The Moviegoer

Nevertheless I vow: I’m a son of a bitch if I’ll be defeated by the everydayness.
    (The everydayness is everywhere now, having begun in the cities and seeking out the remotest nooks and corners of the countryside, even the swamps.)
    For minutes at a stretch I lie rigid as a stick and breathe the black exhalation of the swamp.
    Neither my mother’s family nor my father’s family understand my search.
    My mother’s family think I have lost my faith and they pray for me to recover it. I don’t know what they’re talking about. Other people, so I have read, are pious as children and later become skeptical (or, as they say on This I Believe: “in time I outgrew the creeds and dogmas of organized religion”). Not I. My unbelief was invincible from the beginning. I could never make head or tail of God. The proofs of God’s existence may have been true for all I know, but it didn’t make the slightest difference. If God himself had appeared to me, it would have changed nothing. In fact, I have only to hear the word God and a curtain comes down in my head.
    My father’s family think that the world makes sense without God and that anyone but an idiot knows what the good life is and anyone but a scoundrel can lead it.
    I don’t know what either of them are talking about. Really I can’t make head or tail of it. The best I can do is lie rigid as a stick under the cot, locked in a death grip with everydayness, sworn not to move a muscle until I advance another inch in my search. The swamp exhales beneath me and across the bayou a night bittern pumps away like a diesel. At last the iron grip relaxes and I pull my pants off the chair, fish out a notebook and scribble in the dark:
    REMEMBER TOMORROW
    Starting point for search:
    It no longer avails to start with creatures and prove God.
    Yet it is impossible to rule God out.
    The only possible starting point: the strange fact of one’s own invincible apathy—that if the proofs were proved and God presented himself, nothing would be changed. Here is the strangest fact of all.
    Abraham saw signs of God and believed. Now the only sign is that all the signs in the world make no difference. Is this God’s ironic revenge? But I am onto him.
    4
    Cheppity cheppity chep chep. Chep. Silence. Cheppity chep chep. Chep.
    It starts as an evil turn of events. There is a sense of urgency. Something has to be done. Let us please do something about it. Then it is a color, a very bad color that needs tending to. Then a pain. But there is no use: it is a sound and it is out there in the world and nothing can be done about it. Awake.
    Cheppity cheppity chep chep. Chep. Silence.
    â€œShtfire and save matches.”
    Not ten feet below, two men try to start an outboard motor clamped to a handsome blue hull. The boat drifts into a miniature dock, knocks. The world is milk: sky, water, savannah. The thin etherlike water vaporizes; tendrils of fog gather like smoke; a white shaft lies straight as a ruler over the marsh.
    â€œWhy don’t you tighten up on your needle valve?”
    â€œWhy don’t you kiss my ass?”
    The voices sound reedy and old in the wan white world. One of them must be my stepfather, Roy Smith. Yes, the helmsman. The green visor of his hat covers his face, all but a lip heavy with anger, but I recognize his arms. The muscle curves out far beyond the dimple of the elbow; his forearms are like little hams. Black-burnished hair sprouts through the links of his watchband. He sits embracing the red cowl of the motor, his abdomen strong and heavy between his legs.
    Roy leans back, poises, pulls the rope with a short powerful chop. It catches with a throaty roar and this changes everything. The pleasant man in the bow is taken by surprise and knocked off balance as the boat skews against the dock. But now the boat seeks open water and the fishermen sit quickly about and settle themselves, their faces serene now and full of hope. Roy Smith is seen to be a cheerful florid man, heavy-set but still youngish. The water of the bayou boils up like tea and disgorges bubbles of smoke. The hull disappears into a white middle distance and the sound goes suddenly small as if the boat had run into cotton.
    A deformed live oak emerges from the whiteness, stands up in the air, like a tree in a Chinese print. Minutes pass. An egret lets down on his light stiff wings and cocks one eye at the water. Behind me the screen door