The Atheist

The apartment actually burned down. After all her warnings about the gas, it caught fire. Just a small lapse, just a tiny spark. The bookshelf erupted in a veritable fireworks display. The carpet glowed at its corners. And there I lay in the sleeping alcove, surrounded by flames, already rendered unconscious by the toxic smoke. I murmured softly like a child, or like a fully contented cat, wrapped up in myself and the duvet.

It was so strange. I had never believed in such things, I had devoted a lifetime to arguing for the opposite, for rationality, for what I could comprehend from the little I already thought I understood. Now I saw myself, gasping, as the fire danced closer to my skin and the thin savannas of hair that protected what I called myself proved as effective as a fence against a raging avalanche. Or rather, I just watched and watched: I observed the scene with vacant eyes.

This could not be happening. When life ends, life is over, there is no thought, no analysis, no feeling, no hindsight. And yet I drifted away from life, entering a phase I had spent only a few seconds exploring. Where had I actually ended up, and what, really, was I?

While my body charred, I drifted higher, through the shifting temperatures of the floors, over the roof ridges, toward the sky with its veil of clouds, cumulus and cirrus. Higher, higher. It was as if I were still myself. but what was I if not for those brown irises, the soft rolls of my belly, that slightly offbeat gait which could be heard in the corridor from so far away it was as if I were marching in three-time? “Oh, the drummer is here,” said the girl in the stairwell, and I was, so to speak, on the same note, laughing at our inside joke because I was inside and not out.

But now, what did I look like? There must have been something soulful about my journey, I supposed. The religious had indeed spoken of such things: near-death experiences and other hallucinations, of how thousands, if not millions, of people have described preferring that enticing light over being ground down by the savage march of calendars.

The blue planet was no longer visible. The cardinal directions were thereby obliterated, unnecessary in the universe. There is no up or down. Up to what? Down to what? How could anyone be buried with their head pointed toward Mecca here?

For the first time, I began to wonder what would happen next, for the cosmos, by all reasonable accounts, was infinite. If I were to drift away like this forever, then I would have plenty of time to ponder my meager six decades as a body. In a few years I would probably curse myself for my inadequate sense of security, only to spend a few more lamenting what might have happened if I had, after all, demanded a divorce that one time, so that she would not later take me for granted. Since I wasn’t even man enough to make a single, modest, reasonable demand — “me or him” — there was always an either-or.

And now I drifted further into the other side, that part of existence I had never cared for except as a mere irritation. The ramblings of fools: astrology, witchcraft, spirituality, and the afterlife, if it could even truly be called life, for there were definitions for that: the need for water, the conversion of energy, and the possibility of reproduction. Can souls meet and beget other souls? Perhaps I would come to know that somewhere between now and eternity, but most likely not, I thought, as galaxies flashed by in my peripheral vision at ever-increasing speed, like signal lights on a highway on a December evening. Road work, an emergency call, or something else that did not concern me.

When I finally awoke, still entirely myself, as much as I could ever be. I was no longer composed of joints, or a hairline, or sensitive temples, but of a thin, green being made of chlorophyll, hungrily surging upward through the earth in search of the one thing I had always desired: the sun. Everything had become nothing but neck and toes, stem and roots, and it was, at last, spring.