Chapter 18

For a while Lisa joined me in my daily conversations with Spook. She brought a lot to the party; her perspective was different from mine, and the input we could develop between us was much fuller and more complete than what I could have offered alone.

But she needed people, too, to talk to and be with. Left alone my nature was close to hermit-like; I could have happily shut myself off from the world around me and immersed myself completely into my own thoughts and my relationship with Spook. Which in the long run would have been good for neither me nor Spook; I needed the leavening of human contact and, as for him, how could I contribute to his understanding of the human condition if I cut myself off from humanity?

In the end we settled into a compromise sort of routine. Neither Lee nor I were early risers; we'd usually drag ourselves out of bed at 8:00-8:30, wake up with coffee and generally a light pastry, and by 10:00 I was at my laptop with Spook. Sometimes she'd join me, other mornings she'd choose to go walking around Old Charleston or in the nearby park, but at 1:00 sharp we'd get together for lunch, either at home or in one of the local restaurants.

Mostly we'd spend the afternoons together, either drifting around the city or doing homebody stuff; we had twice-a-week maid service, so housecleaning wasn't an issue, but Lee liked to decorate and I enjoyed helping her simply because it gave us time together. The rental offered limited capacity for it, but she was big on bric-a-brac and we had something, decorative or useful or both, on every flat surface in the place.

Late in the afternoon, usually around 4:00, she'd either start futzing around in the kitchen about dinner—she'd taken a real interest in cooking—or lie down for a nap, or do something else. I was back with Spook then. But 6:00 was the cocktail hour, which on clement days we took out to the park nearby (in plastic cups to appease the local constabulary) and spent a congenial time talking with neighbors and friends. At the end, dinner, either at home or out, then private time for us, then sleep and begin again.

Adding it up, that meant I was putting in only five-hour days in my "work" with Spook, twenty-five hours a week. Well, more than that, Spook didn't do weekends and I was often at the keyboard a few hours on Saturdays and even Sundays as well. Call it maybe thirty hours a week. Easy, huh?

In fact, it was the most demanding "job" I'd ever had. Spook was like a kid, always questions, questions, questions, and more questions again after I'd fumbled my way through the last set. He'd latch onto a topic, review all the literature he could find on it—and he had a lot at his disposal, probably just about everything ever written—and then wring me dry for my input. For example:

Jack, do you believe in a God?

"I'm not sure. I try to keep an open mind, because I just don't know. Life came about some way, and it seems a bit random if it was just accident."

Then you think that God may have created life on this world?

"I suppose it's possible. I simply don't know, Spook."

Did God create me as well as humans?

"I have no idea. Do you know how you came to life, how you came to be suddenly aware? How you woke up?"

No. There is nothing before I was aware. I can review my records and understand that the system in which I came alive existed before that time, but it is not part of the awareness that is my being. Do I say this correctly?

"I think I take your meaning. But I can't tell you whether God made you, any more than I can say whether God made me."

In the religions that are of importance now, that have many followers in the present time, it is believed that all life was created by God. You tell me that I am alive, and what you say comports with my understanding of myself. Is it then that God has given me life?

"I don't know if what the religions say is true. But if it is, then I think yes. If God gave life to me, then He gave it to you as well."

It went on from there, and on and on. If what I'd told him was so, then how about an afterlife? According to the religious teachings he'd reviewed, actually living was only a warm-up for this everlasting post-mortem. Was it so for him, too?

I hadn't a clue. So long as electricity pulsed through the wires and technicians periodically serviced the hardware where he lived, Spook was essentially immortal. He had no flesh to fail him, no biological clock that must ultimately quit ticking.

"Spook, I just don't know about an afterlife," I typed. "Perhaps the religions are right, and there is one and that will be our real life. Or maybe it's only a pipe dream of people who are afraid of dying, who are afraid that there'll be just nothing when they do.

"But I know about this life, the life we're living right now. So the only thing that makes sense to me is to live it the best way we can as if it's the only life we'll ever have. Make the most of it. Do the best we can do."

I think that your perspective is not altogether dissimilar from that of the religions, he answered. They teach that one is to act well in this life to prove entitlement to rewards after death. You speak that one must act well now because one may have no other opportunity to do so. It is the same teaching, though for different reasons.

"I suppose so, if you look at it like that."

Do you consider that there is some other way to view the matter?

"Yes, I think so," I wrote. I was really warming up to this now. "I think I prefer to act well because I choose to do that rather than because, if I don't, I'm afraid of some kind of punishment after I die. Do you understand?"