He had forgotten about music, forgotten harmony, the grand actuality of the reconciled. Forgotten accord and congruence-all the snug coups of correspondence. He did not remember balance. Proportion had slipped his mind and he’d forgotten that here was where the world dovetailed with self, where self tallied with sympathy and distraction alike. He had forgotten dirge and dead- march, scherzo, rondo, jig and reel. He had forgotten the civilized sound of a cello, or that violins indeed sounded like the woe of gypsies. He had not remembered the guitar, lost the sound of flutes, had no recall for the stirring, percussive thump in melody-all the gay kindling points of blood, the incredible flexibility of a piano.
What he had for eyes wept what he had for tears.
A child played “Lightly Row.” He wept. They had Waxman’s “The Puzzle,” Gesanbuch’s “Sun of My Soul.” He wept. Bartok’s “Maypole Dance” was played, Lully’s Gavotte. There was Bach’s Prelude in F, Chopin’s Mazurka in B flat Major, Bohm’s “Gypsy” and Copland’s “The Cat and the Mouse.” He wept for all of them. One of the advanced students-he knew they were students now; professionals would have played better, actors not as well-gave them-for it was “them” now too, the dead man subsumed with the living -Brower Is Three Etudes, and Ladlehaus: sighed, his moods flagrant, ventriloquized by the homeopathic instance of the music, the dead man made generous, tolerant, supportive of all life’s magnificent displacements. Why, I myself am a musician, he thought, my sighs music, my small luxurious whimpers, my soul’s high tempo, its brisk tattoo and call to colors. There is a God, the man who had spoken to Him thought, and murmured, “It’s beautiful. The Lord is with me.”
And He was. He lay over Ladlehaus’s spirit like a flag on a casket.
“I was drawn by the music,” God said.
“I come to all the recitals. I’m going to take Dorset. I like what she did with Bach’s Fantasy in C Minor.”
“Hush, no talking,” said the boy who had identified Quiz.
“That one too,” God said more softly.
“His “Sheep May Safely Graze’ made me all smarmy.”
“No,” Ladlehaus said.
“I give him six months,” He said confidently.
“No,” Ladlehaus pleaded, “it’s Flanoy. Flanoy’s only a child.”
“Oh, please,” said God, “it’s not that I hate children but that I love music.”
Quiz had stationed himself on the bench where he had taken his low-fat, gluten-free, orthomolecular lunches. This was where he heard the disturbance. He rose from the bench and moved beside Ladlehaus’s grave. There, in plain view of the crowd, he began to stomp on Jay Ladlehaus’s marker.
“Hold it down, hold it down, you!”
“Quiz!” Ladlehaus shouted.
The caretaker blenebed. He tried to explain to Mazlish, the principal.
“He knows,” he cried, “he knows who I am.” On his knees he pounded with his fists on Ladlebaus’s grave. He grabbed divots of hallowed ground, sanctified earth, and smeared them across his stone. They tried to drag him away. Quiz wrapped his arms about the dead man’s marker.
“What are you doing?” he screamed, “I’ve got hypertension. I take low-cal minerals, I’m strictly salt-free.
I eat corrective lunch!” “Get him!” Ladlehaus hissed.
“Get him. He’s a composer!”
And God, who knew nothing of their quarrel but owed Ladlebaus a favor, struck Quiz dead.
It would not be so bad, he thought in the momentary shock wave of silence that followed the commotion.
It would not be so bad at all. He would exist in nexus to track meets, to games, to practices and graduations, and spend his death like a man in a prompter’s box beneath all the ceremonies of innocence the St. Paul Board of Education could dream up, spending it as he had spent his life, accomplice to all the lives that were not his own, accessory to them, accomplice and accessory as God.
A composer, he thought, I told Him he was a composer. Well, He makes mistakes, Ladlebaus thought fondly. Ladlehaus sighed and hoped for good weather.
But he did not know that the caretaker’s death had come at a point in the recital when God knew that those children who had already performed would be getting restless, beloved.
PART III The State of the Art
Quiz, in Hell, was making the point that he had been slain.
“You’re dead, you’re a dead man, just one more goner,” Lesefario said.
“No, no. My pop’s a dead man, all the folks on the old man’s side with their bad histories and amok blood counts-they’re dead men. I was definitely slain. Smited. Blasted. Here today gone today. Slain absolutely. And none of the amenities, let me tell you, no last words or final cigarette, the blindfold unoffered. It was as if I’d gotten in to start my car and-boom! Like someone ambushed, snuffed by unions, eating in restaurants and rushed by hit men.”
“Do you know who did it?”
“I’ve got my suspicions, I’m working on it, I have some leads. I’ve-Hey- Where are you going? Hey.”
But Lesefario was gone, vanished in Hell’s vast smoke screen, the fiery fog that was its climate.
Because it was the fate of the damned to run of course, not jog, run, their piss on fire and their shit molten, boiling sperm and their ovaries frying; what they were permitted of body sprinting at full throttle, wounded gallop, burning not fat-fat sizzled off in the first seconds, bubbled like bacon and disappeared, evaporate as steam, though the weight was still there, still with you, its frictive drag subversive as a tear in a kite and not even muscle, which blazed like wick, but the organs themselves, the liver scorching and the heart and brains at flash point, combusting the chemistries, the irons and phosphates,” the atoms and elements, conflagrating vitamin, essence, soul, yet somehow everything still within the limits if not of endurance then of existence. Damnation strictly physical, nothing personal, Hell’s lawless marathon removed from character.
“Sure,” someone had said, “we hit the Wall with every step. It’s all Wall down here. It’s wall-to-wall Wall. What, did you think Hell would be like some old-time baker’s oven? That all you had to do was lie down on a pan like dough, the insignificant heat bringing you out, fluffing you up like bread or oatmeal cookies? You think we’re birthday cake? We’re fucking stars. Damnation is hard work, eternity lousy hours.”
So if Lesefario ran it was his fate to do so, only his body’s kindled imperatives. But he might have run anyway, getting as far as he could from Quiz and his crazy talk about suspicions and leads, angrier at who’d put him there than at his oiled rag presence itself, holding a grudge which in others went up faster than fat, resentment as useless in these primed, mideast circumstances as hope or apology. Also, it made Lesefario wistful, nostalgic, all that talk of slaying and snuffing. It was George’s own last memory. He’d been a clerk in Ellerbee’s liquor store in Minneapolis, an employee who’d worked for the younger man fifteen years, whose crimes were almost victimless, a little harmless chiseling making change and, once, the purchase of some hijacked wine at discount. Certainly nothing that would warrant the final confrontation with the stickup men who’d taken first Ellerbee’s money, then his clerk’s life, shooting him down for no reason, for target practice.
“To teach you a lesson,” his killer had said, and taught him his death. It wasn’t much as these things went, but it was Lesefario’s last human contact and he treasured it.
Meanwhile Quiz collared everyone he could, fixing them with the tale of his unexpected end, sudden as comeuppance.
I make no charges,” he screamed as they double-timed through fire storm in their Dresden tantrum.
“I make no charges, I’ve got no proof, but a thing like that, all that wrath, those terrible swift sword arrangements, that’s the M.O. of God Himself!”
God overheard Quiz’s complaints. They were true and, briefly, surprised Him. Which also surprised Him, Who, unaccustomed to surprise, did not immediately recognize the emotion, for Whom the world and history
were fixed as house odds, Who knew the grooves in phonograph records and numbered the knots in string. Which was a little silly of course. Not without truth, but silly. As though He were the Microfiche God, Lord of the Punched Cards.
That He had smote Quiz struck Him as odd, an act like an oversight. The man had been a groundskeeper in a high school stadium. God had stopped by to hear some children in a summer recital and Quiz had interrupted the performance. I overreacted, thought God, as mildly bemused as He had been briefly surprised.
Because He was no street brawler, not really, though people didn’t appreciate this. He made His reputation in the old days. It was all there in the Bible. Now that was a good book, He thought. He thought. He thought. He does so much thinking He thought because He has no one to talk to, He thought.
Though We were always a good listener. Folks were constantly sending Him their prayers. Tykes in Dr.
Dentons. People in churches. All the bowed-head, locker room theology of teams in contention, the invocations at rallies, the moments of silent prayer, the grace notes at a hundred billion suppertimes, all the laymen of Rotary, Elks, Shrine, and Jaycees. God, God thought, needs din, its mumbled gimme’s.
And He used to listen. He had taken requests. He had smote the Egyptians, knocked off this tribe or that.
Well, it was the worship. He was a sucker for worship. To this day a pilgrimage turned His heart, the legless, like athletes, pulling themselves up the steps of great cathedrals, the prostrate humble face down in dog shit.
He summoned His only begotten son, a young man in his early thirties, a solid, handsome figure who, in life, might once have had skills. He appeared in the doorway of the mansion. There was about him a peculiar, expectant attitude, alerted but ambivalent, not nervous but deferential, like a new cabinet minister standing by microphones near his president. He wore a plain but clearly expensive, loose-fitting robe cinched at the waist. A small, carefully crafted Cross with a half-nude figure not so much suspended from it as vaguely buckled to it, the back arched and the knees slightly raised, flexed as an astronaut’s on his couch, hung about his throat.
The hands, pinioned to the transverse, were nailed at the lifeline and along the forward edges of the palms, rendering it impossible to make a fist. The ankles were crossed, beveled, studded with thick, crude nails.
His Father glanced without pleasure from His only begotten son’s jewelry to the hands crippled at his sides, each hand still in that same stiff equivocal position, neither open nor shut and, holding nothing, giving the impression that they had once been folded and had just now been pulled apart.
God nodded for the son to approach and winced as the young man staggered forward in that odd rolling gait of the lame, each sandaled foot briefly and alternately visible beneath the long robes as he labored toward Him, the toes crushed, twisted, almost braided, suggesting a satyr orthopedics, the wrongly angled, badly set bones of the hidden legs.
“Please,” God said, “sit.”
The son of God paused, looked around, spotted what he’d been looking for.
“So,” he said, “You kept it.”
“Of course,” God said.
Jesus lowered himself onto the crude round less stool. It was almost a parody of furniture, a kid’s first effort in Shop, the badly turned spindles dropsical, rough, caulked at their holes with shim. Hell hurt himself, God thought, but the son had the cripple’s tropism, his lurching, awkward truce with gravity.
“It holds me,” he said. Yes
“That’s right,” Christ said. He looked down.
“I couldn’t make apprentice today,” he said softly.
“You did your crucifix well enough.”
The son smiled.
“What, this old thing?” he seemed to say. Then, in a moment, he did speak.
“I raised the dead,” he said.
“I ran them up like flags on poles. I gave the blind 20/20 and lepers the complexions of debutantes.
Miracle was my metier. This,” he said, brushing the crucifix with fingers that would never be straight,
“nothing to it. It was wished into being. It’s a snapshot is all, a Christ’s gilded baby shoe, sentimental as a lock of hair. Like it? It’s True Cross by the way. But no hands made it.”
“You’ve no forgiveness, have you? There isn’t enough love in you to flesh out a song.”
“The apple doesn’t fall-” “Stop that,” the Father said.
“Wondering where You went wrong, Papa? Why I’m such a surly saviour? Look at it this way. These things happen in the holiest of families.” No. You’ve no forgiveness.”
“Me?” Christ said, “I was built to forgive. I give away dispensation like a loss leader. There isn’t a horror they can dream up I don’t change into cheesecake in the blink of an eye. I go to Yankee Stadium when the home team’s away and the evangelist comes and it’s standing room only for the fans of salvation, and I do it there, under the lights, hitting to all fields, God’s designated hitter, and it’s forgive and forget and bygones be bygones. So don’t tell me I’ve no forgiveness. Why, I’m made of pardon and commutation and forgiveness like the laws of bankruptcy or the statute of limitations. And why not?
What did any of those poor bastards ever do to me?”
“All right,” God said, “I want you to take My case.”
“Your case?”
I smote a man.”
“You-? ” “His name was Quiz. He irritated Me. He made a disturbance during a recital and ruined My concentration. I overreacted.”
“You smote him?”
I already told you,” the Lord said irritably. The Christ giggled.
“So?” God said.
“so?”
“Do what you do to those other poor bastards. Absolve Me, shrive Me, wipe My slate. Put Me on your tab, pick up My check. Carry Me. Forgive Us Our debts as We forgive Our debtors, Luv.”
Though the words were flippant, there was a sort of urgency behind them, a sense He gave off not of rage but of rage cornered, its energy turned to reason. Poor Quiz, Christ thought.
“Sure,” Christ said finally, “for the slaying of Quiz I forgive You.”
“You never understood anything, did you?” the Lord asked murderously.
“You never got into the spirit of things.”
“I thought I was the Spirit of things,” the young man said meekly.
“Lamb!” God roared.
“We were talking about Quiz.”
“We were never talking about Quiz.”
“No,” he said softly, rising awkwardly from the stool as his Father watched. He used his body to steady himself and, turning, stamped the floor like a tap dancer, kicking at leverage, purchase, with his cripple’s volition less two-step. I loved it there,” he said.
“I loved being alive.”
God looked at His son thoughtfully.
“Well,” the Lord said, “in conversation at least you can still turn the other cheek. How’s your mother?”
“Ah,” said the Christ.
Quiz was making a name for himself among the damned. He never let up ranting, each day bringing his charges. It could not have been madness. Paranoia was vaporized even more swiftly than grudge. So, after a while, they began to believe him and, in spite of their own pain, even to take his side. Quiz seemed to be everywhere at once, like a celebrity in a small town.
“I was Pearl Harbor’d,” he might scream, “December Seventh’d by the Lord. Is that fair? I ask you. Men die, have heart attacks, wear out. Mostly wear out. The junk man won’t touch them, Detroit recall them.
And, yes, I grant that some go sudden. There are accidents. Accidents happen. Mother Nature fucks up.
Kids dart into traffic, balls roll in the street. But that’s only physics, it’s physics is all. Guys buy it in war and that’s physics, too. And a crime of passion’s a flexing of glands. It’s physics, it’s science.
“Been stung by a wasp? By hornets, crazed bees? They were doing their duty, fol
lowing Law. With me it was different. God came from His hive. I was stung by the Lord!”
Then one day he was calmer, changed.
“It don’t hurt anymore,” he announced. They looked at him curiously.
“The pain, I can’t feel it. It must pay to complain.” He felt himself carefully, dabbing experimentally at his wounds, the steaming sores and third-degree skin. He poked his fingers in the flaming craters of his flesh, the smoking, dormant cones of erupted boils.
“They’ve turned off the juice. Look,” he said, “look.” And, stooping, gathered a bolus of fire and placed it on his tongue.
“See?” he said, chewing the flame, moving it about like mouthwash, snapping it like gum.
“See? It ain’t any more spice to it than a bite of hot dinner. I frolic in fire, I heigh-ho in heatl” He played with brimstone for them, he waded in flames like a child at the shore. I think they’ve decided to do something for me, I think they’re afraid I might sue.”
Lesefario and the others who saw him crossed themselves in the presence of the miracle, but all they got for their pains was pain, their foreheads and breasts like so many blazing crosses on so many lawns.
She was a modest woman, self-effacing, oldfashioned, downright shy. Intact. A virgin by temperament and inclination as much as compulsion or circumstance. More. Something actually spinster in her nature, a quality not of maiden since that term had about it a smell of the conditional, but of the permanently chaste. Something beyond chastity, however-chastity, in her case at least, not so much a choice as a quality, like the shade of her skin or the height she would be, fixed as her over bite Something beyond chastity, beyond even repression.
It was one of the reasons she’d been chosen, of course. As Saint Joan had been chosen for the breadth of her shoulders, her sinewy arms. It was one of the reasons she’d been chosen, He’d reminded her, in their rare interviews. It was one of the reasons she’d been chosen. Yes. She agreed. It was the cruelest reason.
The Living End Page 7