36 Arguments for the Existence of God (2 page)

For thirty-five weeks now, Cass has had the privilege of acquiring this intimacy of information regarding Lucinda Mandelbaum: her rituals of brushing and flossing and exfoliating and lotioning; the facts that she gets hiccoughs if she eats hard-boiled eggs too quickly and that her cold hands and feet are the result of Raynaud’s syndrome; that she had spent her junior year of college at Oxford and had acquired a taste for certain British products that she orders from a Web site called British Delights; that as a girl she had wanted to be either a concert pianist or Nancy Drew; that she sometimes makes a whole dinner of a product called Sticky Toffee Pudding, is mildly libertarian in her politics, and gasps always with the same sound of astonishment in lovemaking.

How is it that Cass Seltzer is intimate with the texture of Lucinda Mandelbaum’s life? His election—in that old crazy Calvinist sense, about which Cass knows more than a little—is absolute.

Suspended here above the ice-stilled Charles, he pictures Lucinda asleep, her mouth slightly open and her delicate eyelids fluttering in dreams—oh, make them happy!

She usually falls asleep before him, and the sight of her sleeping always wrenches his heart. All that mental power temporally suspended, her lashes reclining on the delicate curve of her high cheekbone, her fluffy ash-blond hair released from its daytime restraints and spread fragrant and soft on her Tempur-Pedic pillow. He sees the little girl she must have been. He sees the phantom child yet to be, materializing before his mind with her mother’s incandescent skin and hair, her gray eyes outlined in blue and lit with points of fierce intelligence. Watching Lucinda sleeping or absentmindedly playing with a strand of hair while she scratches out the esoteric symbols of her science, or leaving their front gate—with its sign left over from the previous owners, “Please close the gate, remember our children”—the force of the fantasy catches him off guard.

Nobody out there is keeping the books, of course, but maybe he’s earned the right to such happiness? Maybe the years he’d given up to mourning Pascale have paid out a retributive dividend? No. He knows
better than to believe in such hocus-pocus, nothing else but more spilled religion.

Pascale’s absurd scarf mummying him up to his rimless glasses, he hadn’t thought much about where he would go at this hour and had headed straight for Harvard Square and then down to the river, and then up onto Weeks Bridge, dead center, which seems to be the spot that he’d been seeking.

The night is so cold that everything seems to have been stripped bare of superfluous existence, reduced to the purity of abstraction. Cass has the distinct impression that he can see better in the sharpened air, that the cold is counteracting the nearsightedness that has had him wearing glasses since he was twelve. He takes them off and, of course, can’t see a thing, can barely see past the nimbus phantom of his own breath.

But then he stares harder and it seems that he
can
see better, that the world has slid into sharper focus. It’s only now, with his glasses off, that he catches sight of the spectacle that the extreme cold has created in the river below, frozen solid except where it’s forced through the three arches of the bridge’s substructure, creating an effect that could reasonably be called sublime, and in the Kantian sense: not cozily beautiful, but touched by a metaphysical chill. The quickened water has sculpted three immense and perfect arches into the solid ice, soaring fifty or sixty feet to their apices, sublime almost as if by design. The surface of the water in the carved-out breaches is polished to obsidian, lustered to transparency against the white-blue gleam of the frozen encasement, and, perspective askew, the whole of it looks like a cathedral rising endlessly, the arches becoming windows opening out onto vistas of black.

Standing dead center on Weeks Bridge, in the dead of winter in the dead of night, staring down at the sublime formation, Cass is contemplating the strange thing that his life has become.

To him. His life has become strange to him. He feels as if he’s wearing somebody else’s coat, grabbed in a hurry from the bed in the spare bedroom after a boozy party. He’s walking around in someone else’s bespoke cashmere while that guy’s got Cass’s hooded parka, and only Cass seems to have noticed the switch.

What has happened is that Cass Seltzer has become an intellectual celebrity. He’s become famous for his abstract ideas. And not just any
old abstract ideas, but
atheist
abstract ideas, which makes him, according to some of the latest polls, a spokesperson for the most distrusted minority in America, the one that most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry.

This is a fact. Studies have found that a large proportion of Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays, and communists, in “sharing their vision of American society.” Atheists, the researchers reported, seem to be playing the pariah role once assigned to Catholics, Jews, and communists, seen as harboring alien and subversive values, or, more likely, as having no inner values at all, and therefore likely to be criminals, rapists, and wild-eyed drug addicts.

“As if,” as Cass often finds himself saying into microphones, “the only reason to live morally is fear of getting caught and being spanked by the heavenly father.”

Cass Seltzer has become the unlikely poster boy for this misunderstood group. His is a good face for counteracting the fallacy of equating godlessness with vice. Handsome, but not in a way to make the squeamish consider indeterminate sexual orientation, Cass has a fundamental niceness written all over him. He’s got a strong jaw, a high ovoid forehead from which his floppy auburn hair is only just slightly receding, and the sweetest, most earnest smile this side of Oral Roberts University. Is this a man who could possibly go out and commit murder and mayhem, rape our virgin daughters, and shoot controlled substances into his veins?

His life has been largely commandeered not only by Sy Auerbach, the literary agent-cum-cultural impresario who represents him, but by a speakers’ agent, publicists, media escorts, and other attendants who two years ago were as alien to him as atheists remain (despite Cass’s best efforts) to the majority of Americans.

No wonder, then, that Cass undergoes moments when he feels he’s lost the
feel
of his own life, its narrative continuity, the very essence of which was insignificance and an obscure yearning in many directions. The loss hardly matters, since he likes this new narrative so much better, likes it too much to own it fully as his own.

For the most part, fame is agreeable to Cass. For one thing, people treat him more nicely. It’s a revelation to learn what a nice bunch of upright mammals we’re capable of being. Everybody happily, gratefully, applies
the Golden Rule when it comes to interacting with the famous. Thou must treat the famous as thou wouldst wish to be treated thyself. Easy! If only everybody could be famous, we would all be effortlessly altruistic.

Of course, notoriety presents its own challenges. Last week, a girl had shown up after one of his lectures with a copy of his book and asked him if he “signed body parts.” Before he could find his voice or gain control over the blush spreading beyond his high hairline, she rolled up her sweater and offered him the heartbreaking baby innocence of her tender inner arm. Not knowing what else to do, wishing the present moment to become the past as quickly as possible, he had mutilated the butterfly softness in the tiniest spider scrawl he could manage.

“It must be that Seltzer boyishness I keep reading about,” Auerbach had said, laughing, when Cass had told him about it, wanting his reassurance that this sort of thing was within the bounds of the normal, that it didn’t transgress an academic’s sacred trust to the impressionable young. “Stop worrying and start enjoying. Anyway, why isn’t it a good thing if a guy like Cass Seltzer becomes a cult figure? Why not you rather than a Scientologist moron like Tom Cruise? Think about it, Seltzer.”

Seltzer is still thinking.

This boyishness of his: before this year, that quality listed awkwardly in the direction of a handicap, socially and professionally, not to speak of romantically. Not that there had been any romances to speak of during that long cold February of the soul that had arced from the day six years ago when Pascale regained her speech and announced the end of their marriage until that day two and a half years ago, when Lucinda Mandelbaum had sat down next to him at the first Friday-afternoon Psychology Outside Speaker lecture of the new fall semester. But now, under the transfiguration of his fame, even his boyishness has become charmed. He’s no boy (forty-two), but he has got boyish looks and boyish ways, of which he used to be boyishly unaware, until he read himself described as “boyish” in several newspapers, magazines, and blogs too many. So now when he goes bounding across some stage, his hair flapping a bit round his ears in time with his eager strides, somewhere in the recesses of his mind he knows that this is boyish, and that this is good.

He knows now, too, from the profiles, that though he’s a tall and lanky man—well, of course, that he knew—he carries himself as if he weren’t,
as if, as one of the features had put it, “he’s almost apologetic to be taking up so much vertical space.” It’s actually less embarrassing to read these personal descriptions of himself than he would have imagined. It’s hard to take the person featured in these articles seriously as the Cass Seltzer that he’s known all his life.

Cass is still trying to assimilate the fact that his book has become an international sensation, translated into twenty-seven languages, including Latvian. He understands that it’s not just a matter of what he’s written—as much as he’d like to believe it is—but also a matter of the rare intersection of the preoccupations of his lifetime with the turmoil of the age. When Cass, in all the safety of his obscurity, set about writing a book that would explain how irrelevant the belief in God can be to religious experience—so irrelevant that the emotional structure of religious experiences can be transplanted to completely godless contexts with little of the impact lost—and when he had also, almost as an afterthought, included as an appendix thirty-six arguments for the existence of God, with rebuttals, his claim being that the most thorough demolition of these arguments would make little difference to the felt qualities of religious experience, he’d had no idea of the massive response his efforts would provoke.

He would never have dubbed himself an atheist in the first place, not because he believes—he certainly doesn’t—but because he believes that belief is beside the point. It’s the Appendix that’s pushed him into the role of atheism’s spokesperson, a literary afterthought that has remade his life.

Tomorrow morning, he will meet with Shimmy Baumzer, the president of Frankfurter University, who will affect his I’m-just-a-hick-from-a-kibbutz demeanor, the better to cover up just how masterful an operator he is.

“What do I have to offer you to keep you from deserting us for those shmendriks up the river?” Cass knows that Baumzer will say to him, because that’s what he had said to Cass’s former colleague Marty Huffer, now at Harvard, three years ago, when Huffer’s research on the psychology of happiness had hit the big time in a book that a mainstream publisher had brought out to a sizable audience and which had been Huffer’s ticket out of Frankfurter.

It was Huffer’s editor to whom Cass had originally sent the manuscript of
The Varieties of Religious Illusion
. Cass knew his name from Huffer’s endless regaling of his former colleagues with tales from the life now lived far above their heads. The editor had called six weeks after Cass had sent the manuscript to him, just at the point when Cass was considering which university press to send it to next, and had invited him to lunch in New York. Over grilled branzini, he had allowed that Cass’s approach was interesting, “especially the Appendix. I liked it. It’s more provocative than the rest of the book. I don’t suppose you could switch it around and make the Appendix the book and the book the Appendix, could you?” While Cass was still gaping, the editor had named his figure.

“This is the absolute upper limit of what I can offer,” he had said, the slightest seizure distorting his upper lip.

Going back on the Acela Express—this was the first time Cass had ever taken the expensive high-speed train rather than the slower regional or, more often, the Chinatown bus, which makes the run from New York’s Chinatown to Boston’s for fifteen dollars and only occasionally catches fire—the fumes of his euphoria making him so giddy that he had laughed aloud twice and sufficiently startled the starchy matron next to him so that she had changed places well before she detrained at New Haven, Cass had suddenly thought back to the editor’s oddly defensive words and the equally odd look on his face while he had said them, a suppressed smile of some sort making merry with his upper lip.

René Descartes identified the seat of the soul as the pineal gland, but in Cass’s experience it’s the upper lip that reflects the true state of the soul, giving accurate tells on the self-regarding emotions. Self-doubt and self-satisfaction will both betray themselves there. And if there is an egotist lurking within, the upper lip is the place that will give him away.

Flashed by the backside of New London, Connecticut, Cass thought back to the editor’s self-congratulatory upper lip and felt the touch of a misgiving tugging at the edge of his elation. Back in Cambridge, he called Marty Huffer, asking him what he thought of the offer. Ninety seconds after he had hung up with Huffer, Cass’s phone had rung, with Huffer’s agent, Sy Auerbach, on the line.

“You can’t possibly accept a contract for a book like that without representation,” Auerbach had informed—or flattered or rebuked—him.

“But I already all but said yes to him,” Cass tried to explain. “I think I may have verbally committed myself to him.”

“No such thing. From now on, I’m the one he deals with. I’m your representative. Do you get it?”

“I’m not entirely sure.”

“Well, here’s something that might help you process it. If I can’t get you more than that offer, then I’ll forgo my commission.”