Godless (5 page)

A nod. “Yeah. Something I think you'd like. Includes religious themes. But not like Moses or Milton. I'm not into that sort of thing. More like Nietzsche meets Sherlock Holmes.”

Matthew recognized both names. A good sign. “I guess,” he answered with a shrug.

“Dostoyevsky,” Mori said before spelling the name. “The true Russian master.”

Matthew tried to imagine enjoying any classic novel, let alone one from Russia.

“Trust me,” Mori continued in reaction to the blank stare, “better than Tolstoy. Every bit as long, but worth the effort.”

Matthew found himself entranced by Mori's rising enthusiasm.

“I promise you've never read more powerful philosophical dialogue than you'll find in
Crime and Punishment
. Or should you start with
The Brothers Karamazov
? More religious. Hard to say.”

“Which is shorter?” Matthew asked.

“Wrong question,” Mori chided. “You mean ‘Which is better?'”

“OK. Which is better, then?”

“That's the problem!” Mori shouted. “After nearly twenty years teaching both books, it would be murder to choose one over the other.” He laughed at an apparent irony Matthew didn't follow.

“Maybe I'll read them both,” Matthew said to his own surprise. It seemed no accident, he thought, that Bryan “Mori” Quincy had approached this particular table. Perhaps a challenging reading regimen could help defend Matthew against another prolonged funk.

“Which one first?” he asked while readying his fingers over his digital device.

Mori rubbed his beard as his eyes rose upward in thought. “I'm not a spiritually oriented person myself,” he finally said, “but I love a good debate about religion.”

He looked toward Matthew out of the corner of one eye, as if the comment were a dipstick checking his new pupil's depth of conviction.

“Me, too,” Matthew said, without specifying whether he meant
not spiritual
or
loves a good debate
.

“I relate more to Ivan Karamazov than to his brother Alyosha,” Mori added.

Matthew stared blankly.

“Sorry,” Mori said. “Ivan is the skeptic. His brother the believer.”

“I see. Which book?”

“
The Brothers Karamazov
.”

Matthew tapped his pad several times, then paused. “Spelling?”

“K-A-R-A-M-A-Z-O-V. You'll never find more ruthless arguments against the goodness of God.”

“Really?” Matthew said as he continued entering the title.

“Oh, yeah,” Mori continued. “Ivan really makes Alyosha squirm. Even I cringe every time I read the part about the kid and the dog.”

Curiosity piqued, Matthew tapped the
DOWNLOAD
icon. The book instantly appeared on his screen. “Eight hundred pages?” he exclaimed.

“I told you it was long, but worth the effort.” The professor jotted down a passage from the book. He handed it to Matthew. “Here you go. Read book five, chapters three through five. That should give you a taste. The section on the Grand Inquisitor will put you on the edge of your seat, I promise.”

“Got it,” Matthew said while making a mental note.

They chatted about this and that for about five minutes before Mori appeared to lose interest in his new protégé. A look of pleasant surprise came over his face while he waved to a fortysomething woman entering the front door. His partner? Or perhaps a colleague he could use to fill the next lonely silence?

“I need to give you back your chair,” he said while standing. “It was nice to meet you, Matthew Adams. Maybe I'll see you around.”

“I hope so,” Matthew replied while accepting a firm farewell shake. He meant it.

Bryan “Mori” Quincy disappeared as suddenly as he had arrived.

Matthew glanced down at his tablet, eager to dive into his assigned reading. But a bouncing icon reminded him of his unfinished task. A single tap resurfaced the abandoned “spiritual dialogue” request form. He chose the first available morning appointment. Then he felt the threat of a yawn that reminded him why he usually stopped after two beers. Matthew waved toward the waitress. She winked an acknowledgment before tapping a device that sent him his tab. While entering his payment code Matthew heard the ping of an arriving confirmation message from Christ Community Church of Denver, Colorado.

A Protestant church?
Hmm
, he thought.
Could be interesting
.

“Nice of
you to come,” Mandy teased while closing the car door. “I was afraid you'd given up on me.”

“Sorry I'm late.” Matthew wiped the last bit of sleep from his eyes. “What've we got today?”

It was the trainee's role to review the string of assigned visits. MedCom provided a series of times and addresses.

“I figured we would start with the three addresses on the east side of town and then head north.” Mandy waited, then smiled in response to Matthew's affirming nod.

He had trained her well. Matthew had been on the job long enough to discover a consistent glitch in the automated scheduling system. It was possible to disregard the scheduled appointment times; you could visit more prospects if you sequenced them by neighborhood. The less time spent driving the better. In Matthew's experience prospective clients were just as likely to be sitting anxiously at home whether he arrived early or late. What else did they have to do? Their lives had been put on hold until they received the news he had been assigned to deliver.

Of course, it would be much more efficient to send word of treatment denial directly from the attending physician's office via digital voice or text message. But MedCom had stumbled onto a huge opportunity to grow the transition market by offering a “high-touch service to patients receiving disheartening news.” After successfully pioneering the service in Arizona and Florida, the company had been featured in the
Wall Street Journal
as a “model of best practices” that, if those practices were expanded, “might help the Youth Initiative come closer to hitting its overly optimistic volunteer recruitment targets.”

Before MedCom came on the scene countless potential volunteers had slipped through the cracks. The process depended too heavily on physicians who had a hard time delivering bad news without going further. Dinosaurs from the era of the Hippocratic oath, many doctors suggested alternative treatment options or told patients they would perform the required procedure “under the radar” without compensation. Medical Communications Associates, later christened MedCom, had solved the problem and, in the process, generated significant revenues. As Matthew knew better than anyone, seniors were much more likely to volunteer in their moment of distress. The trick, he had tried to teach Mandy, was resisting the natural impulse to comfort.

“So,” Matthew said while pulling away from the curb, “remind me of what we learned yesterday.”

She blushed in self-rebuke while repeating her tutor's mantra. “Awkward silence is our friend.”

“Exactly. And?”

“And I need to resist the urge to touch them.” She sighed. “It seems so simple when we're reviewing prep summaries. I don't know what my problem is.”

Your problem
, Matthew thought,
is that you're a girl
.

Mandy was his sixth trainee. Of the prior five, all three female pupils had made the same mistakes. The guys, while less pleasant company, had found it much easier to maintain professional distance.

“You'll do better today,” he said without conviction.

Mandy pointed her tablet toward the dashboard to set them on course to their first appointment. Then she asked if Matthew had watched the latest episode of a show he didn't recognize, then recounted a plot he didn't care to know.

He looked at his perky passenger. Did she admire him less today than she had twenty-four hours earlier? He had embarrassed himself by losing his composure and walking out of their final appointment. Very unprofessional.

“Oh,” Mandy said after a brief pause in the whir of words, “you're supposed to call someone named Freddy.”

He didn't recognize the name. “Freddy who?”

“Freddy Baxter. I guess he's pretty mad.”

Matthew reached for any point of connection. “Baxter? As in Mrs. Baxter from yesterday?”

“Her son left a message last night. It came to us because Mrs. Baxter was in your case load.”

Matthew groaned. He hated handling appointment follow-up calls, especially when they involved upset family members. The complaints were always the same. “What right do you have to pressure my dad into volunteering?” or “You really upset my mother!”

But it was part of the job.

“Let's hear it,” he said, prompting Mandy to tap the
PLAY
icon on her tablet.

“This is Freddy Baxter. You sent some incompetent idiot to my mother's place yesterday to present the transition option. I spent half the evening talking to her last night. She was very upset.”

Odd. Matthew remembered a calm refusal from a woman who seemed more concerned about his depression than her own demise.

“You guys made me look like a fool!” the man's voice continued. “I called to console and reaffirm my mom's decision to volunteer, only to learn she had refused. Why the devil did I get an update notice saying she had said yes? Now she thinks the whole thing was my idea! Have someone call me tomorrow so we can get this mess straightened out.”

The man cursed before the message ended abruptly. Matthew turned to look at his trainee. “Did you file the follow-up form like I asked?”

She had.

“And you selected the ‘No thank you' option?”

The look on Mandy's face told him otherwise.

“We talked for a few minutes after you left,” the trainee explained. “She asked me questions about how volunteering worked, where they carried out the procedures, stuff like that. I sensed she might be open to another try. I couldn't find a ‘Maybe' option so I selected ‘Follow-up advised.'”

Matthew groaned again. “‘Follow-up advised' means they're ready for a pre-transition consultation.”

“What?”

Matthew reviewed the process Mandy should have known. The system automatically alerted immediate family members whenever a prospective client agreed to move ahead. It even recommended language they might want to use to affirm the loved one's decision.

“I'm such a mess-up!” Mandy said.

“Well,” Matthew replied, “I can assure you you'll never make this mistake again.”

“Why's that?”

“Because I won't be calling Freddy Baxter to apologize.” He smiled in her direction. “You will.”

The day turned out to be more productive than Matthew had expected. They had managed to sign up four of five prospective clients, exactly the number needed to complete his commitment. Each trainee was required to observe ten successful closings before he or she could move up the food chain. Matthew could now go back to flying solo, at least until his boss hired another batch of rookies.

Opening a well-deserved can of beer, Matthew grabbed his tablet before plopping himself onto the only chair occupying his apartment's ten-by-twelve-foot living room, a leather-like recliner that still released the slight smell of cigarettes six months after he'd paid thirty dollars to haul it away from a garage sale.

He scanned a list of possible television programs. Then he remembered the assignment he had accepted from the teacher he had met at Peak and Brew. Matthew tapped the book icon to find
The Brothers Karamazov
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. “Read book five, chapters three through five. That should give you a taste,” Mori had urged. “Ruthless arguments against the goodness of God.”

Matthew found the recommended section. He immediately recognized the names of the two characters speaking. Mori had called Ivan the skeptic and Alyosha, his brother, the believer.

At first Matthew felt as if he had stumbled into the second act of a longer drama; which, of course, he had. But he stuck with it, eventually grasping the thread of Ivan Karamazov's attacks that must have been the source of Alyosha's squirming.

“People speak sometimes about the ‘animal' cruelty of man,” Ivan was saying, “but that is terribly unjust and offensive to animals, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel. A tiger simply gnaws and tears, that is all he can do. It would never occur to him to nail people by their ears overnight, even if he were able to do it.”

It was an idea that had never occurred to Matthew. Man more vicious than beasts? Ivan expanded the claim with a series of stories, each more troubling than the last.

A soldier taking delight in torturing children, tossing them in the air and catching them on a bayonet before their mothers' eyes.

A trembling mother watching a man use the end of his gun to amuse her nursing infant.

“The baby laughs gleefully,” Ivan explains, “reaches out its little hands to grab the pistol, and suddenly the artist pulls the trigger right in its face and shatters its little head…Artistic, isn't it?”

A five-year-old little girl tortured by parents who hate her for reasons unknown to themselves. They beat her, flog her, and kick her into a lump of bruised suffering. And then, angered by the child's mishap, they lock her all night in the freezing-cold outhouse after smearing her face and making her eat her own excrement. The mother goes back to sleep “while her poor little child was moaning all night in that vile place!”

Ivan asked Alyosha to picture a little girl in such a cruel dark, cold place; a child unable to comprehend what is being done to her, weeping an anguished prayer for “dear God” to protect her. Then he asked him to imagine another scene.

An eight-year-old boy, a house serf, throws a stone that accidentally hurts the paw of a dog, one of hundreds in the landowner's kennel. Noticing the limp, the landowner asks how the dog got hurt. Someone identifies the boy. “Take him!” commands the man. His servants force the child from the arms of his mother and lock him up for the night. At dawn the man rides out in full hunting attire, surrounded by dogs, handlers, and fellow huntsmen on horseback. Then the rest of the house serfs are assembled and ordered to watch, the boy's mother in front. The child is released and stripped naked. He shivers, not daring to make a sound, crazy with fear. “Drive him!” the landowner commands. “Run, run!” shout the others. He flees. “Sic him!” screams the man, loosing a pack of wolfhounds. Then the man hunts the child down before his mother's eyes until the animals tear the child to bits.

Matthew squeezed his eyelids tight at the suffering of innocence and the cruelty of men. Would a good God allow such things? It was the question Ivan was posing, to Alyosha's unease. Mori had been right: ruthless attacks.

He forced his eyes back onto Ivan's speech.

“Listen to me: I took children only so as to make it more obvious. About all the other human tears that have soaked the whole earth through, from crust to core, I don't say a word.”

Matthew considered the tears that had soaked his own sliver of the planet. Certainly nothing as terrifying as what Ivan's afflicted children had endured. But, in their own ways, indictments against his mother's God. Not to mention Father Tomberlin's dogma.

Better no God
, he mused,
than a cruel one
.

After finishing the second of the three recommended chapters, Matthew noticed the title of the last: “The Grand Inquisitor.” He flipped quickly to count the pages. His sitcom-formed attention span protested at the length. But he overruled it, ordering it to brace itself for another disturbing scene. That's when he heard the ping of an arriving message. He gratefully accepted the distraction.

A surge of excitement lifted Matthew from the recliner. He walked five steps to the kitchen, then five steps back while rereading the message. His mind began to race.

Who would have given Serena Winthrop his name? Certainly not his boss; he depended too much on Matthew to train new recruits.
Unless
. What if MedCom stood to profit from whatever secret project NEXT was testing? Then his boss would suggest its best and brightest.

What kind of research or development did the project entail?

He could use a new challenge, but was he qualified for the job?

Matthew rebuked himself. Of course he was qualified. Why else would a corporate big shot send him a personal invitation to apply?

He moved to the kitchen counter, where he carefully spoke to his tablet. The communication assistant typed a reply.

He read the text on the screen three times before tapping the send icon. Too eager? Too casual? Should he change the appointment by half an hour to give her more time to unwind before meeting with a prospective colleague?