The Last Rational Man Read online

only understand them we would find out that they talk a lot like us. Not only that, he says that they look like us too. They have faces like we do. Well, more or less. They have mouths, ears, noses and eyes, even if they aren't quite the same as ours."

  "Davy, all mammals have the same basic parts, because we are all related. But that doesn't change the fact that there is a difference between humans and other animals."

  "I guess you're right, Mom. But maybe we can at least stop eating meat at breakfast? Like a symbolic thing?"

  "You'd give up on Polish bacon?"

  "Yes. Let's just have cornflakes for breakfast. I'll bet that fatty bacon isn't healthy to eat anyhow."

  His mom smiled at the twisted use of one of her own arguments.

  "Sure, let's give it a try."

  When Davy came downstairs the next morning, he found his mother cheerfully frying Polish Bacon. The smell filled the kitchen. Davy went straight to the table, where a bowl of cornflakes and a carton of bovine milk awaited him.

  "Good morning, Davy. Sure you won't have some?"

  "That's OK, Mom. Cornflakes for me today."

  Davy sat down, poured some milk on his cornflakes, and started eating. They tasted fine. Crunchy, just like the edges of the bacon, but, well not quite like bacon. They smelled good too. Though the smell of the bacon was much stronger. In fact, he could hardly taste the cornflakes. The aroma of bacon, good Polish bacon, assailed his nostrils, and the cornflakes just couldn't compete.

  Davy closed his eyes and tried to imagine that he was actually eating bacon. It only made it worse. Why did his Mom insist on frying them right now? He knew his Dad liked to eat a traditional breakfast, but why couldn't she have waited until he was done eating his bowl of cereal?

  His Mom added Spicy Lebanese Links to the frying pan. They sizzled, and Davy thought he would lose his mind. He ate his cornflakes as fast as he could and fled the kitchen.

  "Got to catch my bus!"

  "You've got plenty of time."

  Davy ignored his mother and ran out of the house to catch his bus.

  Elaine managed to get her son and husband out of the house, dressed, and went off to her part-time job in the library. The work didn't pay well, but the hours were good. She could see her men out of the house in the morning, and usually was home before Davy came back from school.

  On the way home she stopped at the butcher and bought some frozen French Fries. The butcher would cut up fresh ones for you, but the fresh ones cost more, and Elaine didn't think that anybody would be able to tell the difference under all of the salt and ketchup anyway.

  When she got home, she tidied up the house a bit. She could get quite a bit done in that magic hour between coming home and when Davy showed up. She'd fry up the French Fries just before dinner. They were always better straight from the deep fryer. She managed to clean up the kitchen and vacuum the rugs when the screen door banged and Davy came in.

  "Take off your shoes, honey. I just vacuumed the rug."

  Davy liked playing soccer during recess, and he knew that his school shoes were always dirty.

  "OK, Mom."

  He came into the kitchen in his socks. His traditional after-school hot chocolate was ready on the table.

  Elaine smiled watching him drink. It seemed a bit primitive, but food remained a central part of family life, and she felt pleasure in preparing food for her family. In some ways humans hadn't really changed since the days of cavemen, huddled around a smoky fire eating burnt food.

  "Learn anything new in school today?"

  Davy slurped noisily at the hot chocolate.

  "Not really. The English teacher tried teaching us something new, but hardly anybody understood her. She called it 'satire'."

  Elaine sighed. They really expected too much out of the kids these days. First the trip to the slaughterhouse, and now they expected them to understand satire.

  "Didn't she explain what satire is?"

  "Sure. She said it wasn't meant to be believed. That it was an exaggerated version of reality."

  He pronounced 'exaggerated', a word he didn't often use, slowly and deliberately.

  "She said that when somebody writes satire they want you to laugh, they want to show that some idea that people have is silly. None of us really understood what she was talking about."

  Typical of teachers today. They could hardly teach concrete facts these days, let alone abstract ideas.

  "Well, didn't she give you an example?"

  "Yeah. Everybody thought that it was completely serious. Darius even threw up when he read it."

  "Can I see it, the example?"

  "Sure."

  Davy rummaged in his knapsack, and pulled out a few wrinkled sheets. Elaine read them slowly. It was a classic bit of satire, one that she had read in school, though when she was a bit older than Davy was now. She remembered that half of the class didn't really 'get it'. She also remembered that there was one paragraph, the punch-line, if you like, that triggered angry responses.

  Sure enough, there it was, Jonathan Swift's famous bit of satire:

  I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.

  Help Me Die

  Here you are, back in your study. You've opened your Bible, the one that has served you so well for many decades. You know every page, every bookmark. You know that drops of coffee have stained Samuel, right where David kills Goliath:

  Then said David to the Philistine, Thou comest to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a shield: but I come to thee in the name of the LORD of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom thou hast defied.

  The coffee stains seem to be blood stains, Goliath's lifeblood, dripped thick and red on the page, aged and faded to these brown spots three thousand years later.

  You have opened your Bible to a different page now. One of your favorite parts in the Old Testament. How do I know? I know more about you than you yourself know. You are on the page where Elijah is about to go up to the heavens in a whirlwind. The power of those words! But there are more words here than you bargained for. Somebody has written this message in the margins of your Bible. Yes, the one Bible that you have not marked up with highlighter, the one you have never scribbled notes in. Now somebody else has defaced it.

  The somebody else is me. I needed to get your attention, because what I am going to tell you is important, critically important to me, but only terribly important to you.

  So who am I? How did I get into the locked study of a Bishop and manage to scribble this nonsense in his Bible?

  It is worse than you think. I took your Bible out of your office, took it to my home, if you can call it that, made my notes and replaced it on your shelf. So I am writing this in my office, not in yours, and I invaded your office twice.

  The first thing to understand is that I am not, strictly speaking, alive. I am not quite dead either. You see, there is a special place for those of us who did not quite manage to die. A purgatory of sorts, if you like, though I prefer to see this as a waiting room. There are a few permanent residents here, some of whom you may have heard of.

  We have ended up (I use the term "ended" a bit loosely) here for various reasons. But there is one main reason that we stay here. People believe that we are not quite dead. Somehow, that belief has affected our reality.

  To be honest, everybody goes through here at some point. The moment you die, no matter how sudden your death may have been, you reach this place. Most go through here very quickly. They look like flickering ghosts to us. Flick in from life, flick out to death. They are constantly in the background. You learn to ignore them after a while.

  Occasionally some poor soul spends more time here. There Joe is, stretched out on the table, the surgeon wielding the scalpel, the anesthesiologist watching his vit
al signs, when – oops! Something's off. The medical team gets busy with resuscitation, and we have a visitor for a few minutes.

  This is one of the few forms of entertainment that we get here. It isn't as much fun as you would think. They arrive here pretty befuddled, and usually don't sober up before they are gone - back to life, or on to death. We take turns approaching them, trying to talk to them, but it is not much use. If they die, then they are gone. If they live, all that they remember is a "near death" experience. Usually they think that they see Jesus, while it just as easily could be me, or Elvis. People see what they want to see.

  So you are dying to know who else is here, I suppose. Mostly gods that die and come back. A few heroes. Some of them are getting kind of hazy. How many people today believe that Osiris dies and is reborn? Still, there must be a few, since he is still here. I will tell you about a few of my neighbors in a bit.

  So, is this note for real? Well, there are two possibilities. One is that this is some kind of hoax. Though you must wonder how anybody broke into your office here without being seen. The other is that it is true. By the time I am done, you will have heard enough about yourself to realize that I must be telling the truth, and you will at least consider helping me. Yes, I do need your help.

  How can you help me? I'll explain in a bit – but first you should know something about my own life, my biography. By the way, "bio" comes from the Latin for "life". So can I use the term to describe my experiences after I, if not quite dead, was not really alive? Hopefully the