Standing dead center on Weeks Bridge, in the dead of winter in the dead of night, staring down at the sublime formation, Cass is contemplating the strange thing that his life has become.
To him. His life has become strange to him. He feels as if he’s wearing somebody else’s coat, grabbed in a hurry from the bed in the spare bedroom after a boozy party. He’s walking around in someone else’s bespoke cashmere while that guy’s got Cass’s hooded parka, and only Cass seems to have noticed the switch.
What has happened is that Cass Seltzer has become an intellectual celebrity. He’s become famous for his abstract ideas. And not just any old abstract ideas, but atheist abstract ideas, which makes him, according to some of the latest polls, a spokesperson for the most distrusted minority in America, the one that most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry.
This is a fact. Studies have found that a large proportion of Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays, and communists, in “sharing their vision of American society.” Atheists, the researchers reported, seem to be playing the pariah role once assigned to Catholics, Jews, and communists, seen as harboring alien and subversive values, or, more likely, as having no inner values at all, and therefore likely to be criminals, rapists, and wild-eyed drug addicts.
“As if,” as Cass often finds himself saying into microphones, “the only reason to live morally is fear of getting caught and being spanked by the heavenly father.”
Cass Seltzer has become the unlikely poster boy for this misunderstood group. His is a good face for counteracting the fallacy of equating godlessness with vice. Handsome, but not in a way to make the squeamish consider indeterminate sexual orientation, Cass has a fundamental niceness written all over him. He’s got a strong jaw, a high ovoid forehead from which his floppy auburn hair is only just slightly receding, and the sweetest, most earnest smile this side of Oral Roberts University. Is this a man who could possibly go out and commit murder and mayhem, rape our virgin daughters, and shoot controlled substances into his veins?
His life has been largely commandeered not only by Sy Auerbach, the literary agent-cum-cultural impresario who represents him, but by a speakers’ agent, publicists, media escorts, and other attendants who two years ago were as alien to him as atheists remain (despite Cass’s best efforts) to the majority of Americans.
