Mercury Rests

by Robert Kroese

  “Mystical mumbo jumbo,” murmured Cain. Mercury and Job ignored him.

  “So you never did curse God?” Mercury asked.

  Job shook his head. “Haven’t you read the Bible? There’s a whole book about me.”

  “Yeah, but you know how people exaggerate. Like how Goliath wasn’t really nine feet tall.”

  “Nine and a half,” said Cain.

  Job nodded.

  Mercury looked from Job to Cain and back again. “Goliath was not nine and a half feet tall.”

  “Were you there?” asked Job.

  “No, but...the tallest man on record was less than nine feet tall. The human frame simply can’t support—”

  “Crippling back problems,” said Job. “He wasn’t really a bad guy, but what are you going to do when you’re the world’s tallest man and you have the bad luck to be born a Philistine? They made him their champion. He had no choice. He was miserable. Could barely walk in that armor, much less fight anyone. I understand he leaned into that pebble. Poor guy.”

  “Forget I said anything,” said Mercury.

  “They fudged the ending of my story a bit,” said Job. “I guess Heaven felt pretty bad about screwing me over, so they gave me eternal life. Well, technically they gave me ten thousand years, I guess. They sent an angel to explain it, but I wasn’t really paying attention.”

  “How long has it been?” asked Mercury.

  “Hmm,” replied Job. “Must be getting close.”

  “How can you not know?” asked Mercury.

  “I don’t count the days,” said Job. “That’s Cain’s gig. I focus on living.”

  “Don’t look at me,” said Cain. “I don’t know what year he was born. We didn’t meet until he was already a few hundred years old. My best guess is that it’s been around nine thousand, nine hundred years, give or take a century.”

  Nearly ten thousand years! thought Mercury. Most angels weren’t that old. Hell, Mercury wasn’t that old. Well, technically he was probably older, but only if you counted however many centuries had elapsed between the implosion of the moon and his reincorporation here. The number of years that Mercury had actually experienced was around seven thousand, his inception date being roughly 5000 BC. What would it be like to experience ten thousand years trapped on the Mundane Plane? Even the angels, who had the freedom to travel many different planes, tended to get bored after a few thousand years. Job’s life—and Cain’s too—must have been nearly unbearable.

  Yet Job didn’t seem like he was suffering. He seemed, despite the fact that he lived amid the rubble of human civilization, perfectly content. Cain, on the other hand, seemed constantly ill at ease. He frequently looked into the distance, apparently trying to gauge how far away the fog was.

  Mercury suddenly stood and climbed onto a nearby pile of rubble to get a better vantage point. He turned slowly, taking in a 360-degree view. There was no doubt about it anymore: the fog was creeping closer in all directions. Buildings that had been fully visible a few minutes earlier were now shrouded in mist.

  “What is up with this fog?” Mercury asked. “It’s...not normal.”

  Cain laughed. “No,” he said. “It most certainly is not.”

  “This whole situation is weird,” said Mercury. “I mean, the two of you, playing Ping-Pong in the rubble while Ernie and the gang huddle underground, poking at the fire. Is this really what the world has come to?”

  “This is the way the world ends,” said Cain. “Not with a bang, but with a whimper.”

  “Boy, I bet you’re a riot at parties,” said Mercury to Cain. Cain shrugged.

  “I’m more optimistic,” said Job. “I believe that there is a reason for everything. Even this.”

  Cain snorted. “You and your reasons,” Cain scoffed. “There’s always some grand plan, some deus ex machina that’s going to make everything turn out OK. How much longer are you going to keep up the show, Job? You can see the fog as well as I can, always creeping closer. Are you really going to insist on spouting platitudes with your last breath?”

  Job sighed heavily. “Not platitudes, my friend. It’s called faith. And yes, I still believe, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that somehow everything is going to work out for the best.”

  Cain spat at the ground. “You see what I have to deal with?” he asked Mercury. “The perpetual Pollyanna of the Apocalypse.”

  “Dismiss me if you like,” said Job. “But you know what I’ve been through. You know I’ve suffered every bit as much as you.”

  “Have you now?” asked Cain.

  “If you’ve suffered more,” retorted Job, “it’s only because you chose a life of suffering. Your curse is in your head.”

  “In my head!” Cain growled. “So I imagined being cursed to wander the Earth for all eternity, did I?”

  Job sighed again. “Why don’t you tell Mercury your story, and he can judge for himself.”

  Mercury was at that moment more interested in the insidious fog that was threatening to envelope them, but he bit his tongue, afraid to anger Cain further.

  “You know my story,” Cain began. “The first part of it, anyway.” He recited, like a bored Sunday school student:

  And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the LORD. And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground. And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the LORD. And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the LORD had respect unto Abel and to his offering: But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect. And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell. And the LORD said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? And why is thy countenance fallen? If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? And if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him. And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him. And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper? And he said, What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground. And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand; When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth. And Cain said unto the LORD, My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me. And the LORD said unto him, therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.

  When he had finished, they sat in silence for a moment. “Wow,” Mercury said at last. “So it happened just like that? I mean, no offense, but I always kind of thought that story was allegorical. You know, like Plato’s ‘Myth of the Cave.’ ”

  “The myth of what?” asked Job.

  “The Myth of the Cave,” said Mercury. “It’s an allegory about knowledge. These people live in a cave and try to make sense of the world by looking at shadows on the wall.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Job. “Why don’t they just go outside?”

  “I think they’re chained up or something,” said Mercury. “Honestly, it never made much sense to me. I asked Socrates to explain it once, but he wasn’t very helpful. You could never get a straight answer out of that guy. He seemed to think I was being too literal about it. He said sometimes you just have to take a bizarre situation as the writer presents it and not worry too much about how ridiculous it is.”

  Job nodded. “There’s something to that, I think.”

  Cain continued as if he hadn’t heard them. “I’ve been around sin
ce the beginning of the world. I lived through all of it. The rise of civilization, the birth of Christianity, the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, French Revolution, World Wars One, Two, Three, Four, and Five, and finally the gradual decline of all human civilization over the last few thousand years.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Mercury. “I mean, what’s the point of making you go through all of that?”

  “The point?” growled Cain. “There is no point! It just goes on and on, for no reason. ‘Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’ There’s your point!”

  “Like I said,” interjected Job, “he’s a tad bitter. Personally, I like to think that God is trying to teach me something.”

  Cain snorted again.

  “Like what?” asked Mercury.

  “Well, before I lost everything, I thought I had everything figured out,” said Job. “I was a good man. I followed all the rules, and I was rewarded for it. But ultimately I was a rather shallow person. I was like a dog who obeyed his master’s commands because he had learned that’s how you get the treat. I was good because being good worked for me. I learned through my suffering that the sort of mechanical religion I was pushing ultimately isn’t any different than the nihilism of someone like my friend Cain here. Believing in something because it benefits you isn’t any better than believing in nothing at all. They both lead to the same place. No offense,” he added, glancing at Cain.

  Cain shrugged. “I used to believe in something too, you know. I was a scientist. I thought I had figured out the secrets underlying reality. The problem is that once you’ve figured them out, the mysteries of the universe are just more data. And there are always more mysteries to figure out.”

  “But isn’t that the point?” Mercury asked. “I mean, aren’t you supposed to find meaning and purpose in the figuring out?”

  “Sure,” agreed Cain. “That works for about five hundred years. But here’s the thing: science is a closed system. There’s no bridge between science and what you call meaning or purpose. You can fool yourself into thinking that you’re creating your own meaning by exploring the nature of the Universe, but when you spend all day dismissing hypotheses because of insufficient supporting data, eventually you have to accept that meaning and purpose are themselves unsupported hypotheses.”

  Mercury, puzzled, looked to Job for help. Job just shrugged.

  “Think of it this way,” Cain went on. “When I was Bacon, I tried to—”

  “Hang on,” said Mercury. “When you were bacon?”

  “He was Francis Bacon for a while,” explained Job. “Father of empiricism.”

  “Oh, OK,” said Mercury, as if that made perfect sense.

  “As I was saying,” Cain went on impatiently, “when I was Bacon, I tried to maintain my belief in both God and science. I mean, belief in God struck me as absurd, but I tried to convince myself that was all part of faith. The more absurd a belief was, in the light of the known facts, the more faith it required to believe in it.”

  “I have to stop you again,” said Mercury. “Didn’t God Himself mark you for murdering Abel? I mean, in the story, it sounds like you and God were pretty tight. At least until, you know.”

  “Please,” said Cain dismissively. “The story may not be allegorical, but the author took a few liberties. I never actually saw God. I never had any actual evidence of His existence. Despite this, I maintained my belief in Him while spending my days engaged in scientific pursuits. But eventually I realized that I was essentially maintaining two competing belief systems. Realizing I had taken my Bacon identity as far as it could go, I faked my own death—again—and spent some time reflecting. I actually tried to give up science for a while and became a Presbyterian minister in Scotland. But my empirical bent eventually reasserted itself, and I took up philosophy again. You may have read some of my stuff. I wrote under the name David Hume.”

  “Wow, you were Hume too?” marveled Job. “I suppose I should have guessed.”

  Cain nodded wearily. “As Hume, I did my best to rid myself of superstitions and other notions not supported by direct evidence. The problem is, that doesn’t leave you with much. Ultimately you just have to accept certain things as true. For example, I can’t prove scientifically that there’s any correlation between my senses and what actually exists. I can’t prove that because I see fog in the distance, there is actually fog in the distance. Any proof I give will rest on additional observations, and observations rely on the senses. So ultimately I just have to say, screw it, if I see something, it’s probably real. And frankly that’s pretty arbitrary. It’s like a blind and deaf man saying, ‘I don’t believe in automobiles, except for this bus, because this bus just ran me over.’ And then he gets hit by a motorcycle, and he says, ‘Well, OK, I guess I accept the existence of the motorcycle too.’ It may make the blind and deaf man feel better to know that he’s not accepting the existence of automobiles on somebody else’s assurances, but that doesn’t mean he’s acting rationally. And then there’s the whole is-ought problem.”

  “The which?” asked Mercury.

  “The is-ought problem,” repeated Cain. “Science only tells you what is. It can’t tell you what ought to be. It can’t help you make moral judgments. It’s like those people who used to say homosexuality was a sin because animals don’t engage in homosexuality. This is the way it is, they’d say, so this is the way it ought to be. Of course, that’s nonsense. On top of which, anybody who’s ever raised cattle can tell you that animals can get pretty damn kinky when the opportunity arises. Er, what was I talking about?”

  “Is and ought,” Job prompted.

  “Right,” said Cain. “Ideas of meaning and purpose, unfortunately, belong to the realm of ought. You can’t get to meaning or purpose simply by observing things. Those are value concepts. I mean, you can observe a chair that’s missing a leg and say, ‘That’s a bad chair,’ but only because you know what a chair’s purpose is. If you were an eighteen-foot-tall knee-less Martian who had no experience with human beings, and you found a three-legged chair floating in deep space, you’d have no reason to call it a bad chair.”

  Mercury and Job exchanged confused glances.

  “The point is,” Cain went on impatiently, “at the end of the day, I can say, ‘I’ve discovered the principle of electromagnetism, and therefore my life has meaning,’ but that’s just another unproven proposition. I might just as well say, ‘I ate scrambled eggs for breakfast, and therefore an intelligent, loving Creator exists.’ You can’t prove that your life has meaning because of science any more than you can prove that God exists because of what you had for breakfast.”

  “But why does everything have to be proved?” asked Job. “Can’t you just enjoy the process of discovery and call it good enough?”

  “Of course,” said Cain. “But if I’m going to arbitrarily find joy in scientific discovery, without any rational basis for that joy, then I can’t very well condemn someone for believing in God because it makes him happy. For that matter, I can’t condemn someone for believing in unicorns or leprechauns. If personal enjoyment is the standard, then all I can do is argue that when it comes down to it, science is more fulfilling than unicorns. And frankly, I don’t know that it is. It might be really enjoyable to believe in unicorns. I just don’t know.”

  “Unicorns are overrated,” said Mercury. “Gamey.”

  There was a moment of awkward silence.

  Job got to his feet and walked back to the Ping-Pong table. As if following an unspoken agreement, Cain followed. The two began another game.

  After some time, Mercury broke the silence. “So where does that leave you?” he asked Cain. “I mean, with your outlook on life.”

  “Well,” said Cain. “I was an existentialist for a while. I don’t really like to talk about it. Fucking existentialists. I guess these days I’m a nihilist, like Job says.”

  “That doesn’t sound like much fun.
”

  Cain shrugged, gazing at the fog in the distance. “I just want it to be over.”

  Mercury shuddered. “What happens when it gets here? The ‘Existence Horizon’? ”

  “Nothing,” said Cain.

  “We don’t know for sure,” said Job. “Ha!” This last exclamation was in response to Cain’s failure to return Job’s wickedly fast serve.

  “You’re still down thirteen to eleven,” grumbled Cain. “Don’t get cocky. Nothing’s going to happen.”

  “When you say nothing is going to happen,” asked Mercury pensively, “do you mean that nothing is going to happen, or that, you know, nothing is going to happen?”

  “I mean that reality will cease to exist,” Cain answered, while deftly returning Job’s volley. “Time itself will cease to exist, and with it the past, present, and future will be annihilated. Nothing will ever have existed.”

  “Oh,” replied Mercury. “So the bad kind of nothing, then.”

  “Neither good nor bad,” replied Cain. “Nothing just is.”

  “You mean it isn’t,” said Mercury.

  “Ha!” Cain yelled as Job dove for a shot and missed. “Fourteen, eleven. My serve.”

  “So you’re saying that this little area of Manhattan is all that’s left of the world? How is that possible? What about the Sun? Does the Sun still exist?” Mercury peered at the gray sky, trying to pinpoint where the light was coming from.

  “The Sun still exists, more or less,” said Job. “It’s been growing less distinct for a while. We haven’t actually seen it for a couple hundred years. What’s left is sort of a vague idea of the Sun.”

  “Don’t even try to make sense of the physics,” Cain warned. “You’ll drive yourself batty. The laws of physics have broken down, along with everything else. Don’t worry, though. It will all be over with soon.”