Philosophy Made Simple by Robert Hellenga Page A

and how she’d never really thanked her properly, and so on. She’d been seeing a shrink, she said, who was helping her understand some things about her family. She didn’t say what they were, and Rudy didn’t ask.
You’re only as happy as your unhappiest child,
he thought. And the pain he felt for his oldest daughter was like the longing he’d felt that morning when he’d heard the whooping crane, if it had been a whooping crane. He didn’t know what to make of it.
    He poured another glass of wine and sat for a while in thedark, and then he went into his study. What he wanted to do now, he thought, was just lie low, “live unknown,” as Epicurus advised. He’d wanted to make enough money to leave something for the girls, but maybe that wasn’t important. He’d wanted answers to the big questions, but maybe that wasn’t important either. Maybe what was important was just to live simply, to acknowledge one’s insignificance in the larger scheme of things, to acknowledge no authority higher than reason and to subject one’s emotions to this authority without complaining.
    But he couldn’t do it.
You’re only as happy as your unhappiest child.
    He sat at Helen’s desk and tried to sort out his thoughts.
Live unknown,
he wrote. He filled an entire page of the journal he’d bought to keep track of his progress. The ink flowed smoothly from Helen’s eighteen-karat-gold nib:
Live unknown, Live unknown, Live unknown.
Then he put his head down on the desk for a minute, and when he woke with a start, the pen was gone. He felt a familiar sinking feeling, an athlete sensing defeat. He looked on the desk, examined every square inch of the sloping surface. He looked on the floor. He did a grid search of the floor, starting in the back corner under the desk and moving outward, past the wide door that opened into the bathroom, all the way to the opposite wall. He listened in his imagination for the sound of the pen rolling down the sloping surface of the desk and then hitting the floor. But he heard nothing. The pen was gone.
    He looked everywhere. In his pockets. In the desk drawers. But he was very tired. The pen was gone. If Helen had been there,
     he could have called to her, and she’d have been able to tell him where to look without even coming into the room. She’d have known right where the pen was. But Helen wasn’t there, and the sense that the universe was conspiring against him returned more strongly than ever. He experienced a surge of anger.
Why do you do this to me?
he shouted inwardly.
Why?
    And in his imagination a voice responded,
No one is doing anything to you.
He recognized the voice of Epicurus, the voice of reason.
You’ve misplaced the pen, that’s all.
    I haven’t misplaced it, it’s just gone. I’ve looked everywhere.
    You’re too tired to think straight. There’s no point in getting angry.
    1 searched every square inch of the floor. I did a grid search. Do you know what a grid search is?
    Well then, what do you think happened? Do you think the atoms that constitute the pen suddenly dissolved into other forms?
     That will happen eventually, hut do you think it happened in the jew minutes that you dozed off?
    Rudy was reluctant to say it, but he really had no choice:
No.
    Very well, then, now go to bed.
    Rudy acknowledged defeat, but he was too upset to go to bed. In the kitchen he poured himself a small glass of wine which he carried up the tractor path between two rows of trees.
    The trees were in full bloom, so the grove was dark. It was a cloudless night and the moon was full and once he got to the top of the hill he had no trouble finding his way down to the little backwater or inlet — it looked like the head of an upside-down duck on the plat map he’d taped up on the wall in his study — where Creaky and Maxine used to swim, before the accident. There was only a trace now of the opening that Creaky had once cut in the dense chaparral that bordered the river. Helen would have