JACK AND HIS FRIEND HARRY

    There is a reason Jack keeps saying “The Devil’s just a point of view.”
    He has done things that require him to subscribe to this notion.
    He scavenges out in the warehouse district all morning.
    By noon, when he comes in to take his spot at the counter, he has already made more money than most of us will ever see.
    By two, when he gets to his office and his desk, the most has disappeared.
    It’s all of us by then.
    The money’s not in what he finds out there.
    The items he brings with him to the diner and then to the office are spurs for conversation: discarded gadgets, pristine pieces of lumber cut to the wrong size, the occasional sketched self-portrait.
    He has all those conversations.
    “I could probably rewire this to be a really fantastic car alarm.”
    “This is a really fine cedar.”
    “Whoever drew this is probably more talented than he knows. Do you see how the eyes are looking down slightly in a way that suggests shame but then, when you look at it, reveals itself as arrogance?”
    He has them at the diner and he has them at the office.
    It’s possible they are intentional distractions from the money.
    The money comes from the silent distant operation of all his businesses.
    These businesses are the things that he has done.
    One develops airborne toxins for use in wartime.
    Another plainly makes armaments.
    A third deposits radioactive waste and industrial runoff in poor nations, burying it underneath fields that are then used to grow crops or as playgrounds.
    His friends, and there are many, are quick to point out the other types of companies he has started, run, profited from, the medical devices firm, the one that protects personal information from invasive technologies.
    “He’s a saint,” says Harry.
    But these are just offsets and Harry knows it, just as Jack himself knows it, though Jack also knows that it would be inappropriate for he himself to articulate it so clearly, and that is why he is grateful that Harry does.
    Harry, weekly if not daily, advances the point of view that enables Jack to move forward, safe in the belief that he is a man like any other, possessed of flaws, certainly, but also moral in other regards, a “balanced being,” in the parlance of the writer Louis R. Lancaster, who penned How to Forgive (Yourself), the slim 1994 volume that is Harry’s North Star and consequently Jack’s.
    Harry is there at the diner most days at noon when Jack drops by.
    If he is not there, he appears soon after Jack, entering quietly.
    He listens, mostly, smiles often, says nice things about Jack when Jack leaves the diner for the office.
    Harry is the Devil.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas