Yes, she says. It makes no more sense to me now than it did before. Offers him a smile she has forced together, constructed from its constituent parts: a Lego smile.
Later, he runs the conversation through his mind. There are no words for this that are comfortable. Say you believe in God to an atheist and you’ll meet with scorn. Some people you speak to will mentally drop your IQ by fifty points. Some will instantly cease to respect you. There is a prevalent belief that faith is delusional, and if someone believes that, there is no persuading them otherwise. Their belief in No God is not, to their minds, a belief, but a rational fact. They have reached their conclusion by reason. He has reached his by breakdown. His position is logically indefensible. He can only say, This is what I know. This is what I have experienced. And that is not enough.
God itself is such a troubling word. He knows God is the ancient word for this thing he is experiencing, that it has become grafted to religion and stupidity and killing, but he could no more say he didn’t believe in it than he could say he didn’t believe in his own hand.
He looks at his hand, reaching now for the tin in which Jules keeps the tea bags. He abandons his forest conversation and slips into presence: the cool smoothness of the tin in his palm and, as he pulls it open, the satisfying release of the lid. He handles it tenderly, grateful for the tea bag whose genius simplicity does away with the business of pots and strainers, the irritation of a stray tea leaf in the throat. He feels the weight of the kettle and is grateful for the engineering of his elbow. Pours the freshly boiled water, marvelling at its clearness – how extraordinary, the complexity of human endeavours that have brought beings from tramping down to rivers and wells to a time when clean drinking water is available from numerous points in his home at the turn of a tap. He is in love with it all: with the taps, with the water, with the kettle, with the cup, with the tea bag, with the tea-bag tin, with the musical tinkling of the teaspoon; so grateful to be alive at a time of these miraculous simplicities; so joyful to be suddenly conscious they are miracles, instead of running them flat with habituated ingratitude. In love, yes, and this is how God feels when it runs through him; a powerful and inclusive love. He stands completely still, the better to feel the joy of it flowing through him. A clock is ticking. He turns around. It is the kitchen clock. More than eight months they have lived there and not once has he noticed its gentle, patient tick. Love, love, love.