Pascal's Wager

by Nancy Rue

  Maybe he was right. Maybe it was time to seriously consider moving Mother to a home—social worker or no social worker, truth or no truth. But knowing what had been right there in front of my eyes for over twenty years, that Max was hopelessly in love with my mother, it was clear he was the least reliable person to help me make this choice. All he wanted was to stop hurting, and that didn’t require any rational thought. I wasn’t sure he even had any rational thought left.

  I wasn’t sure I did either, for that matter. All I could do at the moment was feel—feel heavy, feel nauseous, feel like my chest was going to contract completely if it got any tighter.

  “Max,” I said, “can I pass on the squid? I need to go out and get some air.”

  “Sure, sure, you go. You’re going crazy here, huh? This thing, this tragedy—it could drive a person mad.”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  I went upstairs, pulled on some running clothes, and called Sam. I kept my voice controlled. I knew if I didn’t, I’d probably throw up on the cell phone.

  “Can you meet me on the Loop?” I said. “In about twenty minutes?”

  “Absolutely. Thought you’d never ask.”

  His voice was light and happy, and that was good. So far I’d disguised how much I wanted to vomit up everything I was feeling. Hopefully by the time I saw him, I’d have myself calmed down.

  When I got to the Loop, Deputy Dog lowered her sunglasses, which were virtually pointless at that hour, and said, “He’s not here yet.”

  “Would you just tell him I started without him?” I said.

  “Sure,” she said. “With those long legs of his, he should have no trouble catching up.”

  I skipped the stretching and set off at a jog for the first hill. It was going on five o’clock and getting chilly so there was no one else on the path for as far as I could see. I tried to settle into the blessed solitude, just the way I’d always done.

  Only it was no longer blessed. It wasn’t even solitude. It was loneliness. I’d never been lonely in my life. I had always been enough for me. When I heard Sam calling my name from the bottom of the hill, I turned in relief. And then I stared.

  What the heck was he wearing?

  I shielded my eyes with my hand and peered down. Sam was charging toward me in his usual swishy running shorts and T-shirt that looked like it had been rescued from the bottom of the laundry basket. But there was something metallic around his waist, and as he drew closer, I could hear it making a sharp, wicked-sounding noise.

  What on earth?

  When he was within a few yards, I saw what it was—except that I didn’t believe it. Why the heck was he wearing what looked like an oversized spiked dog collar around his waist?

  “What is that?” I said.

  He stopped in front of me, breathing only slightly harder than normal, and unhitched the contraption in the back.

  “It’s for you,” he said, grinning. “A la Pascal. So you won’t accidentally let somebody touch you—”

  He stopped, the spiked belt in hand, and the grin faded. “This isn’t the time for a joke, is it? Jill, I’m sorry.”

  “For what?” I said. “Very clever, Blaze. Very cute. But if you think I’m going to wear that thing—”

  “Stop,” he said. “Just stop.” He tossed the belt off the side of the path and put his hands on his hips. “Did something happen? You look wretched.”

  “Thank you so much.” I strained to keep my voice even. “Look, I just wanted to tell you that I’ve made my decision so we probably don’t need to talk about this anymore.”

  “About your mother.”

  “Yes, about my mother,” I said, teeth gritting.

  “Okay,” he said. “But can we talk about you?”

  I started to say no. I wanted to say no. I wanted to fire off some sizzling retort and trot my way around the Loop and go back to the life I’d been entirely satisfied with before. Before I’d found out I was wretched.

  Instead I said, “You know, I was perfectly content until you helped me see that I am a miserable, sarcastic—”

  “Come here,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

  He took me by the arm, looked over his shoulder, and pulled me to the waist-high fence that rendered the hill beyond the path off-limits. Before I could even protest, he picked me up lightly and deposited me on the other side of the fence and then followed, leaving the spiked belt hidden in some bushes.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Breaking every rule you made,” Sam said. He took my arm again. “Come on.”

  I let him take me down a partially overgrown sand path that wound up the hill and down its gently sloped other side. We stopped in front of the thick, gnarled remnant of a tree.

  “What do you see?” Sam said. “Humor me. It’s another one of my little tests.”

  I yanked my ponytail tight with both hands. “It’s a tree.”

  “What’s it doing?”

  I titled my head. “It looks like it got broken off—probably in an earthquake or something—only it kept growing.”

  “Yes! Ten points! Now for twenty bonus points: How did it grow? Where? In what way?”

  “Blaze, you’re out of control. Okay, it continued to grow, but along the ground instead of straight up.”

  “Right again! You get the bonus points!”

  He nodded again at the misshapen tree, which, as I’d described it, had grown a strong, thick trunk in a horizontal direction, not five inches from the ground.

  “No earthquake is going to take this baby down again,” Sam said, “because it’s already down—and yet it kept growing. It’s still alive. Playin’ it safe but alive.”

  “Is there supposed to be some hidden metaphor here?” I said.

  Sam sat down on the horizontal trunk and patted it with his hands on either side of him. “I think the tree’s you,” he said. “I think you’ve grown like this—safely, along the ground, where nobody can hurt you.”

  “And so far nobody has,” I said, “so I guess it’s working.”

  “Is it? You aren’t feeling any pain right now?”

  I folded my arms across my chest.

  “You don’t even have to answer that,” Sam said. “I can see it in your face.”

  “But they’re just circumstances, and I’m only trying to cope with them!”

  “Like this.” He patted the tree. “I can tell you why it isn’t working for you anymore.”

  “You said no more psychoanalyzing.”

  “Options, then. I promised you options.”

  I considered it. Then I went to the tree and climbed onto a gnarled place just above where Sam was sitting. “Okay, options.”

  “Passion is an option,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I’m not talking about sexual passion. Contrary to the picture society paints, there are other kinds.”

  “Name one.”

  “The kind of passion I see in you when you lose your temper and start beating me up.”

  “Well, you tick me off.”

  “But that isn’t just anger—it’s passion. You have a passion for finding out the truth. And not just so you can do the right thing for your mother, although that was the catalyst. I don’t think anything else you’ve ever done in your life has aroused that kind of passion in you—no mathematical dilemma, no man—nothing until now. That’s what has you torn up. You’re finally finding out that you have this deep passion inside you, and you don’t know what to do with it. I’m offering you the option of finding out.”

  I was still suspicious. “Why?”

  “Because I love passion. I love to see its fire in someone.”

  I bet you do, I wanted to say. But I didn’t. I just watched him closely.

  “I don’t like empty Christianity any more than you do,” he said. “And there’s a lot of it around, especially in intellectual circles. It’s cold. What I like to see is real fire, real passion for God—somebody who sees Jes
us Christ and is burning up with the vision.”

  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?

  FOURTEEN

  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?”