Imago Dei

THE WORLD WITHOUT GOD

There is no God when there are no “people.” Instead, there is only Dasein. To be a Dasein is to be a being, and every being has materialized in a unique place within the space-time continuum, and that reality is to be honored like cells in the body: individually important but part of a greater whole. The Free World does not extrapolate some sort of identity and confer it upon its citizenry. Each Dasein must decide for themselves what kind of Dasein they wish to be, but like all good things, there is a catch.

Like Furies unleashed, the Dasein came with iconoclastic purpose: to supplant all evidence of religious token and symbol. When the Free World grew fully conscious of the hermitages on Mount Athos and its congress of men, of orthodoxy, of its archaic arrangement of carbon in the shape of crosses, it was altogether seen as appalling. The Dasein came to a consensus that all religion was guilty of bad faith, that both founders and acolytes were in league to subdue and enslave humanity and the natural world with it. At the very minimum, religion was said to limit the way humanity could live. The Dasein were willing to evolve beyond the reaches of “thou shall” and “thou shall not.” For this reason, Anna now hides her soul from society.

The next morning, she is already at it again. Anna takes to the brush like a thief. A slow, steady, creeping walk is her pace. She looks like a cat stalking her prey. Her father had trained her to have a careful attention to her surroundings. When she is alone, she is to keep an eye out for predators, as there are no more fenced-in nature preserves—all of the natural world has become one large nature preserve. When she looks to the sky, she is to pay attention to the flight of the birds, and especially when they perch in the trees. She knows to do this from her father. She remembers his warning about the birds: “Even in your thoughts, do not curse the king, nor in your bedroom curse the rich, for a bird of the air will carry your voice, or some winged creature tell the matter. Do you know what I mean by this?” her father had asked. But words like ‘king’ and ‘rich’ are mostly concepts to Anna. Her father had offered another axiom: “Pluck a swan of all its feathers and you’ll have a bald goose. Don’t you see?” he asked, “Perception is everything now.”

Anna laughed at her father’s newfound proverb, and the featherless goose became the joke between them for a while. It wasn’t until he made explicit the very real threat against them that she understood his warning was real. He made sure to speak about it further in private.

He spoke of drones in the shape of birds.

“Watch what you say when you go about the peninsula. If you must talk about God or to God, look first. If you see them, then whisper,” he’d said.

Anna doesn’t remember when she started whispering in the presence of birds. To her, it feels like something she’s always done since the time of the Dasein. Whenever a bird flies nearby, she stops to watch it. She studies its head movements, like her father taught her, to see whether they will bob up and down or gawk at her from eye to eye. The drones seem less capable to imitate the rapid head bobbing and careening at the neck, no matter how much biomimicry they exhibited. Her father suggested that it must have been too difficult a trait for the operator to manage while conducting their surveillance and therefore the drones would merely gawk at them instead. Her father taught her to look for the birds that perch and linger on the trees and never come down to scrape their beaks along the earth looking for food. The birds of prey also. It didn’t matter. If a bird is watching them, they are to whisper.

Anna places each step so as to avoid excessive noise from the rocks beneath her. She looks out to the sea to make sure there’s not a single boat making way for the peninsula. She watches the sky like a hawk watches the ground. She is confident to approach her cave, and it’s only a dozen more paces now between her and her private sanctum. She stops and listens before going farther. She takes a final look at the nearby treetops. All is clear.

“Anna? Are you hungry?” asks Athos.

Silence resounds throughout the house.

Athos is stirring in the kitchen—kitchens are usually structured toward the base of the tree, as is theirs, and from it, Athos calls upward to Anna’s bedroom, but there is no answer.

“She’s done it again, hasn’t she?”

Athos suspects that she has gone off; she’s made a habit of sneaking off in the mornings, so he doesn’t bother to look upstairs. It normally wouldn’t matter, but Athos is ignoring a fear that grows in the pit of him with each passing day.

The date is fast approaching—his daughter is expected to participate in the coming-of-age ceremony, and he can delay it no longer. To the Dasein, it is an exalting moment in one’s life—an adolescent turned adult—but the occasion hints at something else. It puts the newly recognized adults on display to include them in the summer celebration of Kípos.

Kípos is a time to celebrate the world between its bloom and harvest, to delight in the fertile grounds of the biome. It is also a time to facilitate a new adult’s first, or “official,” sexual experience. It is considered safe this way, to provide a place to nurture an appetite for it and to exercise a confidence for the occasion. Athos counts the occasion as ungodly, and he has been sure to let Anna know as much. He regards it as an abrupt intrusion on the intentions of God: sex is to be enjoyed in the safe place of marriage between a man and a woman, not as a shared and communal activity prompted by momentary lust—a conviction that is now troubled by a difficult and personal history.

Athos cannot escape his past. Anna’s very existence is the biproduct of his own sexual sin. All these years later, and he still sees the wrinkle upon his conscience. When the Spring festival comes, he is uneasy to say the least. The subject matter of everyone’s thoughts turn to sex such that the peninsula looks to flowers and herbs to find the next aphrodisiac; meanwhile Athos secludes himself from their activity. Chopping firewood is his usual go-to habit to distract himself from the eroticism that lingers thickly in the air. It is only recently that Athos realized he has also secluded Anna from any real conversations about sex, and soon she is to make an important decision about it. What boundary lines will she decide? he wonders.

Anna spends about a half-hour sanding by candlelight the next bit of rock wall she intends to paint. It is a menial task, but she knows it has to be done. She loses herself to the cadence of scratching against the surface until her hands cramp.

One day, Anna had found an oval-shaped gap in the cave that allowed light in, and she relies on this gap to tell the time. She always performs her prep in the final reaches of early morning twilight and gives herself no more than a half-hour after sunrise for painting. It isn’t a perfect situation because the Thrushes aren’t as systematic. They are more religious about the content of their songs than the exact timing of them. Anna has not accounted for the fact that sunrise now occurs earlier in the morning, and there is no real telling when the Thrushes will rise.

The Free World seems to pour all of its contempt of the old world onto Mount Athos. Because of the former occupants and the quality of their convictions, seemingly impervious to time, the Free World has filled the peninsula’s new vacancy with a zealous fraction of a female to male population by a four-to-one ratio. So, it is not uncommon for Anna to meet other female Dasein more frequently wherever she goes. It is, however, irregular for anyone to meet any of the Thrushes before they sing at the start of the day. Anna has just left her cave, and not five minutes later, she runs into one.

“Anna? What are you doing out here?”

A tall female form stands before Anna, garbed in the custom white tunic, and upon her head, a floral crown that every member wears.

“Oh, uh … hi, Zoe. I was—”

“You know you’re not supposed to be outside yet.”

Anna is startled. She doesn’t know when Zoe actually first saw her. Anna can only think of her cave, which makes her tongue lifeless in her mouth. She has nothing, no lie, no pretense, just a guilty face.

“Well?” Zoe prods.

Anna still has no words.

“I am an obligatory reporter, you know this, don’t you?”

Zoe gives a condescending tone, which sparks an anger in Anna that can only be seen in her now-tense brows. Anna is almost 18 years old to Zoe and to the rest of the peninsula. Not yet an adult. Zoe doesn’t know they are actually the same age, and from this ignorance she speaks: “Mother will be displeased to find out about this.”

“Ah, there she is!” Athos’s voice comes barreling over Zoe’s shoulder.

“Well, if it isn’t Athos, the hermit. Look at this, both of you out during curfew.”

Athos, now realizing the situation, quickly provides the pretense.

“I sent Anna to go get some sand for a home-improvement project.”

“Sand? You really expect me to believe that?”

“Yes! That’s what I was doing,” says Anna abruptly. But a lie always sounds like a lie when you are trying to convince someone without having been convinced of it yourself.

“The sand is to make a mortar,” Athos doubles down on his lie.

Zoe looks at Athos, then back at Anna.

“If she is fetching sand for you, how is she to collect it? I don’t see a bucket or anything on either one of you.”

Anna...