The Scent of the Blueberry -- 14

It’s not all that personal a question. Are you religious? Do you believe in God?”

“I used to,” she said sadly. “I really used to. I was raised that way.”

“Why did you stop? Stop believing in God?”

Silence. “Because God stopped believing in me.” Evelyn paused for a moment. “You’re not one of those born again people are you? Someone who’s going to give me a big conversion speech? Because if you are, I think you’re going to have to keep me in chains for a long time.”

“No, I was just trying to explain things. You see, none of this stuff depends on our individual beliefs to exist. What I mean is, God is going to exist or not exist because he does or doesn’t – not because we believe or don’t believe in that existence.”

“No offense, but I think I’m sorry I asked.”

“But that’s the issue, don’t you see? I can’t give you the answers you’re looking for because you won’t believe me.” He paused. “What do you say that we try an experiment?”

“What kind of experiment?”

“You ask, I answer, and you suspend your disbelief – at least for enough time for you to see the whole picture. It’d be like when you go the movies – or read a book. You don’t say, “That guy could never have survived that fall from the building." You just kind of go along with it without being critical – just to see where it takes you. You can always withdraw your belief later – you haven’t committed yourself to anything. What do you say?”

“Sounds a little crazy,” Evelyn said. Still, what did she have to lose? “Okay. What is this all about?”

“First I have to tell you who I am – where I came from. Nothing else makes sense if you don’t understand that.”

“There’s two parts – body and spirit. The spirit came first.” Evelyn winced.

“Remember, suspension of disbelief,” he said.

“Okay.”

“The spirit had its own birth – really before time began. My first memories are of the sky – the movement of our clouds and our stars. They weren’t really clouds or sun, of course. Everything that I’m going to tell you in this part of the story is metaphor. It’s not true, but it isn’t false, either – only translated into terms that we can use words to discuss. Do you understand?”

“Please don’t talk to me like I’m the village idiot. Okay, sorry – yes, I took high school English lit. I know what a metaphor is.”

“Okay. Like I said, the clouds and the stars – and the patterns that they formed. And then I heard music for the first time – my mother would sing as she walked through the day, and her voice was soft and true and divided the silence. And I learned chess, and intuited calculus, and understood the common language that they spoke. I’d lie on my back by the hour, composing music in my head that matched the rotation of the stars. I didn’t speak a word until I went to school – everyone thought that I was defective somehow, but why would you feel the need to speak when the heavens sang in your head every hour and every moment of the day?”

“You were different – did people make fun of you?”

“No – or at least, if they did, I wasn’t aware of it. Everyone pretty much left me alone. It was the happiest time of my life.”

“Because you were alone?”

“Because I was alone with the music and mathematics of creation. I felt the music and mathematics inside myself. Some people – a few rare people – see music in colors. I saw music in shapes, mathematical shapes, and heard music when I played chess. Mathematical formulas – they were simply the words, the language of the shapes, the music – and they ran through my head like water droplets flow down a river.”

“How old were you?”

Michel paused. “It’s difficult to speak of age in a metaphorical sense. I was in training, so I still would have been in the equivalent of an early part of school.”

Evelyn frowned. “And all of this took place before you had a body? When you were only a spirit?”

“You have to understand that the body is an arbitrary factor. You were probably surprised when I wasn’t more emotionally upset at Allen’s death.”

She nodded.

“Allen’s death only affected his body. It was a setback, because now his spirit has to find a new body, so he’s temporarily unavailable for this mission. But it is temporary – he will find a suitable body – either an old one or a new one – and he will continue his existence as the same spirit.”

“What do you mean when you say ‘either an old one or a new one.’”

“Well, usually the spirit will select a new one. We have a certain number of new bodies that are available to us. They’re kind of like blanks – we have to fill them in. For example, when I assumed this body it didn’t have muscles that were well-defined or highly-developed, and it didn’t have any particular knowledge of security procedures. I had to develop those capabilities – I had to learn and train – the same as anyone else.”

“Wait a minute – suspension of disbelief is one thing, but I think you were born like everyone else. I mean, I don’t know what kind of relationship you had with your parents, but they had sex, and then they had you.”

Michel stopped and said, “Wait a minute. Look at this.” He raised the front of his shirt. “What do you see?

She shrugged. “A belly button. A navel – just like everyone else.”

“Look closer. Ignore the scar tissue.”

She did. Michel’s navel was perfect – a perfectly round hole in his abdomen. But Evelyn knew that navels are not perfectly round or symmetrical like this one was. She had to admit that she hadn’t thought about it much but, like snowflakes, she realized that each navel would have to be individual – different from other navels. At the very least, they tended to be slightly elliptical – at the very least, not perfectly round. And this one was.

“I don’t get it.”

“My navel. It’s the result of a surgical procedure.”

Well, they’re all the result of surgical procedures. I mean, I’m not going to go into all the details, but there’s the placenta and the umbilical cord that gets cut and tied off and, presto chango, instant navel. Right?”

“Wrong. This one is entirely cosmetic – surgically added after the selection of the body. My body is. . . a convenience.”