The Professor of Truth Read Free Page B

maker?”
    Whatever I was expecting, it was not this. The simmering anger I’d felt outside rose to the boil. I stood up.
    “I don’t know who you are,” I said, “but I seem to have mistaken you for someone else. If all you’re here for is to try to convert me or save me or whatever it is you people do, then you needn’t bother finishing your coffee.”
    Nilsen was not in the least perturbed. “I’m not a missionary,” he said.
    “You can get the hell out, in fact.”
    “It was a question, that’s all. Just give me an answer.”
    The dark eyes stared. It was possible that I had let a madman into my kitchen. I wanted Nilsen to leave. I certainly did not intend to humour him. Yet I found I could not deny him what he wanted.
    “I don’t believe I have a maker,” I said. “But if I’m wrong and there is one, then, yes, I’m ready. There are a few things I’d have to say to him.” And, thinking it would annoy him, I added, “Or her.”
    “Sit down,” Nilsen said. He made me feel like a fractious guest in my own house. “I’m trying to give you some context,” he said. “The thing is, I
am
ready for my maker. We’ve got a contract, him and me. He’s going to take me to him, but first I’ve got to straighten a few things out.”
    “Oh for God’s sake!” I said. If he heard this as a profanity, if it offended him, he didn’t show it. That face didn’t show much in the way of emotion. For a man who’d found Jesus—I presumed that was the particular maker to whom he referred—he didn’t seem filled with joy and gratitude.
    “I’m dying,” he said.
    “We’re all dying,” I retorted. I was still standing. Out of nowhere a wave of something—not sympathy but perhaps grief or bitterness or exhaustion—washed through me. This happened, still, after twenty-one years. To cover myself I went to the window, as if to check the weather. Snow was falling again, lightly whitening the cleared path. “Tell me something I don’t know,” I said.
    “I have cancer,” Nilsen said. “So I am dying in a certain way and at a certain rate.”
    I turned to face him. “That has nothing to do with me.”
    “Yes it does,” he said, and with a skeletal index finger he pointed very firmly at the other chair. Again I could not resist. I sat down. Nilsen had my attention. I thought, I’ll give him five minutes.
    “It doesn’t make me unique,” Nilsen said. “I know that. There are millions of us. But when some doctor tells you your days are, literally, numbered, you start counting. And you weigh up a lot of stuff. First off you weigh up the chances. Maybe you bitch about the bad hand you’ve been dealt. Me, I never smoked, never drank to excess, ate well, kept fit—so why me? You chase that one around for a day or two, and then you quit. That’s all past, and there’s no profit in it. Then you think about the time you have left. You make a list of things you want to do while you still can. I started to do that and then I threw the list away. I didn’t need a list. Anything I could put on it would be nothing to what I’m going to experience. I’ve got the keys to the kingdom. But like I said, God has a contract with me, so I need to make everything straight before I stand before him. I need to settle my debts. I’ve been doing my rounds.”
    “Then you do have a list,” I said. “A different one.”
    Nilsen sipped from his cup. “Good coffee,” he said. It sounded genuine. That a man in Nilsen’s situation should still appreciate the insignificant things of life did not surprise me. I had my own “situation,” took my own momentary pleasure in tastes, smells, sounds. Maybe that is the most delight there can be—swift, sensual, small—when the roof of your world has fallen in. The difference with Nilsen was that he saw a ladder to some other place ascending from thewreckage, and from the way he was talking celestial light was shining down through the hole. Whereas when I tasted good coffee,