Free Blind Sight by Meg Howrey Page B

there were only eleven of us, and we were being graded.
    A gene that has something to do with mystical feelings seems reasonable enough to me. And so maybe atheism is an attempt to override a natural instinct. Unless you are missing that gene, and then your atheism isn’t a choice, it’s biological. But of course having a gene doesn’t mean you’ll have what it codes for. A whole bunch of other genes have to be in place supporting it.
    Maybe Abigail Perkins didn’t believe in God and that’s why they thought she was a witch and there is a secret history of nonbelievers in my family, passing along a genetic sequence with no VMAT2. Maybe this whole line of thinking is ridiculous.
    I think we should all help our neighbors. I am also happy if my remains provide food for worms. Everybody has to eat.
    Luke imagines his father reading this last sentence and laughing. He does not think Mark can be very religious, considering the fact that he says things like “Jesus fucking Christ.” Luke takes his laptop into his father’s office so he can hook it up to the printer.
    Mark’s office, like the rest of the house, has a surgical neatness to it, although there are a few personal objects in this room. Luke thinks he would like to have an office just like this, with everything at right angles to other things. Luke has already examined all of his father’s books, which are mostly about film, or acting technique, or plays, or actors. He has also inspected the six framed photographs mounted on the wall opposite the bookcase: one large photo of the cast of
The Last
, and five smaller ones of Mark in costume for various roles, standing or sitting with people even more famous than he is. Luke’s favorite is the one where Mark is pretending to lose an arm-wrestlingmatch to the old British actor whose name Luke always confuses with another old British actor.
    Luke sees the pile of photographs he had given his father in a neat stack next to the printer. On top is the one of Luke, in his cross-country shorts and T-shirt, the number 23 on his chest, leading the pack at the invitational against Elmwood High last year.
    While the Nana essay is printing, Luke wanders into the hallway and pauses outside his father’s bedroom door, which is shut. He had a glimpse inside this room when Mark first showed him around the house, but Luke had been watching his father show things, rather than looking at what was being shown. He can only remember a big bed and some kind of artwork above it.
    Luke wants to look in his father’s room. He puts his hand on the doorknob. For a moment he imagines that Mark has rigged some kind of booby trap over the door, a jar of marbles, or a net, and that he will get caught snooping and Mark will send him back to Delaware in disgust. Luke tries for a few moments to think of a plausible excuse for going in his father’s room, but cannot think of any. He also does not want to try the doorknob, in case he finds the door is locked, which would hurt his feelings.
    “I wanted to see inside your room,” Luke now imagines himself saying to Mark. “I wanted to find out more about you because you keep asking me about me, but you never really tell me anything about yourself and we’re supposed to be getting to know each other, not just you knowing me.”
    Luke turns the doorknob and opens the door slightly. Nothing falls. Because his father has not rigged the door, or locked it, Luke feels that it would be more noble not to look inside. He shuts the door quietly. You could misinterpret the significance of objects really easily, he reminds himself. If he hadn’t known that his father had been given boxes of things as gifts he might have looked in the garage and thought his father was some kind of thief, because who kept eight boxes of expensive watches in their garage? And if he tells Marklater, “I wanted to look in your room, but I didn’t,” that will be much better. Because that would be evidence that Mark could trust