Cry Havoc

You can touch them and touch a tree Cortez might have sat under while he charted his course. Where do those stars, those trees, where do they come from? Who made them?'

'UAW?' Frank guessed. 'Should I go look for the union label?'

'You're serious, aren't you?'

'About the label?'

Gail kept studying Frank.

'I don't see you hopping out of bed on Sundays to get to church.'

'You don't have to go to a church to believe. And when I need a church I head out of this god-forsaken city and into the mountains. That's where my church is. Where I can see what God's made. Not what people have made.'

'All right. You win. Can we drop this?' Frank cajoled, her hand out to the doc. Gail took it, but not happily.

'If it'll make you feel better, I'll believe in something. Tell me what you want me to believe in and I will.'

Gail squawked, 'I can't make you believe! That's got to come from inside you. It has nothing to do with me.'

'So how do kids learn to be good Methodists or Jews? Don't they get taught? Don't they go to Sunday school or temple or whatever? You want me to be a tree-hugger, show me how. I'm a quick learner.'

'That's different, Frank. They're children. You're a grown adult. I can't foist a belief on you. You should have your own values, your own beliefs.'

Frank followed Gail inside, countering, 'I do and you don't like them.'

'Working hard and making a difference isn't a faith, it's an ethic. There's a big difference.'

'Does that make me any less of a person?'

'No,' Gail admitted. 'I just... I don't know. I know you claim to be an agnostic, but I always thought underneath it all, bottom line, that you'd have something to cling to greater than yourself.'

'So why's that so sad?'

'It seems lonely. And it makes it impossible to share what I believe in.'

Locking the patio door, Frank answered, 'Not at all. I love it when you talk about the trees and stars. And that grove in Berkeley that you used to hike to when you were a kid. You light up when you talk about that stuff. You're beautiful. Just because I don't believe in it doesn't mean I can't respect that you do.'

'It's just such a comfort to have faith in something greater than myself and my fellow stumbling, bumbling human beings. It's a wonderful sense of tranquility to believe I belong in the world; that I'm part of a design, even though I don't know what that design is. I don't know how to express it. You'd have to feel it yourself and that's the part that makes me sad. That we can't share that tranquility. It's not an option for you.'

Frank kissed the top of Gail's head.

'I'm tranquil when I'm with you. That's all I have right now and it'll have to do.'

'But I'm only human, Frank. I'll fail you.'

'And God hasn't?'

'No,' Gail said, twisting out of Frank's arms. 'Never. Things might happen that you don't like but they happen for a reason. Fate, God, Karma, call it what you like, everything happens for a reason.'

'Ah. The Divine Plan.'

'Exactly. Just because you don't know what it is doesn't mean there isn't a reason.'

'There was a reason you got cancer,' Frank argued.

'Yes! I believe that every time we're faced with a choice we can make a good one, a bad one, or a mediocre one. How you choose affects the results. If we keep making poor choices, ones that concentrate on our lower, more base instincts, then we keep getting the same poor situations until we learn to respond to diem with love and move beyond them. So for me the breast cancer was God's way of shaking me and getting me to take a look at how I was living my life.

'I worked from six in the morning until eight at night. I ate shitty food, got no exercise and slept horribly. All I had was work and the cats. Then when I had to face the very real possibility that I might die, I realized how much I was missing. How much time I've wasted in my life, how much love I've missed. It was so wonderful to be around my mom and sisters and to just appreciate how much they loved me. And how much I loved them. I'd never realized it, never really felt the depth of my passion for them until I was so close to losing them. And you know what? I might not die today or tomorrow, hell, I might live another fifty years, but the point is, I am going to die. Someday. Yet I've lived like I had all the time in the world to waste. The cancer showed me I don't have that time to waste. It was a gift in that it opened my eyes to all the goodness that I can have in my life.'

'So now that you realize all that you'll never get cancer again?'

Gail sighed.

'Now that I realize all that it doesn't matter that I get cancer again. I have the best life imaginable. The best work, the best family, the best lover, the best friends. I finally feel like I'm not missing something.'

'I'm still not sure how God figures into all this bliss.'

'Because my body will be gone, but my soul won't. The core of me, the essence, the energy I have created —either good or bad— will go on without a corporeal vehicle. I don't know if it's reincarnation or angels or what, but I will take the lessons I've learned and apply them elsewhere. The fundamental goodness of me will persist. Just like the stars. I don't know what shape I'll take but I believe there are realities we can't sense, that we're not supposed to sense because our poor little pea brains couldn't comprehend their magnitudes. There's a joy in the mystery, in the not knowing. It's exciting. When I die I'm going on a huge adventure, like a cosmic Disneyland. I don't know what the adventure is—I don't have to know—all I do know is that it's out there.'

Frank didn't say anything. God meant nothing to her and dead was dead. If there was a god, she'd reasoned when she was still a child, he wouldn't have taken her father and left her to care for a woman with one foot wedged in the nuthouse door. When Maggie died, she had irrefutable proof that there wasn't a god. She allowed people their beliefs like an indulgent parent allowed their child an invisible friend. Besides, she had so many of her own crutches she couldn't very well kick others' out from under them.

Still, she found it amusingly human that people persisted in believing in soft and warm and fuzzy. It was so much easier than admitting there was nothing out there, nothing waiting when your ticket finally got punched but oblivion. Frank didn't really think oblivion would be all that bad. Some days she felt it would be her reward for the hell she walked through now. So if Gail wanted to believe in trees and stars, and Mother Love Jones wanted to believe in chickens and hexes, then who was Frank to judge? It was still a free country.

'Look,' Frank said, trying to put an end to the interrogation. 'My dad was Catholic and he went to church once a year. My mom tried on religions like they were shoes. I had an aunt who was a devout Catholic and I've never seen a more pious, more bitter woman. My uncle hated the church and slammed it every chance he got, usually in front of my aunt just to drive her crazy. I didn't have any good role models for organized religion. Or unorganized religion for that matter. I learned that at the end of the day, all I could count on was me. And I haven't seen anything in forty years to change that.'

'How do you explain miracles?'

Frank frowned. 'Random circumstance.'

'I don't believe this,' Gail marveled, 'I'm in love with a raving atheist.'

'Ah, ah,' Frank corrected, shaking one finger. 'Agnostic, I don't believe in a god but I don't care if you believe in one. For all I know there might even be one and then won't I be in trouble. Now, can we drop this and go to bed?'

Gail followed Frank into the bedroom, grumbling, 'A drunken agnostic. How can I ever take you home to meet my mother?'

'You'll just have to play up my other attributes.'

'Remind me what they are.'

'Brilliant detective, superior commander. Exquisite lover. Gourmet chef and chief bottle-washer.'

'Not to mention smooth talker.'