The Miscast Fate- written in the stars chapters twenty to thirty
21. Bargill. “Foolish is as foolish does”.
I read it, I always read what he writes the poor naive fool, I cannot help it, I never have been able to avoid reading anything that he has written ever since I first met him so many years ago now. Stupid and awkward is what he seems to others, me included and I wondered at first; does he not know?
At first I thought it was a front, a barrier that he placed between the rest of the world and him but it is not. A barrier I thought that he placed there, to shield himself from the inadequate masses, as he was so much smarter than the rest of us. I thought that he need it to keep us at arms length to stop him becoming distracted to stop him becoming more like the rest of us, to stop him dumbing down to our level.
I have realised over time that this is not the case the barrier is for his own protection. I have realised that he is just a smart idiot and could not really interact with the rest of us in normal terms if he even tried which it seems he was unwilling to do, but idiot or not he is a talented one.
His focus on astrology just makes him a fool to us, yet I have never known someone so attuned to physics, he sees the answers within himself before he even puts pen to paper. He is perhaps an idiot savant yet he goes with his own thoughts and by passes what we all know about physics and mathematics. Yet sometimes he is right, I can see that he understands sometimes what we just glimpse or imagine.
He does not seem to know the true path or the reasons that we all make rules for ourselves instead he just follows what is in his own mind. Even if the thought in his mind is something as hideously stupid as astrology.
At college I hated him with a fervour that even I could not understand and I consider myself the most reasoning and focused of men. I have had many papers published and have even written a book. I have been with many beautiful women who were, granted, attracted to me more for my brains and money than my good looks yet even then I tower above the rest of humanity in my discoveries. I am considered nothing less than a genius in my field.
I appear on television throughout the world to discuss my ideas on physics and even Meta-physics (though to be honest this is sensationalist and I pander to this only in my public persona for the fame and notoriety) and science in general.
I am wealthy now and accomplished, successful, I own my own company and I have made it yet he has not and so I suppose that you will wonder why I still read everything that he writes and so I shall tell you.
It really does not matter now as I will be dead by the time you read this and so my infamy will become known worldwide. This is something that upsets me as I am not a bad person, I do not wish to be infamous or notorious. The plan I had set for myself saw me becoming much as I have become, rich and successful and leaving my mark upon the sands of time.
Longfellow when he wrote those words thought naught of such as I but I had put myself there and I would leave my footprints on the sands of time as a well-respected and knowledgeable physicist.
I remember first reading that passage at school and it stayed with me for many years and over those years it was the only passage of the poem that I have remembered.
Had I remembered the rest then perhaps I would have been more open, more careful. But I did not and that is why you are now reading this rather me telling you of it. But here, I grow to far ahead of my story I am telling you of things that have not yet happened.
Soon, if I had continued I would be telling you of my death and I would rather delay that terrible thing if you do not mind for some time yet.
I only realised many years later in life that he understood what I had only learned. It is a measure of intelligence used only for the most intelligent and I to my regret lost out to him in that context. Someone can tell you something. You can read a book and you will know what they are saying and that is knowledge.
Original understanding is for the smartest amongst us and Todd was one of those. He surpassed what I saw in myself within days of meeting him and I am smart. Smart beyond the ideas of most human kind. I am not Einstein or even Oppenheimer yet amongst those alive today I measure myself in the top one hundred but think myself in the top ten.
Todd would not be measured in the top ten thousand by academic standards and yet I know that he is and smarter, more intuitive as well, better than me and I hate him for that as well as so many other things.
22. Jasmine. The other side of the world.
I am worried and scared, Todd is frightened, frightened about what they are going to say, what they are going to think of him but he will not be dissuaded he intends to publish his paper. I called Ken earlier tonight to see if he could talk him out of it. I know that Ken hates me and sees me a usurper taking Mary’s place in Todd’s life yet I am so worried for Todd that I tried even that. When first I called and said who I was he hung up on me before I even said hello but I called back and he spoke to me though he barely seemed to know that I was there and very worried for his friend, my love. Ken do not hang up again please I really need to talk to you about Todd. He is going to publish his thesis even though he knows the kind of shit that he is going to get.
Nothing to do with me doll, he replied, I told him to say nothing about it. Anyway no matter what advice I give him he follows his own that's why you are there instead of him being at home with his wife.
I realised at this point that it was futile trying to get him to do something and so said as a departing comment this was not about me but about what Todd is about to do. I don't think that you really understand.
I don't think that he did. Sure they were friends but I really got the impression from Ken that he did not give a shit about Todd and Todd only imagined him as a friend.
I imagine now that its true knowing all that I know and I suppose Todd told me that once that he does not make friends easily and even when you do betrayal is all that you can expect. I was always surprised that he had committed to me. I knew that I was beautiful and smart but like him I was not the easiest person to get on with though I think that I would have been rather easier to get on with than him. But I was worried about him deeply worried, frightened. He was about to tell the world about what was going to happen in the future and that there was a god. That astrology was a fact and that everything we accept as fact will soon be turned on its head.
I spoke to him earlier and he sounded worn out. Tired and a little depressed though he told me he was not and just had been busy.
The fallout was going to be beyond anything that we have experienced heretofore or at least all that I had experienced up until now yet he was going to publish the paper with all that it meant. Shit loads of fallout.
His reputation was already in tatters. The superstar physicist that had talked and published a paper on astrology and had been shattered with the fallout even then, so many years ago and it led to removing himself mainly from the scientific community in which he belonged.
He told me all about it and I realised that he still meant it. It was a fascination of his. That and black magic. I remember him producing a spell for me to prove its existence but stopping me from performing it. He was worried that behind it all there was some truth in it, however unlikely. He made me promise and though I have often broken promises in my life he seemed so worried that I might perform the rite that I did not do it.
He did not believe in such things he always told me and I am sure that he did not believe them knowing how vociferously he talked against them but at the same time did not wish to tempt the devil.
Yet he was going to do exactly that he was going to invite the devil to his door again as he had done once before. Publish his paper. His ego was bigger than I had realised, the only reason I could see for doing so was to make him famous. Either as a new messiah or as the fool that had proved the existence of god. A third of the worlds population already believed and knew of the existence of god without any help from a physicist.
He argued though that people believed in faith yet he was going to offer conclusive scientific proof of the existence of god and that god had indeed created the universe as the bible intimates. This was something very different he argued to blind faith. It was the equivalent of the flat earth theory being disproved by sailing round the world or that there were not dragons beyond the sea as someone had been there and there were none.
I worried at first that he had not realised all it would mean to publish that paper but I need not have as he as always had thought things through to the very end. He knew that it was going to ruin him but in a spirit of altruism, something that he had running up his backbone and into his brain making him some times over generous and often foolish there was nothing that I could say that would stop him.
Perhaps if Ken had been on my side, perhaps if Mary had recanted perhaps if I had been more persuasive then things would have been different but they were not.
Before the world was going to end Todd's world was going to end and very soon indeed.
