Entry 88. Unlikely brothers

I consider one of the greatest proofs of the Tenets of Common Wealth to be my friendship today with Fred Masterson. By trying to reason with him instead of cowering in fear, by settling for disarming him after he took the shot instead of returning kill force with kill force, I reached something inside him.

“I thought you were a dangerous lunatic,” Fred told me some time later, an ironic statement if I ever heard one. “A world with no government, sovereign individuals working out their differences without the force of law to compel them – it sounded like an false idea of a utopia just waiting for a strong dictator to swoop in and convince people otherwise. In fact, I was pretty sure you expected to become that dictator.”

“Me?” I said, and apologized immediately for laughing at him.

“Sure. Who better, if anarkhia didn’t work, to be the benevolent dictator who would step in and make it work? You were telling us and showing us how it could work anyway, so you knew we’d turn to you and beg you to become the leader and force us to behave. And if I was wrong, if you weren’t planning to set yourself up, someone else could come forward and say he was taking over because the commonwealth wasn’t working.”

“If I was dead, maybe the consensus would be that we need a government after all.”

“Exactly.”

“What changed your mind, my friend?”

“You called me your friend.”

“Of course, that’s what you are,” I said, confused.

“No. That’s what changed my mind: You took me as your friend, after I tried to kill you and put a hole in your shoulder. I saw no ambition for power in you. You really believe those tenets you talk about all the time.”

“I do,” I admitted. “And if I didn’t treat you with love, if I didn’t respond to your violence with love, if I didn’t give you more than you were willing to give me, we wouldn’t be friends, would we? I believe in those tenets because I’ve seen them work time and again.”

“As have I – now,” Fred Masterson said.

One night not long afterward, I walked the beach near sunset looking across the harbor at the oxygen-nitrogen generator and hearing the distant hum of its machinery, my arm around a beautiful red-haired woman, both her arms around me, and I felt a sudden throb where the slug had gone through my left shoulder. My cry of pain ended with a joyful peal of laughter, knowing I would always carry a reminder of my deep friendship with Fred Masterson – a friendship forged by an errant bullet.