Everybody’s got a price. I’ve never believed it. It’s a thing people say at dinner to sound worldly, usually right before they order the second bottle someone else is paying for. Everybody’s got a price. No. What most people have is a second.
Here’s what I mean. You think a crime is a plan. A guy in a mask, a van idling in the alley with the side door open. And sometimes it is. But the vast, boring majority of the bad things people do to each other don’t come with a plan. They come with a second. One second where a normal person on a normal Tuesday gets handed a small, terrible opportunity and does not do the thing they’ve done every other second of their life, which is nothing.
Take the assistant manager. She’s closing out the register at some store that sells phone cases and vape juice, and the drawer is over by three hundred dollars, and rent was due yesterday, and the camera in the corner has been a decorative object since March. She’s worked here nine years. She has never so much as taken a pen home. And for one long breath, standing there in the fluorescent hum, the whole arrangement of her life goes very quiet and very simple, and a door she didn’t know was there swings open about six inches.
Most people close the door. She probably closes the door. But the interesting thing, the thing I cannot leave alone, is that the door opened at all. That it’s always there. That it’s standing in the hallway of every single person you have ever trusted, unmarked, and the only reason you think it isn’t is that most of us go a whole lifetime without the right Tuesday.
We really don’t like this idea. We prefer the mask and the van. We prefer our criminals pre-sorted, a separate species, ideally with face tattoos, so that when we watch the news we can do the thing we love most, which is feel the warm bath of not being them. The trouble is the data keeps draining the bath. The person who embezzles is almost never the one who seemed like they might. It’s the treasurer of the youth soccer league. It’s the guy who brought the good potato salad.
I’m not saying everyone’s a criminal. I’m saying the distance between the person who crossed and the person who didn’t is about one second wide, and it is not made of character. It’s made of circumstance and luck and whether the drawer happened to be over on the exact night the rent was late. We flatter ourselves that it’s a wall. It’s a hinge.
That second is where I work. It’s the most expensive second of a person’s life, the one that goes on to spend the next forty years. Everything before it looks like your life. Everything after it belongs to a stranger who has your face and your Tuesday and your one bad idea.
So that’s what this is. Split Second. Once a week I’ll walk you up to that door in somebody else’s hallway, and we’ll stand there a minute and look at it. Not because I think you’re going to do anything. Because I think you’ll recognize the hallway.
Pull up a chair.