This morning, I watched my hand reach out to kill the alarm at 6:27. It moved with a sort of obedient serenity, like a servant who has long since forgotten the name of the master. I lay there in the half-light of my apartment, the gray pooling on the walls like ash, and I waited—not for anything in particular—but because my body knew the sequence. It had always known. I think I used to believe that I had intentions. Now I know better. The hand moves, the eyelids flutter open, the coffee brews itself through me.
I do not decide to do these things. The decision was made long before I was ever aware of it. Before I was born, even. The world was already forming me in the image of its accidents. The molecules of my parent’s bodies aligned under the blind pressures of history, of war, of unspeakable loneliness, and I was the sediment.
I walked to the mirror and examined myself with the same clinical detachment I use when inspecting a government file. There was a pimple on the underside of my chin. I touched it. It hurt a little. The sensation meant nothing, though. Pain arises as predictably as a sunrise, given the right stimuli. I am just a locus of reactions. I thought, I will shave, but even the thought was not mine. It rose up like a bubble from some subterranean pressure. Where did it come from? Childhood? Habit? My father’s smooth jaw? Yes. He shaved every morning too, standing in the same posture, lips curled back slightly to tighten the skin. I watched him once when I was ten. That image lives inside me like a tumor with roots.
The elevator smelled like bleach and onions. The janitor must have cleaned it last night. I found it comforting in a strange way, the staleness of it, the unchosen nature of those molecules swirling in the air. I stepped out onto the street, briefcase in hand, coat buttoned to the third notch. I walk the same route every day, and not out of ritual or preference. I once tried to take a different street, just to see if I could break the pattern, but the weight of deviation was nauseating. I turned around after half a block and felt relief flood my chest—like an addict returning to his dose. This route, this sidewalk, these cracks in the pavement … they are not choices. They are grooves in my being.
At work, I process forms. Paper passes from one side of my desk to the other. I stamp, I initial, I slide. Each act flows from the last. I don’t mind. It is simple, and within its simplicity there is a kind of sacred submission. Sometimes I imagine myself as a neuron firing along a neural pathway in the great brain of history. I do not question the signal. I am the signal.
In the break room, Marcus asked if I wanted to join a bowling league. I told him no, gently, and he laughed and said, “You really never do anything unexpected, huh?” I smiled with my lips, not with my eyes, and I thought, Even this reply was not mine. The ‘no’ was already written into the conversation before he ever asked. Marcus thinks I am eccentric. He doesn’t understand the profound peace of knowing you’ve never chosen anything, not even your refusal.
People around me are sick with the fever of free will. They believe their choices define them. They cling to their preferences like life jackets in a sea of causality. They are drowning, and they don’t even know it.
There was a woman once, Marlene, who loved to sing opera while doing dishes. That memory comes to me with a metallic taste. She asked me once, during a long September evening, why I never surprised her. I told her the truth. “Surprise is just ignorance of the sequence,” I said. “If you knew all the causes, you’d see that every ‘surprise’ was inevitable.”
She stared at me as though I’d struck her. “But don’t you feel like you choose me?” she asked.
I felt nothing. That was the end.
Now I eat alone. I sit by the window, sip my soup, and watch the leaves fall. Each one spirals according to wind speed, stem angle, and the hidden physics of the day. No leaf falls freely, and yet none resist. I am one of them.
Sometimes the weight of it presses against me, this certainty that I am merely the sum of what came before. But it is not a despairing weight. It is thick, yes, and absolute, but it relieves me of all guilt, all responsibility, all shame. I did not become this man. I was unfolded, like a blueprint pressed into flesh.
On my walk home tonight, the clouds hung low and yellow. I passed the bakery. The smell of warm bread reached out to me. I paused. There was a flicker in my chest. An impulse. A suggestion of deviation. I stared at the door, at the glass, at the reflection of my own hesitant hand.
But I kept walking. Not because I resisted. Because the cause of my stopping wasn’t strong enough.
At the crosswalk, an old man leaned on his cane and said to me, “Ever wonder what might’ve happened if you’d done something different, way back when?”
I felt the nausea then. It rose slowly, like steam off rotting meat. The smell of illusion. The grotesque fantasy of choice.
“There was no way back then,” I said. “Only forward, only the path I was already on.”
He shook his head like he pitied me. “You really believe that?”
I looked up at the signal. It blinked red. The world seemed to hold its breath.
“I don’t believe it,” I said. “I am it.”
And then I stepped into the street. The horn of a taxi split the air. It missed me by inches. My heart did not race. There was no adrenaline. Only the sensation of a chapter turned.
Behind me, the old man cursed and muttered, “Crazy bastard.”
But he, too, was only saying what he had to say. Just like me. Just like everyone.
We are all just stones rolling downhill.
Some scream as they fall. I do not.
I simply roll.
Jacob Daniel Weaver 