Roger's Version (23 page)

“Yeah, well,” Dale offered. “What particle physics has to add to that is that reality is intrinsically uncertain and in a very real way dependent upon observation. There’s this physicist named Wheeler down in Texas who says the entire universe had to wait for a conscious observer before it could be real. Not just subjective-real, but real in a very real way. The two-hole experiment, Wheeler points out, can be rigged to be retroactive—that is, the observation that ties down the particle can occur after the hybrid behavior. By hybrid I mean both states of, say, a particle position exist until measurement. Until you look into the box, that is, Schrödinger’s cat is both alive and dead. Mind really does affect matter in this sense. There’s another physicist called Wigner—”

“
Please
,” I interrupted. “This is very charming, but isn’t it, honestly, rather stretching it? The reason people don’t make too much of their minds is that they see how totally at the mercy of the material world the mind is—a brick drops on your head, your mind is extinguished no matter how indeterminate are the motions of the individual atoms composing
the clay in the brick. Life, thought—these are no match for the planets, the tides, the physical laws. Every minute of every day, all the prayers and ardent wishing in the world can’t budge a little blob of cancer, or the AIDS virus, or the bars of a prison, or the latch of a refrigerator a child accidentally locked himself into. Without some huge effort of swallowing shame such as Tertullian outlines, there is no way around matter. It’s implacable. It doesn’t give a damn about us one way or another. It doesn’t even know we’re here. And everything we do, from looking both ways when we cross the street to designing airplanes with huge safety factors, acknowledges this, this heartless indifference in things, no matter what crazy creeds we profess.”

The expression on Dale’s face told me I had become impassioned, and he counted this, in the insufferable way of evangelists, as some kind of triumph. “So that’s how you see it,” he said.

“Well, it’s a way of seeing it,” I said, embarrassed. “In relation to you I have to be a Devil’s advocate.”

“ ‘Crazy creeds,’ ” he repeated, his blue eyes bisected by the light from the tall Gothic window at my back. “You’re really a very angry man.”

“That’s what Esther sometimes says. I don’t see it that way; to me, I’m as calm and good-natured as the human situation warrants—a little more so, even.”

Color, I imagined, had crept into Dale’s waxen cheeks at my mention of Esther. He tried to stay with our theological tussle. “You know,” he told me patiently, “when Christ said faith could move mountains, He didn’t say it would instantly move them, or open up refrigerator doors; your way of thinking is miracles or nothing. But surely you can see that mind, our desires and hopes, do change, can change, the material
world. I mean, what we’re all coming to from about twenty different directions is a holistic—”

“Next to the indeterminacy principle,” I told him, “I have learned in recent years to loathe most the word ‘holistic,’ a meaningless signifier empowering the muddle of all the useful distinctions human thought has labored at for two thousand years.” I added, “Richie’s math—how is that coming?”

Blood, that warm traitor, visibly surged beneath his skin; it was his turn to be
pudibundus
, to shoulder the shame of being. By evoking Richie, fruit of her womb, I had evoked Esther. “Good. He’s a sweet boy, really; so willing. But I’m never sure how much he gets; one week we have it all together and the next session he seems to have forgotten everything. I tried to work around his mental block on bases by bringing in computers, to make it more concrete, the way they’re not only binary in principle but employ, a lot of them, hexadecimal numbers for printout, sixteen being, of course, four four-bit binaries and simplicity itself to convert. But, I don’t know, I guess he takes after his father. With that natural sweetness of his, he’d make a great minister.”

I didn’t want to hear this. I didn’t want to hear most of what Dale told me: he had a knack, like the dental hygienist with her fine-edged scraper, for the soft and tender spots of my enamel. I wanted to keep him close to the carnal, to images recalling him to his sin. “But his mother is so number-minded,” I said. “Do you want to know something interesting about Esther? It’s rather intimate.”

“Sure,” he had to, hesitantly, say.

“She gets on the bathroom scales naked, and whenever she sees she weighs over a hundred pounds, she eats nothing but celery and carrots until she’s back to exactly one oh oh.”

“That’s pretty compulsive,” Dale admitted, in a voice that
sounded reedy, like Verna’s. I knew the reference to our shared bathroom would wound him; our casual, sanctioned nudity, our damp towels and washcloths promiscuously interchanged, our mingled medications and dental floss and mouthwashes and red discarded Band-Aid threads would torment him with the realization that there were many rooms below the attic where he and she enacted their charade of hopeless love—rooms of reality, of shared possessions and wedded tasks, of memories with worn corners and chipped paint, of shelter I could give her and he could not. Well, when you venture into adultery you must expect to trip over the husband’s dental floss.

“I always find it exciting, somehow,” I confessed to him, “to think of her as being exactly one hundred pounds of flesh, of meat. Tertullian calls it
caro, carnis
, which seems a more satisfying word. An argument for the mind-body split you didn’t mention is the estrangement we all feel from our bodies, the disgust we have to fight in dealing with them. Feeding them, wiping them, watching them get wrinkled. Imagine how much worse for a woman—the unwanted body hair, the bleeding, the secretions staining the underpants, all those little malfunctions that result from God’s having packed too many functions into those little round bellies of theirs.…”

“Sir, I don’t want to make you late for your seminar,” Dale interrupted.

“You won’t, there isn’t one. It’s exam period. Next term, we do the post-Nicene heretics—mobs of the poor buggers. The Cathari, the Waldenses, the Apostolici, and then on into the Lollards, the Hussites, the Beghards and Beguines, not to mention you and me.”

“You and me?”

“Protestants. We did away with the middleman. Faith alone. Phooey to works. Phooey to the Pope and his indulgences.
It all gets very political and economic and rather dreary—the Templars, for example, weren’t heretics at all, just victims of the greed of the King of France and Pope Clement the Fifth. A lot of it had to do with the rise of cities. City religion spells relief from the city, and as such tends to be mystical. Anti-organizational. The Church couldn’t have that. Everybody, from Saint Francis to Joan of Arc, wanted their own direct pipeline, and the Church couldn’t stand that either. I much prefer the ante-Nicene part of the course, before the bishop of Rome became quite such a brute. In those first centuries there was something intellectually creative going on; they were trying to work out what had happened—what was the exact nature of Christ. What is it, do you think?”

“What’s what?”

“The nature of Christ. You’re a Christian, yes? You keep wanting to prove the existence of God via natural theology; where does Jesus figure in your diagrams?”

“Why”—his embarrassment had shifted ground but kept its color—“wherever the Creed says He figures, as God made Man, come down to redeem our sins—”

“Oh, please. We don’t need to have our sins redeemed, do we? What sins? A little greed, a little concupiscence? You call those sins, compared with an earthquake, compared with a tidal wave, a plague? Compared with Hitler?”

“Hitler—” he began to argue, hitting on my weak link.

“And don’t talk to me about
the
Creed:
which
Creed? The Athanasian has a totally different emphasis from the Nicene. The Apostles’ is a cover-up, a company hand-out. How do you see the two natures of the God-Man combining? Like the Arians and Adoptionists, with the God part tuned way down, or like the Monophysites and Apollinarianists, with the Man part just a phantom, a pretense? Or like the Nestorians,
with the two parts so independent poor Jesus couldn’t have known Who or what or where He was? How do you feel about His sex life? Any? Some? None? He had a way with the ladies, you must admit, sweet-talking those sisters of Lazarus or just sitting around in the house of Simon the Leper getting expensive oil poured into His hair, and telling everybody not to throw the first stone. Think of being Jesus Christ at age fifteen, back home in Nazareth after Your impish behavior in the Temple has been forgotten and everybody thinks You’re going to be just another carpenter, just like Your dad. Do You masturbate? Do You go out behind the stack of wood scraps with the little Canaanite girl next door? Do You have wet dreams that not even old Yahweh at His most forbidding could hold against a boy? Don’t be embarrassed. This is the kind of thing the ante-Nicenes thought about day and night, this was their bread and butter, and now it’s become my bread and butter. When Esther gets up over a hundred pounds, it’s this bread and butter she’s had too much of. She’s ravenous, have you ever noticed? The woman loves to eat.”

His blanched irises shuttled with fright at my manicky mood. “You talk about me and blasphemy,” he weakly accused.

“Yes,” I said simply. “All this Heaven-storming you want to do. If God wanted His tracks discovered, wouldn’t He have made them plainer? Why tuck them into odd bits of astronomy and nuclear physics? Why be so
coy
, if You’re the Deity? Tell me: are you ever afraid of looking too deep and having your eyes torn out?”

Dale blinked and said simply in turn, “Yes.”

The defenseless answer touched me. I felt myself abruptly, vomitously brimming with that detestable stuff

He confided to me, “Ever since I began to go into this seriously, my prayers at night—they feel unheard. I’ve broken some connection. There’s an anger.”

“Of course there is,” I said, spreading my hands on my gray, stained desk blotter and noticing that once again I had cut the one thumbnail too short, with a notch in it. It must be my way of holding the clippers. “You’re trying to make God stand at the end of some human path,” I told Dale. “You’re building a Tower of Babel.”

“And in my personal life,” he huskily, tearily began to confess, seeing that he had awakened the old minister in me.

But I didn’t want to hear about Esther, however he disguised her. If he were allowed to confess and weep, the wound would start to drain and stop festering. I held up my hand. “Ah well,
that
,” I said. “We all have something. In these circumstances down here everybody has to be a bit kinky. Don’t be afraid of the Earth. The flesh. You know what Tertullian said? He said, ‘There’s nothing to blush for in Nature; Nature should be revered.’
Natura veneranda est, non erubescenda
. He goes on in rather interesting detail, about men and women. He says when they come together the soul and the flesh discharge a duty together; the soul supplies the desire and the flesh the gratification. That the man’s semen derives its fluidity from the body and its warmth from the soul. He calls it, in fact, a drip of the soul. Rather charmingly, saying that he must risk offending modesty in his desire to speak the truth,” I said to Dale, leaning forward as if to activate in the space behind his eyes the licentious images that he and Esther had stored there, “Tertullian says that when a man comes he feels his soul has flown, he feels faintness and his sight goes dim. He goes on to point out that Adam was made from clay and breath, and that clay is naturally moist, and so is the semen
that springs from it.
^*
Nothing to be ashamed of, in short.
Non erubescenda
.”

“It’s funny,” Dale confessed. “But at night I sometimes want to talk to you. I think of arguments. You disturb me, I guess. You tell me not to be afraid of the Earth. I could say the same to you. You’re always bringing up earthquakes, the horrible hugeness and heartlessness of it all, war, disease.…”

“Yes.” I urged him on; I wanted to hear his solution.

He was still blushing, rubescent; his eyes slid away when I sought them. “That sort of thing can be said, of course, and maybe
should
be said; I mean, it’s God speaking within us, this indignation. This rebellion. It’s what makes atheists so religious, in a way, so self-righteous and proselytizing. But”—he forced himself to look at me, my many shades of gray—“what I framed one night to say to you is this: you should realize that our loyalty to God will not go away, because it is basically loyalty to ourselves, if you can follow that.”

“I can,” I said, “and it sounds dangerously close to humanism
to me. There has to be an
Other
. As you know. And once you get the Other, He turns out to be a monster, full of terrible heat and cold and breeding maggots out of the dung and so forth. Anyway, you were good to say it. I know it’s hard to express these things we store up. You were good to want to comfort me.”

We were both, indeed, in a crisis state of discomfort; our eyes, our souls, were sliding back and forth like ghostly eels. The cold blank sky of this January cast a stony light into the cathedral space of this office. My feet felt cold on the floor; I felt in my bones the weight of all the books lining my walls. My pipe had died. “How’s Verna?” I asked, for something to say, as relief from God and these terrible, perilous attempts to pin Him down, to caress the divine substance.

“I don’t know,” Dale told me. “Something’s eating her. She was all up for a while, really exhilarated, it was great to see it, about getting the diploma, and getting going in the world, but something’s pulled her back down. Have you been over there since Christmas?”

“My last visit didn’t feel like a success,” I said, though this hadn’t been quite my feeling at the time. In truth I had been afraid to pursue my advantage, for fear I had imagined it. “We tried to read ‘Thanatopsis’ together.”

“She passed the English part of her exam.”

“Yes, I know.”