Chapter 40
“Tell us you’re not evil,” Sharon demanded, realizing she still had her mask on. She pulled it off and took down her hair.
Creo watched the front doors of the rave. Gorgeous women strolled out with long coats concealing skin that had been laid bare inside. “It’s not that simple.”
“Bullshit.” She looked away in frustration. “For one concerned with truth, you never talk straight.” Pressure built inside her head and behind her eyes. It felt like all the garbage inside Creo was being stuffed inside her skull.
“Easy, Sharon. Creo is a friend.”
How could Laif stick up for him? Creo does everything in his power to avoid helping Cindy. The most he does is give her a tiny box. “What’s in that stupid box you gave her anyways!”
Creo simply shook his head.
“If it was something to help, why not take it a step further and join us?”
He started the engine of the SUV and turned on the heater. Streams of warm air caressed her stomach and face, driving out the chill. But he didn’t begin driving. “You don’t understand. You’re blind to the bigger picture, of which if I spoke, you wouldn’t believe.”
“Enlighten me, oh Jedi master.”
“I wish I could.”
“Try.”
He waited. “Do you ever wonder why sometimes the warmest people come from abusive childhoods?”
“Yes.” She had not expected that question. “Sometimes evil, despite all its attempts, can’t squash goodness.”
“My parents … they were extremely religious. When I strayed from the righteous path in their eyes, they flogged me. I remember when I was ten, and I ate an apple between meals, my parents freaked. They told me I had disobeyed house rules and was sinning, and they beat the evil out of me.”
Sharon had a soft spot in her heart for abused children. She answered with less irritation, “Just because you’re religious, doesn’t mean you’re good.”
“Yes. But that difficult environment, that abusive environment, helped me grow where my parents wouldn’t. Out of a bad place, I made good.”
“Maybe you didn’t grow enough.”
“Perhaps. But there are many examples in history where goodness springs from evil. The two are not mutually exclusive. They need one another to exist.”
Laif argued, “But there’re also many examples of evil coming from abusive environments, evil breeding evil. And of good coming from healthy environments.”
“Apparently so. But where do all the great artists come from, people at the cutting-edge of what society needs, of what society is most tantalized to hear, see, and feel? Do they come from good, normal homes?”
She wasn’t sure of the answer.
“What kind of childhoods did Beethoven and Mozart have?” He smiled. “Or Johnny Cash?”
She glared at him. How did he know I like Johnny Cash? Did he break into my apartment? Or did he psychically get into my mind?
“Or Frans Schubert? Don’t forget, poverty hurts just as a slap does. Where does one get the motivation to fight so passionately against evil, dysfunction, or ignorance? One must have been hurt by these to fight them with such passion.” He hesitated before asking, “What about your own past, Laif?”
He looked away.
“You fight evil, and does it not come from having been exposed to it, knowing its impact on innocence, desiring it to be stopped?”
Laif’s hands began to tremble on the seat. His eyes quickened in their sockets. His reactions seemed excessive to Creo’s words.
Creo said nothing more.
She inferred, “So you’re not going to help the girls because that would be against the greater good?”
Creo turned the car’s heat up a few notches.
She could feel anger clotting and concentrating inside her. “That’s a crock of shit. Why don’t you get out of your mind and into your heart? You sit there and theorize, when children’s lives are at stake, but you don’t act.”
Three women walked by the idling SUV. They looked hard through the windows, and fear shot through Sharon’s heart, fear of being recognized by the dark mist, but the women couldn’t see past the tint in the dark of night. They giggled away.
Gathering himself, Laif said to Creo, “This great evil you spoke of earlier, I felt it at the Brewsters’ house. What is it?”
Creo’s face turned grave. He pulled out of the parking space.
“Where are we going?” she asked. “If you aren’t coming with us, you better not leave because we’ll need our own car.”
“The mountains.” He laughed hard. “What a place for a congregation of evil, huh? Like clouds clumping around the foothills, waiting for strength and density so they can move into the flatlands, raining down, drenching the environment with their essence.”
Laif appeared nervous at the mention of rain, shifting in his seat, and blinking rapidly.
Creo drove around the glass building and pulled out the driveway, passing a stretch limo, and made a left onto Lincoln Avenue.
“What’re you talking about?” she asked. “Does this mean you’re helping?”
Creo didn’t respond. Sharon wasn’t used to being ignored, not as an adult anyways. It made her feel less important. It made her feel like a child again.
He continued east on Lincoln, past the Orange freeway, toward the Santa Ana Mountains. They remained silent for several miles. Just what would they find there? Why was he being so enigmatic?
Creo finally broke the silence. “The scales of good and evil tilt sometimes, one side gaining on the other. We are like a ship, humanity. We are supposed to be headed in a straight direction to evolutionary greatness. If the scales of one side tip too far, then the ship sways in the wrong direction. Too much goodness one century leads to great evil the next. There has to be a balance to steer humanity toward greater good. This time it is evil that has tilted the ship. If it was goodness, I would be inclined to help evil.”
“You’re not good at all,” she said too meekly.
Laif interjected, “He is this time.”
“What do you mean this time? What if things were different?”
“Things are the way they are. Creo is good.”
She said more strongly, “He’s an intellectual bastard is what he is.”
They stopped at Joey’s Fast Burgers in Orange at midnight, and ate greasy fries and cheese burgers on the road to the mountains, everyone pretty much focused on the food. Sharon didn’t like Creo, and now she knew why. He was an inconsistent, uncaring, backstabbing bastard who could be your friend one day and turn on you the next, with no fixed morals. Why did Laif treat him with such respect and consider him a friend?
She wanted to talk alone with Laif about this, but that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. She would have to bear Creo’s presence, just as long as he was willing to help the girls.