god
‘Curse you God! Curse you! I’ll fight you now! Come on then! If you exist I’ll punch you in the face. Well? Well? Evidently, a coward.’
Erwan was speaking to the ceiling, waving his fist in triumph. The other members of the livingroom felt uncomfortable; they quivered in their armchairs. They’d been wobbling for some time, ever since ingesting a certain large quantity of cannabis. Their current quivers also had something to do with Erwan threatening to beat the Almighty, an unhealthy prospect. Theirs was a habitual anxiety. They hadn’t removed the last vestiges of religion from their souls.
Atheist the first: Emmett McFickle.
One morning he had lain in late. He was 16 years old. His father, wondering why he hadn’t risen yet, knocked on the door and entered his room. Emmett had a very tremendous respect for the old man. He never gave him the slightest bit – the idea of having a hint of confrontation was not conceivable. That morning, however, was different. Emmett lay in bed, waiting, not happy, not getting up, thinking with trepidation of what was to come. His father entered the room and looked at him.
‘Emmett, its time to get up. Get to mass.’
‘I’m not going,’ said Emmett. ‘It is bullshit.’
There was a rocky silence.
This was the first time Emmett had ever said ‘bullshit’ in front of his father.
They did not look at each other.
‘No, Emmett, that’s not so. Get up and get ready.’
‘No. I’m not going to mass anymore.’
‘All right.’
His father left the room. Emmett kept the bedsheet wrapped over his head for another half hour. He never went to mass again.
Neil was atheist number two. He left his faith as a result of bible studies. He began remarking upon obvious things. The lack of consistency both within and without Genesis; including fossil evidence; including astrophysics. There was little or no mention of God making thousands of layers of strata on the sixth day; or the fifth day or forth day for that matter. Nor did the author of the Bible (God) explain why he created these multiple strata with the appearance of radioactive antiquity. Either God wished to deceive humanity or modern science was extremely wrong. Nor was there any explanation for tonsillitis or appendices. In short, God had some explaining to do.
Although Neil’s turning point was the lack of intellectual satisfaction, this was made worse by his timid bible studies teacher. The man told Neil not to ask his probing questions. From then on Neil had an unbroken stint of atheism. Excepting one occasion involving a spider during the Great Winter of the Big Pink.
That spider wandered across the ceiling of Neil’s bedroom like a misty-shrouded reaper ’cross a river. Neil was on his back thinking about his life. He was a subcontracted civil servant working in Windsor House. He’d gained a first class honours in Zoology some five months before. Now he lay on his bed looking at the ceiling. A spider span its spindle legs about, first one way and then the other. It seemed coordinated, objective, with a purpose. Neil watched the arachnid pause, machinating its spinnerets. He guessed what it would do next: weave a web. He was wrong. Instead of spinning it scurried into its corner. Neil wondered: had it seen something invisible to him? Neil reflected: there were billions of potential environmental cues. A little spider might respond to several at any time. But the little spider could not respond to all those cues and make an ass of itself. It could only decide which way to move, right, left, across Neil’s ceiling, or around a wall, or out the window. Neil felt his mind enmeshed in a sticky, elastic string of web.
Neil turned his mind to his words and their meaning. He wondered whether he was conscious and not a stone or indeed a web. He wondered what time it was and whether time was real. He told himself that his beliefs were things uncertain too, uncertain like his memory of eating the night before. There was a gap in his ideas that was leaking the others out. But where were the ideas going? Nowhere. That was impossible.
Neil got up and went downstairs to tell this to his friends. Levin and Erwan were in the kitchen making up a fry. It was Sunday after all so the fry was rather large. He tried to state his ideas to them. They rebutted them with hardness. There was no God, they clearly said, and a spider didn’t need a soul. Neil liked their clear rejection of his thinking. His doubts began to crystallise like saltpans by the sea.
Neil went back to his room. There was a church across the road. He sat at his desk and suffered. Despite an otherwise pleasant mental clarity, he felt that he lied. He suffered a ‘moral’ uncertainty. This, it seemed to him, derived from an urge to be dishonest. This led him, he believed, to suffer unavoidable doubts. He wondered with some pain whether he’d ever get his story told.
On the evening of 24th of October Neil walked towards the city centre. He was alone, thankfully so, having left the house unnoticed. He felt irritated. It was infuriating to be like this. He shrugged. There was some pleasure in his double life. Or his multiple life indeed, in contradiction and duplicity.
He arrived at the pub. He knew he would get there. He entered and bought a drink, sitting uncomfortably at the bar. ‘Vodka and cranberry, please.’ He had another and looked about. Purple garish lights and people dancing. He had a drink and joined them. He thought about sex, assholes, penises. The smell of a vibrating rectum. The joy of semen squirting through the air.
He danced with a gentleman the same height as himself. Not all bad looking; he had a pleasant smile. They shouted over the music; that was the best thing about this bar. You didn’t have to hear what the other person was saying. They bought each other drinks until it was time to close. Neil and this fellow – he had no idea what the chap’s name was – returned to the Big Pink. Neil brought him upstairs. Everyone, thank science, had a similar understanding of the need for secrecy. No-one in the house had the least suspicion. They had a merry time of it until about five in the morning. Then Neil saw the fellow out, walked him to the taxi and returned to his bedroom. He slept until twelve and awoke with that familiar sense of joy and duplicity and deep, deep uncertainty like a hole of unknown depth leading to the centre of somewhere that nobody knew anything about.
Levin and Erwan had a jam in Erwan’s room.
It was like the sound a trifle makes when it is raised to dominion status. The trifle played a series of coruscating chords that shallowed sincerity and ended with discordant disharmonies like G followed by A minor followed by F sharp then by some twiddling about on the high E string followed by standing on the 15W amp. Followed then by C bar chord progression in a major scale up to B, then the same thing descending (after an unexpected pause) to G. The robot monkey mother, Levin, hit the big tom and the cymbal at the same time, then the hi hat was used to create a Haydn-style motif that complemented Erwan’s neo-classical upstarting on the B/E string. K-dog thumped the two toms in a quick drill and accidently hit the cymbal that hung above the right tom once. He waited a second until the jelly, Erwan, got back in time and then he stampeded across the plains on a dusty charger wheeling spitting submachine gun – venomous slugs rained against the charcoal-filled lands his ancestors had robbed from him. He sold his sisters and uncles into slavery. He hit the hi hat, and then the bass tom. Erwan meanwhile was remote-controlling the future into a careful box. He sent it with full postage to the nearest living member of the Civil War Society (est. 1964). After that a pigeon knocked on the window. The black tape-recorder on the floor wound tape around its right nipple, magnetically digitising the shiny ribbon that passed beneath its pulsating head. Erwan watched it go, using eyes where eyes would be useless in time; when only ears would do. His eyes rotated around and around, filling the empty space with dumbbells of flowers. Equilateral triangles glazed with dead frosting tied thick voluptuous threads around fenceposts. Erwan flourished a branding iron. He fused two of his strings (B and C) together with a red hot tip. Then he drank some water. Levin struck up a sedate ¾ tempo, a little like a waltz except with a tripline that hit in every third note. Erwan didn’t know how to respond to
this; it seemed unlikely that the note would skip. Nevertheless this pattern persisted for some eight repeats. Erwan got the rhythm. He concentrated on two distinct chords, playing them in succession so that the overall thing repeated every two bars. Then he began altering the emphasis of his chord playing so that a stress appeared every fifth note, thus giving the texture a feel, like a rugged Hebrides jumper. After that Levin and Erwan altered stresses and hits almost at random so that the sound bounced down in a stream hitting off hundreds of little rocks and boulders, until it became submerged in a hissing rush that wiped out the original flow. Having altered his stance to be more at comfort Erwan shifted his stance again, his legs were two inches further apart than before. He began pretending to be sawing lumber at a mill while in fact selling to the Yankees for a higher price.
Levin walked into a dark bar and smashed all the glasses. He opened a textbook and ripped out the central page, carefully. He took a small, pointy stick and tapped a plastic sheet with it. The sheet resonated like two swans mating. He blonged and blanged. Bing-sca-oo-burk-spss-dre-mark-foo-exclabo; resin; several species of small furry animal; chopin; a car screeching in the night; the end of a sound drowned out; two people talking mutteredly near a vendor. A magpie clopping along the guttering of a roof.
An airplane ripping all the air from the world, just overhead.
Then Erwan and Levin paused for a while. Erwan leaned on his guitar and mentioned something about chess. Levin shifted his weight on the wooden chair and coughed. Erwan pressed the pause button. He kneeled down to rewind, the guitar hanging by strap around his shoulders and resting partially on the carpet. Levin asked Erwan to play back a bit. They listened to it, recognising the songs they’d played. This tape was taken downstairs and they listened to it alongside System of a Down’s Toxicity and the soundtrack to Pulp Fiction (Tarantino).
Levin and Erwan were listening to one of these tracks in the kitchen when Neil came down.
‘Hello chaps.’
‘Hello Mr Neil.’
‘Some fry?’
‘No thanks.’ They were having a morning fry.
‘Well, what’s the craic?’
‘Em, not much. I was in my bedroom.’
‘And what were you doing there?’
‘Em … I was looking at a spider in fact.’
Levin and Erwan looked at each other. They knew. Neil was trying to tell them he’d had a religious experience.
‘Ok … and?’
Arched eyebrow.
‘Well, I was just looking at it and thinking, could it …?’
Frowning, two arched eyebrows – hostility, in fact.
‘And? Well?’
‘Well, you know. I was looking at it and thinking – how does it work?’
‘Well, Neil, you are the zoologist – it’s you who knows how it works.’
He told them that the spider had walked across his ceiling and he had been unable to deduce exactly how it would always behave.
They looked uncomfortable, as if a previously English-speaking dog had started barking in Japanese.
Neil tried again.
‘I was thinking … about God,’ he admitted.
They smiled, looked at him and each other, and Levin said shaking his head, ‘Man, that wasn’t God.’
‘No, I know.’
‘Why would it be God?’
‘No reason. It was just an odd idea that came into my head.’
‘Yikes. You’ve got to watch for these things.’
Nevertheless the spider persisted in Neil’s memories and thoughts, buried beneath the secularism that Levin and Erwan had reinforced in him.
‘You’re going to let that spider persist, aren’t you?’ demanded Erwan.
‘No,’ said Neil.
‘Liar!’ said Erwan. He grinned at the tall ginger-head.
‘I am not lying,’ insisted Neil. ‘I had a moment of weird thoughts, that’s all.’
The spinner spun a web, catching flies in it, growing stronger.
Neil began going to his room.
‘Where are you going?’
‘My room,’ said Neil, wondering why he should be challenged.
‘Ok.’
Neil thought they were going to say something about not getting himself caught in the Evil One’s web, but they didn’t. He went back to his room. Levin and Erwan ate their fry and then had a turn of the pain game. The game consisted of holding your right fist level while somebody hit it with their right fist. The person to give up was the loser. On this occasion Erwan retired after punching Levin’s fist; Erwan’s knuckle split open. Levin sneered and called him intolerable names. They played chess. Levin MacHill came down. They flicked matches at one another and chatted amiably about the good times.