Acid Rain by R.D Rhodes (ebook reader txt) 📕

to get the gravitational pull. To be honest I don’t see how anyone can believe it’s all just chance.”

“People are scared. They don’t like the truth.”

“And what’s the truth?”

He grinned. “That life is a joke at our expense.”

I forced my frozen hands into my pockets. It was getting colder.

“Nah, but seriously,” he said, “if the evolutionists are right then we are all just organic material, we are all descended from mutant-monkey-frog-fish, and are all just skin and bone and muscles and neurons. When the brain dies, we die. But it’s so much more complex, and it may be evolution but it’s still a miracle. We have a billion neurons all connecting our brain, a billion strands of DNA, when just one single one isn’t right, we are born with illness and deficiencies, yet most of us are born healthy.”

“And,” I said “it’s like Einstein said, E equals MC squared. Energy can’t just die, it has to go somewhere. When we die our souls have to go someplace. And we do have souls, there’s no doubt about that.”

“Right! Most people have had a supernatural experience, whether they accept it or not. Whether some of the people in the hospital are more susceptible to it, I think they are, but anyway, most people have probably seen a ghost or experienced something. The idea that there is a soul is present in all faiths, in all of history pretty much. Science hasn’t proved it yet, but they haven’t proved evolution or gravity either. Or found a reason for millions of other things, spontaneous human combustion…”

A pair of headlights shone in the distance. We jumped down the roadside and waited till the car passed, then got up and continued on the road again.

“This isn’t it. This can’t be it. There’s much more to life than this. There just has to be.” I said. “I know it.”

“Yeah, I know. But it’s denied to people. Like some, not all, of the patients who get told they are hallucinating, it’s all denied them. All forms of transcendence are crushed by society. I think it was Emerson said that “A man rejects his thought because it is his own. In all works of genius, a man is forced to recognise his own rejected thoughts come back at him.” So he’s saying that we could have a genuine, profound, life-enhancing experience, yet deny it, and not believe it, because it doesn’t fit with what everyone else says or believes in. Or with what you believe in, or what society tells us is real…I don’t know, we spend this thing called money, and we make robots and build technology, but we don’t progress as people. We haven’t evolved in ten thousand years. If anything we’ve gone backward. We rely on all this shit. Society might have moved forward but man definitely hasn’t.”

Our shoes crunched through the crisp layer of frost on the whitening road. A set of clouds that had long been lingering in the distance at last began to drift over in the soft breeze. One reached the moon and passed over it, throwing a great shadow of itself across the land.

“Yeah,” Harry sighed. “Man might progress, really properly progress one day, but we can’t keep going on like this. I sometimes think I might know more about heaven and the soul than I do about man. I just don’t understand them. War, rape, murder, greed. We litter and spill oil and over-fish a dying sea. We cut down the forests, melt the ice caps, tear up the land. We bomb each other over the slightest thing whether money, color or religion. “Man is hell,” as Sartre said, and, for me, woman is the superior species. If women ruled the world we’d be in a much better place and I hope to God that’s the way the world goes one day, otherwise we are all fucked. The things that matter- love, care, compassion- women do naturally. There couldn’t have been a female Stalin or Hitler or Mussolini. Man just corrupts the earth. De-files it. Brutalizes it. Yeah, no truer word was ever spoken, man is hell.”

We went on for hours, talking and walking, until a faint bluish glow emerged over the horizon in the distant east. We got off the road and, in the ever-increasing light, went deep into a wood of beech and oak.

Harry insisted on making a shelter in case it rained, and judging by the clouds it looked like it would do soon. I helped him gather up some fallen branches. He kept picking up ones of a familiar size, about four inches thick in diameter, straight and quite long, and I copied what he did as he set them up against a beech tree in a sort of semi-circle. A bit like a small, half-made tepee.

“You’ve done this before?” I questioned. It didn’t look great, there were big spaces in the roof that a decent shower would have no problem getting through.

“Yeah, once or twice.” he said. “It’s not much, but it’ll do the job.”

“Is this from your homeless days?”

“Sort of, yeah.”

We crouched inside the basic little shelter and lay down, sticking our feet out through the triangle-shaped entrance.

Huddled tight inside, the night so dark it was difficult to see, I thought of what he had told me last night in the quiet room. About him being homeless, and being followed by the kids, and how he had got that scar. He didn’t seem so crazy to me though. I felt safe with him. Felt I could even trust him, and I didn’t know why.

As we’d been walking, I had been thinking of the prayer I had made. When I had asked for company. When I had asked for a friend. Maybe my prayer had been answered? But still, at the same time, wouldn’t it be better, safer, for us to split up? They’d