GLASS SOUP by Jonathan Carroll (funny books to read .txt) 📕

“What is the mosaic?”

“God reassembled.” He glanced at Bob to see if that was a proper way of putting it. The bear nodded its approval.

Holding on to the sides of the stool with her hands, Leni pointed at the mosaic with her foot. “That’s God?”

Haden started to answer but Bob talked over him. “With the big bang theory scientists say that the universe will continue expanding outward to a certain point. But eventually it will slow, stop, and then begin to return to its source. Eventually it will all coalesce again. The same is true with this.

“There are really two mosaics, Leni: the one that is your life and the larger one that is God. How they happen is similar. When you were born your being exploded out into this new life in every direction. All the experiences you had, all the choices you made, all the different things that went into creating the person you were before you died—”

“I was murdered.” Leni paused and then because she couldn’t hold it back, she hissed through gritted teeth, “I was murdered!”

Bob looked away. Even he couldn’t take the intensity of her glare then. “Yes, I’m sorry—before you were murdered. However long a person lives, they create a mosaic with their lives like this one on the floor. A singular design that only they could have produced. When you die the first purpose of the afterlife is to learn how to add your unique mosaic, the one you made of your life, to the greater one that is God.

“Put out your hand again and watch it.” Leni did as she was told and waited. After a short time a lime green ornament snowflake landed on her outstretched palm and remained. All of the others that touched her continued to pass through her body on their way down. This green flake stayed.

“That one is you,” Bob said.

She was inordinately pleased to hear it and found herself grinning at the small green multifaceted object on her hand. She shifted her eyes to the design on the floor. Thinking about what Bob had just said, she wondered where hers belonged in it.

“Look closely at the mosaic now. Do you see the gaps in it—the black spaces sprinkled all over?”

Yes she saw them. More important, once her attention was directed there, Leni noticed something intriguing about these small black gaps scattered around the mosaic: any snow that fell on them melted immediately and disappeared as soon as it touched the blackness. All of these spaces remained empty despite the heavily falling snow.

Bob repeated himself now to make sure she had understood everything. “From time to time a big bang takes place and all of the pieces fly out, but then eventually return. When they come back, they form a different mosaic.”

“They’re forming a different God?”

“That’s right. The distances they’ve traveled, what’s happened to them on their voyages out and back—it changes them. When they do return to form a mosaic, they’re different. Your green snowflake might have been white at the beginning of its journey. Like you, Leni—you weren’t the same person as a child that you were when you died. So your changed shape and color altered the final design of both you and the greater mosaic.”

“God is constantly changing? God?” The concept was equally ominous and enthralling to her.

“Yes. Because you change, so does God.”

“What happens when all the pieces return and a new mosaic is completed?”

“There will be another big bang and the process starts over again.”

It was so complicated yet so simple. Leni could only stare at the remarkable design at her feet while considering what she had heard.

“But there’s one more thing and it changes everything.”

She forced her eyes from the mosaic to look at Bob. She had not digested the information. It ricocheted wildly around her past and present. Her mind kept applying it to this and this and this, things that had mattered when she was alive. Mysteries that once compelled or puzzled her, significant events that had taken place, experiences that began making sense now because she understood their context.

“For the first time ever, Chaos has become conscious in this mosaic—it is able to think. Chaos was part of every mosaic, but only as a force before, like the weather. But imagine how different life would be if the weather could think.”

“What does it mean, Chaos can think? How does that apply to us?”

Tipping his head back, Haden opened his mouth wide. For a few seconds he tried to catch snowflakes on his tongue. In time he turned to her and said, “Imagine what it would be like if lightning didn’t like you.”

“So what?”

“Well Leni, if it didn’t, it would come looking for you and hurt you every chance it got. Like those poor people who actually do get hit by lightning six times in their lives. Why is that? Why them? Maybe the real reason is because lightning doesn’t like them and that’s why it keeps striking them again and again.”

She looked to see if Bob agreed with this. The bear stared back but said nothing. It wanted her to work through as much of this on her own as possible. If she asked her own questions, came to her own connections and conclusions, then things would proceed much faster.

“All right, forget the weather—what about Chaos?”

“Chaos doesn’t want a new mosaic formed because it likes this one; it likes being able to think. So it’s doing everything it can to stop a new mosaic from being formed. That’s why there are so many empty places in the design down there—because it has already found ways to disrupt the process.”

“How?”

Haden chuckled because it was exactly the same one-word question he had asked in the same belligerent tone of voice after hearing the explanation.

Bob said the same thing to her that it had said to Simon. “The simple answer is people. Every individual has their precise place in the mosaic. But if Chaos can transform people into