The Inevitability Game

The theatre smelled of polish and drizzle, though perhaps it was only the memory of drizzle clinging to our coats as we shuffled into the dark. Sometimes the dark is cinema; sometimes it is a fuselage above the Atlantic; sometimes it is the baseline of Arthur Ashe Stadium; sometimes it is a stage where even the candlelight is counterfeit.

We each sat in that dark differently. One of us tried to cry, willing the screen to pierce something buried beneath the layers of irony and exhaustion. Another measured breaths through turbulence, glaring at the blissfully unconscious passengers. A third watched inevitability walk across the court in the body of a red-haired Italian, his precision so brutal it drained the match of air. And one of us listened to soliloquies so finely tuned they emptied themselves of risk, each word a perfect cage.

In all these moments—whether on screen, in the sky, on the court, or on the stage—we found the same question lurking: what has been stolen from the possibility of accident?

The romcom that insists on showing us grime without consequence. The airplane that defies physics so absolutely it terrifies rather than delights. The athlete who wins so thoroughly we forget what it means to hope. The theatre that offers “harmony” as if harmony were not simply another word for silence.

We are told this is progress. Safety. Precision. Order. And yet, how strange that in the moment of safety we grow most anxious. Perhaps because without risk there is no catharsis. Without the threat of falling, flight is only waiting. Without the vulnerability of losing, victory is only arithmetic. Without a stumble, art is only advertising.

The irony is that we still laugh—sometimes at the wrong moments, sometimes at the sheer absurdity of the script, sometimes at ourselves for feeling nothing at all. We laugh because laughter is one of the last untuned instruments, slipping through the grids of harmony.

But laughter, too, can be rehearsed. Already we sense it: the slow training of taste, the smoothing of chaos, the way applause arrives on cue. Everywhere we look, inevitability.

So we leave you with a question: do you still want the mess? The staircases that break ankles, the lovers too poor to be happy, the athletes who bleed and falter, the actors who miss their cues? Or is there comfort in silence, in symmetry, in the inevitability of machines—flying, scripting, scoring, remembering for us?

The Fifth Column