Darling Clementine by Andrew Klavan Page A

aaaalles …”
    â€œOh hon?”
    I creep, I creep from the kitchen, coffee mug in hand. I see Arthur lying on the couch, his legs extending from under the raised tent of the newspaper.
    â€œOh hon? Oh hon?”
    I creep, I creep, my hands trembling, remembering God as he was that day he did not kill Judy Honegger. I believe in nothing now, it occurs to me. It occurs to me—quite suddenly—that that is it: that is the light, the little candle burning at the bottom of the darkness of my bourgeois existence. That, finally, was the Poet’s gift in the Roman graveyard: Negative capability. “To follow the Tao is simple,” says Lao Tse. “You need only give up all your opinions.” Deep down, that candle of unbelief is burning, unnoticed, forcibly unnoticed even by me lest I extinguish it with a frightened hand. But I will not extinguish it; I will cup my hands around it; I will fan it when I can; I believe in nothing; I will believe in nothing; I will dump this cup of coffee on Arthur’s head.
    But as I approach the couch, I have another flash of recognition. That is: I notice the newspaper that Arthur is holding is upside down, that the headline, which stretches in two lines full across the top of the page—odd for a Saturday—the headline reads: “.ecnaifeD swoV abuC .tsetorP steivoS .augaraciN fO ograbmE sredrO tnediserP”
    â€œOh hon?” says Arthur.
    Holding the coffee mug in one hand, I reach out with the other and tear the paper away.
    There is Arthur. He is wearing his sunglasses upside down. A pencil is sticking out of his ear.
    â€œOr,” he says, “we can stay home and eat each other out until we croak.”
    I lean back on my hip, and sip some coffee, considering.

Five
    My Search For God. By Samantha Clementine.
    After God did not kill Judy Honegger, I became angry and guilty at once. Angry because I had fallen on my knees in St. Thomas’ Cathedral, mewling and whining and pleading like the coward I am. And guilty because it had worked, and if I rebelled now, God might take it all back again.
    I was caught in a bind, because the point was: If God had not killed Judy, then God had. If God was innocent, God was guilty, if you get my drift. If I was indebted to God for saving me from God, then the God to whom I was indebted was not the sort of God to whom I wished to be. And it’s no good talking about free will either. Whatever free will Judy Honegger had had was in a little pool in the gutter of 102nd street. Not that Judy meant much to me, but when a violinist gets killed, somebody has to take the fall.
    More than anything, I think—or think now—it was humanity I was looking for, connection in aspiration, voices raised together in holy song. Whatever experience of the mystic I had had—in session with Blumenthal sometimes, sometimes on the hotline, sometimes, especially that one time after Jake’s party, in bed with Arthur, in Rome—had all depended on connection, human connection. And if humans connect in religious circumstances—what then?
    Now, my parents are Episcopalian. We went to church on Easter and Christmas. The whole business was so hypocritical and ridiculous that the religion had died on me like an old man on top of a whore, and I was determined to squirm out from under the dead weight.
    So when Arthur and I returned from Rome, I began attending Catholic services, dragging myself out of bed on Sundays to sit in the eerie draught of the voluminous St. Elmo’s Cathedral. I followed the liturgy, reveling in the guilty thrill of a new creed—though Catholicism, God knows, is not all that different from the other, which maybe added to the kick: it was like changing sides in an internecine feud. I invested the symbolism with my soul, hoping to bring it to life without losing my sense of the world, without placing all my bets on heaven or eternity. I developed, that is to say, a theory:
    The