“Pattern seekers?”
“Fuck me.”
“Well, help me out, then. Because what you just laid out sounds like a pattern.”
“Some patterns exist. A few examples of false pattern recognition don’t convict the thought processes of the entire species.”
“You’re an atheist.”
“By default.”
“So where do the angels fit in? The clouds and eternity? Afterlife? An atheist in paradise is a contradiction.”
“I have certain suspicions in that regard. The ever-expanding thought-reality of this place is reminiscent of Lewis: Hell is a state of mind. I’m sure even you’ve heard that before. This freedom-loving devil sounds an awful lot like she walked out of the pages of Paradise Lost, and all this gallivanting around with dead celebrities is straight out of the pages of Dante. Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita. I scarcely need mention the central conflict, this Paradise-sans-Truth tension, a trope as old and quaint as Eden. Throw in the haphazard philosophies, the hipster irony, the cheap jokes – It’s almost as if some publicly educated and under-employed ass is having literary spasms.”
The eyes of Christopher’s head roamed about the studio until they found the place where the studio met the page. And they looked up off the page and at me. I looked away, for I was guilty. I stepped outside and I smoked a cigarette. I poured myself another coffee. I thought about giving up. But I really wanted to know how Jim was going to fix the firmament, so I went back. I expected to martyr myself against the edges of Christopher’s rhetoric, but when I sat back down he had already moved on.
“As for the angels,” he said, “If apes can graduate, so too can men. It would be a cosmic travesty if we were evolution’s final product.”
“So everybody’s got a pattern for everything,” Jim said. He stole a drink from the half-empty glass, and he nearly spit it back out. “Ughh, that’s bitter.”
“It’s Amarone.”
“It’s bitter.” Jim set down the glass. “So what do we do? Nothing? Just pull up a chair and mock what passes?”
“Carry me,” Christopher said.
“What?”
“I don’t need a body to give these demagogues what-for. Even the invicted heart draws blood from the brain. We’ll divest them of these superstitions with reason, with the dynamics of logic and argument. We’ll scour the fields of battle with the ink of a thousand years of secular thought. Carry me, Jim! I’ll eat in paradise what I merely disdained on Earth.”
“I don’t think it will work,” Jim said.
“Carry me,” the head said.
Jim squatted and met Christopher’s gaze with his own. He said, “These religious guys might be a little silly, but Immanuel Kant is a fucking dick.” Then he made for the door.
“Jim! What humanity lost through submission it will win back through progress and irony! Mark those words, Jim. One day!”
7
So Jim wandered upon the fields of battle. While he wandered he beheld many feats of violence and insanity. He saw the pointy hat of a bishop that wobbled in the hatch of a Sherman tank, and the tank rolled at the head of a legion armed with shovels and pitchforks. He saw great volleys of arrows exchanged between clouds. He saw the shells of artillery rip into a battalion whose armor was duct tape and Bible paper.
And the angels kept a loose perimeter in the sky and on the ground. Some of them were confused or concerned, but most of them pointed and laughed and had a pretty good time.
The crack in the firmament streaked over the war. It glowed.
It came to pass that Jim came to a place between three hills. The place was sheltered by trees and a river. It was open and flat, occupied by a peaceful throng. A middle-aged woman in a conservative summer dress met him as he entered.
“Welcome,” she said.
“What’s going on here?” Jim said. “There’s a war going on, you know.”
“Well, we are the Presbyterian Church of Canada, and we’d much rather have a picnic. Would you like some juice or some coffee? There will be cake and cookies afterwards, but you’re welcome to some coffee now. I could introduce you to the boys. Oh, excuse me. Men. You’re not boys anymore, are you? My son is about your age.”
“Afterwards? After what?” Jim made his suspicions known with a squint.
“Oh, we have a very special speaker.” Then she leaned in and spoke confidentially. “It’s top secret, but I’ll give you a hint. His name is John Calvin.”
The name didn’t mean anything to Jim, but he understood from her tone that it was impressive. “Holy buckets,” he said. He retained the squint.
“The holiest,” she said. “Can I bring you to my son? The two of you will get on just great.”
“Sure.”
She led him to a small group of men at the edge of the peaceful throng. She introduced them and Jim introduced himself and then she left. Her son had thick shoulders and a good handshake. His name was Michael. Jim liked him, and the liking intensified his suspicions.
“So Jim,” Michael said, “Are you looking to buy something, or just hiding from the weather?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, do you have any interest in becoming a Presbyterian?”
“Oh, well, not really. I’m not very religious.”
“That’s quite alright, Jim. No worries, really. You know, I’ve got this theory about Jesus. Not sure how original it is, but it goes like this: Don’t shove Him down anybody’s throat, and He won’t fly out of anybody’s ass.” He slapped Jim on the shoulder. “You alright? Looks like you’ve got something in your eye.”
For Jim had squinted too far. He relaxed his face. “You seem alright,” he said.
“Yeah, I know we get a bad rap once in a while. Hell, we deserve it. And I’ll be honest with you, I only believe in half of this stuff myself. But I really do believe in that half.”
“Which half?”
“Redemption. The idea that no matter what you’ve done, you can come back around. You can get clean and be good in the eyes of God. Like, we all fuck up sometimes, you know? And sometimes it gets pretty ugly. But you can always come back here, and as long as you come with an open heart, you can get back to even.”
Jim considered these words, for he had nuked the firmament, and he felt pretty bad about it. And the peaceful throng was nice and wholesome. They would probably even forgive him.
Maybe I’m a Presbyterian, he thought.
John Calvin arrived. He elevated himself on a tree stump in the center of the throng. He spoke for twenty minutes. He condemned the war but not those who fought in it, and he asked everyone to pray for their misguided brothers and sisters. He spoke eloquently about the difficulties of moral absolutes and the mysteries of eternity. As he neared the end of his speaking, he said there remained a single theological problem to resolve, and Jim was hanging on his words.
Calvin said, “As we know, God in His wisdom and His mercy granted Grace Everlasting to some of us, and Damnation to others. We are all mortally bound to the Original Sin and we share equally in the depravity of the Human Condition, and His choice has nothing to do with our little worlds, and everything to do with His mercy. The difficulty we face, following the crack in the firmament, is that everyone is now in Paradise. It has been theologically established that this is not the will of the Creator, and something must be done.
“Lacking the authority to deliver Damnation, and being naturally opposed to it for the frailty of our Condition, there is but one path to Reconciliation with God. Some of our number must reject Paradise through voluntary discomfiture. The discomfort must not be too severe, for through pride and vanity we would flay ourselves and abuse God’s dignity. Nor must it be too trifling, for through gluttony we would abuse His mercy. Therefore, one third of our number must wear scratchy undergarments and abstain from wi-fi for the duration of the breach of the firmament. We shall endure this discomfiture together, in rotation, in shifts not less than twelve and not exceeding forty da
ys. We thank God for His patience and for giving us this wisdom. Amen.
“Oh, and if anyone has a skin condition, or is otherwise ill-disposed to the wearing of scratchy undergarments, please give your name to Mrs. Roy. We’ll find you a more suitable discomfiture.”
Michael stopped Jim at the exit. “Jim!” he said. “At least stay for some cake!”
“It’s too sweet,” Jim said.
8
She sat in a mortar hole in the charred and blasted ground. Light played upon her through the branches of a broken tree. She was Gabriella where the light touched her, and she was Lucy in the shade.
“They love this war,” she said. “They love it more than the lie. They will never stop fighting.”
Jim sat down next to her. He was unsure about their relationship, for she was both the devil who had blown him and the angel who had harangued the Christian elite. He said, “It’s the ones that aren’t fighting that you should be worried about. They’re itching to go to hell.” But it was a feeble joke, and it fell upon the blasted ground and died.
“Would I lie to you, Jim?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“If I did, would you be angry? If the lie gave you paradise, if it gave you everything you ever dreamed of, would you still be angry?”
“I guess so.”
“Why?”
“I mean, things are either real or they aren’t. You want things to be real.”
There was some silence. Jim watched the light play upon the angel and the shade upon the devil. He found in his pocket the card she had given him when they first met. He stared at the address, 1 Truth Road. Then he said,
“You know what. To hell with the Truth. It can wait. I’m gonna go find Jesus.”
She laughed. The light made a diagonal cut through her face, and there was sadness in the angel and fury in the devil. She laughed in the middle.
“I wouldn’t lie to you, Jim,” she said. “Not because I wouldn’t lie, but because the lie wouldn’t work. You’re a man who can’t be lied to.” She gave him a folded and tattered paper that was yellow with age.
He unfolded a map of paradise. It was marked with triangle trees and up-arrow mountains, poofy clouds and asterisk cities. There were also dotted-line highways and snaky rivers. And left of center there was scrawled an X with the caption, Christ be here.
X
1
Now Jim came to the place where the X was Jesus. It was a lake. He rented a canoe and rowed about on the surface of the lake, and he looked about on the surface, but he couldn’t find Jesus. There were many trees and rocks and there was a great deal of sky, but there weren’t any ripples in the water.
Then he came to where the lake became narrow. It twisted through roots and shallows and opened up into an austere cove. The water looked like a block of metal that reflected the sky. In the middle of it a small man fished from a wooden raft.
Jim paddled up to him. “Uh, Mr. Christ?”
The man didn’t move. He sat upon the wooden raft with the wooden pole. He looked into the water.
“I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Christ,” Jim said. “I know you’re retired. And I really don’t believe in you. Or at you. On you. However that works. I came out here and I’m bothering you because there’s a lot of people that do believe, and they’re pretty mixed up about it. Like, they’re blowing paradise to hell because of some things you said once. I’ve heard it was mostly nice things, and I don’t really get it, but I thought maybe you could, I don’t know, give them the business. Set them straight. Or something.”
The man said, “I’ve been fishing this spot for three hundred years. Three hundred years, and I haven’t caught a single fish.”
“That sucks.”
“If a man casts his pole into a pond that has no fish, does he deserve to eat?”
Jim thought, Man, not this shit again. He said, “I’ll be completely honest with you, Mr. Christ. I don’t care. Questions like that have been getting me shot out of cannons and sucked into black holes. I’m done with them. I mean, your followers are ripping paradise apart, and you’re out here fishing.”
“Josh.”
“What?”
“My name.”
“Well, alright Josh, I’m Jim.”
“I’m glad to meet you, Jim. But the politics of paradise no longer interest me.”
“The fuck they don’t!” Then Jim realized he just yelled fuck at Jesus, who was Josh, and he pulled back a little. “I’m sorry. Maybe that wasn’t called for. But you’re the guy at the center of the whole thing. They’re all fighting for different versions of you.”
“No they aren’t.”
“Yes they are.”
“Not really.”
“Goddammit they are! Sorry.”
Josh pulled up his wooden pole and the hook and the lure came out of the water. He opened his tackle box, changed the lure, and cast off again.
He said, “They’d rather die for the things they can’t see, than live with the ones they can. One look at me and they’ll say, Oh well that’s not really him, and they’ll go right on dying.”
“That’s the problem. Nobody’s dying,” Jim said. “And isn’t that why you died?”
Josh laughed at this. It was a deep laugh that came from his gut. “You know, I tried doing it for a while,” he said. “Playing the savior. There was this one time, I went to some Pope or another, just to talk. I don’t remember why. And he believed who I was, or at least who I had been. And suddenly, in the middle of our conversation, he looked at me and said, Listen buddy, all I need to know is, are you a Catholic? When I said no, he had me thrown into a sack and they buried me under the Stupid Fucking Mountain. It took me a decade to crawl out.”
“Hey,” said Jim. “I climbed that mountain.”
“Everyone climbs the Stupid Fucking Mountain.”
“Well, I climbed it too.”
“The point is, none of it has anything to do with me. So I’m done with it. And I told her that those firmaments were a bad idea, but she was desperate. I’m curious, what finally brought them down?”
“It’s not important,” Jim said. “They’re down and nobody is special anymore and they’re pissed off about it. I came here to get you to talk to them, but evidently it’s hopeless.”
They stared together at the place where the fishing line met the metal block of water. Jim expected the line to jerk at any moment, and for Josh to finally catch his fish. But though they stared for a long time, nothing broke the surface.
And Josh said, “What did you do in life?”
“What do you mean?” said Jim.
“What work did you do? How did you eat?”
“Well, I just worked, really. Welding was good money. I did some roofing and drywalling. Whatever I could find.”
“We are not so different. I also just worked. Mending ploughs, building houses. I even did some roofing.” Josh looked Jim in the eye for the first time. “Would you give another man the road because he had clean hands? Would you accept his whip when you didn’t give it fast enough?”
“No,” Jim said. “I’d shove that whip right up his ass.”
“Well, we had hammers and empty stomachs, and the Romans had armor and feasts. They were chosen by many colorful gods and we were slaves to a dark one. So one day, after three Roman soldiers raped and killed a friend of mine, I stood on a crate and said, I am a son of God.
“Between the Aramaic of the people, and the Hebrew of the Scholars, and the Greek of Romans, the a became a the. Articles don’t translate so well. I became the son of God, and a few years later the fuckers nailed me to a cross.”
It was Jim’s turn to laugh, a deep laugh that came from the gut.
“I can’t help you,” Josh said.
“Seriously though, you’ve got to give me something. I came a long way.”
“Work.”
“Huh?”
“You said you were a roofer. The firmament is a roof.”
“The
re’s a war in paradise because the devil lied, and now that the lie is broken the advice of Jesus Christ is that I board it up?”
“My name is Josh.”
So Jim took his leave of the small man on the wooden raft. When he reached the edge of the cove, the man called out some parting words:
“Jim! Before you cast off, make sure there’s fish!”
2
With a bag full of nails, a good hammer, and planks of wood donated by the Presbyterian Church of Canada, Jim went to work. He started where the crack in the firmament met the ground and he worked his way up. And though he doubted that the advice of Jesus who was Josh had been sincere, it felt good to hammer in the nails. It felt good to work.
And he worked for a long time. Days and then weeks and then years came to pass. He went through thousands of boards and millions of nails. He didn’t eat and he didn’t sleep. He didn’t look up because it discouraged him, and he didn’t look down because it frightened him. He looked at his hands and at the place where the hammer met the nail.
But then one day the hammer broke and Jim looked around. He was a mile high over the shredded fields of war. His labor trailed behind him as a wooden rainbow. Then he put his eyes forward and beheld that he had the whole sky to go.
“I don’t think this is gonna work,” he said.
Now a friendly and wise old face popped in through the crack in the firmament. “Jim!” it said. “You goddamn crazy hillbilly! You can’t fix the sky with wood!”
“Einstein. Well, your dice didn’t work for shit, either,” Jim said.
Einstein pulled himself up and mounted the firmament like a horse. “I’ll make it up to you,” he said.
“Yeah?”
Book of Jim: Agnostic Parables and Dick Jokes From Lucifer's Paradise Page 8