"That's right," he said emphatically. "Nothing, no-thing. More accurately no divinity, just a return right?"

I nodded.

"It's the same for all of us, no divinity. This, here and now, is all we have. This meal, this conversation, the friends and lovers you have and the ideas you hold dear are all your world consist of. They are all that you have, they are all that any of us have. You and I are blessed, or cursed depending on how you look at it, in that we know that these things are the makeup and extent of our world, of ourselves as individuals. We should therefore relish our time and move to enrich our lives as much as possible because in so doing we enrich all that our world will ever be. I believe this truer for normal people than it is for us because their time is much shorter than ours in a practical sense. We have a consciousness that transcends death. We survive it as individuals, the same individuals or consciousnesses if you will. Normal people obviously don't do that or don't know they do that - either way the outcome is the same. For those people, Epicurus' lessons should be all the more poignant."

"Do you buy that?" I asked Zohra.

"I don't have to buy that, I have faith," she said laconically, to which Samas burst out in uproarious laughter.

"Now you see why I love her," he said, still laughing.

"Poppy told me something similar only her take on the whole thing was much angrier."

"Poppy?" asked Zohra.

Samas pointed to his tattoo. "You've never met her. She's the one who found Evan." He turned toward me. "Let me guess. She damns all of them for their ignorance of what we know is fact. Is that pretty close?"

I chuckled. "Yeah, that's pretty close. You must have known her for a long time."

"Since the beginning. What she doesn't realize is that you can only be responsible for yourself and your own happiness. Take her for example," he said, pointing to Zohra. "She believes that if she lives by the code set forth in the Koran, she will ascend to heaven after she dies. If it makes her happy, it makes me happy. And who's to say she isn't right. Just because it can't happen to us doesn't mean it can't happen to them, perhaps that's why she won't come back. That's the point. We cannot know, and that's why we should live in the here and now and bask in what it has to offer us. And that's why you should eat your fill of this fine meal."