Roger's Version (29 page)

Yet Dale’s presentation was halting, and at points his voice dragged to a long pause; it was as if he had rehearsed this moment in his mind so often that when it finally came he had no energy to give it. He was at the end of his strength. He seemed resigned to rejection.

Smelling blood, Jeremy said, in his gravelly grieving dark voice, “Since Kant and Kierkegaard on up through William James and Heidegger, religion has planted itself within subjectivity. Subjectivity is religion’s proper domain. We must not let ourselves be tempted out of that domain. You start poking around with this sort of pseudo-science, you’ll be right back to magic and fundamentalism of the least defensible sort. Good-bye, moral imperatives; hello, voodoo.”

Rebecca said, “But, Jere, aren’t you really being a bit un-Biblical? The God of Abraham and Moses wasn’t a subjective phenomenon only; the Israelites experienced Him with their total being, as history. They argued with Him, even wrestled with Him. They were
covenanted
by Him. You wouldn’t want to be the one to say to God, You can’t come into history, You can’t come into the objective world!”

“Every day of the week,” Closson said, clearing his throat with a nicotine-induced scrape, “prayers invite Him in; and the damnedest thing is, nobody knows, after all these years, if He’s come in or not!”

“What
Ah
worry about,” said the Reverend Ed Snea with his ceremonious Southern twang, “is, supposing these computers in the kind of array that Mr. Kohler has described to us
do
acquire something like intelligence, doesn’t that mean they
will acquire a subjectivity also, and so even if one of them testifies that in the objective sense there is an Absolute, is that going to mean any more than the testimony of some Jesus Saves hillbilly from the backwoods of Tennessee?”

“Or than that of the Aztec maiden who believed enough in Huitzilopochtli to let the priests tear her heart from her living breast.” Closson’s reptilian eyes twinkled and his foul brown mouth creaked open in a little silent laugh. Religion, it came to me, had never ceased to amuse him.

“What
Ah’d
like to do,” Ed said, “is give these computers enough rope to hang their selves. Computers in my book are just fancy filing cabinets.”

“In
my
view it would be a sorry misappropriation,” Jeremy said, “in this day and age when black and women’s studies are starving for funds—”

Rebecca interrupted, “Some of the women I talk to are tired of being studied. Is being a woman
all
we do? Can’t we say anything about ourselves except that the patriarchal society has forced deodorants on us? My sweet little militants, they look as if they’ve never washed their hair or cleaned their fingernails, as if it were
men
who invented bathing—” She knew she should stop but went on, with an irresistible swift smile, “I think it’s
charm
ing that this young man wants to come over from the science end of the university and give us a helping hand.”

Closson cleared his throat once more and turned his big overstuffed box of a head toward me. “Roger, do you have any insights or thoughts you’d like to share with us before we excuse Mr. Kohler?” One of his cover-over strands had come unstuck and waved out from the side of his head like an inquisitive antenna.

It shocked me, to be called out of my apartness, my existence as purely a shadow. “You know me, Jesse,” I said, with a false
jocosity that barked in my own ears. “A Barthian all the way. Barth, I fear, would have regarded Dale’s project as the most futile and insolent sort of natural theology. I also agree with Jere: apologetics mustn’t leave ground where it’s somewhat safe for ground where religion has been made to look ridiculous time and time again. Like Rebecca, I don’t think God should be reduced purely to human subjectivity; but His objectivity must be of a totally other sort than that of these physical equations. Even if this were not so, there are additional problems with provability. Wouldn’t a God Who let Himself be proven—more exactly, a God Who can’t
help
being proven—be too submissive, too passive and beholden to human ingenuity, a helpless and contingent God, in short? I also see a problem with His facticity, as it would be demonstrated to us. We all know, as teachers, what happens to facts: they get ignored, forgotten. Facts are boring. Facts are inert, impersonal. A God Who is a mere fact will just sit there on the table with all the other facts: we can take Him or leave Him. The way it is, we are always in motion
toward
the God Who flees, the
Deus absconditus;
He by His apparent absence is always with us. What is being proposed here for us to finance, I’m sorry, just strikes me as a kind of obscene cosmological prying that has little to do with religion as I understand it. As Barth himself says somewhere—I can’t give you the exact reference offhand—‘What manner of God is He Who has to be proved?’ ”

After this Judas kiss, Dale for the first time glanced my way. His acne, my visual impression was, was clearing up, thanks to Esther’s ministrations. His blue eyes were dazed, clouded. He didn’t understand the favor I had done him.

Jesse, of course, is an ecumenicist and a sentimental Tillichian, and Ed a professional Bultmannite, and Rebecca not insensitive to the streak of suppressed anti-Semitic feeling
present in Barth’s professed philo-Semiticism,
^*

and Jeremy a social activist and an ethical logisticist; by bringing Barth, the scornful enemy of religious humanists and accommodators, the old foe of Tillich and Bultmann, so thumpingly into the discussion, I had swung the committee against me: that is, toward Dale.

Jesse hawed a bit and tried to sum up: “Well, yes, the Ground of All Being has to
be
in a somewhat superior sense, I suppose, He can’t be just one more being. But that poses a whole slew of interesting questions, whether being,
esse, Sein
, is a simple either/or—a binary condition, in Mr. Kohler’s language—or whether there are degrees, intensities.… This is
all
very interesting, actually: you’ve gotten us to think, young man, and that’s not easy in academic circles. Heh. Heh-heh. You should be hearing from us within two weeks.”

When, ten days later, I told Esther that Closson had let me know that the committee had voted to give Dale a provisional grant of twenty-five hundred dollars, renewable upon application next September subject to his submission by June first of a forty-page paper summarizing his concrete and original results, she said, “That’s too bad. That’s terrible, in fact.”

“How so?”

“Now he’ll feel he has to come up with something, and it’s impossible, what he’s trying to do.”

“O ye of little faith.”

“He’s losing his faith. This will do it in entirely.”

“How do you know he’s losing his faith?” I asked.

She turned on her clacky heels and swished down the hall, giving me that back view from which even the smallest woman looks somehow grand, a piece of the Earth. She was wearing snug khaki slacks; she had been out in the garden, doing some fidgety winter pruning, wondering when the mulch should come off, finding the first snowdrops hanging their heads over in that sun-warmed corner of our fence toward the Ellicotts’ tool shed. “Aren’t we all?” she called back to me, before vanishing into the kitchen. I had never thought of Esther as having any faith; that had been part of her charm, the succulent freedom she had held out.

I had asked her to take Verna to the abortion clinic and she refused, saying that she was my niece and anyway Verna had conceived a dislike to her; she was quite rude coming into the day-care center. Where, incidentally, she brought Paula less and less faithfully, and when she did bring her the poor child was filthy. Things were deteriorating on
that
front, she said. As if there were any number of fronts, and she and I were campaign headquarters.

Over the telephone Verna had been quite clear that she didn’t want to go alone. She said it was my idea anyway. I said I would take her, then. Better that than let her wriggle out. I was determined to see this through. On the appointed afternoon a babysitter from within the project crumped out at the last minute, typically. So little Paula had to come with us. It was a time of day, late afternoon, that until recently had been pitch-dark and that now surprised us with its light, the daylight
lingering on the three-decker rows, the corner stores with their grated windows, the leafless sycamores and locusts, the bent and spray-painted No Parking signs. The light embarrassed me as I chauffered this nineteen-year-old woman and the one-and-a-half-year-old girl in my solid, unmarred, slightly racy Audi along these streets lined with the rusted bloat of Detroit, cars frozen here like wads of lava. I had no business here. But I did. I was killing an unborn child, to try to save a born one. Two born ones. The clinic was a low building of white brick, the building not exactly new and the brick only white enough to make the mortar look dark; it was a number of blocks beyond the project, deeper into that section of the city where I never used to go.

It embarrassed me, too, to go into the clinic office attached to this mulatto toddler and this slack-mouthed, sallow-faced, slightly overweight teen-ager. For this event Verna had contrived to put on her most thrift-shoppy outfit, a collage of wide pea-green wool skirt and canary-yellow turtleneck and orange leather vest under some kind of plaid serape; she looked like an ingénue bag lady. And her hair was done up in oily curls—that wet, snaky look, as if fresh from the shower, which you see more and more, even on the secretaries at the Divinity School.

The fluorescent lights inside the clinic, faintly buzzing and humming, made little headway against the sullen air. There were two desks in the anteroom, staffed by a nurse and a secretary. The nurse looked up and gave me a look that seemed accusatory. To fill out the forms, Verna had to pass Paula into my arms, and the child felt heavier than when I had last lifted her—not only the outdoor winter clothes but growth, new muscle demanding satisfaction from the world. How tiny she was, yet how fully alive, with personhood’s full unitary value. She was
getting leggy. Her face now wore a more complex, thoughtful expression. In my grasp she felt restless, her little muscles softly rolling, yet undecided as to whether or not to make a strenuous effort to break free. From inches away she looked me straight in the eyes, unsmiling, appraising. “Not faw down,” she said, singsong. Her eyes, which had once looked navy-blue to me, had become brown, shades deeper than Verna’s.

“Paula not fall,” I agreed. “Man hold tight.” I wondered what the little smell was, coming off of her as she warmed in my grasp; I remembered Esther’s “filthy” but this was not excrement, it was a musty comfortable odor from deep in my life, savoring of the enchanted spaces behind bureaus or of closets whose shelves were lined with oilcloth. I remembered this child’s grandmother in the slant-roofed attic that day, the dust motes, the sad gray-white of her dickey as Edna reached inside her sweater to undo it. I remembered the longing that our poor minds press against the bodies of others, like water against the bodies of swimmers.

“Nunc, mind if I put you down as next of kin?” Verna asked in her scratchy and conspicuous voice. Several faces turned toward me. There was a row of chairs to wait in, in this room with its flickering fluorescent ceiling, its Venetian blinds hiding the view of the street, its wall panels of institutional pastel. An odd thick interior silence diluted the swish of traffic outside; the plastic bucket chairs, in different primary colors as in an elementary school, were a third occupied, by young women, mostly black, and a few desultory escorts. One prospective mother chewed bubble gum, with virtuoso deadpan placing perfect pink spheres in front of her lips, repeatedly, expanding and popping and growing again. Another wore a Walkman and her eyes were shut upon the din filling her head. A black boy who looked little older than the child who
had guarded my car was urgently murmuring into the ear of a girl and offering her drags of his cigarette. She had wet cheeks but was otherwise impassive, an African mask, her lips and jaw majestically protruding.

“But I’m not,” I said, stepping closer and whispering.

“Bad man,” Paula said close to my face, testing, flirting. Her rubbery wet fingers probed my mouth and tugged at my lower lip. Her tiny fingernails scratched.

“I don’t want to put down Mom and Dad,” Verna said, carelessly loud. “They say fuck me, I say fuck them.”

Another bubble popped. A car with a broken muffler snarled tigerishly out on the street. The nurse, with a blue cardigan worn like a cape over her starchy white uniform, led Verna into another, brighter room. Paula and I could see her inside the ajar door sitting in a chair, having her blood pressure taken from a bare arm. A thermometer tilted upwards jauntily in Verna’s mouth. The child became agitated, fearful that her mother was being hurt, and I carried her outside.

Outside on the sidewalk, night had come. From the distant heart of the city, where a dome of light stained the sky and the airplane-warning lights at the tops of the skyscrapers pulsed, there arose a muffled roaring, an oceanic sound as if the stalled surge of traffic had taken on an everlasting meaning. This neighborhood seemed almost suburban; a grocery store glowed on one corner, and faceless pedestrians moved back and forth across the street, snapping off words of greeting. Paula bucked in my arms; she was apprehensive, hungry, and increasingly heavy. She kept kicking me softly through my sheepskin coat and scratching curiously at my lower lip. Rather than venture back into that flickering waiting room, I took her into the shelter of the Audi, and on the car radio tried to find a song that would please her. I tried to find that
song with all the bops in it, but in the jungle growth of new songs and new stars, Cyndi Lauper was nowhere to be found, from one end of the softly glowing dial to the other.

“Music,” Paula observed.

“Wonderful stuff,” I agreed.

“Awesome,” she said, in her mother’s exact tone, slightly trancelike.