Free Idolism by Marcus Herzig

version of the Marseillaise with Julian’s breaking voice made you want to storm the Bastille even if you were 230 years late. Julian’s voice broke rather late because he had this condition. Something with his hormone glands, I keep forgetting the name. He didn’t have enough testosterone, so they gave him these testosterone pills to trigger his puberty. But by the time the doctors had found out what was wrong with him, he’d already been two or three years behind in his physical development. Now he was 17 but he still sounded like 15, and despite being rather tall and lanky he barely looked 13. Maybe that’s why he came up with the name of our band, Puerity. It’s supposed to be a cross between purity and puerility. Julian was a child at heart, and he was a child physically. But he was a child with the mind of a university professor.
    MINDY was really just one of Julian’s weird ideas that started running amok in my head one day. It was during that phase when he was 15 or so and became obsessed with the theory of evolution. He would stand in front of that tree-of-life poster in my room and ask me a million questions about evolution, so I gave him a bunch of Richard Dawkins books just to shut him up. Julian devoured those books, and he became an instant Richard Dawkins fanboy. In the following weeks he didn’t only read all of Dakwins’ books but he also looked him up on YouTube and watched dozens upon dozens of videos in which Professor Dawkins talked not only about evolution but also—and especially—about atheism.
    One night I called him on the phone, and he said I had just interrupted his prayers.
    “Your what?” I asked.
    “I was just praying.”
    “Since when do you pray?”
    “I don’t know, a while ago. Every night before I go to bed I get on my knees and pray to Yahweh, Zeus, Odin, Vishnu and a couple of others to thank them for Richard Dawkins.”
    I couldn’t tell if he was being serious or silly. One of the main reasons why he became such a polarizing figure in later years when he turned into that global media phenomenon was because every so often when he said something that was meant to be funny, people took him seriously, and whenever he was being blunt but serious, some people thought he was being sarcastic. I think he was deliberately trying to be that ambiguous. He enjoyed seeing the puzzled looks on people’s faces when they were trying to figure out whether he was being funny or serious.
    He once said to us, “Imagine you were talking to someone about something that really matters to you, and all they did was to shrug their shoulders and say, ‘yeah, whatever’. I’d much rather confuse them, surprise them, catch them off guard. Sometimes I can see it in their eyes. Sometimes I can see how a brain that has been dormant for years suddenly wakes up and starts working again. It’s the most beautiful thing in the world.”
    “Yeah, wha’ever, Jules,” Tummy said.
    Julian just stared at him. He didn’t get the joke.
    So anyway, one day we were hanging out at my place, and Julian told us about his hypothesis of the Global Teenager.
    “Have you guys ever noticed how, with regard to developmental stages, ontogeny seems to recapitulate phylogeny?”
    “English, please,” Tummy said and licked his fingers. He was eating crisps.
    “That was English,” Ginger said. “If you had paid attention in science class, you’d know.”
    “Well excuse me, Mary Curry, why don’t you tell me the difference between oncology and philology then, if you’re so smart?”
    Ginger rolled her eyes. “First of all, it’s Marie Curie, not Mary Curry. Second, oncology is the study of tumours; philology is the science of language. Not that this has anything to do with what Julian was asking.”
    “Phylogeny,” Julian said, “is the evolutionary development of a species. Ontogeny is the development of an individual. Your physical development over your lifetime mirrors that of the human species; or