"Good evening! How are you tonight?"
I overhear the words, more boisterous than one would usually suspect. Some more words are spoken, and I see a young dark-haired woman, bundled in a soft black coat and a gray knit hat, walk in contempt away from... someone.
Precipitation--cold, condensed, crystalline & white--melts on my opened green jacket in this underground indoor structure of steel and concrete and lights.
I see a variety of people awaiting their passage in this room, designed solely for the purpose of waiting.
My thoughts are interrupted by the stimuli of a warm, broad-nosed, salt-bearded, white-haired presence before me.
In green, uniformed coverings, he exudes the self-assuredness that some confuse for "confidence."
"Good eve to you! How are you tonight?"
I take him in.
"I'm well... you?"
"Very well!"
No pause to even consider his response; his reply is too quick to be truthful, too boisterous and robust to be sincere.
"I see you've got a briefcase--you're going to work?"
Somewhat--dumbfounded?--by his candor, I think for a reply.
Before one occurs to me, the thick-lipped man continues, sensing that my response would be a qualified, "No."
"Maybe you're going to court, to deliver some papers?"
His searching puzzles me.
"A delivery, yes, but more mundane than court... just some letters, for a friend."
In an instant, and for only an instant, dissatisfaction flickers across his face. I cannot, at this point, fathom what it is he is searching for, what he hasn't yet found.
"So what do you do?"
A more direct question; not free from assumption, yet having far fewer than his other questions.
"I'm a web developer."
And the canned response:
"Oh really?"
I could have answered myriad ways; accountant, farmer, engineer, brick-layer. It doesn't matter.
"I'm a freelance preacher."
From the look of satisfaction on the features that starkly contrasted his white hair, it is evident that he has accomplished his first goal; to ask questions in order to wait to talk.
"Oh."
It is all I have for him.
"You know..."
And now, he continues with what he started.
"Somebody had to make this. Do you know who?"
I simply raise my right eye-brow. Without intending it, a smile plays across my lips.
"People had to build this..."
He gestures around the cavernous underground platform.
"...using materials and inspiration that were put here by the Creator."
I stand there, unimpressed by the "logic" of the implied parable.
"See, just like someone had to make all this--"
Gesturing around again.
"--somebody had to put the materials here. Who? How did they get here?"
I want to explain the life cycle of stars and planetary systems; how the nebular remnants of a nova coalesce into a star capable of producing heavier elements, and so on, resulting in a system replete with the building blocks of still more complex structures. I want to explain the entropy of super-systems and the harmonies of the very small. I want to tell him a story of natural history more romantic than the kind the minds of men could invent.
I stand silent, the smile playing. I know it doesn't matter. The argument is one of infinite regression--and a hypocritical abhorrence of the infinite that appeals to the Infinite as the answer, all at the same time.
"See, I believe in a creator. And the good book says..."
I stand there, drinking in his words without thirst. If he is to broker dogma, why did he begin with logic?
"And you know how much planning went into this structure?"
I follow his gesture around the cavern, smiling at the reductio ad absurbam.
The musty man seems disturbed that I have not answered, though he had really asked no questions.
"Just like Nagasaki or Hiroshima, all of it can be destroyed. The atoms have scattered..."
I blink at the slight inaccuracy of the wording.
"See, we won't melt the ice caps. The good book says there won't be another flood. We've changed the ecosystem--now there's draught. But now they have us looking for meteorites. See, they hit the moon, and it has craters, because it doesn't have our atmosphere--and it's further out, too."
Again, I cannot help but smile at hearing this evidence that geocentrism is alive and well.
"But it won't be like that. But everyone has science as their god--science, trying to replace their god and telling them to watch for these things."
I ponder where he came from.
Lonely? Dejected? Perhaps why he would lurk, to prey on those like himself.
"All of it had to come from somewhere. And all of it can disappear in fire."
A horrific thought strikes, as I ponder his distinctive features; ponder his history, his origins.
He wouldn't believe, if his ancestor's master hadn't.
"When Columbus came, none of this was here. Someone had to make it out of the materials left here for us..."
The cultural egotism--this left here for us? The materials were just as stolen from the heirs to this land, as his ancestry had been from another.
You wouldn't believe if your ancestor's master hadn't.
I want to spit it.
"The Egyptians, they built pyramids. When their Clintons died, they put them in because they were important."
This preyer of prayer... In a logic of all things having their origins, he is more a symptom than a cause.
Are things so bad?
"All things must come from somewhere..."
Are we all sinking into this darkness?
"And ultimately, then, you have to come to the source..."
Is this our legacy?
"Who created the creator?"
It is the only question that would matter. It is the only question to ask of this man, "proving" the need for an uncaused cause by asserting that all causes must be caused.
He stands, stunned.
He has--
--no answer.
"I don't know."
He looks around the tunnel.
I can hear the trolley's squeal.
"How do you think this got here?"
"I don't know."
I consider those words to be the beginning.
"There are some things I'm not meant to know."
He considers them an impasse.
"See, the Word was empowered..."
You wouldn't be a...
"That power was the universe..."
If your ancestor's...
"Do you believe this can burn?"
Oh yes.
Oh god... yes.
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