He looked at me fully, then said, “If you would’ve been around in the eighties when AIDS was really having its way with us, you wouldn’t believe in your God.” A terrible, lonely sadness passed through his body, and a little anger. As if it was my fault somehow. Like my belief in God is what gave God the power to kill his lover with AIDS.

“That’s, umm . . .”

“That’s what your God does to the naughty boys and girls, right? It’s only what we deserve after all. Like Sodom and Gomorrah. And then he rips the flesh off our bones.”

“No, He doesn’t,” I said carefully, as if I was trying to convince him that I wasn’t, in fact, complicit in killing his lover.

“You just watch yourself, Mikey. Don’t you go misbehaving or you never know what your loving and compassionate God might do to you.”

My Adam’s apple felt suddenly heavier than it should as a wave of guilt and terror passed through my body. What would God do to me? Quiet afternoon sunlight coming in through the shop windows tattooed our table in a way that seemed communicative, like letters of a spectral alphabet. Saying what? I did not have to wonder: Run!

“You’re good God made a shitty, lonely, disappointing world,” he said.

“I thought you were an atheist.”

“I am. But it infuriates me when intelligent people conclude there’s someone out there who’s doing this to us on purpose. Imagine if you watched a kid drowning in a bath. Imagine you watched through a surveillance camera while a baby drowned in a bath. Watching that video feed, you’d be correct to conclude that the parent wasn’t in the room. Or if they were that they were a sick bastard. And you’d be right.”

“Yeah. The question can never be answered fully.”

“Fully??”

I said, “Yes, fully. It’s not answered fully. But it is answered a little. That’s what the story of Adam and Eve and the Snake is about. It’s the first story in the Bible for a reason. In the Beginning, the Lord put humanity in the Garden of Eden. Paradise. No danger, no war, no sickness, no tsunamis, no volcanoes. And God tells Adam and Eve if they eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, the tree of knowing good and bad, they’re going to die. Death will come to their world. And they chose to eat the apple. If you want to know good and bad, if you want free will and you want to choose your own destiny, there have to be consequences. If we were all encased in bubble wrap and, no matter what we did, we’d always have everything we needed and would never suffer or know loss and heartache, how would our choices matter? It would be like—you can choose, but don’t worry because you’re really safe either way. If you work hard or if you lay around all day playing video games, either way you get a nice house in the suburbs and a free tab at the grocery store because God can’t let anyone want or suffer. In that world, none of our choices would matter. Nothing we did would matter. We’d all just walk around naked eating fruit off the abundant, ever-ripe fruit trees. According to the story, God made the world that way first: no hunger, no suffering, no evil, no death, no good and bad and, therefore, really no choice but one—the choice to have choice. And we, man, even you and I if we think about it, chose choice. We want there to be stakes. We want the challenge of achievement, which requires the risk of failure. We want to live our own lives and be our own people and win sometimes and lose sometimes and grow sometimes and, yes, suffer sometimes. Think about it this way—imagine you had a son.”

“It’s unlikely.”

“Or a daughter.”

“Better, but still improbable.”

“Okay, you have a daughter. You can choose a life for her. The angel Gabriel appears to you and says you can choose the life your daughter will live. Here are the choices: At the age of eighteen she will win a billion-dollar Powerball. She’ll be able to buy yachts, live a life of luxury and leisure where her every wish and whim are hers for the taking, and she gets it without any effort at all. Just two dollars for the ticket while she’s getting a Slurpee. Or, she can not win the lottery and instead go to college, take out loans, pursue a career, work hard, achieve, have successes, have failures, work through her challenges, earn and save and one day buy a small vacation home outside the city where she works and lives with her family. Which kid would you like better when they were, say, forty years old? Which one of these life trajectories would you choose for your own child? You’d choose the second one in a heartbeat. It’s not even a question. But winning the Powerball means you get everything you can ever possibly want without the drudgery and anxiety of the daily grind. How could you not choose that for your own child?”

“Who said I wouldn’t?”

“If you did, your daughter almost certainly ends up spoiled, selfish, petty, and empty. Her soul is a shriveled up prune by the time she’s thirty. Her relationships are shallow and fleeting, she’s been divorced twice if not three times. This is the life people with unearned privilege lead almost without exception. That’s what you would choose for your child?”

“Okay. I see where you’re going with this.”

“Right,” I said. “Because getting whatever you want isn’t actually good. Facing challenges and making choices and working hard and living well, living in a world where our actions and decisions are consequential is much better than having a lot of stuff and pleasure without pain. Why? Why is that? If you gave a dog lots of food and lots of mates, it would be very happy. It would not suffer spiritual euthanasia. So then you say, ‘Yeah, but does there need to be quite so much suffering in the world to achieve free will? Does the pain need to be quite so pervasive and horrific?’ At some point you have to have a little humility.”

“If you watched someone you love die horribly you might feel differently.”

“I’m sure I would, but you know that’s the point too. God knows what He’s doing, and we don’t know what He’s doing, and He knows we don’t know, so that’s part of the plan. We’re meant to struggle with this. God intends this to be difficult. He wants to challenge us to accept His judgements. That might sound crazy but think of the strength of character you find in people who really accept God’s will. It’s almost as if, and this is the crazy part, it’s almost as if the exercise itself is the thing which makes them strong.”