Free The Natural Order of Things by Kevin P. Keating

curse of metempsychosis,” she explained to him one night.
    He sighs and fingers through the dwindling cash in his money clip. If only she could gaze into her crystal ball and divine a simple solution to their financial difficulties—maybe he would be in Paris, Copenhagen, Amsterdam instead of marooned in the city of his birth, riding in the back of a yellow cab that rumbles like a tank in the final cataclysmic scene of some generic wartime melodrama, the rusted muffler scraping along the ridges and fissures in the road, the brakes screeching and grinding at every turn, the radio hissing and crackling and occasionally exploding with unintelligible outbursts from an angry dispatcher. Suddenly de Vere feels not like an aristocrat waited on by a liveried footman but a magician’s assistant stuffed into a tiny black box, waiting to be impaled by sharp objects.
    From the rearview mirror dark eyes study him. They blink in rapid succession as if trying to untangle his snarled storyline, the profusion of lives he has lived.
    “Family troubles?”
    De Vere lowers his flask. “Why do you ask?”
    “I have been driving this cab for many years now, yes, many years. Women, children, they take their toll on a man. I have come to recognize the symptoms.”
    “Perhaps you can describe these … symptoms.”
    The driver chuckles and expertly flicks his cigarette out the window. “Well, for one, you have a certain look of resignation. Also, a look of distrust in your eyes. But of course a man can never trust the people he loves. No, not entirely.”
    De Vere crosses his arms, shifts uneasily in the backseat. “I don’t trust anyone. My son is a thief, my best friend is a gullible fool, and I’m starting to think my wife is a borderline sociopath trying to poison me. She’s developed a fascination for alternative medicine. Witchcraft.” He shrugs his shoulders. “It’s a cliché, I know, but only my dog remains loyal to me.”
    He feels some shame for divulging the details of his life to a complete stranger, but like a lot of people he knows, too many really, de Vere has become more and more involved in his own problems; he cultivates them, multiplies them, makes them deeper and richer than if he left them alone to spin round and round his brain.
    The driver nods. “Why do we trouble ourselves over such things, eh? Wives, sons, they are of little consequence. Life is merely something to endure. Like a disease. Repose will come soon enough.”
    De Vere smirks. “Repose? Yes. Or absolution. I would settle for that.”
    “You are a man with deep religious convictions?”
    De Vere considers this for a moment, notices the small statue of Saint Fiacre on the dashboard. “I thought about becoming an atheist, but then I realized atheism requires more devotion.”
    The driver laughs, a low gritty sound like the crunch and grind of asphalt beneath the tires. “Indeed,” he says, “an atheist must be diligent. There is always the temptation tobelieve in a fearsome god or in a tempting devil. And any nightmarish circumstance can quickly cure a man of his apostasy.”
    De Vere isn’t interested in advice, if that is what this meddlesome man is offering. No one can convince him that what he is doing is wrong, certainly not the cab driver who will soon discover the truth for himself; not the abstinence-stricken priests who listen to de Vere’s expurgated confessions on Saturday afternoons and wait for the appropriate moment to beg him for more filthy lucre; not his wife who suspects him of every kind of misdeed and then attempts to exorcize the demons of infidelity by encouraging him to ingest a hundred different homeopathic potions that are as evil-smelling as they are toxic; not even his perpetually dour best friend to whom he confides every wretched detail late at night in the disquieting calm of his study.
    There are too many moral crusaders in the world, each with an equally improbable scheme to lead a man to salvation, a million