The Good Atheist by Michael Manto Page B

she said.
    “Sure,” I said, not really listening or wanting to talk about it. I hitched my thumb towards the door. “I’m going to look around outside for a bit.”
    She waved me off. “Have fun. I’ll go see what’s in the other rooms.”
    I headed off across the expansive lawn in the direction of the pond, the dry grass crunching under my feet. It took a few minutes to reach the pond. I walked out onto the dock and sat down in one of the Adirondack chairs.
    The air was so still it seemed as if the world was holding its breath. The leaves of the trees in the hills surrounding my little paradise didn’t stir. I sat for several long moments just taking it all in: the green hills, the stillness of the air and water, and the silence.
    A deafening silence.
    I had never heard such absolute quiet before – if one could hear quiet. The quiet wasn’t merely an absence of noise. This silence felt like a real, solid presence of Something that seemed absolutely content and at peace with itself. Most city people who have grown used to the ubiquitous background roar of the city might be driven to distraction by such quiet. But I felt as though I could have lingered for hours.
    But it was not to be.
    The peace was shattered by Selene shouting for me from the cottage. I twisted around in the chair to see Selene standing at a window, gesturing wildly at me. “Jack, get in here quick. Hurry!” I sighed and went back into the cottage.
    I found her in the den adjoining the living room. It was filled with natural light coming in through the large picture window that overlooked the pond where I had been sitting. There was a big wooden desk with a computer, with a large comfortable-looking leather recliner. Selene stood behind the desk as if for protection, pointing up at one of the shelves.
    “It’s big and hairy,” she said, indicating an upper corner where the shelves reached the ceiling.
    But I wasn’t looking where she was pointing. I was too preoccupied with what packed the room.
    Books.
    Real, paper books.
    The walls were covered with book-lined shelves. More books were piled on the surface of the desk, and there were a few more stacked on the floor, apparently waiting for more shelving units. I’d never seen so many hard-copy books in one place.
    “This is incredible,” I said under my breath.
    Selene shook her head. “Ah, it’s a big hairy spider, that’s what it is.”
    “I mean the books. Look at all these books!” I said. Most of them would be old, since printed books went out of use in my grandfather’s day. Only collectors and specialty stores still carried them. The expense was beyond the means of the average reader.
    I was overwhelmed by the sheer physicality of them, and I wondered how people used to manage it back in the day. But I realized that before ebooks, this is what people would have had to do. Either you devoted entire rooms to storing them, or you didn’t own very many. Carrying them would be such a pain. You would never be able to carry more than a few at a time.
    It wasn’t just books that filled the shelves. There were a few framed photographs as well. One of them caught my eye and I went over for a closer look. It was of me, when I was about five, sitting on my father’s knee. We were outdoors in a park somewhere. I held a baseball and was grinning ear to ear. The man in the picture didn’t look like the type to run off on his wife and son.
    I went around the room looking at the other pictures. They were all of me between the ages of newborn to about six. Dad and Grandpa were in several of them. I picked one of them up and held it in my hands. My grandpa looked in the pictures pretty much the way I remembered him, except he did not seem so old to me now. As a little boy he seemed positively ancient, but now in the pictures he just looked like a healthy man in his mid-fifties.
    And the pictures sent me one message. My grandfather hadn’t forgotten me. But that only begged the question why