Could she really believe that?

A couple of days ago -- wait, was it only yesterday? -- I posted a dialog between me and Wife's good friend D in which I mentioned (among other things) Boyfriend 5's claim that he can teleport. Apollo Unchained commented on this posting, reasonably enough, as follows:

Whew!
Teleported from the Old Country to North America?!
Could she really believe that? Surely she knows it's bullshit. Hosea, can you allow her to act on such a belief? Consider her physical safety ...

I was going to add just a short reply, and then I thought maybe the question deserved a little bit more time and thought.

In the first place, this isn't the first time the topic has come up. For veteran readers, if any :-) I mentioned it briefly way back in June, in a trio of connected posts. I set up the situation here, and then continued the reference here and finally here. And it has figured in discussions between me and Wife since then, on and off. Of course it is obvious to me that the claim is bullshit, and that Boyfriend 5 is a con artist or -- at the very least -- a very imaginative liar. But she doesn't see it that way, which was a large part of my lament to D a couple days ago.

Back when the subject first came up, I told Wife what I thought of the idea ... and I added that at the very least I was profoundly skeptical because anybody who claims something so outrageous has to face a monumental burden of proof. Wife passed these remarks along to Boyfriend 5, who proceeded to get outrageously "angry" and "hurt" at being challenged and interrogated and distrusted in this way. To me it was obvious that an over-reaction like this is a classic manipulation: if you can't refute an accusation, make the accuser feel guilty for ever mentioning it. But Wife nearly went to pieces that she had "wounded" her darling so badly. It took a lot of damage control on her part to get Boyfriend 5 to calm down, and she only succeeded by petting his ego and telling him, in effect, "There, there, it'll be all right. It's not that Hosea doesn't believe you or doesn't trust you or anything like that. It's just basic scientific curiosity on his part ... he has never seen anybody teleport before and so he is genuinely curious how you do it." [Insert gagging sound coming from Hosea.] And Boyfriend 5, finally mollified, allowed as how maybe someday he would show me. Sweet guy, huh?

Anyway, ever since then Wife has been unwilling to question the veracity of Boyfriend 5's claim to teleport. I will add that he has told Wife several times he will teleport to our house one day while the children are in school, so that they can meet in person and finally fuck. He has even said he can take her back to the Old Country that way, in which case I am not quite sure why she is fussing about with Frequent Flyer Miles from D's sister. But he has never followed up on any of these offers. That doesn't seem to faze Wife.

I seem to have addressed the question whether she can possibly believe this. The question how she can believe it has, I think, two different kinds of answers.

The first answer is a dismissive one: she wants to believe it, and human beings can believe almost anything if they want to badly enough. The second answer is that Wife has had a number of experiences at different times in the past that have seemed somehow paranormal to her. None of them, so far as I know, have violated basic laws of physics -- most typically these experiences have involved some kind of premonition that later turned out true. But the consequence is that she is not inclined to dismiss tales of unusual abilities out of hand. To me it seems obvious that even if there is something real behind some paranormal experiences, teleportation is never going to be one of them. On the other hand, it's not like this is the first difference of opinion we have ever had.

The last question is the most important, but it is in some ways the hardest to answer in a satisfying way. How can I let her plan a trip to the Old Country under circumstances like this? What about her physical safety? Don't I have a moral obligation to intevene?

Well of course I would like to intervene, but unfortunately it doesn't look that simple. In the first place, as I replied to Marianne when she left a similar comment on one of my posts last July, it's not clear how I could intervene. Wife is a grown woman with credit cards; no airline is going to refuse a reservation from her, and it's not like I want to invite a charge of kidnapping by duct-taping her to the bed. If it came down to that kind of contest, I don't think there is any legal way I could stop her.

This doesn't mean that I am blind to the possibilities. I can think of several, in fact:

• She could get to the Old Country and meet Boyfriend 5 as planned, and spend a rapturous week with him. (I think this is the least likely option.)
• She could get to the Old Country and nobody meets her at the airport. (I think this is the most likely option.) After waiting at the airport for a long time -- two hours, four hours, six hours -- she calls me long-distance to ask in a tone of helpless panic, "Hosea, what do I do now? I'm alone in a strange city, and they are trying to close the airport and want me to leave, and it is the middle of the night, and nobody has come here to pick me up, and I don't know where to go or how to get there, and I have no idea where to turn or what to do next ... and I need you to fix it for me right away!"
• She could get to the Old Country and nobody meets her at the airport ... so she takes a taxi to the address she has for Boyfriend 5. Either the address exists ... and it's a business, or a vacant lot, or a residential home where nobody has ever heard of her (or even speaks English); or else the address doesn't exist and the cabbie drives around aimlessly for a while, runs up a big bill, and deposits her ... somewhere. We have all heard about countries where you have to be careful about your choice of taxi, because there are criminals disguised as cabbies who will drive their passengers to remote places far from help, loot all their goods, and then rape or kill them. I don't know for sure if this is a problem in the Old Country, but I sure hope Wife never has a chance to find out. Still, I can't rule it out.
• She could get to the Old Country and nobody meets her at the airport ... so she asks an airport official how to get where she is going. The airport official inquires the name of the family she is trying to find, and quickly realizes she is looking for a family of noted terrorists (a family whose patriarch is legally forbidden to enter the United States, for starters). The official asks her a few questions about her business with this family, and her answers are completely outlandish (because Boyfriend 5 has been feeding her a load of crap). So the official concludes that she is a particularly stupid terrorist who can't remember her cover story but who is a contact between this family and sympathizers in the USA; he turns her over to the immigration authorities or the police, and she lands in jail in some part of the world that has never been troubled with details like habeas corpus or due process of law. This is marginally better than the previous option, because her American passport will probably prevent her from being out-and-out killed by public officials. On the other hand, I wouldn't want to bet good money on how long it would take her to get home again.
• And of course there are countless variations on these themes ....

So if these are the possibilities, and if my gut tells me that the first one is the least likely, then what am I morally obligated to do? What, for that matter, can I do?

• I can't physically stop her from going.
• I can try to persuade her not to go, but my attempts to persuade in this arena have been particularly ineffective to date.
• Or I can simply let her go if and when she wants, not blind to the possibilities but resigned to them. This means telling myself, as she gets on the plane, that I might never see her again; and it means preparing myself for a phone call which confirms exactly that. And you know, in a sense we should all tell ourselves the same thing when a loved one boards a plane. For all that flying is the safest form of travel per mile travelled, some planes do crash. And you just never know.

I wish I had a better answer than that. This answer breaks my heart, but I just don't see a better one.