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“Like most intellectuals?” he asked, sounding just a tad bit mocking. “Char, didn’t I raise you better than to assume things like that. But to give you the benefit of the doubt, when I was younger, I was much more sure of things like you. There was no God. It made no rational sense. It couldn’t be proven.”
“But as you’ve gotten older?” I prompted.
“But as I’ve gotten older, I guess I’ve become a little more… open to the idea of a God. Maybe it is as simple as getting closer to the grave, and finding comfort in the idea of an afterlife. But, I don’t know, maybe it is more the people I am around now.They’re smart, Char. As a whip. Like all the other intellectuals I’ve ever known. Yet most of them believe. Not necessarily in any one thing, but the idea of… something.”
“Something,” I repeated, looking at the claw marks on my body. That was… something alright.
“I even know physicists who believe. They are perhaps who have swayed me the most. They claim it is actual more irrational to believe this and us is all there is in the whole world, the whole universe. You should hear them go off about aliens.”
“So, you believe?” I asked, getting him back on track.
We were good at getting off of it, talking for hours about a million different barely-related topics before circling back to the main one. But I didn’t have time for that. I was too busy trying not to believe I was actually losing my mind.
“I… maybe,” he said. “I think anyone who says they know anything for sure when it comes to this sort of thing is lying to themselves. Whether they are believers or non-believers. Because, at the end of the day, Char, none of us can know. Not until we’re dead.”
“I guess that’s true.”
“What’s going on, Char? Why this talk now? Is something wrong?”
Other than just having sex with an actual demon? No, everything was goingswimmingly.
“I just met someone,” I said. “And they’re an intellectual, but a, ah, firm believer,” I said, figuring that was the easiest way to put it without saying the truth.
“And, what, you can’t have differing opinions?” he asked.
“It’s not that. It’s… I am starting to question things,” I admitted, my hand rubbing the marks on my hip.
“Questioning things is good. It’s how we have evolved. When we stop questioning, stop searching, stop learning, that is when we collectively start to devolve.”
He was always right, my father.
“Okay. I have another question.”
“Sure.”
“If you believe in a higher power, do you also believe in a, well, lower one?”
“Like a devil?” he asked, letting out a dry laugh. “That might be too far of a stretch of the imagination for me. Like I said, I believe in something, but not any particular mythos, any set-in-stone rulebook about Heaven, Hell, and Earth.”
“So… demons?” I asked.
“Fantasy, I’d say. Now, again, I could always be wrong. It just sounds like something an overactive imagination made up.”
Except, they were real.
I’d had one’s hands—no,talons—on me.
“Thanks, Dad,” I said, taking a deep breath. His calm, reasonable voice always managed to calm me down. “How are you?”
“I’m doing well. A little concerned about these crazy weather phenomena we’ve had going on.”
“Crazy weather phenomena?” I asked, brows knitting.
“Oh, Char, you need to get your head out of a book long enough to watch the news on occasion, okay? There’s a lot of serious things happening in the world right now.”
“I will catch up with everything as soon as we are off the phone,” I assured him, letting the conversation shift to simpler things. His new friends. His new job. His life halfway across the world from me.
I told him about my classes, my students, the university as a whole.
