The Death Bed

  “I do believe it all.”

  “No you don’t, and none of your friends in there do either. Blind belief isn’t really faith it’s just blindness,” Julia said pointing to the steepled building.

  “What do you mean?” Sara asked, obviously confused.

  “You want to believe, because you know that if all of that were really true you could find meaning in life, but if you really believed you wouldn’t be so belligerently shortsighted. People are only belligerent when they want to convince themselves. You’re all just like salesmen. You try to convince people that you’ve got the answer, but at the same time you don’t really believe in what you’re trying to sell. The only difference is if you could believe in your product, you’d actually have a purpose.”

  “I don’t understand. So you’re basically saying that everything I believe is a bunch of lies for idiots who can’t reason,” Sara asked.

  Julia’s tone softened. “No, that’s not what I was getting at. It’s been a hard month. I’m just saying that it’s an awful lot to expect someone to believe, and I don’t think that any of you actually do, because if you did believe you wouldn’t be spending all your money on fancy benches and new video equipment. You’d be using it to help poor people who really need help. People who really believe wouldn’t waste their time protesting outside the courthouse or picketing at rallies or blowing up . . .” she hesitated. “Or blowing up clinics. Instead they would be helping the people who didn’t have anywhere else to turn. You’re never going to change the world by legislation. Everyone in there was so caught up with making the world better, but let me tell you that the world isn’t going to magically become better by making everything you don’t agree with illegal.”

  The hurt look on her friend’s face made Julia hesitate, but she had to speak her mind. “I know that you don’t do all of those things, but your people do.” She pointed again to the steeple. “I hear people rant about evolution or global warming who don’t understand the first thing about the subject. They just parrot what they’ve been taught to believe. If you really believed what the Bible says, then you wouldn’t be up in arms to try and keep people from learning or thinking differently, and you wouldn’t be afraid of it, because it wouldn’t matter.”

  “But if you think it’s all a bunch of wishful thinking then why waste so much time reading all of it?” Sara asked.

  Julia froze. She didn’t know how to answer the question.

  “My grandfather told me about this man,” she said. “Actually he was only nineteen but,” she couldn’t finish her sentence. Standing in the parking lot in the shadow of that steeple all of the reasoning that had convinced her to take the dead man’s book seemed childish at best.

  “You never used to talk like this. What’s the matter? Are you okay?” Sara asked.

  “Maybe I never talked like this, but I always thought these sorts of things. I just stopped caring what other people would think if they knew what I was really thinking. Or maybe it’s because of that place,” Julia said pointing back to the building. “How on earth is a decent thinking person supposed to walk in there without getting angry? All that stereotype about Christians being idiotic and judgmental and hypocritical doesn’t seem so far off. I could tell by the way they treated me what they thought. I could see that they hated me because I didn’t wait for Jason to ask me, but they don’t even know half of what,” Julia broke off again. She still couldn’t tell Sara about what she’d done. She didn’t know how. It had been easier to tell Abraham; he was dying. Talking to him was like writing in her diary or whispering to herself, but Sara was real to her.

  “And what if Sara’s just like the rest of them,” she wondered even though she knew that wasn’t the case. “How can I tell her? What will she think of me?” Sara spoke up, interrupting her thoughts. “You’re still not making any sense to me,” she said. “But I’m still your best friend; a best friend is a hard thing to replace you know. You’re saying things that just sound like nonsense to me. Don’t take that the wrong way. I’m only saying that I don’t understand what’s wrong, but I want to.”

  “I’m sorry,” Julia answered.

  Sara suggested that they go out and get ice cream, but Julia apologized again and said that she didn’t know what had come over her. She stepped into her car and closed the door before Sara could respond.

  “Thanks for always being there for me, even when I didn’t deserve it. Friends like that are hard to come by. I’m glad to have you; I really am.” Julia mouthed the words from inside her car, but Sara had already turned away. Then she turned on the ignition, turned down the stereo system, and drove home in silence.

  When she got back to her house she was surprised to see Thomas, but then remembered that the next day was Thanksgiving. The holiday had snuck up on her, much like it had done to everyone else in the Manchell family. She’d seen all the signs and commercials, and everyone had been talking about it in school, but with everything on her mind the actuality of the holiday hadn’t sunk in until that moment when she saw her brother home from college and sitting in the living room. The rest of the family had gathered in the living room as well, and listened as Thomas talked about his first few months of college. They were all in a festive mood and Julia tried to reciprocate. She noted the brown paper bags that lined the kitchen counter and wished that she had been home to help her mother with the shopping.

  “Where’ve you been?” her father asked in what seemed to be a genuinely cheery voice as she entered the living room and sat down next to him on the couch.

  Chapter 11

  Soon after Julia got home Peter’s brother and sister-in-law arrived. Lewis was thrilled to see Uncle Luke and Aunt Debra, and even more so at the prospect of them staying the night while their own house was being fumigated. Hannah did a fantastic job of pretending not to mind their intrusion while they talked about purchasing a timeshare out in New Mexico, and how well their stock was doing, in spite of the economic recession. After hot chocolate, coffee, and small talk, Luke and Debra retired to the guest bedroom which had been the study a day before, Lewis’s refuge the day before that, and a few months ago had been Thomas’s room. With their guests in bed, Peter and Hannah followed suit, and Lewis slunk off to some other part of the house.

  In the end, Julia and Thomas were the only ones left in the living room.

  “It sounds like you’re really having a good time up there. Is that why you never come back to visit on the weekends?” Julia asked. Thomas’s coffee was still steaming on the end table. Julia curled up in the cushion of the rocking chair, and pulled the blanket up around her neck so that only her head protruded out of the bundle. Thomas sat up straight in the couch, and took a sip from the steaming mug before answering.

  “It’s wonderful. I’m thinking about failing some classes just so I’ll have an excuse to stay longer.”

  “Since when did you like coffee?” Julia asked.

  “It’s something you just get used to when you’re in college. I can’t wait for you to get up there. You have to take Dr. Bowman’s intro to philosophy. The man is a genius, and isn’t hampered at all by conventional thinking, really progressive.”

  “What do you mean?” If Julia wasn’t interested in the class she was glad to see her brother and catch up on his life—as long as they weren’t catching up on hers she was content.

  “We’ve been studying moral relativity by looking at normal societal conventions, and how conditioning shapes our worldview, and how we judge different behaviors.”

  Julia didn’t understand a word that came out of her brother’s mouth and he could tell by her blank expression.

  “It’s the idea that right and wrong might not be set in stone. I mean without an absolute standard everything’s subjective, and it’s up to the individual to give meaning to his or her surroundings.”

  “For instance,” Julia prompted.

  “Like suicide. It’s generally frowned upon in society because we’ve been taught that it??
?s unacceptable, cowardly, etcetera. But maybe it’s noble. Maybe it’s a way of taking control of one’s situation and surroundings. Look at other cultures that accept or even expect it. How can one person say what suicide is for everyone else? For you suicide might be despicable but for me it might be an act of greatness.”

  “You think that you learned all about suicide from your class,” Julia said. “You think that because you read a few books and listened to a few lectures that you know everything there is to know.”

  “So now you think that you’re the expert. What do you know about suicide anyway?” Thomas said. He was obviously offended that his sister would be any less enthusiastic about this idea than he had been when he first heard it.

  “I’ve stared it in the face, but I couldn’t go through with it,” Julia interjected, “People are always thinking about doing great or horrible things, but when the moment comes they always back down. We all want to follow through with the plans that we formulate in our heads. We arrange every detail but then when it comes time to act we freeze. Something inside of us keeps us from doing or saying what we want to. Every time we start to act we don’t, and it just reinforces a pattern of not acting, until eventually the habit of doing nothing gets so ingrained it becomes part of our character, and then it’s impossible for us to do anything at all. That’s why we watch television. We all live through fantasy, or those few men and women that haven’t lost the basic ability to act. The rest of us, we’re already dead. I don’t know if it’s great or horrible, but I can tell you that it’s a miracle that anybody ever gets around to actually committing suicide.”

  Julia waited for her brother to reply. He had been listening impatiently, but attentively enough to contradict her, and the vulnerability in Julia’s confession had escaped his notice.

  “So do you think that I’m one of those people who can’t act?” Thomas asked snidely, trying to distance himself from the heart of his sister’s remarks.

  “You’ll have to answer that for yourself,” Julia said, and after a short pause continued, “as for me I’ve decided that I will never be one of those kinds of people, not anymore.”

  “Look,” Thomas said in a different tone that denoted a slight shift in the topic. “We read this story in literature about a giant balloon above the city and for some people it was an image of doom and for others it symbolized hope.”

  “Which was it?” Julia asked forcing herself to calm down a bit.

  “Neither. It just was. In the end everyone had to decide for themselves what they wanted it to stand for.”

  “So what’s the point of it all? Julia asked abruptly, cutting Thomas off before he could begin one of his diatribes.

  “There is no point. That’s what makes it great!”

  “But if there’s no point then why tell it, why read it?”

  “To show that there is no single answer, and when there’s no definite meaning you can make it mean whatever you want. If there’s no right interpretation then there can’t be any wrong one either.”

  “So the point of your story is that the story itself, and everything else, is pointless.”

  “Exactly”

  “Then it has a point. There is a definite meaning even if it’s only that there is no meaning. The whole thing’s self-contradictory,” Julia said in triumphant exasperation.

  Thomas felt that he hadn’t explained the story correctly or that he’d let his sister distort his words. Julia felt very proud of herself for being able to finally put her finger on what had been so frustrating about all of Thomas’s arguments and e-mails since he’d left for college.

  “You’re just too simple to get it,” Thomas returned. “There are several people in my classes just like you who can’t get free of their traditional way of thinking, even though the way my professor explained it was perfectly clear. When you get to college and take the class for yourself maybe you’ll be able to understand.”

  “You’re only a year older than me. But I guess you understand it all perfectly,” Julia said, her voice full of sarcasm.

  “It’s a complicated concept, and a lot of people reject it because they’re stuck in the conventional mindset of the morality of right and wrong,” Thomas answered.

  “I know a story too,” interrupted Julia, “do you want to hear it?” Without waiting for an answer she continued.

  “It’s about an emperor who paid a large amount of money to some tailors to have clothes made for him out of a fabric that was only visible to people who were very wise. The problem is that nobody could see the clothes so they all lied instead. Even the emperor couldn’t see his clothes, but he didn’t want his subjects to think that he was the only person who couldn’t see them, so he accepted their compliments graciously. This all went on for quite some time until one day a small boy saw the emperor passing by on the street and exclaimed, ‘The emperor doesn’t have any clothes.’ Then all of the people realized that the emperor had been cheated by the tailors, and that their stupidity, and wishful thinking, and pride had made them miss it. The end. But unlike your story, mine does have a point.”

  “What are you trying to get at?” Thomas asked, already guessing the meaning of the familiar anecdote. Julia was only too eager to drive the point home.

  You and all your learned professors are naked and you’re trying to convince everyone else that you’re not. But do you know who you’re really trying to convince?”

  “Who?” Thomas asked with condescension, in an attempt to convince himself that he was only humoring his sister.

  “Yourself. You’re trying to explain away that little boy who tells you how things really are, so you can do whatever you want and not feel bad about it.”

  Another silence ensued in which the conversation could have been dropped, but Julia still felt the need to vent; something still burned inside her that needed to escape. She looked at Thomas and all she could see was him, his smug smile and casual condescending tone.

  “If you really think that we’re so free from absolutes,” she went on, “then answer this. How many girls did you sleep with this last semester? And if one of them gets pregnant are you just going to leave her to deal with the consequences? Who’s to say that’s wrong? Or will you be a noble person, and pay for her to go into a clinic and have a little operation that will fix everything, and then pretend nothing happened. Of course if there’s nothing bad then I don’t know why you would feel obligated. Only a man could buy into all that nonsense they’re preaching up there.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong; my literature professor’s a woman,” Thomas said, choosing to address the latter part of his sister’s rant rather than answering her initial question.

  “It’s Thanksgiving. What are you two fighting over?” Peter asked from the kitchen. He wandered into the living room chewing one of the chocolate chip cookies that Hannah had insisted be saved for Thursday. Julia noticed that the clock on the mantle read 12:08 and wondered if her father had been waiting for midnight to sneak one out of the cookie jar so that he could get by on the technicality.

  “Julia’s insisting on all the conventional morality that she got indoctrinated with at that church,” Thomas said.

  Peter approached the doorway, fixed a stern look at his daughter, making sure to catch her attention before he spoke.

  “Now your mother and I don’t care if you want to go to church, we figure that you’re old enough to make your own decisions about that sort of thing, but I won’t have you bringing all those ideas home to cause strife in this household. There will be no proselytizing under my roof.”

  “But Dad,” Julia began. “I only went because Sara asked, and I didn’t even . . .”

  “I don’t want to hear it. We let most things slide so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t argue about this one.”

  And before his daughter could respond Peter had left the room. Thomas wore a triumphant grin, obviously content with how he had manipulated the situation.

  “What are you smili
ng about?” Julia demanded and, like her father, left without waiting for a reply. Shortly afterward the house reverberated from the slamming of the front door, and the sound of a car starting could be heard in the driveway.

  Lewis crawled out from his hiding place under the nice new tablecloth that his father had draped over the old table. He hurried to his room, one step ahead of Thomas so he could pretend to already be asleep. A few seconds later, Thomas swept his hand across the smooth white fabric as he walked by on the way back to Lewis’s room, where he rolled out an old sleeping bag on the floor, trying to be quiet so as not to wake his little brother.

  * * *

  The next morning most of the members of the Manchell family woke up at their leisure and ate from the spread of breads, jellies, and fruits that Hannah had laid out. After everyone had eaten and the spread was put away, Lewis made his way to the living room, where he sat on the couch, mesmerized by his Uncle Luke’s magic tricks. Debra was in the kitchen helping Hannah with the pumpkin and pecan pies, while Peter stood on the opposite side of the kitchen preparing the turkey. Julia cleaned up the dining room, and set the table with the fine china that nobody had laid eyes on since last year. When Thomas finally got around to waking up, he and Julia drove to the store to pick up the creamed corn and peas that Hannah had forgotten the day before, having been preoccupied while she was shopping.

  For one morning the group of people who had gathered in the Manchell house worked together like a unit. They were diverse elements coming together working in unity: a family. They all knew that the morning was beautiful, that life was being lived the way it ought to be, and that for a day they could put aside all their worries. But none of them acknowledged it, afraid of jinxing the moment.

  When Thomas and Julia got back from the store, they set the groceries on the counter where Hannah and Debra were working. Julia went to the back porch where she found her father preparing the smoker. Peter had set patio furniture out on the porch, and Lewis had raked the leaves and dead twigs that had fallen from the enormous birch tree that loomed over the plot of ground that Hannah had always meant to make into a flower garden.