A Conversation

“You know I hate resorting to cliches, but the times really are a changing,” Bartleby said with a sigh.

“Normally I’d admonish you for trying to float a say-nothing phrase like that one, but in this case, I think I might actually agree with you,” Gabriel III replied in his own dejected tone of voice. “It’s all hitting me at once, just how obsolete we’re becoming.”

“I think the proper word in this case would actually be ‘redundant’, at least if you pay credence to The Word, which I know you still do,” Bartleby said, correcting his angelic friend.

“When I think back,” Gabriel III continued, paying his friend’s correction no mind, “it seems so obvious. Like, how did we not see this day coming? Could we really not connect the dots?”

“First time it really struck me, you know, the moment when I first stopped and thought, oh, this is bad, I was on a routine possession, and it felt like I’d been doing a fantastic job, you know, the kind where you’re really proud of yourself even as it’s happening. And so I’m in there and I’m working and working and working and all of a sudden I look up and this doctor’s standing there, all, ‘Your daughter suffers from a condition known as epilepsy‘ and that’s when I first remember stopping to think, yeah, this could be bad.”

“Was that the time you missed like two weeks from work just sitting in your apartment eating pop tarts and reading every comic book you owned from cover to cover? Dude, we even heard about that one over on our side, you really must have taken it pretty hard,” Gabriel III said.

“Yeah, it messed me up pretty good,” Bartleby replied.

“For me, it wasn’t some isolated incident that did it,” Gabriel III said, “it was more like several things taking place over a period of time, like the cumulative effect of those things, like I remember hearing a joke about how having AIDS was all of a sudden no different than being on birth control or something where you just had to take a bunch of pills every day and you were fine. And I remember kind of going, shit, these people don’t believe in miracles anymore.”

“And you’d think these things would go to benefit one of us, right? Like people losing their faith, that should be popping up somewhere on our side of the scoreboard, but it’s not,” Bartleby said.

“Nobody believes in Adam and Eve anymore,” Gabriel III groaned. “Or the flood, or the Moses and the Red Sea, or any of the great stories, really. We’ve been debunked.”

“You can’t even say the word psychology around my office any more,” Bartleby said, looking wistfully straight ahead. “Just between you and me, a lot of the guys in my group are more afraid of DSM-V than they are The Holy Bible. They say they’d rather be cast into The Pit for an eternity than to just be explained away and never come back. Normally solid guys, too. You know Aamon, right? He’s one of the main ones always talking about psychology, I kid you not. Guy’s been around forever, like from the very beginning, and he’s seen and survived all of it, you know? It’s crazy, here’s one of those guys nobody can remember not idolizing, and you’re telling me this is what finally rattles him?”

Gabriel winced. He lit a cigarette.

Silence.

For a short while, each of them was content to watch the globe spin on its axis in silence, drifting in and out of their own thoughts, tiptoeing around any of the more uncomfortable ones. Bartleby liked this, the way that he and Gabriel III could just sit in an agenda-less silence and not feel the pressure of a mounting counter-point like he did with most people on the other team. Taking breaks with Gabriel III seemed to Bartleby like being alone but on your own terms.

“What’s the man in charge down there saying about all this?” Gabriel III asked. He’d not even thought twice about posing a question like that one, either. Bartleby couldn’t keep secrets from Gabriel III, didn’t have to, there was no need for them. Too long and deep of a friendship to still care about being legalistic and “loyal” to his side, whatever that even meant anymore. And also, Gabriel III’s boss, God, was omniscient anyway and so if it were really important, Gabriel III would have found out eventually.

“Oh you can probably guess. More of the same meaningless corporate babble he always puts out there, pointless messages using an optimal number of words to say absolutely nothing and yet still letting us know he’s concerned about our problems and wants to do anything he can to help, blah blah blah,” Bartleby said.

“Kind of don’t blame those guys,” Gabriel III finally said.

“What guys?” Bartleby asked.

“The guys in your group, the ones frightened of psychology. I actually don’t blame them for thinking that way. I mean, assuming that those are the only two options out there, and that they’re legitimate,” Gabriel III said.

“Go on,” Bartleby said.

“Oh I didn’t have some deep thought lined up or anything. I just think that any form of existence, no matter how tortuous and – pardon the expression – hellish it may be, I think that would still be preferable to an absolute end to reality,” Gabriel III explained.

“Yeah, I don’t disagree,” Bartleby said. “But what bothers me about the whole thing, though, is that it feels like there’s this crack in the damn, only we’d all agreed to ignore it, even though it was very obviously growing. And now that it’s too big too ignore, people are still acting like they’re shocked to see it there as big as it is.”

Gabriel couldn’t say it, but the same thoughts had occurred to him lately, too. He’d tried to shake it off at first, but the thought proved irresistible so he finally just gave in and scratched the itch of thinking what if this whole story of Good and Evil that we’ve been pitched so many times and for so long, what if the giant morality tale of God versus Satan wasn’t true and that nobody really knew how this was going to turn out or if any of them were even going to go on existing for much longer?