The Indifference League (16 page)

SuperBarbie grabs Hippie Avenger's shoulders and spins her around. “And I suppose
you
could do a better job protecting freedom and democracy from tyranny and evil?”

“So,” Hippie Avenger says, cocking her head to one side, “you're okay with your own gender being mocked and maligned, but if anybody criticizes the military…?”

SuperBarbie pokes Hippie Avenger in the chest.

“
He
was injured fighting the good fight,” she spits, “protecting
us
and the ideals that we stand for. While
he
was overseas, getting his legs smashed up,
you
were over here, sipping wine and selling
art
.”

She pokes Hippie Avenger again.

“
He's
a War Hero. What kind of hero are
you
, sweetie?”

Another poke.

“Ow!” Hippie Avenger yelps. “Stop that!”

“If you don't stand behind our military,” SuperBarbie says, “try standing in front of them.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Hippie Avenger says. “I read that one on the back of your minivan.”

“Well, y'know,” SuperBarbie says, the pitch and volume of her voice rising. “I read a lot of
baloney
on the back of your van! You should be ashamed of yourself.”

She pokes Hippie Avenger in the chest again.

The Statistician expects Hippie Avenger to fall back on her usual excuse,
“My parents put those stickers on, I didn't,”
but instead she retorts:

“Oh, yeah? And
what
exactly, in your sacred opinion, should I be ashamed of?”

“‘What if they held a war and nobody showed up?'”
SuperBarbie says in a nasal voice, quoting one of the stickers on Hippie Avenger's Volkswagen. “What a bunch of bleeding-heart
baloney!
”

“‘One Race — the HUMAN Race!'”
SuperKen adds. “If we were all as naive as you and your pinko tree-hugger parents, there would be nothing left of our society.”

Hippie Avenger snaps at SuperKen, “Leave my parents out of this, Captain America.”

“Don't you
dare
talk to my husband that way,” Super-Barbie fumes, “all of you ponytail-wearing, lefty liberals would be speaking
Arabic
if it weren't for men like him protecting your Godless, granola-munching asses!

“How am I
Godless
?” Hippie Avenger yelps. “I'm
Godless
because I prefer peace to war? The Bible calls Jesus the Prince of
Peace!
Is Jesus therefore
Godless
?”

“Don't you
dare
blaspheme!” SuperBarbie says, squinting, teeth bared. “‘
Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain'
! Have you heard that one before?”

She pokes Hippie Avenger again.

“As a matter of fact, I have,” Hippie Avenger retorts. “It's the second commandment if you're Catholic or Lutheran, the third if you're Protestant or Jewish. And stop poking me.”

“Then you've also heard
‘Thou shalt not commit adultery'
right? And ‘
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife'
? I suppose it applies to our neighbour's husbands as well.” SuperBarbie grins smugly.

“I don't like what you're implying,” The Statistician says.

“We're just hanging out,” Hippie Avenger adds.

“Just hanging out. Hmm. So I suppose you also know the commandment that says,
‘Remember the Sabbath, and keep it Holy.'
But you chose to
hang out
all morning rather than observing the Sabbath, didn't you?”

“‘Thou shalt not kill.'”
Hippie Avenger says, glaring at SuperBarbie, then at SuperKen, then at SuperBarbie again. “Someone ought to remember that one the next time they launch a bunch of missiles at a village full of ‘
enemy
' civilians, eh? Or how about,
‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, or anything that is thy neighbour's'
?
Someone should recite that one the next time a bunch of kids are sent overseas to die for another country's oil.”

“Our enemies are getting what they've got coming to them,” SuperBarbie hisses, poking Hippie Avenger again,
“‘An eye for an eye'!”

“‘Makes the whole world blind,'”
Hippie Avenger says, quoting one of the stickers on her Microbus. “And stop fucking poking me!”

“Don't you swear at
me
, you bleeding lefty liberal!”

She pokes Hippie Avenger again.

Hippie Avenger grabs SuperBarbie's finger.

“Stop. Poking. Me.”

“Let go of my finger.”

“Don't poke me again.”

“Or
what
?”

SuperBarbie pulls.

Hippie Avenger doesn't let go.

SuperBarbie pulls harder, digging her heels into the rug, flexing her muscular legs.

Hippie Avenger releases her grip.

SuperBarbie stumbles backward, landing on her ass on the ottoman behind her. She leaps right back up, lunges at Hippie Avenger, fists raised.

“Don't mess with me, you, you …” Her face is flushed. She's shaking. “I was the Female Athlete of the Year. What were you? You were
nothing
.”

In his wheelchair, SuperKen hisses, “Yesss!” pumping his fist in the air, bouncing up and down on the seat of his wheelchair. His wife is
sooooooo
sexy when she's like this. It's like watching her spike a volleyball off an opponent's forehead. It's like that enraged predator face she used to make as her chest broke through the ribbon at the end of a race.

“Okay, okay,” The Statistician says, pushing himself between SuperBarbie and Hippie Avenger. “This was only meant to be an academic conversation between four presumably rational and intelligent people. There is no need to get emotional. There is no need to get personal.”

“That's why they called him The Android in high school,” SuperKen says.

“See?” The Statistician says, “that's getting personal.” He is feeling
quite
misanthropic now. “Why don't we all just agree to disagree, okay?”

SuperKen rises from his wheelchair and faces The Statistician. “So you don't have anything else to say on the subject, Mr. Know-It-All?”

“Let's just drop it for now,” The Statistician says. “Before someone says something they'll regret later.”

“So you're finished?”

“Yes. I'm finished.”

“You lose, then,” SuperKen says, folding his arms across his chest. “We win.”

“Excuse me?”

“You lose. We win.”

“But, terms of empirical evidence, we haven't even …”

“You retreated. You surrendered,” SuperKen says. “So you lose. And we win.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“Never declare war on a warrior, buddy,” he says, slapping SuperBarbie's behind.

SuperBarbie winks at her husband, saying, “‘And God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.' C'mon, baby. Let's go upstairs.”

She prances up the steps, invigorated. SuperKen unbuckles his belt as he hobbles up behind her.

Hippie Avenger and The Statistician collapse together on the couch, heads pitched back, sighing simultaneously.

“Thanks, by the way,” she says.

“For what?”

“The bit about different races having children together and genetically improving the human race … dominant genes and all that … that was for me, wasn't it?”

The Statistician shrugs. “It's scientifically true.”

And Hippie Avenger realizes something about The Statistician: As the Not-So-Super Friend with whom she has spent the least amount of time, he probably doesn't even know.

“You never met my parents, did you?”

He shakes his head no.

“So you didn't know that my mom is black and my dad is white.”

“Really?” The Statistician says. “I thought you were Spanish, or Italian, or something like that.” The Statistician's eyes meander from Hippie Avenger's shapely olive-bronze legs, to her long, curly black hair, then into her dark eyes. “Regardless, your parents passed some pretty good genes on to you.”

This is the closest The Statistician has ever come to telling Hippie Avenger that he thinks she's beautiful.

Upstairs, the sounds of attempted conception begin yet again.

Hippie Avenger turns sideways, lays back, slides her toes under The Statistician's warm thigh once more, and wonders aloud, “Do you suppose there's a gene that makes them the way they are?”

The Statistician sighs. “Let's hope it's recessive.”

THE ODDS

“Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an
asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to 1.”
“Never tell me the odds.”

— Conversation between C-3PO and Han Solo,
from the movie
The Empire Strikes Back
, 1980

T
he afternoon sun settles over the lake, and sunlight floods The Hall of Indifference. Hippie Avenger and The Statistician, drained from their scrap with The Perfect Pair, fall asleep together on the couch, in a pool of blood-warm light.

Neither The Perfect Pair's aggressive attempts at Creation upstairs, nor the laughing and screaming of Time Bomb and Miss Demeanor out in the lake, nor the rumble of The Drifter's Norton Commando rolling into the driveway wakes them. What rouses them from their cat like slumber is the gravelly voice of The Drifter demanding, “So what the hell has been going on here, anyway?”

He stands before the couch, still wearing his motorcycle jacket, holding his helmet against his hip like a gunslinger ready to draw. The Stunner stands behind him in a similar pose.

Oh no,
thinks The Statistician.
He knows. She's told him!
He sits upright and yelps, “What? What do you mean?”

“Well,” says The Drifter, sounding like Clint Eastwood in a Western movie, pointing ominously at the ceiling, “the two Co-Chairs of Teens Need Truth, who signed a friggin'
vow of chastity
in high school, are now screwing the bejeezus out of each other ten times a day. And they are
not
keeping it to themselves. Does that not seem a bit bizarro?”

He points out to the lake, through the sliding-glass door.

“And Miss Demeanor, who normally dresses like Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, is out there flouncing around in a pink bathing suit with a Miss Piggy decal on it. Bizarro. And Time Bomb is running around with her, wearing almost nothing, screaming and laughing. She usually never even smiles! I don't remember her smiling at your
wedding
, for crying out loud. Not even for the pictures. Is that not bizarro? And suddenly she's Miss Demeanor's best buddy? The one who once called her
Mizz Tight-Ass
to her face? Bizarro.”

He crouches down before the couch.

“And here are you and Hippie Avenger, who I didn't think agreed on
anything
, snuggled up together like the last two kittens in the litter. So what the hell is going on around here? It's like I've landed on Bizarro World.”

“Bizarro World?”

The Drifter breaks into a grin. “The alternate-universe planet in Superman comics, where everything is the opposite as it is on Earth.”

“Bizarro World,” The Statistician repeats.

“You should have read more comic books when you were a kid. Life wouldn't seem so weird.”

The Drifter stands up, slides his arm around The Stunner's waist.

“Oh, by the way,” The Stunner says flatly to The Statistician, “I told your brother about our past relationship.”

The Statistician glares at The Stunner, as if to say,
I thought we had a deal.

“No wonder you two were acting so weird around each other,” The Drifter says. “You should have just
told
me that she used to be a student of yours. It's no big deal. It's not like you're grading her papers anymore, right?”

“Right.”

“I mean, I know that would be unethical. But she's graduated, and she's got her degree now, so there's no conflict anymore, right?”

“No conflict. No.”

“Actually,” The Drifter says, “I think it's kind of cool that the two of you met before this weekend. I mean, what are the odds of that?”

“Well,” says The Stunner, “in theoretical terms, taking the entire population of the Earth into account, the odds of any two people meeting are approximately, well … let's round it to seven billion to one. So the pure odds of any
two
humans meeting the same
third
human are about fourteen
billion to one.”

“But in
practical
terms,” says The Statistician, looking her in the eyes for the first time since this morning, “you've got to take into account some geographic and demographic factors. You met at a Chinese place near the university, right?”

“Right.”

“And my brother is staying at the university residence in the same area, correct?”

“Correct.”

This exchange reminds The Stunner of the Socratic discussions she and The Statistician used to have in class, and later in his office, before that afternoon in her apartment.

“So,” The Statistician says, “you can make the assumption that …”

The Stunner completes his sentence: “… that your sample group is limited to the average population of the University of Toronto campus and its surroundings.”

She used to finish his thoughts this way during tutorial discussions. The other students were a bit jealous.

“So,” says The Statistician, “give me a number.”

“I … I don't have any data to work with. And there must be a thousand other variables involved.”

“Sometimes you've got to ignore the thousand other variables and take an educated guess.”

This sort of statement is one of the reasons that The Stunner was attracted to The Statistician;
academically
attracted to him, that is. He gave her permission to think past the numbers.

“Well, what's the population of Toronto?” she asks.

“The GTA is about five and half million. The city proper is about two and a half.”

“So let's say the U of T and the Annex make up about a tenth of the actual city's area. Let's suppose the number of people in the defined area is about 250,000, then. So the odds of two brothers meeting the same girl at different times within roughly the same timeframe are about half a million to one.”

“Pretty slim odds,” The Statistician says, wearing that tight-lipped, difficult-to-interpret expression that attracted The Stunner to him in a
non-academic
way.

He had seemed so cool, so impermeable; she wanted to defrost him, to penetrate his shell. When she invited him up to her apartment, slipped him that note, touched his hand that certain way, looked him in the eyes with her Magnetic Power cranked up to Level Ten, she still figured that the odds of him actually showing up were also about a half million to one.

“But it happened anyway,” she says, inspecting the toes of her riding boots. “Didn't it?”

“Indeed,” says The Statistician. “It happened anyway.”

The Drifter says, “You're both wrong. The odds were much lower than that.”

“How so?” The Statistician and The Stunner say simultaneously.

“Well,” The Drifter says, “maybe the odds of anyone meeting
randomly
are pretty high, but this wasn't random at all. You signed up for a
specific
math course that my brother
specifically
teaches. That made the odds of you meeting him much lower than random.”

“Indeed,” says The Statistician, nodding his head.

“And the odds of
me
meeting you were even better,” the Drifter says to The Stunner.

“How so?” Only she says it this time.

“Because I was
looking
for you,” The Drifter says. “I was looking for
you
. You in
particular
. And when you're looking for someone in particular, you're much more likely to find them.”

The Stunner throws her arms around The Drifter's neck. “See? That's the kind of logic that makes me love you so much.”

“I was looking for you,” The Drifter says again, as if he's just solved the quadratic equation.

They turn and walk outside together.

The Statistician sighs
. I was looking for her, too.

*

Hippie Avenger sits cross-legged on the couch, facing The Statistician. When she's sure that the Drifter and The Stunner have wandered far from the cottage, she says, “There's more to the story, isn't there?”

“She offered me sexual favours in exchange for a better grade,” The Statistician says plainly. “And I accepted.”

So he's not an android after all.

“I was her professor. And I'm married,” he says. “I let my sexual frustrations outweigh my ethical obligations.”

Hippie Avenger says, “I understand.” And she does. She understands how it feels to want something — to want someone — that you're not supposed to have. She understands want, spelled-in-capital-letters
WANT
. She understands.

“It was irrational,” he says. “It was weak.”

She tries to lighten the mood. “Hey, it's not your fault. They say that God gave man both a brain and a penis, but only enough blood to operate one or the other.”

The Statistician doesn't laugh. “You must think I'm a horrible person,” he says.

“No. I just think you're a
person
.”

She shuffles across the sofa, holds him just slightly longer than a friend comforting another friend should, just a decimal point past Platonic.

Then she resumes her cross-legged position on the couch, closer to him this time.

Upstairs, the Perfect Pair's bedposts begin to drum on the floorboards yet again.

Through the sliding glass door, The Statistician can see his wife splashing around in the water, laughing hysterically with Miss Demeanor, who just days earlier was her least favourite member of The Indifference League.

He can see The Drifter standing on the beach with The Stunner, holding her and kissing her. Just two weeks earlier, she was his Protégée. Now she's something else. And his younger brother has become something else, too.

“Every day that passes,” The Statistician finally offers, “the world makes less sense to me.”

“Bizarro World,” Hippie Avenger says.

“Bizarro World, indeed.”