Excerpt: The Creator

“Fred? What are you doing awake?”

“Jesus, Laura!” Friedrich jerked upright in his chair and closed the diary with a loud clap all in the same second.

“Tut, tut, taking the Lord’s name in vain? I thought we’d had that discussion.”

Taking off his glasses with one hand and massaging the bridge of his nose with the other, Friedrich shook his head apologetically. “I know, dear, I’m sorry. You startled me, that’s all.”

His wife, who had donned a silk dressing gown before descending the stairs in search of him, walked to his side and perched herself on the arm of the chair, wrapping an arm around his shoulders. “That’s a blast from the past,” she pointed at the book in his lap. “When did you start writing in that old thing again?”

“Just now.”

“Aha,” Laura nodded knowingly, “somehow I always guessed it would come back to this.” She ran her fingers slowly through his hair and kissed the top of his head. “You’re too big for your own britches now, Doctor Gottschalk, and nobody knows better than you how to bring yourself down a peg or two.”

“You are too perceptive for your own good, Mrs. Gottschalk.” Friedrich smiled up at her, marveling for a moment at the face of his bride of thirty years, wondering for the trillionth time how it was that he managed to get so lucky. “To be perfectly honest,” he continued, returning his gaze to the diary, which he once more opened to its newest crease, “that’s what I’d intended to do when I resurrected it. But I don’t think it quite turned out that way.”

They sat in silence for a moment as he paged back to the beginning of the entry and scanned over his words. He didn’t mind laying his innermost thoughts so nakedly open in front of Laura, knowing that not only would she probably end up hearing them from his own lips eventually, but that her own innate sense of decorum would keep her from reading over his shoulder until he invited her to do so. As he skimmed through the loosely organized paragraphs, a pattern began to emerge that disturbed him. What had begun as a personal vindication of the path upon which he had so fortuitously found himself had rapidly deteriorated into the ranting of an angry man determined to blaspheme his way straight into the Hell in which he didn’t believe. Certainly he hadn’t let his mind return to such a dark place? Certainly he had a more positive direction for such ravings, a light at the end of the tunnel?

His concern must have been evident on his face, as Laura leaned over the top of his head and looked down at him with her brow furrowed. “What is it?”

Friedrich shook his head. “I don’t know, I thought I. . .” He paused for a moment and started again. “Do you remember, Laura, what I said to you when you first asked me to go to church with you?”

“How could I forget?”

“And what did you tell me in return?”

She straightened up on the edge of the chair. “I said that science can show you an awful lot of wonderful things. It can show you why the sun rises in the day and why the stars come out at night. It can explain the tides and the seasons and all the colors of the rainbow. But it can never show you God, because God is love and if there is no love, what purpose is there in living?”

“I wanted to believe you so much when you said that,” Friedrich sighed regretfully. “I wanted to believe you because I knew I loved you in that moment and I thought that if someone like you could love me enough to want to bring me into your world, then I’d believe anything for you.” He reached up and stroked her cheek, lost in the memory.

Laura reminded him why he had recalled it in the first place. “But you didn’t believe me. And you still don’t.” There was no contempt in her voice, only the sighing acceptance of one long resigned to a difficult truth.

Suddenly feeling that there was too much distance between them, Friedrich circled his wife around her waist and guided her down into the seat of the chair. She was a small woman, but he was an admittedly larger man, and she had to swing her legs over his lap and rest her feet on the arm opposite in order to fit. Grasping her hand and preoccupying his free thumb with the stone on her engagement ring, Friedrich lowered his voice to a mere murmur as he continued, as though afraid that someone else was in the room with them would hear him.

“I went through all those classes, those humiliating ceremonies, those tests of true faith as they call them, to prove to the people who mattered that I was worthy of you. I went against everything that I held sacred because I knew how important it was to you to be married by a priest under the approving gaze of God and, perhaps more importantly, your family.” He chuckled a bit in spite of himself, and was glad that Laura smiled with him. “And although no amount of Bible thumping and rote recitation of psalms and prayers could re-indoctrinate me into a faith that everything in my being told me was wrong, I learned from the experience. I felt a kind of tranquility with the world that I had never known. Rather than resentment for the people who chose to devote their lives to what I saw as mere fiction, I recognized a simplicity in religion. How could I hate something which brought peace of mind to so many people? Rather than anger, I felt pity that those people couldn’t, or wouldn’t, know the things that I know, and see the things that I have seen. . . the poetry of existence, a poetry all the more beautiful than the preaching of Scripture because it is true, because it has been tested and validated and proven.”

Friedrich paused for a moment, granting Laura an opportunity to interject her own thoughts. She, however, remained silent, looking down into her lap. He continued, “But now, it’s almost as though all of that old frustration is coming back to me. For the first time ever, the world has proof—absolutely undeniable proof—that it does not take a supreme being to build a universe. And still people cling to their dogmas. If anything, they cling with all the more force. It’s as though they are afraid of reality. Who wants to live his entire life in a dream world?”

Laura shifted and looked up at him. The look on her face was honest and penetrating, the sort of look a wife gave to her husband when he was about to be contradicted. “Do you think I live in a dream world, Friedrich?”

“No, no, of course not, dear.”

“I’ve seen everything you’ve seen, as you put it, or at least as much as anyone outside your laboratory possibly can. I ask questions. I like to understand the strange, far away things as much as you do. But I still have my faith.”

Friedrich did not know how to respond. He’d had some variant of the science versus religion discussion many times with Laura, always ending with their agreement to disagree. Somehow this was shaping up to be no different, and he was simply not in the mood to argue. He needed her to be there for him now more than ever, and the last thing he wanted was to end up mired in a dispute in which he would inevitably choose the wrong words and end up sleeping on the sofa.