Everywhere students were roaming about. Some hurried to their classes while others meandered in the park, conversing with friends or simply taking in the pleasantly brisk day.
“Recognize anything?” inquired Ransom as they strolled beneath a shaded walkway that bordered the park, its ceiling upheld by a row of austere pillars to their right.
“My old university,” breathed Corwin.
“An institution where young minds are molded, not always for the better.”
Corwin smirked at the jab. “You don’t sound too fond of education.”
“On the contrary,” replied Ransom. “The pursuit of God has long gone together with the pursuit of knowledge about his handiwork, but the most important lessons—those of how to live rightly—are seldom taught in your universities anymore.”
“I don’t know about that,” said Corwin. “They do encourage ethics of a sort. It’s called Political Correctness.”
“Ah yes, an ethical code in which the greatest sin is causing offense. Do you ascribe to it?”
“No thanks. Being considerate is well and good, but I think people ought to grow some thicker skin. In my experience, you can’t take a stand for anything without offending somebody.”
Ransom seemed satisfied with the answer and they continued down the path. As a steady flow of students filed past, Corwin couldn’t help but notice that something was odd. No one had spared him or his sveltely-clad companion so much as a glance.
“Can they see us?”
“No. We are merely shades in this time and place,” explained Ransom.
“Interesting.” Corwin snatched a textbook off the nearby balustrade, beside which two men stood chatting. “Does that mean I’m like a poltergeist right now?” he asked as he sent the book bobbing and swaying before them, adding a ghostly moan for good measure.
With a beleaguered sigh, Ransom shook his head.
“When a shade touches something, it creates a sort of copy, one that exists on our plane, but not theirs.”
His hopes deflated, Corwin tossed the textbook over his shoulder, leaving the students to carry on in their discussion, blissfully unaware. A second look confirmed that, indeed, the original book had reappeared right in the same place. Armed with this revelation, a new plot sprang to mind as he spotted a comely blond, the threads of her yellow sweater showcasing an impressive degree of elasticity.
“Can I make a copy of her?”
“It only works for things without souls,” Ransom stiffly replied.
A wave of Corwin’s arm proved as much. His hand passed right through the girl’s waist as though she were nothing more than a hologram.
The strangeness of being a shade was disconcerting, yet intriguing. Corwin felt like a scientist having happened upon a new discovery, his mind awhirl with questions. If touching things created copies, was there a limit to how many copies he could make? Or was it a choice? Could he walk through walls if he felt so inclined? What if he were to meet other shades? Did dead people make a habit of roaming the earth like creepy, voyeuristic tourists?
As the possibilities played out in his head, his roving gaze strayed to the windows, where the park’s florid reflection shone in the glass. There were joggers and picnickers and benches home to studying students. It was a scene that could have belonged to any sunny afternoon. Almost.
One man stood apart. Wearing a dark suit and a fedora, he leaned against a maple with The Times spread open before him, but he wasn’t reading the news. His black stare was leveled towards the windows, towards Corwin.
Not towards me, Corwin realized. At me.
In the reflection their eyes met. Slowly the stranger lowered his newspaper, a mirthless smile on his lips, and Corwin’s blood turned to ice. He swung his gaze away from the windows, into the park, finding only dead leaves. There was no one beneath the maple tree.
4
Dark Winds Rising
Braxton Hall’s entrance was a set of glass and aluminum double doors that bespoke modern sensibilities informing the Georgian bricks. Following on the heels of a troop of students, Corwin and Ransom stepped inside and shortly took a turn, ascending a broad stairway to the second story. The angel halted at a classroom’s rear door.
“Sounds like class is already in session.”
Like a pair of tardy students, they slipped in quietly and found a place against the far wall. It was a modestly-sized room with windows to one side and seven rows of desks, mostly filled. A man whose abundantly gray hair clashed with his tanned, only slightly lined face leaned behind a podium in a plaid dress shirt. He spun the words of his lecture with a preacher’s passion.
“Professor Valentine!” exclaimed Corwin. “Now there was a man who had a knack for teaching! His course on existentialism introduced me to philosophy. But that’s strange . . .” He gave the man a hard stare. “He looks as though he hasn’t aged a day.”
“Has he?” questioned Ransom. “Don’t assume that the same chains of time that bind mortal men apply to me.”
“Sorry! I didn’t realize that my lawyer was the Ghost of Christmas Past.”
Corwin reflected that the mild weather and turning of the leaves had been rather out of place for the season.
The professor relaxed against his podium, a copy of Albert Camus’ The Stranger in hand. He was reading an excerpt.
. . . It was as if I had waited all this time for this moment and for the first light of this dawn to be vindicated. Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he. Throughout the whole absurd life I'd lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living.
Snapping the book shut, he lifted his gaze to regard the class.
“A dark wind rising from my future,” uttered Valentine. “Camus describes death as a dark wind, an irresistible force that lays low all the acts of our lives. But it’s also a source of meaning, a commonality that binds us. We all die, and so we are all brothers.
“But is death enough? Is the reaper’s inevitable march enough to provide a source of meaning in our lives? Nietzsche didn’t think so.
“The existentialists and the nihilists agree in their rejection of an afterlife, but not in the implications. Nietzsche believed that the absoluteness of death rendered life meaningless, while Sartre and Camus believed that man could create his own meaning.”
“But isn’t it true that Camus never considered himself an existentialist?” objected a woman with black-rimmed glasses.
“Camus didn’t much care for labels,” answered the professor. “But in his quest for meaning despite life’s absurdity, his thoughts largely echo those of men such as Sartre.”
“Doesn’t Nietzsche’s own concept of the superman contradict the principles of nihilism?” inquired a flaxen-haired boy in a hooded sweatshirt.
“Good catch, Corwin! Nietzsche’s model man was one who thinks for himself and lives by his own rules. And yet, if everything is as meaningless as nihilism suggests, what does it matter whether you live by your own rules or someone else’s? Is it not all the same in the end?”
The sight of his younger self gave Corwin a peculiar sense of déjà vu, and for the first time since the train’s lethal impact, he genuinely felt as if he were in a dream. Was that dark wind of which Camus spoke already swirling about him? At any moment, might this dream shatter and banish him not to the waking world, but to nothingness?
Professor Valentine’s lecture drew to a close and soon students were emptying out into the halls. Outside the windows, the sun was setting. A violet curtain shrouded the heavens, save where the horizon blushed coral in the west. Pivoting a desk, Ransom sat atop it and threw one leg up on the chair.
“Why take me here?” asked Corwin. “If a philosophical debate is in order, I feel that I may require more bourbon.”
“Before you attended this university,” said Ransom,
“you already had your doubts about God and Christianity, but here something changed. Those doubts solidified into a worldview, turning you from an agnostic into a hardened atheist. Do you recall what spurred that change?”
“I guess it was the first time that I’d applied critical thinking to religion. Once you stop trying to justify the fairy tales, all that’s left are contradictions and wishful thinking.”
“Yes, yes.” Ransom waved a hand dismissively. “That’s all very enlightening, but it’s not really what I wanted to know. What changed you wasn’t anything that you realized about religion. It was something you realized about yourself.”
The angel’s words struck a chord and Corwin understood at once what he meant. It wasn’t any clever argument or decisive piece of evidence that had swayed him. To question a creed was easy, and the merit of such arguments could be endlessly debated by those who felt compelled to do so, but to look in the mirror and question one’s innermost self . . . that took a bit more resolve.
“I came to see that I’d been accepting beliefs, or at least entertaining them, simply because they were comforting. They were what I had always been told, and easier than seeking my own answers. At first it was scary letting go of religion’s promises, walking the tightrope of life without a spiritual safety net, but if I was to be honest with myself, it was a step that I had to take.”
“Good!” Ransom clapped him on the shoulder. “That’s more like it!”
Corwin blinked hard, unsure whether the angel staring back at him was still playing for the same team.
“Humans are creatures of passion,” said Ransom. “Whether finding faith or rejecting it, the decision is often more a matter of the heart than of the head. Take the atheist who scorns God on account of the foolishness that men do in his name, or the believer who clings to faith because the harshness of life without the hope of Heaven is too much for his fragile spirit to bear.”
“People believe what they want to believe,” affirmed Corwin.
“When perceived truth differs from the truth one desires, a person must choose. You chose the right master, Corwin. In your self-reflection, you stumbled upon a simple and profound, yet seldom followed principle.”
“And that would be?”
“That the only good reason to believe something is if it’s true.”
A decade earlier, Corwin had arrived at the same conclusion while pouring through volumes of philosophy, asking the fearful questions that he had avoided all his life.
“But the truth I found led me to reject your god.”
Ransom stood, and as he did so the world darkened until only the faint orange disk of the sun remained. A shadowy cross divided it, and then it was no longer the sun, but a four-paned ocular window. Hazy light streamed into a stuffy room stacked with boxes, chests and forgotten furniture. Corwin had to stoop, checking his head as he ducked under the beams of the low, vaulted ceiling. From the rear of the attic, a staircase creaked with footsteps. An elderly man’s spectacles peeked over the floorboards.
“A man finds an old, dusty painting in the attic,” said Ransom, his character living out the story in time. “He rubs one corner and uncovers a feathered wing. You’re like that man, thinking you’ve found the portrait of a bird, but the wing belongs to Saint Michael.”
A thick gloom washed over them and Corwin saw that he was back in the classroom, twilight’s first stars poking through the dusky sky.
“If I was wrong, then life is surely a cruel trick, a puzzle meant to deceive,” he argued. “Let the lord drag me into his courtroom and I’ll tell him the same thing that Bertrand Russell once said: ‘Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence!’”
“You chose to limit ‘evidence’ to that which fits neatly into units of measurement. Even there you might have found clues, but it is not my intention to belittle your convictions. That fear of which you spoke, it is a trial faced by every truth seeker who challenges his own preconceptions.”
“Even angels?” Corwin couldn’t resist asking.
Ransom laughed. “The Father’s existence was never in question to my kind. Our test was not one of faith, but of pride.”
“Yet somehow you managed to pass,” Corwin said slyly. “Whatever did god demand that was so humiliating anyway?”
“That’s nothing that pertains to your case.”
“It’s my soul on the line. Indulge me.”
Ransom strolled to the windows, a faraway look in his eyes.
“Long before the dawn of this universe, there existed an age when we angels were the Father’s only children. Ours was a realm of thought and song and symmetry. Then came man. By all estimation, your race was vastly inferior to us, yet even so, the Father doted on you, favoring the lowest of humans with no less love than that which he bestowed upon the wisest and mightiest of the seraphim. Confounded by his ways, some began to distrust, but another test would prove greater still, for the Father not only cherished you. He became one of you.
“When one beholds God in all his glory, worship comes as naturally as the sense of awe that stirs within when staring up at the stars or at a majestic mountain range. We recognize our smallness and are filled with humility and wonder. But what if the Father should humble himself? When it was foreknown that he would become man, the thought was too much for some of my brothers to stand. Lucifer, whose power and beauty was first among us, decided that rather than bend the knee to a God made flesh, he would rebel. And so was fought the Betrayer’s War.”
“Do all angels think so little of us?” inquired Corwin, more surprised than offended.
“Your race’s history doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Most humans sin so often and so readily that you appear to comprehend your world no better than booklice devouring a novel comprehend the words written on its pages.”
“Well it’s comforting to know that racism isn’t a uniquely human vice.”
“How eagerly would you bend the knee and pledge your eternal loyalty to a God who took the form of an insect? A rodent? A wafer of bread?”
Ransom left the question hanging in the air. Turning away from the windows, he lit up another cigarette.
“You still doubt that this place is real.”
“I am a skeptic, after all.”
“A skeptic!” scoffed Ransom. “Everyone’s a skeptic. Religious people are skeptics too. They’re skeptical of atheism.”
“A materialist then, or an empiricist,” elaborated Corwin. “My personal philosophy has no need of anything so insubstantial as faith.”
“No need of faith?”
“You know what I mean! I have faith that the sun will rise, that gravity will keep me from floating away, that my car will start when I turn the key in the ignition. But my faith is rooted in the world’s physical laws, not in any supernatural, metaphysical delusions.”
“I see,” said Ransom. “Tell me, what is religion’s place in your mind?”
Corwin considered his words carefully.
“Religion is a crutch. Man desires something outside himself to lean on, to afford a sense of security, but this I did not need. I could walk on my own.”
A heavy silence passed between them and the humorless mask of Ransom’s face left Corwin wondering if perhaps he had roused his attorney’s ire.
“That sounds about right,” Ransom said at last.
“You’re agreeing with me?” blurted Corwin in disbelief.
The angel shrugged.
“Your overdramatic choice of words has more sting than substance, but the assertion that man yearns for something outside himself on which to lean—I don't disagree with that. Where our difference lies is in what that longing means.”
“I suspect our differences run a bit deeper.”
“But surely even you must admit that religion is a natural inclination of man?”
“That seems obvious enough,” conceded Corwin. “Why are we here? What happens when we die? Everyone likes to imagine that there’s some grand meaning behind it all. Burial
rites are as old as humanity, and it’s not hard to see why.”
“As I recall from your file, you even wrote an essay about it.”
“I made a frequent habit of putting my thoughts to paper. Sometimes we see ideas clearer when we write them down.”
“Fortunately it makes my job easier as well,” said Ransom. “In your essay, aptly titled ‘Why People Cling to Religion,’ you identify three main causes of religious thought. Why don’t we start by revisiting them?”
“It’s been years!” protested Corwin. “I’m sure I made plenty of salient points, but I doubt how well I can remember them now.”
“Over time the human brain grows forgetful, but when you came here we took the liberty of installing a few upgrades.”
“Upgrades?”
“Picture your brain as a computer, your soul as the operator. If you try looking back, I think you’ll find your memory to be most adequate.”
It was more than adequate. As Corwin searched his mind, the past vividly unfolded, immersing him in a sensory flood. He saw himself typing his college essay, the words crisp on his laptop screen. He thought back further, to his tenth birthday. His dad had taken him to see the Yankees play. The stadium roiled like a boiling kettle and cheers erupted at the crack of a bat. Lost in a forest of jerseys, he smelled hotdogs and soft-baked pretzels and nacho cheese. Years later he was stuffing suitcases and cramming them into his car. His mother watched through the window blinds as he drove away, never looking back, never saying goodbye.
Another time and place, and Corwin was standing in the rain, getting drenched without a care as a girl in a Volkswagen Beetle asked him for directions. The cold downpour couldn’t begin to dull the warmth of her hazel eyes.
Dead & Godless Page 3