Wonders of a Godless World

by Andrew McGahan

  Then higher levels of the tower were skimming by, and the orphan watched as the boy slowly withdrew from the world, hiding away from his friends and from his family. His parents did not know what to do. They called in a doctor to examine him, but the doctor found nothing wrong. Not physically. At the sight of the archangel’s giant penis dangling long and limp and innocent, the man only winked and laughed, and the boy was too mortified to speak of the terrible things it did.

  But he wasn’t, the orphan thought, actually mad. He was just confused, and scared, and lonely. If someone had simply explained…

  But then one day he discovered the book.

  She did not see how he came across it, whether someone gave it to him or whether he found it on his own. It was just there suddenly, in his hands, and he was devouring it. And—a marvel!—the orphan could devour it too. The black lines and squiggles, they were transformed through the archangel’s mind and entered hers as voices that boomed like thunder and images that blazed like lightning.

  So this was what reading was like!

  The boy—and the orphan with him—was transfixed. Battles he saw, and blood spilling, and stern-faced men suffering and dying and seeking vengeance, and there were lists of rules and proscriptions and punishments unending, and there were visions of peace and of paradise, presided over by a mighty god.

  But as dazzling as all this was, what really captivated him was the recognition he found there of his own condition. For the book spoke too of the evils of the body. In particular, of the evil that dwelt at the core of all men, aroused by the evil that dwelt at the core of all women. It spoke of a snake. And at last the boy understood what was wrong with him.

  Up through the tower the orphan rose, and now she saw that the walls were made of paper, they were made from the pages of the book, thousands upon thousands of them, read over and over and all stuck together by the moisture of licked fingers. They were a constant warning to the boy to reject the weakness of his flesh, to loathe the baseness of his own desires, and to seek for the purity of the mind and the soul.

  And it worked. The more he read, and the higher he built the tower, the further he climbed away from the snake-beast at his waist. And if that beast stirred from time to time, in defiance of all that he had learnt, and if the tower trembled as lust pumped and engorged in his groin, then he knew what to do.

  He punished the body.

  He took out his knife and cut away at his skin until the pain and the flow of blood soothed him again.

  The orphan rose faster now, refusing to watch the knife slice. The last few levels of the boy’s life rushed by. At some point the blood of his self-inflicted injuries was discovered by his parents. They sent for more doctors, but it was much too late for that. The cutting continued, and finally he was confined to the locked ward, his knife taken away. But it didn’t matter. In isolation, his mind and soul became stronger still, even without the knife. As long as his book was with him…

  It was over. The orphan was at the top of the tower again. The boy sat in his chair, unmoving. He was fully grown now, and there was no fear remaining in him. His body, and the evil thing that fed on it, had been left far behind. He was a being of spirit now. He sat tranquilly in the cool, calming silence. Not a boy anymore, but an angel.

  An archangel.

  Except…through the windows, the clouds still moved, rolling slowly, fascinating somehow. And the orphan guessed that for all his control and serenity, a part of the archangel wanted to turn his head and look at them.

  She withdrew from him, blinking in the dim light of the dayroom.

  The foreigner was waiting. You saw?

  She nodded. It was so sad. When she thought of how the nurses teased him, and joked about the size of him…

  It’s pitiable, I agree. And all so unnecessary. But do you understand? Sexuality is a powerful thing. Denied, warped by superstition, it can deviate mightily.

  She had no wish to deny herself. Or to warp herself. But what did he suggest? Should she seek out the night nurse and let him do what he wanted?

  Of course not.

  Well, who else would have her? (Would he?) At least the archangel had found some measure of relief in his tower. It was not preferable to sanity, assuredly, but at least he was free of his shame and misery.

  Exasperation. The archangel is not free! Madness is never freedom! You’ve missed the point entirely. Those clouds about his tower—

  He broke off. The orphan looked up in the silence. The archangel had paused, mid-prayer. He was staring. As if he heard something.

  Ah. It seems you were not quite subtle enough in your investigations.

  Had she harmed him?

  No. But he is aware of us now.

  The orphan stood. The archangel, as ever, paid her no direct attention. But his head was still cocked, searching.

  Leave him be and come back to my room. If you’ve learnt nothing from peering into his god-filled head, then perhaps my own memories, and my own madness, will serve better. It’s time, either way, that you heard the tale of my fourth life.

  Penitent, the orphan went, and listened.

  20

  You’ll remember where we left me—roasted to death in the forest of doomed butterflies. I came to life again, of course, stark and withered, but there would be no such recovery for my forest. It was now a sterile, silent, killed piece of the world. I couldn’t bear to look at it. I crept away and began my slow healing. And, as before, it was with a new face and body that I emerged from the ordeal.

  I was a new man within, too. I decided I would have no more to do with defending nature. If the planet itself had no interest in preserving life, then why should I? If mother earth was no more than the empty processes of chemistry, then why find her beautiful? No, I’d learnt my lesson. The only beauty to be found, the only life that offered permanence, wasn’t worldly at all. It was consciousness that really mattered. Hadn’t I proved that? My mind had survived three deaths now, intact. My body had not.

  It was clear then what I had to do—reject the physical world entirely, from the widths of the universe right down to the square inches of my own flesh. I had to concentrate on the only truly meaningful thing. Mind. Thought. Awareness itself.

  True, this was hardly an original revelation. History is crowded with religions and philosophies that preach something similar. Oh, they might speak of soul instead of mind, and prayer instead of thought, but at their heart the moral is always the same—the repudiation of the physical in favour of nurturing the spirit.

  Indeed, understanding that I was treading a well-worn path, I began to wonder. Was I the first to experience such immortality; the first to go through so many deaths, and yet live? Perhaps all the great prophets and philosophers had been men like me, their beliefs formed as a result of living life after life, and dying death after death.

  Were there others out there like me even now? Men and women also on their third or fourth life? Indeed, on their fortieth life? People who had lived not merely hundreds but thousands of years? What would they be like? What would they have learnt? What puzzles might they solve for me, if I could only find them?

  Was I, or was I not, alone?

  I devoted my new life to finding out. I bought a big house in a big city, and made it my headquarters. I knew that the kind of people I was looking for would hide their immortality, so I hired a team of researchers and investigators to hunt for them. They combed through medical journals in search of miraculous recoveries and patients undying. They posted cryptic advertisements in newspapers around the world, full of hints and clues that might draw someone like me. They travelled from country to country, haunting the halls of philosophy departments and holy places and psychiatric hospitals, searching for the merest whisper of an experience that echoed mine.

  They found no one at all, and heard nothing.

  But others found me. It was typical of the age, perhaps. The world was going through great upheavals around then. It was a time of new cults and sects
, of a younger generation rebelling against the old. And my search had been noticed, rumours about me had spread. Pilgrims began to arrive at my door. Young people, eager, fascinated. They were not the companions I sought. None of them had died even once, let alone three times. But they were convinced that I knew the secret to eternal life. How I laughed at that. To be accused of concealing the very thing I was trying to discover myself!

  But despite my scorn, the pilgrims kept coming. They turned me into their prophet whether I wanted it or not. They filled up my house and gave me their money and demanded I tell them how to run their lives. They wouldn’t go away. And even though they were useless to me, their company was better than nothing.

  So I bought a bigger place, a compound, away from the city. More believers came. They requested rituals and rules, and I obliged. I taught them that the mind, and only the mind, was important. I told them to reject nature and the human world and even their own bodies. I told them that only the consciousness knows no death.

  Why did I do this? Because my search for other undying humans had failed. And I began to ask myself—if there was no one else like me in the world, if I was otherwise fated to be unique and alone among humanity, then was it possible that I could create someone like myself? Could I make others immortal?

  I resolved to try. My followers were certainly willing. Indeed, this was the very reason they had come to me. They would do whatever I asked. I had already instructed them to forswear their families, their careers, their society and their country; to forswear luxury and sex, and the false beauty of the natural world; to throw off every distraction, and seek for mind. And they had obeyed it all.

  Now, I said, it was time to forswear life. I told them to stop eating and drinking. Consciousness knows no death, I intoned solemnly, and the time had come to shrug off their bodies and die, and then be reborn, just as I had been.

  I lost most of my flock right there and then.

  Oh, many gave it a passing try, but soon enough the hunger pangs bit through their fervour, and they left. Only one small group remained, determined to see it through. And I could tell that they really meant it. They would die to please me, and to follow my teachings. I could have stopped them as soon as I realised that. I could have ordered them away, told them to go and live their lives and not be fools. But I did nothing. I was becoming desperate, I suppose. I needed to know, just as badly as they did.

  And so they starved. Not all of them, it’s true. A last few became afraid as they sickened and grew thin, and their fingernails and teeth fell out. They departed, never to return, and I let them go. But three stayed, trusting me, and I let them stay. Indeed, I was so moved by their devotion that I starved with them. I didn’t eat for nearly two months. It was unpleasant, oh yes, but I’d survived far worse. Mere hunger wasn’t going to kill me.

  But it killed my three disciples.

  And when it did, I stood watch by their corpses, waiting to see if even just one of them would rise again, like I had.

  All they did, however, was putrefy.

  And now the loneliness was inescapable.

  Only you, my orphan, can appreciate what I was going through. You’ve experienced it too, I know you have—the desolation of being utterly different from every other being around you. So different, indeed, that even communication with others is scarcely viable, and true understanding impossible. The fear of that loneliness can drive one to do awful things. But finally I saw that I must turn and confront it. After all, I had been searching for years now, and I had found not even the slightest suggestion that there were other immortal minds in the world. Perhaps then the only thing to realise about eternal life was that it was a life alone. In which case, solitude was not to be dreaded.

  In fact, perhaps solitude was to be sought after.

  So I bought an island.

  That is, I leased an island, at great expense, for my exclusive occupation, from a government that had no other practical use for it.

  It was nothing like this island, my orphan. There were no plantations, no jungles, no golden beaches or calm blue seas. This was an island in another part of the world entirely. A bare, rocky lump of a place amid a grey, heaving ocean. A sealing station had stood there once, but now humans no longer visited. It was too far from land, and away from the modern sea routes. Nothing was left but an old stone hut, and stairs leading down a cliff to a small jetty carved out of the rock, washed by waves.

  It was perfect, I thought. I gathered my supplies and had myself transported there by ship. I instructed that no one was to call for me for at least five years. The people on the boat thought I was mad and that I would surely die. I was hardly concerned by that, of course, and once they sailed away, I was blessedly on my own. I had not even a radio. I was alone in a way that would strike terror into most souls. But I was elated. Five years, shut off from all human contact. I would become pure consciousness, freed from every distraction, a universe of one. I would at last unlock the mystery of my immortality.

  And perhaps it might have worked, if I’d chosen some other place for my exile. An empty desert maybe, where prophets and messiahs always seem to go. Or even simply a concrete bunker underground, away from all noise and light.

  But I chose an island. All the while forgetting the very thing that defined it as an island. The body that surrounded it…

  There was a sound at the door.

  The orphan, lulled almost to sleep by the foreigner’s tale, snapped upright and glanced around. The archangel crouched there, his book clutched in his hand but hanging loose at his side. His dark gaze was locked on the foreigner’s bed.

  He could hear. He too was listening to the story.

  It isn’t my doing, said the foreigner, and he sounded tired. I didn’t call him, I don’t want him, I’m not speaking for his benefit, and yet here he is.

  The orphan went to rise. She would return the youth to his room.

  He’ll only come back.

  But how could he even perceive the foreigner’s voice?

  Perhaps one madness speaks to the other. What’s the difference, after all, between an island and a tower? Let him be.

  All her doubts alive again, the orphan settled.

  Both of you then, listen.

  The sea—that’s what I’d forgotten.

  Oh, I knew it was there. I was not ignorant of the ocean. In my various lives I had sailed upon it and swum within it and mined beneath it. I knew its chemical composition and its biology. I knew that it enabled life on earth, that nothing—our weather, our food, our selves—would exist without it. I knew too that, for all its apparent size, it was really only a film of moisture on the earth’s crust. I knew that all the waters of the world added together would make not even a thousandth part of the mass of the globe.

  I knew as much about the ocean as anyone. Yes.

  But I knew nothing at all about the sea.

  Even on my island, with water all around me, I still paid it little attention. Instead I happily paced out the limits of the rock on which I stood. It was no more than a few hundred steps across, rimmed by cliffs in every direction, with not a blade of grass to be seen. Its very bleakness was what I liked about it. But gradually…

  It was a tiny thing at first. An uneasiness I could not define. My days were calm and uninterrupted, I had the minimum of food and water and shelter to keep me comfortable, no ship or plane or other human device intruded to disturb me. And yet I could not quite reach a state of tranquillity. Something was unsettling me…

  Finally I discovered the problem. The island was swaying.

  Oh, very subtly. I doubt that anyone but me—or you, orphan—could have detected it. But as I sat upon the rock, my eyes closed in meditation, I could now feel a slow movement, first to one side, and then to the other. Perhaps an inch over an entire day. It was not like any earthquake or tremor I’d known before. It did not seem to be connected to the inner earth at all. It was too rhythmic, too smooth.

  I strove to ignore it. But, per
versely, the more I emptied my mind of thought the more insistently, and nauseatingly, I could feel the swaying.

  I was seasick.

  I would have laughed if it wasn’t so horrible. And how could it be happening? I wasn’t afloat. I reached out in thought, down below the waterline, and for the first time I saw what my island really was—the last upright shard of a long-collapsed volcanic rim: a single fang of rock that leapt up from the deep ocean floor.

  In fact, it was little more than a pillar of stone. And all about it, I saw now, the ocean flowed in great currents. All those unimaginable tons of water would press up against the pillar—and tilt it. It was stone, yes, but it was fighting against the weight of an ocean, and inevitably it was the stone that would give, wrested by inches off its true line. And then the current would ease, and the stone would flex back, only to be assaulted from a new direction, as the cycles of the ocean ebbed and changed.

  Can you picture it? Here I thought I was on solid earth, that my island was a stable point upon which I could rest, but instead I may as well have balanced myself atop a slender tree as a gale was blowing.

  I could find no peace after that. They whispered to me, those ocean currents. They were constant. I felt them tugging not only at the base of my island, but at my mind. They wanted to take me away with them, to carry me off on their far journeys in the deeps. By daylight I could resist. But at night the currents came for me in my sleep, when I was defenceless, and entered my dreams.

  I can remember those dreams even now. I would let go of my hold upon the rock and then be swept away, not tumbling along blindly like a pebble in a stream, but soaring high above the ocean floor, a nimble bird in the water. I flew over the great abysses and black chasms of the ocean trenches. I wheeled above the limitless undersea plains, and climbed across the submarine ranges which gird the earth. I circled the tallest mountains known to the world, drowned deep, all of them, except for their island pinnacles.