I look at Leo—really look at him—and I see someone who has wrestled with his own ghosts and come out the other side with a very specific, weary sort of wisdom.
“For what it’s worth,” Leo says, “I think you’re brave as hell for leaving. For trying to build something that’s yours. That takes guts.”
“Or stupidity.”
“Or both.” He offers a small, tired smile, one that reaches his eyes and stays there. “Usually the best things require a little of both.”
Chapter 16
LEO
The Manhattan skyline is a glowing ribcage outside my window, but inside this apartment, the world has shrunk down to the six square feet of space between the sofa and the radiator.
We’re on the floor and it’s 3:30 in the morning, the time of night when you either say too much or nothing at all. We finished off the Bordeaux an hour ago, and now we’re working our way through a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape I’d been saving for a milestone. A promotion. A wedding. A funeral. Turns out, Annie Collier sitting three inches away from me in the middle of a Friday night is a bigger occasion than any of those.
I spend my days lecturing nineteen-year-olds on synaptic pruning and the prefrontal cortex. Usually, by 9:00 PM, I’m a zombie. I’m drained, I’ve spent all my social currency. But with Annie, I don’t feel that way. I feel electric. I feel like I could talk to her forever—about anything, about nothing—and never get tired of it.
She’s leaning her head back against the cushions, her hair a messy, gorgeous wreck of curls pinned up with a pencil, her bangs skimming just below her eyebrows. A few strands are clinging to the column of her neck. The light from the floor lamp is hitting her eyes, bringing out the swirls of green. There’s a blanket in her lap and her bare feet are tucked underher, her toenails painted this deep, bruised plum color that matches the sediment in the bottom of our glasses. Her cheeks are flushed from the wine, from laughing, from the warmth of the apartment. She’s laughing at something I said—I can’t even remember what anymore—and she looks stunning.
She’s beautiful. It’s a tectonic-shifting sort of beautiful. I wonder if I’m going to be eighty years old and still get the wind knocked out of me every time I look at her for too long.
“So, Leo,” she says, smirking over the rim of her glass. “You’re a man of the Mind. The Big Science Guy. I’m assuming that means you don’t leave any room for the Great Beyond? No ghosts? No cosmic destiny? No Big Man in the sky?”
I swirl the wine, watching the way it stains the glass. “I believe that God was man-made. Not the other way around.”
“Wow. Okay. Big statement.”
“It’s not that radical,” I say. “The human brain is wired to find patterns. To create narratives. We see faces in clouds, we hear voices in white noise. It’s called pareidolia—our tendency to perceive meaningful patterns where none exist.”
“So God is just…a survival mechanism?”
“I think God is what happens when humans try to make sense of things they can’t control. Death, natural disasters, why bad things happen to good people. Religion gave us a framework. He’s the gap between what we know and what we fear.”
Annie tilts her head, considering this. “But what about the feeling people get? That sense of something bigger than themselves? You can’t tell me that’s just neurons firing or something.”
“Actually, I can.” I smile. “There’s a part of the brain called the temporal lobe. When it’s stimulated—through meditation, prayer, even certain drugs—it can produce intense feelings oftranscendence. Of connection to something divine. You feel ‘one with everything.’ We’ve replicated it in labs.”
“That is the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard, Leo.”
“Why?”
“Because it makes the best parts of being human feel like a glitch or something. Not real, I guess.”
“I think it’s the opposite,” I say, leaning toward her. “I think it’s a miracle. Not a religious one, but a structural one. Our brains are so sophisticated, so hungry for connection, that they can manufacture a sense of the infinite just to make sense of something like a sunset.”
She’s quiet for a second, watching me. The radiator hisses, a metallic heartbeat. “So if you can’t measure it, it’s not real?”
“I didn’t say that. I believe in plenty of things I can’t quantify.” I lean my head back against the couch. “Love. Grief. How music can make you feel something you don’t have words for. I can’t quantify those things, but I know they’re real.”
“Because you can observe their effects.”
“Exactly.”
“So if you can’t observe it, it doesn’t exist?”
“If I can’t observe it or measure it or test it in any meaningful way? Then yeah, I’m skeptical.”
Annie shifts, pulling her knees to her chest, her bare feet tucked under the hem of her jeans. “What if God is like…a germ? A thousand years ago, we didn’t know about bacteria. We thought people got sick because they were cursed. We just didn’t have the tools to see the truth. Maybe we just haven’t built the right telescope to see God yet.”
