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Mr B is trying to hold it together. Mr B tells himself that if he smuggles in heroin and Mr A sees, then Mr A will rat him out. Mr B tells himself this every day and so far he has resisted temptation.

Disaster! Mr B has seen Mr A with heroin. Now what? If he stays silent Mr A owes him one. That wasn’t the plan. Mr B knows how this ends. Mr A owes him one, so he can smuggle in some heroin himself without having to hide it from Mr A. That makes it too easy, that is what is going to happen. Alternatively he can rat on Mr A himself. On the one hand that will make him unpopular. On the other hand, the thing he has been telling himself and depending on (that he can’t smuggle in heroin because Mr A will see it and rat on Mr B) becomes gloriously true. Mr B takes the alternative path and rats out Mr A, for the sake of himself, Mr B.

In this version Mr A has got Mr B into a sticky situation (by failing to conceal the thing Mr B doesn’t want to know about, thus burdening Mr B with dangerous knowledge) and Mr B is trying to get Mr B out of it without any real concern for the consequence for Mr A.

So Mr B is not being a hero, far from it, but tattletale? No! That is missing the point. Mr A just wanted to get high, but having been discovered, the thing he did not intend but cannot now disavow is the implied offer: “Don’t tell on me and I won’t tell on you.” Mr B is turning down the implied offer.

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I don’t know what exactly Deiseach’s reasoning here is, but this passage might shed some light on where she’s coming from:

“I ain’t done nothing wrong.”

“Where love and faith are concerned, how can any man not do wrong? Are you indeed superhuman in that way? Earlier you were boasting that you were not.”

“I weren’t boasting. Just saying.”

“Do you have faith in her?”

“What’s that?”

“Do you have faith she will return?”

“Why are your priests always on about faith?”

“Why do doctors talk about diseases? Faith is not some mystical glamour; it is a very real, hard, practical solution to a very real and hard problem: the problem of enduring the unendurable. If you knew she loved you, and you knew she would make every effort, including superhuman effort since she is, after all, a superhuman, you would not give into impatience, or wrath, or self-pity, or despair.”

“Yearning to see you wife again ain’t a sin, Padre!”

“Despair is.”

“What makes you think it’s a sin?”

“What makes you think so? I hear guilt in your voice, First Ancestor.”

“So what would this practical solution of yours be?”

“Confess it now. I will impose a penance on you to last until your Rania returns to you, the penance being that you must wait in hopeful joy until she comes again, without surrendering to hopelessness.”

“But I got to wait anyway. I got no choice.”

“The suffering will be easier if you know it is penance. Suffering to amend for your own wrongs can be endured. Pointless suffering cannot be endured.”

“You think she ain’t coming back for me?”

“I cannot say. Nor can you. There are things we simply do not know and cannot know. When we face the unknown, there are two and only two responses: the sane and tame surrender of despair and the mad and wild defiance of hope.”

“C’mon, you put it that way, there’s no real choice. Madness is common sense.”

“There is always a choice, and therefore always a chance to choose wrongly. But hope is hard when we are burdened.”

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I’m hearing all of this second hand of course, so I don’t know how accurate my retelling is. Maybe the tattle heroin addict had a previous situation like that and learned that (certain) rehab boards prefer tattle-tellers?

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In the eyes of the authority figure, who normally doesn’t mind in the slightest harm done to the victim.

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