The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms. Ian Thornton

war over tobacco, vomit, and feces.

      One little boy lay there, with a gaping hole in his bulbous head. He was the most grateful recipient of the nurses’ toil and of the generosity of spirit which is unique to their calling, the selfless act of giving care to the injured, sick, and dying. Johan spent many hours watching them as they scurried through the hospital injecting, chatting, and joking to a beat, in order to overcome the horror of their tasks. He would catch them yawning after marathon shifts, or crying after a particular old guy had rattled his last breath. While his friends were being force-fed Catholicism, Orthodoxy, or Islam, it was these women whose impression began to form in him a worldview based on everyday experience.

      Johan had started to piece together his own proposition for the nature of things. He had learned at school that humans breathed out just enough carbon dioxide to feed the trees, which in turn returned just the right amount of oxygen for humans. Then there was the sun, which was just far enough away to keep him warm and to grow crops, and to give the world light for enough time to do work and have a bit of play before proffering the night, which loaned just enough darkness to allow sleep, for tomorrow’s energy. If the sun were any closer, life would not be possible; any farther away, he would freeze. There was just enough food on the table for when he was hungry, and if he was thirsty, there was stuff he could pour into his mouth to quench his thirst. If he was cold, there were clothes or a fire, and there was ice for a hot day. He had a soccer ball or a chess set when he was bored. There were those injections and white tablets for when his head hurt. There had been horses to take men around, and now there were engines and automobiles to do it as well. There seemed to be someone for every job. Everything just seemed to work, but was its sheer brilliance by divine design? Or, more likely, was it just too marvelous to have been designed? He started to suspect, with increasing evidence, the latter.

      And here were these wonderful women in starched white who would give love and comfort to those with little love and no comfort. He presumed that there were just enough of these generous girls, spread around the globe the right distance apart, that he would never be alone with his pain and would always be clean, surrounded by caring faces and by loving hands, which would put him back together again. The scattering of these angels meant that everywhere had just enough and they were not in excess or shortfall in any one location. The pieces of life’s jigsaw seemed to fall into place, so well designed that there could not possibly be a God who could be doing this. It was just too big a job.

      He considered infinity in the other direction, to the smallest particle. If x was an atom, y, cosmic vastness, and z, time, it was just too much. It was miraculous in its nature, in its randomness, in its nondesign. Just one huge coincidence that all seemed to work. From the nurses and their love, he extrapolated a theory that explained everything. It was naive and juvenile (he was just a small boy), but also incredibly neat and real.

      The Universe (and everything in it) had been arrived at simply by a series of coincidences—good luck and bad luck, and nothing more. He was convinced of what Caesar had once suspected: that the skies had endured for whatever reason, but that his own future was yet to be determined. His path was in the palm of his own hand. Johan gave God zero credit for life’s canvas and no credit for the oils, which he dreamed of using sometimes liberally, sometimes sparingly, to create a busy yet beautifully arced masterpiece. He would attempt to be measured in his decisions, for he knew that statistics would always be lurking, and would likely kick the fool in the shins. So, having thanked coincidence for delivering him to his current coordinates, Johan would now aim, within the parameters of reason, mathematics, and statistics, to be the Caesar of his own fortunes.

      He pondered that he had used up so much of his good luck in surviving a bladed antler in the skull that, if he were to ever again have such a close scrape with death, he would have to run and run and run. He imagined it to be the equivalent of having used up eight feline lives in a single incident. Right now, though, he was grateful to be alive, for he knew that there was no one waiting for him on the other side of that white light.

      And so Johan Thoms became Europe’s youngest atheist.

      “Does all that God nonsense make sense to you, Dad?” he groggily asked Drago.

      “I know, son. It’s like a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn’t there, but still finding the thing!”

      Johan explained his theory of the Universe, which he had dubbed the Immoral Highground, to his father. Drago was proud.

       Four

       The Butterflies Flutter By

       Happiness is like a butterfly, which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

      —Nathaniel Hawthorne

      My schooldays! The silent gliding on of my existence, the unseen, unfelt progress of my life, from childhood up to youth. Let me think, as I look back upon that flowing water, now a dry channel overgrown with leaves, whether there are any marks along its course, by which I can remember how it ran.”

      “David Copperfield?” Ernest asked.

      “But of course. Who else?”

      * * *

       September 1901. Argona.

      For a few weeks, Johan lived out the role of minor local celebrity. The bandages came off layer by layer, ultimately revealing a rather normal, if not very lucky, stitched-up young boy. After the interminable summer holiday, he returned to school.

      Clusters of children flocked reluctantly to the crumbling schoolyard each morning—less like bees to honey, and more like a hefty trawl of kicking fish. Their uniform khaki trousers and steel-gray shirts sensibly replaced the bleached white of the spring term. With the gray shirts came the unmistakable September nip in the air, and the butterfly nerves of the new term.

      Johan had to endure a barrage of teasing about his talking to animals rather than the respect he might have thought he deserved for cheating death, saving the hospital, and becoming friends with European royalty all in one fell swoop.

      He would tag along with groups of other boys in the local park, invariably in their wake. The comforting ringing of sublime church bells nearby was enough to send Johan into a deep trance. By the time he would come around, he would find his supposed friends a distant memory, just a small puff of dust where they had stood. He would hear the distant echo of muffled laughter disappearing into the labyrinth of back alleys before he wandered off by himself, seemingly untroubled but still breathing too fast for his own good.

      In his solitary walks, he got to know the town by heart. He became a flâneur. Argona was an archaic wonderland, and a safe place in which to grow up. Even the stray dogs bounced around worry-free. Side streets and alleyways, where the bells squeezed and resonated, were wedged between buildings which looked as if they had been there forever. The gargoyles, which seemed to have come straight from a tale by Edgar Allan Poe, glared and spewed not just from towers and eaves, but on door knockers, too, and were carved into the white stone itself. Though supernatural, they lacked any sort of actual threat. Even the abundant ghost stories carried no horror, nor bore any malice.

      Argona’s centerpiece was a church dating back to the fourteenth century. Although the cloisters had been destroyed by fire (allegedly during an almighty scrap between God and Lucifer in the fifteenth century), the church had made Argona an important trading center, and it remained a magnificent structure. The rest of the town’s architecture slipstreamed in its former glory.

      Old men, when they were not riding through town on trusty, rusty bikes, waited for the last train in faded suits with small trunks. Others sat on the benches around town, considering the club of other old guys doing the same for thousands of miles in every direction. They sat alone, or with a contemporary or a grandson, to whom they repeated exaggerated tales.

      In the mornings, the smell of the town’s two bakeries pervaded