36 Arguments for the Existence of God - [34]

“I see,” Cass said quietly. Now he wasn’t sure whether Gideon Raven was taunting him or consoling him. Both, he suspected. He had already decided that, whatever his motive, Thomas Nagel’s The View from Nowhere had no part in it. “So it isn’t true about Hannah being crazy.”

“Well, I wouldn’t go that far.”

“But she didn’t burn down the house.”

“I’m not capable of making that stuff up, but Charlotte Brontë was. Jane Eyre. Sorry. I thought you’d get the reference right away. Grace Poole and all.”

“I was pre-med.”

“You were pre-med?”

“Yes.”

“Permit me to be vulgar, but wow. How did you end up working with Jonas?”

“My senior year, I took ‘The Manic, The Mantic, and the Mimetic.’ It changed my life.”

“As you no doubt told Jonas? Not in so many words, of course. Or maybe yes, in so many words?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Cass, I don’t really know why I’m telling you this, since there’s really nothing in it for me. But just because there really is nothing in it for me, you should take what I’m saying extremely seriously. I want you to concentrate hard and try to understand what I’m going to tell you. It’s been a long, hard day, you look like you’re ready to collapse, but I want you to listen closely. Are you listening?”

“Yes.”

“Go back to pre-med.”

Cass was silent for a while.

“I guess what you’re saying is that I can’t make the grade, that I’m just not good enough to work with Jonas Elijah Klapper.”

“You’re not getting it, Mr. Seltzer. The un-Adorno-ed truth: if I had any chance to go to medical school, I’d be out of here so fast the back draft would blow the foam off this beer. I’ve sunk twelve years into Jonas Elijah Klapper. You haven’t lost anything yet. Just walk out of here and never look back, Billy Budd.”

Yet another classic Cass had never read.

“Baby Budd, Jimmy Legs is down on you.” Gideon was again impersonating someone or other.

“I don’t know what you’re referring to.”

“You’ve never read that either? Well, no matter. You won’t need Melville in medical school. Medical school! God, what I wouldn’t give for the chance to go to medical school! The humanities are finished, dead so long they’re long past stinking. Jonas is the Shakespearean gravedigging clown. Medical school! Could you imagine the joy and jubilation on the part of Lady Lizzie! To have a real doctor as a husband, instead of a gravedigging clown-in-training whose only acquired skills are appeasing and impersonating Jonas Elijah Klapper.”

Gideon fell into a gloomy silence, and Cass had no inclination to disturb it. At some point, Gideon had replaced the pitcher with another, and they were nearing the bottom of that one, too.

“You had any dinner tonight?” Gideon asked, and on being told that Cass hadn’t, he went to get some sustenance, bringing back “the house special,” a saucer plate with some tubules of beef jerky.

Cass thought about getting up and leaving-he’d probably be doing Lizzie a favor-but he was pretty sure that he no longer had access to the muscles controlling his limbs. If you have to think about it, it’s not a good sign. He wasn’t altogether certain either whether he could find his way back to his bleak room on Canal Street. He was dissolving into oblivion for the third time that day, and only the middle time had been edifying.

From some unlit level of his mind, a submerged question, vaguely menacing, swam to the surface. A slippery, eel-like thing, with a long poisonous ray-he struggled to get a grip on it.

“Why isn’t he Klepfish?”

“Hmm. What’s that, young Billy?”

“Klapper, not Klepfish, why?”

“He changed his name.”

“Another book, or for real?”

“For real, Baby Budd.”

“Klepfish.” Cass was staring down at the table, shaking his head, unable to assimilate the enormity of the fact, repeating the name softly.

“Time to get you home, Billy boy. Come on. Upsy-daisy.” And Gideon Raven, all five feet eight of him, helped the towering Cass to his feet with surprisingly tender solicitousness, which is how he delivered him to his room. Cass couldn’t quite remember, but he had a vague memory of Gideon’s actually helping him get his shoes off and into bed, murmuring, “Fated boy. What have you done?”

Next week, Cass was back at the less-crowded seminar table-the three undergraduates had jumped ship, as well as the philosophy graduate student and a few of the English students.

In addition to Aristotle’s Poetics, Cass had brought to class the reassuring knowledge of the culminating fact on the list that he had assembled last week. Cass had been chosen, and he would not be exiled.

VI The Argument from Intimations of Immortality

to: [email protected]

from: [email protected]

date: Feb. 27 2008 1:15 a.m.

subject: the missing proof

Are you awake? Any new proofs tonight?

to: [email protected]

from: [email protected]

date: Feb. 27 2008 1:20 a.m.

subject: re: the missing proof

In a manner of speaking, yes. You’ll never guess who breezed into town today. Roz!

to: [email protected]

from: [email protected]

date: Feb. 27 2008 1:23 a.m.

subject: re: re: the missing proof

Has she really been downgraded to a breeze? How is she? What’s she up to?