Shooting in the Dark

‘That business about “I think therefore I am”, it must’ve made people insecure.’
    ‘They wanted to burn him at the stake,’ Sam said. ‘Guy must’ve got up their noses.’
    ‘Theologians. Sensitive crowd at the best of times. They’d have had him as well, if he hadn’t escaped to Sweden.’
    ‘Dunno,’ said Sam. ‘I know about cogito ergo sum, and that he wasn’t the flavour of the month, but I don’t understand why.’
    ‘We’re talking seventeenth, eighteenth century here. Everybody assumed that they lived in an ontologically consistent universe. There were problems of life and death, people died with horrendous diseases and sometimes starved, but they all felt good about themselves. ’ They knew who they were, and they didn’t have any ' doubts about their place in the world. About being. They were absolutely secure: God was in the heavens, the king was in his castle, and the poor man was at the gate. There were squabbles occasionally, know what I mean? But there wasn’t any really serious angst, not concerning the self. Psychoanalysis hadn’t been invented yet, because there was no need for it. The only people who were in real mental anguish were lunatics, heretics: a tiny minority of the population.
    ‘Then Descartes comes along and lays this “I think therefore I am” thing on them, and there appears a tiny crack in the known universe. Suddenly, just for a moment, there is the possibility of an evil genius running the world, and we catch a glimpse of this monster through the chink made by those two words “I think”.’
    ‘You’re losing me,’ said Sam.
    ‘No, hang in there. What happened was that people ceased to be people. A man stopped being a man, and became instead the thing that thinks. Everyone was reduced. They weren’t men and women any more; they were things that think. And that allowed all kinds of doubts and uncertainties to gain dominance over us.
    ‘So now we have people saying, Christians, for example, who say, “Do I believe in God, or do I just think I believe in God?” They don’t know any more, not really.’
    ‘Is that right, JD?’
    ‘Yeah, and it’s all down to old Descartes.’
    ‘So what are you actually telling me here?’
    ‘Nothing you don’t already know. We live in a shithole universe. God’s dead, and we’re all replicants with preprogrammed memories and emotions. All we can do to escape it is to fly off into a fantasy world, but then we have to wonder if the fantasy world isn’t the real world, and all the horrors we thought were the real world are just thought patterns that the devil torments us with.’
    ‘You want us to stop thinking, right?’
    ‘No, we can’t do that anyway. And if I could, I wouldn’t go that way. It’s just a great adventure to me. I really like it here in hell.’
    ‘And what you like best about it is describing how we got here.’
    ‘Yeah, you’re reading my mind.’
    ‘So, perhaps you could tell me how we got to be sitting in your van in the middle of a car park outside a lemonade factory.’
    That’s easy.’ JD smiled. ‘I followed a blind woman here. A car picked her up from her house around ten-thirty this morning, delivered her here with a briefcase, and she disappeared through the swing doors. She looked gorgeous, little black suit with a short skirt, made me feel like I’ve been asleep for a hundred years. She hasn’t been out since. One or two shady-looking characters have gone in (I got photographs of them), but they’ve all come out again. None of them seemed in a hurry, no bloodstains on their clothes, far as I could see.
    ‘The lady’s up on the third floor, second window from the right. Sometimes comes to the window, as though she’s having a look at the world. Leans on the windowsill. She’s in the room by herself, or at least I haven’t seen anyone else at the window, and she doesn’t seem to be talking to anyone.
    ‘Oh, and she promotes libidinal urges within me.’
    ‘Does she do that?’ asked Sam. ‘Or do you just think she does that, but in fact those libidinal urges are entirely your own, and not related to her in any way whatsoever?’
    ‘Now that’s an interesting topic you’re raising there,’ JD said. ‘There is in fact a school of thought which declares that all sexual activity is masturbatory. It doesn’t really make any difference if you do it with your hand or a man or a woman or a goat or an organic vegetable. The sexual partner is wholly