‘I don’t know,’ Atlas said. ‘All of them are young. They look like they suck blood out of the corpses, don’t they? There aren’t any old ones anymore. Maybe they eat the old ones.’
‘What do they want?’
‘Business.’ And then he goes back to his father’s religious passion as though the bridge from undertakers to epistemology were perfectly natural. Nobody can trust a man like this. ‘Politics, music, drugs, mathematics, God,’ he says, ‘what’s the difference? They all come to the same thing in the end. People think math is dull because they’ve never experienced what hooks mathematicians. Get the generality, get the pattern right and it’s like orgasm – like what happens when you inject heroin – like when Mozart gets just the right mix of keys.’
The joke of it is that Atlas knew nothing about his father’s loss of faith. Nor did my father – or any of Jonathan’s other children. All assumed he was a profound believer throughout his life. Which is to say they didn’t know him at all. My information comes direct from the diaries, and as you will see, it fits. Without it, nothing that follows makes sense. Pulling out of Portland my grandfather felt only outrage. What right did God have to go and die on him like that? Who did He think He was anyway? A neighborhood dog, to be run down by the first dirty driver that comes along? Karl von Clausewitz, the philosopher of war, says of an army that if it is a peacetime affair, inexperienced in battle, held together merely by the glue of service regulations, it may look impressive but ‘as with a glass too quickly cooled, a single crack breaks the whole mass’. So it was with Jonathan’s God. South on the California & Oregon, past the great cedars, past – who cares? Into California. Over the hills. Plot the route with care, negotiate it meticulously and even so – bang! – the world it is the old world yet and nothing he’d done meant anything at all. There was nothing he wanted from this world anymore or could ever see himself wanting. In San Francisco he booked a ticket on the Western Pacific to Salt Lake City, the route that ran through Mogul. But Mogul was no longer listed as a stop. It was a sign, he thought, wearily now, but then so was everything else. The train jostled its way across the desert until it met a westbound goods carrier on the single line of track that spanned this reach of the continent. The two trains faced each other cow-catcher to cow-catcher. Jonathan’s crept forward, the other crept back, and so they inched into Mogul’s station to pass one another on the siding there.
From the train window Mogul was as aggressively dead now as it had been aggressively alive before. It had been sixteen years since College got himself impaled there on a thousand tons of stibnite, and sixteen years is an eternity in the mayfly-like lives of those old boom-towns. No buildings remained, only skeletons – naked roof struts, half-collapsed walls, sun-bleached clapboard. Rusty tin cans lay scattered here and there, escapees from the heaps of rubbish cached between buildings. The silence was absolute – everything shrouded in the drab, gray sand made from stibnite, quartz and the pulverized shells of creatures that had lived here millennia before when the area was the bed of an inland sea. Those must have been the great days, Jonathan thought, staring out. A heavy damp hung in the air, not right for the place or the wintery time of year.