“And what did God create the heavens and the Earth from?” he asked.
“From nothing,” I said. “He’s God, he can do that.”
“Well there you go then. You just admitted that it’s possible to create something from nothing. Whether it’s done by natural forces or a supernatural entity may be debatable, but if you say God did it, you open another line of questioning: who or what created God, what did they create Him from, and how did they do it? You’re just shifting the problem.”
Julian also said that there was nothing before the Big Bang. Time itself was created in the Big Bang, and there was no
before
. I found it difficult to wrap me head around that as well. I didn’t understand how time could not have been there forever. A word like ‘forever’ didn’t even make any sense to me if time was not eternal. The Bible talked a lot about eternity. But if there was a beginning of time, wouldn’t there also have to be an end of time? The thought of that proper scared me, and that’s why I believed it. That the end of time would come before eternity is up.
But I was just a guy, just an average student. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to understand such things. Maybe none of us were. Maybe God didn’t want us to understand them, and maybe that’s why it would have been better to just leave them be.
In the beginning, God created the universe and time and space. The end.
As I was sitting there, munching on me salt and vinegar crisps and pondering these imponderable questions, I suddenly realized that although I had been staring at the TV screen the whole time, me brain had completely failed to register all the things I had been watching; how the Pope’s airplane had touched down and come to a halt, how they had rolled out a red carpet for His Holiness, how thousands of people were cheering and chanting in excitement and waving little paper flags of Honduras and of the Vatican, and how the ground crew had moved the boarding stairs in place at the front door of the aircraft.
It was Julian who ultimately forced my attention back onto the scene at Tenochtitlan. As I already said, Julian was a very quiet person and very soft-spoken, which is why I was all the more startled when he suddenly shouted out at the top of his lungs, “Holy shit!” before he burst out laughing, shrill and eerily like a madman.
The Gospel According to Michael – 1
A perfectly reliable way to get on my tits is to constantly ask me what the problem is while I’m on my knees, crawling across the floor and trying to figure out what the bloody problem is. Just being good with computers doesn’t make me a bloody electrician. Some people seemed to think that if I was able to hack into the school computer network to cause a bit of good-humoured mayhem by rearranging everyone’s schedules, then I must also have been able to use my x-ray vision to detect a broken audio cable when we were supposed to rehearse our songs for the big school anniversary gala evening. Well, this is not how it works. In order to solve a complex problem one has to apply the scientific method. First you have to carefully observe the situation; then you develop one or several hypotheses that would explain the situation; and finally you test your hypotheses against the actual evidence and come to a conclusion. All this takes time and patience, and for me it usually takes more time with people constantly peeking over my shoulder and asking me how it’s going.
We were down in my room in the basement, the place the others insisted on referring to as Underground Zero. One day Julian had plucked the expression out of thin air, and Tummy and Ginger had eagerly adopted it as an oh-so-clever name for our totally not secret headquarters as if we were the bloody
Famous Five
or something.
I will readily admit that Underground Zero was a bit of a mess. It wasn’t dirty or anything. I actually kept the place rather tidy, getting rid of pizza boxes, candy wrappers, and empty bottles every night after the others had gone home, and I vacuumed it at least once a week. But it was crowded with equipment. There was the TV and the stereo, my three computers—two desktops and a laptop—there were three different games consoles, there was my drum kit in the corner, and the guitar racks and the microphone stands, and of course the PA system and the loudspeakers. And there were 124 metres of cable to connect it all. If the PA didn’t make a sound, it could be due to a multitude of reasons. It would take me a while to sort it all out, so I was sort of glad that the others had found ways to entertain themselves while I was plugging and unplugging cables.
I wasn’t in a hurry. As long as Julian was waiting for the Pope to arrive in Tegucigalpa, no band rehearsal was going to happen anyway. Julian had this very strange fascination with all sorts of rituals, religious or otherwise, from royal weddings to common funerals to Olympic opening ceremonies to general elections to the State Opening of Parliament by Her Majesty the Queen. I once made the mistake to let him walk me past Buckingham Palace at 11 a.m. on a weekday, and he had to stop and watch the bloody Changing of the Guard, even though he had seen it a million times before and it was exactly the same every single time. But he couldn’t help it. All you had to do was to give him a bunch of people in uniforms, walking and talking in funny, idiosyncratic ways, and he was mesmerized like a five-year-old in front of a lit Christmas tree.
Now he was having one of his little discussions with Tummy about God and the Bible. While it was always entertaining to see Julian quip about anything, and Tummy excelled in his role as prime example of what years of religious indoctrination could do to the mind of an innocent but impressionable child, I usually zoned out pretty quickly whenever they had their conversations about religion. I neither had the time to deal with God, nor had I any interest. God had abandoned me when my mum had died of cancer, and I hadn’t missed him ever since.
Julian had never abandoned me.
He had always been kind of weird, though. A psychiatrist probably would have described him as a bipolar obsessive-compulsive hyperactive autistic genius. He was shy and timid around strangers, and socially awkward, but always kind and friendly. I had never seen him get angry at anyone or anything. I don’t know if he wasn’t capable of anger, or if he was just good at hiding it. Either way, he would have made a perfect Jedi knight. He’d never let his emotions get in the way of his reasoning. Nor had I ever seen him raise his voice at anyone or for any reason. He was always so calm, so quiet; his voice smooth and soothing. I had never heard him shout out loud until that evening when we were at Underground Zero for a band rehearsal that wasn’t meant to happen due to a broken audio cable and an event that would shake the world to its foundations.
I was on the floor under my desk and just about to locate the reason for the dead silent PA, when all of a sudden the sound of Julian’s voice made me jump. It’s obviously not recommendable to jump while kneeling under a desk, but I couldn’t help it. I always have to jump at loud or unexpected noises. This one was as unexpected as it was loud, and it was followed by Julian’s roaring laughter. Julian wasn’t exactly the LOL type. A subtle smile, maybe a little chuckle, usually marked the height of his amusement. If he was literally laughing out loud, it could only mean that something very extraordinary must have happened.
Rubbing the bruise on my head, I crawled out from under my desk and went over to the TV where Julian was still laughing like a Tickle Me Elmo, while Tummy was staring at the TV with crisp crumbs falling out of his wide open mouth, and Ginger took the name of the Lord in vain.
“Oh my God!”
I was about to ask what had happened, but the answer to my question was already right there on the TV screen, a ten-second video clip being replayed over and over again and commented on by a stunned, aghast, and somewhat inappropriately excited news reporter.
The Pope, as he was disembarking his aircraft at Toncontin International Airport in Tegucigalpa, had stumbled, fallen down the boarding stairs, and cracked his skull on the tarmac.
He was dead.
The Gospel According to Ginger – 2
Does God exist?
Why, of course He does.
God is real. He created the heavens and the Earth, and He’s all knowing, all powerful, kind and gentle and loving. As long as you don’t piss him off, because then He can get very angry to the point where He’s ready to destroy the whole of His creation like a sulky little child and kill everyone, even those who never sinned, who never did anything wrong. I wonder what the Pope must have done to piss off God so much that He would push him down the stairs, live in front of millions people.
God is very real.
In the minds of some people.
In the minds of some people God is as real as Santa Claus was to me when I was five years old. But I’m not five anymore.
God is alive in the minds of some people, and that’s perfectly fine with me as long as He stays there. I’m not anyone’s judge. If you want to believe in God, fine. If you’re absolutely one hundred percent convinced that God exists, if He talks to you and tells you what is right and wrong and how to live your life, then go on, have a ball. But leave me out of it.
Religion is a lot like sex, I suppose, in that it’s best enjoyed in the privacy of your own home. I’m interested in public displays of religion just about as much as I’m interested in public displays of sexual intercourse, and that is
not at all
. I’m ready to accept your religion and tolerate your views as long as you are ready to accept that I’m not interested, so please leave me alone with it. If your God is all powerful, then He doesn’t you to speak for Him. And if He wants to talk to me, He knows where I live and He’s got my number.
So the Pope had taken a nosedive down the stairs and died, and Julian was glued to the TV. For me the most annoying thing about breaking news stories is that news people keep obsessing over them for ages. I mean, just because everyone is on a 24-hour news cycle these days doesn’t mean that even the smallest bit of news has to be stretched to 24 hours, dissected and scrutinized and analyzed and sucked dry, does it? But then there were TV channels whose job it was to do just that. Like T-Vox, that ultra-conservative, reactionary, racist, homophobic, bigoted channel that had started polluting British airwaves a few years ago and that had since grown into the drug of choice for those parts of the population who were in desperate need of someone to blame for their misery and their own ineptitude.
Precariat TV
, my dad used to call it.
85-year-old man falls down the stairs, cracks his skull, and dies. They could have covered that event in depth in five minutes. But instead they were repeating it for hours and hours, and they brought in all sorts of so-called experts. They brought in airline experts and airport experts, church experts and old-people experts, and they all kept discussing every single aspect of the story ad nauseam, and in the end the whole world was none the wiser, except that an old man had fallen down the stairs and died. It was just so pointless.
Julian loved every minute of it of course.
It’s not that he was excited about the mere fact that an 85-year-old man in a dress had died a hilarious, tragic death. Julian was excited about the whole baggage that this event was bound to bring with it, all the implications of things to come in the next couple of days and weeks. Luckily, we had our very own pundit, our own expert on all things churchy and popey.
“So what’s going to happen next?” Julian looked at Tummy.
“They’ll be taking him to the morgue, I guess,” Tummy said.
“No, I mean, they will have to elect a new pope, right?”
“Well, yes, obviously.”
“So how does that work?”
Tummy frowned. “Haven’t I told you this before?”
“Yes, but I want to hear it again.”
“Right. Okay. Well, the Conclave typically begins 15 to 20 days after the death of a pope. The College of Cardinals gets locked up in the Sistine Chapel and starts voting. A candidate needs a majority of two thirds to be elected. That usually doesn’t happen on the first vote, so they’ll take the ballot papers and burn them, and they add chemicals to make the smoke black, so that the people on the outside know that there is no new pope yet because the smoke coming from the chimney on the Sistine Chapel is black.”
“And then they vote again,” Julian said.
“Well yes, but not right away. Having over a hundred cardinals cast their vote and having all the votes counted and verified is a lengthy process, so they’ll have a maximum of four ballots per day, two in the morning and two in the afternoon.”
“And they keep doing that until a candidate has a two-thirds majority.”
Tummy nodded. “That’s right. And when that happens they add different chemicals to the ballot papers when they burn them, so the people on the outside see white smoke and know that there’s a new pope.”
“I wonder who the next pope will be,” Julian mused.
“Impossible to tell nowadays. Could be anybody. How about you run for pope? Eh, Jules?” Tummy nudged him with his elbow. “They could do with a fresh face down at the Vatican.”
“I’m not a cardinal, though.”
“You don’t have to be,” Tummy said. “It’s a common misconception that you have to be a cardinal first in order to become pope. But that’s not true. Well, at least in theory. But you’d have to become a Catholic first of course.”
“Hey,” Michael said, “don’t give him any funny ideas like that.”
Julian shook his head. “Thanks, but this time I think I’ll pass.”
And so on.
I have never quite understood Julian’s fascination with religion. Maybe it’s because he never came into contact with religion at home. His mum never made him go to church, and for all I know they didn’t even have a copy of the Bible in the house until Julian bought his own one day. I suppose initially Julian was just intrigued by religion the same way he was intrigued by everything else he didn’t know anything about.