The Good Atheist

by Michael Manto

  “Keys?”

  “Sure. I had it retrofitted for traditional keys. I never could stand all the voice and retinal recognition crap. Makes it hard for the neighbors to take my truck when they need it.”

  This was not usually the major concern in Chicago where I come from. “Thanks, if you’re sure.”

  “Sure I’m sure. Just leave the keys with Dan.”

  “Dan?”

  “He’s the clerk at the motel.”

  “Well, thank you very much. That’s very generous.”

  He waved me off. “Think nothing of it.”

  We said our goodbyes to the host, thanked the kind man who loaned us his truck, whose name I’d neglected to ask for, and drove back to the motel. The lawyer had given us a brief description of our property. Selene was still in heels and formal dress. I was still in my best suit. We changed into clothes more suitable for crawling around an old cottage and left the keys to the truck with Dan behind the counter. He also gave us directions to the lawyer’s.

  Richard Abrams was waiting for us when we got to his office, and he led the way out of town towards the cottage. We followed in our rental car. The smooth highway narrowed to two lanes, and after a few more miles we turned onto a potholed county road. I switched the car over into hover-mode, and the ride smoothed out. Then pot-holes gave way to rutted gravel, the road narrowed and the steep green hills closed in around us.

  A few more miles, and the lawyer slowed down and turned off into the trees. I slowed down and found the small dirt road where the lawyer had turned. It was deeply rutted, and the ruts were filled with water. I kept the car in hover-mode and passed smoothly over the ruts. The driveway was narrow and the limbs of the trees on either side touched overhead, forming a dark green tunnel. Eventually the driveway brought us to an old cottage made of fieldstone and timber. I brought the car to a stop, it settled to the ground in a puff of dust, and our gull-wing doors swooshed open.

  Selene and I climbed out and stood in silence, surveying our new country property. Moss grew on the roof of the cottage and tall grass and weeds flourished in the eaves troughs. A rickety wooden porch extended across the front, and the wood frames around the windows hadn’t been painted in years. While we watched, a large flake of paint detached itself from one of the window frames and drifted like a fleck of dandruff to the ground.

  Selene crossed her arms and frowned. “What a dump!”

  “It needs a little love, I’ll admit,” I said.

  “What it needs is a bulldozer,” she said.

  We stood for a few moments taking in the scenery. The cottage sat in the middle of a wide grassy clearing surrounded by high tree-covered hills. Just beyond the cottage was a large pond, with a wooden dock and a boat tethered to it. A pair of Adirondack chairs sat at the end of the dock. A garden ran down from the cottage to the pond.

  “It’s beautiful,” I breathed.

  “There’s nothing out here,” Selene said.

  “The solitude is so peaceful.”

  “We’re in the middle of nowhere, miles from any other human being,” Selene moaned.

  “A chance for some peace and quiet!”

  “I’ll go nuts with boredom,” she said.

  Richard walked over from his car to stand with us, and pointed to the woods and fields to the north and east beyond the cottage. “You’ve got a little over two acres, extending all the way to the foot of the hills in that direction,” he said. Then he pointed to the south. “And over that way your property extends a good two hundred feet into the woods.”

  “There’s nothing out here,” Selene moaned again.

  Richard appeared to ignore her and indicated a dilapidated wooden structure to our left. “That’s the toolshed over there.” The roof sagged in and the door was held closed by a rusted chain. It looked large enough to hold four hover-cars. He started ticking off the features of the property. “The pond over there is stocked with trout. There is a greenhouse at the back of the property. Your grandfather grew tomatoes in it.” He nodded in the general direction. I could see sunlight glinting off of a large glass structure in the distance.

  “What are the taxes?” I asked.

  He referenced his datapad and tapped it. “Thirty-five thousand credits annually.”

  “Euro?”

  He shook his head. “American.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank goodness.”

  Selene muttered. “Even thirty-five U.S. will still be hard to carry.”

  But the good lawyer was not to be deterred. “Your grandfather left everything to you. This entire property and everything on it, and the contents of the cottage. The cottage has basic electrical service. It’s on well water, so be careful of consumption. Don’t flush the toilets too often – only when you really need to,” he added with a smile.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Selene said.

  “Just like camping when I was a kid,” I said, trying to put a helpful spin on things.

  “There are no debts or liens. You own it free and clear. There’s also a nice little savings account. You’re not billionaires, but he left you a comfortable nest egg. Let’s take care of the legalities before we go in,” Richard said, and held his datapad out for me. “Sign here please.”

  Using my index finger, I scribbled my signature across the surface of his device.

  “Thanks. Do you have your device?” The lawyer asked.

  I pulled out my phone, and he touched his datapad to it. “Now you’ve got all the documents. The deed, the will, and powers of attorney. It’s all yours now.” Then he pulled a ring of metal keys out of a pocket and rattled them. “Well, let’s go in, shall we?”

  We followed Richard across the porch to the front door, where he held up the keys for us to see. “I’m afraid there’s no swipe card or electronic locks with passcodes here. The locks still use old-style metal keys.” He fumbled with the keys for a few seconds. “Not that Ben ever locked his place,” he added. He finally found the right key and inserted it into the lock. The door creaked open and we stepped into a bright, cozy, living room. Sunlight streamed in through a large south-facing window, with a view of the wooded hills beyond the fields. There was a comfortable-looking couch and a couple of large wing-backed chairs and several end tables.

  Beautifully beaded wainscoting covered the lower third of the walls. “Is all this paneling real?” I asked. “It looks like real oak.”

  “Yes. He only used genuine wood,” he said. “He detested the artificial stuff.”

  I looked around, admiring the luxurious paneling. I’d never seen so much real wood. Selene grabbed my elbow and pointed at a black iron monstrosity sitting in the corner. “What’s that?”

  “That’s a wood stove,” I said. There was a large comfortable chair in front of it, next to a neat stack of wood along the wall. I’d used wood stoves before, while on fishing trips up north, but Selene was barely aware of life outside the big city. Her idea of roughing it was a fast-food restaurant without a drive-thru. But the wood stove got me wondering, and I turned to Richard. “How’s this place heated?”

  “Oil. But he used the wood stove to heat the place when the power went out, which happens a lot around here in the winter, I’m afraid.” The lawyer went on, filling us in on the vagaries of the local weather, no doubt believing that we would be as fascinated as he was now that we owned property in the area. But my thoughts drifted to the woods outside and Selene’s eyes glazed over. She pulled her phone out of a pocket and looked at the screen. With her, like most people, checking for messages every minute had become a neurotic habit, almost like a nervous tic on your face that you can’t stop.

  “There’s no signal,” Selene said, tapping at the screen of her phone.

  Richard looked at her as she tried to prod her phone to life. “There’s no cell coverage out here,” he said. “You won’t get a signal until you’re back on the highway closer to town.”

  Selene’s eyes shot up. “You’re kidding? There’s n
o phone? No internet?”

  He shook his head. “I’m afraid not.” He turned away, and pointed to a hallway leading off the living room. “You’ll find the bathroom and bedrooms down that way,” he said. Next he brought our attention to a wide set of French double doors with frosted panes to our left. “Office and library is in there. It has a nice a view of the pond and garden. Personally, it’s my favorite room in the cottage. But let’s go see the kitchen first.”

  The living room was open to the kitchen and we followed him in. It looked like something from the nineteenth century. There was wood everywhere. Hardwood counters. Oak cabinets. I ran my hand along the countertop, feeling the texture. It was hard to believe it was all real wood. A white porcelain sink was sunk into the counter, with a hand-cranked water pump next to it. The tiny kitchen also had a harvest-gold electric range next to a small white fridge. They had no touch screens, keypads or any kind of virtual interface that I could see.

  Selene went over to the stove and introduced herself. “Hello, Stove, my name is Selene. What’s yours?”

  When the stove didn’t answer, Selene frowned. “Stove, I’m your new owner. Respond please.”

  Richard cleared his throat and grinned. “It’s not a smart stove. It hasn’t been upgraded. In fact, it’s an old model and can’t even take the upgrade.”

  “How will it know what to cook?”

  “You have to do the cooking yourself.”

  Selene slowly shook her head. “I don’t believe this place.”

  I picked up a kerosene lamp that was on the kitchen table. There were several of them hanging from hooks throughout the cottage. “Look at this.”

  “What is it?” Selene asked.

  “An old kerosene lantern. It uses flammable liquid to produce light.”

  “Well, put it down before you set something on fire,” she said.

  I chuckled. “It’s not turned on.”

  “It’s a good idea to always have alternative sources of light and heat,” the lawyer chimed in. “The electricity goes out a lot in this area, like I said. Your grandfather always kept some kerosene lamps and wood for the fireplace on hand just in case.”

  Then he checked his watch. “I need to go. I’ve got a five o’clock. But I think you’ve got a good lay of the land. You can do some exploring on your own now.” He held the keys out and dropped them into my hands. “The place is all yours now, Jack. Give me a call if you have any questions.”

  “How will we do that without cell coverage?” Selene asked pointedly, an ironic lilt to her voice.

  “Good point,” Richard said. “Ben would just get in his car and drive up the highway a bit when he needed to make a call or check for messages. He was often in town anyway.”

  Staying here would be difficult for Selene, but I liked the idea of being cut off and not getting messages from work, which appeared on my phone constantly day and night. Selene stayed back in the kitchen while I saw Richard to the front door.

  I thanked him for everything, but he waved me off. “Not at all. Your grandfather was a good friend of mine,” he said. “I won’t be charging the estate for my services. He’s done a lot for me over the years.” I thanked him again and we said our goodbyes. He got into his car, and a moment later it kicked up a cloud of dust as it lifted up from the ground, pivoted, and glided silently away six feet over the ground.

  I remained outside on the porch, taking it all in. I’d never imagined I would ever own so much property. The world was green and inviting, and I went inside to tell Selene I was going to explore outside for a bit. I found her in the kitchen, trying to strike up a conversation with the fridge, without much success.

  “Honey, I don’t think any of the appliances have interfaces.”

  She rolled her eyes towards the ceiling. “This place is such a throwback to the dark ages.”

  “I kind of like the rustic charm,” I said.

  “Did you know there are no cleaning droids or servbots in this place?”

  “Hmm,” I said.

  “How are we ever going to make a dent in the dust around here?” she said, dragging her finger across a table surface.

  “There must be cleaning supplies somewhere. If not, we can go into town and get some,” I said.

  “We’ve got a lot of cleaning and sorting to do before we can use this place, whether we decide to sell it or keep it ourselves,” she said.

  “Sure,” I said, not really listening or wanting to talk about it. I hitched my thumb towards the door. “I’m going to look around outside for a bit.”

  She waved me off. “Have fun. I’ll go see what’s in the other rooms.”

  I headed off across the expansive lawn in the direction of the pond, the dry grass crunching under my feet. It took a few minutes to reach the pond. I walked out onto the dock and sat down in one of the Adirondack chairs.

  The air was so still it seemed as if the world was holding its breath. The leaves of the trees in the hills surrounding my little paradise didn’t stir. I sat for several long moments just taking it all in: the green hills, the stillness of the air and water, and the silence.

  A deafening silence.

  I had never heard such absolute quiet before – if one could hear quiet. The quiet wasn’t merely an absence of noise. This silence felt like a real, solid presence of Something that seemed absolutely content and at peace with itself. Most city people who have grown used to the ubiquitous background roar of the city might be driven to distraction by such quiet. But I felt as though I could have lingered for hours.

  But it was not to be.

  The peace was shattered by Selene shouting for me from the cottage. I twisted around in the chair to see Selene standing at a window, gesturing wildly at me. “Jack, get in here quick. Hurry!” I sighed and went back into the cottage.

  I found her in the den adjoining the living room. It was filled with natural light coming in through the large picture window that overlooked the pond where I had been sitting. There was a big wooden desk with a computer, with a large comfortable-looking leather recliner. Selene stood behind the desk as if for protection, pointing up at one of the shelves.

  “It’s big and hairy,” she said, indicating an upper corner where the shelves reached the ceiling.

  But I wasn’t looking where she was pointing. I was too preoccupied with what packed the room.

  Books.

  Real, paper books.

  The walls were covered with book-lined shelves. More books were piled on the surface of the desk, and there were a few more stacked on the floor, apparently waiting for more shelving units. I’d never seen so many hard-copy books in one place.

  “This is incredible,” I said under my breath.

  Selene shook her head. “Ah, it’s a big hairy spider, that’s what it is.”

  “I mean the books. Look at all these books!” I said. Most of them would be old, since printed books went out of use in my grandfather’s day. Only collectors and specialty stores still carried them. The expense was beyond the means of the average reader.

  I was overwhelmed by the sheer physicality of them, and I wondered how people used to manage it back in the day. But I realized that before ebooks, this is what people would have had to do. Either you devoted entire rooms to storing them, or you didn’t own very many. Carrying them would be such a pain. You would never be able to carry more than a few at a time.

  It wasn’t just books that filled the shelves. There were a few framed photographs as well. One of them caught my eye and I went over for a closer look. It was of me, when I was about five, sitting on my father’s knee. We were outdoors in a park somewhere. I held a baseball and was grinning ear to ear. The man in the picture didn’t look like the type to run off on his wife and son.

  I went around the room looking at the other pictures. They were all of me between the ages of newborn to about six. Dad and Grandpa were in several of them. I picked one of them up and held it in my hands. My grandpa looked in the pictures pretty much the way I
remembered him, except he did not seem so old to me now. As a little boy he seemed positively ancient, but now in the pictures he just looked like a healthy man in his mid-fifties.

  And the pictures sent me one message. My grandfather hadn’t forgotten me. But that only begged the question why he hadn’t contacted me. Why was he content to keep pictures of me in his den and never call?

  Selene broke into my thoughts. “Jack, would you stop staring at those pictures and look?”

  I set the picture back on the shelf. “It’s incredible. There’s got to be hundreds of real paper books here.”

  She pointed her finger towards an upper corner of the room, shaking it for emphasis. “Jack, for crying out loud!”

  I looked up to the corner of the ceiling where she pointed. “It’s just a spider,” I said.

  “Well, it’s the biggest spider I’ve ever seen. Can you kill it before it decides to put us on its dinner menu?”

  “Just a sec,” I said. I pulled a book off the shelf in front of me and looked at the front cover. The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Probably harmless, I thought, though most history books printed previous to the Harris purges were banned. I’d have to check the Prohibited Publications list to be sure.

  The History of the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. sat next to it. I was familiar with that title, as we studied the digital version in high school. But here was a rare early copy of the print edition. It would be worth a small fortune, if it wasn’t banned. I’d have to check the Prohibited list for that one as well.

  “Jack, what on earth are you doing?”

  “Just looking.”

  “Can you please get that spider for me?” Selene had an almost psychotic aversion to dirt and bugs, but especially spiders, and I realized I was being insensitive to her situation. I looked around for something handy to squish it with, like a tissue box. There was a stack of books on the desk, but it felt wrong somehow to use a rare paper book as a bug swatter.

  I pulled off my shoe and approached the corner of the shelving unit where the spider lurked. The spider suddenly dropped on a silky thread and landed on the spine of a book sitting on the top shelf. I read the title as the spider crawled down the spine.