by Ladies
For Mibzar, if it wasn’t a prophetic dream, it was headaches, goiters, or excruciating groin pain—anything so long as he had something to yak about, and he was his favorite topic of conversation. Yakking about himself was what came natural to him and he believed it was a talent that would lead him to bigger and better things, better things than simply delivering meat at the butcher shop. And so he stood outside the shop and as people walked by, Mibzar yakked.
“In a dream last night, I saw monkeys underwater,” Mibzar cried. “I don’t know how much more of this I can take. I have a very sensitive soul. My skin is sensitive, too. I apply ointments of aloe half a dozen times a day and still I have psychosomatic anal welts the size of bees.”
He saw that speaking about himself only drew a small crowd, but when he added a twist of flood talk— offered up in high-flown language—more people came to listen and they stayed longer.
“Have you ever seen a tiger underwater? That you should see. Its spine twisting and nails scratching? A tiger, even in his last breath, will try to eat a tuna swimming by because he must obey his calling. But man has a higher calling. Man has things like compassion and kindness. We can only hope that from way up there the Almighty can see that.”
Flood debate and speculation was popular in those days. People were still trying to make sense of the whole thing. It was Mibzar’s belief that had Noah been more articulate in explaining his conversations with God, he could have made people better understand the consequences of their behavior. And so, Mibzar believed, the flood was largely due to Noah’s incompetence as a public speaker.
“I have spoken with God,” Mibzar imagined Noah saying, “and He hath commanded me to build an ark. It shall be such and such cubits long, and such and such cubits high and blah blah blah blah.”
People were either asleep by the time he was done talking, or back to sodomizing goats and chickens. Mibzar knew that people need a little song and dance. You have to build empathy, otherwise you turn them off.
No, there had to have been a classier way to go about it, a better way to grab people’s attention. Mibzar would have included himself in the story—to humanize it. He’d have told them what he ate for breakfast on the day he spoke to God—how the figs he’d consumed were doing a number on his bowels. And most importantly, he would have opened with a joke.
“Do you have any idea what it’s like talking to God?” he would have asked in a manner that was warm and conversational. “You think you have a problem speaking in front of a crowd? Try addressing the Creator of the Universe. Build an ark? You got it. Tell me to cut the skin at the fore of my willing-and-able cane and I’ll do it!”
It was with his powers as a public speaker at his command that Mibzar undertook what he decided would be his true calling. He would pitch the people of Babel on the idea of building a great monolith. A tower whose top echelons, in the event of another flood, they could flee to. He would oversee its construction and call it “the Tower of Mibzar.”
When he first waved over the crowd passing outside the front of his family’s butcher shop, Mibzar knew he would need a strong opening line.
“God killed your grandpa,” he said. “Don’t let him kill your kids. Rainbows and lollipops are one thing, but what I’m proposing is security.”
“Is that off the rump or a cutlet?” asked a soft-headed roofer named Emile as he peered into the butcher shop.
“This has nothing to do with meat,” screamed Mibzar, and one of his brothers came outside and shot him a look that said “Pipe down.”
“Look,” continued Mibzar, making his voice calm, “I would not even presume to know what the Almighty is thinking. That would be preposterous, but we do have imaginations. It is the way the Fat One in the Sky constructed us, and so we imagine. And I will tell you this: it is my imagining that on the day He drowned the whole world, He could not have been feeling very good about himself. It just isn’t the behavior of a very self-actualized Almighty. All I’m saying is, who knows what goes through This Guy’s head? He’s whimsical!”
Mibzar explained his idea for the tower and as he spoke, the crowd around him grew, and as it grew, he became emboldened, explaining it through metaphor, saying it was not so much a prayer to God as it was a prayer to man—a celebration of their humanness. And also their penises.
Along with all of this celebrating, Mibzar offered something else as well: the world’s first insurance policy. It would help them sleep better at night. And for Mibzar, it gave him the sense of importance he’d been after his whole life.
* * *
The people of Babel were smitten with the idea of a tower and they set to work on it with vigor and purpose. One shift worked all through the morning and another worked through the night. Because of various chronic pains, Mibzar could not actually perform any manual labor, but he stood off to the side for hours, watching the workers as they toiled. When their pace slackened, he threw a few inspirational words their way and, where he saw fit, he peppered his talk with personal anecdotes— about his lifelong battle with foot odor or his childhood fancy for girls with crooked teeth.
On the day he had to stand on his tiptoes to reach the blossoming tower’s top, he did a hand-clapping jig that was so pure and unself-conscious that those around him were embarrassed to watch.
“The tower’s shade alone will provide a spectacular getaway for a midafternoon siesta,” he said, his buttocks gyrating behind him.
In the months that followed, whenever it started to rain, everyone would scramble up the tower laughing like children. Wheee, they’d yell, whizzing up the steps. They knew that whoever got the highest had the best chance of surviving the flood, so there was a fair bit of good-natured jostling.
As the tower grew taller, it could be seen in nearby towns. Curious neighboring villagers came to check it out and once Mibzar explained it all to them in his back-slapping way—making generous mention of his difficult relationship with his father and his problems with mucus in the morning—soon enough, they were immigrating to Babel to work on the tower and take their place in history. And the higher it got, the farther news of the tower spread—and news was spreading far, for now the tower almost poked straight into the clouds.
At night when Mibzar dreamed, it was no longer terrible images of the flood that he saw; it was of himself, ascending the tower. At the very top, he would step onto Heaven’s carpet.
“I love what you’ve done with the place,” he’d say to God. Even in dreams, even when standing before the Creator of the Universe, he knew to open with something casual.
The tower slowly grew and as it did, there never seemed any good reason to stop. Everyone was working well together. From Babel and beyond, they all felt like brothers working toward a common goal, and that goal, which had begun as a mere escape ladder, had now become something else—something less easy to define. It had something to do with being more than just a workaday human. It had to do with questing after the infinite. Flood or no flood, they knew their time on Earth would only last so long, and after that—eternal darkness. But with the tower, they’d leave their mark.
As the men worked, Mibzar watched. Making speeches had become exhausting, and so he took to wearing a whistle around his neck, which he blew into to make his wishes known. One toot meant work faster, two toots meant work faster still, and three toots meant send for the lad who scrubs my feet.
Mibzar took to perching himself at the top of the tower and watching the world below. He felt like he could actually breathe up there.
“Sometimes it is simpler to gaze upon bald spots than faces,” he thought. “Faces always need to be talked to.”
Things looked so small down there. The butcher shop, where he had toiled thanklessly for so many years, the site of all his humiliations and petty triumphs—as puny as an ant hill.
“I can crush it with a finger,” he said, lifting a pinkie to his eyes.
Mibzar wondered if that was a little how God felt sometimes. Crushy. He wondered, too,
if He might like how the tower was bringing the two of them closer together.
He wanted to stay up there all day, in silence, just thinking his thoughts while looking down and allowing his joyous laborers to carry him ever higher, ever closer to God.
But it was on one particularly glorious day of fraternal labor that Mibzar, watching from on high, noticed something was not right. Whereas usually the harmonious sound of men happily working together could be heard—cries of “pass me that bucket of mortar, friend” and “throw me a pickax, my bosom”—now all he could hear were sounds that were garbled, weird, more animal than human. What’s more, the jumble sounded panicked—terrified, even.
Mibzar raced down the tower’s steps and with his whistle, summoned one of his foremen. Mibzar looked at him quizzically.
“Quelque chose de bizarre s’arrive,” said the foreman.
Annoyed by the man’s insubordinate gobbledygook, Mibzar blew his whistle at three men hauling rocks on their backs. The men dropped their loads and trotted over.
“¿Qué pasa? . . . ¡Qué raro! ¿Qué está saliendo de mi boca?” said the first man.
“Hakka Nee-ay shong dong teeyong nee oy eyow,” said the second.
“Sento come ho mangiato il fungo magico,” said the third.
Mibzar tore the whistle from around his neck and spoke.
“Alk-tay ormal-nay!”
Upon hearing the strange sounds that escaped his lips, Mibzar covered his mouth as though having emitted a long series of burps. Waiting a few seconds, he tried again.
“Ut-whay e-thay ell-hay is-way oing-gay on-way?” he cried. It was as though there was a hand in his mouth, bending and curving his tongue against his will.
For a long while, none of the men dared speak. For Mibzar, it was the first time in his life that his mouth felt like an enemy. The men all stood staring at one another, not knowing what to do. Finally, Mibzar broke the silence. Looking into the heavens, he said in a very quiet voice: “Od-Gay, ou-yay in-way.”
And as he stared up at the tower, the noonday wind blew through the whistle in his hand in gusts that sounded like high-pitched laughter.
During the days that followed, in the absence of a common language, there was a lot of awkward bowing and smiling—people trying to make themselves understood by talking really loudly and slowly—but it did no good, and after only a week, work on the tower ground to a complete halt. In resigned silence, everyone packed up his tools and journeyed back to his home.
It was hard to return to tending sheep and planting vegetables, though. The work they had done on the tower awakened new hungers in them, hungers they had never known before. They now wanted to create things in the world that were bigger than they were— that would outlast them and instill wonder in the generations to come.
And so they cooked up new ideas. Not high things (they had learned their lesson and wouldn’t be opening that can of worms any time soon) but other things. Li wanted to build the world’s longest wall; Costa wanted to build a place where hundreds of people could sit in a circle and watch marvelous events; and Bastet, a real cat person, wanted to sculpt the world’s biggest feline.
In the months after the men and women of the neighboring towns left, because of how inexperienced they were, most of Babel’s tower crumbled away. In the very end, out of the whole thing, only one floor remained—the ground floor—and it was here that Mibzar made his home, opening the world’s first language school. Inside, he taught Aramaic as a second language. Mibzar was the kind of teacher who always kept the students way past the end of class, continuing to yak away about himself, or whatever else it was that pleased him.
Jacob and Esau
No matter how many times he heard Rebekah tell the story of the great fight inside her belly, Jacob would get sucked right in. After all, he was its star.
“I think I remember a little,” he said. “There was light in there.”
“You remember,” Rebekah said. “You’re such a genius.”
His mother was always telling him that. If he drew an X in the sand it was more perfect than God’s creation. Made pottage without burning the pan—a hero.
Rebekah would explain, sometimes laughingly and sometimes not, what it felt like to have her belly pulled in opposite directions.
“It was like my lungs were wrestling. From the very beginning you two never got along. My name, Rebekah, means ‘she who binds’ and how I wished I could bind the two of you to keep you apart. I would rub my stomach to calm you. ‘My babies,’ I would say. ‘What is there to fight for? You are both as close to the one who loves you as can be.’ But your brother Esau was never satisfied. He wanted to get in closer. For him, it was not enough to be in me. He wanted to be a part of me. He wanted to swim in my blood like a tuna.” She scrunched up her face with distaste and leaned into him.
“Needy,” she whispered.
“You were on the left, Jacob. I knew this, and when I stroked you, you became very still. I called you ‘Lefty,’ which means ‘he who is on the left.’
“ ‘Lefty,’ I cooed, ‘outside in the world I am waiting, my heart bursting with love.’ Even then you knew to listen to your mother. Even then we had a special bond. I’ll never forget the day you were born.”
She never spoke of it as the day they were born.
* * *
When he thought he was remembering, being in her belly was something like being underwater. Everything was red. It was a whole universe in there, but wherever he swam, there was Esau. Sometimes they bumped heads. Sometimes Esau would grab him and hug him too tightly, making it hard for him to breathe. He sort of recalled he and Esau chewing their mother’s bones and trying to stand on each other’s shoulders, trying to use the other to get higher. It was a part of some bigger inside joke, but he couldn’t quite remember what it was.
“Then I had a dream and in this dream, God spoke to me. And even in the dream I thought, ‘How can this be? God doesn’t speak to women. Maybe Thou art leaving a message for my husband?’ My knees were shaking. ‘Wait until your father hears about this,’ I thought, because you know about him and God! Isaac’s been waiting to hear from Him—has been afraid to hear from Him—since he was a little boy, so a part of me felt bad that I was the one He called out to. But it was funny, too.”
Whenever his mother explained this part, she would put the palms of her hands on her thighs. She would imitate the sound of God by making her voice stern and serious, like a nursery teacher’s.
“So he says to me, he says, ‘Your sons will each father a nation and these nations will not like each other, at all, at all.’ ”
She threw her hands up in the air as though to say this was all beyond the intellect of a simple shepherd’s wife.
“The old women told me that I had a couple of kickers and kickers were healthy. ‘But,’ I told the old women, ‘what I have is more than kickers. They’re trying to kill each other!’ I feared for your lives and for my own. When I tried to stand still you both knocked me from one end of the house to the other. One night I dreamed that you were both at it again. In the dream I stuck my finger into my belly button to try and separate you, and someone in there tried to pull me in. I woke up screaming. I had begun to give birth.”
* * *
“We named Esau Esau, which means ‘he who is hairy.’ When he was born he looked like a wet little monkey— or one of your father’s hairy fists! He was cute,” she allowed, “but you! Jacob, you were the light of my life. When your father put you on my belly I just laughed and laughed and cried and laughed and cried some more. My cheeks were raw from where the old women slapped to calm me down. One hundred, two hundred slaps and still I laughed and cried. I was out of my mind with ecstasy. Making you was the best thing I ever did.”
“And Esau, too?” Jacob asked.
“I love all of my children,” she said soberly.
The way Jacob heard it, he had been born with his hand gripped on to Esau’s foot. It was like he was holding on to the strin
g of a balloon that was slowly rising out of the red universe.
In those days being the oldest was serious business, and since Esau came out first, everything was to go to him. The birthright, the Big Blessing. Everything.
As children, Esau would always make sure to introduce Jacob as his baby brother.
“How can you call me that?” Jacob would ask. “I came out five minutes after you. Five lousy minutes!”
“And so I will always be five minutes ahead of you. Five minutes wiser. Five minutes more seasoned. Doesn’t it make you feel safe? Like you have a battering ram pushing on ahead of you into the future? I would tell you what it’s like here in the future, but you know I’m not very good with words.”
Esau acted like it was a photo finish at the derby. There he was at the finish line, carrying flowers and posing for portraits, Jacob’s hand still clamped desperately on to his foot.
Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob, and Esau would all lie in bed. They were a bed family. With Isaac lying down all day, it was the only way they could all spend time together.
Jacob and Esau would rub Rebekah’s back.
“See if you can tell if it’s me or Jacob,” said Esau and, every time, Rebekah was able to tell.
“Your touch restores me,” she would tell Jacob afterward. “I don’t know why. You’re so good, Jacob. Please don’t be mad. I know you love your brother.”
When Esau was alone, he would sometimes pack things up his nose—barley, grass, pebbles. It was his hobby and Rebekah found it gross. She would turn away and gag, or pretend to gag. Isaac said packing things up or picking things out of the nose were signs of a deep thinker. But one day Esau packed too much sponge up there and couldn’t get it out. Isaac had to pull back the tip of his nose to get a look. He held Esau in his arms as he screamed and pleaded.