And then we die. We’re gone, just like that. And we think all the time that it matters, all the stuff we do, when the truth is that we’re all nothing anyway. Mathematically speaking.”
I realized right then that I’d been hanging around with the twins too much because the first thing I thought was that if Walter was a Pooh character, he’d be that depressing donkey. Eeyore.
“What do you mean, we’re all nothing?” I said.
Walter said, “The universe has maybe a hundred billion galaxies in it. And each of those galaxies has somewhere between a billion and a trillion stars.”
“Yeah?” I said.
Walter said, “And orbiting around just one of those trillions and trillions of stars is our planet, which has six billion people on it. We’re like dust spots on a dust spot in the middle of a dust spot. Mathematically speaking, we average out to absolutely nothing.”
Mathematically speaking
is one of Walter’s expressions.
I knew there was a good reason I hated math.
“You know what else?” Walter said. “There’s a philosopher who thinks maybe we’re not even here at all. He says our whole reality might be a computer game played by some incredibly advanced civilization. You know, like we’re the Sims.”
“That’s nuts,” I said.
But I could feel myself starting to worry about the time when I took the ladder out of the Sims’ little swimming pool and just left them to swim back and forth until they croaked.
Then I thought how pissed I’d be if that turned out to be true and Eli died because some dumb-ass Little Green Kid from Alpha Centauri got bored and clicked DELETE .
Walter got down off Jedediah, walked over, and started poking with his high-top sneaker at the little Wheeler graves.
“What do you think happens after we die?” I said.
Walter got that struggle expression people get when you’ve asked them an awkward question and they’re about to give you an answer you don’t want to hear.
“Nothing,” Walter said finally. “I think once the brain stops working, we cease to exist and all the molecules and atoms that we’re made of drift off to become part of something else.”
“Like what kind of something else?” I said. “Like reincarnation?”
Walter rolled his eyes and kept poking the grass with his toe.
“Like recycling,” he said. “Like grass. Squirrels. Worms.”
I thought Eli might like to be part of a squirrel. Or maybe a bird. Eli always said if he could have one X-gene mutant superpower, he’d like to be able to fly.
“What about your soul?” I said. “Don’t you believe in souls?”
Pastor Jay and the Methodist Sunday School had been pretty definitive on the subject of souls.
“Look, you asked me,” Walter said. “I’m not saying there’s no heaven full of people running through fields of flowers. I’m just saying what I think, is all.”
“Hey. That’s cool,” I said.
“Not usually, it isn’t,” Walter said.
He grinned at me suddenly, and I saw that he had this crookedy grin that went up a little bit more on one side than the other, just like Eli’s. I realized I’d never seen Walter smile before.
I guess that was when Walter and I became friends.
Things Walter loves are irrational numbers, Big Bang theory, Rube Goldberg machines, chess, licorice, Linux, the Grand Canyon, the M13 galaxy, octopuses, graphing calculators, Dr Pepper, and the Periodic Table of Elements. Things he hates are nonserious people, astrology, baseball caps on people who aren’t playing baseball, Mickey Mouse, the British royal family, Twinkies, lima beans, social events, homeopathy, and preemptive war. The people he admires are Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, Alan Turing, Albert Einstein, and Bertrand Russell.
And the guy who wrote
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
I know that because in his Facebook picture he’s got two heads and he claims his name is Zaphod Beeblebrox.
W alter and Isabelle and I started hanging out together that summer
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