Staring at the Sun (23 page)

7. That God didn’t actually create Man and the Universe: he merely
inherited
them. He was quietly sheep-farming out in some celestial Australia when a panting cub reporter from a local newspaper tracked him down and explained
that because of some genealogical jiggery-pokery (unconsummated marriage, a dollop of virgin birth and what-have-you) he had inherited possession of the earth and all that is contained therein. He could no more reject the inheritance than, say, lose the power to fly.

8. That God did exist, doesn’t exist at the moment, but will exist again in the future. He is merely taking a divine sabbatical at the moment. This would explain a lot.

9. That God hasn’t existed so far at all, but will exist in the future. He will arrive at some point to clear away our garbage, trim the grass in the public parks and gentrify the neighbourhood. God is an overworked maintenance man in a stained boiler suit with far too many planets to look after. We should consider paying more and having a regular maintenance contract instead of calling him out on an emergency basis as we do now.

10. That God and Man are not the separate entities we tend to imagine, and the connection is much stronger than merely having an eternal soul—God’s bit, as it were—stuck inside a throwaway body. Perhaps the connection is like that of two children running a three-legged race.

11. That Man is really God and God is really Man, but some ontological trick with mirrors prevents us from seeing things as they really are. If so, who set up the mirrors?

12. That there are several Gods. This might explain a lot. (a) They might always be quarrelling, and so no one is minding the shop. (b) They might be paralysed by an excess of democracy, like the United Nations; each God has a veto, and so nothing gets past the Security Council. Small wonder that our planet is derelict. (c) This subdivision of responsibility has weakened their strength and weakened their concentration. They might be able to see what is going wrong and yet do nothing about it; perhaps the gods are benign but powerless, perhaps they can merely look on like eunuchs in a harem.

13. That there is a God, and that he did create the world, but that it is only a first draft—a botch, in other words. Creating a world is a pretty complicated business, after all: should you expect even God to get it right first time? There are bound to be a few wrinkles—disease, mosquitoes, stuff like that—in any trial run. God created us and then moved off to some other end of the universe where the drainage is better and the gravity isn’t so tricky. He could have destroyed this botched first attempt, of course, screwed it up into a ball and finger-flicked it into outer space as a comet or something. It’s a sign of his magnanimity that he didn’t. Of course he made sure that it didn’t hang around forever—he fixed it so that after a while the earth would collapse into the sun and burn up—but he didn’t object to our having squatters’ rights in the meantime. Go on, have it for the eyeblink of a few millennia, God said, it isn’t any use to me. And perhaps he drops in on us occasionally, just to check that things haven’t got too bad. God is a juggler with a lot of spinning plates. We were his first plate, and we tend to get neglected. We wobble and flag a great deal on our pole; the audience worries for us; but always the divine forefinger gives our planet another twirl in time.

14. That we are all fragments of a God who destroyed himself at the beginning of Time. Why did he do so? Perhaps he simply didn’t want to live: he was a Swedish God, a Robeck. This would account for a lot, maybe everything: the universe’s imperfections, our sense of cosmic loneliness, our longing to believe—even our suicidal impulses. If we are fragments of a self-slaughtering God, then it is natural, even holy, that we should want to kill ourselves. Some of those early Christian martyrs (whose haste to die makes them look like pushy
arrivistes
seeking an early place in heaven) might in fact have been no more than devoted suicides. One vivid heresy had even considered Christ a
suicide, on the grounds that he told his life to depart and it did. Perhaps these heretics were right: Christ was only following the example of his Father.

Gregory played with such possibilities until his brain was exhausted. He slept, and when he woke found the following story. God exists and has always existed; he is omnipotent and omniscient; Man has free will and is punished if he uses that free will for evil purposes; we cannot hope to understand, in this brief earthly existence, the manner in which God works; it suffices to recognize him, love him, let him radiate through our being, to obey and honour him. The old story, the first story: Gregory eased himself into it. A comfortable jacket, an armchair fitted to your shape by long use, the wooden handle of an old saw, a jazz tune with all its parts, a footprint in the sand which fits your shoe. That’s better, Gregory thought, that feels right; then laughed at himself uneasily.

Who can tell what is brave? It was often said—especially by those who have never seen a battlefield—that in war the bravest were the least imaginative. Was this true; and if true, did this reduce their courage? If you are more brave because you can imagine mutilation and death in advance and put them to one side, then those who can imagine these things most vividly, who can summon up in advance the fear and pain, are the bravest. But those with this capacity—to see extinction before them in 3D—are usually called cowards. Are the bravest, then, only failed cowards, cowards without the guts to run away?

Is it brave to believe in God, Gregory wondered. Well, at the low level, it might be brave because few people believe in him nowadays, and it is a kind of courage to remain steadfast in the face of apathy. At the high level, it is brave because you are elevating yourself to the status of God’s creation; you are proposing yourself as something higher than a clod of clay—which takes some daring. You are also, perhaps, offering yourself up to the possibility of final judgment: does your nerve still hold at the thought of that? When you say you believe in God, you are the child who raises his hand
in class. You draw attention to yourself, and you receive a public decision: Right or Wrong. Imagine that moment. Imagine the fear.

Is it braver not to believe in God? Again, at a low level, this demands a certain tactical courage. You are telling God he doesn’t exist: what if he does? Will you be able to handle the moment when he reveals himself to you? Imagine the shame. Imagine the loss of face. And at a higher level, you are declaring the certainty of your own nonexistence. I end. I do not go on. You are not even giving yourself a sporting chance in the matter. You are complacent in the face of extinction; you decline to contest its smug dominion over you. You stretch out on your deathbed confident that you have understood the question of life; you boldly declare for the void. Imagine that moment. Imagine the fear.

There were some who believed in the courage of laughter. The way to defeat death is to mock it: decline to take it at its own high estimation and you take away its terror. With a joke we disarm eternity. Scared? Not me. Eternal life? I can take it or leave it. Does God exist? Have another slice of pork pie. Gregory in his younger days had been attracted by the cosmic smirk; but no longer. We all fear death; we would all prefer some system of eternal life, even if we had it only on approval to start off with. Six thousand years of afterlife, sale or return, no obligation to make a final purchase: we’d all fill in that coupon. And so Gregory declined to join those who laughed at death. Laughing at death is like pissing in the waist-high bracken beside a golf course. You see steam rising, and you persuade yourself that this denotes heat.

Fifteen, Gregory thought. That there is no God, but there
is
eternal life. This would be an interesting system. After all, do we technically need them both? We could organize eternal life without God’s help, couldn’t we? Children, left to themselves, invent games and rules. We could surely manage to run things on our own. Our record so far may not be that good, but the conditions under which we’ve been labouring in these brief terrestrial lives of ours have been less than perfect. I mean, for a start there was a lot of ignorance around, and then our material circumstances left much to be desired,
and there was some pretty terrible weather, and then just when our kings and our wise men began to get things into some kind of order, this terribly, terribly
unfair
backhander called mortality comes along and wipes them all out. Had to start again with a brand-new set of kings and wise men. Hardly surprising in the light of this that we frequently take two paces forward and one back. Whereas, if we had eternal life … there’s no knowing what we might not achieve.

“Let me show you something,” Jean said. She took out a cigarette, lit it and began to smoke.

After a minute or two, Gregory said, “What is it?”

“Wait and see.”

He waited; she smoked; the ash on her cigarette grew longer, but did not fall. He looked puzzled at first, then watched her seriously, then began smiling. Finally he said, “I didn’t know you were a magician.”

“Oh, we can all do magic,” Jean said, and laid down her pillar of ash. “Uncle Leslie taught me this one. He told me the secret not long before he died. You just put a needle down the middle of the cigarette. Then it’s easy.”

In bed, Gregory began to brood about his mother’s trick. She had never done anything like it before. Was she trying to tell him something? Her motives were becoming ever more opaque. Perhaps the needle in the cigarette was meant to be the soul in the body, or something like that. But his mother didn’t believe in such things; she had once told him approvingly about an old Chinese philosopher who had written an essay called “The Destructibility of the Soul.” Perhaps she was saying that the needle in the cigarette was like the soul in the body in this respect: that it was only a trick—something which made us seem impressive, but which in the end was really no more than an ordinary piece of magic. He would have asked what she meant, except that increasingly she chose not to answer questions if she didn’t feel like it. She would merely smile; and he didn’t know if she was just a clever old woman or if she hadn’t been paying attention.

In the Temple of Heaven, through a Chinaman’s ear, you hear soft Western voices. What are they saying? What are they saying?

Gregory went to consult TAT on a morning when the grey sky sat low and flat on the city like a saucepan lid. He had a doctor’s certificate and a permission slip signed by Jean. A girl receptionist in a blue-green suit with an official lapel pin gave him a will form and showed him how to use the auto witnessing machine. She smiled confidingly and said, “It’s not as bad as it seems.”

Gregory felt cross with her. He didn’t want to be told that everything was really all right, that there was nothing to worry about. He wanted the formalities to be extensive, the gravity to be impressive, the fear to come easily. He wanted them to make him bring overnight things in a holdall. He wanted them to take away his tie and shoelaces at the door. For God’s sake, you only come to TAT once in your life: why couldn’t they make it more of an event?

Gregory had little interest in politics. To him the history of his country consisted of a neurotic shuffle between repression and anarchy, and those periods praised for their stability were merely chance instants of balance: points at which both anarchy and repression briefly had their appetites gratified. When the state was being nasty it called itself decisive; when sloppy, it called itself democratic. Look what was happening to marriage. He had never married himself, but he was appalled at the way others did the deed. People wanted to get married with no more sense of seriousness and occasion than they might bring to picking up a hitchhiker; so that was democratically permitted. Some state official would arrive like a baker’s roundsman, knock discreetly on the back door and whisper, “It’s quite all right about you two being married, you know. On the other hand, if you don’t want to, that’s quite all right as well.” Just so that no one felt the strain of commitment, of seriousness …

Well, maybe he was just getting old. And if that was what they all wanted—as the computervote had emphatically confirmed—
then that, he supposed, was what they should be allowed to have. Even so, he thought the approach to TAT ought to have been made a little more bracing, a little more austere. It felt no more formal than going into hospital.

The receptionist flipped his three forms onto her desk—one skimmed down to the floor, but she didn’t bother to pick it up—and led him along a buff corridor. The carpet was the colour of the receptionist’s uniform, and the walls were hung with the originals of newspaper cartoons about the opening of TAT. Gregory fleetingly noticed the TAT building portrayed as a mincing machine, a psychiatric hospital, a crematorium and a state video parlour. He sighed disapprovingly: why did the place display such a cheerful collusion in the popular image of itself?

He was left in a cubicle which, apart from its blue-green colour, looked like any other GPC cubicle. He expected a happy-pill dispenser, or a spy hole, or a mirror that might be two way; or
something
. But the room looked ordinary, even a bit scruffy, and the TAT console no different from any GPC input. There was nobody keeping him here, or looking after him, or suggesting how he might proceed. He was free, it seemed, to do as he liked; there was a lock on the inside of the door, but not the outside. So where had all these myths started, the ones in which TAT-enquirers were strapped onto couches like laboratory animals and force-fed truth until they vomited it out?

Gregory entered his social security number and GPC reference, then waited for instructions. A surprisingly long minute went by before the
READY
sign came on and the green cursor started to flash. He wondered how to begin. The mesmerizing diamond blinked relentlessly, like a blip on a surgical monitor: as long as it continued, he was still alive … Then it became the blip on a radar screen: as long as it continued his aircraft had not gone missing … Then it was the blip of an auto-lighthouse: beware the rocks, beware the rocks … He flipped Input but continued to stare at the green diamond. Maybe it was designed to have some hypnotic effect. No, that was too paranoid.