“I just ate.”
“Suit yourself, but they make a great Roquefort dressing here. Not like at the Vatican, where you can’t get a decent meal.”
“I’ll come right to the point, Pontiff. I’m looking for God.”
“You came to the right person.”
“Then He does exist?” They all found this very amusing and laughed. The hood next to me said, “Oh, that’s funny. Bright boy wants to know if He exists.”
I shifted my chair to get comfortable and brought the leg down on his little toe. “Sorry.” But he was steaming.
“Sure He exists, Lupowitz, but I’m the only one that communicates with him. He speaks only through me.”
“Why you, pal?”
“Because I got the red suit.”
“This get-up?”
“Don’t knock it. Every morning I rise, put on this red suit, and suddenly I’m a big cheese. It’s all in the suit. I mean, face it, if I went around in slacks and a sports jacket, I couldn’t get arrested religion- wise.”
“Then it’s a hype. There’s no God.”
“I don’t know. But what’s the difference? The money’s good.”
“You ever worry the laundry won’t get your red suit back on time and you’ll be like the rest of us?”
“I use the special one-day service. I figure it’s worth the extra few cents to be safe.”
“Name Claire Rosensweig mean anything to you?”
“Sure. She’s in the science department at Bryn Mawr.”
“Science, you say? Thanks.”
“For what?”
“The answer, Pontiff.” I grabbed a cab and shot over the George Washington Bridge. On the way I stopped at my office and did some fast checking. Driving to Claire’s apartment, I put the pieces together, and for the first time they fit. When I got there she was in a diaphanous peignoir and something seemed to be troubling her.
“God is dead. The police were here. They’re looking for you. They think an existentialist did it.”
“No, sugar. It was you.”
“What? Don’t make jokes, Kaiser.”
“It was you that did it.”
“What are you saying?”
“You, baby. Not Heather Butkiss or Claire Rosensweig, but Doctor Ellen Shepherd.”
“How did you know my name?”
“Professor of physics at Bryn Mawr. The youngest one ever to head a department there. At the midwinter Hop you get stuck on a jazz musician who’s heavily into philosophy. He’s married, but that doesn’t stop you. A couple of nights in the hay and it feels like love. But it doesn’t work out because something comes between you. God. Y’see, sugar, he believed, or wanted to, but you, with your pretty little scientific mind, had to have absolute certainty.”
“No, Kaiser, I swear.”
“So you pretend to study philosophy because that gives you a chance to eliminate certain obstacles. You get rid of Socrates easy enough, but Descartes takes over, so you use Spinoza to get rid of Descartes, but when Kant doesn’t come through you have to get rid of him too.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“You made mincemeat out of Leibnitz, but that wasn’t good enough for you because you knew if anybody believed Pascal you were dead, so he had to be gotten rid of too, but that’s where you made your mistake because you trusted Martin Buber. Except, sugar, he was soft. He believed in God, so you had to get rid of God yourself.”
“Kaiser, you’re mad!”
“No, baby. You posed as a pantheist and that gave you access to Him-
“Who the hell are Shelby and Jason?”
“What’s the difference? Life’s absurd now anyway.”
“Kaiser,” she said, suddenly trembling. “You wouldn’t turn me in?”
“Oh yes, baby. When the Supreme Being gets knocked off,
“Oh, Kaiser, we could go away together. Just the two of us. We could forget about philosophy. Settle down and maybe get into semantics.”
“Sorry, sugar. It’s no dice.”
She was all tears now as she started lowering the shoulder straps of her peignoir and I was standing there suddenly with a naked Venus whose whole body seemed to be saying, Take me-I’m yours. A Venus whose right hand tousled my hair while her left hand had picked up a forty-five and was holding it behind my back. I let go with a slug from my thirty-eight before she could pull the trigger, and she dropped her gun and doubled over in disbelief.
“How could you, Kaiser?”
She was fading fast, but I managed to get it in, in time.
“The manifestation of the universe as a complex idea unto itself as opposed to being in or outside the true Being of itself is inherently a conceptual nothingness or Nothingness in relation to any abstract form of existing or to exist or having existed in perpetuity and not subject to laws of physicality or motion or ideas relating to non-matter or the lack of objective Being or subjective otherness.”
It was a subtle concept but I think she understood before she died.
