French Toast
She awakens in her bed. It is morning. “It would have been nice if you’d woken me up,” she chides Rupert. “It’s not like I have whole bunches of time to spare.”
“it was nicer,” Rupert beams, “let you sleep. I should know; we heavenly beings are experts in kindness.”
“I’ll have to take your word for it,” Jennie sighs. “no time to debate the little things, what with it being my last day alive and all.”
She cannot decide how to spend her last day alive. She drives to Church Street, parks, and wanders aimlessly, staring at the stone facades of century-old storefronts housing decade-young shops. She follows the gentle declining curve of the road down to where it crosses the river. On the bridge she stares down at the water. It is black and cold; it will freeze soon. She could jump in. She knows she cannot escape the judgment Rupert has in store, but at least the leap will spare her this evening’s meeting. She puts one rain boot on the rail. Her phone buzzes against her poised leg.
“I’m hungry as hell,” Mona yawns when Jennie answers. “Meet me at the diner for brunch?”
Half an hour later, Jennie is standing in the diner lobby, waiting. The diner is a grimy, unsanitary place, one of the last establishments in the state to end indoor smoking. Nicotine stains still discolor the ceiling. The floor is black-and-off-white tile, a ghost of 1950’s glory.
Mona enters, wearing about six scarves, breathing visible plumes of steam. “Good morning,” she says brightly. “Let’s eat everything.”
The harsh Greek host seats them in a booth with red cushioned seats. Yellowish foam peeks from beneath the cracks in the leather. The server—a portrait of who Jennie would hope not to become in ten years, if she had ten years before her—sullenly scratches out their order.
Brunch comes with surprising speed: French toast, bacon, and that diner beverage that is not quite coffee but evokes the idea of coffee just distinctly enough to keep one drinking it. Jennie sips the deep black liquid from a mug whose inside may once have been white, eons ago.
“Eliot called the other day wanting to see me,” she confides as they break their fast into small pieces. “I’m meeting him for dinner tonight.”
Mona’s eyes widen with curiosity and more than a bit of surprise. Or perhaps merely a bit of surprise, but surprise is a definite factor, however great or small. “Do you have any idea what it’s about?” She takes a bite of her breakfast and whispers, “Jesus, that’s good.”
“He didn’t say.” Jennie figures she really has nothing to lose at this point. “Who knows, maybe he knocked some girl up and wants me to raise the child for him.” Rupert attempts a reply to this, which Jennie decides she does not want to hear. To occupy the silence before he can get to it, she says the first thing that comes to her mind. The first thing that comes to mind is, “So what do you think happens when you die?”
“A little morbid this morning, aren’t we? But it just so happens I know the answer. When you die,” Mona says assuredly. The half of her face facing the window glows with sunlight. “Your soul turns into a great big ball of light. This light drifts upward toward the sun, which as everyone knows is where heaven is. The sun slowly gets bigger from the influx of all these souls, and one day in the far future, it will reach critical mass and explode, extinguishing life on earth. For this reason, space travel is very important. We need to inhabit other solar systems to ease the burden on our sun.”
Jennie blinks. For one terribly long moment, she wonders if her coworker is mentally unstable and Jenny should fear for her life. Then she recalls that she doesn’t have much life for which to fear, and she bursts out laughing. Mona, despite lacking this knowledge, laughs as well.
“Look,” she continues, “I don’t actually know what happens when we die. But then, neither does anyone. They’re a bunch of people who are certain they know, but when you remember that they’re all certain of different, opposing things, you end up back where you started: knowing nothing. This philosophy professor I had said Socrates was called the wisest man who ever lived, precisely because he knew that he knew nothing. I think that’s the only lesson there is. I’m still trying to learn it.”
“But what if there is some sort of judgment when we die,” Jennie protests, “and we’re expected to have done or believed a certain thing while we were alive? We’d be pretty screwed then, if all we had to say for ourselves was that we didn’t know anything.”
Mona shrugs. “True,” she says through a mouthful of French toast. She pauses to swallow. “So you can pick a belief system, on that basis. But then you’re only covered against one of like a thousand possibilities, which I don’t see as much better, especially if you haven’t found a really convincing reason to believe in that thing in the first place.” She takes another bite, gesticulating with her fork before she continues. “And most people believe what they were raised to believe. At the very least, they choose among the handful of options they’re most familiar with. There could be some spiteful being punishing people with no understanding of that.
“I mean, I don’t even believe in God myself, so take all this with a grain of salt.” Mona takes it with a slab of bacon drenched in cheap table syrup. “But if there is a God that’s anything like people imagine, and he actually loves and cares about people and more importantly understands them, I would think he’d only really care about whether people tried their hardest to be decent people. Not what belief system their parents handed them, but whether they did their best with the hand they were dealt. I would think God would be especially understanding of that, since it’s him doing the dealing.”
Beside her, disapprovingly, Rupert shakes his head.