He stood motionless for a brief moment, feeling embarrassed as he held the inexpensive pocket Bible. A man wearing a button-down shirt and slacks stands outside a subway station, clutching a Bible and making a stupid face.

His thoughts turned to the possibility of a stranger taking a picture of him and posting it on Reddit with a caption. "Guy gets converted on his way home, LOL."

In the brief moment he stood motionless, he considered throwing it back at her, leaving it on a bench, and a variety of other options.

Finally, he chose the most convenient middle ground: he tucked it under his arm like a folder of work papers and walked away.

He intended to discard the Bible after walking about three blocks. His target was the wire trash can outside the Korean supermarket on Vermont. On Fridays, the nearest trash cans that he hadn't passed by were always full.

When he passed the second block, he decided that the Bible would end up in the trash, alongside the takeout containers and discarded newspapers. At the very least, he had considered recycling it, so he would make things easier by sorting it accordingly.

He walked over to the garbage can, holding the book, and paused abruptly. Neither the family he saw standing at the bus stop nor the security camera flashing above the grocery store awning had anything to do with it. Something in his arm weakened just as he registered the spectators.

When he attempted to lower his hand, the Bible, which he had intended to discard, remained stuck in his grasp.

At that moment, he told himself that his discomfort was due to the family, which consisted of a mother, a father, and two children dressed in matching red windbreakers.

If they had looked over, they would have noticed a man dressed in business casual throwing a Bible into the garbage. But they weren't looking at him at the time. If they had, one of their dinner stories would have been, "You wouldn't believe what we saw on the way home tonight." He didn't want to be "That Guy," the subject of stories like this.

He had no intention of ever becoming "That Guy." His entire adult life appeared to be a complicated effort to avoid being "That Guy" in any of the numerous categories available. As a result, he re-tucked the Bible under his arm and continued walking, convincing himself that it wasn't about the moment he noticed the children but about the optics of discarding a Bible in front of them.

The Bible now sat on the counter in his kitchen, and he found himself glancing at it frequently, which irritated him.

He put the game on hold. The digital mayhem unfolding on the screen came to a sudden halt mid-explosion—a helicopter dangling over an alley, with debris strewn about like a photograph.

Finally, he got to his feet. He felt pain in his lower back and knees. A minute passed in the apartment that he would never recall.

He approached the counter and took up the Bible. As is typical with books that appear heavy, it was lighter than it looked.

As an experiment, he turned the pages. Words were racing at a pace that was impossible to keep up with, and the pages fluttered like whispers. The cover, which was not quite leather, already bore faint fingerprints from his thumb's grip.

He opened it randomly. The page opened to a column of thick black print labeled 'GENESIS.' He wasn't surprised that the first page it opened to was Genesis. The Bible seemed made to open to Genesis, where the binding was thinnest. Like a well-read paperback, it opened easily and lay flat at first.

He read the first verse:
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth. And the earth was without form and void, and darkness covered the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering above the surface of the water. And God said, "Let there be light." And there was light.

He let out a snort. His snort was a reflexive and involuntary action that disregarded higher thought. He read the words aloud in the voice he'd honed over years of heated internet debates: a nasal, slightly throaty drawl, like a man impersonating a televangelist for an unseen audience.

He uttered the words, "And God saw the light, that it was good," while raising his hand in a mock blessing gesture toward the vacant apartment. Yes, you made a great catch, big guy. You were able to create light and verify that it was light. The stuff is truly omniscient.

"An authentic five-dimensional game of chess from the Holy One."

He proceeded to turn the pages of the book forward. The ancient cosmology of a flat earth protected by a solid dome included the firmament as well as the waters that were above and below it.

At the same time that he flipped through to the next page, he muttered, "Bronze Age weather report." "The sky is a Tupperware lid that is preventing sky water from escaping." This statement reflects the true wisdom that comes from the Creator.

It was unable to bring up the topic of heliocentrism or atmospheric pressure. The world apparently is a dome with windows that open up when it rains.

He remembered a thread from the previous month, or was it from two weeks ago? Someone asserted that the "scientific foreknowledge" of the Bible demonstrated that heliocentrism was correct.

Alexandre dismantled the whole argument through the use of citations from Mesopotamian myths, which demonstrated that the Hebrew cosmology was similar to the Enuma Elish and was incorrect in terms of the same things.

He received fifty-three upvotes on his post, which was his highest number of the month, and the rush of dopamine lasted for two days.

Closing the Bible, he tossed it back on the makeshift table. It hit the floor with a soft thud next to the empty rib box. The absurdity of the scene almost made him laugh: a holy book beside the remains of a pig its authors would have considered an abomination, both in the living room of a man who had eaten one and rejected the other on the same Friday evening.

Meaningless. He said it aloud, not knowing why the word had come to his mind. It simply emerged from some deeper current of thought.

He faced the television again, clicked "play," and spent another forty minutes on the game, though he wasn't fully into it.

The hours passed. The game had lost its edge at eleven. He turned off the PlayStation, and the screen went black and then went into screen-saver mode, with the off-brand logo bouncing around, a pattern he'd watched for years.

The apartment was silent now save for the air conditioner's slow late-night setting and the muffled bassline of his upstairs neighbor's music vibrating the ceiling just below conscious detection.

He stood, stretched, and heard something pop. He went to the bathroom and pissed but didn't flush because the handle sometimes stuck, and he didn't want to deal with it at this hour. He washed his hands in the old porcelain sink, yellowed at the drain, and caught his reflection in the mirror above it.

He looked tired, not in a good way after a long and fulfilling day, but in the opposite way. The kind that sneaks up on you in a life without special tragedy or meaning.

His life was happening to him, rather than through him. It wasn't the life he wanted, but he continued to live it because the rent was paid, the job was secure, and there was always the possibility that something would change someday.

There was still barbecue sauce on his collarbone. He hadn't noticed it before till now; still, he didn't wipe it off. The bathroom mirror was his sole audience, and it didn't care.

"For when the sky turns, and reality becomes but a distant memory."

He gazed at his reflection, and the voice of the old woman echoed in his mind. Her warm fingers, the tilt of her head like a bird's, and that look in her eyes.

He shrugged and left the bathroom. In the living room, he looked out at the wreckage of the night: empty bottles, milk crates, controllers, and the Bible.

The Bible was getting on his nerves. He wanted to make it clear to himself that his feelings about the Bible were not spiritual. He felt no divine summons, no conviction of sin. It felt wrong somehow; it was like an analog interloper in his digital sanctuary, a book that didn’t belong on his coffee table next to takeout containers. A book that did not belong anywhere in his space.

He grabbed it. He'd set it down. Out of sight, somewhere. In a drawer, in a box. That wasn't throwing it away; that was just basic organization.

He entered the bedroom. The MALM nightstand sat next to the bed, a flat-pack monument to his early adulthood. He bought it three years ago, in the course of a short relationship with Naima, an interior designer who was mildly appalled by his milk-crate setup.

She took him to IKEA and walked him through the room settings like a museum docent with a child. She picked the nightstand, promising herself that this was the beginning of a more aesthetic life for him.

Eight months later, Naima moved to Portland with Trevor, a man in machine learning who, per her Instagram, owned actual furniture. The MALM stayed on.

He assembled it himself one Sunday, with instructions translated from the Swedish by someone who theoretically knew English. One screw on the right-hand rail was half stripped in. He didn't start over, pretending that it was ok.

The drawer never closed properly, always hanging open by a quarter of an inch, a visual reminder of the day he decided good enough was good enough.

He pulled the drawer open. Inside was a small collection of items he didn't use but hadn't discarded.

A dead iPod Shuffle from 2012, a tiny silver clip that last charged during the second Obama administration. A birthday card from Aunt Florence, who still sent him twenty dollars in cash every year even though he was thirty-two and hadn't called her in six months.

Three copper coins from a 2017 trip to London... pence or euro cents? He couldn't remember and had given up trying. A single earbud, its silicone tip yellowed with age; the other was lost forever to a laundromat dryer four years ago.

He stacked the Bible on top of this small museum of disinterest. It blended in with the dead iPod, the birthday card, and the orphaned earbud, like it belonged there, just another insignificant artifact of a life lived by a man who had stopped paying attention.

He pushed the drawer shut. It struck the misalignment and bounced, remaining open by the same stubborn quarter-inch. Good enough.

He went and sat at the very edge of the bed. It was clear to him that he needed to obtain some rest because he could feel the fatigue in his lower back and the sandy texture in his eyes whenever he blinked.

However, he was not prepared for the day to come to an end, much like a child refusing to go to bed, as if going to sleep meant acknowledging that the day had come to an end.

One of his reflexes was to reach for his laptop, which was an extension of his arm. When the laptop lit up, it displayed the forum he had left open during his free period that afternoon. His comment appeared near the top of the thread regarding the televangelist.

"Theism is ironic because it requires a Creator who is simpler than the creation he designed. Those individuals who are afraid of the unknown can use it as a form of intellectual protection."

Forty-seven upvotes!

After scrolling down, he read the responses. Some individuals attempted to start a side argument about deism versus theism, while others agreed with the statement, and still others personally disagreed with it. While he was scrolling past them, he went to a different thread, which was an older argument in which someone had recently tagged him.

U/AlexInTheArchives:
"Cope harder; the universe does not owe you a meaning. Simply put, you can make one up; that is the point of the whole thing. But you won't make your own meaning, as that would mean admitting it's fake, which goes against your belief that meaning is given, not created."

Thirty-one upvotes!

The act of reading his words brought him the distinct pleasure of observing his reflection and determining that it was satisfactory.

And he felt a warm glow of vindication, the familiar pleasure of being among a certain group, the enlightened, the awake, those who had seen through everything. It was a small, specific safety, much like scoring well in a game.

He hovered over the reply box on another thread. Someone inquired, "But, if not from God, where does morality come from?" He began typing:

"The issue with using moral intuition as proof for God is that intuition is a product of—"

He paused and stared at the blinking cursor. It was a thought he'd had a hundred times, ready for the hundredth and first time.

He felt exhausted.

He deleted the text and closed the reply box, promising himself he'd finish it tomorrow. The argument would still exist, and the internet strangers would be incorrect. There would be time for that afterward.

He closed the laptop, dropped it on the floor, and never opened it again. Then he lay back on the bed.