With and Without Class by David Fleming Page B

things out.” Patty closed the form. “Harold, I think this divorce is the right thing to do. But, I didn’t cheat on you.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI was scared. I felt trapped. I felt like it was the only way you would listen.”
    Harold rubbed his hands over his forehead and cheeks. “It’s not that I expect you to lie, but somehow I’m not really surprised. I didn’t think you would do that to us. What are you afraid of?”
    â€œI’m afraid of forever. But I’m more afraid of us being together forever. When we were alive, the idea of it seemed sweet and romantic but now the reality of it is horrifying.”
    â€œI know,” Harold said. “I feel the same way. But aren’t we soulmates? Isn’t that what soulmates are supposed to do? Live together, forever.”
    â€œHow do we know if we’re soulmates? If we’re wrong and we spend forever together, that’s a pretty big waste; isn’t it? And what are we going to be like at the end of forever? We have to change, right?”
    â€œThe end of forever?”
    â€œYou know. Will we be monsters? Will we still love? Will love have any meaning at all?”
    â€œI think C.S. Lewis wrote something about the goal of the afterlife being the creation of these miniature gods similar to God.”
    â€œI don’t want to be a miniature god. I want a little house and another first child and a crappy job with a stupid boss and stupid friends and chocolate.”
    â€œWell I’m not too thrilled about meeting this Deus ex Machina Machine.”
    â€œWhat? What’s that?”
    â€œGod. You know, solver of impossible problems.”
    â€œThat’s not His name,” Patty said. “That’s a nickname. Who told you to call Him that?”
    â€œSammy.”
    â€œWhat? Sammy the ATM Machine?” She smirked. “Harold, this is important. We need to do this right. If you needed money for a lawyer you could have asked. You know I took three million with me. That’s our account. Our money. We earned it together.”
    â€œIt didn’t feel right.”
    â€œHarold, we have to make a decision one way or the other. I’ve filled out this vapor-paper . It allows us to do a trial run—to see what the separation will be like. It lets us split up the major ideas that define our life together. But even the major ideas have a bunch of minor ideas that get tangled up and mixed in. I put in our numbers and the form fills most of itself out. We just have to assign a few major ideas to either you or me as a trial run. Our houses were pretty major so I gave you the house in Georgia and I took the one on Third Street. Here,” She moved the form toward him. “The first few pages describe it better. It describes how they get around the problem of vagueness when splitting up ideas between two people.
    â€œThey’ve got these Venn Diagrams. The big circle is the major idea: The House. And the small circles are the minor ideas. The black part that the circles share is how much the two ideas are related in the minds of you and me.
    â€œHere’s the important one. When the amount that the two ideas have in common is exactly the same as the amount they don’t have in common, those are the ideas we need to come to agreement about. So we fill out a vapor-paper like this one and decide on as many major ideas as we can. Then the form calculates where all the minor ideas fall and we settle up the ones it can’t calculate for us in court.” She looked up to him. “What do you think?”
    â€œI guess we need to do this.”
    She turned over the next page. “We do, Harold.” She folded the stapled pages beneath and set it flat on the bar. “It’s like firing missiles; we both have to have our thumbs pressed onto the thumb ports at the same time.”
    â€œThese black spots right here on the page?”