Doubtless, unbelievers would judge Lucien’s Subtle God as impotent. Any poetic dimension to A Higher Power must be regarded as deliberate vagueness; and poetry can only be synonymous with immateriality where materialists cannot envision virtue in subtlety. Though the materialist ranks evolutionary biology among the first order of facts, the accomplishments of Charles Darwin, where they are condescendingly professed, never inspired anyone to work in a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving.
Religion, for all its shortcomings, as the former seminary student believed, provided a credo by which men of unexceptional intelligence were compelled, by the prospect of a higher judgment, to second guess themselves, whereas unbelievers have no such compunction. While the uneducated man never forgets his lacking, the educated man suffers more in never being as educated as he presumes.
The backbencher, regardless, rated himself first among sinners, even while he labored in the windowless laboratory of his own faith. Believers are often the best advertisement for atonement by being most in need of it. Here, perhaps, the subtlety in penitence is altogether too subtle for an outsider to appreciate.
It began at the bureau of motor vehicles, when Lucien was asked to choose a license plate design. Since he disliked conspicuousness, and expense, he avoided the vanity plates and chose one of two default plates: the generic state design. What arrived in the mail was the second default option: the “In God We Trust” plate. The former seminary student did not send it back, seeing Providence in the mistaken selection. Travel was the one thing that interrupted an otherwise risk-averse life, and though Lucien only travelled twice a year to visit his parents, God would be a reliable copilot on these occasions.
After moving away, Lucien took dirty clothes home over his visits and laundered them in the family’s washer and dryer, so to keep up the pretense that he still lived in the house. The thread that connected offspring to parent—to the memory of a mother patching wounds with Mercurochrome, or her daylong simmering crock pots on the kitchen counter—was the ache of a boy wanting to have his mother close, but not too close.
Survival was never long out of Lucien’s mind. These journeys home exposed the phobic to variables in both landscapes and the internal combustion engine, and this made him keenly attuned to his surroundings. No detail was too minor that, in his neglect, was not capable of producing monstrous consequences. Resultantly, Lucien carried little when he travelled, with the belief that every item beyond bare necessity was reckless and ostentatious: Surfeit belongings, when viewed from the passenger window of his car, were not only tempting to potential thieves but also dead weight. They were burdens that made him less nimble and responsive to changeable situations.
Regardless, he was bound to travel with his laptop computer, so packed his car with a mind to hide it under a hypoallergenic pillow or articles of laundry repurposed from the clothes hamper. When he was required to stop along the roadside to eat, a window seat facing the parking lot (and his automobile) was chosen. This was the next best thing to a sentry post.
Among the few things the motorist was less concerned about hiding were over-the-counter medications, which he kept on the console. This survival kit included baby aspirin (taken daily to guard against heart disease), Vitamin D capsules (taken daily to guard against blindness disease linked to regular aspirin consumption); and prescription pantoprazole (taken nightly for reflux).
The traveler was also concerned with sleeping arrangements, so opted for motels closest to the interstate. He reasoned that any motel so exposed, so accessible, and so removed from the boonies, could not be a motel where, dragged from his bed in the middle of the night, he would be murdered, skinned, and worn as an overcoat by a hillbilly proprietor. Well-lit chain motels were known for continuity, and this left little room for unwelcome deviation.
Lucien indulged in fast food only when on the road, since these businesses were similarly close to the federally maintained interstate system. He preferred Bingo Burgers because they used the same store layout at every location. The men’s room, for example, was always along the entrance side of the building. Three urinals were standard, with generous partitions that made him less self-conscious about the inconstancy of his urine stream. Motion-activated sinks also pleased the germ-phobic man.
Wi-fi was another appealing feature of Bingo Burgers, so at regular intervals he turned to his laptop to make a visual map of the day ahead.
In view of his predilection for eldritch locations, points of interest were plotted along the way, especially places where commercial airliners crashed. Prior to coming on these locations, he logged onto Wikipedia to get exact longitudinal and latitudinal markings. If there was a memorial on site, he scheduled a side trip; if not, he did not venture onto private property.
The allure for such places stemmed from a boyhood pilgrimage he took with his grandfather to the Shiloh Civil War Battleground Memorial, where both sensed the solemn presence of the dead.
Lester Earl was a tall man, and possessed a smooth, taunt face. His skin was permanently tanned from years of toil in cotton fields. His high cheekbones indicated his Cherokee bloodline, as his people originated from Savannah, Tennessee. He once rescued a boy from a burning house; and in later life, he worked as a police sheriff in Parkin, Arkansas, where he sometimes picked up hitchhikers and brought them home for breakfast and a shower before returning them to the highway.
He was notorious for his ghost stories, which had visitors spending the night in his house instead of braving gremlins and headless ghouls patrolling the banks of The Saint Francis River. The patriarch towered over the grandson’s formative memory like a Cherokee scout, forever anticipating changes of terrain and travel dangers.
During his last trip through the haunted Ohio River Valley, Lucien drove past the obelisk chimney at Rockport, Indiana, which marked his jump across the river to Owensboro, Kentucky. Since no Bingo Burgers was in the area, he stopped at an International House of Pancakes on the Parkway for lunch and ordered an unadorned stack of pancakes with no-thrills maple syrup and coffee.
While keeping tabs on his car through the plate glass window, he studied a rail of a man circling the parking lot on foot. His appearance was sudden, and because there was no dampness to his trouser legs, he arguably arrived by means other than a slog through rain-soaked perimeter grass.
Lucien had special radar for detecting others of his ilk: Whereas low-functioning autistics were more alike than different, those on the upper end of the scale were like individual snowflakes. This autistic engaged in typical stereotyped behavior, and marched around the parking lot in pursuit of something like intellectual closure. The diner tried to ignore him, but the wanderer appeared to be sizing up license plates like a parking enforcement officer. He was possibly adding up numbers in a running tally, but unaware that there was no end to the sum where he kept confronting the same plates in his circuit.
Stopping finally at Lucien’s car, he came inside to resume his pacing.
The motorist began his conversation tentatively, feeling compelled by the man’s patterned trot past his table to disrupt it. “Are you looking for someone?” he asked gruffly.
“Are you the ‘In God We Trust’ license plate?”
The diner nodded timidly, but affirmatively.
Plopping into the seat opposite the former seminary student, the pacer declared in a voice for public speaking, “My name is Edward. A book writer.”
‘Book writer’ was a curious self-description. Going by the fellow’s bulging pockets of inky napkins, this work was likely unbound and unpublished. “Are you in a spiritual crisis?” inquired Lucien.
Edward proceeded methodically. “In this book I’m writing, a conversation transpires between two characters who argue about whether there is a design to reality. The topic of Sherlock Holmes comes up, and the first man attributes the detective’s clever deductions to the luck given him by his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle. Information, reasons the skeptic, is withheld to create a dramatic effect, so it’s all trickery. The second man argues that one should imagine God to be at least as good a storyteller as Doyle, and perhaps slight-of-hand is the best option available to Him to move behind the scenes.”
Lucien concurred. “If God exerts influence in this world, it must be along these lines—true. Only atheists and fundamentalists require the straw man of an Old Testament God with thunderbolts. God is a prior and must evolve intellectually with the understanding of the times that seek Him. He was not replaced by quantum mechanics, but better understood through it.”
Edward accepted this, although his spontaneous topic was a preamble. “Little of what I tell you is in chronological order since my understanding of these events came later.
In the weeks following my mother’s death, I had only fleeting glimpses of her in my dreams, like the back of her head. It had me believing nothing was left of her, even when I talked tearfully at clouds as placeholders for her.
Then, a short time later, a lucid hallucination came to me near daybreak. It began when I heard someone talking in the hallway of my apartment building while I drifted in and out of a light sleep. I remember footsteps, and then the sound of a vacuum cleaner. It was not building maintenance, I reasoned, given the early hour. I was compelled to investigate.
I fumbled toward the dark door, but was still hindered by a paralysis of partial sleep. The hallway of my mother’s house greeted me. A running vacuum cleaner was parked along the wall between my sister’s bedroom and mine. My mother, in vivid Technicolor, stood at the end of the hall toward the kitchen, pulling up slack in the power cord as she walked toward where I crouched in the floor weeping. Her hair was brilliant white—a color she never had at any age. She was beautiful, in full Church makeup, and wore a dark bluish sweat suit.
Given my grief and elation, I called to her loudly, but my larynx was paralyzed. I could not make out what she was telling me, but she gestured with her hands, and her expression was severe, as if her time to convey a message was short.
My sister (also in my dream) heard my garbled cry and dashed into the hall, but Mom had disappeared. The vacuum cleaner started up again in another room, leaving both of us staring at our mother’s bedroom in disbelief.
I awoke, still mumbling and crying. My hair was standing on end. I left the apartment in the half hour, and saw a brilliant morning cloud the color of his mother’s dream hair. Overcast clouds had briefly parted to set it off in a patch of blue sky. It ended up raining the whole day.”
“Do you believe your mother was trying to warn you of something?”
“At the time,” Edward confessed. “I was only disappointed that my mother had not embraced me, but—yes—you are correct. She was there to warn me. I would not understand what about until much later. I made a fateful medical decision the following year that had grave consequences for my ability to sleep, and to dream.”
The listener was now fully immersed in the conversation.
“Were my vision merely a grief-induced hallucination, then the cloud may only be regarded as uncanny in a summer unusually populated by memorable clouds. Still—this was only the first of many uncanny things arising from this hallucination.
The last serious conversation I had with my mother provided context to this visitation, even if I did not remember it immediately. It centered on a paranormal TV show we watched together in the den. Her life, by then, was reduced to the indignities of meals composed of snack chips and sherbet. She was never a sentimental woman, and when I asked her, prompted by the nature of the television show, if she would visit me in my dreams after her passing, she tearfully replied, ’Well, I don’t know. I will have so much housework to do.’”
The house by then was ill kept (by my mother’s exacting standards). Yet it was filled with more foreboding than dust. A presence was palpable on these late visits. My sister was with my mother the night she died in the house. She went peacefully in her bed, pointing at the door. When I stayed at the house during the funeral, and slept in the same bed, I tried to imagine what she saw in the doorway.—
Regardless, during our final time together, I worked on my laptop at the kitchen table one morning. The family dog irritated me from the floor. I got up to scold it ungraciously, and to let it outside. At the second my back was turned, I heard a nearly empty glass of water topple behind me. The spill, though slight, poured in the direction of my computer.
Apart from my shock was the memory of a similar incident that occurred years earlier in my apartment. I had left a room and heard ice cubes tumble to the floor from a toppled glass. At the time I shuddered, but figured the only way a tall plastic glass filled with little more than a couple of ice cubes could tip over on its own was if the ice was cold enough to explode while it thawed. The energy released would throw an otherwise stable glass off-balance. I did not hear the ice pop because I was in another room, yet knew this must be what happened.
Tellingly, I was standing beside the second glass when it fell in my mother’s house. No loud cracking ice preceded it. There was only the rim of the plastic cup softly striking the table.”
Lucien rushed ahead. “This was secret knowledge—of which only you would know.”
“It is possible this glass was cold enough to condensate. It may have slid a short distance across the table over a puddle of water, and in coming to an abrupt stop, tipped over. Yet—I do not think my glass was sweating at the time. Even if it had, it seems improbable, given a low center of gravity for a cup containing an ounce of water, that this would put it in danger of tipping.
If one were inclined to believe in ghosts, then an intercessor (possibly my father) wanted me to know that the two cup events were just similar enough for me to acknowledge their uncanny kinship across a span of time, and at a period of momentous change, where humility was required on my part so to keep the lines of communication open.”
“Yes,” answered the listener. “Scolding the dog adds a moral dimension to it. That, too, is uncanny.”
The storyteller continued, “I was awakened by my sister’s phone call with news of my mother’s death several weeks later, after I returned home. It was a Sunday evening. Because I sleep with a fan, I had placed my cell phone near my bed, since I expected an early morning call from an AT&T repairman. (It would have been doubtful I would have heard the ring otherwise.)
I walked around my apartment after the heartbreaking conversation with my sister, not able to process what I was told. I wanted to connect to my mother at that moment, but nothing came to me. I had been watching a documentary about Adrian Conan Doyle in the hour before bed, but this was a trivial detail… so trivial, in fact, that it was a day or two before I realized the connection.”
“In how it relates to your earlier story,” interrupted Lucien excitedly. “About Arthur Conan Doyle, God, and the omission of important information, in order to make an impact?”
Edward revisited the reference. “The scene I mentioned was written months before my mother’s death, but I effectively planted a clue for myself, which both described a process of discovery, as well and the name of the person who would be the trigger object. The documentary served as the missing bit to connect it:
During the interview with Adrian, he talked about his famous father’s experience with spiritualism, and how Arthur concluded that the dead do survive death. As the son stressed, the proof must be established in first-person experience. These words carried special meaning for me in light of who was saying them—and in view that my mother would die little more than an hour later.
“It is subtle, and contingent,” confessed the storyteller. “The skeptic would not be impressed with my piecemeal analysis, but I invent nothing in retelling these unusual facts.”
Lucien recast it. “A scientist rarely possesses his insight all at once. Sometimes he must live with his facts before he has enough inspiration to know how they fit together. You needn’t concern yourself with skeptics. The skeptic answers only to a notion of linear causality, which is painfully obvious to everyone on the way out the door, but to no one on the way in.”
“Was it mere coincidence that comfort for a grieving son came by way of a prescient television interview? It was not like I was engrossed in study of Conan Doyle at the time. The documentary was in my possession almost a year before I viewed it. My understanding of its meaning did not come to me over a cup of coffee, but in the middle of the night, when I awoke and could not go back to sleep. Perhaps the plotting of a daylight intellect is avoided on these midnight occasions, where God tailors understanding without it appearing too manufactured. You wake up and there it is, fully realized in your head, without a syllable of introduction.”
Lucien was confident. “God knows what the individual requires by way of evidence. Even the ardent atheist may expect a reply where he seeks the answer to an earnest question.”
“There is one last coincidence,” Edward stressed quietly, “a year removed from these events. Since my book indirectly deals with this chapter in my life, I have tried to accommodate the most striking coincidences in its pages.
I visited my sister during Christmas, and on Christmas morning she shared a video with me, which was a five second snippet from our mother’s last Christmas on Earth. Hearing my mother’s long-removed voice filled me with sadness, and it was not until later, after returning home, that what she said in those five second pierced me.
She was looking over a book of murder mystery fiction, which she received as a gift. (My mother loved reading.) Though weak of voice, she said to my sister filming her, words to the effect, ‘he has started (or introduced) a new character.’ This was all she said. She was referring to the author of her book, of course, in what must have been the latest installment in a series of books by him.
The strangeness in this utterance is this: The mysterious events surrounding my mother’s passing were so compelling that I needed to include them in my novel. This required creating a new character to which these events could be assigned, and then creating a special section in the middle of my book where this character could relate these events. This character appears in no other part of my book.
This interlude was conceived and written after my mother passed in early September, ten months after she spoke in that video. Although I was present at her last Christmas, I did not know of this video’s existence or my mother saying these words.”
Lucien was first moved to silence, but then noted the meta feature of their unusual encounter. “Our conversation is an reenactment of this chapter?”
Edward made rare eye contact. “My current feelings make me more human; and I have never been more human, more receptive, than I have been during this prolonged grieving process. I do not want to relinquish the sadness I feel over my mother’s death. I do not want to lose whatever contact I have with her. Is this madness?” he worried aloud. “To the doubter, my story is a collection of self-selecting coincidences.”
Lucien put it another way. “All facts are self-selecting. There would never be an insight of any value, otherwise. Some believe the right brain should not be allowed a place at the table when it comes down to the left brain dotting all the ‘I’s and crossing all the ‘T’s. Trust in one’s intuition need not be strident where subtlety is the architect. Humility is qualifier enough.”
Edward rose to leave, and said in parting, “My relationship to intuition resembles a blind man’s relationship to furniture in his room: It produces bruises, but little confidence.”
Whatever awkwardness preceded the wanderer into the building was vanished. Lucien wondered which of the men was the intended beneficiary of their discussion. The coincidence that set each on an intersecting path—where there was no Bingo Burgers but there was an unintended license plate—again pushed them to opposite shores of the world.
Nothing of the fellow interlocutor was seen in the parking lot on resumption of the traveler’s journey: No car sped toward the onramp of the interstate; no fresh path was laid through wet perimeter grass.
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.