God Is Dead (12 page)

Q.

Correct. The answer is, I don't have an answer. I can offer no comfort and little insight. I am not your God. Or if I am, I'm no God you can seek out for deliverance or explanation. I'm the kind of God who would eat you without compunction if I were hungry. You're as naked and alone in this world as you were before finding me. And so now the question becomes: Can you abide by this knowledge? Or will it destroy you, empty you out, make you a husk among husks?

 

Parents just didn't understand.

Arnold found himself thinking this more and more often in the latter half of his sixteenth year. He was thinking it now, as he sat on his rock on his beach and watched the ferry recede into the horizon where blue met blue, pursued by seagulls which never seemed to figure out that it wasn't a fishing boat and there were no free meals to be had. He'd dropped the grim weight of his book bag on the ground, where the sand was still wet from high tide, and when he slung the bag over his shoulders for the walk home it would be damp against his back and stink of dead clams. But he didn't care. He lit a cigarette, trying and failing to appear practiced and nonchalant about it, like the leathery fishermen on the mainland who seemed to have half-smoked Pall Malls surgically implanted on their lips. He took shallow drags and inhaled carefully. He watched the ferry and felt contemplative and full of important thoughts. He was putting on a show for an imagined audience of one. And though he knew at any moment he could have a real and unwelcome audience, in the form of his mother Selia, he didn't care about this, either.

He was in love. And that, among other things (such as Arnold's growing faith in Postmodern Anthropology), was what his father and Selia didn't understand.

Arnold was smart enough to realize, though, that as different as life was now, some things had always been more or less the same. When his father and Selia were teenagers, they surely had had clashes with their folks over this sort of stuff. Well, maybe not his father. But Selia, definitely. Arnold could imagine her staying out past curfew, driving fast and loose, outdrinking rough boys she was forbidden to be with, then taking them to bed. Maybe falling in love with one of those rough boys. Having a big blowup over it with her father, and running away for a while. The only difference now was that she and his dad didn't disapprove of
who
Arnold loved—in fact, they had never met Amanda, and neither had Arnold, for that matter. Their issue was with
how
he loved her. And this was where they just didn't understand, because the world had changed but they hadn't changed with it.

This is how love was, now: Arnold sat and imagined he was being observed tenderly from an unapproachable distance by Amanda. She was everywhere and nowhere at once, watching him, as he sat here smoking on his beach, or whistling a tune in the shower, or listening to a lecture in class on the evils of Evolutionary Psychology. No matter where he went or what he did, Amanda was with him, and this sense of being observed, even as he slept, produced in Arnold a constant, consuming exhilaration from which there was no relief.

Not that he sought relief. In fact, he reveled in the excitement of love as only a teenager can, scrawling page after page of poetry in Amanda's honor, sending hundreds of messages to her phone every day (which she never replied to, thankfully, because to have real contact with her, to start an actual dialogue, would ruin everything, and this was understood intuitively by Arnold and all the kids he knew). He did not so much as brush his teeth without considering how he appeared to Amanda, whether or not she would approve of his posture, his choice of circular strokes as opposed to vertical, the way he scrunched his face up to reach the molars in the back.

He was preparing to flick away the spent butt of his cigarette in a casual move Amanda would find pleasing when Selia appeared at the top of the bluff, her pantlegs rolled up in wide cuffs, clam-digging gear in hand.

“Shit,” Arnold said under his breath. He hurried to dispose of the cigarette and the flick became more of a drop; the butt followed a weak trajectory down and landed in the sand a few inches from his boot. Amanda would not be impressed.

“You've taken up smoking now?” Selia said as she approached him, her bare feet leaving behind prints that filled with seeping seawater. “Fuel to the fire, eh, kiddo?”

Arnold said nothing. When his mother was upset, it was best to just take his licks and wait for it to be over. She could talk circles around him, and any attempt to explain or argue would only increase the severity of the tongue-lashing.

Selia handed him the pail, with the rake and shovel inside. Still talking, she rolled her pantlegs up further until they were above her knees. “Don't sweat it. I don't care. After all, I'm just some old bat who happens to be your ma. Smoke if you want to. Smoke a pipe. Smoke some weed. Smoke ground banana peels.” Finished with her pants, Selia held her hands out, and Arnold turned over the gear without a word. “Run off and join the army, while you're at it,” Selia continued. “Go to the war. Get shot full of holes for the glory of PoMo Anthropology. Kill a whole platoon of Evo-Psychs with nothing but a soupspoon. See if I care.”

Arnold ventured only a sullen stare in response. He knew Amanda would want him to speak up, defend himself, assert his independence. But when it came to Selia, he was prepared to defy her only indirectly—sneaking cigarettes, for example. Besides, even when she was just guessing, his mother always seemed to be right. He'd been reading the war news, how the Evolutionary Psychologist armies had taken New Guinea and most of Australia. And he'd been thinking, with a curious admixture of dread and eagerness, that as a member (even a junior one) of the PoMo Party, he was duty-bound to defend his faith, especially at so crucial a time.

Plus, the thought of cutting a heroic swath through the Evo-Psych lines in Amanda's sight made his groin tingle.

But how did his mother always know these things, even when they never left his head?

After a few moments when neither of them spoke, Selia's eyes softened a bit, and she held the shovel out to him. “Hey,” she said. “Help me find the clam shows.”

Arnold hesitated. Just because he was afraid to fight openly with Selia didn't mean he had to accept a truce. He hadn't dug clams with her for a long time, though when he was younger, before he started attending school on the mainland, they'd gone digging together nearly every day. It was something he'd enjoyed, being united in purpose with his mother, being useful as something more than an object of adoration, carrying the great bucket of clams home by himself, with both hands. His father would already have a kettle on the gas stove, steam shooting from under the lid. And the eating of food he'd earned by his own work—fingers wet with butter and sea salt, the laughter around the table—had been a deep satisfaction to Arnold, even as a child.

But he was not a child anymore. And these days dinner was, more often than not, a silent, joyless affair. He refused the shovel Selia offered by turning away and lifting his book bag from the sand.

Selia shrugged. “Suit yourself,” she said. Her tone struck Arnold as a bit too indifferent, and he winced to realize he'd wounded her, though that was exactly what he'd intended.

In his bedroom Arnold lit the two candles on the shelf beneath the framed photo of Amanda that hung on the wall. He sat on his bed and checked his cell phone, that essential apparatus of teenage society which his father had recently agreed to buy for him despite Selia's protests. There were 253 new text messages, all of them from Lisa Beard, a sophomore at the girls' school on the mainland. This is how love was now—Arnold had his own supplicant (as did many kids his age) whom he did not know and to whose messages he never responded. He erased them without reading and typed in his own message, to Amanda:

Arnold sent the message. He put the phone down on the bed beside him, slid back against the headboard with his booted feet on the comforter, and thought a moment. He picked up the phone again and typed:

Arnold sent the message, then groped around in the book bag for his copy of the
Institutional Selves
textbook. He flipped to the section that Mr. Oswalt had assigned them to read, but couldn't manage more than a few paragraphs at a time before his attention wandered and his thoughts drifted to Amanda. He sent her another brief, pious message and tried again to read, but almost of their own accord his eyes moved to the framed picture of Amanda, mounted on the wall opposite his bed for easy viewing. The photo was a blown-up copy from the girls' school yearbook. Amanda's eyes, bisected by a loosely curled lock of blond hair that fell across her forehead, flickered in the light from the candles, the same blue as the ocean on Arnold's beach. Like the ocean, her eyes stared into him, steady and benevolent. Arnold felt that exquisite thrill rising slowly, still new enough to make him breathless, until he had no choice but to relieve it in the only way he knew how. Which he did, and quickly, to avoid being caught. He cleaned himself up with a handful of tissues, then deposited these in the bottom of the trash can under his desk. After sending one more message to Amanda, he turned back to the textbook and managed to read twenty pages before his father knocked twice, quietly.

“Come in,” Arnold said.

His father opened the door. “Dinner,” he said.

Arnold did not look up from his book. “Okay. I'll be right there.”

His father remained in the doorway. “Arnie,” he said, “you know it drives your mother nuts when you put your shoes on the bed.”

Still reading, Arnold swung his feet until they hung awkwardly off the side.

“Nice effort,” his father said. “But my point is, you don't
have
to do things just because they upset her.”

At this Arnold looked up. “Dad,” he said, “I'm a postmodern anthropologist. I don't
have
to do anything. I choose my own fate.”

“Okay,” his father said, trying to suppress an indulgent smile. “But so you know your fate is going to be a painful death at your mother's hands if she catches you with your shoes on the bed again.”

“One of our great dilemmas,” Mr. Oswalt said to the class, “raised by the text you were assigned to read, is how to strike a balance between our principles, as Postmodern Anthropologists, and our security—or, put more dramatically, the survival of our way of life. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?”

Most of the boys were preoccupied with the sight of a bull moose grazing in the baseball field outside the window. Arnold, seated toward the rear of the classroom, wondered if Amanda would want him to raise his hand.

“Mr. McCutcheon?” Oswalt said, striding slowly between the rows of desks.

Kelly McCutcheon cleared his throat. “I don't really understand the question.”

Oswalt pushed up his glasses with one finger. “Did you do the reading?”

“Most of it.”

“Most of it,” Oswalt repeated. “Translation: You skimmed a few pages.” He returned to the front of the classroom and leaned against his own desk. “Anybody have an idea what I'm driving at here?” he asked.

Arnold said, “We believe that no one paradigm is superior to another.”