JACK
RIEPE
The New and Improved Marlin Rosetti By Jack Riepe #116117
All 160 horses of the K 1300 stampeded through the murk to get through the mountain pass ahead of fast-moving summer thunderstorms. To the rider hunched over the tank, the lightning of a dry Montana thunderstorm was a force majeure from hell. The rider had been on the road a week and was now only 200 miles outside of Great Falls, the site of his first BMW MOA National Rally. He’d been cautious about lightning, always getting out of the storm, but there was nowhere to hide from this one.
Eighteen months earlier
Marlin Rosetti lived by the numbers. An actuary for the One Way Benefit Insurance Company, he was an expert at morphing long columns of numbers into statistics that defined risk, gain, loss and ultimately the value of life. His professional experience revealed that at the end of the day, a brick in the wall carries the same significance as a shooting star. Glancing back at his career, Marlin felt he had the qualities of both. He was a shooting star among actuaries and a brick at parties. Rosetti exercised moderately, ate wisely, drank little, and didn’t smoke. Still, the actuarial tables barely extended his existence to age 72—ten years into the
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future. He ran the figures several times, and the result was always the same. He had nine years, seven months, one week, five days, four hours, and 15 minutes to become an Olympic pole vaulter or a concert pianist. Not that these professions held any allure for him, but Olympic pole vaulters lived an average of 78 years, and most concert pianists hit 80. He wanted the extra time. “To do what?” asked his wife. Rosetti also ran the figures for his wife, discovering that she would live to 86. He found this result annoyingly unfair. He’d married the only woman he’d ever seen naked and breezed through the next 25 years like an air fern, living on male
criticism which his wife converted from oxygen. There were candlelight dinners and wild sex for a while, but Rosetti didn’t hear about these until years afterward when the kid who used to deliver pizza got religion and sought forgiveness at a televised revival. No mother ever held a newborn baby to her breast and whispered, “One day you will be a faceless entity in a vertical cash scheme,” yet such was Marlin Rosetti’s fate; a fate he never questioned until he attended an industry seminar introducing new procedural evaluations to the actuary profession. A speaker claimed you could use hobbies as lifestyle indicators to limit insurance liability.
