Socratess: A Philosophical Tragedy

The first step, she said, is to define your terms.

She was dead. Dead. The state of being not-alive. The cessation of vital activity. In some belief systems, the state of having passed on into some kind of afterlife. Irrevocably gone.

Her obituary said she was full of life. Well, actually, it said she was full of “vim and vigor.” I thought about that as I sat through the funeral. You'd have thought that I wouldn't have noticed most of the details, all things considered. It should have been a blur. But I had learned too well how to pay attention, how to pick out the things that didn't quite fit. All through, it was like she was sitting right next to me on the pew, like she had so many times before, giggling and rolling her eyes at the good parts. I fingered the stone in my pocket as they brought in the coffin. It was closed; I wasn't surprised. She cringed as an overweight middle aged woman sang one of those endless funeral songs, out of key and screechy.

I went to shove her, realized that she wasn't really there. She laughed at my reaction. "Aren't you respectful of nothing? You don't see no one else laughing, now do you?"

She shrugged. "It's my funeral. I can laugh if I want to."

She didn't really, of course. She was down there in that coffin, and if she had been laughing someone probably would have mentioned it by now. I could hear her voice, see her face, so long as I didn't turn my head. If I turned, she wouldn't be there. The dusty balcony was empty; unused, now. There weren't enough people left in the town to fill that old church, and most of them wouldn't have come to her funeral anyway.

The words of her obituary repeated in my head endlessly, and I thought to myself that this couldn't possibly be her funeral. They sure as hell weren't talking about the girl I knew. It must have been someone else, some other girl who had died, some other girl who had bled out her life on a dusty country road, someone else's father droning on now. I never met her pa. Never met any of her family, for that matter. I had never thought of that, really, not until the funeral. Her having a family, I mean. Looking back, it seems laughable. Not laughable as in 'ha ha', but laughable as in pathetic. For all her questions, she was remarkably clever at fending off ones about herself. Of course, even if I had asked, she wouldn't have answered. But I never asked. . never thought to. Her family just didn't seem important, somehow. Apparently she had one; someone paid for the funeral, anyway. People sat there in their black and sobbed, gave touching eulogies. (What the hell kind of word is "eulogy," anyway? It means "good word," did you know that? Sure ain't nothing good about it, in my opinion. Say a bunch of lies about a dead person, people call it some fancy thing in a dead language and say it's "good". People are damn stupid.) If they weren't her family, I'm sure I wouldn't know who they were. But they weren't a part of her life; they were never mentioned, never a factor. They certainly didn't seem to know her all that well.

"Beautiful, full of vim and vigor." Beautiful? Not ugly, certainly. Attractive? Yeah. But most folks couldn't have told you what color her eyes were. Truth to tell, after five minutes, you never noticed her looks. She was too much... well, too much herself, if that makes sense. Too much this alien thing, too much unrecognizable, too much beyond their comprehension. They had no frame of reference for her, no box to put her in... to all extents and purposes, she didn't exist for most of 'em. Beautiful... that could be forgiven, from a father. Fathers could be like that, at least the ones I knew. But vim and vigor? It sounded like he was describing a horse, for cripes sake. And aside from that, it betrays a very superficial knowledge of the subject. (Superficial knowledge of the subject? That's her talking, not me. She whispers in my head, now. She laughed through her own funeral, and I sure as hell didn't feel like laughing.) Full of life? Animated, certainly. But no one so full of life would have spent so many hours among the ancient gravestones of the abandoned cemetery, and stare at the graves with such longing.

She called death “the final answer.” I never quite figured out what question it was supposed to answer in her head. Maybe all of them. Why the world was the way it was. Why people acted the way they did; what made things work in their heads. Me, I never figured people needed a reason to be stupid; they were people after all. It's part of the definition. But she believed in the inherent reason of humanity... not that they were good reasons, but that there were reasons. So that's why she studied it. I just did because she did. Screw the rest of humanity; she was the one I wanted to understand.

Maybe she just meant she couldn't ask questions anymore if she was dead.

The day she said that, it was high summer, the dog days of August; a brilliant blue sky without a cloud glaring down on us like an unblinking eye. I could hear the crack of a bat, cheers and jeers; the kids playing ball nearby. The bees buzzed in the flowering weeds poking through the gravestones. Part of me regarded that and thought about that metaphor of life in death that it presented; she'd had enough of an effect of me by then. She stared out into space, that crooked, dreamy half smile on her face. I never really knew what the word "fey" meant, but I figure that pretty well described her in that mood. And that's when she looked beautiful, when she wasn't full of life but full of death and that final burning question, the only one she never asked. It was something I never understood, try as I might. Everything else, I could somewhat... but that, whatever it was that drove her, was something beyond me. As always, the actions made sense, but the reason escaped me. Here, I followed her everywhere, but in her head she went places I could never go. Of course, in those moments my thoughts were usually far from the metaphysical. My senses were on fire, and all I could think of was putting my arm around her.

Guess I was a damned Epicurean after all.

Never did manage that. Putting my arm around her. Never will, now. Not enough of a damned Epicurean to go through with it. If it weren't her, I wouldn't even know what a damned Epicurean was.

Be happier for it, too.

Can't even sit here and make fun of myself for being one without thinking about how I'm using the word wrong. The original Epicurus was all about gardens and quiet contemplation, apparently. Or maybe it means both. What was the word? Polysemic. Polysemic and over-determined...

But I'm babbling. And telling it all out of order. It's her story, and she'd have wanted told in order, logical. To answer a question. Every story, she said, was an answer to a question, even if the question was only "what if." But what if I don't know the right question to ask?

***
The first time I met her, she was staring at a stop sign down on Hague Ave., which despite its name was a little dirt road out in the boonies, near the McKelloch's farm. She had this little notebook, and was scrawling something it as she circled it and muttered to herself. Needless to say, I was a bit confused by this, so I ambled over to see what the heck she was doing.

She didn't notice my arrival till she ran into me on one of her circles. That's what it usually took to get her attention, so I eventually got used to catching her when she fell over, but at the time it caught me nearly as much by surprise as it did her. We both landed in the dirt.

I sat up and glared at her, trying to brush the dust off myself; a losing battle, as my clothing was now a uniform light brown, at least on the side that had been planted. She looked at me from under her cap and grinned. "You're a mess."

Since she had landed in puddle, she was, if possible, even dirtier than I was. In fact, she was dripping mud. She seemed unconcerned, except to try and wipe her glasses off with her shirt. Her shirt being covered, that did nothing but smear them worse. She shrugged and put them in her jeans pocket.

I didn't wear glasses myself, but I kinda figured that wasn't what you were supposed to do with them.

"You ain't no prize yerself." Though actually her muddy clothes showed off a rather nice figure, that wasn't something I was going to mention. You don't say something like that till maybe your second date, that they look real nice mud wrestling. And some girls still don't take it as a compliment, go figure.

Hey, I got eyes, don't I? No harm looking. Well, all right, if your right eye causes you to stumble and all that, but at the time I sure wouldn't have taken it seriously. And she didn't seem to mind none. All right, she didn't seem to notice, but same difference.

"I'm not any prize, yes." She grinned again. I wondered if she were crazy or just stupid. She'd soon have me convinced that she was the sanest person on the face of the earth, despite the fact that she was crazy as a loon. "In a mad world, only the mad are sane." She said once. It's about as true as anything else that manages to sound clever, I suppose.

She just laughed at me. "Mud is good for the skin. There's rich ladies who will pay good money to get wrapped up in mud. I just got the bulk rate... it's a lot cheaper."

I had to laugh at that. "What the heck are you doing, anyway? You were just circling around that sign like a fly around a manure pile."

She raised her eyebrows. "My, what a colorful metaphor. You pick up many girls with lines like that?"

I scowled at her. "Knocked you over, didn't I?"

"And a brilliant means of introduction it was, though that doesn't seem to be entirely relevant to what we were discussing." She seemed to lose interest in me entirely at that point; she had gone back to circling around that road sign again, humming an odd tune to herself. I would later learn was the tune from the Largo of Dvorak's New World Symphony. She tended to hum it a lot when she was wrapped up in something, and since she was almost always wrapped up in something I got real familiar with it. I might have hummed it through her funeral, in fact.

"So what are you doing with that sign?" I finally asked again after a long pause.
She started; she had apparently forgotten all about my presence. Peering rather muzzily at me (her glasses still being in her pocket), she was silent for a moment. "Trying to figure out its story."

I gave her a blank look. "It's story? It's a road sign, for cripes sake, it doesn't have a story."

"Everything has a story." She ran her fingers lightly over the metal of the pole, still humming to herself.

"How can a road sign have a story? It just stands there and tells people to..." I had to walk over to the other side to see what it actually said. "Yield. Nothing confusing about that."

She just looked at me for a minute. "There's no other street here. What are they supposed to yield to?"

I gaped at her; I looked around, at that rusty yellow sign, which still said yield, and at the long, unbroken country road in the middle of nowhere that stretched out in the distance in both directions and, sure enough, did not intersect another road for as long as I could see. The only thing this road crossed was cornfields. I looked back at the sign, then back at the road again, and gaped some more.

"Never thought if it, did you?"

I was silent. Just because it was true didn't mean she had to say it.

She did, though; she was no more capable of not speaking the truth than she would have been to stop breathing. A bit less, in fact, seeing as how she did stop breathing. The idea of not telling the truth was probably the only idea that never crossed her mind.

"Don't feel too bad about it." she said. With people who had accepted the idea that they had been idiots, she could be magnanimous in her victories. Not that she really considered them victories; to her, in contradiction to all the experience I had had with the human race, truth would always win out; there was simply no other option. But pity the fool who was stupid enough to hold to his folly in her presence! "Most people don't notice things like that." A sad pause. "Most people don't notice anything at all."

I have since come to the conclusion that it's safer that way.

"So why is it here, then?" I asked.

"I have no idea. If I knew its story, I wouldn't have to be here." I didn't think it was really all that important to be there anyway, to figure out that stupid story. She never did let go of it, though. Well, not till she let go of everything. "Look here, though." She said. "The reason for its existence isn't the only part of its story." She pointed to a deep bend in the pole. "What caused this?"

I shrugged. "A car hit it, I suppose."

"When? Why? Who was driving?"

"How should I know? Who really cares? Does it really matter?"

It was her turn to shrug. "Maybe. I'd have to know what happened before I could tell you whether it was important or not."

"Shouldn't you know whether it's important to know before you spend all that time and energy to figure out what went on?"

She looked at that sign with a strange look in her eyes, a light I would become all too familiar with. It was the light of the burning Unanswered Question, the light she sometimes said was the voice of God, and I sometimes thought was the curse of the Devil. "The Devil is the Father of Lies," the preacher said once. And whatever it was that drove her drove her for the truth.... but then, maybe sometimes the truth is the biggest lie.

"Nothing is unimportant to know, in the long run. It's just a story that hasn't been told... yet."

Something about her words at that moment, that light in her eyes, made me shudder. It was at the same time hypnotic and repellent. The sun shone down bright, glinting off the stagnant puddles and the non-rusted parts of the yield sign; her eyes did not shine, but were somehow shiny.

"Maybe some stories shouldn't be told."

I really wasn't thinking about that road sign anymore. Maybe I didn't notice things, not like her, but I did know a few things about the world that maybe deep down she didn't really understand, or wouldn't accept; all the little petty dramas that everyone I knew played out secretly and would do almost anything to keep that way.

"All stories should be told."
* *

I walked last night to Town, three hours, all dressed up in my Sunday best... which was covered in dust by the time I got there. It was a few days after the funeral. I wanted to go to the theater, see. Shakespeare. I wasn't stupid enough to go to Romeo and Juliet... I knew what that would do to me. It was Hamlet. Damn, was I shaking when I walked out. "What dreams may come, when we shuffle off this mortal coil that human flesh is heir to..." But not to think of that. Anything but that. So I thought of actors. I thought about how they told a story, told a truth, using a lie. Behind those curtains they took off their costumes, wiped off their makeup masks, and became different people. They laugh, love, talk, and die on stage, curtain closes, they're no longer dead, they get up and go out for a cup of coffee with the person they love on stage and quietly loathe in real life. Everything on-stage is but an illusion, but it claims to show us something true.

All the world is but a stage...

***

After that encounter with her at the signpost, I trudged my way back home through the dust, not so much in a daze as in a state of sudden seeming clarity. I had always wondered how Peter and them could live their lives and then, suddenly, having been approached by a man they had never met who came and told them "Come follow me." could just up and go. She would later ask the same thing about Hitler, how he could tell people to these horrible things in the name of his vision, and they would up and do them. I doubt they questioned it much, at the time. I know I didn't.

An idea can be a very powerful thing.

I trudged up, and glanced at the mailbox; the red flag on the side was up again, and I snorted and wondered what new miracle product they had sent away for this time. Something else to clutter up the basement or block the garage. The screen door shrieked as I opened it and banged closed behind me; I waited for a yell from upstairs to mind the noise, but apparently Pa was either sleeping much sounder than normal or had gone to grab some dinner at the diner before heading off to the factory. I didn't much care either way. Ma, of course, would have just gotten off work and be at the Church for Bingo.

I took a shower real quick to wash off all that dust, then went and grabbed a coke out of the fridge and lit up a cigarette, still thinking about her. From that moment on, I usually was.

I thought it was love, or what passes for it in boys and men of a certain age or mentality, and wondered what it is about her that could possibly be attractive. She was crazy. And she wasn't that good looking, either. I had had better, more than once, and still could. The football player stereotype is overrated; some girls will put out regardless of you athletic affiliation. But it wasn't cheerleaders who danced through my head while I lay on my bed and stared up at the ceiling. It was her and her damn signpost, which in the back of my head I rather muzzily understood as some kind of metaphor, but be damned if I knew what of.

* * *


I met her the next day, walking down the street towards the cemetery. It was funny, how we had the same haunts, but I had never seen her before that day at the signpost. Not just there, but anywhere. I asked around, later, and no one else had, either. No one really knew her, but no one else had ever thought to ask who she was or where she had come from, either. Maybe she had just moved here, I don't know. It was a fairly small community, so normally new faces would have gotten a lot of attention, but her, she had this way of acting like wherever she was was exactly where she belonged. So people would often assume that she did, even if they didn't really remember. Or maybe she had been there all along, like that road sign, and no one had ever noticed the incongruity.

We had both hung out in the graveyard, though. Me, I had started going there when I was younger and home got to be too much. Graveyards are quiet, see, and most people don't go there unless they have too, so I wouldn't have to deal with any people there. She went there... well, she had a couple of reasons for going there, and not all of them were reasons you would suspect.

When I walked up in the middle of that afternoon, she was standing there on the path leading up to it, staring at the gate. I couldn't resist getting a dig in. "Trying to figure out the gate's story? Thinking of all the thing's it's seen? The bodies that have passed therein? The stories that have ended here?"

"Some stories start at a funeral," she said distractedly. "But I was trying to figure out how to get in, actually, seeing as how someone put a lock on the gate. Who locks a cemetery, anyway?"

"They caught some of those Satanist kids from the high school digging up a body last week."

"Really?" I had caught her attention; she looked at me instead of the gate. "What for?"

"They thought the decaying corpse might be a health risk."

She looked exasperated. "Not 'what did they catch the kids for,' 'what did they want the body for?'"

"That was what they wanted the body for."

She was suspicious. "Really?"

"How should I know what they wanted a body for? Do I look like a Satanist?"

She gave me this look; it wasn't anger, but more this quiet disappointment, and then shook her head slightly and started walking around the fence, looking for a way in. I felt obscurely ashamed for a moment, but then I got angry. Who was she, to be disappointed in me? We didn't even know each other, for crying out loud. It's not like I had done anything wrong; I was just telling a joke. What was she, one of those politically correct nut jobs who couldn't stand to hear anything about anyone that could possibly be considered offensive? She had no right to try to make me ashamed of something she thought was wrong and I didn't... I continued fuming along that vein for a while in my head. I would later realize that such anger was irrational (and misdirected, in this case), but, at the time I was pissed off.

"What are you fuming about?" she asked a few minutes later, having gone around the whole outside without finding a break in the fence. She kicked the gate without spirit.

"You."

She gave me a blank look. "Whyfor?"

"You're so... so... arrogant. Think you know everything."

She was astonished by my comment. "Quite the opposite, I assure you."

"Wha?" Not only was I confused by her statement, I was a bit amazed that someone actually used the words 'quite the opposite, I assure you' in a real, everyday conversation.

She smiled. "Every time I learn anything, I become more aware of all the things I don't know or understand. Like Socrates, that is what makes me wise." The smile widened to a grin; I couldn't tell whether she was serious or not. There were days when I couldn't decide whether she was serious about any of the things she said or not; maybe it was just some huge, horrible joke.

The joke was on her if it was.

I looked at her in confusion, shook my head. "Then why did you give me that look?"

She looked down at the ground, shuffled her feet a bit. Her voice, when she spoke, was slightly sullen. "You lied."

"It wasn't a lie, it was a joke."

"You deliberately said something that wasn't true. That's a lie, whatever you call it. A rose by any other name and all that."

My fists clenched a bit involuntarily. "Everyone lies."

Her head came up sharply, making her hair whip around her face. Nonetheless, her voice was soft. "I don't."

"What, never?" My voice was perhaps more sarcastic than I intended. I didn't believe her. But it was true. Never, in all the time I knew her, did she ever deliberately say anything untrue. She lived... and died... for the truth. It was one of the things that at once attracted me to her and repelled me; that idea of morality, the absolute conviction. I admired her convictions, how she always stood for them unwaveringly. There wasn't a hypocritical bone in her body. What made me despise her was how all that virtue made me feel about myself. Morality of her sort was all well and good, but I had never aspired to live up to it. All that excessive conviction would always give me a large but vague and undefined feeling of guilt, and I didn't like feeling guilty.

She opened her mouth, hesitated, shrugged slightly. "Never intentionally. I always speak the truth as I know it."

We both kind of stood there for a moment, half glaring at each other. Well, I glared; she looked more quietly determined than anything else. I looked away first. I shook my head silently, and opened the lock on the gate and held it open for her. "It's just for show."

She grinned again and curtseyed, then walked through; I followed right behind her.

***

There once was a story about a group of men. They lived in a cave, chained to a rock. Their whole life, they lived in that cave, sitting in that stone chair, staring at the wall in front of them. They couldn't do anything else; they were chained in that position. Behind them there were torches which illuminated the room, letting them see something of their world... but it was still only their little portion of the wall. Every so often, there would be weird and fantastic shapes on that wall, and they would stare at them and study them. Some believed they were shadows of something else they could not see, and others believes there was nothing but the shapes. The first would ponder and discuss about what kind of creature or object could create those kind of shapes; the second would study the shapes on the wall to understand their behavior. No one agreed on the truth, and, because they could not see the reality behind them, no one ever guessed the truth.

Time passed.

The, one day, another man came into the cave. He released them from their chains, and turned them around to see behind them. He showed them their cave wall, and how it was nothing but the shadow of a much greater reality. He tried to explain.

In terror and fury, they killed the man and chained themselves back into their comfortable stone chairs and stared at their wall.

He never even had a chance to explain that there was an outside, beyond the cave.

The moral of the story is...

***

She was chewing gum and reading the Bible, next time I saw her. For that, I almost didn't go up to talk to her. The only person I ever saw reading the Bible outside Sunday Service was Tim... and, well, Tim and I didn't get along so well. Hypocritical little... well, we just didn't get along so well. But she grinned and waved when she saw me, so I ambled on over.

"Hola! ¿Como estas?"

"What?"

"¿No hablas español?" She shook her head. "Pity."

I scowled at her. "No need to be insulting."

"What? Oh, no. I wasn't." She went back to her reading.

I rolled my eyes and sat down on the bench next to her. When was that? It's all blurring together now. September, maybe. It was getting cooler, I know. We were... downtown? I think. Why can't I remember? Anyway, there was this little park downtown; we went there sometimes and sat on that little bench beneath the willow tree next to that artificial waterfall.

I hated when we sat there. It reminded me of all those chick movies, all that romantic crap. It gave me... thoughts. Not sex-thoughts. Those were normal. The other thoughts were more frightening.

Her lips pursed in frustration as she stared at the book; she sighed and closed it, closing her eyes for a moment.

"It upsetting you?"

She shook her head, a wistful look in her eyes. "No. No, it's not upsetting me."

She sure looked upset to me. "Well, if that's not upsetting you, what is?"

She cocked her head a bit and brushed a lock of escaping hair back behind her ear. She didn't answer for a moment; she stared off into the distance with a terrible kind of sadness. "Me, I suppose. Maybe the idea of knowledge."

That took me aback, a little. She was the one who was on the great quest for knowledge, wasn't she? "Knowledge?" I was confused, and I was fighting an urge to play comforter. Her eyes just looked so much like a little puppy's that had just been kicked for the first time.

"Or lack thereof."

I thought then that I understood. "Well... I'm sure you'll figure it out eventually." I paused. "Whatever it is you're trying to figure out."

She turned those eyes on me, then. "Will I?" She said, voice dull. "How can I? Once, I was arrogant enough to think that reason alone could lead me to the truth... but, like Faust, have come to the point where all I can say is, 'I now do see that we can nothing know.'"

She paused; I couldn't think of anything to say.

She continued. "How can I learn anything, when everyone is lying to me?"

"Everyone? Surely that's a bit of an exaggeration?" I ventured.

She ignored me. "One person tells me one thing is true, another the very opposite. Both sides accuse the other of distorting the evidence to prove their own biases... and both are right, about that at least. With everyone muddying the waters, how can anyone ever discover the truth?"

I looked at the Bible she was clutching, her knuckles turning white. "You talking about religion?"

"That. Yes. No. Everything, really."

I shook my head. "Science has proven there is no need for God."

She snorted. "Sure they have." She shook her head in turn. "Science lies too, boy."

"But... science is fact. That's what it means."

"Eh. Science is what ever they think is fact at any given time. It changes. In the 1800's, they thought Flemming and his eels had disproved the necessity of God... their "facts" have changed, but not their principle."

"That doesn't mean that this isn't true. What does that prove?"

"Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Nothing proves anything, and today's facts are tomorrow's myths... what, then, can we base anything on?" She looked at her Bible with sadness. "Ah, Lord..." A whisper, barely audible. A prayer. "God of truth... what is truth?"

She shook her head violently, and glared. "Eh. What am I babbling about? You really should shut me up when I'm talking nonsense."

"Err..." How the hell was I supposed to be able to tell the difference from the normal nonsense and that kind of nonsense? None of it made sense to me.

"There has to be an answer. There has to be a way to find the answer. Otherwise, what would the point be?" She was talking to herself, muttering with a kind of worried fierceness.

"Maybe there isn't a point."

She just looked at me.

***

I went for a walk the other day, trying to forget. It's fall, and raining; two things that are usually synonymous, at least around here. It's been raining for five days straight. I slogged my way down the road, my head bowed down out of the wind. I wanted to forget, but I grinned as I remembered. When I looked up, I could see her out of the corner of my eye, prancing gleefully in the mud, her face turned up towards the clouds.

She always said she was trying to drown herself, and would laugh.

I thought it was a joke.

My smile fell away, and I walked on in sodden misery, and stood in front of that damn, rusted yield sign. Stifling the sound that tried to spring from my throat, I clenched my fists till the palms began to bleed.

Tell me then, you, if you were so clever... what's the story behind a sign that's been broken into pieces and left in a cairn by the side of the road, with blood that runs into the mud with the rain?

***

She started dragging me to church with her on Sundays. I don't know why I went with her, that first time... well, actually I do know, and it didn't have nothing to do with religion. And it certainly wasn't to listen to no preacher tell me I was going to hell and try to get money out of me. It was different than I expected, though.

It wasn't different. It was exactly how I thought it would be. But she made me see it differently.

We sat up in the balcony. I'd lean back in the old pew, put my feet up on the cracked wood of the railing with its peeling and faded gold paint, and watch her as she listened. She had a nervous sort of energy that would fade into complete stillness and then burst back out again; she would nod with the preacher and shift positions, cross and uncross her legs, lean forward and drum her fingers on the railing. When she was particularly interested she would rest her head on one shoulder and bite the thumb knuckle of the opposite hand. Then something would happen; I was never quite sure what. But whatever she was listening or looking for, it wouldn't be there. Or maybe she saw or heard something that shouldn't have been there but was. But whatever it was, she would slump back in her seat and close her eyes for a minute, and not move at all. I think she would hold her breath; you couldn't see her chest move anyway. It would be almost like she was dead.

Then she would spring up again, and make some humorous comment, and it would be like nothing had ever happened.

When she really was dead, I kept thinking she had just seen whatever it was again, and was just being still for a moment. I kept waiting for her to suddenly jump and blink and grin at me and pretend that everything was okay. That nothing had ever happened.

***

The story is all blurring together, and I'm jumping back and forth in time. I don't remember that first time I sat next to her in the pew. I don't remember what we said to each other, or what the preacher said, or if that crazy old lady in the flowered hat tried to drag us back to her house for Sunday dinner that week, or if the one in the purple dress with the gold buttons made a scene about the sermon. I don't remember the sermon. I don't remember the color of her eyes...

***

I muttered to myself as we walked down the cracked stone stairs of the old church building. She raised her eyebrows and quirked a half-grin at me. “Something bothering you?”

I kicked a pebble, didn't look up, gestured back at the door.

“The service? Something the pastor said? The people?” She leaned against the iron railing and looked up at me through half-lidded eyes. Everything about her was half, that day. Half-smiling, half-looking, half-paying attention. I put my hands in my pockets and kept walking; she half-ran to catch up with me, stumbling on the loose rocks.

“Dinner at Miss Rosalee's?” she asked.

“No.” I kept walking.

Silence. Then, “She made pie.”

I hesitated. “What kind?”

“Peanut butter.” She twisted a loose lock of hair in her fingers, watching me. No hint of a smile, but I could hear one.

“Well...”

She nodded. “That's settled, then. Now what's the problem?”

I stifled a sigh. It wouldn't do any good. She just kept watching me as I shuffled my feet. “Don't they realize they look like idiots?” She kept looking. “All that feel-good crap. The false hopes that this time their prayers are going to be answered. The emotional outbursts. The altar calls, where the same people go up Sunday after Sunday, for the same things as the time before, and the time before that. Those ridiculous songs. Everything.” I leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette.

She took it away from me and put it out. “'The wisdom of God is like foolishness to man.'”

I glared at her and kept kicking the stone. “Bible verses.”

She shrugged, leaned against the same wall. “They only look like idiots if you assume they're wrong.”

“It doesn't make any sense.”

“It does to them.”

I kicked the stone into the wall. “Does it to you?”

She was silent for a minute. “I want it to make sense.”

“So it doesn't.”

She picked up the rock I had been kicking, fiddled with it for awhile. “What is this?

“A rock.”

“A rock. Which used to be part of something bigger, something useful, maybe beautiful. Now, something to be played with when you're focusing on something else. Dull, grey, boring. Still sparkles if you look at it just right, though. Igneous, so it was forged in the white-hot magma under the earth's surface, cooled, expelled, and broken. Some people put one in their pocket and rub it when they get worried or upset.” She handed it to me, expecting me to somehow be enlightened by her elaborate extended metaphor.

“Or it could just be a rock.” I said.

She shrugged and walked away. I put the rock in my pocket and followed her.

* * *

It sits on the desk in front of me, next to the battered and gnawed-upon blue and white pens. People used to believe in something called “the philosopher's stone,” something which could change one element to another, or give the alchemist immortality. Everything was made up of a combination of four basic properties, and it was just a matter of reorganizing them a little.

We laugh at them, of course. Silly, thinking things can be broken down into dryness and wetness, hotness and coldness, instead of positive, negative, and neutral. Or strange-ness, charmed-ness, up-ness, down-ness, top-ness, and bottom-ness. Or something new they'll think of tomorrow, breaking things down further. So close, really – the wrong names, the wrong number of elements. But the basic material is there, and all we have to do is – rearrange. Add something new as a catalyst.

I pick it up, and it makes a comforting weight in my hand, solid, smooth from wear. If I would hold it up to the desk lamp it would sparkle, but I prefer it dark. Its coolness warms as I run a calloused thumb over its familiar surface. Then my fist clenches, and I pitch the thing out of my window.

Just a damn rock.

* * *

The Preacher was fresh out of seminary, and full of all sorts of pretty, idealistic notions about sparking revival and true Christian brotherly love in his parishioners. Not a bad sort, really. He meant well, in his eager-puppy way, and his sermons were nice and short and simple – not all theological or mystical. Might come as a surprise, but mystic isn't really my thing. Anyways, I still didn't really buy the whole religion thing, and he couldn't have proved anything logical-like if his life depended on it, but he figured proof was counter-productive anyhow. If I was going to be religious, I wouldn't mind having his sort, I guess. Certain, simple, clear-sighted.

His parishioners hated him, of course.

Oh, not all of them. But enough to make things difficult. The problem with idealists is, people who ain't so idealistic don't like to be around them so much. If they were all about reforming themselves, they'd have been doing it before he came around. Most of them figured things were just fine the way they were, thank you, and didn't want to hear nothing otherwise. And then people who are idealistic in different ways don't get along so good either, 'cause they think different things are important. And some people are just damn mean.

So, what that all boils down to, I found I didn't mind going to Church so much, even though the actual church part didn't mean anything to me. I thought about bringing popcorn for the show, but she wouldn't have appreciated that.

She had her own problems with the poor preacher. She thought he was oversimplifying things.

“Look,” I said one Sunday as we sat in the balcony. “Don't go arguing with him over the sermon again this week, okay?”

She leaned backwards in the pew and fiddled with her pencil. “But...”

“Crazy-hat-lady got him enough for this week.”

She snorted. “She's an idiot. And didn't have a decent argument.”

I nodded, all agreeable. “But you didn't like the sermon either.”

“No, but I have good reasons.” She scowled. “He means well, I know, but the theology...”

“I dunno. Not gossiping sounds like a nice good Christian doctrine to me.” I grinned at her. “Not that you could convince any of those good little church ladies about it.” Miss Rosalee was sweet with her Sunday dinners, but I think half 'cause she wanted a fresh audience for all her stories.

“Well, yes, gossiping is bad, but he can't just skip to that. He's not giving them any foundation.” She wasn't looking at anything, just doodling on the bulletin.

“They're supposed to already have the foundation. Faith in Jesus and all that.” I made mine into a paper airplane and mimed throwing it at one of the big-hatted ladies' heads. Since she didn't notice, I didn't bother to actually try anything.

“There has to be more to it than just salvation and moral behavior.”

I shrugged. “It all seems to be working well enough for him,” I said, sighting along my plane at the poor man besieged by fake-polite compliments on the sermon and still beaming his earnest smile and shaking hands. “Perseverance in adversity, humility, comfort in times of trial...”

“If it works, that makes it true?”

“Got a better way to decide?”

* * *
Not everyone, of course, appreciates questions, or the people who ask them a bit too insistently. I found her obsession with capital-T Truth rather endearing, but even I didn't care too much for being in the laserlike focus of Inquiry. Everyone has things they just don't want to get into, for various reasons – shame, fear, the sheer joy of keeping secrets. Hell, sometimes people don't want to talk about the things that make them happiest, in case it evaporates when it hits the open air.

Her, though, she saw secrets as a kind of cancer. One little cell, growing and breeding in the darkness of someone's guts, until it brings the whole system to an agonizing standstill, and the only way to save the patient is to slice them open with something sharp and cut the thing out. I tried to tell her sometimes cancers are inoperable, but she accused me of taking the metaphor too far. I was taking it too far. Ha. Point was, people don't like random strangers cutting 'em up and rummaging around in their insides, and that was all I was saying.

Small towns are especially bad when it comes to secrets, 'cause it's so much harder to bury them. No hiding in the crowd, as it were; everybody knows everybody and wants to be in everybody's business, only not in all their business, 'cause if they know what's going on they might have to do something about it, and who wants that? Gossip in a small town is an art form. Say everything without saying anything, say anything without saying everything. Give a look, whisper, but keep to the lie agreed upon. You don't want to incriminate yourself. You want to be able to say, later, “we didn't know.” Round here, secrets are hidden by consensus.

I told her. I told her, some things should just be left alone. Sometimes things get broken, and all you can do is put some duct tape on it and hope for the best. It isn't the best, and it sure ain't pretty, but so long as it's still running, you just walk quiet around it so it doesn't finish breaking. You don't take it apart to figure out how it works, 'cause it might not go back together. I told her.