Liberty was two things.

Liberty stood high on the bridge, looking at the water below. She could feel the pull of its gravity. It tugged at the darkness inside her.

Liberty.

Her goddamn hippie parents had named her that. She’d always hated the way the name reduced her to one stupid dimension in the eyes of people who didn’t know her. When it came down to it, no one really knew her.

Liberty was beautiful. But inside her there was something ugly. “Will you stop acting like you’re God’s gift to mankind!” Derrick would shout when the ugly inside her got to be too much for him. That was always the line he used to exit their arguments. Even when it had nothing to do with what they were fighting about. Liberty thought it must have been a line he’d heard his mother use when he was growing up. She had spit that particular insight back at him the last time they argued. But he was already gone.

Derrick was good for her, mostly. And then he wasn’t.

He wasn’t coming back. Why should he? Liberty knew she could be fickle and say cruel things. But only when the ugly inside her came out. We’re all dichotomies, she liked to tell people. Good and bad. Happy and sad. Free and captive. It was her best excuse.

Liberty swung like a pendulum between the light and dark of her existence. She tended to max out on whatever direction was ascendant inside her at the moment.

Her phone chirped with an incoming text.

“Where are U?”

Cool, efficient Andrea, with the first gentle probe of her campaign to convince Liberty to focus on the obligations of the day.

“Thinking,” Liberty replied. That would buy her a moment of peace from the office. Thinking was her job, after all. The reason she made the big bucks.

Further out on the bridge a man in a business suit took a selfie, trying to frame his face with the city skyline in the background. It wasn’t easy to get it all in. Liberty knew this because she’d often watched people stop repeatedly along the bridge to find the right spot to make a selfie work. The bridge had become her favorite place of late. She said it was because coming her helped her think. But there was more to it than that.

Besides the tourists and the occasional runner, the bridge was inhabited this morning by the old woman. Liberty was intrigued by her. The woman seemed content to sit for hours on a bench toward the center of the bridge, just watching. Not even a book or a newspaper thought Liberty, whose wheels were always turning. People who are in constant motion can’t fathom those who are not. Sometimes the woman would walk along the bridge. Occasionally a comment or even short conversation with passersby. But mostly she just watched, as if the random day-to-day activity on the bridge was storyline enough to keep her enthralled. She and Liberty had yet to exchange a word.

A tugboat pushed a string of barges up the river. Liberty wandered up the gentle curve of the walkway toward the center of the bridge as she watched its progress

Her phone chirped again. “What’s your ETA?”

“I’m thinking about letting the team handle today,” Liberty texted back.

“!!!!!!!!!!!!!!???” shot back the reply from Andrea.

Most days that would be enough to bring out responsible, nice Liberty. Even the darkness growing inside her was calculating enough to know she shouldn’t risk losing Andrea. She was careful never to test the limits with Andrea the same way she had with Derrick.

But Responsible Liberty was nowhere to be found on this particular morning. The ugly inside took charge of her thumbs and composed a terse message. “Can’t anybody do anything without me?”

“We have the bankers today!!!!” came the answer she knew she would get from Andrea. Exclamation points, Andrea had once told Liberty, were her code that it was time to quit fucking around and get down to business. Andrea could talk that way at the office. Liberty could not, at least not without feeling totally self-conscious. That was part of what she valued in Andrea.

But Andrea was wrong about the bankers. The company didn’t need to trot out Liberty like some prize show-horse to get their funding. Not any more. The ideas were sound. The research had proven the concept. Even the narrow-minded quants she’d spent the past year of her life wooing could understand the value of what she’d come up with. Sooner or later the financing would take care of itself. Liberty was exhausted from chasing money.

She noticed another incoming text. She didn’t wait to see what it said, but instead gave a casual flip of her wrist. There was a bright flash as her phone arced out into the air beyond the bridge and its screen caught the sunlight. Liberty watched, entranced, as the phone descended in lazy spirals toward the water. There was no splash. The phone merely disappeared from her sight against the slight ripple that the breeze had stirred on the surface of the river.

“Are you going to jump in after that?”

The voice behind her startled Liberty. “No!” she said reflexively as she turned around. The woman who spent her days sitting on the bench was standing directly behind her. She wasn’t as old as Liberty had assumed. But more hardened. She looked like she’d been living on the street.

Liberty’s natural poise slowly returned as she studied the woman. “I mean…excuse me?”

“That phone looked expensive. Are you planning to follow it into the river?” The woman spoke with a clipped, matter-of-fact tone.

“I’m not sure why I did that,” Liberty said wistfully.

“Maybe you’re nuts.”

“It was annoying me,” Liberty said. “My job, I mean. Not the phone. The phone is just a device, so by itself it can’t actually be annoying…”

Liberty noticed that the woman was looking at her like she really was nuts.

“I’m sorry. I’m babbling, aren’t I?”

“You could have just given it to me,” the woman said.

At that Liberty smiled a small, almost imperceptible smile. “You wouldn’t want to have to deal with Andrea.”

Liberty was silent for a moment, then for some unknowable reason she began telling the strange woman about her life and her company, and the pressure they were under from the financial people who couldn’t seem to get it through their thick skulls what a great benefit the whole thing would be to humanity if they’d just put some money behind Liberty’s little start-up. But mostly Liberty described the feeling that something dark was growing within her, what she called the ugly inside. She told the woman about her theory that it was a thing, real and alive, come to separate her from the life that she had so loved.

“I feel like I’m methodically detaching myself from the world,” Liberty explained. “Like a spider undoing her web one strand at a time.”

“That sounds like a load of crap,” the woman told Liberty. “Just tell me I’m not going to have to watch you jump off this bridge.”

The woman turned and began to walk back to her bench. She called over shoulder, “You don’t have a cigarette, do you?”

“No I don’t smoke.”

Then, “Don’t worry I’m not going to jump.”

But she would. If not right this instant, then soon.

That’s the way it always played out. Liberty would jump, and that would be the end of her and of the darkness growing inside her. Then she would be born again, and grow up and become successful at just the right thing so she would once again be there at just the right moment to nudge humanity away from its more self-destructive impulses. It had happened time and again throughout history.

Derrick was more right then he knew when he chided her for thinking she was God’s gift to mankind. She actually was.

Liberty was an angel.

She didn’t know it. She would have been too practical-minded to believe it anyway.

Nor did she understand the metaphysical conundrum she represented. It is not possible to put the singularity of an angel into human form. Human flesh is too much a Petri dish of emotion and conflict and bad decisions. Sooner or later something sinister will take root, fed by the bright innocence of the angel.

Liberty was an angel. She was also a devil. And the devil was growing darker and stronger inside her. She was able to comprehend none of this. She only knew two things. She had done what she had come to do. The company would go on without her and become amazing and in some small but vital way be exactly what humanity most needed at this precarious moment of its existence.

And far below the water tugged at the darkness inside her with a gravity that was becoming ever so hard to resist.

NOTE: You probably already figured out this story is an allegory, and the name Liberty was chosen on purpose. I hope it makes people think a little more deeply as we wind down this nutball year of votes for western democracies. If you agree that we could use more people thinking more deeply right about now, help get this out into the world with recommends, shares, etc.