Grave Goods

They ask in BlackRock interviews:

You are guarding 100 murderers in a field, and you have a gun with a single bullet. If any one of the murderers has a non-zero probability of surviving, he will attempt to escape. If a murderer is certain of death, he will not attempt an escape.

How do you stop them from escaping?

Easy. I shoot one of them, making me a murderer. I escape with the rest. I win by putting myself on the right side of the riddle.

It’s what we’ve always done. It’s what separates us from the animals; the fact that we decided to separate ourselves from the animals. A sleight of hand trick we’ve performed since Genesis. We’ve had to. An open secret: we’re all going to die. A fact that might drive us insane if we hadn’t spent millions of years developing methods to put ourselves on the right side of it. Denisovans buried their dead with jewelry, Neanderthals theirs with spears, so they could be beautiful and hunt in the afterlife respectively. Even the early hominins found ways to spin their mortality.

I read about Neanderthals and Denisovans in Seattle, Washington. In Seattle, I have my own apartment. It’s the first time I’ve ever lived alone. I dress the place in clashing patterns and classy kitsch. I go to work, not at BlackRock, and listen to my coworker talk about how 9/11 and COVID were fake and how tofu is terrible for men. I buy an inflatable kayak on Facebook Marketplace. I keep the window cracked and wade through a reluctant spring. I don’t get a lot of texts.

Sometimes I think about a freeway in the high desert of Eastern Oregon, where I once killed a cat with my car. Not on purpose, I’m not a psychopath. The road was Taylor Swift-straight and I couldn’t see around the car in front of me, a white pickup towing an empty trailer. It must have had higher clearance than me. I know this because neither the cab nor its cargo hit the cat that appeared from under the chassis, not twenty feet from my car. He was laying down. He lifted his head confusedly, the way cats do when they’re pet in their sleep. There was maybe a second between the moment I saw him and the thunk.

I was going 70, and there was no shoulder to pull off onto. I don’t think there’s anything I could have done. If there was, I didn’t do it.

I say he. The cat looked like a cat that lived outside the house I slept in my senior year of college, a big tuxedo named Boots.

Are animals aware of their own mortality? It’s a hard question to answer. Most scientists and philosophers think no. “The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it,” Ernest Becker argued in his 1973 Pulitzer-winning book The Denial of Death. “They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over.”

A few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish. A thunk.

Sometimes I think about Göbekli Tepe. Twelve thousand years ago, people living in the Germuş Mountains of what’s now Anatolia built an architectural marvel. Göbekli Tepe consists of seven concentric circles made up of 20 intricately carved pillars, each between thirty and a hundred feet tall and weighing between ten and twenty tons. The monument, likely a ritual center, predates the written word, agriculture, and even the wheel, and it’s estimated that it would have taken over five hundred workers to design and build it. It’s thought that groups of people like these, living in close proximity for long periods of time in service of their beliefs, stimulated developments in domestic agriculture and construction. If true, this completely upends the commonly held timeline of civilizational development. Food followed faith, not the other way around. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven; give us this day our daily bread.

“What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms.” That’s Becker again.

But is that all it is? I don’t know, I don’t know.

That day in the desert I cried on and off the rest of my five hour drive home. I stopped at a Sinclair outside of Hood River for gas and when I got back in my car I found a Xanax on the floor by the gas pedal and it felt like a miracle. How lovely to be on the receiving end of a miracle. I watched the sunset turn the Columbia River Gorge gold. How many sunsets will I get to see? Only so many, and maybe I’m all the more lucky for it. I like to pretend I’m a Martian vacationing on Earth, like I’m seeing it all for the first time, like all of it’s special, grocery shopping and highway traffic and papercuts. I stare out the window of my apartment and watch the cars whizz by on the road outside. I let my coworker tell me in detail how seed oils are poisoning us all. I blow up my kayak and watch the sunset from the center of Lake Washington. I forget to close my window when it rains and my carpet gets wet. I call my mom. I put miles and miles on my car. I plumb the sadness and the joy and the rage and I get to see what’s on the other side. Someday I’d like to climb Mt. Rainier. I’d like to get married. Visit Göbekli Tepe. How lovely to be on the right side of the riddle.

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rosalindmargulies.com