‘But at least he means well.’
‘Also rather repetitive, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Mm. He plods through his premise. And then after he’s done that, with that out of the way, he plods through it again. Besides, it isn’t the only body part I’ve used for blasphemy.’
‘…Sorry, Hitch, I don’t get you. What other body parts?’
‘Well, my dick, I suppose, and my brain and my tongue. But that’s the least of it. Think what sort of god is being summoned. Literal-minded, thin-skinned, madly insecure, and wildly childish.’
‘Especially childish…You know, when Nat wasn’t quite two, I displeased him in some way, and he scowled at me fiercely as I left the room. A couple of minutes later I came back in – and he was astonished to see me.’
‘That you’d survived. Because he’d wished you dead.’
‘Dead or at least very fucked up. And there I was, bold as brass and still breathing, if you please. For about six months children think they’re omnipotent.’*1
‘Boy children anyway. Alexander was like that, except he didn’t want to use lightning bolts. He wanted to do the job himself. But not even children insist on being metronomically praised.’
I asked him, ‘How would you feel, no, what would you think, if you got scanned in the morning and found you were miraculously cured. Miraculously.’
—————
This subsection is a flashback. Our talk about blasphemy took place in Washington DC, on Everyone Pray for Hitchens Day, which fell on September 20, 2010 (Houston and the synchrotron were still six months ahead of him).
Yes, Everyone Pray for Hitchens Day. So far as the religious community was concerned, the Christopher prognosis – made public that June – was the most newsworthy development in almost a decade. God hadn’t had this kind of attention since September 11.
So Christopher at that point was on the receiving end of innumerable communications from the nation’s churchgoers. And although a fraction of them were written by admirers and proponents of hellfire, the rest were expressions of solicitude – and love. One day earlier, in the hall, as I made my re-entry, he showed me some of it, or rather showed me some of the extent of it: hefty hardboard folders, in stacks. I said,
‘That’s the key thing about you, Hitch. You excite love.’
He said, ‘My dear Little Keith…’
‘Even among the puritans. Who don’t know what a dirty little bastard you really are. But the love, Hitch – it’s the key thing. When was an essayist last loved?’
…Some correspondents said tenderly that they would refrain from praying for him (out of respect for his ‘deepest convictions’) and other correspondents said even more tenderly that they were going to pray for him anyway.
When two acquaintances, both of them evangelical clerics, reported that their congregations were praying for him, Christopher wrote back with the question: Praying, exactly, for what?
And of course it turned out that these letters weren’t get-well-soon cards, or not in the normal sense. We are, to be sure, concerned about your health, too, but that is a very secondary consideration. While they’d be pleased enough if Christopher’s body put itself right, their primary consideration was the fate of his soul.
Apart from all the religious (and all the secular) websites devoting themselves to the Hitch, a further online amenity encouraged you to place bets on whether or when he would lose his nerve – would crack, and hurriedly convert.
It was now nearly half past eleven. Hesitantly and of course drunkenly, I said,
‘Put aside Pascal’s Wager for now – Christ, how did that ever get itself capitalised? – and just think about Bohr’s Tease.’*2
It was five to twelve and Christopher said, ‘If on the stroke of midnight I became cancer free I’d be overjoyed, but I wouldn’t go down on my knees. I’d be delighted to thank a doctor. But I’m not saying o gracias – aw, muchísimas gracias – to no Nobodaddy.’
‘…And anyway, prayer’s so potent that it doesn’t care if you don’t believe in it.’
‘Still, it would be a very irritating coincidence…Our blogger friend – the Hellfire artist. If he thinks God awards the appropriate cancers, what does he make of childhood leukaemia? They haven’t blasphemed, they haven’t sinned. And they haven’t spent forty-five years living like there’s no tomorrow, let alone no eternity.’
Everyone Pray for Hitchens Day was a Monday. Christopher and his entourage were not especially disheartened to find him unrecovered on Tuesday morning.
At this point he was no longer living as if there was no tomorrow. He was still smoking and drinking (up to a point), and he was still eating, and he was still talking (all four habits would soon be in serious question). He was still writing his thousand words a day and he was still engaging in public debates. And he was still giving time to pundits and profilists: open a paper or a magazine, and there’d almost always be something about the Hitch.
Once or twice Christopher described these pieces as gun-jumping obituaries, but the ones I saw were careful to avoid the slightest suggestion of finality. His younger fans and followers, in particular, always signed off rousingly, with something like If anyone can beat cancer, it’s Hitchens or Up against Hitchens, cancer doesn’t have a chance. Although I approved and concurred, I could tell that these codas were to some degree expressions of hope – rhetorical hope.
My hope wasn’t rhetorical. It was actual. Christopher, I was sure, would win his fight, whether anyone prayed for him or not. But I must have known – mustn’t I? – that cancer at least had a chance.
Texas: Come again another day
The word went forth from the state house in Austin. Governor Rick Perry announced with no little pomp (‘I do hereby proclaim’) that April 22–24, 2011, Good Friday through Easter Sunday
