The Man Who Figured Out God?

By John Fischer

The Man Who Figured Out God? takes you on a journey of ideas to the very heart of the God concept – out beyond belief to an intriguing destination within your own mind.
Two old friends, one alive, one not, set out on an exciting, entertaining and challenging ride that is at once a renewal of friendship and an exploration of one of life's great questions: Suppose there is no God? What then could possibly explain the ongoing belief in one across time, space, and the many and varied cultures throughout the history of mankind? Rob Victor's determination to answer that question leads him on a journey of discovery to a powerful solution that questions the very belief in belief itself. Is Rob The Man Who Figured Out God? Rob's best friend Jason is about to find out.
Following Rob's death in an unexplained boat explosion Jason is gifted an audio tape on which Rob has recorded his fascinatingly unorthodox answer to the "God problem" he's been working on since he and Jason became best friends back in their college days.
To honor Rob's memory, Jason decides to listen to the tape during a week-long road trip that relives a spirited expedition the two of them shared 25 years earlier. As Rob travels along on Jason's unexpectedly adventure-prone ride, Jason, in turn, rides along on Rob's thought-provoking journey to his surprising conclusion - a conclusion that astoundingly also explains the real motive behind Rob's death.
Where will the ride take you? Is Rob The Man Who Figured Out God?

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543971378

John Fischer

John Fischer is a resident of New York, and divides his time between writing and a career as a marketing consultant. His work has appeared in Guernica, PANK Magazine, Palooka Journal, the Random House Anthology, Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2012.

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The Man Who Figured Out God? Copyright © 2019 by John Fischer

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author

except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing, 2019

ISBN (Print Edition): 978-1-54397-136-1

ISBN (eBook Edition): 978-1-54397-137-8

Published by: BookBaby

www.BookBaby.com

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Taylor & Francis Group for quote from chapter one of THE GREEK PHILOSOPHERS: FROM THALES to ARISTOTLE by W.K.C. Guthrie, originally published by Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1950

Dr. Dean Hamer

Philosophical Library, New York

Einstein quote in chapter 9 is copyright The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Kendra Smith

Copyright Clearance Center

Karen Armstrong

Dr. Andrew Newberg

The Estate of Lewis and Sophia Mumford

Christopher S. Peck

For

Kathleen

Kristen, Karen

And Roger

Thank you

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1

Dead.

The jumble of details from the long-distance phone call earlier that evening kept bouncing around in Jason’s head: an afternoon sight-seeing tour on Lake Michigan off Chicago’s Navy Pier; forty-five people on board; Rob was showing off the city to his cousin visiting from Pittsburgh; unexplained explosion; all but one killed; probably an accident, but police investigating; memorial service for Rob out in Chicago this Friday.

Jason swung his feet to the floor and stood up from bed in the early morning quiet and let his disbelief and anger simmer for a moment.

How the hell could his best friend be dead? How did that make any sense? The guy had just gotten engaged, for God’s sake. He had just run a marathon…

Dead.

He stared into, then away from the darkness. Then back again.

Eventually he drifted toward the glow at the other end of the room. The waning August gibbous moon outside his suburban White Plains, New York bedroom window morphed back and forth from clear to muddled, ducking in and out of the high stratus meandering by from the west. Rain coming. He gazed at it for a bit, distracted for a moment as its changing patterns played with his imagination.

In the bed at the other end of the shadows, Kathleen was having no trouble staying asleep at 2:30 in the morning. Her steady hypnotic deep-sleep breathing was surprisingly comforting, though, and gradually it lured him away from the moon and back to a seat on the edge of the mattress.

An eerie visage of Rob blowing up refused to leave him alone. What the hell kind of way is that to die? He stubbornly shook it off and managed to push his mind to the smiling image he remembered from the last time he had seen Rob alive—just five months ago at his surprise fiftieth birthday party in Chicago.

Then he remembered the first time.

September 16, 1975

Hey!

Jason heard the shout, but it bounced around and off the granite walls and marble steps of Fordham University’s Keating Hall, making it hard to tell where it was coming from.

Hey! Up here.

Jason’s eyes darted from side to side as he rounded the building’s southwest corner. He looked up between the sunlit branches of a nearby maple, and there, camouflaged among its early-autumn crimson leaves, was a slender young man with curly black hair crawling over his ears, hanging onto a limb about a dozen feet up.

I need you to catch this.

What is it?

A cat.

No sooner did Jason move closer to the trunk to get a better look than the young man said Thanks, leaned down and gently dropped the calico into Jason’s arms. He then deftly swiveled to his left, grabbed the branch he had been balancing on and swung himself down. The cat, meantime, clearly wanted no more of this. It let out a toe-curling re-owerr, bounded out of Jason’s grasp and took off.

Jason was briefly startled and then confused. Aren’t you going to chase him?

No. She’ll find her way home.

He’s not yours?

No. I don’t know whose she is. She was stuck up in the tree and couldn’t get down. She’ll be fine.

Jason looked off in the direction the cat had run to see it had already disappeared. I hope he…or she gets home alright.

Definitely a she, the climber said. All calicos are female.

Oh…I didn’t know that.

Yeah, it has to do with genetics and XY chromosomal divisions.

Ah…. Jason paused for a second, and then, almost reflexively, held out his hand. Jason Williams.

Rob Victor, the climber replied with a broad grin, grabbing Jason’s hand after wiping some stray pieces of bark off his own.

I’ve never met an actual cat rescuer before, Jason said, returning the smile.

Me neither.

The moon was sinking lower in the sky and caught the corner of Jason’s eye as all kinds of memories came flashing back: the bike ride he and Rob had taken together out to Chicago; Rob’s stories of his ordeals in the Peace Corps; the time they got suspended from school for climbing to the top of Keating Tower; and, of course, Rob’s famous campfire challenge, his vow to figure out how to fix the world.

And now, blown up.

Thirty-two years of friendship gone in an unexplained explosion—and ironically on the same day the news was otherwise filled with bulletins about the Pope being suddenly rushed to a hospital in Rome. Too much.

Three cuckoos echoed from the antique clock down in the foyer. Jason took a deep breath, seeing again Rob’s boyish fifty-year-old face reflecting the joy of a ten-year-old as he polished off his second piece of store-bought Happy Fiftieth Birthday cake.

He smiled for a moment, then spooned up behind his wife, melted into her back, filled his left hand with her right breast, and slowly finally faded off as the moonlight dimmed to cloud cover.

2

The rain pelting the gray vinyl siding, along with the wind chimes clanging on the front porch downstairs, eventually found their way into Jason’s consciousness. He reluctantly opened his left eye to see the clock telling him it was already after ten. He was alone. Kathleen had quietly gotten up and left for church over an hour ago. He turned onto his back and with his eyes mostly still closed managed to find the switch on the bedside lamp.

Jason usually accompanied his wife, but of late had decided to protest what he thought was a bit of hypocrisy—on one hand, the church refusing to even consider ordaining women, and on the other, its recent voicing concern over Islam’s unfortunate treatment of them.

Speaking of which, he wondered how the Pope was doing. He hadn’t paid much attention to the news since hearing about Rob. He rolled out of bed, slipped his six-foot-one-inch frame into his too-short robe, plodded barefoot down to the kitchen and flipped on CNN. He half-listened to the pert, young blonde newscaster reel off the latest statistics about the economy while he slowly poured orange juice into a glass filled with ice cubes. As he was reaching for a knife to slice open a mostly stale English muffin he had retrieved from the bread box the young news reader caught his ear.

In Chicago this morning Mayor Daley extended his condolences to the families of those killed in the tragic explosion on Lake Michigan yesterday and promised a thorough investigation. Police divers recovered the last of the bodies early this morning and continue to collect pieces of the wreckage. A spokesman for the Chicago Police Department says foul play is not suspected. The lone survivor, a woman in her early thirties, has not yet been identified and remains unconscious at the University of Chicago hospital.

Jason stared for a second, thought about Rob, and then grabbed the remote to press the mute button. What a waste, he mumbled at the TV. Rob was probably the smartest guy he ever knew— an I.Q. of 172, Rob’s mom once told him. What a colossal waste, he said a bit louder.

The sudden creaking of the garage door snapped Jason back to his orange juice and muffin. Kathleen was home from church. He could hear her humming what sounded like one of the church hymns as she came in through the laundry room. She shook the raindrops off her umbrella, and set it in its holder in the kitchen corner between the schefflera tree and the oak pie-safe, her wavy blonde hair and knee-length flowered summer Sunday dress none the worse for wear.

Hi honey, Jason said, scratching his unshaven face. Did you get wet out there?

It wasn’t too bad, though it does seem to have picked up a bit in the past hour or so. Thank goodness! We could certainly use the rain. Father Joe said to say hi.

He knew she was trying to make a point about his not being there. He ignored it. Want half of my English muffin?

No thanks. She slipped off her wet shoes and set them next to the umbrella. I guess you heard?

Heard what?

About that, she said pointing to the TV screen.

Jason looked to see a full-screen picture of the Pope with the dates 1945-2007 underneath. He grabbed the remote to press mute again.

Repeating our top story: Pope Pius the Thirteenth died last night in his hospital room in Rome. A cause of death has not been announced and, in what is considered to be a highly unusual step, authorities have ordered an autopsy on the Pope’s body. Doctors at the Vatican admit they are baffled by his sudden death after a brief illness. Pope Pius the Thirteenth, head of the world’s Roman Catholic Church, dead at the age of 62.

3

The following week was a picture postcard of what August should be in suburbia—lots of warm sunshine, kids making noise in the cul-de-sac, golf courses full of sick employees, convertible tops down, joggers. All of which were momentary distractions from the ongoing headlines and Special Reports about the Pope’s death and funeral.

On Monday a story came out that said according to official sources in Rome a nun who worked on the Pope’s private staff at the Vatican had contacted authorities just before the pontiff’s death, and the implication was that had something to do with why the autopsy had been ordered. That evening it was announced the funeral would be moved back a day so more tests could be done. And the following appeared in the morning paper:

ROME (AP) The Holy See in Vatican City announced today that Pope Pius XIII would be laid to rest on Thursday.

Security at the ceremony will be very tight as dignitaries, including several heads of state from around the world, are expected to attend the funeral on Thursday morning. The College of Cardinals is then set to convene and, as is church tradition, will stay secluded until reaching a consensus on who among them will be declared the next leader of the world’s one billion Catholics.

Circumstances surrounding the Pope’s death remain the subject of speculation. Antonio Rosatti, Rome’s newly appointed Chief of Police, is quoted as saying he will make no conclusion about the death until the results of the autopsy are complete. Neither the doctor who was at the pontiff’s bedside when he passed away nor the nun who worked on his private staff and who contacted Roman authorities just before the pontiff’s death has been available for comment.

The Pope, who was an active 62 years old, was known to have had a minor heart condition during his 20s, but was given a clean bill of health several years ago. Last winter he spent an active vacation skiing with his brother in the Austrian Alps.

Known throughout his papacy as a pastoral pontiff who used much of his time visiting his flock around the world, he had spent most of the past several months secluded at the Vatican. Church officials say he had been attending to various church affairs and was heavily involved in some theological research.

A press release from the Vatican this morning is asking all Catholics to observe a moment of silence on Thursday at noon local time.

On Thursday the networks and news channels were completely dominated by the funeral which, as expected, was a magnificent affair with long eulogies and various presidents and prime ministers praising him as a man of peace. By Friday things started to calm down, though speculation about circumstances surrounding his death and the unusual papal autopsy was running rampant.

Friday was also the day Jason found himself in passenger seat 15A at 8:30 a.m. on his way to Chicago for Rob’s memorial service. He had flown from New York to Chicago several times before, but this time he felt almost lost. He still hadn’t gotten used to the idea that Rob was actually gone.

He looked quietly out the window, and as the jet lifted off and climbed Jason thought the thin clouds breaking over the wing and rushing past him looked a bit like smoke; and it sent his mind back to the three-day camping and hiking trip he and Rob had taken together in the Adirondacks between their sophomore and junior years.

July 29, 1977

Ya know, Rob said, leaning back from the fire and away from the smoke, I don’t even like hot dogs and I just ate five.

Well, they taste better when they’re cooked on an open fire, Jason said almost, but not quite, apologetically. Besides, how was I supposed to know you don’t like hot dogs? Everybody likes hot dogs!

Rob grinned as he finished licking mustard off his fingers. He had used about half a jar on the five franks.

Out beyond the canopy of fir trees surrounding their Appalachian Trail campsite the western sky was dissolving from indigo to starlight and, with the exception of a crackle or two from the fire pit and the occasional complaint about hot dogs, silence was the only sound.

Know any ghost stories? Jason teased.

Rob just glanced at him out of the corner of his eye.

You know, Jason pressed on, you never told me about your Peace Corps days in Africa. You must have had a couple of interesting adventures over there.

Rob chased the last of the hot dogs and mustard down with a gulp of cherry Kool-Aid. I’m not a big fan of Kool-Aid, either, he deadpanned. Next time we do this I get to be in charge of the food.

Fine. Jason grinned. You can be food man. So…what about the Peace Corps? How did you get in anyway? I thought you had to be a college graduate."

They make exceptions every once in a while, Rob said. I had taken a lot of college-level classes in high school, and graduated ahead of my class in January. So between then and going to Fordham, I did a stint in the corps. Oh, and, uh…my uncle knew a congressman.

Jason smirked. Ahh, the old my-uncle-knew-a-congressman trick. So…where in Africa were you?

Ghana mostly. West coast.

Was it hard?

It had its moments.

Such as? I mean, what was one of the toughest?

There were a lot of tough ones, I guess. Creature comforts we take for granted here are almost unheard of over there. If you ever go, make sure to bring some toilet paper with you. He looked over toward the fire and lobbed another log on. I did have a pretty scary run-in, though, with a guy they called ‘Poke-Man.’

Poke-Man, Jason repeated.

Yeah. He was a bad guy from the north country over near Togo.

What did he do?

He was kind of an independent war lord. He would intimidate the villagers and steal from them. Law enforcement was not a hallmark of the government in Ghana back then—or today either, for that matter. He was a big guy with a deep James Earl Jones voice. He wore fatigues and rode around in an old army truck with a couple of henchmen who carried automatic rifles.

How did you get involved with him?

"I was in one of the more remote areas of Ghana, working with villagers near the town of Salaga, south of Tamale. There were maybe sixty or so of them living in thatched huts. It was a pretty bare-bones existence. They were mostly cheerful, though, even if they didn’t totally trust white guys from America who were skeptical of their voodoo. Anyway, I was with a couple of other volunteers and our job was to set up a simple water purification system so they wouldn’t keep getting cholera from the river.

They had food problems, too. That year there was a pretty bad drought and the U.N. was sending in sporadic shipments of food. I’d been there about a month when a shipment came in. There were pallets full of rice and beans and powdered milk and dried fruit and…and, the thing was, it just sat there at the edge of the village. Nobody went to get it.

Jason threw a stick he was holding onto the fire. Sparks flared up. How come?

When I asked, Rob continued, "I was told they had to give the food to some guy they called ‘Poke-Man.’ I found out later his real name was Robert Ndukwe. ‘Poke-Man’ was his nick-name. Short for ‘Poker-Man.’ He had a reputation for being good at poker, probably because nobody ever dared beat him.

So, sure enough, the next day he shows up at the village with his truck and his henchmen. His M.O. was to follow about a day behind the U.N. convoy, steal the food that had been left, and re-sell it. And nobody was willing to challenge him. So…I thought…maybe I should.

Jason raised an eyebrow. Did you have a machine gun or something?

No. But I had an idea. Rob moved a little closer to the fire. "The day he showed up, I watched him for a couple of minutes, and then slowly walked toward him with, of course, my hands in plain view. I didn’t want to make the henchmen nervous. He was definitely a large guy, maybe three-hundred pounds. He would have made a good defensive lineman. Anyway, when I got within about fifteen feet or so he told me to stop and one of his boys took the safety off his rifle and turned toward me.

I told him I had something for him. When he asked me what it was, I said…me.

Jason looked up from the fire and stared right at him. What, the hell, did you mean by that?

Well, I told him if he left the food for the villagers I would spend the next year working for him instead of the Peace Corps.

Can you do that? Wouldn’t you get arrested or something when you got back to the States?

I don’t know. But it wasn’t important.

Why not?

"Because of the rest of my idea. I knew