I laugh, and she laughs.
“Don’t idealize me,” she says. “I’m a human fool. We all are, and it took me a long time to become the happy person I am today. A long time. Okay?”
I look back at the stars, and so does she.
“So do you believe in God?” I ask.
“I do.”
“But you’re not Christian.”
She sits up abruptly. “Surely you’re aware that not everyone who believes in God is a Christian, right?”
“Well, yeah,” I say, though in fact I have temporarily forgotten that, like, a majority of the world isn’t Christian. How did I forget? Thomas and Laurelei meditate. They’re probably Buddhists. How stupid am I?
“So you stopped believing in Christ and started believing in what?”
“It’s hard to explain,” she says. “I would say that I’m more spiritual than religious at this point.”
“What does that even mean?” I stare upward at the gleaming stars.
“To me, religion is the Walmart of spirituality.”
I laugh. “It’s all cheap stuff made in China?”
“Exactly.” She flicks me in the back of the head again. “Exactly what I meant. I mean it’s prepackaged. Lowest common denominator. People just have to follow the preset motions and rituals and rules. They don’t have to think about how the words reconcile with their own hearts. Their own experience.”
“Huh,” I say, considering that. “And what do you believe in now?”
She raises her hands to the sky, then puts them behind her head. “Everything.”
I snort. “Weak sauce.”
She laughs. “You don’t believe.”
I shake my head. “I’m sorry. I just have trouble believing in things that don’t exist.”
“What doesn’t exist? The stars? The sky?”
“God,” I say. “God is a concept used by people who want to feel better about the pointlessness of being alive. You live, you die. The end. Sorry, but that’s what’s real.”
“For you,” she says, as if to add it to the end of my sentence.
“Hey, call it what you want. That’s what I know to be true.”
“So can I teach you something I’ve learned?”
I look over at Laurelei, who is beautiful in a mom way, who I would be okay spending the rest of my life listening to, even if she’s batshit crazy. “Go for it. Knock yourself out.”
“I’ve learned that the answer to every question about God is ‘Yes.’ ”
“What if it isn’t a yes or no question?”
“So judgmental for such an otherwise delightful young man. I’m saying that whatever it is that a person believes about God is totally, completely, irrevocably true — but only if you add two words.”
“Check, please?”
That one earns me another playful smack, and then she stands up and says, “I think I’ll head back to sleep. You?”
I nod and stand up too. “So you didn’t tell me what the two words are,” I say.
She opens the screen door and holds it open for me to walk through, and then she follows me. I see Aisha’s sleeping cheek illuminated by the starlight.
“For me,” she whispers, and she disappears into the darkness of the trailer.
I WAKE UP to loud clanking above me, like a pinball game played by someone who is seriously bad at it. The pings come in quick succession, and then nothing for a minute. Then more pings. I look over to the other couch. Aisha is gone and her blanket is nicely folded. Light pours into the trailer from the semiopen blinds above me. I must have overslept.
I find my shoes, check my breath, decide it’s not terrible, run my hand through my hair, and step outside in the sweatpants I slept in. Then I scream.
A man is crouched on the ground. With a rifle. Pointed at me. I cover my face with my hands and duck.
“Oh hey!”
It’s Thomas’s voice. I peek through my fingers as he slowly hoists himself to his feet and puts the rifle down. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“No worries,” I say, as if it’s a typical Carson morning to wake up in a trailer, go outside, and almost get shot.
“Sorry for the noise. Damn pigeons. Drive me crazy.”
I walk out to where he is and look up. There on the pitched roof of the trailer are three pigeons, milling around.
“Isn’t there like a ‘Thou shalt not kill’ rule or something?” I ask.
He glances at me sideways and laughs. “For pigeons? Don’t think so. Wait ’til one day you have these dirty things pooping all over your front yard. You’ll want to shoot them too.”
“Hey, I already kind of want to shoot them,” I say, and he grins. “Is it legal?”
“BB gun,” he says.
“Oh.” That doesn’t really answer my question, but I don’t care.
He cocks the rifle, lays it on his right shoulder, and squints one eye closed. I’ve never seen a BB gun before. I’ve actually never seen any gun up close before. We’re not big recreational shooters, we who take the 2 train to school.
He shoots. The gun emits a little pop, followed by a clank when the BB hits the metal roof … about fifteen feet away from the trio of birds, who don’t look remotely alarmed.
“Where is everyone?” I ask.
“The girls went to meditate,” he says, and I feel glad that Aisha found something she likes, even if it’s something stupid. Then I think about the “for me” thing that Laurelei said, and I let it go.
Thomas aims again and shoots. Oh for two.
“Aisha is so pretty,” he says.
“Don’t I know it.”
We share a look, and it’s like he knows that I dig her. He reloads. “I heard you and Laurelei talked about God last night.”
“We spoke about God, and we concluded that God is dead.”
The ends of his thick mustache dance when he laughs. “You’re a tough nut to crack.”
“When you’re trying to sell me on God, yeah.” I put my hand out. “Can I try?”
He hesitates for maybe just a nanosecond, and then he hands me the rifle.
“Nobody’s trying to sell you anything. You believe what you believe. That’s all.”
“If you say so,” I say.
“So what exactly does this God I’m trying to sell you look like? What does he do?”
I fiddle with the rifle, unsure of what to do. “Oh, I don’t know.”
Thomas takes the rifle from me and shows me how to hold it. He places the butt of the rifle against his right shoulder and puts his right hand on the trigger. His left hand holds the rifle steady. Then he tilts his head down to look down the barrel.
“You see how there are two sights? This little slot near your face and the bead at the end of the barrel? Line ’em up.”
He hands the rifle to me, and because I’m a lefty, I reverse what he’s shown me.
“You’re a natural,” he says. “Wanna shoot?”
“I guess.” I concentrate on aiming at the birds, unsure if I’ll be able to pull the trigger. I’ve never killed anything before.
“So what does this God look like?” he asks again.
I put the rifle down and look at Thomas, and I think, You. Which is weird. God doesn’t exist, so he doesn’t look like anyone. But if he did, I realize, to me he would look and act like Thomas. He’d be authoritative and manly, not silly and prone to emotional outbursts like my dad. He’d be kind and serene, or whatever you get from meditating (aside from bored).
But that’s the kind of thing you really can’t say to a person without having them question your sanity — that he looks like God. So I say something else instead.
“He’s a big white dude, and he has a white beard and he wears flowing white gowns, but not in a gay way. He has thousands of switches and levers in front of him and they’re labeled, like, ‘Middle East Violence’ and ‘Bali Earthquake.’ Some of them he just flicks on and then laughs, a real deep laugh. Others he can adjust, such as the weather — someone’s gotta control the weather. What with global warming and whatnot, that’s almost a full-time job.”