Winter: Halfway to God III
Ash led me through one door to another, hallway to hallway, curving this way and that, like a maze. The silence was heavy.

Finally I could not help but speak. "Why are we here?"

He misunderstood my question. Or maybe he answered on purpose. "Because we are going to the Clubs Tower."

I was disappointed by his misunderstanding, deliberate or not. I relapsed into silence.

Ash, having somehow felt my discontent underneath my silence, beckoned, "Come with me."

We turned back, and weaved through another path in the maze until we had come to the Hall of Windows, overlooking the lake. It is black, bottomless.

"This is the only place where we can see outside."

"Why are we here?" I repeated my question.

He leaned against a wall and looked out the window. His eyes are looking far away: past the trees, the snow, the clouds, to the sky.

"We are here because God is gracious and he wants us to dedicate ourselves so that we can follow him into the new world." he said simply and without feeling, repeating what he has heard maybe a thousad times.

"You don't believe that," I said. What do you believe? I asked silently.

He pushed his hair out of his eyes, a habit of his when troubled, I learned later. "Sometimes I just want to go outside."

"But you can," I reminded him. I had seen many people exit into the courtyard to stroll by the pond or just breathing the air like quenching a thirst. Ash's thirst, I noticed, was of a different kind.

"Yes," he said and at the same time he seemed to be saying no. "When I had just come here, I went outside. Not to the courtyard, but outside outside." With his hand he gestured to the window, the treetops, the sky. "When I tried to find my way around the trees, I got lost and no matter how much further I thought I walked, I could hear the lake. In the end I broke down at the foot of a tree until it became dark. The Prophet found me and he said to me, 'There is nothing outside.'

"As much as I revere the Prophet, this is the only thing I disagree with, because how can you not feel that there is more out there than there is in here?"

Having heard this, I decided I liked him.