Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible!

by Ladies

  But their lips did not move. Noah started to speak once more, and once more he heard the tiny voice behind his own voice. It was mumbly and high-pitched and he could hardly hear it. He kept his mouth shut for the rest of the day, communicating his wishes to his sons through a hardy assortment of lashes, sucker punches, and cold stares. He put down his wine jug and waited for sobriety to return, whereupon he would take a long walk with Brandy, his beloved poodle. He would talk freely. He would see if the little voice still lingered.

  Several weeks went by and the voice continued still. Eventually, Noah began to understand little bits, here and there. Out in the woods, Noah would speak:

  “I am talking. I am talking. Blah blah blah. My sons are dummies. Blah blah blah. I am listening and I’m talking. Blah blah blah.”

  And as he spoke he could hear:

  “You must build an ark made of gopher wood. I will guide your hand to choose animals which you will place within the ark. There is going to be a great flood. All will drown except you and yours and the chosen animals.”

  The little voice inside his nose pretty much always said the same thing. It instructed him to build a great ark, with various specifications and cubit requirements.

  Noah had many questions, like “What’s an ark?” and “Does one listen to the voice inside one’s nose?” Unfortunately for Noah, he had no one to share these problems with, and so he wandered the forests with Brandy, racking his brain for answers.

  For increased clarity, Noah decided to stop drinking and take up a strict regimen of health food and exercise. He ate pine cones with strong, forceful bites and when he lashed his sons’ calves, he did so using his left arm in equal portion to the right, favoring neither, so that they could both grow equally strong.

  With his increased strength, the pip-squeaky voice, too, became stronger. He would ask it questions and it would answer him. It would answer him as he was asking the questions.

  “What is a cubit?”

  “It is the distance from your elbow to the tip of your long finger.”

  “What is gopher wood?”

  “It’s this wood that gophers like.”

  “How long will it take to build an ark?”

  “Who knows?”

  “Can I enlist the help of the Dummies?”

  “No. You must do it yourself.”

  “Why build an ark?”

  “I shall bring a flood that will wipe out the world. The whole thing was a bad mistake. Except for you. You I like.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I am the Creator of the Universe.”

  Upon hearing that, Noah’s sinuses became as hollow as an empty conch, and from up within his nostrils there flowed a stream of blood.

  Noah decided to sit the whole family down and tell them what God had in store.

  “I was just talking with the Lord,” said Noah. “And you know what? He regrets having made his children, too. ‘They are all dummies, dear God,’ I pleaded in the world’s defense. ‘What can a couple of regular guys like you and me do?’ Then He says to me, He says—and He says it just like this—‘I will blot them out.’ ”

  The brothers looked at each other.

  “What does that mean, ‘blot them out’?” asked Shem.

  “You take your thumb and push them into the earth like ladybugs! He’s going to drown the whole world with his tears of rage, and after everyone’s dead, he’s going to start fresh. And guess who he chose to spearhead the operation? That’s right. Me. Also, you virginal dummies have to get married so we can reseed the Earth. Enough waxing the nimrod! Clean your toga, balm your whip welts, and get out there!”

  Regardless of how mentally imbalanced they might have felt their father to be, once Noah started building his ark, his sons felt great relief, as it kept him out of their hair. Noah said God would not allow anyone to help him, so he left his sons alone. No matter how long it took, he had to build the whole thing himself.

  “Are you sure I can’t do anything?” asked Shem. He loved the sound of his father turning down free labor and couldn’t get enough of it.

  “Are you a stupid dummy, you stupid?” his father would ask. “What did I just say? I’m the only one who can handle the job. Building an ark is man’s work. Do you want to befoul the whole thing? If you so much as pound in one nail the whole thing is good only for the crapper.”

  His father had had visions before, and so the prevailing opinion was that the old man was, once again, off his rocker. There was the time he had drunk two and a half jugs of apricot wine and had become convinced a pile of rotted tree bark was imploring him to go live among goats. There was another time, sick in bed with a high fever, that he instructed his wife to climb up on the roof and yell out to God that he knew that sandals were for the weak of heart and from then on he and his sons would paint the soles of their feet with pepper sauce and keep stones between their toes.

  Of everyone—the family, the neighbors, the village at large—it was Noah’s youngest son, Ham, who was the only one who believed his father might not be crazy. From what Ham had heard about God, He was a lot like his father—tough, stubborn, and prone to yelling right in your face for pretty much no reason. A flood didn’t seem that out of the question, and God would have chosen his father because his father felt just like He did: he hated his kids and was going to teach them the meaning of righteousness by killing them dead. If there was going to be someone God was going to get in touch with, to Ham, Noah seemed the obvious choice.

  * * *

  Sometimes, when his father was hard at work on his ark, Ham would sit off to the side and draw pictures of him. It incensed Noah.

  “Are you sick in the head?” Noah would exclaim. “Why would anyone want to make stupid pictures? Can you eat them? Can you build a house with them? Can you use your precious art to diaper your loins?”

  Noah wanted Ham to snap out of it, and he used reverse psychology to help him see his errors. He had seen how Ham spoke with his good-for-nothing artist friends and how his artist friends spoke back to him. He thought that if he talked their language, maybe he could get through to his son.

  “Hey, jive turkey!” he said, approaching Ham. “That’s right. Your old father Noah is going to be an artist from now on! How’s that? Ha ha. Like this we can both make art and afterward we can talk about how deep it is. ‘I pity the poor fool who can’t dig art. You digging me, mister? Go ahead and make my day. Art is radical. Case closed.’ Is that what you want? Well, I can’t do it. Ach. Pteh. Yech.”

  As far as Noah could see, Ham’s artist friends did not contribute much to society. Still, Ham liked them. He spent much of his time with a woman artist named Lila. For her last piece, Lila had covered an apple tree in bear fur and replaced all the apples with dead snakes. She called it The Tree of Knowledge. Ham thought Lila’s work was provocative, and he thought Lila herself was possessed of a strange, blond-haired weasel-like beauty.

  It was while sitting together one day, sketching pictures of Noah as he worked, that Lila told Ham that she thought his father was the truest artist she’d ever met, and that his ark was his art.

  “Think about it,” she said. “He builds it for reasons no one can fathom, he applies himself to it every day, and every day he works with great passion.”

  Hearing Lila talk about his father that way while watching him work was enough to make Ham feel tenderly toward the old man.

  Feelings of tenderness would cease as soon as his father opened his mouth.

  “You’d better not be representing my likeness. And when I die, don’t you dare make a mural that lovingly sings my praises. If you do some phony mural of me, I’ll come back from the grave as a ghost and scream in your ear. ‘What are you doing, you lousy good-for-nothing!’ I will screech. ‘Also, use cross-hatching to make the side of my face more shrouded in dark.’ ”

  Japheth and Shem had already taken for themselves brides. Ham had to find a mate for himself, too, lest he provoke his father’s lash-heavy ire.
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  “If somehow the old man is right about this whole flood thing,” said Ham, turning to Lila, “I’d like you to come ride out the flood with me.”

  Lila considered Ham’s offer, then she took his hand.

  “I suppose the new world will need artists,” she said.

  When the ark was ready, Noah took to the task of herding animals. After just one day of work, he looked like hell. He appeared to be bleeding out of every pore in his body. He had two black eyes, three broken ribs, and his nose hung half off from a bobcat bite. So great was his pain that, after that first day, even he began to doubt whether he had actually heard the voice of God.

  “Maybe they are all right about me. Maybe I am sick in the head. But what is there left for me? If I admit to that, then I will be laughed out of town. The kids and the wife will make my domestic life a living hell. There is nothing left for me but to persist.”

  And so he persisted. He decided he would start small. He would collect the tiniest animals he could— ants, grasshoppers—and then slowly work his way up to squirrels and kittens.

  “You should try to catch a hummingbird! That you should try,” Noah complained to his wife. “Once you succeed in catching one, you hate it so much that you end up just strangling it. After three times you learn to control your temper, but that’s still two dead hummingbirds and an entire morning’s work shot to hell.”

  As Noah hunted around for animals, he judged them. He wanted to try to bring only the most worthy animals onboard his ark. He would stop by a group of rabbits and figure out who was a hardworking rabbit and who was a lazy, stupid dummy. Judging the rabbits made him feel a bit like God. He liked that.

  “If I were you,” he’d say, squatting beside a white bunny, “I’d eat facing a tree. As it is you look like a good-for-nothing layabout, but with that cabbage leaf in your mouth, you look like you have a secret agenda— a secret agenda you are too stupid a bunny to carry out.”

  As he walked away with the ones he had chosen for salvation, he would look back at their brethren and shake his head disapprovingly. “Good-bye, you dead dummies.” And that was that.

  For a long time, there was no rain, so Noah took to praying for it.

  “Please, dear Lord who is a just lord, remember not our pact, kind Sire? I was to build the Boat of Heaven and You were to rain down the floods of Hell. I have kept my end of the deal, big strong oily-muscled One. Should it not flood I will appear as a stupid dummy before my family and friends. I have heeded the words from my nose, dear Lord my God, and now You must reek a flood upon the land so that we both do not appear as asses before the world. I will watch those stupid dummies drown from the safety of the Lord’s ark and I will say, ‘Ha. Look at you, you dumb stupids who heed not the Lord. Not so smart now, your lungs full of brine.’ ”

  In this way, Noah conversed with the Lord, going on about how no one understood either of them, and how now, with the Lord’s help, they will all see how stupid they are. They will see this for only a few minutes—an hour tops—and then they will drown. Noah imagined them all down there floating in the water like pickled lab rats—the butcher, still in his bloody apron, the lousy jerk who cut his hair and was always trying to convince him to grow out his bangs—the whole lot of them under the water, gasping for one last breath.

  The flood started slowly. It did not seem biblical at all. The first day was nothing more than a drizzle, really, nothing to cause alarm. It continued like this for some time.

  “We sure are getting an awful lot of rain for this time of year,” people said, but eventually it got worse. The rain fell faster and heavier, each drop fat with purpose and spite.

  Ham stood looking at the ark with Lila at his side. His father was already onboard. He had begun to live in there several days earlier as the very first drops of water fell. Ham turned his head toward the sky and felt the drops of rain pockmark his face.

  He imagined them all in the ark. He imagined the aardvarks, the orangutans, the smell, the claustrophobia—his father’s constant screams and shouts. He imagined himself deciding at the very last minute to forgo the ark entirely and take his chances with the flood. At the very last minute, when they were all loaded inside, he would offer to go back out and close the door behind them. Unless Noah had already trained a monkey for the task, someone would have to do it.

  “I must sacrifice myself so that you may live,” he would say.

  “You dumb, stupid dummy,” his father would answer. “God is going to close the door. Stop being melodramatic and go clean the hyena cage.”

  The sky began to hemorrhage. All at once, the drops became indistinguishable one from the other. The water poured down like all the heavens had become an inverted ocean. Ham opened his mouth to scream and caught a yapful of water. The taste reminded him of the time when he was ten and almost drowned at the beach. In a panic, he grabbed Lila by the skin of her bicep and together they ran up the plank and into the cold, echoey darkness of the ark.

  * * *

  The first hands he heard banging at the outside walls felt like nails pushing into his temples. Then there were more hands. Pounding. Punching. Scratching. Then kicks and shrieking that even drowned out the sound of the rain.

  The worst was when Ham could make out individual voices. He could hear their neighbor Zebeleh and her little daughter Ariel.

  “You know we could empty out the alligator cage, to make room for a few more people,” offered Ham. “The world can do without alligators.”

  “And disobey God, you dummy?—and you try reopening that door. Do you have any idea what a pain in the ass we’d be in for? No, thanks.”

  Noah sat down and ate apples in the dark, waiting for his ark to rise above the world.

  For forty days and forty nights they rode the ark as the animals roared, whined, and screeched. Sometimes, when things quieted down, Noah and his family pressed their ears against the walls to try to figure out where they were. Sometimes they tried to imagine what all of this looked like to the fish. Were the fish allowed to live because they were more pious than everyone else? Was the secret to piety keeping your mouth shut?

  Sometimes Noah tried to get his family to sing to help uplift their spirits, but their songs would usually degenerate into sobs and cries and Noah would stomp off, disgusted with the boatload of them. Most often, though, they just spent their time remembering. Ham thought back to the days he’d spent with his artist friends and some of the old crowd he ran with. You couldn’t put down your money purse in front of Olgar without having him riffle through it and help himself to a few coins to disperse to the poor; but when he did his imitation of a one-armed dwarf milking a large cow, he could make Ham laugh like nobody else. And there was Alois, who lived in a tree house and made big pots of bark soup for the hungry; and Gwendolyn, a young widow who kept her big fat baby in a sack on her back and could dance with so much joy that to see her, you couldn’t help but smile. He thought about every single person he had ever known, and how he would never see them again.

  Thinking it might bring him some solace, Ham pulled out a stick of his sketching coal and some parchment and went over to draw the puppies in their cages. He studied their faces. He tried to see what God and his father had seen in them, why they had chosen these particular dogs over all the others. On the surface, they looked no different from any other puppies he had ever seen. They were small and furry.

  The two dogs paced about their cage, and, as Ham watched them, the puppy that was slightly larger suddenly set upon the haunch of the other and, for no apparent reason, tore into it with nasty, purposeful bites. The smaller dog yelped, twisted its body over, and sank its teeth into the ear of its attacker. Locked upon each other in this way, the puppies rolled across the floor, their eyes glowing an unearthly purple.

  Ham turned away and walked over to the giraffe cage. There he found the long-necked beasts eye to eye, each trying to step on the other’s hooves. Up near the roof, their mouths were opened wide, crying out in silence. He
looked over at the tiger cage, where the tigers were scraping at the walls to get at the bear cubs next door, and the bear cubs sat stock-still, eyeing Ham with hunger.

  Ham left the cages and went looking for Lila. She was sitting on the floor, painting a flower onto a rock she held in her hand. He knelt down beside her, put his face in her hair, and waited for the rain to stop.

  The Tower of Babel

  After the flood, man’s relationship with God changed. Where once there was disinterest—a sort of “you go your way, we’ll go ours” attitude—there was now distrust. The generations after Noah did not know when their time might come to be wiped out.

  Noah had said the people of the Earth were evil, that God had to get rid of them and start over, that God had made some kind of mistake—either in killing them or in creating them in the first place. There were different versions.

  After the flood, God had given man the rainbow. It was a gift and a symbol—a promise that this kind of thing would never happen again. Back then there wasn’t much in the way of entertainment so when a rainbow came along, it was the closest you got to a drive-in so the tendency was to try to enjoy. But despite its flash, when humans looked upon the rainbow, rather than feeling reassured, they felt a bit like God was trying to dupe them, like he was saying, “Let’s forget about all this nasty genocide business and enjoy the pretty colors.”

  Man did not take God at his word, and it was this lack of trust that Mibzar played on. Mibzar was the youngest son in a family of butchers who worked in Babel.

  “I had a dream,” Mibzar said to his neighbors. “And in this dream, a new rain came and it made the old rain look like an old lady making pee-pee.”