“You didn’t just say you love me?”
“No, I proposed that we fall in love with each other since all indications are it would impact favorably on our lives, make us happier.”
“How romantic, too bad you can’t choose to fall in love.”
“No?”
“No, you either feel it or you don’t”
“How would you know?”
“It’s obvious, there’s a loss of control there that precludes choice.”
“So you’re saying no?”
“Right, no.”
“Because?”
Laughs.
“Because you can’t decide to fall in love. It either happens or it doesn’t Casi.”
“Guess you’re right, but you sure have strong feelings on something you couldn’t even define a minute ago.”
“What do you mean?”
“What is love?”
“Love is like a . . . feeling . . . where . . . you just love.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Look we all know what love is even if I can’t put it into words just this moment.”
“You’ll know it when you feel it right?”
“Right.”
“And you don’t feel it now.”
“No.”
“Me either but I think I wish I did.”
Traci looked out the window then placed her palm on the pane. “It’s freezing out again,” she said. “I can’t ever remember anything like this. Can you? I mean it used to be, okay, a cold day here and there, the kind you would take notice of, but this is every day, day after day.”
“Relentless,” I said. “There’s no relent,” I added.
“Exactly. I read today that the temperature hasn’t reached double digits in like two weeks, I mean where are we? Not to mention the wind, my God.” Traci was drawing on my window. With her finger on the condensation. “The thing about this kind of sustained cold,” she said after a fairly long while, “is that after a while it almost fails to register, know what I mean? It becomes like just another part of us, our world, no more noticeable than the sky or the trees.”
“The sky is white.”
“Right.”
“I mean uniformly white though. That can’t be good right?”
Just then, Traci sprang up out of the couch. She had heard something I hadn’t. “Someone’s downstairs,” she said. “Maybe I can get my pendant.” She jumped out promising to return. I turned to watch her go out and almost fell off my stool. I left the stool on the floor and moved to the sofa which was still warm with her heat. I looked at the window and tried to identify her drawing. I couldn’t.
Traci came back in to say “false alarm.”
“Who was it?”
“I don’t know but he looks lost.”
“Besides lost, what else does he look like?”
“Like professorial, meaning eggheady.”
“Toom!” I shouted out the door and I was right. “Up here!”
My master plan had worked, I was pleased.
Traci was leaving. We said goodbye. First her then me.
She disappeared out the door and Toomberg appeared. “I did have your number,” he said. “And I’ve been trying to call you for the last hour but have received only constant busy signals.”
“I guess my phone’s finally had it, sorry.”
“They now manufacture phones of the cellular variety by the way.”
“Never.”
“Anyway I procured your address from Denise but no apartment number was listed.”
“I see.”
“So I was kind of lost.”
“Understood, thank you.”
“I think someone is calling you, out the window. Is not someone calling your name?”
I looked out the window and saw Traci looking up. When I opened the window to hear what she had to say, the cold stayed outside at first. But nanoseconds later it came in, riding an invisible tidal wave and causing me to shake, my teeth chattering, and turn to the side to avoid a direct hit.
“Casi?”
“Traci.”
“Just saying. If I did do what you proposed? If it was possible?”
“Yes?”
“It would be with you.”
She smiled. I smiled back. Then she turned, hugged herself, and walked down the block. I watched her the whole time. When she reached the end of the block she turned right at the corner and out of my sight. I never saw her again.
“Was that the woman I passed on my ascent?”
“Wasn’t she absolutely, transcendentally, achingly beautiful?”
“She was fairly attractive.”
“Keep your shirt on Toom, don’t go overboard.”
“I’m sorry, are you in love with her? I’m not familiar with the conventions.”
“Relax, I’m talking about her attractiveness on a purely physical level. I didn’t make my statement in any amatory way. I’m simply asking for your opinion as to her level of beauty.”
“I’m a married man.”
“You are? And you’re getting married again this weekend? Isn’t that illegal you polygamous bastard?”
“I am not getting married this weekend, I am merely attending a wedding.”
“Guess that’s your story, may as well stick with it. But what of that woman’s heart-delaying beauty?”
“I said, she’s attractive.”
“I pity you Toomie, using that word to describe the situation. Don’t you realize how intoxicating women are? How amazing life is? You know, there didn’t have to be women, and they certainly didn’t have to be this compelling.”
“There had to be women for life to continue.”
“Exactly, I for one would certainly kill myself.”
“I meant from a reproductive standpoint.”
“I suppose that’s true too, if you want to get all technical.”
“You believe life to be amazing Casi? As in amazingly good?”
“As in, yes. Amazingly good. How else can you describe a state of affairs where I can be sitting in this lonely apartment one minute only to answer the door the next to find that woman standing before me? Where she will later stop in bone-piercing cold to tell me that, if she could, she would fall in love with me.”
“Where two seven-year-olds will snatch an infant and beat her to death?”
“There’s that.”
“Just pray nothing similar ever happens to you or yours.”
“I’m in control here Toom. Things don’t happen to me. They happen because of me. Do you have any kids Mr. Melvyn Toomberg?”
“No but did Hurtado conclude the way you wished?”
“Ow. Agony. Stop. That’s different though.”
“What happens more often? An attractive woman appears in your doorway or you deal with someone like Arronaugh or Cymbeline?”
“You know about Cymbeline?”
“Naturally, everyone does.”
“Who’s everyone and what do they know? Specifics.”
“Fine, everyone at work knows that you are going to be charged with contempt because of Arronaugh and Cymbeline.”
“Oh.”
“What did you say to Arronaugh anyway?”
“I don’t know but it was probably contemptible.”
“Did you urge a client to leave Cymbeline’s courtroom because she was going to put him in?”
“Of course not. But I should have.”
“Aren’t you concerned?”
“Why should I be? Somebody’ll smooth it over for me. Maybe Gold, he’s great at that sort of thing.”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen here.”
“So I’ll fight it. Isn’t Tom supposed to be like the greatest lawyer in the Western Hemisphere or something? You think he’s going to let me get convicted?”
“Now you sound like a client.”
“That was stupid. The point is that our psuedo law firm will expend, if necessary, all of its limitless resources on my defense.”
&n
bsp; “I don’t think so.”
“You’re right, you can’t expend all of something that has no limit.”
“Also, from what I’m hearing, the people you’re counting on to help, you may end up viewing as additional enemies.”
“How so?”
“Well the rumor, and it’s just that for now, is that along with the contempt proceeding there’s going to be a contemporaneous in-house investigation.”
“Regarding what?” I was laughing, near-hysterically, I think at the phrase in-house.
“Well, several things.”
“Like what?”
“Like that you might have forged Tom’s signature to get some minutes.”
“Of course, they should investigate me if I hadn’t!”
“That you verbally assaulted Solomon Grinn.”
“Verbally?”
“Assaulted.”
“Assaulted?”
“Verbally.”
“Which time?”
“On more than one occasion.”
“That’s all? It’ll never stick.”
“That you physically assaulted Liszt.”
“Liszt?”
“Physically.”
“His wall?”
“No his person.”
“Whose person?”
“Liszt’s person.”
“Liszt has a person now?”
“The allegation, I surmise, is that you tried to punch him.”
“That’s crazy. That should be an easy one to fight. Just ask Liszt, he’ll say it was his wall, not him, that I took offense with. Ask him.”
“I can’t because he’s out.”
“Out where?”
“Out of work, out on Disability.”
“Why, what happened?”
“You happened it seems.”
“Me? He can’t be saying I hit him.”
“Emotional distress, I gather, from the near miss. That’s my impression although he may be saying you did in fact hit him, that sort of thing being notoriously difficult to ascertain. At any rate, he’s on indefinite Disability Leave as a result of your encounter with him.”
“Good Lord.”
“Yes.”
“Man, this is like a multiple count indictment they’re working on against me.”
“It would appear so.”
“And Tom’s out for like another week?”
“At least. And even when he returns, Tom’s influence may be waning.”
“Really?”
“Yes, in fact—”
“Anyway on Kingg we’re basically preparing to throw a Hail Mary pass aren’t we?”
“I must warn you, if that’s a sports metaphor those invariably escape me.”
“And if we fail they take him out like a week later right?”
“They execute him yes, if we fail.”
“What do you suppose Kingg will be thinking then?”
“When they execute him?”
“Well, before. Just-before for example.”
“I don’t know, I don’t really know him.”
“You don’t have to know him do you?”
“What do you mean, Casi?”
“They executed a federal prisoner last year didn’t they?”
“Yes, they did.”
“An unrepentant killer right?
“I don’t know.”
“Well, hundreds dead right?”
“Right.”
“At his hands.”
“Yes.”
“And no stated remorse.”
“True but that assumes his public proclamations matched his internal state.”
“Right, in fact that’s sort of what I’m getting at. You know what I heard this guy did just before he was killed? This unrepentant killer and avowed atheist?”
“What?”
“He was offered and received a sacrament, Extreme Unction.”
“Isn’t that like Last Rites?”
“Yes, especially in this context.”
“Okay, why is that meaningful to you?”
“Because Extreme Unction is a sacrament, one of the seven, whereby the recipient is essentially prepared for death and the ensuing afterlife through repentance, forgiveness et cetera. Don’t you find it amazingly anomalous and all sorts of suggestive that this individual, who killed hundreds without apology, and who maintained all along that he did not believe in God, at the last moment basically asked for forgiveness and prepared for an afterlife?”
“Maybe it’s true what they say regarding the dearth of atheists in foxholes.”
“Yes! Let’s talk about that statement. Can we determine whether or not it’s true and what the consequences would be accordingly? Is that even the type of thing we can discover Toom?”
“Yes, of course.”
“How?”
“Through reason.”
“Fine, well, the statement is there are no atheists in foxholes. Is it true?”
“Literally?”
“No, let’s take the alleged truth the statement is trying to express, which is, I think, that people who are faced with their imminent mortality invariably turn to a belief in God and all attendant beliefs. What do you say?”
“First I suppose we need to address what it even means for a statement like that to be true.”
“I guess does the statement accurately reflect the physical world we live in and the people we share it with? In other words, is it true that human beings, when faced with the very real possibility of impending death, invariably turn to a belief in God regardless of their prior level of piety.”
“Phrased that way, I think the answer is simple. The answer would be that the statement, if it means what you just said, is almost certainly not true, so few things being true of all people.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere Toom, I agree. So let’s modify slightly what we think the statement purports to allege. Imagine we have the individual who coined this phrase before us presently. She says, look, the world is divided into those who believe in God and an afterlife and those who don’t. Of those who don’t, I believe the overwhelming majority of them will in some form adopt such a belief when they believe they are about to die. Do we agree with her?”
“I really wouldn’t know where to begin examining her statement. The little experience I’ve had with people who were aware they were dying was with people who had a belief in God and an afterlife to begin with, although it did seem that the belief was if anything strengthened and not weakened by their circumstances.”
“I knew a woman who worked as a nurse at an intensive care unit. Now as you know nurses are basically saints making a pit stop on earth; dealing with the nastiest shit you can imagine without any of the prestige or compensations doctors get. So, unlike you, she dealt with an endless procession of people facing imminent death and according to her, in all her years, not one, not one patient who knew he was about to die persisted in an atheistic or even agnostic belief. Now if you know anything about the extreme laxity of my data-gathering standards then you’ll know that this nurse’s statement, along with my own admittedly limited experience of the near-dead, and along with our Extreme Unction friend is enough to convince me of the general truth of the foxhole statement.”
“So if it is true, a rather large proviso but one which I’m willing to forgo challenging for the moment, what do we take from that?”
“That’s the interesting question of course. Why do human beings engage in this behavior Toom?”
“Maybe they’re seeking comfort. The person is about to have something bad happen to them, as bad as they can envision. Under those circumstances, the person is looking for a consolation, so he latches on to the belief that the imminent end isn’t really an end.”
“A belief he never had before right?”
“Presumably.”
“Well no, I only want to deal with people who truly never believed not those who just said they didn’t but deep down did.”
“Okay.”
�
��If one of those people is going to adopt a belief purely for psychological comfort, and despite the fact that they believed the proposition to be a complete fiction prior to their predicament, why not adopt a different belief that might offer even more hope without any possible downside. Why not suddenly choose to believe that human beings, despite all evidence to the contrary, are in fact immortal and death is nothing more than an elaborate ruse? Or better yet that human beings are in fact mortal but I myself am not. I am immortal. Why not choose to believe any of those things? Note that those beliefs, if believed in the absence of a God, would arguably offer more comfort to the atheist since they would not involve any apologetic explanation to a higher being both for the disbelief and for any other wrong actions or inactions. So why not?”
“Because those would be the beliefs of a madman. Nothing speaks in their favor, there’s no proof.”
“And where is the proof of an afterlife? Of a God? Surely someone who was previously an avowed atheist would be the first to say there is no actual proof right?”
“Maybe there is no proof per se but there’s a certain safety in numbers and a lot of other people believe in God and an afterlife whereas seemingly no sane person believes in their own corporeal immortality.”
“Why is that the case? Why is it that countless seemingly sane people believe these things in the absence of proof?”
“One possible reason is that these beliefs are endemic to human culture and therefore predispose us to their adoption.”
“So that someone who has truly resisted these cultural impetuses their entire life is suddenly incapable of resisting them at a time when, near death, you would expect them to be less affected by societal pressures than at any other time in their life?”
“Desperate times call for desperate measures.”
“You make it sound as if these beliefs can never fail to provide comfort but what about our Extreme Unction recipient? You think he wanted to confront what he had done? Wouldn’t such a person be better comforted by the belief that what follows death is a complete nothing? Nothing by nature entailing no need to confront one’s senseless slaughter of children?”
“People are petrified of nothingness. Repentance and groveling they can deal with more easily I think. Maybe this fear of a complete nothing, not true belief, was his motivation. Besides, the papers said that although an atheist, he was raised Catholic meaning his last-minute belief may have been nothing more than him reverting, in his darkest hour, to an emblem of his simpler youth and drawing comfort from that. So I’m not ready to concede that he experienced true belief, though of course he may have.”
A Naked Singularity: A Novel Page 49
