MY FRIEND VICKI just earned or just used up about a million karma points — I’m not sure which. Vicki works in a clothing store in Rifle, a small town in Colorado. She was at work on July 3, and the place was fairly busy. At about 2:30 p.m., a strange man walked in. Vicki remembers that he had a shaved head and wore a T-shirt that wasn’t tucked in. She took one look at him and the hair on the back of her neck stood up. He used inappropriate body language, he flailed his arms wildly, he had a crazy look in his eyes, and he was talking about crazy things — God and redemption and his hatred for certain types of shirts. He was obviously way out of it, but Vicki approached him, because that’s her job, and she figured that he deserved to be treated with respect, even if he was one taco short of a combo platter.

She asked if she could help him with anything. He moved up close to her — inappropriately close. She could smell his breath. " The world’s a very bad place, " he said, wild-eyed.

" Sometimes it can be a really wonderful place, though, " she said, smiling at the scary stranger. Vicki is like that. She defaults to smiling. The crazy guy looked at her hard. Then he said, " You will survive today. Because you’re a woman and because you’re nice. "

Eventually, the stranger left, and Vicki went back to folding the shirts he had unfolded and scattered about the place.

Eight hours later, the stranger shot seven people in a mobile-home park, killing four. He was apprehended immediately, because he was known to the cops in this small town and there were many witnesses. He made no attempt to conceal his actions. During interrogation, the stranger admitted to police that he had initially intended to kill everyone in the first place he walked into earlier in the day, a small clothing store in downtown Rifle. He told police that he changed his mind about exterminating everyone in the store when he met a really nice lady who was working there.

VICKI, AND everyone else I know, lives wrapped in a veil of security. We believe that nothing bad will happen to us. We have to believe it. It’s what allows us to get on airplanes and into the backs of cabs, and it allows us to walk down the street without fear. When something bad happens to others, the very first thing we do is look for a reason to believe they might have brought it on themselves so we can convince ourselves that we never, ever would have made the same decisions and are, therefore, safe. But random acts of violence rip that veil of security right away from our eyes and show us something that we like to pretend isn’t there: evil without reason that exists for its own sake. There are no right ways or wrong ways to handle it when you come up against that kind of evil. You just have to get out of its way ... or not.

If Vicki had avoided the stranger, she’d probably be dead, and so would the eight or nine other people who were in the store with her. It makes her, and everyone who knows her, sick in the stomach to think what might have happened if she’d done one single thing differently. If she had avoided him, or if it had been someone else who approached him — say, a less friendly colleague — one can only imagine the outcome. As it was, her decisions saved her, but led the madman to create hell for someone else. The ending of Vicki’s tale is not happy, just less horrifying than it could have been for her.

Vicki’s story isn’t a morality play about the importance of being nice to people who make your hair stand on end. Had the madman in Vicki’s store been a rapist who hunted her down later that night, she would have been criticized for being too friendly. People would have taken solace in the fact that they are never friendly to strangers — they would have said Vicki made a mistake. What her story should do is remind us that our lives are like continuous movies, and no one knows the ending, or how our actions will affect the rest of the scenes. Life is one long exercise in chaos theory. Our lives are lived from moment to moment, and decisions made in one moment cascade like a waterfall into the next, and into all the moments ever afterward. Vicki got a rare glimpse into the downstream slip of that river.

How many times in a day do we avert disaster, or brush up against evil, but do not realize it, because the unthinkable never comes to pass? For one day, one moment, wouldn’t it be fascinating to see the results of a decision that we thought we’d made in a vacuum? You’d discover, for example, the impact of your decision not to put nuts in the brownies that you brought to the family picnic, and which were brought home by a distant cousin as leftovers, and were then eaten by his neighbor’s severely nut-allergic child when no one was looking. You might learn the results of the words you spoke that changed someone’s mind. Life isn’t defined by heroic acts, of which there are very few. It’s defined by the simple acts, one after another, day after day. Some of these acts have consequences far beyond our intentions. The lesson of Vicki’s story may be to live more thoughtfully. Or perhaps the lesson is that we aren’t meant to see all the ways that our routine, autopilot actions shape the lives of others and alter the course of history. I for one would go mad if given that kind of vision.

But if you ever meet up with Vicki, a pretty blonde with laughing eyes and a ready smile, buy her a beer. And ask what it feels like to get a glimpse down the river.

Kris Frieswick can be reached at krisf1@gte.net.

Issue Date: July 19-26, 2001