Indecision [antikvár]

PROLOGUE Not until my ears popped and the plane was coming down over the winking hghts of Bogotá—or really it looked like any other city at night—did I raise my eyes from the page I'd been puzzling at and begin to think of the girl, or woman, the friend or acquaintance, Natasha, whom I was flying so far to visit. That's how it was with me then: I couldn't think of the future until I arrived there. Yet everybody always remarked on my apparently remarkable, indestructible Dwightness that was immune to time and place. "Dwight, dude, you're exactly the same, man!" an old friend from school would say Or "So lovely to have seen you, Dwight, you haven't changed a bit!" a friend of mom's would say Even mom herself would sometimes say this. And I knew these people had to be on to something, since otherwise you would have to imagine either a) a conspiracy or b) a radical collective incompetence in matters of personal identity, both of which possibilities I tended to reject as someone who'd majored in philosophy in college and adopted, as the best of bad options, a pragmatist view whereby what most people said was true probably actually was true, or close enough. I never looked into this or other philosophical problems any deeper than was necessary to rate a B average in an era of runaway grade-inflation, but a pragmatist I was all the same. And not only did my dispassionate investi-