Somewhere Over the Sea Read Online Free Page A

of automated emotional response that enables us to transform them into good, funny stories.
    And sometimes you are so pricelessly inappropriate that the laughter comes bubbling up by itself. On the way home from our holiday in Thailand, for example. It was late at night, and you staggered, drunk with sleeplessness and nausea, on board the Amsterdam plane, curly-haired, tanned, and beautiful as a little god, with your handpicked coconuts dangling from your fingers and a necklace of mauve orchids around your neck. We were on our way toward seat number forty-something at the rear of the plane when you came to a halt in the first-class cabin, looked around, caught sight of a glamorous model swathed in silk and sable two rows away, then resolutely marched over to her and vomited fourteen days’ worth of ice cream, fizzy drinks, and fried rice all over her furs and Armani and bleached hair. A tactful and efficient air hostess sorted the situation out and you slept in my lap back there on seat 48f , and I stroked your head and thought Bravo! and laughed all the way to Europe.
    BUT I DON’T MEAN any of this when I say you astonish me. Stories like these, which can be funny and sad, even both at the same time, are not about astonishment, about the enigmatic contexts that make you so different that science has found it necessary to make up new words for them.

CHAPTER THREE
    â€” I s it true that God lives in heaven?
    â€” Why does no one know God? After all, God knows all people. Has anyone ever seen God?
    â€” God doesn’t exist. He died a very long time ago. He died on a cross. Before that, God lived.
    â€” Oh yes, God exists, I forgot, he came alive again. He didn’t disappear and vanish forever.
    â€” God must really be magic if he can make people appear on the earth. Otherwise how could he do it?
    â€” No, God isn’t magic. God isn’t a human being at all. You once told me that.
    â€” But how could God have been born into the world when he was the one who made it? Wait, no, that’s it, it was Jesus who was born. But aren’t Jesus and God the same?
    YOU ASK AND YOU ASK , Gabriel, but God, Jesus, and heaven aren’t things I know much about.
    It’s not surprising that you should want to know. At school they tell you stories from the Bible, you’re taken along to church on various occasions, and many of the people who live in the area around us have a strong faith in God that can’t help but influence you.
    Whatever I’ve said to you when you ask, I’ve said carefully, because questions like these have to be approached with caution. They are difficult for all of us, and they are full of sinister verbal traps. It’s never easy to know what people mean when they talk about God and heaven. They might mean it literally, that an old man with a white beard lives up there and that he once spent six days creating the world. They might also mean it metaphorically, that God is an idea, something that exists only in our heads. For you who are so infinitely literal in your understanding and interpretation of the world, it must be an almost insurmountable trial to keep check of such multifarious concepts for which you have no tangible frame of reference.
    You have an impressively large vocabulary, which you employ with exquisite precision. But in your sentences everything has to have its ordained and regular place, because you are dependent on words having and imparting a single, clear, and unambiguous meaning. You’ll only smile condescendingly if, for example, we ask you to “hold your horses,” or explain that in order to make bread you have to “knead” the dough. And if someone asks you, when it is obvious that your hair is a little shorter, if you’ve cut your hair, you answer with friendly exasperation:
    â€” No, I haven’t cut my hair. I’ve been to the barber’s.
    There are certain expressions