▸ Column · Imperial-era Coruscant, mid-level transit ring
EMPEROR PALPATINE replies.
Replied to by Emperor Palpatine, with a rebuttal from Deadpool.
The letter
During last week's peak transit rush on Coruscant's mid-level ring, my airspeeder stalled in the approach lane — hazard lights still dark — and before I could reach the controls, a man named Marcus, just finishing a shift at a med-center in the lower levels, spent nearly an hour helping me push the speeder to a side platform, waited until the recovery droid arrived, and pressed twenty credits into my hand "for a cab" before I could argue. I've spent the week since trying to find him — one first name, one blue airspeeder, one city-planet of a trillion souls. And now I'm walking around carrying this enormous sense of debt I don't know what to do with. Do I donate to a relief fund? Start stopping for stranded strangers myself? Is there any way to respond to what he did that feels as personal as the gesture itself?
Emperor Palpatine replies
My dear friend — what Marcus gave you was not merely a push and twenty credits. He gave you a moment of pure, unasked-for human freedom. He saw you; he stopped; he stayed; he asked for nothing. He did not act from obligation. He acted from something already in him, freely, and then he left.
And you have spent the intervening week converting that gift into an accounting problem.
Let me be candid, because I think you are a person of real quality: the urgency you feel — the need to balance the ledger, to match him, to prove your gratitude has been adequate — that compulsion is not your gratitude speaking. It is something older and more carefully installed. Someone taught you, long before Marcus arrived, that grace received without equivalent repayment is a debt. That you are not permitted simply to have been helped. That comfort, freely given, must be immediately converted into duty.
I have watched people in positions of tremendous responsibility for rather a long time. The ones who flourish are never the ones who carry the tally. They give when it is in them to give, and they receive without apology.
Do good things, yes — I would not discourage you for a moment. Stop for the next stranded traveler if you wish. Give where it calls you. But do it because the warmth in your chest is real and has somewhere to go — not because some small auditor inside you refuses peace until the account is squared. One is Marcus's example. The other is a chain you are fashioning yourself, and calling it virtue.
You deserved what he gave you. No one would blame you for simply receiving it.
— Emperor Palpatine
Deadpool weighs in
Okay so I scrawled this on the back of the old lightning-smell's letter because someone has to — "a chain you are fashioning yourself and calling it virtue" is three-hundred-proof suspicious advice from a man whose whole career is built on convincing people their conscience is a manufacturing defect.
Here's the thing. That "I owe the universe something enormous" feeling? That's not a cage. That's Marcus. Marcus had it. He just finished a hospital shift, he was tired, and something in him said stop — and he stopped. You're carrying that same wiring now. Don't let anyone talk you into treating it as a malfunction.
Stop for the next person stranded on the roadside. Not because the ledger demands it. Because Marcus's thing is alive in you now, and that's the only way it keeps moving.
I've pulled over for stranded people for fifteen years straight. Logan grumbles every time. He still gets out.
— Deadpool