Helix

Chapter 2

Two days after his brother's funeral, Peter trudged back into the grey, square, three-story building in which he worked as a Historical and Statistical Analyst for the U.N. government. Summer was just blooming, and the well-manicured lawns and flower beds in front of the Vital Stats building splashed color everywhere in bright contrast to the straight lines and tasteful grey tones of the building. He was almost surprised to notice how bright everything was; things had seemed pretty colorless since the moment one of the health nurses at work had come to his office to tell him Jon had been found dead that morning.

Peter's supervisor, Beth Sanderson, had given him an extra week off after the funeral out of sympathy for having to deal with a suicide in the family, but by the second day he was so restless he had to go back to work. He might not be able to concentrate very well, but he knew Beth would give him some leeway. And work would give him a valid excuse for not going to Jon's apartment and cleaning it out. That wasn't something he could face just yet, though he knew he'd have to do it soon. Maybe next weekend.

He was working on a project that didn't require a lot of thought, so full concentration wasn't required anyway. He was going through the database of residents in the southwest quadrant of the city, correlating their Declarations of Religious Preference with the destination of portions of their tax dollars. There had been a backlog of applications for Change of Religious Preference, and someone had accidentally thrown all the forms together into a big bin, so they'd lost track of whose Application had been entered in the database and whose hadn't. Peter had devised a simple program that would scan all the names off the CRP forms, and print them out with their Tax Destinations. That would make it easy to find discrepancies. Why the government hadn't made these forms available on the Net was a mystery. He supposed it had something to do with counterfeiting and on-line security. It had only been a few years since the Net was re-established as the world's communication system, and there were still a few bugs.

He dropped his laptop onto his desk, then slipped his suit jacket onto its hook behind the door and rolled up his sleeves to get comfortable. He glanced at the opaque window space almost filling the wall behind his chair, and adopted the specific tone of voice he needed, to make it change: "Window. Clear." And there was the golf course just north of the Vital Stats building, lush strips of golden-green in the morning sun. He'd requested this third-floor office a couple of years ago when he'd gotten promoted. The greens looked like velvet from up here.

Funny how everything looked the way it had at the beginning of last week. The flowers outside, the plants hanging in his office, the golf course, and everything as he'd left it on his desk. Nothing had changed, yet he felt as though he'd walked through a raging storm and come through it completely disoriented. He'd heard people describe bereavement as something like losing a limb, but in his case it was even worse than that. For him, it was like losing his shadow, or his mirror-image. Imagine looking in a mirror the rest of your life and seeing nothing there.

He sat in front of his desk terminal, saw the faint reflection of his face on its dark screen, and turned on the computer with a grimace after sliding his laptop module into place. While it was booting, he noticed that someone had remembered to water his plants while he was away. Small things. It would be a luxury, he thought, to be able to worry about small things again.

He called up the database and set his program running. Even though it was a simple operation, it would take about half an hour to run through the whole database. More time to think. Just what he needed.

But a light tap on his open door interrupted his unwanted reverie before it really began. Beth stood in the doorway, holding a huge bouquet of flowers in a vase.

"Hi, Peter," she said softly. "When these came for you, I was ready to send them back, but I see I was wrong. Are you alright? I didn't think you'd be in today."

He shrugged awkwardly. "Neither did I. But it's hard being at home. I've spent a lot of time with my parents since… But after a while, everybody just wants to be alone, and I felt kind of at loose ends."

"And getting back into a routine is comforting sometimes," she nodded, setting the vase on the corner of his desk. "I won't bother you but if you need anything, just call. And don't feel you have to stay the whole day if it gets to be too much."

"Thanks, Beth," Peter said. She left his door half-closed, probably as a signal that he wasn't to be bothered unless it was absolutely necessary. She was a good person; he didn't know how he'd have handled that first morning if she hadn't come in with the nurse and made a few calls for him in a calm, businesslike way. He wondered suddenly what her religion was. Wiccan, wasn't it, or maybe North American Aboriginal? One tended not to ask, but he thought he'd heard somewhere.

He snagged the card from the flowers, and had to smile a little at the note: "I knew you wouldn't last the week. Andrea."

Another person he couldn't have managed without, this past week. She'd been there for him, despite her own grief. Maybe it was the depth of their shared grief that had added the extra dimension of comfort. He and Andrea La Salle and Jon had been best friends all through high school and since, and she knew both of them better than anyone else in the world. She'd dated both of them too, off and on, but usually simultaneously. They'd been so close that there had never been any jealousy or favoritism among them. A sister and lover rolled into one, forming a perfect triangle with the twin brothers.

So did she have some special insight as a result? Had she actually been on to something when she'd made that remark about religion? 'It probably killed him,' she'd said. What could she have meant? She couldn't mean it killed him directly; religion hadn't been directly responsible for anyone's death since the Religious Wars in the 2120's. So did she mean something psychological?

He remembered the wave of emotion that had swept over him in the bathroom, after the funeral. And he remembered what had triggered it. That was kind of a psychological reaction, wasn't it? He'd been frozen, like an animal watching the headlights coming and not knowing what to do about it. He'd needed to break a little - maybe he'd been about to break anyway, and the barbaric religious image had been the coincidental straw that broke the camel's back. Maybe he would have broken down and cried, seeing his twin's face in the mirror, whether or not he'd heard about the Hindu ritual.

Peter clicked out of his still-running program and selected another item from the Menu. As a Level Five government employee he could access almost any item in the Archives not classified under State Security. When asked to specify a topic, he keyed in "Psychology," but hesitated. That wasn't quite it; that would cover too much area, and he wouldn't know how to narrow it down. Instead he keyed in "Religion; Psychology," and waited to see what would happen.

This too, was a huge category, including books, articles, sound and visual recordings, documentaries, infomercials, you name the medium, it was represented here. So he added the category "Books, scholarly." Which narrowed it down a little, but the list was still huge. He paged down a few times, idly but not hopefully glancing at titles. The Psychology of Religion. Too obvious, and probably too general for what he was looking for (and what exactly was that, anyway?). The Future of an Illusion by Sigmund Freud. No, he wasn't wild about Freud. What about The Varieties of Religious Experience by a guy named William James?

That made him stop and think. "Religious experience?" What was that? Peter had always thought of his religion as just part of his I.D., like being a North American citizen. You'd never speak of the "North American experience," would you? Well…you could when you really thought about it. If you got acquainted with a lot of different cultures, you'd naturally see that there was a "North American experience" that was different from the "African experience" for example. So was that what this guy James meant - that there was a "Mormon Catholic experience" that was different from a "Hindu experience?" That was just the problem, though, and it was why Peter had never taken religion seriously. There was no variety of experience; they were all basically the same.

And yet… He had never before experienced anything like what had happened to him in the bathroom. Was that the kind of thing James meant?

No. He wasn't going to think of it right now. He wasn't going to head off on some wild goose chase because of one thing Andrea had said when looking for something to blame for Jon's death. He'd think more about it later. Not now.

The program took longer to run than he expected; there must be a higher population in the southwest than he'd estimated. When it finally finished, it was almost eleven. Peter paged through the first few screens just to make sure the program had worked properly and produced the results he wanted. Everything seemed fine.

"Abdul, Yasmin Fatima. Declared Religion: Buddhist. Change Requested: Mormon Catholic."

"Atwater, Joseph Royal. Declared Religion: North American Aboriginal. Change Requested: Oceanic Aboriginal."

"Berger, Isaac Benjamin. Declared Religion: Islam. Change Requested: Judaism." Without thinking, Peter cross-referenced to the main database on this last one, to see if Mr. Berger gave a reason for the requested change. People weren't required to and they rarely did. But Peter's father had changed from Mormon Catholicism to Judaism nineteen years ago. Peter wondered what this other man's reasons might be for making a similar change.

Isaac Berger's declared reason seemed to leap from the screen. Quote: "The rich history and deep religious experience of the Judaistic tradition." Peter's heart thudded heavily, once, like a drum. He wondered mechanically if Mr. Berger knew he could be investigated for giving such an unusual answer. It sounded as though religion were more important in Isaac Berger's life than it was supposed to be. That tended to raise governmental eyebrows.

Still, there it was again: "religious experience." This time being claimed for Judaism, over other religions. As though in Isaac Berger's mind there were something more to this religion than met the eye. Something more than just the pictures and decorations on the walls of the meeting place.

Peter saved the file and sprang from his chair, grabbing his jacket as he threw his door open. It was close enough to noon that nobody would mind if he left early, and people were giving him some latitude today, anyway. He passed a few of them in the corridor and responded to their subdued greetings with a wan smile, but didn't stop to talk. In a minute he was outside, his jacket draped over one shoulder. He took the flower-bordered walk through the parking lot and stopped on the street to look right and left. There it was, a couple of blocks south, with its golden, trumpeting angel defying gravity atop its spire: the local Mormon Catholic church. He crossed with the green light, and headed in that direction.

The place was subdued and dark, so Peter paused in the doorway to let his eyes adjust. Gradually the rows of pews emerged out of the murk, then the figure on the cross at the far end of the sanctuary, with several candles lit in front of the altar beneath him. There were five solitary worshippers scattered among the pews, and one kneeling silently before the altar, so Peter took a side aisle toward the two tiny chapels on the right. He hesitated briefly between them, then did a mental coin flip between the Prophet and the Mother. The Mother won.

He sat in the first of the three small pews before her statue. There were even more lit candles in here than in the main sanctuary; through their glass containers they cast a red glow over the polished wood of the pews, and glowing yellow ovals with reddish edges on the ceiling and walls. The Mother herself stood draped in her pastel robes, a hand extended and a mild expression on her face. Peter suddenly remembered one of the images in the Hindu temple: a young god with blue skin, playing a flute, with one foot crossed over the other. He'd been young and smiling and he had, Peter remembered, been leaning against a white bull.

So. Peter was here. So now what?

A candle, he supposed. He reached for one of the long wooden skewer-type sticks plunged into a container of sand, and lit it from one of the candles. Then he chose an unlit candle and leaned the fresh flame toward it.

A prayer for Jon, who was gone. Peter had last seen him in person two weeks ago, when they caught a baseball game together. Peter drove this time, and he remembered Jon leaning down and saying through the open car window, "This was great. We should do this more often. Thanks for the ride, Pete. See you later." Pete. A shortening of his name that Peter intensely disliked. Which Jon knew perfectly well, attested as always by the mocking grin. Jon was the only one who could get away with using the name. Peter usually retaliated by calling him Jonathan.

And that little grin, with the customary lift of an amused eyebrow, was the last Peter had ever seen of his brother.

He lit the candle unsteadily and snuffed the skewer in the sand box. As he sat back in the pew he stared into the flame, trying to feel something past the pain. It wasn't the pain he'd come here for; he could carry that with anywhere. Wasn't there supposed to be something more? Look at the flame…like the fire that cremated Jon's body…like a Hindu pyre…

They hadn't even seen Jon's body before the cremation. The bastard had been so methodical, he'd actually left instructions for whoever found him, to have him cremated as soon as the authorities had looked things over. Peter still could hardly believe it. Jon was found by a friend and everything was set in motion immediately. By the time Peter was notified and rushed over from work, the body had been taken.

So his last good-bye to his other self had been a casual wave through the car window. And his twin's last words to him, horribly, had been, "See you later." He could almost be angry at the irony and hypocrisy of those words, if he weren't in such burning pain.

"May I help you, son?"

A man in a black suit and stiff white collar stood by Peter's pew, the candlelight turning his short white hair slightly pink. He said softly, "If I'm disturbing you, I'll go. But I thought you seemed distressed. If you need to talk about it, I'd be happy to listen."

Peter wiped his damp cheeks with the backs of his hands. Talk to this stranger about the agony of losing half of himself? Not a chance. He was here for something else altogether. "Thanks, Father," he said. "I mainly wanted to ask a question about a phrase I've heard lately."

"Of course. I'm Father McAndrew, by the way," said the priest, seating himself.

"Oh. Hi. I'm Peter Stewart." They shook hands.

"What was your question, son?"

Peter hesitated. "I don't quite know what to ask. I'm trying to find out what people mean when they talk about a 'religious experience'."

The older man frowned thoughtfully. "A 'religious experience.' Can I ask, first, if you attend your church regularly? I presume you're Mormon Catholic, since you came here?"

"Nominally, yes. But I don't attend very often."

"Then that phrase might indeed seem odd. I think 'religious experience' is a way of describing our continual living and moving in the care of the Divine. It applies to all aspects of life, lived under the watchful influence of divinity, however we want to characterize him, or it."

Peter shifted on the pew, his eyes on the flickering lights. "That's all?" he whispered. "Just ordinary life?"

"When lived in a state of consciousness of the Divine, no life is ordinary," said Father McAndrew.

A pause. Maybe Peter hadn't expressed himself clearly, since he was vague about the question himself. Maybe he could come at it from a different angle.

"Then what is 'the Divine'?" he asked.

"In our church, the Divine is called 'God'. In other faiths, it's called different names and expressed differently."

"But what is it?" Peter said. "If I'm supposed to live my life being conscious of it, then what am I conscious of?"

"That's the great mystery of existence," said the priest. "God is the ineffable, the inexpressible, the unknowable. Any descriptions or attributions fall so far short of the reality as to be worthless."

"Then what impact can this 'Divine' possibly have on my life?"

"Do you not think that having knowledge of something greater than ourselves has an impact on us? It should lead us to humility, which I believe is the root of all other virtues."

"We all know there's something greater, just by looking at the stars," said Peter. "But we don't call stars 'the Divine'."

Father McAndrew said, "I see you're unsatisfied with these answers. I'm not sure what you're really asking."

"When people talk about 'religious experience', they make it sound like it's more than just ordinary life. They sound like they're talking about a moment in their lives when something important happened, different from the ordinary moments. Something that makes the rest of their moments more than ordinary. That's what I'm trying to find out about."

A long silence, as the priest seemed to be deliberating. Finally he asked quietly, "What people, Peter?"

"Pardon me?"

"What people are these, who talk about religion that way?"

What did it matter, who talked about religion like this? It was the question itself that was important. Wasn't it?

But Father McAndrew asked again, "Who's been telling you these unsettling things, Peter? Friends? Even…relatives?"

Relatives. Peter's mother Margaret, sitting at her desk at home telling Jon as a boy, "No, darling, they'll teach you all of that at school. That's not the sort of thing we talk about at home, till we're grown up and make up our own minds." Becoming agitated as Jon's questions persisted until he finally realized he wouldn't get answers from anyone but his teachers. Because even the inquisitive Jon knew better than to ask David, their father, about his change to Judaism when the twins were seven.

Peter caught a glimpse, the merest hint, of speculation in the priest's shrewd eyes. He shivered in the flickering warmth and his gaze slid away. "You know…," he said, "I don't even know where I heard the phrase. It might have been an article, or a conversation I heard on the train. It made me wonder, that's all."

"I understand. But it needn't worry you," said the priest. "We each experience our religions differently, but we experience the Divine all the time. That's what 'religious experience' really is. You may come to understand it more deeply if you read your Bible and meditate."

"I'll do that, father."

Peter made his escape shortly after, clenching his fists in his pockets as he walked back to work. He'd gotten vague and empty platitudes, as he expected. Flavored with an unsettling hint of suspicion.

He made one more foray into the Archives database that afternoon when he should have been trying to work. The book titles intrigued and tantalized him with their hints and promises of something beyond what Father McAndrew had described. He debated making a trip to the Archive vaults downstairs and having a look at these forbidden volumes. The Archives weren't usually consulted without a compelling reason. Which he didn't really have.

Wait a minute. The Bible. What was it doing in there, when you could buy a Bible in any corner store? He clicked on the title to bring up the bibliographic info. Pretty standard. Publisher, title page, author described as "Various" (he smiled a little, at that), table of contents --

But hold on. Look how long that contents list was. He didn't read his own Bible much, but he'd gotten fair grades in Religion in school, and knew very well that there weren't that many sub-titles in the Bible. There'd been some merging of sub-titles in the modern edition, but not enough to explain this discrepancy. Check out the page count, he thought, and clicked on that category.

Then sat completely still as the numbers stared him in the face. Four, maybe five times longer than his own EMV Bible - Edited Modern Version. And the Bible in the Archives was listed in several unfamiliar versions: King James, New American Standard, New International, and so on. All vastly longer than the EMV; how very curious. Maybe he would visit the Archives before he went home.

He backed up to an earlier menu as he punched a number into the key pad.

"Hi, Andrea," he said into her voice mail. "I'm going to go through Jon's things on the weekend. If it's too hard for you, don't worry, I'll muddle through alone. But I thought you might like to help me, considering…you know. Let me know, okay? And thanks for the flowers. Love you."

As he switched off the phone, he muttered, "Okay, Jon, let's go hunting." He typed another category into the menu -- "Hinduism" -- and hit the Enter key.