People have lost their ability to throw off the weight of the visible world. Everything we experience crushes us, stresses us, steamrolls us. But if we could just get farther away, the gravitational pull would get weaker and weaker until more massive objects pulled us toward them and pushed us elsewhere. The light of the sun, its heat, its energy — and God saw that it was good. God is everywhere and sees everything we do, with an indifference that causes us to fear him. The indifference of the universe. The indifference of everything else, its immensity, these spaces full of dark, unknown things whose effects on the course of our existence we can only guess at. God is the protective screen we are destroying in our collective murderous rage. We are indifferent to God, too, when we choose to keep our gaze downcast, because our shame prevents us from seeing the sky and the glory of creation.

Sometimes I fantasize about meeting Carl Sagan, in the same way others dream of coming face to face with Genghis Khan or John Lennon. I’d ask him what he thinks of us, of me, of my theory that all good and evil are relative, that the world has its own distinct meaning for each and every one of us, and that’s what makes us unique and alone, so very alone. We’re the same and different, but we are all the same in the eyes of the other so-called inferior creatures, less clever than us but with so much sharper instincts, waiting, petrified, for us to hurt them one more time.

7

Walks

Since the art of vengeance requires both energy and risk, you have to make choices. You can’t punish everyone. You can’t take out every offender even if, at one time or another, everyone will get on your last nerve. But there’s no reason you can’t have a little fun.

The worst summer of my life was my first summer in the city. It was far worse than the heat wave I’d suffer through in the brown-carpeted sweatbox apartment four years later.