Chapter 2

So what do you do when you suddenly discover that you have an incredible power that nobody, so far as can be determined, ever had before?

You think about how to use it. And maybe how not to.

You also wonder what other powers you might have that you hadn’t known were in the arsenal.

I tried a few experiments along those lines. I wished that Barbara Walters, who was that very morning appearing on that show where she and several other women yelled at each other across a table, would suddenly suffer an on-camera nosebleed and be forced to flee the set forthwith.

I watched the program intently, but Ba-ba never got her nosebleed.

I stayed there, watching live events on television that whole afternoon, and even into the weekend, while making non-fatal bad-luck wishes on a number of different irritating television personalities. On Sunday, I wished that the Eagles’ quarterback would stumble and fall on his ass while trying to find a receiver, losing eight yards in the process and forcing a punt.

He didn’t fall. In fact, he completed the pass for first down and the Eagles went on to score.

So, okay, clearly I didn’t have a general power to just wish-something-and-make-it-so. Not even little, two-bit nosebleeds, or quarterback fall-downs.

So much for influencing events in general.

But I could sure as hell fucking kill people. So I went back to focusing exclusively on that.

Did I worry about the morality of offing perfect (okay, imperfect) strangers — willy-nilly?

Nope. Not even a little bit. Maybe it was just the impersonal nature of the whole thing, but killing bad people didn’t strike me as something about which I should spend a lot of time brooding.

But I did worry about the “willy-nilly” part. You know -- offing the wrong people. I mean, I knew plenty of names of people that my government, or the national press, or some other interest group might think richly deserved to die. But I was bright enough and sensitive enough to realize that the motives of governments (or of the national press, or some interest group that maybe happened to share one’s personal prejudices) often could leave a lot to be desired.

Think about it: If former vice president Richard Cheney thought some middle Eastern dictator should die, there ought to at least be a preliminary investigation to try to determine whether Cheney’s motives were pure.

Who knows? Maybe the guy Cheney hated was more virtuous than was his detractor? That wouldn’t be too hard. Maybe Cheney’s wanting you dead would qualify as a positive entry on one’s resume.

So I’m kind of proud to say that one of the first things I told myself (after having already killed two prominent scumbags on a pretty casual basis) was that thereafter, before I offed some poor bastard for being a worldwide environmental hazard, I would perform some due diligence.

There would have to be genuine research!

Ideally, I’d have convened a select committee of the world’s best (and most morally unassailable) people to help me with my selection process. But unfortunately, it was clear enough that my unique capabilities would have to remain thoroughly under wraps. Were anybody to get wind of where these convenient deaths were coming from, my own life wouldn’t be worth very much for very long.

I would have to become The Lone Arranger.

So I spent a lot of time on the Internet and at the public library, reading up on the world’s principal Bad Guys. I tried to be careful to separate the wheat from the chaff. It wasn’t enough to establish merely that some military leader or national dictator was a known tyrant. I needed to determine, at least as best I could, that he was a true obstacle to progress in his home country. He was preventing better people from perhaps ruling with a more beneficent hand.

He (or she) had to be unjust, power-mad, and cruel.

There were plenty of candidates (and most of them didn’t survive my basic research). It was hard work, but once I satisfied myself that a Bad Guy didn’t have any redeeming social value, the “work” of sending him straight to Hell was as simple as could be.

I just mentally zapped the S.O.B. and waited for the news services to confirm the kill.

For quite awhile, I concentrated on political types. The press began to notice the sudden epidemic of deceased dictators, and a few commentators even discussed the matter in their newspaper columns or blogs. There were increasingly frequent suggestions that the CIA, or some other international evildoer, might be behind the outbreak of Sudden Dictator Death Syndrome.

But of course there was no evidence to be found anywhere that this growing group of miscreants had not simply met their Maker in close temporal proximity. The deaths were all just happy coincidences. Or at least, so it seemed.

World politics is a complicated subject, so it wasn’t like there was a sudden outbreak of Peace on Earth and Good Will Toward Men. Not infrequently, Evil Dictator Number Two turned out to be waiting in the wings and when the better-known bad guy croaked, Evil Dictator Version 2.1 was right there, ready to take his place, and conditions locally didn’t noticeably improve.

It got kind of frustrating, really. I knew I was doing something “good,” or trying to, but the hard evidence of my success wasn’t always clear, even weeks after the event.

And all that research! It was hard work, I’ll tell you. Granted, it was educational. I knew a helluva lot more about world affairs and the intricacies of international relations than I’d ever known before. Unfortunately, I didn’t find that doing all that research was itself fascinating. In fact, it was boring as hell.

So after awhile I got to thinking. I wondered if maybe I could come up with a more efficient way to rid the world of bad people. Maybe I couldn’t give Barbara Walters a nosebleed on national television, but what if I could come up with a way of killing off reprobates -- wholesale?

I put aside all the back copies of Current Affairs and my other research materials and focused on formulating a foolproof General Descriptor.

Let’s see. What if I decided to kill everyone in the world who had secured his or her position of power by unjust means?

But wait. That was far too broad! Who knows how many hundreds of beloved international leaders and captains of industry would be inadvertently included?

Okay. so I’ll just off everyone who had secured power by unjust means, and who was following policies tending to oppress large segments of the population of his or her country, and whose long-term motives were not focused on the perceived best interests of his or her nation, or the region, or the world.

Complicated. And probably, some pretty bad characters would escape the reach of my formulation. But if it worked, I would have knocked off who-knows-how-many baddies, all in one fell swoop.