, he was an endearing friend to Otto, someone too difficult to hate.
Mo was also practical and understood the ways of the world. If he was here, he’d tell Otto to consider the consequences of his action.
Help one good person and get fired, or help one bad person and retain the chance to help a million others.
“Are you Death?” Rue interrupted Otto’s train of thoughts.
“What?”
“My friend Jake says the reason I can see you, and others can’t, is because you are Death. You’ve come to take me away.”
“No, I’m not Death,” Otto said.
“Oh!”
“You seem disappointed?”
“It’s just that… it’d have been nice to go away with you, rather than with someone else.”
Otto wanted to say something but he found a lump in his throat blocking in all the words. Finally, he let out a deep sigh. It had been a strange and confusing week, but it was time to acknowledge that he had always known what his decision would be.
On Sunday morning, AX09 breathed his last, and Rue got to keep the man’s kidney. As Otto was stripped of his powers, Rue was the last human that he got a chance to help.
“Was it worth letting go of the greater good?” Mo asked Otto when they met.
“One is as important as many, isn’t it?” Otto asked. “And anyway, there would always be some other God to help the chosen others. Rue only had me.”
“But you lost everything!”
Otto wanted to tell Mo how he sometimes found himself giggling like he used to as a little boy. How he woke up feeling completely refreshed, looking forward to the day ahead. How it came easy now to crack a joke with a friend. How he started to look at things around him all over again in wonder.
Instead, he simply said, “Free will isn’t just for humans, Mo. It’s for us, too.”
“Goodnight, Moon,” said Rue, softly, putting away the hardbound story book on the bedside table. As she shut her eyes, she said a silent goodnight to her angel, whom she had once mistakenly assumed as Death. “Goodnight, Otto.”
***
A freelance writer from Bengaluru, Ramya Srinivasan's stories have been published in Third Lane, MeanPepperVine, The Quiver Review and Tell Me Your Stories, and in the anthologies Blind Turns, Kintsugi, Skin and The Mask. Her work has also been longlisted in the Strands International Flash Fiction Competition. Her personal essay, "The Dream is Still On", was published in the Chicken Soup for the Indian Entrepreneur’s Soul. You can find her on Twitter: @ramya_vasan and Instagram: @ramya.vasan.
