Free Ivory and the Horn by Charles De Lint

nod. “I guess I was. I mean, I am. I don’t think I can even face going into the office. I’ll just send them my letter of resignation and have somebody pick up my stuff from my desk.”
    “You do make a difference,” she said. “It might not seem so at a time like this, but you’ve got to concentrate on all the people you have helped. That’s got to count for something, doesn’t it?”
    “How would you know?” Dennison asked her. No sooner did the question leave his mouth, than it was followed by a flood of others. “Where did you come from? What are you doing here? It’s got to be more than trying to convince me to keep my job so that I can afford to donate some money to your cause.”
    “You don’t believe in good Samaritans?”
    Dennison shook his head. “Nor Santa Claus.”
    But maybe angels, he added to himself. She was so fresh and pretty—light years different from the people who came into his office, their worn and desperate features eventually all bleeding one into the other.
    “I appreciate your looking after me the way you did,” he said. “Really I do. And I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. But it just doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
    “You help people all the time.”
    “That’s my job— was my job.” He looked away from her steady gaze. “Christ, I don’t know anymore.”
    “And that’s all it was?” she asked.
    “No. It’s just… I’m tired, I guess. Tired of seeing it all turn to shit on me. This little kid who died yesterday… I could’ve tried harder. If I’d tried harder, maybe he’d still be alive.”
    “That’s the way I feel about the environment, sometimes,” she said. “There are times when it just feels so hopeless, I can’t go on.”
    “So why do you?”
    “Because the bottom line is I believe I can make a difference. Not a big one. What I do is just a small ripple, but I know it helps. And if enough little people like me make our little differences, one day we’re going to wake up to find that we really did manage to change the world.”
    “There’s a big distinction between some trees getting cut down and a kid dying,” Dennison said.
    “From our perspective, sure,” she agreed. “But maybe not from a global view. We have to remember that everything’s connected. The real world’s not something that can be divided into convenient little compartments, like we’ll label this, ‘the child abuse problem,’ this’ll go under ‘depletion of the ozone layer.’ If you help some homeless child on these city streets, it has repercussions that touch every part of the world.”
    “I don’t get it.”
    “It’s like a vibe,” she said. “If enough people think positively, take positive action, then it snowballs all of its own accord and the world can’t help but get a little better.”
    Dennison couldn’t stop from voicing the cynical retort that immediately came into his mind.
    “How retro,” he said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “It sounds so sixties. All this talk about vibes and positive mumbo-jumbo.”
    “Positive thinking brought down the Berlin Wall,” she said.
    “Yeah, and I’m sure some fortune teller predicted it in the pages of a supermarket tabloid, although she probably got the decade wrong. Look, I’m sorry, but I don’t buy it. If the world really worked on ‘vibes,’ I think it’d be in even worse shape than it already is.”
    “Maybe that’s what is wrong with it: too much negative energy. So we’ve got to counteract it with positive energy.”
    “Oh, please.”
    She got a sad look on her face. “I believe it,” she said. “I learned that from a man that I came to love very much. I didn’t believe him when he told me, either, but now I know it’s true.”
    “How can you know it’s true?”
    Debra sighed. She put her hand in the back pocket of her jeans and pulled out a piece of paper.
    “Talk to these people,” she said. “They can explain it a whole lot better than I can.”
    Dennison looked at the