“This is different.”
“Honey, it’s time.”
She looked up, squinting. “No. Not yet.”
“You did your job; you got us across the border. You need to start getting these meds into your system.”
“We still haven’t gotten to Edo,” she said. “Until that happens, you do not want me off my game.”
“I’m just saying, you need to start loading up. There’s no jumpstart for going the other way.”
“What about you? Are you going to take your meds?”
“I don’t take any meds,” I said. My heart rate had revved like the throttle on that fucking ro-boat.
“The antiepileptics you were taking in the NAT,” she said. “The ones to keep your hallucinations in check.”
“Those don’t work. I lied to Counselor Todd about ’em.”
“You never took them—you palmed them and threw them in the toilet. So how do you know they don’t work?”
Fuck. I didn’t know that Ollie had sussed that out.
“This isn’t about me,” I said, doing my best impersonation of a calm person. “You’re deflecting.”
“I’m deflecting?” Ollie said. “You are bullshitting me, right now, to my face.”
“Ollie, please…”
“It’s not your job to manage me,” Ollie said.
I sat down on the futon and tried to steady my breathing. Right about now Dr. G would have made some comment about the likelihood of two brain-damaged patients holding it together during the world’s craziest road trip. We both needed professional supervision.
“Okay,” I said. “We just both need to keep our shit together for a little while longer.”
* * *
I hadn’t been in New York for over a decade, so I asked Rovil to pick a place we could walk to. He chose an Egyptian restaurant that he said had the highest aggregate score across the major social networks of any establishment that was (a) in SoHo, and (b) did not require reservations. “Have you ever been there?” I asked him.
“Oh yes.”
“Did you like it?”
“I’m not a good enough judge of food to disagree with the scores.”
Dr. Gloria was waiting for us at a street corner, looking happy after a couple hours of sightseeing. “Have you noticed how clean the city is?” she asked me.
It was true. The sidewalks were swept, and I didn’t spot a single homeless person on the three-block walk to the restaurant. Was it just Rovil’s neighborhood, or the entire city? Times Square had already been Disneyfied by the time I first visited as a teenager, back in the 2000s. Perhaps they’d been pushing the circle of cleanliness wider and wider, an event horizon of money that made ordinary reality disappear. The economic collapse that had knocked my father out of the workforce for half a decade was long forgotten. The new boom had made Manhattan into an island of millionaires.
My mood improved as soon as we walked into the restaurant. The dining room was crowded and noisy. I got the hostess to seat us at a sheltered spot in the corner where we could talk more easily. We sat at a low table on padded stools, and soon I was scooping piles of unidentified vegetables and beans onto the wide, floppy Egyptian bread. I said to Rovil, “Do you want me to rate it dish by dish, or only when we’re done?”
“When we’re done is fine,” he said.
* * *
A while later I asked him, “How’d you do it, Rovil? The car, the job, the apartment…”
“I try to work hard.”
“Do your bosses know about your condition?”
“I told them it was a bicycle accident.”
I laughed. “Not the bruises. I meant your other condition.”
“Oh! Yes, of course.” He looked embarrassed. “But not exactly. They think I am cured.”
“But you’re not, are you?” Ollie asked.
“Oh no,” he said, not taking offense.
“Because I don’t see your eyes jumping around,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“When Lyda talks to her angel, she can’t help but look at it,” Ollie said.
Rovil glanced at me, surprised.
Dr. Gloria said, “I hadn’t noticed that.”
“See?” Ollie said to me. “You just did it.” To Rovil she said, “But you, you’re steady, all the time. You’re not distracted by it?”
“Ah,” Rovil said. He wiped his mouth and sat back. “My god and I have … I guess you would call it an agreement. It was important to me that no one suspect that I was different. People would not understand. So, my god stays out of sight unless I desire him to appear.”
“I wish mine would do that,” I said.
“Ahem,” Dr. Gloria said.
Rovil smiled. “I feel Ganesh with me all the time. But only rarely does he speak in words.”
“Again, jealous.”
Ollie said to Rovil, “It doesn’t bother you that he came to you only after you overdosed on a drug?”
“It’s a fair question,” Rovil said. “I of course understand your skepticism. It’s logical to think that I’m experiencing a hallucination. But the overdose awakened me; it didn’t put me to sleep. I believe that this sensitivity to the godhead, this facility, exists in all humans, but we cannot access it on demand. The higher power is waiting there for us to reach out to it. The drug simply tore down all those defenses, all the walls that kept God out.”
“But your god has an elephant head,” Ollie said. “Hers is an angel. Gilbert sees some kind of organic, plant-like structure, and Edo—”
“I need to stop being impressed every time you know something about my life that I haven’t told you,” I said to Ollie.
“The trial was covered in the news,” she said. “The transcripts are all online. I read them the day you came to the hospital.” She shrugged. “Don’t take it personally. I did a backgrounder on everyone back then.” Then meaning in the hospital, when she was off the meds, paranoid and determined enough to run a search despite being allowed no access to pens or the internet. She said, “From what I read, all of you were exposed to the drug, but you all had different experiences.”
“It’s true,” Rovil said. “God appears differently for each believer. He—or She, this higher power—takes whatever form that the believer can understand. It’s always been this way, which I admit has caused some problems. Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists—they perceive Him differently, but it’s all the same God.”
“Amen,” the doctor said.
“The Divine Asshole hypothesis,” I said. “God’s fucking with us, putting on masks, changing His name, hiding dinosaur bones in rocks—just to test our faith.”
Rovil laughed. “You are as profane as always. Our misunderstanding of God is not His fault. Our job is to seek Him out.”
“He’s sure not making it easy,” I said. “At this point there must be some evidence for the existence of God. But where’s the proof?”
“This isn’t about proof,” he said. “It’s about faith. Science and religion do not have anything to say—”
“Spare me the NOMA bullshit. God is a testable hypothesis.”
He smiled. “You’re quoting Victor Stenger.”
Ollie frowned, not following us.
“A physicist,” I said. “One of the old New Atheists, like Dawkins and Hitchens.”
“They’re in Hell now,” Dr. Gloria said.
“And NOMA?” Ollie asked.
“Nonoverlapping magisteria,” I said. “Stephen Jay Gould’s phrase, which was just him trying to pussy out of the argument and declare a truce. But he was wrong. If God created the universe, then He ought to at least be detectable. Even if He’s some deist god who set the clockwork in motion and then left the scene, never to interfere again, we ought to be able to see a few of His fingerprints on the Big Bang. But no, not even there. And don’t get me started on the anthropic principle or Intelligent Design.”