could.
'
,' he said. His gaze lifted to meet mine.
He was squat, scraggly, and covered with oozing boils. Clad only in a few rags, he waddled across the charnel morass barefooted.
'What do
want?' His voice was as harsh as sandpaper on a sunburn. 'You're not supposed to be here. You're not rotting!'
'Is this hell?' I asked.
He stared at me as if I'd asked him if it were the Chinese Theater. Grubby-no,
-fingers smeared a few grey strands of long, matted hair away from his eyes.
'Of course this isn't hell, you stupid tit. There isn't any hell or heaven. You don't go anywhere when you die. Except maybe underground.' He picked up a finger from one of the more advanced cases of decay and waved it at me. 'And mind you not to start asking me about souls, you ignorant bastard. Your soul dies with you!'
'Energy,' I repeated from high school physics, 'can neither be created nor destroyed. My mind is electrochemical energy that cannot be destroyed. It's my soul, and it's got to go somewhere.'
The squat little man (if it was a man) sat on the withers of a deceased horse. Its ribs caved in with a crunch and a sigh. He jumped up cursing.
After brushing away the excess putridity, he said, 'Thermodynamics, eh?' He hefted a pair of bloated, purplescent bodies one on the other, then climbed atop to straddle them.
'All right,' he said, 'where does the memory of a pocket calculator go when you switch it off?'
'Huh?' I think I preferred playing Three Card Monte with the Stranger. The smell was getting to me.
'The electrons that form the number pattern in the calculator aren't destroyed when you switch it off. Where does the memory go? Silicon Heaven?'
I shrugged. 'It must go somewhere.'
He jumped off the bodies to land on some dead puppies. 'It goes nowhere! The electrons remain, but the
is destroyed.'
'My soul's a pattern?'
'Your mind is an electrochemical ordering that is built up over time. Ten, thirty, fifty years. Oh, sure-the constituents of that ordering remain after your death, but the order itself begins to disintegrate in the absence of oxygen and electrical current. The pattern randomizes, and your soul dies with you!'
'Mighty deep philosophy for a caretaker.'
'And why not? I've eaten some of the best minds here. I've breakfasted on Buddha, lunched on Leibniz, noshed on Nietzsche, and munched a Messiah or two. They all come here. They're dead and their souls are, too. So I eat their brains and-oops.' He glanced sheepishly in my direction.
'And they live on in you.'
'Oh, shit.'
'And back on earth,' I said, watching him sink his head in his hands, 'people's souls live on in the things they've done, the people they've touched.'
'Only metaphorically!' he retorted with a shake of his tired grey head.
'Metaphors are all we need.' I bent over him. 'I'm only a simile of my genetic code. Our image of God is only a
