The Universe versus Alex Woods

by Extence, Gavin

  He’d still have all the correspondence he carried out for Amnesty International, I supposed – and sometimes people even wrote back – but that wasn’t the same as interacting with people face to face. It wasn’t the same as having a community.

  There were several occasions when I found myself thinking it was a shame we were both atheists. Otherwise we could have gone to church, which I imagined must be quite a sociable activity too, and would have provided a regular outing for Sundays, when the shop and the post office – the only other attractions in Lower Godley – were closed. Of course, I didn’t really know for sure what went on in church, but I had the vague idea they spent a lot of time talking about morality and the state of the universe, which appealed to me quite a lot. The only thing that didn’t appeal to me was the supernaturalism – that and the fact that they only read the Bible, which, from the little I’d seen, wasn’t exactly a page-turner.

  I thought that if you could address these issues, you’d have the kind of community it would be nice to be a part of. And it was from this thought that the Secular Church was born.

  By the time I first mentioned it to Mr Peterson, the idea had been bubbling away for a while. It seemed like the solution to a lot of problems.

  Ever since I’d finished reading A Man Without a Country, some months earlier, I’d been thinking that I’d like to re-read all the Kurt Vonnegut books. I imagined I’d probably get more out of them a second time round, now that I was approximately ten per cent older than when I’d first picked one up. Furthermore, I realized this did not have to be a solitary pursuit.

  Further enquiries in Glastonbury Library were encouraging. Fiona Fitton, the head librarian, told me that she thought setting up a reading group was a very good idea. They had a special noticeboard in the entranceway where things like that were advertised.

  ‘Would you be interested in joining?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, Alex,’ she said, ‘I’m sure I would.’

  ‘I don’t mean hypothetically,’ I clarified. ‘I mean, when I’ve worked out all the details, shall I sign you up?’

  This sentence seemed to amuse her – it made quite a lot of smile lines appear at the corners of her eyes. ‘Smile lines’ was a term Fiona Fitton had coined to refer to her many transient wrinkles. She often used it to express how much something she’d read or heard had pleased her. ‘It made all my smile lines come out!’ she’d say. She was a few years older than my mother – maybe forty or so – and her hair was strawberry blonde, getting more and more strawberry towards the roots. I’d been telling her for some time that she should definitely read some Kurt Vonnegut. I thought that plenty of his sentences would bring out her smile lines.

  ‘Alex, you can sign me up!’ she said. ‘Non-hypothetically. Just pick a day when I’m not working.’

  ‘I thought Sundays would probably be convenient for most people,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, Sundays would be perfect,’ she agreed.

  With this first foundation stone laid, I started thinking about the other readers I knew who might be interested in joining my Kurt Vonnegut book club.

  There was Mrs Griffith, for a start. Ever since the funeral, when she’d said that she’d enjoyed my reading, I’d been meaning to drop a copy of Sirens off at the post office. (It wasn’t exactly The Lord of the Rings, but from personal experience, I knew it was perfectly possible to enjoy both.) Then there was Dr Enderby. He already knew a bit about Kurt Vonnegut because we’d talked about him at some of my appointments. Dr Enderby had read Slaughterhouse-Five at university, three decades ago, and he said that he remembered it being very funny and very sad. But he hadn’t read any more Kurt Vonnegut since then. Dr Enderby said that these days it was difficult to find the time for reading – or for reading anything other than medical journals (which were essential) or Emily Dickinson poems (which were very short).

  Personally, I thought that Dr Enderby needed to make time for reading, which is what I told him at our next appointment. I also told him that he should view it the same way he viewed his meditation. Regular reading made you a calmer, wiser person. It was good for one’s boat.

  Needless to say, this proved a compelling pitch.

  ‘A book club?’ Mr Peterson asked.

  ‘Yes, that’s right. But only with Kurt Vonnegut books. We’ll read all of them, start to finish. Nothing else.’

  I couldn’t look over to see his expression, but I got the feeling that Mr Peterson was frowning. The reason I couldn’t look over was that I was driving at the time and I had to keep both eyes on the road. The only reason you should ever take your eyes off the road when you’re driving is to check your mirrors, which you should do briskly and often, especially when turning or pulling out at a junction. Of course, since I was not quite fifteen at the time, my driving was restricted to Mr Peterson’s lane (which was usually empty) and his private drive (which was always empty), but it was still best to be vigilant at all times. Technically, I shouldn’t have been driving at all. Not only was I two and a bit years too young, I was also too epileptic to hold a licence. You’re only allowed to drive if you’ve been seizure-free for a full year. My seizures were increasingly infrequent, but they hadn’t ceased entirely.

  ‘But you know when you’re gonna have a fit,’ Mr Peterson had pointed out (at the onset of our lessons). ‘You’ve got that weird sixth sense, right?’

  ‘Yes,’ I acknowledged. ‘I always know. I get a very strong aura prior to any major seizure.’

  ‘Great. So if you’re gonna have a fit, just tell me and stop the car. Hell, you’re not gonna be travellin’ at more than twenty, twenty-five miles per hour anyway. I don’t think we’ll be in any imminent danger.’

  Mr Peterson thought it would be better for me to learn to drive sooner rather than later, not only because it would be useful, but also because he thought it would be good for my confidence; and, in hindsight, I suppose he was right. I was surprised to discover that driving came quite naturally to me. I was a cautious driver, but never a nervous one, and I never felt in danger of a seizure while at the wheel. In fact, I found the quiet concentration that driving required kept me extremely calm and composed.

  After a few half-hour lessons, I knew how to stop and start the car, how to check my blind spot, and mirror-signal-manoeuvre. Soon after that I mastered the clutch: I could pull away without stalling, and change between first, second and third. (There was never any call for fourth.) And after only a few more lessons, I felt that my reverse- and parallel-parking were really rather elegant. Mr Peterson didn’t have a garage, but we used two lines of plant pots to construct a standard-sized parking bay. None of these plant pots ever got damaged.

  Anyway, since I was having another driving lesson at the time of our conversation, I couldn’t look over to verify that Mr Peterson was frowning, but there was certainly a lot of scepticism evident in his voice.

  ‘A book club that only reads Kurt Vonnegut?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘I’m not sure you’re gonna get an overwhelming response to that idea,’ Mr Peterson predicted.

  I was prepared for this, of course. ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I’ve already found a few people who’ve said they might be interested: Mrs Griffith, Dr Enderby – my neurologist – and Fiona Fitton, who works at Glastonbury Library. She even said we might be able to order in multiple copies of the books we need, just in case there are people who’d like to join but can’t afford it. The council will pay because the council thinks reading’s good for the soul.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘So, anyway, I’m happy to organize it all. But we’ll need somewhere to host it, obviously.’

  ‘Right. And where did you have in mind?’

  ‘Well, your house seems the obvious choice. I guess we can probably squeeze a fair few people in the front room before things get too tight. And then there’s all this space for parking.’ I gestured with my left hand. We were just pulling up to the house at that point.

 
‘Keep both hands on the wheel, kid,’ Mr Peterson warned.

  I returned my hands to ten to two and brought the car to a gentle halt in front of the bay window. ‘I’ve already thought of a snappy name,’ I said. ‘I think a reading group should have a snappy name to attract members, don’t you?’

  Mr Peterson didn’t ask about my snappy name, but I could tell his curiosity was piqued.

  ‘“The Secular Church of Kurt Vonnegut,”’ I said.

  ‘Jesus F Christ,’ said Mr Peterson.

  ‘It’d be like a regular church but with no singing or praying, and better stories. We can meet every Sunday.’

  ‘Every Sunday?’

  ‘Right. A book a week.’

  ‘Kid, most people don’t read that quick.’

  ‘It’s only twenty to forty pages per day. They’re not long books.’

  ‘Trust me. A book a month is more realistic. Most people have busy lives.’

  ‘Oh.’ I frowned. ‘Well, I suppose one Sunday a month would be okay. That means it’ll take a bit more than a year if we just stick to the fourteen novels, or about eighteen months if we include the short stories and essays and journalism as well.’

  Mr Peterson was definitely scowling at this point. ‘Kid, you’ve lost the plot. What exactly are we gonna do in this church?’

  ‘I figured we’d discuss morality and so on.’

  ‘Morality?’

  ‘Well, yeah. After all, it is quite a large theme of the books. But there are lots of other things too. You know: satire, time travel, war, genocide, jokes, extraterrestrials. What do you think?’

  ‘I think I’m gonna end up with a bunch of nuts in my house.’

  ‘Does that mean you’re willing to host it?’ I asked.

  Mr Peterson chewed his lip for a bit. ‘Okay, kid,’ he said eventually. ‘Find enough people and I’ll let you hold it here.’

  ‘How many people’s “enough” people?’ I asked.

  ‘A half-dozen, excluding us. Of course, there’s no chance in hell you will find that many people. Not in a month of Sundays. That’s the only reason I’m agreeing.’

  ‘Understood,’ I said.

  That evening, buoyed by our conversation, I designed and printed my poster for Glastonbury Library, which looked like this:

  * * *

  EVER WONDERED WHY WE’RE HERE?

  WHERE WE’RE GOING?

  WHAT THE POINT IS?

  CONCERNED ABOUT THE STATE OF THE UNIVERSE IN GENERAL??

  THE SECULAR CHURCH OF KURT VONNEGUT

  A book club for people interested in all or some of the following:

  morality, ecology, time travel, extraterrestrial life, twentieth-century history, humanism, humour, et cetera

  Phone Alex Woods: ***** *** ***

  * * *

  The stars, as you’ve probably worked out, were the digits of my home phone number, which I’m not going to reveal in case of nuisance calls.

  A week later, I got my first response – or pair of responses – from John and Barbara Blessed. Their surname was pronounced Bless-ed, in two syllables, as in ‘Blessed are the meek . . .’ Considering the name of my reading group, this was a curiously apt surname, as Barbara Blessed, whom I spoke to on the phone, was quick to point out.

  John and Barbara Blessed were both teachers, but not at Asquith. John Blessed turned out to be a compact, soft-spoken man who taught physics at a sixth-form college in Wells. Barbara Blessed was two inches taller than her husband, taught maths, suffered from chronic insomnia and to π knew one hundred decimal places. As you probably know, π is the number equal to a circle’s circumference divided by its diameter, which is approximately 3.14159. It’s a number that you can’t write in full because it goes on literally for ever. Most people count sheep when they can’t sleep, but Barbara Blessed recited π.

  John and Barbara Blessed were both interested in time travel. John Blessed collected research papers on the subject and would later explain to me that on a sub-atomic scale, time travel was in fact a rather common phenomenon. But when it came to macroscopic objects, such as human beings and spaceships, most physicists agreed that the laws of nature probably conspired to make time travel a practical, if not physical, impossibility. Personally, John Blessed was of the opinion that ‘whatever time is, it’s not what we think it is.’ It was an opinion he shared with not only Kurt Vonnegut but also Stephen Hawking. John Blessed said that when physicists worked out a Theory of Everything (ToE), concepts such as space and time might no longer be tenable on a fundamental level, though they’d still be useful for day-to-day purposes such as arranging appointments and going to the supermarket.

  Of course, most of this did not come up during that first phone conversation, in which I spoke to John Blessed only indirectly, via his wife. This is what she said: ‘Forgive me, Mr Woods, but my husband’s been on about this ever since we first saw your advert, and I really think I need to put him out of his misery. He wants to know if you’re the Alex Woods.’

  This foxed me for only a few seconds.

  ‘I think there’s a good chance I might be the Alex Woods,’ I admitted, cautiously. ‘But obviously it depends on which Alex Woods your husband has in mind.’

  Barbara Blessed cleared her throat. ‘It’s preposterous, really, but my husband has it in his head that Alex Woods was the name of the young boy who was hit by a fragment of the Wells meteor. You probably remember the story: it was in the papers for weeks. Anyway, I told him that even if he has remembered the name correctly—’

  ‘Yes, that was me,’ I confirmed.

  The phone was quiet for a bit. I could hear the Blesseds conferring in the background. Then Mrs Blessed came back on the line. ‘I hope you don’t think it’s rude of me to ask, but how old are you, Alex?’

  ‘I’m almost fifteen,’ I said, ‘but my reading age is higher.’

  This was not a joke, but it made Barbara Blessed laugh like a drain nonetheless.

  After that, I took down Barbara Blessed’s email address and told her that I’d contact her once I’d finalized the date for our inaugural meeting. I also promised to bring along my iron–nickel meteor fragment.

  In Glastonbury Library, a few days later, I recruited my second librarian. This was Sophie Haynes. She was fifty-five years old and the serenest of all the Glastonbury librarians. Her hair was the colour of graphite, and she always wore floaty ankle-length skirts or dresses rather than trousers, which rendered her walk more of a glide. She liked cryptic crosswords and William Blake, which I had discovered one afternoon while she was on a tea break and I was sitting in one of the soft chairs in the reading area, researching Emily Dickinson. William Blake was also a deceased poet, and artist, who had written a very famous poem about tigers:

  Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

  In the forests of the night,

  What immortal hand or eye

  Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

  The fact that he couldn’t spell notwithstanding, I liked William Blake’s poem very much. When Sophie Haynes showed it to me, I told her that although I didn’t get all of the imagery straight away, reading it still made my heart beat a little bit faster, and she said that this probably meant I’d understood it well enough. The tiger had claws and jaws that could rip through human flesh as easily as I might skin a banana, and, for William Blake, it was difficult to reconcile the existence of such a creation with a benevolent creator. Sophie Haynes directed my attention to the penultimate stanza:

  When the stars threw down their spears,

  And watered heaven with their tears,

  Did he smile his work to see?

  Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

  This I got. In return, I directed Sophie Haynes to page 159 of Breakfast of Champions, where Kurt Vonnegut had expressed similar concerns vis-à-vis the rattlesnake: ‘The Creator of the Universe had put a rattle on its tail. The Creator had also given it front teeth which were hypodermic syringes filled with deadly poison . . . Sometimes I wonder a
bout the Creator of the Universe.’

  Because of this earlier exchange, I knew it was the ‘secular’ part of my reading group that would appeal in particular to Sophie Haynes. Sophie Haynes, in fact, was a secular humanist, which meant that she thought God and the devil and heaven and hell were all figments, but this didn’t matter because it was possible (and preferable) to have a system of ethics based on shared human values and rational enquiry instead of supernatural scripture. Kurt Vonnegut was also a secular humanist, and so am I, although I didn’t fully realize this until I buried Mr Peterson’s dog. Before that, I didn’t know what I was. In contrast, Sophie Haynes was a convert. She’d been raised a Christian but lost her faith after her appendix burst on her twenty-first birthday. The human appendix was another thing that no sane, kind and competent designer would have designed.

  With the ball now gaining momentum, it occurred to me that there were many finer details I was going to have to address. For example, I knew that we were going to read all the Kurt Vonnegut novels, fourteen books in fourteen months, but I didn’t know what order we were going to read them in. It was a simple problem that gave me some difficulty.

  Originally, I’d assumed we’d just go through them in chronological order, starting with Player Piano and ending with Timequake. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized this might not be the most interesting way to set about matters. Timequake was a good book to finish on, but Player Piano was not the best place to start. It was far too conventional, with too much plot and description and not enough humour and digression. As Kurt Vonnegut books go, it was very atypical.