Just a slob like one of us
...tryna make his way home
My cellmate Cody was a true believer. He carried the Bible with him everywhere, even out in the yard. He attended every service, half-day on Sundays, and AA meetings five days a week.
The day he got his parole, that all went down the toilet.
Threw his Bible in the trash that same night. In front of the entire cell block. Made a real spectacle of it.
“I followed your rules, did my time, got my parole,” he said. “Now kiss my ass.”
Stopped going to services. Dropped AA.
We stayed civil in the cell. But on the yard, in the dayroom, anytime he had an audience, he tried to get a rise out of me.
One night in particular got ugly.
“Hey, D’Arcy,” he yelled across the crowded dayroom. “So you don’t believe in God, is that it? Allah? Christ the Savior and King?”
He did this in front of the Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics, and the guys who didn’t give a shit but we’re always up for violence.
I didn’t respond. He got more agitated.
“No Higher Power? Creator of heaven and earth? Is that what you’re saying, D’Arcy?”
He swaggered up, leaned in, breathed stale anger and coffee into my ear, whispered, “Mr. Bigshot college boy. Mr. High and Mighty,” he snorted.
“Mr. High and Mighty full of shit!” he yelled. “You think you’re better than the rest of us, don’t ya, D’Arcy?”
I discovered physics in high school
Mr. Scioli talking about atoms, electrons, empty space. He explained how solid matter was an illusion, just energy vibrating.
"Everything you touch," he said, tapping his knuckles on the desk, "is mostly nothing. Empty space. The atom is merely a vacuum with tiny specks of matter floating around. Like dust in a cathedral."
I raised my hand. "So we're all just energy?"
"Essentially, yes."
"The same energy?"
He hesitated. "At the most fundamental level, you could argue that."
After class, I stayed behind. Asked him if that meant we were all connected somehow. Parts of the same thing.
He looked uncomfortable, like I'd crossed some line between science and something else.
He gathered his papers. "Science describes, it doesn't prescribe meaning," he smiled. “Now we’re getting into philosophy. Not really my department," and walked away.
But I couldn't stop thinking about it.
I was nineteen when Lizzie overdosed.
We'd been friends since third grade. Skinned knees, shared lunches, and later, in high school, we shared joints, cigarettes, beers, and our shame—every dirty little secret.
Found her in her car behind the abandoned paper mill, windows up, engine off. Peaceful looking. Just went to sleep and didn't wake up.
At the funeral, some priest who’d never met her talked about God's plan. About Lizzie being with Him now.
I wanted to put my fist through his teeth. What kind of fucked-up plan purples Lizzie’s lips and puts her in a box?
Lizzie's mother wore sunglasses inside the church, face rigid with Xanax. Stone silent.
She wailed once in the middle of mass, an unreal sound, inhuman, a wretched siren that froze the congregation and prickled our skin.
I stood at the back, gutted, empty, too numb to feel, cry… anything.
Later, alone by the fresh dirt, I broke.
What’s it all mean?
“Define it,” I finally said.
“Define your terms, Cody. What do you mean when you say ‘God’? Define God.”
The Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics, and the guys who didn’t give a shit but we’re always up for violence fell silent.
“God!” Cody yelled, arms in a V.
He was mad as a hornet now—ready to fight, which is all he wanted in the first place.
“You know…” waving his outstretched arms to the heavens, “a higher power, spiritual being, creator, Allah, Christ, Buddha, you know exactly what the fuck I’m talking about, D’Arcy. Don’t be a pussy! Answer the question!”
“Do you believe in God?”
The nature of God
In community college, my philosophy professor assigned Spinoza.
"God is nature," he'd written. "And we are in God as God is in us."
While the other students argued abstractions, logical proofs, I sat silent, thinking of Lizzie.
After class, the professor noticed me lingering. "Pretty quiet today," he said. “What’s on your mind?”
"I don’t think I have the words."
"Try anyway."
I hesitated. "What if... what if we're all just like atoms? Like tiny pieces of some bigger thing swirling around and bumping into one another."
He smiled, cocked his head. "The divine shattered into countless pieces, each containing the whole?"
"Maybe? I don’t know. But let’s say that’s it —only we don't know it. As far as we can see, we're separate."
"That sounds painful,” he said. “Being so close, yet disconnected.”
“I guess.”
“You know,” he said, “the Buddha says our suffering comes from this illusion of separateness."
I shrugged.
He considered me for a moment. "Have you read any Eastern philosophy?"
I shook my head.
"You might find it interesting." He wrote something down. "Start here."
Where to now?
About five years after we buried Lizzie, I visited her mom in the hospital. Cancer eating her from inside. Machines beeping, monitoring what little of her was left.
“When Lizzie…," I choked, “when Lizzie died.” I paused, testing her reaction.
She squinted at me with her tiny morphine pupils. "So?"
“So that priest said she went to be with God.”
The machines marked time.
“I think maybe she went looking in the wrong direction. Out there somewhere."
She closed her eyes, grimaced. "What difference does it make where God is if He doesn't help?"
I held her hand, felt her brittle bones, crepe paper skin. "Maybe that's not what God does. Maybe God isn't separate from what happens. Maybe God is what happens."
Eyes closed, she whispered, "That's no comfort."
"I'm not sure it's supposed to be."
I looked out the window at the parking lot, at people coming and going. Each one carrying that unreal sound, inhuman, their own wretched siren to announce when someone gets broken apart from them.
"Maybe comfort is something we give each other."
She didn't answer, already drifting.
I sat there watching her breathe, feeling the strange emptiness atoms must feel, drifting through all this nothingness.
The space between
Three nights before his release, Cody sat above me on his bunk, letter crumpled in his fist. His mother was sick. Cancer. Same as Lizzie's mom.
"Hey, D'Arcy?" His voice, vacant. "You never answered my question."
I waited.
"About God," he said. Softer now. "About believing."
Yard lights blazed a solid beam of unforgiving brilliance through our cell window. Dust motes, suspended in nothingness, drifted in and out of existence.
Cody was quiet for a long time.
"In AA," he finally said, "they tell you to find your higher power. I thought I had to choose, ya know? God or no God. Jesus or Allah. Like picking a team."
I sat up. "Maybe it's not about choosing sides."
"Then what's it about?"
"Maybe it's about seeing what's between. Like maybe all these different beliefs, they're just different ways of pointing at the same mystery."
“Fuck you,” he said, angry again. “Pussy.”
But he didn't move.
Just sat there in the dark with his letter and his questions and his anger and his freedom just three days away. Both of us feeling the weight of all that space between things.
Like atoms in a cathedral, like the Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics, and the guys who didn’t give a shit but we’re always up for violence…
We drifted.
✌️
With you in this cathedral. 🙏
—Paul
A special thanks to Maarten van den Heuvel on Unsplash for the photo that accompanies this essay. - Thank you, Maarten
p.s. If you appreciate my work, please consider buying me a Diet Coke.
Thank you ♥️ ☺️ - and may god bless you, each and every one.
Very powerful. I love this Paul!
Really love this. It's my favorite one yet.