The Science of Gods
DETERMINISM — THE WORLD view that nature and our own life are completely determined from past to future — reflects the human need for certainty in an uncertain world. The projection of that need is the all knowing God some people find in the Bible, a God who knows the past and future down to the finest detail — like a film that has already been developed. We may not have seen the film, but what it holds for us is already fixed.
- American Physicist Heinz Pagels, The Cosmic Code
Act 1: Recursion
“Long ago, God decided to create the heavens and the earth. He made the land and the sky in an inspired and perfect way. The mesh of creation became sensical by divinity until finally on the seventh day, God rested.”
Riley’s eyelids fluttered like the injured wings of a butterfly as Ms. Moivre’s voice continued to reverberate throughout the classroom. When her words reached Riley, they became nothing more than sound waves of various amplitudes and periods.
For a long time, Riley had thought about why it was so hard for her to focus on Ms. Moivre during class. For a while she attributed it to Ms. Moivre’s dreadfully monotone voice accompanied by the exhaustion of the last period of the day. But it wasn’t that. Ms. Moivre wasn’t bad at convincing; Riley was simply bad at being convinced.
In a fit of what she could only describe as boredom, Riley had transcribed 31 lines of Pascal’s triangle from memory into the wooden classroom table. Ones churned down the sides of the numerical pyramid and numbers of combinatorial value settled inside the stomach. It was logic cascading in repeating steps that flowed like water skipping across rocks in a river.
1
121
1331
14641
15101051
The singular number 1, sitting on its high chair above the rational waterfall of descendants below, was the most beautiful of all. Riley once learnt that Pythagoras believed the number one to be the origin of all things, a symbol of divinity and unity. It wasn’t hard to understand why after seeing it in such regal placement above the chaos below.
It wasn’t fun to start from the top and iterate down. Riley wished she was first shown the mess at the center of the triangle and then asked to induce what number came first. That chase to find the patterns and the traces would have been exhilarating.
“I don’t believe in God; I believe in science,” screamed Harry from the other side of the hollow classroom. All around her, the fidgeting of her classmates skidded to a halt. Ms. Moivre shifted at the front of the class, and her cross necklace shimmered in place right above her chest.
It felt like the world was covered in ice, but that feeling didn’t last for long. Suddenly, Ms. Moivre slammed her bible onto the wooden desk, and Riley’s frozen limbs shattered at the thunderous sound. Ms. Moivre’s grip around the edges of the book was so tight that her fingers were turning blood red.
“Do not disrupt my class. I will not extend the welcome of my classroom to anyone so discourteous. Out!” shrieked Ms. Moivre with vigour, lips harshly crashing against each other. Riley could feel his cheeks blossoming in pastel red behind her.
Riley looked one last time at the abandoned numbers inscribed on her desk. She had always liked numbers and axioms because they never made wrong moves nor said a thing that was untrue. Looks like goodbye, she thought. She watched Harry leave the room underwater, drowning in the sickly attention of their classmates. What she didn’t know was that Harry felt her gaze in that moment, and from that day on he would never forget it.
“Riley Wu,” Ms. Moivre said, her shrillness shattering Riley’s castle of thoughts, “Go have a talk with your brother — perhaps one later with your father would be helpful, too.”
At that moment, Riley’s heart and lungs crumpled together like sheets of wet pink paper. Sometimes Harry made her want to scratch her eyes out with a set of protractors; he was insufferable in the way he could never keep his thoughts to himself. Riley knew that whether he thought God to be real or not, that wasn’t why he had shouted such a thing.
“Yes, Ms. Moivre,” Riley replied with a film of sweetness. Standing up, she hastily swept the Old Testament worksheet into her turquoise blue backpack. Even without checking inside, she knew she had wrinkled the corners and edges of her folders.
The search for Harry was swift. Riley found him where he usually hid when he was upset, tucked away on the corner platform where the stairwell turned for the next set of steps.
Riley’s hands, previously knotted together into tight fists, relaxed at once when she saw him. Arms curled around his stomach, he was hunched over the edge of the platform. The towering forms of trees and dynamic shapes of water reflected themselves in the almond bends of his eyes. Riley had seen this face of his before.
“Harry?” she asked, rummaging into her pocket for her mobile candy stash. She carefully felt through the shapes of Hershey kisses and Mars bars, until a familiar malleable texture greeted her. The wrapper was worn and torn at this point, but she tapped him on the shoulder and offered it to him nonetheless. Tootsie Rolls used to be his favorite.
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“Go away,” Harry shot back, his eyes flicking towards her and then darting back to place. Riley hated the way he said the words, rough and metallic — so sure of themselves. Riley bit her lip and stepped towards him again. Praying that Harry could hear her thoughts, she gently placed her hand onto his shoulder.
Harry shook it off.
“Why?” She asked. Even he himself didn’t know why.
“Do you think a God exists that would leave us? God wouldn’t leave us without Mom,” Harry whispered, the tall wall surrounding his heart crumbling down so that his sister could see the red halls hidden within. For a second neither of them broke the silence.
Riley looked down at the concrete, trying to think of the right words to say. Surely there were words that could make the conversation go right; there had to be a correct set of verbs that could solve the expression presented to her with such earnestness.
“Go back to your math, you don’t understand, you have no idea. You and Father can continue on, but he can’t even stand to look at me,” Harry spat hurriedly, tumbling the words one over another, not knowing how to contain himself.
Riley’s lips quivered slightly as a lonely screw loosened inside her heart. By the time the metal pin had clattered to the pit of her stomach, she had already started swinging her backpack onto the concrete ground, rushing up to push Harry squarely in the shoulders. She liked the shock written all over his face.
“What’s wrong with you? Just because you’re stupid doesn’t mean you can resort to pushing and shoving like a Neanderthal,” Harry yelped.
“You’re so annoying! Father doesn’t like you because you’re so annoying!”
The sound reverberated in eyes that were so similar yet so different from her own. But even as she said it, she knew it wasn’t true. She made to take it back, but it was already too late.
Harry lunged at her impulsively, shoving her harder than she had shoved him. Like a puck slipping across the ice, Riley slid backward over the railing of the stairwell. Before Harry could act, a startling scream ruptured the mild spring air.
Riley was so afraid that she wasn’t afraid anymore.
As a little girl fell from the 4th floor of her middle school’s history wing, she thought that she could see numbers falling up in lines beside her, adding up perfectly into neat sums, full sets, and ideal vectors. As the distance between her and the ground approached infinitesimally close to zero, suddenly a singular number one flashed before her eyes.
After the fall, I didn’t talk for three days. There were red and blue lights flashing around my house for a month in May. It seemed that the news couldn’t get enough of our sad story. The last thing I
When I fell asleep at night, I dreamed of ones falling down the side of a staircase, so afraid of what would happen when they reached the ground. When I woke up in the morning, I obsessed over her notebooks packed with problems and notes. I became accustomed to the smell of her old watermelon perfume.
After a while, it became my hobby. I brought her old problems to school and worked through them by the foot of the staircase during lunch. It wasn’t like any of my old friends wanted to talk to me anyway.
The worst part though was being alone with Father. He didn’t speak a word to me unless absolutely necessary, and anything other than seeing Riley at the hospital meant no interaction. Between interviews and crying there wasn’t any time for father and son catch on the lawn. Not that there had been before anyway.
As we drove to the hospital together in Father’s old space grey Honda Civic, the moon lapped through the window in small tides of warm white. The radio made an attempt to defend against the siege of silence with the Billboard’s Top 100 Hits. The lyrics were just words that didn’t mean anything, pawns in the viscous quiet’s game of chess.
During the car ride, I had already counted 57 raindrops and found 15 of a shape I’d never cataloged before. Outside, I had seen 3 barred owls, a common sight during the Massachusetts nighttime. When the owls laughed into the night, the car muffled their sound to a dim and dull rapping. I hated this restricted version of owl laughter.
As we walked through the hospital door, I noticed that the air between Father and I had turned so brittle that it would snap with the wrong word. When Father approached the nurse at the front desk, he told her that we would visit separately and allowed himself to be led away first. I saw the chairs lining the walls of the hospital race after him as he walked away. I wanted to join in.
Sitting down in the lobby, I watched the yellow and green of people’s hopes and worries skating across the vinyl flooring. Across the room, there was a man reading a newspaper who checked his watch more times than there were periods in an article. I myself resorted to a dry daze of foot tapping, and eventually time turned to a slush.
“Harry Wu? It’s your time to visit now,” said a nurse, sharp and clear. My eyes were filled with the residue of sleep, and my heart was groggy. As the nurse led me to Riley’s room, I counted everything I saw: one set of stairs, four lefts, six rights, four doors, and one elevator.
Every thing inducted into my library of memories slowed the rhythm of my pulsing heart. There was something comforting about having a copy of the present that would never change the way it was.
“I’ll leave you to it,” said the nurse, so quietly that the sound of her voice got lost in the beeping of the machines a room over. As I approached the door, I noticed a million little details about the handle, how it was too small, too large, too smooth, too rough. The soft click that sounded at the turn of the handle stabbed me in the ear.
Cradled by white sheets, Riley was propped up on the cushions of the hospital cot. On the bedside table, a wrinkle of tissue lay lazily beside a half peeled mandarin. From some river upstream in the skies, a silver blue bubble popped and rained down onto my face, tracing a long arch before joining the ground underneath my feet.
