19. The answer.

A young woman spoke first. "I've heard that story before. It's a Buddhist parable."

He waited.

"The idea," she said, "is that, instead of accepting that he was about to die and making peace with the world, he wasted time thinking of revenge."

A few of the people muttered. The woman continued watching him. She sipped from her cup of lukewarm coffee.

"That is the point, and it isn't," he said. The woman scoffed, got up, and left, although she did cast a backward glance. The old woman was now staring at him.

"What is the point then?" the old woman asked, in a dry old voice. She seemed mildly surprised that she had said anything at all.

"The point is that the man did nothing about his suffering, and consumed the last moments of his life trying to find its source: an irrelevant thing."

The old woman didn't react. He walked toward her as the others watched.

"Imagine what it was like. He had been shot. He could feel his chest tightening, the fluids building up around his lungs. His breath quickened. Dark spots appeared at the edges of his vision. Through a sickening, wet warmth that spread now up to his neck and into his abdomen below, he could feel the first sharp stabs of pain."

The old woman's eyes widened.

"The pain had become a searing agony by the time his companions arrived. Death was an absolute certainty. He had forgotten what he was hunting, had forgotten his family, had nearly forgotten who he was. And through all this, he believed that knowing who shot him would bring him some comfort, some great answer. Instead of removing the arrow, or in some other way reducing his suffering, his mind craved information as irrelevant as the name of the midwife who had helped deliver him."

"I'm a Christian," the old woman said finally.

One of the young men spoke up next. "So is the point that we're all suffering, and doing the wrong thing about it?"

He turned to them and regarded them carefully. "Knowing the nature of the suffering is irrelevant. The source of the suffering is irrelevant. It is relevant that we are suffering, that all material life is suffering."

"But then there's no answer," the other young man said.

"Man," a passerby commented. "Pretty depressing stuff. There's a reason they call it a nihilistic religion."