The Evil Eye - The Fate Of A Marked Man In An Uncertain, Probabilistic World

Bobby Crandall had always had what was called 'a service motive', an innate desire to help others and to do good; and yet, time after time as he was doing his bit to make the world a better place, he was derailed.  His life in fact had been a series of untoward, unexpected, hapless events.  

In fact the closer he got to his goal, the more the way would be strewn with rocks and rubble that had tumbled down just as he was about to pass.  It was as if some unseen, indomitable force had its eye on him, harbored some deviational anger, and refused to let him get on with his life.  

When he was a boy he was always bruised, cut, and banged up; so much so that he was convinced that he was accident prone.  'Nonsense', said his mother. 'You're just not careful'; but as much as he tried to avoid the potholes in the road or the tree roots under the sidewalk, he was still pitched off his bike into the briars and had to straggle home, wheeling his bent, de-spoked Schwinn, to an exasperated mother. 

It got to the point that he was afraid to go outside, and he became a wheezy, dorky kid who did nothing but build Legos and work out chess puzzles.  His parents became worried.  Their otherwise normal child was becoming an addenda to the vibrant, healthy, optimistic society of privilege to which he was born.  They shooed him out of the house come rain or come shine; but the boy always returned with some malady, some wound, some untidiness that could never be explained.  

'Boys will be boys', said his father, Prentiss Arthur Crandall, industrialist, Rotarian, and civic leader - a man who ironically never had any misfortune in his life.  Not one broken bone, not one stupendous fall, not even measles; so it was with dismay and concern that he wondered about his son who was intelligent, coordinated, and strong but yet had one pitfall after another.  It was as though he were somehow marked by fate, the victim of some evil eye. 

Now, of course, the likes of Prentiss Crandall would never ever consider such things in actuality - life was a random affair, mitigated by a set of particularly good genes and happy happenstance - but certainly not the work of some supernatural trickster.  Religion was for other people, talk of the Devil a comic book fantasy, and the intervention of the supernatural in human affairs a flighty, nonsensical idea.  Why would an all-powerful, omnipresent divinity who sees all and knows all care in the least about any one individual?

While Prentiss was teeing off at the Farmington Country Club on a bright, sunny, warm Sunday morning, thousands were crowding into church begging for intercession, some acknowledgment that they mattered, some sign of compassion or at least intermittent interest.  So the thought that anything but bad luck, impatience, and dreamy inattention was responsible for his son's mighty struggle to remain upright, was unconscionable. 

 

As Bobby grew older he upped the ante on doing good. Yet, the evil eye - this is what he finally and reluctantly called it - persisted in interfering with his anointed rounds.  He was on the first Freedom Bus to Selma but somewhere in North Carolina a wheel came off, the bus overturned and careened into a ditch, and was too wrecked to do anything but be towed to the junkyard.  Some black field hands came and pulled him and his classmates out of the mud, but that was the closest he ever got to the Southern black experience. 

Marching at Berkeley for Free Speech and close enough to Mario Savio and the San Francisco hippy firebrands to jump on the stage and join them in their protest, he turned his ankle on the way up the rickety stairs, fell back into the crowd, and limped his way back to his communal house where for five days he elevated his leg and soaked it in ice.  By the time he felt he was able to join the protesters, they had been dispersed, locked up, or scattered. 

 

On his way to Algeria as a volunteer to help vaccinate desert Berbers, word came that a violent coup had just taken place, that his plane could not land, and that he would have to return to New York.  Disconsolate, and unemployed, he applied for a taxi license; but on his first night shift he got mugged, beaten, and left on the corner of St. Nicholas Avenue and 125th Street, his car hijacked and later found in the Hudson River. 

He had paid no attention to his fellow cabbies who told him never to pick up a (*****) after 7pm let alone drive him to Harlem, but the old service instinct was still very much alive and well, and he couldn't very well act on the racist warnings of others.  Now, there are tens of thousands of cab rides taken in New York City every day, and serious infractions, assaults, and robberies are a fraction of one percent of them.  Yet, Bobby on his very first day behind the wheel, gets jumped by a black man with no intention of paying his way uptown. 

Bobby gave up.  He knew that there was something other than random circumstance, negative serendipity, and simple bad luck behind his unbelievable string of mishaps.  Against his better judgement but at the end of his rope, he consulted an old Romanian gypsy whose shop he had passed a hundred times in the Bowery. 

Everything was as it was supposed to be - subdued, indirect lighting, beads, tinkly background music and the imposing six-foot presence of Madame Luisa, all dressed in Eastern skirts and medieval shawls, a crone of a woman, beak-nosed but with azure blue eyes she fixed on him as she took his hand and sat him down at the center table under an ornate Victorian tassled lampshade. 

Platitudes and good guesses, hocus pocus, and special effects; but Bobby came out no better off than when he went in.  Yet there was one thing, an almost incidental thing, a fragment of Candomblé or voodoo, and when she said it there was a sparkle in her eyes, an almost playful glance although her chant was as somber as that prayed by the priest in Kenscoff before exorcising a maiden.  Why at that moment was there a connection? 

On his way back up Broadway and into the lights of Times Square, he wondered when the next happenstance would occur - a pothole that would crack an axle and send him careening across the median, a random gunshot through the passenger window and through his neck...but the night was calm, almost serene.  He drove north and south, east and west, out to Queens and Staten Island, safe, secure, and unbothered. 

He waited and waited, crossed every street with the caution of a spinster, and still expected the unexpected which never came; and so it was that he went back to the old gypsy woman to thank her, if that indeed was what one did after a happening so supernatural; but she was nonchalant and uninterested and asked him only if he wanted a seance.  

The next day as he was walking on 38th street by a construction site, a rivet that had been dropped thirty stories above whizzed an inch past his ear and whanged and twanged off the sidewalk into the street.  It should have hit him squarely on the top of his head and drilled down to the base of his feet, but missed, and so it was that Bobby realized that his misfortunes were nothing but the luck of the draw, an old stochastic problem of probability.  

There was no way that so many misfortunes could have happened to one person unless they were looked at in the context of billions.  A rough patch, nothing more, unusual but just as possible as someone somewhere rolling sevens five times in a row. 

Epiphanies are what we are all about, creatures of assumptions and quick to jump to conclusions; but then one day it all becomes clear.  There is nothing but randomness in the world, no evil eye, no omniscient God, no nothing; and getting used to that idea in and of itself is remarkable.