Road to Paradise

by Paullina Simons

  “But what if the voice inside my head tells me to hope in God?”

  Gina shrugged. “That’s your trip, man.”

  “But priests know nothing?”

  “Right. They’re always on the news, saying, don’t do this, don’t do that. A lot of stuff we can’t do. It’s just not appealing, to be perfectly frank,” said Gina. “All that parochialism, that arrogant attitude.”

  Candy said nothing.

  “They’re living in la-la land. They can’t keep up with the times. All these people who don’t know me, telling me what to do,” Gina continued. “They don’t know what’s good for me. What’s good for one person may not be good for another. I hate being dictated to by complete strangers. Really turns me off.”

  “You’ve been a church goer, then?”

  “No, I never go. I choose not to go. The likes of you keep telling me I have free will.”

  “So who’s dictating to you?”

  “They would if they could,” said Gina. “I won’t let them.”

  “All these barricades you’ve set up for yourself,” said Candy. “Is it to prevent yourself from thinking?”

  “What barricades? I think plenty, just not about your stupid bullshit. Nobody owns me. Nobody owns my life. Sloane here agrees with me. She wants to have the free will to kick a puppy,” said Gina. “Right, Sloane?”

  “Leave me out of your little analogies.”

  Like I hadn’t spoken. “What I’m asking is,” said Candy, “are there absolute things that it’s bad to do?”

  Gina stared at me. “I guess,” she said. “A few of them.”

  “Like what?”

  “Look, can you two stop this?” I snapped, speeding up.

  “We need to be more forgiving,” said Gina. “We’d all be better off.”

  “Where did this whole concept of forgiveness come from?” asked Candy. “Forgiveness means, you did something wrong, and someone said, it’s okay, don’t worry. But the wrongdoing is essential. Otherwise there’d be nothing to forgive.”

  “Well, maybe forgive is a wrong word then,” Gina amended. “I mean more, like, let it go, man. Just let it go.”

  “Like all things, let it go?”

  “Sadly, yeah.”

  “It’s all okay?”

  “I guess.” She shrugged. “Clearly, not all is okay. Kicking puppies, for example. And other things.” She took a breath. “But some things are up for dispute. Why is the church always telling me I can’t have premarital sex, or use contraception, or have an abortion, or whatnot? That’s the kind of stuff I mean.”

  “Okay, sure, abortions are good,” said Candy, “but what about the other stuff? Like burning the houses of people you don’t like, or putting water in someone’s gas tank, or siccing your dog on a human being, or—”

  “Jeez, Candy, you’re so literal. Obviously,” said Gina, “those things are wrong.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says society.”

  “Where’d society get all that from? Why did they decide that you stealing money from an open cash register is wrong?”

  “Because it hurts other people.”

  “Ah. So things that hurt other people are wrong?”

  Gina tried very hard not to look at me. “Yes.”

  “What about things that hurt yourself?”

  “See, no. If you hurt yourself, it’s your choice.”

  “Isn’t stealing also your choice?”

  “But it affects other people!”

  “What if you steal from someone who is very rich and barely notices? What if you take a diamond necklace from your friend, and she’s got three of them. You don’t have any, she’s got three. Is that wrong?”

  “Yes, stealing is wrong.”

  “What if you eat the dog’s food and the dog starves?”

  “That would also be wrong.”

  “But a dog is not a person.”

  “God, you’re so literal! Other living things, okay?”

  “Plants? Ants? Snails? Lilypads?”

  Gina rubbed her face. “Shelby’s right. This conversation is ridiculous.”

  But we were trapped in the car on the open road with nowhere to go, and the Top 40 was boring us to tears. Gina refused to allow the Psalms, and we couldn’t talk about Erv because he was all too real, so we talked about this.

  “What you do to yourself affects other people, too,” said Candy. “Say you take drugs. And your kids run around neglected. That’s hurting somebody, no?”

  “Yeah, but what if you take drugs and you don’t have kids? Who does it hurt, then?”

  “I don’t know. Do you have parents who love you? Brothers? Sisters? An elderly aunt? Your best friend? What about the dog that’ll die if you don’t feed him? Or the cat that needs a drink while you’re strung up on smack? You say you’re free, but aren’t you just as enslaved, to drugs or drink or whatnot? Aren’t you enslaved to sin?”

  “I totally disagree with this whole notion of sin,” said Gina.

  I furrowed my puzzled eyebrows. Do you, Gina, I inaudibly whispered. You didn’t last night. How did she manage to argue this on both sides of the aisle?

  “What about all the kids you could have and don’t because you’re tripping out?” Candy asked.

  Gina breathed out in frustration. “This is just idiotic. So what?”

  “I don’t think you’ve thought deeply about this, is what,” Candy said calmly.

  “How do you know what I’ve thought deeply about? You have no idea.”

  “I do. By the things you say. I get the feeling that there are some things you feel are absolutely wrong, but if you say so, it’ll weaken your argument. So you throw up your hands and say I don’t want to talk about it, but what you really mean is, you don’t want to think about it. Which is fine. But if you were a little more honest, you’d have to admit that if there is a Truth out there, then it demands certain things from you. It’s like a path. You have to know what the path is, and where it is. It’s nice and convenient to pick and choose the parts of the road you like, and reject the parts you don’t want to apply to you. You’re not really walking the road, then, are you, you’re just flailing, hitting every tree in the forest. Because I guarantee you, Gina,” Candy continued, not letting Gina interrupt, “that drug addicts are as vociferous defending their drug use and their consequent neglect of everything else in their lives as you are defending your positions on free sex. Bank robbers have a thousand good reasons for robbing banks and how society is to blame. What I’m saying is, everybody defends their own sin, while managing to be smug about other people’s. Mine is not so bad, but yours, now yours is terrible. But either there is such thing as sin, or there isn’t. You say there isn’t. Okay. But if there is, then it’s governed by forces other than you. Either there is Truth, or there isn’t. That’s your choice: live your life like there is Truth, or live your life like there isn’t. I have no problem with anything you say. It’s your selective morality I question. I noticed how all the things you picked that were against some vague notion of right and wrong, you yourself do not do. I assume you don’t do drugs or kick puppies. But all the things you rail at some phantom priests for judging you for, I assume you do or would like to do. You want a live and let live policy toward yourself, but we all want that. You want acceptance, we all want it, addicts and thieves, and killers.”

  “What the hell . . .”

  “And by the way,” said Candy, “just so we’re clear, I am the first of all sinners. I tell you this like I’m in the confessional. I am less perfect than you can ever imagine. You are an angel of the Lord compared with me.”

  Gina scoffed. “No kidding.”

  “But I don’t pretend I’m doing anything else but wrong, and then spend my time justifying it. I don’t go around saying there is no wrong, and all the things I do are right. Just the opposite. I judge myself harshly, and give everyone else a break.” Candy smiled. “Let them work out their own salvation.”

  “The only thi
ng I agree with,” said Gina, “in your whole mess of nonsense is that you’re right—everybody does defend their own sin.” She tried very hard not to look at me, and I tried very hard not to look at her.

  “Truth comes in many faiths,” Gina added after half an hour had passed. “I don’t have to be a believer in any particular one. How can you be so certain about something you have no proof of? Me, I like to keep an open mind, that’s all.”

  “Ah,” said Candy. “Now you’re getting somewhere. So you’d like God to supply you with proof so you can believe?”

  “That would be nice. He wants me to believe? Then he needs to prove himself to me.”

  “So now God is your little performing monkey? Jumping through flaming hoops on your command?”

  “No, and I don’t want to talk about it anymore!”

  “Sort of like the devil asked Jesus to be a little performing monkey for him. It wasn’t enough for Jesus to turn stone into bread, he had to throw himself on the rocks and then miraculously come back to life.”

  “I said I didn’t want to talk about it!”

  “The people at Calvary said it, too. If you’re God, come on, come down from that cross. Show us. Prove it. Nah-nah.”

  “How many times, how many different ways am I going to have to say it?” Gina yelled.

  “Okay, fine. But, Gina,” said Candy, “don’t forget. Make it as secure as you can.”

  “Holy God!”

  “Guys, can we please talk about something else?” I said.

  “Like what?” Gina snapped. “Like what she’s doing in our car? What danger we’re in because she’s in our car? How I told you not to pick her up and you didn’t listen to me, and now look. Is that what you want to talk about?”

  And from the back, Candy intoned, “O Jesus, hurl yourself from the cross, show us what you’re made of!”

  “Ahhh!” I think that was me.

  Thus we reached U.S. 20 and drove for a long time without stopping, we crossed half the state, and it took us half a day. Iowa didn’t look like Maryland—the trees in Iowa were all planted in purposeful clusters around the farms to protect them from tornadoes. The more trees, the more prosperous the farm.

  Were farms prosperous? This is what I was reduced to, in a car where no one was speaking, and where REO Speedwagon kept on loving me except they didn’t know what Joy Division knew, that love would tear us apart, I was thinking of living on a farm, hidden in the trees, the tornadoes coming every summer and tearing the whole place down while The Jam went underground. Candy started to sing. Remember, O Lord, Your tender mercies . . . do not remember the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions; according to Your mercy remember me . . .

  “What did I say?” barked Gina.

  Was Styx right? Was this the best of times? I wasn’t sure. I hoped not. I was an American girl driving across America the beautiful, the sky above me, the golden valleys, one of my companions was hostile and not speaking, and her hostility was preventing me from hearing the loud Elton rock or from daydreaming about being torn apart by tornadoes.

  There was plenty like me to be found, but not like Candy, a mongrel who didn’t have a penny . . . I wished I could stop driving because the thing I wanted to do was look at her, not like Gina with irritated puzzlement, but with bewilderment. As in: who are you, you who waltzed into my car? Who are you that came first on a road I was never going to go on, and I passed you by, then you came to me again, on another road I was never going to go on, but this time, I stopped. Now, you’re saying things in my Mustang that I’ve never heard, making me think things I’ve never thought, and do things I’d never dreamed of. You are not even eighteen. Who are you?

  2

  Hoadley Dean

  We stopped for a late lunch and gas in Waterloo in the middle of Iowa. After that the road got bleaker, the sky got grayer. I was closing my eyes in a narcoleptic funk as I drove, but Gina and Candy got their second wind.

  “Not atheist, agnostic!”

  “What’s the difference?” asked Candy.

  “Oh, same difference,” I chimed in, but Gina didn’t think I was funny.

  “You want proof? What about Design as Order?” continued Candy as if there had not been a three-hour break in the conversation. “What about Purpose, Simplicity, Complexity? Sense and Coherence, Information and Cosmic Constants, the laws of physics, of nature, and nature itself, the beauty of the world? One has to try very hard to be an atheist in this world, one has to have real blinders on.”

  “Not atheist, agnostic!” Right into it, that Gina, the salsa not dried at her lips. “Open-minded. I’m saying I don’t know. I’m keeping an open mind. Leaving my options open. Because I just don’t know.”

  “Okay. But in your world of open-mindedness, you have to somehow acknowledge Jesus, no? Even to reject him. Or to refute him, if you’re able, to react to him in some way. In the world of ‘I’m keeping my options open,’ why isn’t he even making the cut at the bottom of your waiting list? How did you manage to discard him without so much as a mental argument with yourself?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I think about other things.”

  “Yes, you talked about Baba, about Ashram, dualism, a little monism. What about equal time for Jesus?”

  “You know why? Because I’m just not interested in your philosophy.”

  “Then how can you say you have an open mind? Open to what? Everything other than Jesus?”

  “Yes. Because the whole Jesus thing is not important to me.”

  “But it speaks to the heart of man.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “The God question is the most fundamental question of human existence.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “What was he? Tell me. In your opinion.”

  “I have no opinion on the subject.”

  “Why not? You have an opinion on everything else.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Did he exist?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “So he didn’t exist?”

  “I never said that.”

  “No, you didn’t say much. Okay. So if he existed, what was he? One way or another you have to recognize his presence in the history of mankind.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “It’s not just about the design or chaos of the universe. It’s not about evolution or the Big Bang. It’s not about something that impersonal and removed.”

  “Then what is it about?”

  “It’s about the love that moves the sun and the other stars,” said Candy. “It’s about Sin and Grace. The Holy Trinity, God speaking through Beauty, through sex, through marriage. It’s about the Sacraments, prayer, the Gospels, Freedom, Virtue, Christ’s two commandments, the historical value of the New Testament, oh, and let’s not forget His Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection. Doesn’t an open mind imply that you have to deal with at least some of these questions?”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “This is what I think,” said Candy. “I don’t think you’ve thought about it and dismissed it. I think you’re dismissing it because you don’t want to think about it.”

  “I’m dismissing it,” said Gina, “because I don’t give a shit.”

  “Exactly.” Candy was very hard to offend or goad.

  “But you can’t make me care by badgering me! You can’t force me to care about your little beliefs. You know what my most fundamental question is? How long is it going to take me to get to Bakersfield? I like music, I like to hang out, I like my friends, I love my family, I love my fiancé. And, unlike the person sitting next to me driving this fool car, I love dogs. I try not to hurt other people, I keep to myself. I’m like your black-truck driver. I do me, and you do you. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Is that your philosophy of life? I do me and you do you?”

  “Yes! Mind your own damn business and I’ll mind mine.”

  “Then why were you lecturing me about the married guy u
p in the hills?”

  “Because that affects me! I care about that. I don’t care about your Jesus. I. Just. Don’t. Care. And you can’t make me. It’s like when Shelby starts talking about geography. My eyes glaze over.”

  Like I was saying, said Candy.

  Like I was saying, said Gina.

  I, Shelby, who had contributed nothing to this entire exchange, coughed to clear my throat, and said, “But, Gina, if you’re all about the live and let live, why did you, along with your mother, for three years try to convince me of the rightness of Baba and hatha yoga?”

  “Because I cared!”

  And now I said okay. Candy laughed and because she could never stop, even when she was a word ahead, said, “There are some people who hate Christianity and call their hatred an equal love for all religions.”

  “I don’t hate Christianity!” exclaimed Gina. “That would imply a degree of involvement I don’t have. I’m exactly like Shelby on this.”

  Candy prodded me, twirling the hair at the back of my head. “No, I don’t believe you are.”

  I, Shelby the diplomat, said nothing, by the art of my own omission managing an affront to atheists, agnostics, my best friend, a well-meaning hitchhiker, and Jesus.

  It started to rain. It was four, then five P.M., and we were straggling at thirty, forty miles an hour behind an oil truck. I couldn’t pass an oil truck. I had visions of slipping on the ice, so to speak, ramming into its side, and burning to death. I slowed down. The cars behind me honked furiously through the rain. The oncoming traffic was too heavy for them to pass us, and I followed that truck through every town in western Iowa. I guessed it was headed to Nebraska, like us. Candy had been sleeping, but the first thing she said when she woke up was, stop, pull over, what are you doing? Let it get ahead.

  I pulled over and we just sat for a while watching the rain. So she didn’t think we were safe even here. Would the truck driver have spotted our small yellow car tucked behind him on a wet one-lane road? What if he did? “Get it through your head, Sloane,” she said. “A truck is like a direct phone line to Erv. And I mean that literally. They call his handle on the CB, straight from their vehicle, and they talk to him about us.” No music, no metaphysical argument could take the place of facing down the miles talking about this.