Free Will in the Gord of Eden

The Story of a Weird Old Man, a Construction Job, and Compatibilism

Once upon a time, I must have considered the peacock to be a sign of prestige and opulence. Yet at the age of twenty-two, doing my best to hang insulation in the crawlspace underneath a house, I came to see peacocks as vexatious, demonic, and pure white trash. I learned to hate peacocks with such venom that even my earliest memories of them are now polluted by my later disdain. While I could probably once have readily imagined peacocks beautifying the gardens of rich lords and sultans, opening magnificent plumage on green landscapes while dignified orchestras played classical music and men of science reached unimaginable intellectual heights, I can now only see them as the world’s most prolific shitters hiding their innate smugness behind a sham oil slick paint job.

Thirty sets of peacock eyes glittered in the darkness all around me, occasionally popping their heads into the circle of light from my electric lantern to peck at me or a stray staple from my staple gun. Or again, to shit a horrid black dump in my immediate vicinity. They held neither respect for me as their master nor an animal’s natural fear for the boundaries of a larger animal. Occasionally, as the mood struck, several peacocks would get intimately close to my ear make a weird peacock sound signaling they wanted food, which is a sound that cannot be written down with English letters and must be heard in-person to be truly understood. Surely, it is a sound composed by devils. Several other peacocks performed wanton mating displays where the crawlspace clearance allowed, setting their tail-feathers into a crisp semi-circle, although thankfully the gesture was directed at one another and not me. They seemed to do it all the time whenever I looked their way as they possessed no self control. It was in all ways evidence that peacocks saw me as their servant. They were only bashful when taking flight, and only ever quietly flew to the tops of trees when I looked away for a moment. At times, they seemed to teleport like Batman or Michael Myers, just appearing from out of nowhere to surprise or startle me while I was in the middle of some task. For several weeks, it had been my job to feed them as well as my other duties.

“Say, guy,” called Gord, my employer. His voice sounded a bit like he looked, gravelly and befitting a salt of the Earth mountain man trying to fit into a new-fangled world. Gord was in his seventies, wore Long Johns and suspenders every day, and had a habit of patting his head dry with a handkerchief that added to the image. I suppose he was that, but he was also a highly eccentric millionaire who had recently retired and sold his construction company. It was his house that I toiled under. The peacocks who harassed me were also his property.

“Yeah, Gord, what’s up?”I asked.

Gord sat on an upside-down work bucket by the crawlspace access. If I lifted my head, I could see his mud-caked leather boots. We had yet to spread rock chips on his driveway and the job site was usually filthy as a result. The boots filled the one square of light I could see, as if guarding the exit until my work was done.

“You ever been in one of them gangbangs?” Gord asked.

I ignored the question for a while and indulged in a recurring fantasy of strangling one of Gord’s peacocks. I figured I could grab at least two before the rest ran off. It would be nice for at least something in the world to feel respect or fear of me. I only sighed in exasperation instead. A few weeks previous, I’d been installing the flooring in Gord’s entryway. He’d taken a few quarters out of a freezer and dropped them down the crack of my ass.

Reader… I yelped.

Gord had laughed for a full ten minutes at my surprise and discomfort, reciting, “there’s some change for your coin slot,” while slapping his leg. He had cried while I made an undignified exit to the bathroom. Apparently, he had been planning it for days after I’d done the flooring in the bedrooms. Millionaire or mountain man, he did not have any sense of professional boundaries.

“I’m not really that kind of guy, Gord,” I said without emotion.

“Well,” Gord breathed lustfully, “I am.”