Interlude 4—"All Right, I'll go to Hell"
Location: Goldman house
Time: 5 PM, January 18, Merge + 19
Becky flounced on the couch. "Dad, you have to talk to Mom!"
Bill looked up from his book. He didn't disagree with his daughter. It was starting to—hell, it had looked from the beginning—like Sandy's merge with the eighth level champion, Sandra of Corinth, might well destroy their marriage. Sandy would talk to him. Sandra seemed to feel that sharing with him was a betrayal of her oath to God. "Your mother is going through a difficult time."
Since the night of the Merge, Sandy was sleeping on the couch—the one that Becky was on right now. She insisted that she be the one to sleep on the couch because the change in their relationship wasn't Bill's fault. But she had to figure out whether her devotion to God or the family came first in her heart.
"Dad, wake up and smell the coffee. Mom merged with a religious nut job and she's liable to kill someone." Becky pulled a coin from her pocket and walked it across her fingers, an ability she'd picked up from her own merge. They were all changed by the Merge. Bill's book wasn't on history. It was engineering. Bill had never been good at, or all that interested in, science or mechanical things before the Merge. Now he was.
"Sandra of Corinth wasn't a religious nutjob. Not in her world."
Becky sat forward on the couch. "Thing is, Dad, I think Mom's in there somewhere screaming to get out."
✽✽✽
Sandra Louise Goldman heard the comment and stopped just before she would have entered the living room. She wasn't trapped, exactly. It was more complicated than that. When she did her morning devotions she felt God's presence, but at the same time she felt that he was disappointed in her. What she couldn't tell was why He was disappointed in her. She assumed it was that because of the Merge, she was no longer a virgin. No longer pure. So she was sleeping alone when what she wanted most in the world was the comfort of Bill's arms.
But now another thought came to her. Might God want her to fulfill her family obligations? Be mother and wife as well as knight of the temple. Sandra of Corinth had such certainty, but the harder Sandy held to that certainty the more she doubted. She wanted to talk it all out with Bill. But he was in there reassuring their daughter that Mom wasn't a crazy person. So she went into the master bedroom, sat on the bed where Bill had tossed a shirt and started to cry.
She picked up the shirt to dry her eyes and found herself inhaling Bill's scent. It was while she was sitting there sniffing his shirt that Bill came in.
She looked up saw him standing there and almost attacked him for witnessing her weakness. But it wasn't his fault; none of it was his fault. It was her fault. Her fault for still wanting what they had when all she should want was to serve God. She stood and ran into the bathroom, but Bill followed her. He stood in the door and said, "Dammit, Sandy. Talk to me. Let me help."
And she did. She poured it all out, all her doubts, all her self-loathing for having those doubts, missing not just the intimacy, but the sex and feeling guilty over missing it. And through it all, Bill listened. When she had spilled it all out, he thought for a minute and said, "You need to have a talk with Huck Finn."
"Huck Finn?"
"Huckleberry Finn, a great philosopher of the Mississippi. Granted, he's fictional, but in a world with wizards and vampires, champions of this and that god, being fictional isn't such a disadvantage as it might at first seem."
"I know who Huck Finn is, you idiot. But he was the bad boy of Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer books. Not exactly Immanuel Kant, much less Descartes."
"Maybe not. But he is the greatest proponent of moral courage I've ever run across. Sit yourself down, oh mighty champion, and hear the tale of one who dwarfs your courage."
She sat down on the bed and he told her.
"It was the climax of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Jim and Huck have been betrayed, and Jim is being held in a shed where he will stay till he is shipped back to his master. And the absolutely vital thing to know about all this is that Huck knows that this is the way it's supposed to be. It's what he's been taught. He doesn't doubt. His failure to return Jim to that state of bondage he was born to was theft, nothing less. A monumental sin. And by Huck's lights, by the way he was trained and brought up, treating Jim like a person, liking Jim like he was a real person, was even worse. So Huck writes a letter laying bare his sins and telling Jim's owners where to find him.
"Yet as he contemplates the letter, he remembers all the times on the trip that Jim has helped him. And he realizes that as wrong as it is, Jim is his friend. And Huck can't bring himself to send the letter. So he decides he won't, and says to himself—or maybe to God—'All right, I'll go to hell.' He says that not in the secret belief that he's right and everyone else is wrong, but in the sure and certain knowledge that he's wrong and really will go to hell." Bill shook his head.
"You do realize that same logic, that same willingness to follow my gut, could lead me to hunt down Alice Blake and stake her? To follow Peter's example and abandon my family to better serve God?"
"Yes, I do. But let me add one more point. Huck was deciding, in spite of his training, not to hurt someone. If you decide to leave us and go stake Alice Blake, you will be deciding to do harm." Bill patted her on the shoulder and left her to think about it.