Distress

disintegrating… but this machinery—as much a part of me as anything organic—still worked perfectly.

He began, “When I was a child, my parents used to take me to the most beautiful church in the world.”

“I’ve heard that line before.”

“This time it’s true. The Reformed Methodist Church in Suva. It was a huge, white building. It looked plain from the outside—austere as a barn. But it had a row of stained glass windows, showing scenes from the scriptures, carved by a computer in sky-blue, rose and gold. Every wall was lined with a hundred kinds of flowers— hibiscus, orchids, lillies— piled up to the roof. And the pews were always crammed with people; everyone wore their finest, brightest clothes, everyone sang, everyone smiled. It was like stepping straight into heaven. Even the sermons were beautiful: no hell-fire, only comfort and joy. No ranting about sin and damnation: just some modest suggestions about kindness, charity, love.”

I said, “Sounds perfect. What happened? Did God send a Greenhouse storm to put an end to all this blasphemous happiness and moderation?”

“Nothing happened to the church. It’s still there.”

“But you parted company? Why?”

“I took the scriptures too literally. They said put away childish things. So I did.”

“Now you’re being facetious.”

He hesitated. “If you really want to know the precise escape route… it all started with just one parable. Have you heard the story of the widow’s mite?”

“Yes.”

“For years, as a schoolboy, I turned it over and over in my head. The poor widow’s small gift was more precious than the rich man’s large one. Okay. Fine. I understood the message. I could see the dignity it gave to every act of charity. But I could see a whole lot more encoded in that parable, and those other things wouldn’t go away.

“I could see a religion which cared more about feeling good than doing good. A religion which valued the pleasure of giving—or the pain—more than any tangible effect. A religion which put… saving your own soul through good works far above their worldly consequences.

“Maybe I was reading too much into one story. But if it hadn’t started there, it would have started somewhere else. My religion was beautiful—but I needed more than that. I demanded more. It had to be true. And it wasn’t.”

He smiled sadly, and raised his hands, let them fall. I thought I could see the loss in his eyes, I thought I understood.

He said, “Growing up with faith is like growing up with crutches.”

“But you threw away your crutches and walked?”

“No. I threw away my crutches and fell flat on my face. All the strength had gone into the crutches—I had none of my own. I was nineteen, when it finally all fell apart for me. The end of adolescence is the perfect age for an existential crisis, don’t you think? You’ve left yours awfully late.”

My face burned with humiliation. Michael reached over and touched my shoulder. He said, “I’ve had a long shift, my judgment’s slipping. I'm not trying to be cruel.” He laughed. “Listen to me, spouting ’season for everything’ bullshit—like the Edenites meet Il Duce: Get those emotional trains running on time!” He leaned back, and ran a hand through his hair. “But I was nineteen, there’s no getting around it. And I’d lost God. What can I say? I read Sartre, I read Camus, I read Nietzche—”

I winced. Michael was puzzled. “You have a problem with Friedrich?”

The cramp tightened. I replied through gritted teeth, “Not at all. All the best European philosophers went mad and committed suicide.”

“Exactly. And I read them all.”

“And?”

He shook his head, smiling, embarrassed. “For a year or so… I really believed it: Here I am, staring into the abyss with Nietzche. Here I am, on the brink of insanity, entropy, meaninglessness: the Enlightenment’s unspeakable godless rational damnation. One wrong step, and I’ll go spiraling down.”

He hesitated. I watched him closely, suddenly suspicious. Was he making this up as he went along? A little improvised Care-for-the-Whole-Patient routine? And even if he wasn’t… we’d had different lives, different histories. What use was any of this to me?

I listened, though.

“But I didn’t go spiraling down. Because there is no abyss. There is no yawning chasm waiting to swallow us up, when we learn that there is no god, that we’re animals like any other animal, that the universe has no purpose, that our souls are made of the same stuff as water and sand.”

I said, “There are two thousand cultists on this island who believe otherwise.”

Michael shrugged. “What do you expect from moral flat-Earthers, if not fear of falling? If you desperately, passionately want to plummet into the abyss, of course its possible—but only if you work hard. Only if you will the entire thing into being. Only if you manufacture every last centimeter of it, on your way down.

“I don’t believe that honesty leads to madness. I don’t believe we need delusions to stay sane. I don’t believe the truth is strewn with booby-traps, waiting to swallow up anyone who thinks too much. There is nowhere to fall—not unless you stand there digging the hole.”

I said, “You fell, didn’t you? When you lost your faith.”

“Yes—but how far? What have I become? A serial killer? A torturer?”

“I sincerely hope not. But you lost a lot more than ‘childish things,’ didn’t you? What about all those stirring sermons on kindness, charity and love?”

Michael laughed softly. “And the least of these is faith. What makes you think I’ve lost anything? I’ve stopped pretending that the things I value are locked up in some magical vault called ‘God'—outside the universe, outside time, outside myself. That’s all. I don’t need beautiful lies anymore, just to make the decisions I want to make, to try to live a life I think is good. If the truth had taken those things away… I could never really have had them in the first place.

“And I still clean up your shit, don’t I? I still tell you stories at three in the morning. If you want greater miracles than that, you’re out of luck.”

Whether it was genuine autobiography, or just a slick piece of ad hoc therapy, Michael’s story began to undermine my panic and claustrophobia. His arguments made too much sense to me; they sliced through my self-pity like a hot wire. If the universe itself wasn’t a cultural construct, the gray terror I felt from seeing myself as a part of it certainly was. I’d never had the honesty to embrace the molecular nature of my own existence—but then, the whole society I’d inhabited had been equally coy. The reality had always been glossed over, censored, ignored. I’d spent thirty-six years in a world still infested with lingering dualism, with tacit dumb spirituality—where every movie, every song, still wailed about the immortal soul… while everyone swallowed designer drugs predicated on pure materialism. No wonder the truth had come as a shock.

The abyss—like everything else—was understandable. I lost interest in digging myself a hole.

Vibrio cholerae declined to follow my example.

I lay curled on my side, my notepad propped up against an extra pillow, while Sisyphus showed me what was happening inside me.

“The В subunit of the choleragen molecule binds to the surface of the intestinal mucosal cell; the A subunit detaches and traverses the membrane. This catalyzes increased adenylate cyclase activity, which in turn raises the level of cyclic AMP, stimulating the secretion of sodium ions. The ordinary concentration gradient is reversed, and fluid is pumped in the wrong direction: out into the intestinal space.”

I watched the molecules interlocking, I watched the merciless random dance. This was what I was—whether it gave me any comfort to understand it, or not. The same physics which had kept me alive for thirty-six years might or might not casually destroy me—but if I couldn’t accept that simple, obvious truth, I had no business explaining the world to anyone. Solace and redemption could screw themselves. I’d been tempted by the Ignorance Cults—and maybe I half understood what drove them, now—but what did they have to offer, in the end? Alienation from reality. The universe as an unspeakable horror to be endlessly denied, shrouded in saccharine artificial mysteries, every truth subjugated to doublethink and fairy tales.

Fuck that. I was sick from too little honesty, not too much. Too many myths about the H-word, not too few. I would have been better prepared for the whole ordeal by a lifetime spent calmly facing the truth, than a lifetime