Godless (20 page)

The gastropodarium is missing.

I watch Shin sleep. His breathing is choppy. His spidery fingers curl and twitch, and I can see his eyes moving beneath closed eyelids. Dreaming. I am afraid to wake him up. I am afraid he will not be the Shin I know. Was Dan right? Has Shin really gone off the deep end?

I sit down at his desk and open the sketchbook. Page after page is covered from edge to edge with his crabbed script. I start reading in the middle of the page.

… and I saw ten thousand towers descend on pillars of flame and as they settled upon the plain their members did bore deep into the firmament and inject new life into the parched soil, and the towers did crumble then and give their substance unto the Earth …

I wonder if the men who wrote the Bible were anything like Shin. I turn the page. More writing. Thousands of words. More words than I have written in my entire life. I flip through the pages, not reading, just staring at the sheer mass of words.

About two-thirds of the way through the book, the words abruptly end:

… for it is by my image that you shall know me, and it is by my image that you shall be saved.

I turn the page to a drawing of the St. Andrew Valley water tower: The Ten-legged One in all his glory, with every strut, seam, cable, and rivet precisely and lovingly rendered with the tip of an ultra-fine technical pen, a masterpiece of accuracy and detail. It must have taken him hours. Maybe days. I turn to the next page, and the next. More towers. Not just water towers, but towers of every description. Some of them I recognize. The Eiffel Tower. The twin towers of the World Trade Center, before it collapsed. Others are fantasy towers, convoluted, ornate constructions. But most of the drawings are of water towers. Towers with double and triple tanks. Towers with tanks balanced on impossibly thin columns. Water towers in flight. I page through slowly, astonished by the quality, precision, and detail of the illustrations. I knew Shin could draw, but I never knew he could draw like this.

I am looking at a picture of a pair of distorted dark towers standing on a mountaintop when I feel Shin's breath on my neck.

I spin around in the chair.

“Hey,” I say.

Shin's eyes are sleepy, his mouth is slack, his hair is sticking out all to one side.

He points at the dark towers. “My parents,” he says.

“How are you doing?” I ask.

“I'm good.” He turns the page. “This is me,” he says.
The drawing is of a tall, spidery, insubstantial-looking tower.

“What happened to your pods?”

“My pods?” He smiles. “I let them all go. I let my pods go.” He turns to a drawing of a tower with knotted, twisted legs and a distorted, angry-looking tank. “See this one? You know who this is?”

Oddly enough, I recognize it. “Is it Henry?”

“Right.” He turns the page to a sleek and jaunty five-legged tower.

“Magda,” I say.

He shows me more. Columns of towers representing the police; a great squat tank representing the St. Andrew Valley High School; a pallid, featureless tower that is unmistakably Dan Grant.

“Look,” he says, turning the page to a large, blocky water tower supported by four stout columns. The drawing is larger than any of the others, filling the page from edge to edge. “That's you,” he says.

I look at him, right in the eyes.

“Shin, are you crazy?”

“I don't know,” he says. “Do you think I am?”

“Well, this water tower stuff … it seems like you're, you know, so
into
it. You don't really think the water tower is God, do you?”

His eyebrows crumple. “Don't you?”

“As a joke, sure. But … no, I don't.”

He is looking at the sketchbook, at his rendering of Tower God Jason Bock.

“You said you did,” he says.

“Yeah, but I was—”

“How do you know it's not true if you don't believe in it?”

“I … huh?”

He looks up from the sketchbook and into my eyes. “How can you understand something you don't believe in?”

“Shin, that doesn't make any sense. That's like saying you can't understand leprechauns unless you believe in them.”

“Do you understand leprechauns?”

“I don't believe in them.”

“There you go.”

A
ND IN THE END, ONLY THE
O
CEAN REMAINED, AND THE
O
CEAN WAS ALONE
.

31
 

I met with my father the other day
to give him my book reports. The meeting got off to a rough start when I told him that I had written nothing.

“Here's my report,” I said, empty-handed. “I didn't care for any of them.”

He stares at me, his face showing nothing. “You read them all?”

“I read as much as I could. They're all pretty much the same.”

“Oh? You're telling me that
Teen Jesus
is indistinguishable from Thomas Merton's
The Seven Storey Mountain!
”

“They all require a belief in a supreme being. If you don't believe in God, then the books don't mean much.”

My father sighed and sat back and said, “You think you're an atheist, then?”

“I'm not sure what I am.”

He looked at me for a long time then. I think it was the longest time he has ever looked at me without saying anything. Finally, he spoke.

“I'm sorry to hear that, Jason.”

“Why?”

“Because it means you've got a long, lonely road ahead of you.”

“It's my road.”

“You're right about that.” His shoulders dropped and I felt something go out of him, as if he had been holding his breath for years and had suddenly remembered to exhale.

“All right then,” he said, his mouth curved into a sad smile. It wasn't one of his usual looks—angry, bewildered, impatient, friendly, curious, or astonished. It was more of a
level
look, a look of recognition and understanding.

“All right then … what?” I asked.

“You're sixteen, old enough to make your own choices. I'm not going to force anything on you. If you don't want to go to church anymore, that's up to you. TPO meetings are optional. Worship water towers, trees, frogs, whatever.”

“What's the catch?”

He laughed, shaking his head. “There are a lot of perfectly good religions out there. You're a smart kid, Jason. I know you'll find what you're looking for.”

One week before school starts I am at Crossroads Mall to buy myself a new pair of shoes—I wore out my last pair out on Route 17. I am hulking along the mezzanine, imagining myself as a mountain troll from Middle Earth, when I see Henry and Magda. Henry is still on crutches. Magda is walking with him, talking and laughing, carrying two shopping bags in one hand and touching his arm with the other. I stop and watch them approach. They are so wrapped up in each other they don't notice me until they are about to crash right into me.

“Jay-boy!” Henry says. “What are you doing here? I thought you were grounded for the next ten years.”

“They let me out,” I say, feeling excessively surly and trollish.

“Hi, Jason,” Magda says, her face carefully composed.

I ignore her.

“Haven't seen any graffiti on the water tower lately,” I say to Henry. “Was spelling out all those words too hard for your stooges?”

“Nah, but after your buddy Schinner tried to drown himself they put some motion detectors on the tower. We haven't figured out how to get past 'em, but we will. Soon as this thing—” He raps his plastic splint with a crutch. “—comes off.”

Looking down at Henry, I wonder what Magda can possibly see in this skinny little guy on crutches. He can't even go shopping without a girl to carry his bags. I
can hardly believe that, just a few weeks ago, I was afraid of him. There are plenty of scarier things in this world than Henry Stagg's knobby fists, especially to an oversize, leather-skinned mountain troll such as myself.

I look at him and laugh.

“What's so funny?” he says suspiciously.

“You are,” I say, feeling reckless and angry. I turn to Magda and put an extra dash of nasty in my voice. “Haven't seen you at TPO lately.” I had gone to the last three TPO meetings, mostly in hopes of seeing Magda, but she never showed up. Avoiding me, probably. Do I take it personally? Hell, yes.

“I've been busy,” she says.

“Busy with
Henry
?”

“That is none of your business,” she says, her big eyes becoming slits.

I look at Henry, who is scowling dangerously, then back at Magda.

“You could do better,” I say, jerking my thumb in Henry's direction.

I see Henry's right arm move, but he's too fast for me. His crutch whacks me across the side of my head and I go down like a 230-pound sack of lard. Next thing I know I'm staring up at Henry Stagg's flushed, knotted features, and above him the bright white fluorescent light fixtures are spinning and I hear Magda's voice crying, “Omigod! Omigod!”

They're keeping me overnight in the hospital because I
have a mild concussion from my head hitting the floor. It took seven stitches to sew my scalp back together, which will leave a really interesting scar. My mother is hysterical, of course. My father wants to press charges. Henry is banished forever from Crossroads Mall. And Magda sent me a bunch of flowers and a get well card.

Yeah, my head hurts right now, but as Henry might say, “You live to be a hundred, you're gonna remember it like it was yesterday.”

The middle of the night in a hospital is a good time to think. It's mostly quiet (except for the constant beeping of machines, and the occasional death rattle) and there is nothing to do
but
think. So I've been thinking about Shin, remembering what he said to me last time I saw him—that you can't really understand something until you believe in it. It sounded crazy to me at the time, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. For example, you can't really understand what it means to be Catholic (or Muslim, or whatever) unless you have faith. And you can't understand algebra unless you believe in numbers. Same deal with gastropods and water towers.

Maybe Shin's got it right. He just decides to believe in something, then he dives right in. I suppose in a few weeks he'll get rid of the water tower obsession just as he got rid of his snails, and move on to something new. Leprechauns, maybe. Does that make him crazy? I don't know. In a way I envy him. He always seems to know what he wants.

I envy my father, too. I envy his unshakable belief in the Catholic Church—his faith gives him power and contentment. I envy everyone who has a religion they can believe in. I envy Henry and Magda, who believe in each other. I even envy Dan, who thinks I'm a dangerous heretic.

Me? I have Chutengodianism—a religion with no church, no money, and only one member. I have a religion, but I have no faith. Maybe one day I'll find a deity I can believe in. Until then, my god is made of steel and rust.