“He looked and looked. But I don’t think he looked hard enough.”

“What was he looking for?”

“God.”

Ben watches me for a long moment.

“Um.” He tucks my hair behind my ear. “Are you—and I will love you no matter what your answer is—but are you saying you believe in God now? Because it sounds like that’s what—”

“Keep up, geophysicist! I’m saying I found MYSELF.”

He just looks at me. Honestly, sometimes I question the level of instruction at MIT.

“Because I AM GOD. YOU ARE GOD. EVERYTHING IS GOD! Quintessence!”

Ben’s face clears, and my wonderful atheist boy looks very relieved.

I think I feel just like Chuck Yeager did in 1947 when he became the fastest man alive by being the first pilot to break the sound barrier, flying faster than the speed of sound at level flight. In The Right Stuff, the flying aces are always talking about chasing a demon in the sky, like the sound barrier itself was a demon—and I think I just did the same. I beat that hungry ghost by a mile.

“Just so you know,” he says, “that quote of Yuri’s has been disputed.”

“Really?”

He nods, very serious, his lips twitching. “Apparently, he was a believer.”

I stare at him. “Now he’s fucking with my serenity EVEN MORE.”

Ben is trying hard not to laugh, I can tell. “Does that change your conclusions?”

“Of course not. Gagarin is irrelevant to the logic of my argument, which is sound.”

“You’re still God.”

“Yes. And so are you. At the end of the day, the universe is clearly a proponent of equality.”

“So, basically, you lay down on Boston Common and achieved enlightenment,” Ben says.

“Basically.”

He throws up his hands. “A couple visits to Dharma Bums and you’re already a Zen Master.”

I grin. “I progress through things very quickly.”

“Like father, like daughter.”

Ben reaches for his copy of Dark Diving. Flips through it to a dog-eared page. Reads my dad’s words to me.