	RodMer Short Story Package FF The Final Win
by Rod Anderson	for on-line reading now in your browser

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Here is Short Story Package FF a short story by Rod Anderson.

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This short story was published in The Antigonish Review Issue #61, Summer 1985. It was, in fact, my first acceptance of a literary submission to a Canadian litmag. As a coincidence, Merike had seen and read the story in this litmag just before we met some eleven years ago. Fate is full of odd synchronicities.

THE FINAL WIN

Approximately 1,700 words

One thing about Rogan, he was always sure of himself. In fact, it was just this supreme arrogance which was so intensely irritating. For whenever there was a problem to be solved, some enigma to be unravelled, some obstacle to be overcome, who was always there, every time, with the unquestionably correct answer? Rogan, of course, that detestable, self-centred know-it-all! Three or four of us would be carefully calculating the risks of alternative courses of action, weighing the probabilistic outcomes, painstakingly weeding out sub-optimal strategies in search of the one most promising approach, when in would stride Rogan, crashing right through the whole crowd of us, trampling on everybody's toes, pushing us aside, crowing over his victory with that cocky self-confidence of his and, completely oblivious to our feelings, stump his way straight up to the one inevitable solution.

Of course, once he had succeeded we all saw that given just a little longer we would have reached the same conclusion ourselves and done exactly the same thing. Of course we would have. Any fool can see that. But now it was too late, for Rogan had already done it. The action which had been crying out for doing, straining against its undone-ness with all the tension of its potential energy, had now been done. It was no longer spirit waiting to be born, awaiting gratification, fulfillment. It had been carried out, executed, laid to rest, settled for all time, perfected, defined, determined, resolved.

Anything in the same direction that any of us might now do would be the palest of imitations, unoriginal, unsatisfying, indeed even open to the charge of plagiarism. Perhaps even professional disgrace. No, Rogan had once again seized the initiative, exploited it shamelessly, feasted brazenly on his own success, leaving the rest of us out in the cold, looking in like poor beggars, faces pressed against the windows gazing hungrily at the banquet we could never now enjoy, while glory and honour were heaped undeserved upon that insufferable fathead Rogan for doing, by luck, what we all could easily have done ourselves, though in our case it would have been for much better reason, being based on careful and conscientious analysis.

For that was the galling part! His solution always came to him by the purest accident -- completely unwarranted considering the hours of work, weighty deliberations, and elaborate investigations each of us had invested in the problem. Suddenly Rogan, out of complete ignorance, fueled solely by his inexhaustible assertiveness, shooting from the hip, as it were, would declare, "This is the action we shall take," and, of course, immediately we would all recognize that that was exactly the action to which our own calculations had been pointing. If there were any justice at all, it is clear that we should have received the honour. And yet there was Rogan, like a gambler on a winning streak, arrogantly mistaking his own blind luck for intelligence, and strutting about with that infuriating, self-assured contentedness that only served to rub the salt of envy deeper into our wounds. How we hated the man!

Every time we though we were finally going to get the best of him, were in fact just on the verge of discovery, on that very threshold of success, the cry of "Eureka!" already forming in our anxious throats, in would charge Rogan, stealing our victory at the final moment, upstaging us all, grabbing the limelight, leaving the rest of us tripping over our reference books in the shadows, hurt, confused, and angered by the shabby treatment that fate had handed us.

It was probably for this reason that Rogan's final success caught us so completely and so unfairly by surprise. It happened like this. We were milling about in the analysis of a particularly paradoxical problem, making gradual headway, but knowing in our heart of hearts that any second now Rogan would come barging through with the one correct solution leaving us all fumbling and fuming behind.

But, strangely, he never came. We milled about and pondered and analyzed and measured and considered, all the time listening with half an ear for the obscene trumpeting of Rogan's entry behind our backs -- in angry anticipation of his inevitable victory.

Just then by happenstance, one of our group a nervous middle-aged woman recently back from a holiday in Acapulco, hit upon the solution, sort of fell into it accidentally you might say, as she was pacing back and forth staring at the fore-shortening and checking the lines of perspective, and there suddenly she had it. "My God, I have it!" she whispered, awe-struck. And there she stood, somewhat confused that it was right there in her hand and no Rogan to seize it and make a great fuss and take all the credit. To tell the truth, she was not exactly sure what to so with it now that she had it, so unexpected was this result and so unprepared were we all for this contingency.

Next, an old man in our group, a retired musician, I believe, by making a series of unexpected chromatic modulations through the relative minor, stumbled across the same answer too, dropping his cane in his excitement, and hobbling about the room opening and closing his mouth in amazement while we all looked on equally surprised and wondering how it was that Rogan, the great scene-stealer, had still not arrived.

It was only a few minutes later, after completing on my own some intricate calculations involving linear regression and Monte Carlo methods, and scratching my head in thought, that I myself noticed an odd symmetry in two of the equations I'd been convoluting and immediately had the solution as well. And next, a young girl, one of the precocious, brainy sort, short, with thick, ugly glasses, and braces on her teeth, the kind that ten years later surprises everyone by turning into a stunning woman with three lovers and a successful law practice, well she came up with the same answer. We were still pretty puzzled, I can tell you, about Rogan. Why hadn't he come to upstage us once again? Though he could hardly do that now that we already had the solution and he hadn't.

But it was starting to get a little crowded, the bunch of us being right here on this single, unique intersection of the answer. We were all starting to suffocate a bit. For the solution, or rather its roots, you see, lay at just this one point, or perhaps along a single line satisfying the condition X plus Y equals and everywhere else in space, in the whole of the universe, in fact, X plus Y had some other value like two hundred and sixteen or minus seven or the base of natural logarithms raised to the power of pi or the square root of minus one or any of an infinite number of other possible values, but here on this narrow little line where we were all trying to balance it had the value of exactly zero.

Not that zero is very much fun. In fact, it's rather limiting. Its very nothingness is essentially mean, miserly, and unappealing if you get right down to it. And here we all were, trying to share exactly this nothingness and there not really being room for us all to squeeze into this small little space where the right answer lay. Hardly room to turn around or scratch your ear or wave to your friends because we were packed in their solid, as I say, and more of us kept crowding in with that same right solution every instant. And finally we were all precisely there and it just wasn't possible to move at all. Of course, we knew we were absolutely in the right but that was hardly much comfort when we couldn't enjoy it.

And it was just at that moment that I happened to look out from our squashed point of perfection. And out there in the vast open airiness of infinitely-dimensioned space what did I see but Rogan dancing about like a whirling dervish. Of course, all this space through which he cavorted was erroneous, because we were the only ones that had the right solution and we were exactly here but he wasn't, he was over there except there was so much more of the "there" than this narrow, tight spot which was the "here". And we all felt suddenly bound and constrained by our success because one can only succeed in the one narrow way whereas there are an infinite number of wrong ways in which to fail. So that the greater freedom by far lies in failing. And if one were setting about to fail there are really an infinite number of options open and it isn't at all the suffocating, pinched sort of thing that the once correct answer is, which, as the mathematicians say, offers no "degrees of freedom" at all.

So we looked longingly out at Rogan's dancing and I watched him turning cartwheels and backflips and pirouettes, careening from one error to another with a gay and irresponsible abandon. It didn't matter that we knew that all his positions were absolutely wrong, for he was having such a rollicking good time with them all and laughing for the first occasion I'd seen in his life. And we were looking on enviously like prisoners on the inside, faces pressed to the prison windows, gazing sadly at the one free man on the outside, and at the freedom we had once had and now realized we had never used and now, when it really mattered, we knew it was too late. And at that moment the old anger flooded over us as we realized that for the final time Rogan had won and upstaged us all again.

....................................................................Copyright 1984 Rod Anderson
Published in The Antigonish Review Spring 1985 issue (#61).

Rod Anderson
'SwallowHill', 1940 Hill 60 Rd., R.R.5
Cobourg, ON, K9A 4J8
Canada
rod@rodmer.com