It was too early to call his mother; the baby monitor’s sluggish wink suggested she was yet to rise.
The motel door swayed on its hinges like a relieved valve. Past it, the caped companion was spotted touring the tree line of the property. Hunger turned the traveler toward a Chrysler Town Car with heavily tinted windows. The piquant scent of red pepper grilling in breakfast sausage patties mingled with the aroma of hot thermos coffee. This was the motel’s advertised continental breakfast being served out of the vehicle’s open trunk.
The diner used the excuse of a powdered donut to meditate on the mysterious building across the field. In his speedy retreat from the facility, his immunity from death (if not injury) was forgotten. And in not finding Enoch in the bathroom or anywhere else during the night, he wondered if the deity played a part in this perfidy. Regardless, the monstrous presence met in the warehouse was many times scarier than Death himself, who only dressed as a birthday party conjurer. The archangel had kindly warned his charge that his appearance, while in essence incomprehensible, merely met an expectation, such as appropriating the nightmarish guise of a graveyard squirrel.
The last of his coffee was slurped hurriedly, and the diner occupied himself less sinisterly with the gleaming rail of the I-40 onramp. A pickup truck lay in his line of sight across the parking lot, and matched the one recalled from Bingo Burgers. Was the ill-paired couple seen there dining the night before also encamped at the motel?
Enoch had settled in the car. He glared impatiently ahead of the sun’s track, seeing midday in place over the next hillock.
Leaving behind the Central Time Zone, the travelers scaled the high plains desert of New Mexico and gained on a line of thin blue-grey clouds. These produced snow on the shrubby peaks of accessible mountains. Equally poetic, earth-red boxcars of a Santa Fe train moved westward against terracotta buttes. Transformation of the landscape was complete, as nothing was left of the forested eastern land.
The Bingo Burgers selected for lunch was situated east of metropolitan Albuquerque, and faced onto a desolation of blackened lava fields. Lucien was delayed in ordering his meal when he did not find the restrooms on the proper side of the building, as mandated by corporate blueprint. A misconfiguration of windows further alarmed him, but his attention was soon redirected by the same pregnant hitchhiker, seen the previous evening, sitting three tables away. Two sets of travelers leaving from the same location that morning might conceivably cover the same ground in the same time; but was enough time allowed for her to acquire a different older man for company?
The coincidence was not judged uncanny, leaving the committed omnivore to return outside to find more more disruption:
Enoch had disappeared.
Death was far too entertaining as a companion to match, where convention demanded comparison, the gravitas assigned to his reputation, yet he was no merry Andrew, either. As the western theatre expanded throughout their travel, the deity was coming to resemble a Native-American trickster spirit, assuming guises, and perhaps even those of animals conjured from campfire smoke. Surely he resented Lucien’s captivity more than he let on.
An unattended shopping cart was just then descending an incline from the far end of the neighboring parking lot. Lucien was aiming at a set of automated doors connected to these premises when a second stray cart was spotted. It approached from the opposite direction. The two rattling cages gained speed as they converged on a seeming crater, yet missed each other by inches. These binary stars circled in a slow dance of mutual annihilation, and while the spectator waited to see if enough momentum was available for another orbit. The glare of the sun made the shadow of a nearby soffit penetrable.
Enoch stood beneath it squinting southward toward the lava fields, which resembled a a lake of asphalt; a line of darker clouds tracked across them. “We must stay in front of the weather,” he advised.
“Are you the architect of that?” questioned Lucien, pointing to the galloping shopping carts.
“To deny Death is to deny physics,” was his pert reply. “For those objects to collide would endanger microbes living on them. Your will in holding me captive has created a repellent form of magnetism.”
The companion glumly concluded, “Then I waste my time with antibacterial soap in the men’s room.”
Returned to the highway, Lucien meditated on what, unseen, lay across sacred native land. “The glacial processes of the desert makes one rank details differently,” he philosophized.
“It is a chalk slate,” answered the passenger. “An opportunity.”
“What more is to be gained in this sparseness?” probed the student. “If Evolution drives us toward survival, then what is the point of sticking around in these inhospitable places? Nothing is to be gained from tarrying in these arid sunsets and jeweled canyons—nothing that would feed the stomach.”
The angel again ruminated. “Evolution is characterized as a blind, impersonal process, and yet its defenders infuse it with much personality. It is not merely anthropomorphized but deified. If those who believe the rich complexity of the world comes down entirely to a blind process of Natural Selection, they would just as readily prefer inserting the phrase ‘dumb luck’ into their sentences as saying, ‘Evolution did this,’ or ‘Evolution decided that.’ Of course, this sounds silly: ‘Dumb luck allowed for birds to have hollow bones to enable flight. Dumb luck allowed for octopi to change their color to match their surroundings.’ Such characterizations take away the ring of authority: The dismissive holier than thou. It is moreover ironic to see how science often uses the dead language of Latin, as used by religion, to coin its authoritative terms and concepts, though with the opposite object to demystify the world. In both examples, the musical incantation is to persuade (seduce).”
Lucien imagined a reply. “Evolution’s defenders would doubtless argue that, if one runs across a room full of furniture that flows agreeably with itself, one sees motive where only erosion was the decorator.”
“And still there is implicate order in agreeableness,” stressed the angel. “Why should one find order, of any kind, pleasing? Is value and value positing simply more late invention? More dumb luck stuck on us like opposable thumbs? When we speak of judgments, do we speak only of habituation where one could just as easily say black is white as white is black? Would one prefer to live on a trash heap if that is where one is raised? Would seeing a green valley displease one?”
“These are valid questions,” reasoned the other. “There should be no necessary aesthetic in biology. Or at least there shouldn’t be one where bodily organs evolve in dark cavities.”
Enoch almost laughed at this. “It would be like dressing up for bed. Why should one’s clothes match where they will not be seen?”
Lucien, also amused, reflected further. “I have always thought children are better examples of Evolution’s simple scheming than their parents. The cruelty children inflict on one another in vying for advantage on the playground is grisly. The Neo-Darwinist might say this type of ostracism is instinctual, and attempts to weed out weak children for the good of the species. Yet is this determination scientific? Were children, because they share vulnerabilities, shown to be supportive of one another, doubtless the evolutionist would argue the opposite: that this behavior increases the chances that many more of them will survive. Regardless the outcome, the evolutionist adapts his explanation to fit it. Rationalism is snuck in under the banner of empirical proof.”
Enoch grimaced. “Fossils have no motive, so—true—theorists supply one for them.”
“And yet,” pressed Lucien, “adults do not throw sickly children overboard for the good of the species. They are more likely to make a considerable (even imprudent) investment in a sickly child’s survival. Neo-Darwinists have a devil of a time explaining our preoccupation (one might even say obsession) with empathy.”
Enoch considered the question seriously. “The evolutionary rationalist insists that our value judgments emerge naturally out of Evolution. It is the example of the Rembrandt painting arising naturally from the binding properties of oxidized linseed oil and pigment: Because esteemed notions owe their existence to chemistry as a matter of genealogy, then one need look no further than their elemental assembly to explain them. This, of course, is never positively stated because it sounds quasi-religious, unscientific, and (frankly) silly. And yet, this conclusion stands in plain sight to be drawn from its suppositions: One must respect The Supreme Court Building because of the quality of ideas that occasionally issue from its gilded doors. The only people who professed happiness with this explanation are those who were inconvenienced by the question. A great deal of show is made in removing a fly from ointment.”
The student ventured, “And what of autistics like myself who seek to build empathetic feeling where biology is defective? What is it I strive to develop? Something that must forever remain an intellectual project? It sounds like the scientist who needs to deconstruct empathy is thinking like an autistic who realizes he has a problem.”
The angel sighed. “The brain, as feeble as it is often portrayed by its appraisers, is more like a receiver than a transmitter, which means the ideas that come to occupy it are, ostensively, more essential than the brain itself. There is teleology (an end use) to the organ that is not reductive to front-loaded survivalist mechanics.”
The listener injected his own illustration. “Despite being belittled for its low wattage, the brain is routinely likened to a computer. And because supercomputers are capable of higher processing speeds, the brain is seen as a machine that can be potentially outperformed by this measure.
I find this computer analogy faulty: Research into psilocybin, the psychoactive drug in mushrooms, has discovered that its effect is to slow down brain function, not speed it up. Conceptual processing is reduced, which forces the brain to confront perceptual reality with fewer filters. Moreover, the value attached to the experience of psilocybin by its consumers is not dissimilar to experiences described by those acquainted with self-induced meditative or spiritual states. Contrary to the belief of those companioning the inevitable omnipotence of supercomputers, the greatest insights to be had in the mind may not be linked to faster processing speeds of more data. It is doubtful a fast computer (or even a slow one) would reach this epiphany.”
Enoch concurred. “Speed of operation is a definite improvement among confidence tricksters and those who skate on thin ice.”
The topic of empathy continued to press on the driver’s mind, especially as he could not long escape thinking of his mother’s struggles, and how willingly he would take on many of them to prolong her life (if this impulse was not purely selfish). Psychological roundabouts were torturous where the son tried to understand his intentions. Was it conceit or continuance of a status quo he desired through his mother? Or was it to abide in grace a while longer: a grace provided by his mother that he was only beginning to understand?
Where one rushed ahead of one’s thoughts, so to flee the intellect and its second-guessing, one raced into the very vapor of reality—and at the very second one collided with it like an atmosphere! The intellect, as a late comer, may only impose on it.
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.