The Good Atheist (8 page)

“I thought you were supposed to be sorting them,” she prodded.

When I didn’t answer, she carefully picked her footing through the books to get to me and stood next to the chair. “Jack. Did you hear me?”

I nodded absently.

“Honey, you’re acting strange – even for you. What’s wrong?”

I still held the letters on my lap. For an answer, I held them out to her.

“What’s this?”

“Letters from my dad.”

“What?”

“Just read them,” I said.

She took them from me and read them where she was, standing over me next to the chair. It didn’t take her long to finish.

“Are you sure? Marcus is a common name.”

“It’s safe to infer,” I said. “Marcus was my father’s name, and no one else is going to refer to my grandfather as Dad. And he asks about me, by name, as well as referring to me as ‘my son’. It’s a pretty safe bet.”

“Yes, but he’s dead, hon. There must be another explanation. Maybe ‘Dad’ is just an affectionate term. When I was a little girl, my mom had a friend named Clarissa. Mom had known her forever, and we called her Aunt Clarissa. She wasn’t a real aunt – it was an honorary title. This might be something like that.”

“Someone who just happens to be named Marcus? Who has a son named Jack? It’s too much of a coincidence. And the term ‘Dad’ is used too directly and too often. If my grandfather was an honorary ‘Dad’ to this person, than I think the term was being stretched an awful lot. And the writer also asks about me, remember, as his son.”

She nodded, getting the point. “But he died in a car accident when you were young.”

“So my mother says. But I only have her word on it, and we both know how reliable that is.”

“It was in the news. We’ve both seen the news stories.”

“Yeah, and we both know the news is never wrong, right?”

“But your mother wouldn’t lie about a thing like this.”

I just looked at her. I knew full well my mother’s capacity for lies and deceit. “It should be easy enough to check,” I said. “But it will have to wait until we return to the land of the living. We’ve got no internet or phone coverage out here in the boonies. But I think I know what I’m going to find.”

She sat on an arm of the chair, leaned in, and put her arms around me. I rested my head against her, and we remained like that for a long time, not saying anything.

Selene finally broke the silence. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know just yet. I still need more time to absorb this. The letters tells me he’s alive, but there is no indication where he is. He may not even know Grandpa is dead. He wasn’t at the funeral. He could be worried, wondering why the letters from Grandpa have stopped. I’m going to look around for more letters, pictures, documents, emails, anything that might tell me where he is and what happened to him.”

“Did you look in the desk?”

“What?”

“The desk, silly. In the old days when people wrote letters on paper, they would often keep them in a desk drawer. I remember my old Aunt Lillie doing that.”

Why hadn’t I thought of that? I spun around in the chair and searched the desk. I found a bundle of letters held together with a rubber band in one of the drawers. A quick look through the stack confirmed that they were from the same man – this Marcus who called my grandfather Dad.

“Bingo,” I said. I placed them with the other letters.

Selene looked around the room. “It’s late and we’ve had a long day. Let’s get to back to the motel. I wouldn’t mind getting a decent meal and a hot shower.”

I checked my watch. It was past dinner. “Why don’t we just stay here?”

She shook her head. “Uh-uh. I’m not spending the night in this dusty old place. I need to get back to civilization. Check my messages, get a hot shower. And I’m not sure how we can cook in this primitive kitchen. There are no droids to help us clean, and the stove can’t even cook. We’d have to do everything ourselves.”

I was too wired with excitement to leave. I had to stay. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I’d finished reading all the letters. But I could see the tiredness in her eyes. “Hon, why don’t you go ahead without me? I’ll stay, read the rest of the letters, and look around for anything else that might tell me more about my dad.”

“We can come back in the morning,” Selene suggested.

I shook my head. “No way. Don’t you get it? I’ve found evidence my dad is alive. There is a good chance that somewhere in this cottage will be something that tells me more about him, maybe even where he is. I’m not leaving until I’ve had a careful look, even if it takes all night. And I still need to sort out the banned books and pack them up so we can turn them in for burning.”

“All right,” she said. “If you want to stay that badly, I guess one night here won’t kill me.”

“I’ll be fine. Go back to the motel for the night.”

But Selene crossed her arms. “Nope. I’ll stay too. I can help sort the books.”

“Thanks,” I said, pulling her close to me.

“You’re welcome,” she said. She started to say more, but I stopped her with a kiss. After a few minutes she finally pushed me away. “Look, I’m giving up a decent night’s sleep and a hot shower for this, so let’s get on with it.” She turned to the nearest pile of books on the floor, and started picking through them.

It was going to be a long night, and coffee would be required. I left Selene in the den and went into the kitchen to see about making some. It was getting dark, and I commanded the house to turn on the lights, before remembering that this was a primitive home without artificial intelligence. I went around, manually flicking on lights. It felt odd to be in a house that would not answer questions or obey my commands. I would have to do everything the old-fashioned way. Manually flipping switches, turning knobs and even, for heaven’s sake, making my own coffee.

I found an old-fashioned coffee maker sitting on the counter next to the stove. It was the kind that you had to manually pour water into the top. I knew Grandpa had been a coffee drinker, and I dug around the kitchen cupboards until I found a can of coffee. Next to it were paper cone filters. I put a filter into the coffee maker, and poured some coffee grounds into it. I had to guess how much to use – Ellie normally made the coffee for us at home.

I pumped some water out of the tap at the sink, poured it into the coffee maker, turned the switch on, and waited. I stood at the counter, watching the coffee drip through. It seemed to take forever, but then everything seemed to take longer. Instead of feeling impatient, I found myself enjoying the slower pace and doing things for myself. And I enjoyed the quiet and solitude. There were no servbots or cleaning droids scurrying around. The house wouldn’t try to schedule my life. I could open the fridge door, and it wouldn’t give me dietary advice or make snide comments on my snack choices. And the stove wouldn’t try to tell me how to cook.

I could get used to this, I decided.

Maybe if I did more for myself, I wouldn’t need a gym membership to stay in shape.

I made a full pot of coffee and took a cup into Selene. She was busy organizing the books in neat stacks, separating the wheat from the chaff, the good – or at least the harmless – from the religious.

I took the rest of the pot of coffee, along with the letters, into the living room, and sat down next to a reading lamp. I began by sorting the letters in date order. My father had the habit of putting the date at the top of each letter, and soon I had them in order. The letters started almost seventeen years ago, shortly after the last time I saw him and, according to my mother, had run off with another woman. The last letter was dated December 15, 2057, just six months ago. I started reading in chronological order. There were almost a hundred – it was going to be a long night.

 I made a conscious decision to keep my emotions in check until I’d finished, but it was hard. At time the tears blurred my vision so much I had to stop reading and get myself back under control.

I lost track of time. I hadn’t heard a peep from Selene for a long while. I got up to stretch my legs and check on her. She was fast asleep, curled up in the big chair. She looked comfortable enough, so I decided to let her be. I went into a bedroom, pulled a blanket off one of the beds, and covered her up, carefully tucking it in around the edges. Then I went back into the kitchen and made a second pot of coffee before returning to my reading.

When I finished the last letter, I was convinced they were from my father, but they left me with more questions than answers. The picture of my father that emerged from the correspondence was completely different from what I’d been told by my mother. There was no mention of another woman, and there had never been a car crash. And he was in hiding from the Tolerance Bureau. That much was apparent. There were no concrete references to places or people. The letters seemed to be very carefully composed not to give any hint of his location.

And in some of the letters he would mention a major event in my life, such as my engagement and marriage to Selene. Apparently Dad and Grandpa had been keeping track of me, probably using one of the many social websites. This raised a host of questions: why didn’t he or Grandpa contact me? Sending me a message on my social page would have been easy enough. But they both chose to keep tabs on my life remotely, using the web, without ever contacting me.

It was also apparent that my father had become a Christian. He spoke often of his faith in Christ, which he said sustained him in the difficult conditions of his life. Clearly my mother had lied to me, big time. My father had not died in a car crash, and there had never been another woman.

I wondered why he’d become a Christian. He was an intelligent, well-educated man. An astronomer, a man of science. He was not the kind of person to indulge in superstitious nonsense. He’d never spoken to me about God, but then religious instruction of minors was illegal and carried some stiff jail time. Both my parents had been very devout atheists, volunteering at the local temple, joining in neighborhood watches. It didn’t make sense.

I set the letters down on the coffee table and got up from the couch. It was still pitch-black out the windows, and very late. But I couldn’t go to bed, not yet. The question consumed me, and tired as I was, I felt obsessed with the need to know why my father had come to believe in God.

You can tell a lot about a person by the books they read. Electric light from the den filtered through the frosted panes of the door into the living room. It seemed to me that the answers I wanted could very well be in there. Somewhere in this cottage.

Jorge had said that my grandfather had moved up here seventeen years ago – which would have been around the same time Dad disappeared. It was very likely that my father had spent time up here, likely read many of those same books in the den. My grandfather had gone to a lot of trouble to acquire those books, since paper books were rare and religious books in particular, having been banned for years, were now extremely difficult to find. I could safely assume that my grandfather considered them important and worth the risk of keeping, and therefore likely to be representative of the Christian faith. Certainly the Bible I had found in there would be.

Maybe reading those books would help me understand my father’s thought process and the reasons he might have become a believer.

And that was just the books in the den. This was a good-sized cottage, and a careful search might turn up more clues. Something that might indicate what had happened to my father and where he was now. A photo, an album, a souvenir, files on his computer – anything.

I came to see the cottage as a vital link to my father, and therefore to my own past. Very likely the only link I had to finding him.

I went into the den. Selene was still fast asleep in the chair with all the lights on. She’d made a good start in sorting the books, organizing them by subject matter in neat stacks on the floor. Many of the religious books were packed into some plastic crates she’d found in the shed.

I’d made a real mess of the room when I was tearing through the bookshelves looking for letters. I started placing the books back on the shelves, keeping them roughly in the same subject groupings that Selene had started, beginning with the religious books.

I picked through the religious books and tried to select a few to read. It was difficult to know where to start, but I found a few that claimed to be representative of the Christian faith and set them aside to read later.

At the bottom of one of the crates, underneath a stack of religious books, I found a thick brown envelope. I opened it up and pulled out a bundle of typewritten sheets of paper. The top page gave the title and name of the author:
The Rational Basis for Faith in an Intelligent Universe
, by Lucius Rex Singh. It was dated 2043. Fifteen years ago. And hand-scribbled in pen and ink underneath was a personal note from the author. The scribbling was messy, but after a moment I was able to decipher it.

To my good friend Marcus. May your faith continue to grow strong. L. R. Singh.

This was a manuscript for a book, personally autographed by the author for my father. I turned to the first page, which contained a summary. It claimed to provide a rational basis for faith, giving reasons why belief in God was supported by science. I set the manuscript on the desk and decided I would take it home for a careful reading. It was as good a place to start as any. I was most of the way through getting all the books off the floor and onto the shelves when Selene stirred. She opened her eyes, yawned, and stretched.

“Hey, sleepy head,” I said. Selene watched me pick another book out of a box and set it next to the others on the shelf.

“What are you doing?” she asked in a groggy voice.

“Putting the books back on the shelves.”

“I had the religious books boxed and ready to take to the incinerators. Why are you putting them back?”

“I don’t want to recycle them just yet. I want to keep them.”

She jumped out of the chair. “Jack, we can’t keep them. They’re banned. Even a lot of those history texts will be banned. We have to turn them in, you know that.”