Chapter 16
LEO
The Manhattan skyline is a glowing ribcage outside my window, but inside this apartment, the world has shrunk down to the six square feet of space between the sofa and the radiator.
She’s leaning her head back against the cushions, her hair a messy, gorgeous wreck of curls pinned up with a pencil, her bangs skimming just below her eyebrows.
A few strands are clinging to the column of her neck.
The light from the floor lamp is hitting her eyes, bringing out the swirls of green.
There’s a blanket in her lap and her bare feet are tucked under her, her toenails painted this deep, bruised plum color that matches the sediment in the bottom of our glasses.
Her cheeks are flushed from the wine, from laughing, from the warmth of the apartment.
She’s laughing at something I said—I can’t even remember what anymore—and she looks stunning.
She’s beautiful. It’s a tectonic-shifting sort of beautiful. I wonder if I’m going to be eighty years old and still get the wind knocked out of me every time I look at her for too long.
“So, Leo,” she says, smirking over the rim of her glass. “You’re a man of the Mind. The Big Science Guy. I’m assuming that means you don’t leave any room for the Great Beyond? No ghosts? No cosmic destiny? No Big Man in the sky?”
I swirl the wine, watching the way it stains the glass. “I believe that God was man-made. Not the other way around.”
“Wow. Okay. Big statement.”
“It’s not that radical,” I say. “The human brain is wired to find patterns. To create narratives. We see faces in clouds, we hear voices in white noise. It’s called pareidolia—our tendency to perceive meaningful patterns where none exist.”
“So God is just…a survival mechanism?”
“I think God is what happens when humans try to make sense of things they can’t control. Death, natural disasters, why bad things happen to good people. Religion gave us a framework. He’s the gap between what we know and what we fear.”
Annie tilts her head, considering this. “But what about the feeling people get? That sense of something bigger than themselves? You can’t tell me that’s just neurons firing or something.”
“Actually, I can.” I smile. “There’s a part of the brain called the temporal lobe. When it’s stimulated—through meditation, prayer, even certain drugs—it can produce intense feelings of transcendence. Of connection to something divine. You feel ‘one with everything.’ We’ve replicated it in labs.”
“That is the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard, Leo.”
“Why?”
“Because it makes the best parts of being human feel like a glitch or something. Not real, I guess.”
“I think it’s the opposite,” I say, leaning toward her. “I think it’s a miracle. Not a religious one, but a structural one. Our brains are so sophisticated, so hungry for connection, that they can manufacture a sense of the infinite just to make sense of something like a sunset.”
She’s quiet for a second, watching me. The radiator hisses, a metallic heartbeat. “So if you can’t measure it, it’s not real?”
“I didn’t say that. I believe in plenty of things I can’t quantify.” I lean my head back against the couch. “Love. Grief. How music can make you feel something you don’t have words for. I can’t quantify those things, but I know they’re real.”
“Because you can observe their effects.”
“Exactly.”
“So if you can’t observe it, it doesn’t exist?”
“If I can’t observe it or measure it or test it in any meaningful way? Then yeah, I’m skeptical.”
Annie shifts, pulling her knees to her chest, her bare feet tucked under the hem of her jeans.
“What if God is like…a germ? A thousand years ago, we didn’t know about bacteria.
We thought people got sick because they were cursed.
We just didn’t have the tools to see the truth.
Maybe we just haven’t built the right telescope to see God yet. ”
“Or maybe,” I say, my voice dropping an octave, “the reason the search has come up empty for ten millennia is because there’s no one to find. Maybe the seat is vacant.”
She narrows her eyes. “You’re very sure of yourself for a man who lives in a world of variables.”
“I’m a scientist. I go where the evidence leads.”
“And the evidence leads to…nothing?”
“The evidence leads to the conclusion that humans created God to explain the unexplainable. And as science has answered more questions, the things we attribute to God have gotten smaller and smaller. We used to think God made thunder and lightning. Now we know it’s atmospheric electricity.
We used to think God made people sick. Now we know it’s viruses and bacteria. ”
“So God is just…shrinking?”
“God is filling in the gaps of what we don’t know yet. And the gaps keep getting smaller.”
Annie’s quiet, thinking. Then she says, “But doesn’t that make life feel kind of…meaningless? If there’s no grand plan, no purpose, no reason we’re here?”
“Why does there need to be a reason?”
“Because otherwise we’re just…random. Accidents.”
“We are accidents,” I say gently. “We’re the most spectacular accidents in the history of the universe. Billions of years of stars exploding and molecules colliding in the dark, all leading to this. To us, on this floor, right now. But that doesn’t make us meaningless. It makes us miraculous.”
She looks at me, her eyes searching mine.
“We get to create our own meaning,” I continue. “Our own purpose. That’s not depressing, it’s freeing.”
“Or it’s terrifying.”
“Maybe both.”
She laughs, soft and a little sad. “You’re very comfortable with uncertainty.”
“I’m a parent. Uncertainty is the job description.”
“Fair.”
We sit in comfortable silence for a moment. The wine bottle is almost empty between us.
I like this. Actually, no—I’m obsessed with this. There’s something fundamentally intoxicating about the way Annie doesn’t just take my cynicism on the chin. She catches it, challenges it, asks me if I’m sure I want to keep it. She digs.
She doesn’t play the part of the agreeable audience. She’s in the ring with me, and damn, it’s the most alive I’ve felt in a long, long time.
With Rebecca, everything was so…linear. We talked about the rent, we talked about the department holiday party, we talked about whether the chicken was too dry or if Emma needed new socks.
We were constantly hovering over the surface of things, like two people skating on a frozen lake, absolutely terrified that if we stopped moving or dug our heels in, the ice would crack and we’d have to admit we didn’t know how to swim in the deep stuff.
We traded intimacy for safety, and for a long time, I convinced myself that was just what “grown-up” love looked like.
But with Annie, at 3:30 in the morning on my living room floor, talking about the cosmos and fate and what it all means—I realize I’ve been starving for this.
I need the friction. I need a partner who looks at my dopamine-mapped world and tells me it’s a bit small sometimes.
Because as a man who spends his days explaining how people think, I am desperately, pathetically in need of someone who can explain why it matters.
I need someone who doesn’t just fit into my life, but someone who expands the borders of it.
Talking to her about the universe and the terrifying, beautiful “more” doesn’t feel like a performance.
It doesn’t feel weird. It doesn’t feel awkward or pretentious or like we’re trying too hard.
It feels like the most natural thing in the world.
Like this is what conversation is supposed to be.
Like I’ve been having the wrong kind of conversations my entire adult life and didn’t realize it until now.
“For the record,” she says softly, “I’m not religious. I don’t really know what I believe. I don’t need a guy on a throne. But I like the idea of a thread. Something that ties the mess together. Energy, intention. I don’t know…something.”
“You don’t need a deity for that,” I say. I can’t help the grin. “You just need physics.”
She looks up, her eyes wide. “Physics? The most boring subject in high school?”
“Physics is the most romantic thing in the world, Annie. First Law of Thermodynamics: Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It only changes form. That means every bit of energy in you—the heat in your skin, the pulses in your brain—it’s been here since the Big Bang.
You aren’t just in the universe, you are the universe.
The carbon in your DNA was forged in the heart of a dying star.
You’re literally made of stardust. That’s not a metaphor. That’s a fact.”
Annie stares at me, her mouth slightly open. The air in the room feels charged, like the moments before a thunderstorm breaks over the Hudson.
“That’s…actually sort of beautiful,” she says.
“Science usually is.”
She shakes her head, a genuine, warm smile breaking through. “You are such a nerd, Leo.”
“Guilty as charged.”
“Okay but here’s my question.” She leans forward slightly, her eyes bright. “You can’t measure love, not really. You can measure the chemicals, sure—dopamine, oxytocin, whatever—but not the actual feeling. So by your logic, does it exist?”
I take a sip of wine, considering. “Love exists in the same way pain exists. I can measure the neurological responses—the activation of certain brain regions, the release of specific neurotransmitters. I can observe the behavioral changes. But the subjective experience? The qualia of it? That’s harder to pin down. ”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It is an answer. Just not the one you want.”
She narrows her eyes, looking at me over the rim of her glass. “You’re dodging. You’re being a coward.”
I let out a short, surprised bark of a laugh. “A coward?”
“Yes,” she says, her voice gaining heat. “You’re hiding behind science because the real answer is too messy for you. It’s uncomfortable.”
“And what is the ‘real’ answer, according to the Gospel of Annie?”