The question was: Why had God stopped talking to him? And if God was silent now, did that mean He would be silent forever or eventually start talking to him again? And if He never talked again, could it mean that Ferguson had deluded himself and God had never been there in the first place?
For as long as he could remember, the voice had been in his head, talking to him whenever he was alone, a quiet, measured voice that was at once reassuring and commanding, a baritone murmur bearing the verbal emanations of the great invisible spirit who ruled the world, and Ferguson had always felt comforted by that voice, protected by that voice, which told him that as long as he kept up his end of the bargain all would go well for him, his end being an eternal promise to be good, to treat others with kindness and generosity, and to obey the holy commandments, which meant never lying or stealing or succumbing to envy, which meant loving his parents and working hard at school and staying out of trouble, and Ferguson believed in the voice and did his best to follow its instructions at all times, and since God seemed to be keeping up His end of the bargain by making things go well for him, Ferguson felt loved and happy, secure in the knowledge that God believed in him just as much as he believed in God. So it went until he was seven and a half, and then one morning in early November, a morning that felt no different from any other morning, his mother walked into his room and told him his father was dead, and everything suddenly changed. God had lied to him. The great invisible spirit could no longer be trusted, and even though He went on talking to Ferguson for the next several days, asking for another chance to prove Himself, beseeching the fatherless boy to stay with him through this dark time of death and mourning, Ferguson was so angry at Him that he refused to listen. Then, four days after the funeral, the voice abruptly went silent, and since that day it hadn’t spoken again.
That was the challenge now: to figure out whether God was still with him in the silence or whether He had vanished from his life for good. Ferguson didn’t have the heart to commit a knowing act of cruelty, he couldn’t bring himself to lie or cheat or steal, he had no inclination to hurt or offend his mother, but within the narrow scope of misdeeds he was capable of, he understood that the only way to answer the question was to break his end of the bargain as often as he could, to defy the injunction to follow the holy commandments and then wait for God to do something bad to him, something nasty and personal that would serve as a clear sign of intended retribution — a broken arm, an attack of boils on his face, a rabid dog biting off a chunk of his leg. If God failed to punish him, that would prove He had indeed disappeared when the voice stopped talking, and since God was supposedly everywhere, in every tree and blade of grass, in every gust of wind and human feeling, it made no sense that He could disappear from one place and still be everywhere else. He necessarily had to be with Ferguson because He was in all places at the same time, and if He was absent from the place where Ferguson happened to be, that could only mean that He was in no place and had never been in any place at all, that He in fact had never existed and the voice Ferguson had taken for the voice of God had been none other than his own voice speaking to him in an inner conversation with himself.
The first act of revolt had been tearing up the Ted Williams baseball card, the precious card that Jeff Balsoni had slipped into his hand a couple of days after he returned to school as a gesture of undying friendship and commiseration. How disgusting it had been to destroy that gift, and how shameful it had been to turn his eyes away from Mrs. Costello and pretend she hadn’t been there, and now that he was at Hilliard, how unconscionable it was for him to be pursuing his campaign of willful self-sabotage, building on his efforts of the first year to establish a new pattern of maddeningly inconsistent results, a far more effective strategy than one of pure failure, he decided, a hundred percent on two math tests in a row, for example, and then twenty-five percent on the next, forty percent on the one after that, and then ninety percent followed by a dead-last zero, how mystified they all were by him, his teachers and classmates alike, not to mention his poor mother and the rest of his family, and yet even though Ferguson continued to spit on the rules of responsible human behavior, no dog had jumped up to bite him on the leg, no boulder had dropped on his foot, no slamming door had crushed his nose, and it seemed that God had no interest in punishing him, for Ferguson had been engaged in a life of crime for almost a year now, and still there wasn’t a single scratch on him.
That should have settled the matter once and for all, but it didn’t. If God wouldn’t punish him, that meant He couldn’t punish him, and therefore He didn’t exist. Or so Ferguson had assumed, but now that God was on the verge of being lost to him forever, he asked himself: What if he had already been punished enough? What if the killing of his father had been punishment on such a grand scale, a tragedy with such monstrous, everlasting effects, that God had decided to spare him from any other punishments in the future? That seemed possible to him, by no means certain but possible, yet with the voice still silent after so many months, Ferguson had no way of confirming his intuition. God had wronged him, and now He was struggling to make it up to Ferguson by treating him with divine gentleness and mercy. If the voice could no longer tell him what he needed to know, perhaps God could communicate with him in some other way, through some inaudible sign that would prove He was still listening to his thoughts, and so began the final stage of Ferguson’s long theological inquiry, the months of silent prayer when he begged God to reveal Himself to him or else lose the right to bear the name of God. Ferguson wasn’t asking for some grand, biblical revelation, a mighty clap of thunder or a sudden parting of the seas, no, he would have been content with something small, an infinitesimal miracle that only he himself would have been aware of: for the wind to blow hard enough to push an errant scrap of paper across the street before the traffic light changed color, for his watch to stop ticking for ten seconds and then start again, for a single drop of rain to fall from a cloudless sky and land on his finger, for his mother to say the word mysterious within the next thirty seconds, for the radio to turn on by itself, for seventeen people to pass in front of the window within the next minute and a half, for the robin on the grass in Central Park to pull out a worm before the next plane passed overhead, for three cars to honk their horns at the same time, for the book in his hand to fall open to page 97, for the wrong date to appear on the front page of the morning paper, for a quarter to be lying next to his foot when he looked down at the sidewalk, for the Dodgers to score three runs in the bottom of the ninth and win the game, for his Great-aunt Pearl’s cat to wink at him, for everyone in the room to yawn at the same time, for everyone in the room to laugh at the same time, for no one in the room to make a sound for the next thirty-three and a third seconds. One by one, Ferguson wished for those things to happen, those things and many others as well, and when none of them happened over six months of wordless supplication, he stopped wishing for anything and turned his thoughts away from God.