Mutuality

In the garden

“Are you there, Lord? It’s me, Amelie.”

It has been a long night in the garden. She has spent every hour in prayer, with barely a break.

The gnarled olive trees stay mute, save for the hiss of the dawn wind through their branches, upper twigs waving like the thin, sharp-nailed fingers of a demented witch as she casts a hex on one who threatens her peace.

And then Amelie sees the tall figure, at the far end of the grove, throughthe limbs and foliage. Smiling, bearded, white-robed, hands clasped, glowing in the morning sun. Open-armed, he radiates benevolence and Amelie knows her prayer has been answered.

En route

As the empty bus rumbled down the road to the Mount of Olives, Amelie Mueller relived and re-suffered the torment of her abject confession. She had failed. She had let down the half and the whole of humanity. And that was why she had come here.

Too immediate to be a memory, pushing into her consciousness, the heavy, cold, varnished oak of the confessional was here, live, now. She closed her eyes and succumbed to the replay.

“Forgive me, father, for I have sinned,” she mouthed again as she summoned the scene.

Silence from the other side of the grating. The unseen witness must be sitting, waiting, listening.

“I… I know what I have done. The Lord knows too. I have offended Him and I am sorry to the core of my being.”

She waited. At last, a sighing exhalation from beyond the grille, and the voice of the priest. Fifties, she guessed, with a hint of Irish. “Tell me what it was you did, my daughter.”

Amelie paused. Was this another celibate pervert whose only thrill was listening to girls telling him what they’d been up to while naked? Well, if so, he was about to be disappointed. “Father, I felt an aspiration to join the priesthood. I know, I know, priests represent the likeness of Jesus, through the college of the twelve apostles, but I felt the Lord call me so strongly, I…”

A cough, from behind the grille. “Enough, my daughter. Enough.”

Irked, she spat, “You don’t want to hear the rest of my confession? Three Hail Marys and I’m absolved?”

For a moment, she thought she saw him, a movement behind the grating, radiating middle-aged white male condescension. “No, my daughter, three Hail Marys will not do; nor will thirty-three. You must make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, to the Garden of Gethsemane, the scene of our Lord’s agony, of his betrayal and his arrest. You must pass a night among the olive trees. That is the only way you shall see the unwisdom of your former ways and return to the path of righteousness. Go, now, without another word. God bless you; may the grace of Our Lady save you and guide you back to us.”

Had Amelie known that her confessor was neither Irish nor human, she might have made her plans differently.

Hard Talk, BBC TV

“Surely, there must be members of our audience who are convinced that is the most ridiculous thing they have ever heard,” declared Stephen Sackur, fingertips together, sitting back in his black leather chair.

The evening’s guest on Sackur’s Hard Talk programme - where, each week, a person of public interest is subjected to a rigorous and well-researched grilling - smiled, unfazed and went on.

“I thought so too, Stephen, when I first came across the idea. I mean, pulling something out of nothing just doesn’t make sense, does it? Thing is, the real world doesn’t always go along with our intuition. Stuff happens, down at the microscopic level, and beggars belief. Like, out of nothing, two equal and opposite particles are born. The ‘nothing’ they came from is the sum total of their separate existences, and the product to which they will return.”

The interlocutor stared, impassive. “With respect, Catherine, I think it’s going to take more than that to convince the sceptics among our audience. You are saying that nothing - that is, emptiness, space, zilch - can transform into not one, but two, solid, real, somethings, down at the sub-microscopic level? I mean, have you seen that happen?”

Professor Catherine Huygens nodded. “Oh, yes, Stephen, all the time. And at the everyday macroscopic level, too. Take country dancing. I remember it from primary school. Two partners link hands and swing, whirling about their combined centre of gravity. Their spin is real. They can feel it. It’s making them dizzy. But it came from nothing - it depends on their connected coexistence at that point in space and time. Neither of them can do it alone. When they release hands, and either stop dancing or fall over, the spin collapses back to nothing again. That’s the fundamental insight theoretical physics gives us into reality. ‘Nothing’ is stranger than we assume. It’s not as empty as we think it is. It can give rise to real, solid somethings. Their sum total might be nothing, like someone with a thousand pound overdraft, and his brother with a thousand pounds’ credit. Together, their balance is nothing, but separately, both their situations are inescapably real. Solar systems can exist only while their planets’ angular momentum offsets their central star’s gravitational pull. Take away the balance and the system collapses back to the nothing it came from.”

“So you’re saying,” said Sackur, scratching his chin, “that there can be two real, opposite somethings, which came from nothing, and will collapse back to nothing if certain conditions are not met?”

In the garden

Drawn toward the beaming figure, Amelie walks hesitantly forward. She cannot resist the urge to hold out her arms, mirroring his open embrace. Birds wheel under the blue morning sky. She is swept along in a warm rush of love, of forgiveness, of everything being all right again. Her fingers brush the soft, corded robes. There is a sweet scent. His hair is soft and light, two colours, thinner wisps blowing in the breeze.

His strong arms are about her. She feels safer, happier, calmer than she can ever remember. 

His voice is soft and warm. “Trust in me,” he breathes. “Your soul is safe with me.”

She nods. “Yes, Lord. Yes.”

The arms are firm, protective. Tight. Now tighter. She smiles, unable to breathe in. “Lord, I can’t…”

Suddenly, the grip is crushing. She struggles against the iron-like band around her ribs. Nails like claws sting into her flesh, through her clothes. She looks again into his face. Its face. The features blur and stretch. Green eyes. Yellow teeth in a foul rictus grin. She gags on stinking breath, from the bottom of a sewer.

The voice is out of a nightmare, deep and obscene. “YOUR SOUL IS MINE.”

Desperate, against the infernal creature’s grip, she twists her head. Clear view down the olive grove. Another white-robed figure appears in the centre of the path. It walks a few steps forward and stops, keeping its distance.

Amelie is quick to understand. “LORD!” she yells. “Please, save me. Please, do something.” The demon, who holds her, sneers through rotten teeth, its foetid breath in her face.

The figure in the grove spreads his upturned hands and gazes downward. Amelie hears a soft, deep, puissant voice in her mind. “I’m sorry, Amelie.”

Incredulous, Amelie shakes her head. “All-powerful Lord, destroy this evil demon, I pray you.” A rancid-breathed snigger from her captor.

The deep, benign voice again. “Amelie, I fear if I destroy him, I shall destroy myself too, whereupon I shall be even more powerless to help you. You see, he and I are two opposite spins. Our sum total is zero. Were I to exercise my omnipotence and destroy him, I too would cease to exist. That is the power he wields over me.’’

Hard Talk, BBC TV

Catherine Huygens nodded to camera, with a perfect Colgate smile. “Yes, Stephen. There are real entities who exist in opposite pairs, each one’s presence in the universe contingent upon the other’s survival. Take away one, and you destroy the other.”

Stephen Sackur set down his clipboard on the table. “Professor Catherine Huygens of the University of Edinburgh, thank you for being on Hard Talk.”