I was glad to get home that night, away from the gallery opening, away from the lingering party chatter that I could still hear below me—down in Angela’s loft—where Melissa, too, was shut away in her room for the night. I stretched out, but sleep eluded me. This was the same bed, I thought, where I had made love to Nathalie countless mad times, and where I used to lie awake after she was gone, wishing I could make my body shut down, my heart stop its beating. I wanted to die there, quickly, with no pain or fuss. Unfortunately, you can’t erase yourself from the world without violence. Even the strongest human will is not enough to paralyze your lungs, to reduce your vital processes to zero. You can fight sickness with sickness but not life with life. No, it takes a stronger poison than that.
A joke came into my head in the dark. What if Hogan’s God Almighty had gone slightly nuts like Angela’s ex? It was a funny thought. The result might be the world as we know it. I don’t care what Hogan says, there’s a flaw in the universe, and its name is death. How’s that for profundity—or was it blasphemy? Great, I said to myself, now I’m doing theology on sleep meds and vodka. No wonder that Jehovah, like Hogan, comes into my mind at the oddest times. Often they arrive together.
Nathalie once had everything but innocence, I thought, and now I had everything but faith. Hogan says I lack the daring. You have to be willing to fight—and maybe die—for an innocence that you’ve already lost and no longer believe in. He calls it thinking like a soldier—a Christian soldier no less. According to him, it’s the very absurdity of faith, its evasion of logic and evidence, that makes it the only sane response to an irrational world. Or was it the other way around? Anyway Christ, to Hogan, is like a criminal whose dossier can never be closed. God is a crime against reason—the only one he condones. His theory makes no sense, but I understand it completely. Sometimes I think about Missy that way.