The Good Atheist (7 page)

But it was not to be.

The peace was shattered by Selene shouting for me from the cottage. I twisted around in the chair to see Selene standing at a window, gesturing wildly at me. “Jack, get in here quick. Hurry!” I sighed and went back into the cottage.

I found her in the den adjoining the living room. It was filled with natural light coming in through the large picture window that overlooked the pond where I had been sitting. There was a big wooden desk with a computer, with a large comfortable-looking leather recliner. Selene stood behind the desk as if for protection, pointing up at one of the shelves.

“It’s big and hairy,” she said, indicating an upper corner where the shelves reached the ceiling.

But I wasn’t looking where she was pointing. I was too preoccupied with what packed the room.

Books.

Real, paper books.

The walls were covered with book-lined shelves. More books were piled on the surface of the desk, and there were a few more stacked on the floor, apparently waiting for more shelving units. I’d never seen so many hard-copy books in one place.

“This is incredible,” I said under my breath.

Selene shook her head. “Ah, it’s a big hairy spider, that’s what it is.”

“I mean the books. Look at all these books!” I said. Most of them would be old, since printed books went out of use in my grandfather’s day. Only collectors and specialty stores still carried them. The expense was beyond the means of the average reader.

I was overwhelmed by the sheer physicality of them, and I wondered how people used to manage it back in the day. But I realized that before ebooks, this is what people would have had to do. Either you devoted entire rooms to storing them, or you didn’t own very many. Carrying them would be such a pain. You would never be able to carry more than a few at a time.

It wasn’t just books that filled the shelves. There were a few framed photographs as well. One of them caught my eye and I went over for a closer look. It was of me, when I was about five, sitting on my father’s knee. We were outdoors in a park somewhere. I held a baseball and was grinning ear to ear. The man in the picture didn’t look like the type to run off on his wife and son.

I went around the room looking at the other pictures. They were all of me between the ages of newborn to about six. Dad and Grandpa were in several of them. I picked one of them up and held it in my hands. My grandpa looked in the pictures pretty much the way I remembered him, except he did not seem so old to me now. As a little boy he seemed positively ancient, but now in the pictures he just looked like a healthy man in his mid-fifties.

And the pictures sent me one message. My grandfather hadn’t forgotten me. But that only begged the question why he hadn’t contacted me. Why was he content to keep pictures of me in his den and never call?

Selene broke into my thoughts. “Jack, would you stop staring at those pictures and look?”

I set the picture back on the shelf. “It’s incredible. There’s got to be hundreds of real paper books here.”

She pointed her finger towards an upper corner of the room, shaking it for emphasis. “Jack, for crying out loud!”

I looked up to the corner of the ceiling where she pointed. “It’s just a spider,” I said.

“Well, it’s the biggest spider I’ve ever seen. Can you kill it before it decides to put us on its dinner menu?”

“Just a sec,” I said. I pulled a book off the shelf in front of me and looked at the front cover.
The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire
. Probably harmless, I thought, though most history books printed previous to the Harris purges were banned. I’d have to check the Prohibited Publications list to be sure.

The History of the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S.
sat next to it. I was familiar with that title, as we studied the digital version in high school. But here was a rare early copy of the print edition. It would be worth a small fortune, if it wasn’t banned. I’d have to check the Prohibited list for that one as well.

“Jack, what on earth are you doing?”

“Just looking.”

“Can you please get that spider for me?” Selene had an almost psychotic aversion to dirt and bugs, but especially spiders, and I realized I was being insensitive to her situation. I looked around for something handy to squish it with, like a tissue box. There was a stack of books on the desk, but it felt wrong somehow to use a rare paper book as a bug swatter.

I pulled off my shoe and approached the corner of the shelving unit where the spider lurked. The spider suddenly dropped on a silky thread and landed on the spine of a book sitting on the top shelf. I read the title as the spider crawled down the spine.

The Holy Bible.

I pulled it off the shelf and held it in my hands, reading the title again to make sure I wasn’t mistaken. I could hardly believe it. A real copy of the Bible.

“Jack, what are you doing?” Selene asked me with a puzzled look on her face.

I held up the book for her to see. “Honey, we’ve got a problem here,” I said quietly.

“I know. So why don’t you just kill it. What are you waiting for?”

“No, I mean look at this.” I handed the Bible to her and she took it from me. She looked at the front cover of the book, turned it over and read the back copy, then handed it back. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen one before, except in a museum behind glass.”

I put the Bible down on the desk and looked at the shelves. The Bible was banned, of course, and owning one was prohibited. If Grandpa had a copy of the Bible lying around, then I wondered what else might fill these shelves. I looked at the book that had been next to the Bible on the shelf, and it was almost as shocking:
The Reason for God
. I pulled it off the shelf and paged through it. A random reading told me all I needed to know. This book, as the title darkly hinted, was an argument for the existence of God. I held the book in my hand and scanned down the row of books on the shelf.
God and the Astronomers
.
Why I Believe. The Case for Christianity
.
Reasonable Faith. The Existence of God.

The room was filled with religious books.

I held
The Reason for God
out for Selene to see. “And it gets worse. Look at this,” I said. She took it from me and looked at it, turning it over in her hands.

“These shelves are filled with religious books,” I said.

“We’ll need to find a public incinerator,” she said.

She was right, of course. Bibles were strictly
verboten
, along with most religious books. Just having a Bible in your possession would get you jail time. We were obligated under law to call the Inquisitors, or turn them into the nearest public library for burning.

“I think we passed a library on our way through town. They’ll have an incinerator drop box,” I said. “I’ll have to sort through the books and pull out the ones that have to go.”

“Okay, but don’t be too long. It’s getting late. I’m going to see if I can get that primitive kitchen to make us some coffee,” she said.

“Hon, the kitchen won’t make the coffee. You’re going to have to do it,” I started to explain. But she left before I could finish, leaving me alone in the room packed with contraband books and a man-eating spider.

The Bible was still there, on the desk where I’d left it. I had heard of the Bible, of course, and some backward countries still allowed it, but I had never seen one, let alone actually read it. Not that I needed to. Everyone knew that it was filled with hate, prejudice, intolerance and backward, archaic laws. Things that no advanced civilization could tolerate.

Religion poisons everything. Everyone knows that. They taught us that in school.

But something possessed me to look at it. Call it morbid curiosity, but for whatever reason I picked it up and took it over to the large chair behind the desk. I sat down, and flipped the Book open at random and began to read.

Love your enemies. Do good to those who misuse you.

I flipped again.

Treat others as you would have them treat you.

I flipped again.

Blessed are the peacemakers.
The words troubled me, because they weren’t the evil, hate-filled words dripping with prejudice that I’d been taught to expect from the Bible.

I flipped again, and a folded sheet of paper fell out onto the desk in front of me. I picked it up and unfolded it. It was a handwritten letter on a lined sheet of white paper 8 ½ by 11, covered in very neat cursive. Handwriting was a dying art, and I started to read it, taking pleasure in the beautifully flowing script. It was dated August 2057, just ten months ago and addressed to my grandfather.

I settled back in the large chair and started to read, more out of curiosity than anything. I didn’t think Gramps would mind too much. The writer thanked Grandpa for a recent shipment of tomatoes, enquired into his health, listed a few common household items he would like to have included with the next delivery of tomatoes, and a few other mundane matters. I stifled a yawn and was about to toss the letter aside when I came across the next line:

Thanks, Dad, for everything. How is Jack?

That stopped me cold.

Dad had been an only child. I reread the letter to be sure my eyes weren’t playing tricks. My hands were shaking by the time I finished. The person who wrote this letter asked about me by name and called my grandfather Dad. Only my father fit the bill.

One of my favorite memories of Dad was when he took me to the university where he worked late one night. He let me sit at the controls of the VLSA – Very Large Space Array – and we spent hours exploring the wonders of the night sky. Later, he got me a small telescope and we spent many evenings gazing up at the stars. My father disappeared shortly after that. I was only eight at the time. My mother simply told me that he had run off with another woman, although my child’s mind was not able to grasp what that meant. I never heard from him, and a year later my mother told me, in an even, flat, matter-of-fact tone, that he had died in a car accident.

Who else would address Grandpa as Dad? And the writer asked about me! The best explanation was that the letter came from my dad. Except that he was supposed to have been dead for the past seventeen years.

I looked at the date on the letter again just to make sure. Last August. For a long while all I could do was sit and stare out the window while I tried to come to grips with the implications of the letter. If it really was from my father, then obviously he was still alive – at least until ten months ago. I couldn’t be one hundred percent certain, but it was too much of a coincidence.

As I thought it through, I realized that the only real proof I had that Dad was dead was the word of my mother and a few news articles on the web. At the time I was just a trusting child and it didn’t occur to me to question it. Later, as the years passed without any contact from my father, it only served to confirm the story. When I grew into a man I had no reason to doubt it.

No reason until now.

If he was still alive why had I not heard from him? But that alone did not logically prove he was dead. There could be some other explanation that I was not aware of, and I had to admit that my knowledge of the facts was still pretty limited.

Could it really be true that my father was alive? After believing since the age of eight that he was dead, the thought was staggeringly hard to accept. But I held in my hands reasonable evidence that he might be alive after all.

The letter gave precious few hard facts, and assumed that the reader had knowledge of a lot of background information. But that fit if the letter was simply an installment in an ongoing, regular correspondence. In fact, the letter was surprisingly dull. The entire purpose of it was to request a few electronic parts with the next delivery of tomatoes. He made reference to another recent letter, and there seemed to be a lot that was simply assumed between the two. It made sense, though. If you are in regular touch with someone you don’t fill them in on everything going on in your life with each exchange. You just talk about whatever is new. The rest, all the background, is known and assumed.

I wondered why the letter was written out by hand on paper, and physically delivered. Why not email or text?

It seemed to me that if this letter was part of a regular correspondence, then there could be more letters somewhere. And since I’d found this one stuck in a book, the bookshelves were as good a place as any to start looking for more.

I got up and started pulling books off the shelves one by one. As I pulled each book off the shelf, I held it upside down and fanned the pages to see if anything fell out. Then I tossed it on the floor and grabbed the next one from the shelf, working quickly from left to right. I found the second letter in
A History of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement
, apparently used as a bookmark. I found several others in the same way. More were sandwiched between books.

I kept up the frantic pace, and an hour later the shelves were empty. All the books lay in heaps on the floor. My efforts had produced a dozen more letters. I took the letters with me back to the large armchair and sat down to read.

When I finished the last one, I sat and stared out the window, trying to put the pieces together with the scant information I could glean from the letters.

According to the dates on the letters, they ranged in time from five years to six months ago. The language was vague in many respects. There was no mention of where the writer lived, or what he was doing. A couple of letters said that ‘the work’ was going well, but no indication of what that was.

But most of the letters were signed ‘Marcus’ or ‘Your son.’ And several of them mentioned me by name. It seemed that these letters represented correspondence from my father, but that was hardly possible.

I was still lost in thought when Selene came into the room. She looked around, surveying the wreckage. The floor was a mess of books. “Ah, I see you’ve made good progress,” she quipped.

I kept staring out the window in silence.