Pascal's Wager (17 page)

Sam was doing a fair amount of burning himself. His eyes looked like they were going to ignite any moment.

“I know you think I'm obsessed with Pascal,” he said, “but he's just so right in this situation. He was consumed by a divine fire,
and I relate to that. And I want to see the passion of a direct, immediate experience of God. What I wouldn't give to see just a spark of that in one of my colleagues who calls himself a Christian.”

“And you're expecting me to exhibit this passion?” I said. “For a God I don't even believe in?”

“Im saying use your natural passion to help you where you are right now. Take the wager, Jill. Just act as if there is a God.”

“You better spell that out for me,” I said. “There is no Sunday school in my past.”

“Do some research. That's your thing anyway, right?”

“Research. Like what, read the Bible?”

“Eventually. But for now, approach it scientifically. Observe and imitate the experience of people you know who have succeeded in finding God.”

I grunted. “Except for you, that is exactly no one.”

He slipped his hands easily into the pockets of his running shorts and lounged on the tree. “Try it for, say, a week.”

“Are you going to leave me alone until I do?” I said.

“Probably not.”

I pressed my hands into the bark.
What are you doing, Jill?
I thought.
What are you thinking?

But I knew what I was thinking. For the first time in several days, my thoughts revealed a clearing in the smog. I was thinking if I didn't hang on to something, I was going to get lost in it—and I was never going to come out. If it had to be passion, then let it be passion.

I looked at Sam. He was watching me, intent on my face.

“On one condition,” I said. “That I go at this as a theorem I can either prove or disprove.”

“You can do that,” he said. “Because in order to disprove a theorem, you have to apply it repeatedly until you find an instance in which it doesn't work.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “You play dumb when it comes to math, but you know more than you let on.”

“Just enough to be dangerous,” he said. And then he grinned at me.

Yeah. He was dangerous, all right.

All was quiet at home when I got there. Mother was sleeping, for the moment, and Max was watching her.

“Do you believe in God, Max?” I whispered to him.

“God?” He looked at me as if I'd grown an extra head out on the Loop. “Of course! Doesn't everybody?”

Somehow I was sure that wasn't the kind of belief Sam had in mind. But I did watch as Max leaned over and kissed my mother tenderly on the forehead.

“She would never let me do that before,” he said. “Never.”

It wasn't a bad night, and Freda III did reappear the next morning. I wrote down my cell phone number for her for the tenth time and pressed it into her hand as I was leaving the house.

“Call me if she even looks like she's going to do something weird,” I said.

“All right, hon,” she said and patted my arm.

I almost asked her if she believed in God, but I decided against it. I was pretty sure I'd get an answer like Max's, and that wasn't doing anything for my research.

No “test problems” presented themselves at all, in fact, until that afternoon when Tabitha came in for her tutoring session. Why, I asked myself, hadn't I thought of her before?

I
coached Tabitha as usual that day, and then I watched her struggle with a problem, twisting her hair around her finger and silently moving her lips. It was enough to make me change my mind about Sam's proposed research, except that I didn't have a whole lot of other possibilities. None, to be exact.

“Oh!” she said suddenly. “So if you add the series in sixteen and seventeen and then divide by two, the even terms cancel.”

“Right,” I said. “You had it all along. You just freak out.”

“It's like, I—”

I cut in or we'd have been there for days. “Tabitha, you believe in God, right?”

“I do,” she said without hesitation. “I couldn't even live my life without the Lord.”

“Lord, as in…”

“Jesus Christ. He's God, only—”

“That's okay,” I interrupted again. “Just let me ask you this: What does that look like in your life?”

“I don't understand.”

“How do you live differently than you would live if you didn't believe in God?”

“Oh!” She frowned. “I can't even imagine that.”

I groaned within. This had been a really bad idea.

But Tabitha's face smoothed over, and she looked at me straight on. “Yes, I can imagine it,” she said, “because, like, at the beginning of the quarter when I was all messed up about everything—you remember that?”

“Vividly,” I said.

“I would get this really empty feeling when I was wondering why God had me here when it was so hard, and I started thinking maybe He really didn't care, and whenever I started thinking that, I'd feel really mean toward the girls on my hall.”

“I can't imagine you being mean, Tabitha,” I said.

“I didn't actually
do
anything mean, but I wanted to.”

I found myself being intrigued. “Like what?”

“Like this one girl came in and she was talking to my roommate and she was all going on about how they were out partying the night before, and I'm, like, trying to study, plus they were acting like I wasn't even in the room and I was thinking,
I hope you get picked up for underage drinking and have to spend the night in a jail so I can have some quiet to study!”

I couldn't hold back a snort. “That sounds like a normal reaction to me.”

“But it isn't God,” she said. “See, with God—Jesus—in your heart—”

I stiffened at the cliché, but I let it pass and nodded.

“—you respond in love instead of hate. You show as much love as you can because you show God that you love Him by loving His people, no matter who they are. And if you love God, you'll see God and you'll know what He wants you to do and then you'll do it. So it's all about love, see?”

I wasn't sure I did see. In fact, it was all I could do not to go cross-eyed.

“Okay. Well, I was just wondering.” I gestured toward her calculus book. “Why don't you try number ten?”

Tabitha turned happily back to the problem at hand, and I tried to sort it all out.

So you act like you believe in God by kissing up to everybody.

No, that wasn't what she said. You love people no matter who they are
.

Jacoboni? I
shuddered. She couldn't possibly mean that.

“So, Tabitha,” I said.

She looked up expectantly. She really was a cute kid.

“This love thing,” I said. “You just sit around thinking lovey-dovey thoughts about people?”

“No,” she said. “It's more like you
do
loving things for people. You know, little stuff like let somebody in line in front of you or listen to somebody talk even if they're boring you to death—or it can be big stuff, like you making extra time to tutor me when you probably don't actually have to. You want to hear the really weird thing about it?”

“That's why I came in here today,” I said.

She looked puzzled for a second, then grinned and went on. Where did this girl
come
from?

“What's really weird is that I have the hardest time loving the people I actually love. I mean, like my family sometimes or my friends. It's so hard not to take them for granted. Wow!”

She stopped, her eyes wide.

“What?” I said.

“I just thought of this!” she said. “Maybe that's why I've had to be so miserable here so far. Maybe God's trying to teach me not to take the people I love for granted. That is, like, huge! I've been trying to figure it out all quarter and then—bam!—there it is.” She looked at me in awe. “It was a God-thing, you asking me all these questions today. I would have taken forever to figure that out.”

“I did a God-thing?” I said. “I don't think so, Tabitha. I don't even—”

I bit my lip and nodded at her book. “Do one more, and I think you'll have it.”

Then I watched the top of her head as she bent over the problem. I couldn't just out-and-out tell this kid I didn't believe in the God who
she
was obviously convinced ran her whole show. I might as well knife her as do that. Besides, I was supposed to be acting “as if.”

Love. That was the ticket as far as I could tell from Tabitha, and since she was my only available test case, that was all I had to go on.

When she was gone, I picked up a pad from my desk and poised my pencil over it. In two minutes, I'd gone cold. The theorem was practically disproven already, because I couldn't think of a single name to write down.

Don't be stupid. You have friends. Theres Max
. That was a given.
Deb. Jacoboni
. Jacoboni? I could barely stand him. And what did Deb and I have beyond mutual complaining?

But if they weren't on the list, who was?

And where were they anyway?

It was unusually quiet in the halls, even for Sloan. I checked the schedule tacked to the wall above my desk.

Oops. There was a Kiddie Colloquium going on up in the grad student lounge. I was supposed to be there. I snatched up the pad and pencil and headed for the door. At least the KC gave me an excuse to suddenly spring myself on them after hibernating for the last month.

Kiddie Colloquiums, as we called them, were get-togethers the math grad students had every Friday. Somebody presented something to the rest of us and we responded—giving us practice in defending our dissertations or in lecturing. Our hope was always to become better speakers than most of the people who came from other universities to give seminars and who generally put half the audience into a coma.

When I got to the lounge, Rashad was standing at the overhead holding forth in his thick Israeli accent. There were about fifteen other grad students sitting on the motley collection of chairs and couches, staring at him with glazed eyes. I slipped onto a black vinyl sofa beside Deb and whispered, “What's going on?”

“He's just finishing up,” she whispered back. “To what do we owe the honor of
your
presence?”

There was a sudden spattering of applause, and several people
got up and scurried out the door as if they heard their pagers beeping. Rashad looked at the rest of us with raised eyebrows.

“Feedback?” he said.

Jacoboni sprang up from the nap he'd fallen into in the corner and said, “Hey, what do you say we give you feedback at Antonio's, eh, Rashad? It's Friday afternoon!”

“I
love
that idea,” Deb said.

“Hey, is that Jill?” Jacoboni said.

“Yes, it's Jill,” I said. “I still work here.”

“But the question is, do you still party here?”

“Come to Antonio's with us,” Peter said.

I agreed to go—but only because being alone suddenly felt threatening.

A dart game ensued almost the minute we arrived, and within about five minutes, Jacoboni had downed his first Heineken. I sat at the bar on a stool and ordered a club soda and wondered who I was supposed to reach out to in love.

It obviously wasn't this crowd. I'd been exchanging barbs with them for almost five years now, and I knew virtually nothing about any of them. Tabitha's advice notwithstanding, I didn't really
want
to know any more about them than I already did.

But that wasn't a satisfying realization. It was a lonely one. I was developing a cold ache I wasn't accustomed to.

I was already trying to figure out a graceful way to leave when my cell phone rang. It was Freda III, yelling into the phone.

“I think you'd better come home, hon!”

“Why?
What's wrong?”

Her voice was breathless. “I just found Liz in the study. I don't know how she got in there—whether you left it unlocked or what. But I was fixing lunch and suddenly I heard all this noise—”

“What noise?”

“The paper shredder.”

“Paper shre— What was she shredding?”

“I don't know,” Freda said. “When I got in there, she was taking something off the desk and sticking it into the machine.”

“Get her out of there!” I said. “I'll be right home.”

I flung the phone into my bag, snatched out a handful of bills and slapped them onto the bar.

“Hey, Jill!” Jacoboni called to me. “Where you goin, darlin? You just got here!”

“Party's over,” I said and bolted for the door.

When I got home, Freda had Mother at the kitchen table with a sandwich in front of her, and she was standing over her with her arms folded.

“She hasn't moved since I called you, hon,” she said. “But I don't know how much she destroyed before I caught her. I hope it wasn't anything important of yours.”

I know it was important!
I thought frantically as I hoofed it down the hall to the study.
There wasn't anything on that desk that wasn't important!

Silently cursing Nigel for ever suggesting I work on my dissertation at home—and myself for listening to him—I got to the desk and froze. My binder was open, the one I used to do all my computations for my research. I turned pages like the Tasmanian Devil, first in one direction, then in the other. There was no way to know until I sat down and went through it step by step, but it appeared that everything was still there.

I lifted the top off the shredder and pawed through the confetti. That told me nothing, except that the stuff on the top all seemed to have been typed. There was nothing with pencil in any sizeable piece.

I put the lid back on and sank into the chair.

“Everything all right, hon?” Freda III said from the doorway.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think so.”

But I didn't. I didn't think so at all. It was the most—what was it Sam had called it?—passionate I had felt all day. It wasn't rage; it was fear that something I'd cared about for two years had almost become packing material. I hadn't been able to think of anyone to put on my “people-to-love” list, but I'd go to the guillotine for my work. I leaned down and yanked out the shredder's plug from the socket and then picked up the phone and dialed.

“Sam Bakalis.”

“I have no passion for people.”

“Hi, Jill. I'm fine, thanks.”

“I'm serious, Blaze. Why do I have absolutely no passion for anything but this dissertation?”

“Personally, I think you do, but since we're sticking to options, here's the deal.” I could picture him shifting in his seat, ready to weave the tale. “To be human is to worship. We do it whether we mean to or not, because that's what people do.”

“You're saying I
worship
my work.”

“I haven't finished yet.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Go on.”

“If human beings don't worship the true God of love, sooner or later they'll find some false god to worship.”

“Where's the option?” I said.

I could almost
hear
him grinning. “This might get a little heavy for the phone. You want to meet me somewhere?”

“No, I'm at Mother's house, and I'm going to let Freda go home soon. I need to stay here.”

“I can come there.”

“Okay,” I said, “but no spiked belts, all right, Blaze?”

I spent the next half hour alternating between brushing my hair and putting on lip gloss, and chastising myself for feeling better because I'd heard Sam's voice, and for feeling even better than that because he was coming over.

By the time he got there, however, I had chewed off enough of the lip gloss not to look too terribly inviting, and I'd talked myself
into believing that anybody's voice would have sounded good to me at this point.

Mother was sitting at the kitchen table when I let Sam in. When I introduced her to him, she covered her mouth with her hand and ran giggling from the room. I heard her slippers hit the floor in the guest room.

“She's going to take a nap. Probably number six of the day.”

Sam looked at the doorway she'd just vacated. His eyes were sad.

“That isn't the same woman you saw speaking at that dinner, is it?” I said. “I thought she was acting strangely
that
night. I had no idea what she was about to turn into.”

“She doesn't act like the same woman,” Sam said. “But I'm still holding out for you to agree that she is.”

“You want something? Tea? Soda?”

He shook his head. “Nope. I think we've evolved far enough that we can just sit here and talk. Unless you feel better pacing?”

“I'm not pacing,” I said.

I stopped in the middle of the kitchen floor, and he grinned at me.

“I'm sitting,” I said, and I dropped into the chair across from him.

He leaned toward me, eyes intent. “I knew you'd move fast, but I didn't think it would be this fast. You're already licking the earth.”

“What?”

“That's what Pascal called it. He said something like, ‘I conceive it to be the glory and the greatness of mankind to be able to look upwards from licking the earth to survey the destiny that awaits him beyond time.' Something like that.”