into one of those two categories. “There is only Jacob or Esau! Elect or reprobate!” as my mother would say. C.G. didn’t see it that way. He suggested a third group: people who were decent, but not religious. Why would God condemn people who had lived decently in the world? In truth, C.G. seemed to find shades of nuance and complexity in every situation—even when it meant reversing himself on opinions he’d previously expressed in strong terms. I found this tendency perplexing at first—as if I could never know for sure what he was really thinking—but I soon came to admire this quality, too. He was always reevaluating, never so committed to a position that he couldn’t assimilate new evidence.
As I came to appreciate him more and more, it became distressing to hear of his distress. When Amy Winehouse passed away that summer, my family celebrated: she was a whore and a drug addict, and her death was God’s punishment. But like so many others who filled my Twitter feed, C.G. lamented her early demise—a tragic loss of life and the beauty that her immense talent had brought into the world. How very young twenty-seven was. When a far-right terrorist murdered seventy-seven in a car bombing of Oslo and subsequent attack on a youth summer camp, church members rejoiced again. “My entire Facebook wall is shattered Norwegian innocence,” C.G. told me. He simply could not imagine telling the parents of murdered children to PRAY FOR MORE DEAD KIDS. I insisted to C.G. that God was good and that all His judgments were righteous. I quoted verses wherein God laughs at the calamity of unbelievers because they rejected Him. Because I have called, and ye refused; I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded; I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh. But watching my family track the rising body count with glee, I felt mournful.
The truth was that I had started to feel sad in response to tragedies even when C.G. wasn’t there to prompt me. On Twitter, I came across a photo-essay about a famine in Somalia, bursting into tears at the sight of the first image: a tiny emaciated child. My mother heard and immediately walked over to my desk, asking what was wrong. I pointed to the photo on my screen and shook my head. “Would you send me that link, hon?” she said eagerly, “I’m going to write a GodSmack about it!” The disparity between my response and my mother’s gave me pause, but she didn’t seem to notice. She was already caught up in composing a celebratory blog post. In the past, this discrepancy would have made me wonder what was wrong with me, but now I thought of the prophet Elisha, weeping at his prophecy of the destruction of Israel. As I watched my mother’s fingers fly over the keys, a small part of me began to wonder if there was something wrong with Westboro.
I couldn’t acknowledge any of this to C.G., of course, or even to myself. Instead I quoted Bible verses and insisted that he needed to stop substituting his judgments for God’s.
When our discussions became thorny like this, as they inevitably did, he directed us back to music, books, movies. He introduced me to David Foster Wallace and Norwegian cookies, writer and comedian Jake Fogelnest, and the music of John Roderick, Blind Pilot, the Avett Brothers, and Foster the People. They became special to me for the simple fact that they’d come from him, but I also discovered that I really enjoyed them, too. I didn’t want to forget anything he told me, so I started recording everything in a Field Notes Brand notebook—the notebook itself being another item he’d introduced me to. He was a hipster through and through—I’d never known one before—and I quickly came to love all things I-heard-about-this-cool-new-group-months-ago. I was saturated in his digital presence, even though we were worlds apart.
Throughout it all, we approached each other with the deliberate caution one might employ in the presence of a dangerous, frightened animal; a single false step could be one’s undoing, or it might send the beast hightailing it into obscurity, never to exploit another Triple Word Score again. This sense that so much was at stake with each word was unwavering, almost palpable, and the thrill of it was combustible. There was no thought of speaking openly or directly about any feelings we might be developing, because to do