The drowsy, waxing hours of daylight brought intense sensation, of which a child anticipated but to which the adult awoke: Other members of his family were dreamily envisioned, like himself mired in their beds in a lightening house slow to warm. Each perhaps, also like himself, toyed with notions of consciousness, or of remaining in their shared, synaptic sleep. The smell of pancakes and frying bacon mingled with the scent of a dusty forced-air furnace, but these evocations were quick to disintegrate.
The riser threw his legs over the bed rail. Lucien emerged from a bathroom with a rinsed toothbrush, infusing the air with mint incense and asking, “What is there in the Pacific Northwest to connect any holiday to a calendar?”
Liam shook off his crumpled-ness. “Do you have rampaging toddlers, here?” he complained bitterly. “I think I heard a baby rolling around on a ship deck last night like a loose cannonball.”
The resident puzzled, “There is a pregnant teenager on the third floor. She’s been pregnant for no less than a year. Unless I confuse her with another unwed mother on the third floor. Perhaps you dreamt the episode.”
Lucien set about a minor chore and Liam was not inclined to pursue a line of investigation. He next searched his duffle bag for his toothbrush. “Where do you want to eat for breakfast?” he asked.
The denizen replied, “There’s an early bird special at Bingo Burgers.”
“Today we buy a Christmas tree,” chirped the visiting herald, who added, in glancing around the cramped apartment, “a small one.”
The out-of-towner persuaded his brother to accompany him to Redding in pursuit of a Starbucks, although he was instantly turned around on heavily shaded roads, re-encountering concrete baffles and traffic-calming obstructions that were conspiratorial in number, and constipated in over-construction. The driver sniped peevishly about the left coast and, approaching yet another roadblock, found a raised concrete platform in the middle of the narrow lane. It was painted bright yellow, with slots for bicyclists to pass through, if not offending automobiles. A plethora of road signs warned of nonexistent pedestrians and wildlife and their right of way, yet no obvious way was seen around the barrier. A line of safety cones hugged both gravel shoulders to dissuade anyone thinking they could escape the lecture.
“I see!” Liam laughed. “This is like hanging a thief from a gibbet along the highway to warn visitors to take their misbehavior elsewhere!“
One sign depicted a bear on two legs; this anthropomorphism was thought particularly galling. “Okay, I get the bear—no one in a car wants to slam into a three-hundred pound bear, but why is it jogging like a kid rushing to catch a school bus?”
“These bears are quite intelligent,” explained the passenger.
The driver swung his car wide and nudged several fluorescent orange cones; these were sent rolling down a piney embankment. This action cleared a path back onto the far side of the lane.
One expected to see plaster statues further down the road, erected along the center white line to memorialize bipeds and quadrupeds killed by motorists, but none were encountered.
The twins regrouped at the chain coffeehouse and breakfasted on Americanos and peach croissants. The large window beside their wobbly table glowed in the slanting light, and its tranquil effect left Liam basking like a reptile. Neither man, being solitary in habits, was prone to palaver or play host.
Lucien was preoccupied with the four-legged table, fearful his drink would splash with a thoughtless elbow placed on its teetering springboard. He wedged a folded napkin made of dingy recycled paper (actually, two) under the leg deemed shortest. “This would not be a problem if they made all tables in restaurants three-legged,“ rang his complaint.
Liam nodded without surrendering the pink-shade under his eyelids.
The resident squinted toward the rise, where the morning sun cleared an evergreen ridge. “Isn’t it uncanny how the sun and moon are nearly identical in size from our perspective, and how they should align ever so mysteriously from time to time to instill fear and awe in us?”
“Uncanny,” agreed the listless listener.
Lucien pressed his point in raising the comparison. “Were the ancients wrong to believe things like that meant something? What we are not told about solar eclipses is that, short of a total one, where the spheres perfectly align, we would not fully appreciate the spectacle. You cannot see the moon in a partial eclipse, not without special glasses. One might go blind to attempt it. Even where the sun is nearly covered, daylight only weakens slightly. When there is a full solar eclipse, however, you not only see a dark sky, but you can stare directly at the sun without harm, and partake in the full measure of the miracle. Were the sun, or moon, bigger or smaller in any direction, then the event might be noteworthy, but not miraculous.”
Liam was moved to relate. “We witnessed the same solar eclipse, I believe, and both remarked on how terrifying it was. Some weeks later, I had a strange dream where I was being haunted by an electrical circuitboard, or something strange along those lines. I cannot say why I was scared precisely, other than the thing may have been insect like, or some order of creepy crawly. Still, I was so disturbed that I placed it in an attic. I imagined it scurrying around like a cockroach up there until I finally woke up, and I was unable to go back to sleep.
I have a bottle of extra gabapentin capsules. Sometimes an extra 100 milligrams will nudge me back to sleep when need arises. I got up to retrieve one, but would not turn on the bathroom light to prevent further wakefulness. Groggy, I forgot the bottle was on the cabinet, so I reached into my pill drawer to fetch it. As I reached into the back of the drawer, a sudden light lit up, like I had laid my hand on a firefly. I recoiled in horror, and thought I imagined it. But it happened again. I knew an unplug night light was in that drawer, but then I remembered a small LED flashlight, that had burned out years ago, was in there, too. The batteries had briefly resuscitated, and the light, like a switch, was waiting for the exact night and circumstance for me to discover it. The next day I connected my fear in the nightmare to my fear during the eclipse.”
The brother enjoyed the story. “Have we grown too cynical and sophisticated over the eons to believe everything that is just so in this impossible world is just because? Acts of Providence bombard us at every turn, and we have no reason to suppose their existence where their purpose saturates us.”
Liam suspected that his brother intended a segue, so asked, “Do you propose that we live in a simulation?”
The idea put off the speculator. “Its more than living in a habitable zone,” he complained, “or occupying a universe where a multitude of impossible variables are fine-tuned to allow for our existence—and this doesn’t even get at the impossible fact of life itself, where a complicated operating system and software emerged coextensively to exploit one another.
We live on the edge of one of the largest voids in the universe, where a density of hazards threatening our planet is fortuitously absent. And then there is the necessary invention of Inflation Theory, Many Worlds Theory, Multiverse Theory to explain why the universe is what it is and not a hot mess…
Science worries over all this, so has constructed its own Prime Mover Argument or Get Out of Jail Free Card to get around the difficulties. It is easier for materialists to believe in a simulator than a God, even though the simulator also falls prey to the infinite regression paradox to which the materialist routinely subjects an immaterial God: The simulator, in like manner, cannot escape the possibility that he too may be a simulation of a simulator.
The Copernican Principle, which gave cover to scientists to declare our planet to be cosmologically unexceptional, keeps getting into trouble by lack of its predictive power. A dipole boundary within the Microwave Background Radiation weirdly shares our Solar System’s ecliptic plane—the mere existence of this unnerving coincidence has earned it the nickname ‘Axis of Evil.’ Meanwhile, our hospitable yellow dwarf sun, which was once thought humdrum, turns out to be an unusually quiet specimen among G class stars. These are but two violations of The Principle.”
“God, by your examples, better fits Occam’s Razor than a simulation?”
The sibling responded approvingly. “God is like the square root of negative one, which cannot be known but can nevertheless be shown to exist. An imaginary number is inserted into this equation as a placeholder, designated as (i). This number’s function is indispensable to arriving at useful answers.”
“Yet surely this is an altogether too impersonal view of your personal God.”
Lucien nodded. “It is… But, as I am always saying, once you enter into a prayerful relationship with God, the coincidences that lead you to a successful action become just as profound as any fine-tuned cosmological parameter. (Provide you pay attention.)
If you are a painter, poet, or composer, then you appreciate a perspective on reality’s intricacy that is not even consider to be of value in searching out the scientific ends and means of reality. If you understand the complexity and beauty of all these creative endeavors, or even of mathematics, philosophy, or engineering, then you begin to glimpse the sheer impossibility of it all when viewed alongside the complexities of biology, chemistry, and cosmology.
Add to this the Hubble telescope. When we look at beautiful planetary nebula, whose radiated gas and dust is moving at inconceivable speeds, they are so large and so far away that they barely appear to move at all. And yet, The Pillars of Creation are little more than spitting off our back porch since they are so near by. This give you the incomprehensible scale of the Milky Way Galaxy—and it isn’t even the largest galaxy by a mile. Turn the telescope out into the deepest regions of space and billions of galaxies materialize out to the edge of the Observable Universe. And there are innumerable galaxies beyond this!
Only a materialist would concentrate on our smallest in these scenarios. They do not include Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas or Monet’s paintings in their reductionist calculus. A lack of extraterrestrial life, vastly older than us, overrunning us from every direction of the cosmos also does not merit discussion on our unique perspectives. Who has the imagination to put everything under one tent pole and declare it reality, in such terms, is impossible. The magnitude of these impossibilities, when viewed together, scream of not only design, but purpose.”
“It must be spiritual for you living among these mountains.”
Lucien shook his head lazily, dismissively. “Those are not clinquant Christmas trees out there, dear brother. The Cascade Range broods in its emerald shadows. But—yes—there is a window to a place: an opportunity for the right brain to perceive and drink in a pure landscape before the left brain reduces everything to indistinguishable routine. From there, one lives by CliffsNotes—that is, until a visiting relative turns up and remarks on the pretty scenery.”
“I see where there may be little to do here,” Liam chimed.
“Sublime scenery without industry leads to diseased thought,” conceded Lucien. “The mind cannot be left idle too long in wilderness before it turns one into Ted Kaczynski, or into a designer of diabolical traffic baffles.”
“Like I said last night, you can always move.”
Sighing, the expat explained, “I overcame my fear of death, once. The day I drove out here and got stranded.”
“Stranded?” sounded the brother with surprise.
The confessional twin reeled in his gaze, letting it settle less ambitiously on holiday decorations nearer to the table. “I can only say I am terrified to face the world without the love of my Mother. It was unconditional. When she told me she loved me, I felt it to my bones. It was like redemption. It was like Jesus Christ dying on a Cross for my sins.”
“There is a Christmas Parade today in Shasta,” announced the other cheeringly, glancing over a regional newspaper.
Copyright © 2008-2024 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.