by James Morrow
“When I say my daughter was full of life,” she continued, “I am stating a hard fact, and wish to be taken as literally as if I’d said, ‘My daughter was a Capricorn,’ or ‘My daughter had red hair.’ Perhaps you expect tears from me now—tears of joy, confusion…whatever. I shall not offer them. Sentimentality offends me. What’s happening here is not a defeat of death but a shabby compromise with death. It’s Kristin I want back, not some nebulous vibration, and Kristin will never come back. Believe me, nothing in this situation can lessen my pain, so if my needs were all that counted, I would send you on your separate ways and never let your ‘critical mass,’ as you put it, form again. But, of course, the needs of another must be considered.”
Merribell guided us up the stairs, plucking cats from our path. The hallway was a musty collection of antique lamps, old clocks, and oriental rugs. As we paused outside Kristin’s bedroom door, I saw that we were aligned in anatomical order: skin, ears, eye, tongue, heart, stomach, vagina, hand.
“I have not entered this place in two and a half years,” Merribell informed us. “I will not enter it today. Everything here burns me.” She vanished into a hall closet and reappeared holding a moist wad of clay. “Which of you has my daughter’s hand?”
I held up Kristin’s hand.
“There’s a potter’s wheel near her bed.”
“I know nothing about them.”
“Put the clay on the wheel head,” said Merribell impatiently. “Activate the motor. Press down. That’s all. I don’t expect a Greek vase, young man. Just press the clay.”
I entered the room, flexed my fingers, and began carrying out my orders. A hologram of Kristin kept watch from above the nightstand. She had an angel’s face, a sibyl’s smile. She looked full of life.
“Concentrate on your hand,” Merribell called to me upon hearing the motor’s drone.
The wet clay sucked at my palm, oozed between my fingers, crept under my nails. My intellect found the sensation vaguely disquieting—and yet—and yet I could not deny it: my borrowed hand was glad. Its flesh tingled. Its bones rejoiced.
I returned to the hallway and spoke up for Kristin’s hand. How does one articulate the gratitude of a hand? I discoursed slowly, without eloquence.
“And who has my daughter’s ears?”
Stepping forward, Maggie Yost received her orders. She was to enter the sanctum and listen to a tape that Kristin had recorded live—and illegally—during a Tinker’s Damn concert. Maggie disclosed her unmitigated loathing for Tinker’s Damn. Merribell admonished her to let her ears decide.
“There was pleasure in my ears,” Maggie admitted afterward. “Just in my ears,” she hastened to add. “Nowhere else.”
Eyes were next. The object of their affection: a bedside poster of the film star Rainsford Spawn. When Kendra came back out, she didn’t need to elaborate the romantic excitement experienced by her right eye. Its copious tears, unmatched on the left, told all.
“My daughter loved to jog,” Merribell informed us.
“She loved the sensation of her heart thumping inside her body.”
A job for Wesley Ransom, would-be actor, former arteriosclerosis victim, and enemy of all things athletic. He ran around the block, returned to the group, and told how it felt to betray one’s mind in deference to one’s heart.
“Tongue, skin, stomach, vagina,” said Merribell. “We could test these, too, but it’s clear what we would find. Kristin enjoyed wine and ice cream. She loved swimming and the sun. She was a connoisseur of rollercoaster rides, with a stomach that took pleasure in what many find nauseating. And, finally, I must admit that my daughter was not a virgin.”
Merribell opened a crinkled hand. A key lay at the intersection of her heart line and head line. She presented it to me, whom she evidently regarded as the group’s leader—a reasonable conclusion, when you consider that the human brain evolved pursuant to the ambitions of the human hand, or so I am told.
“This key opens Kristin’s favorite place,” she explained, “her grandmother’s house on Cape Cod. Kristin spent joyous summers there. It was her second home. She called it Wet Heaven.” The tears Merribell had forbidden herself began to flow. “I would say that you owe her at least one week per year. I’m thinking of her youth, you see. She was so very…young.”
The old woman sobbed. I told her a week sounded reasonable.
And so the Kristin Alcott Society was born. That none of us enjoys the hobby he practices for Kristin’s sake is merely, I’m sure, just one more dark coincidence in a universe filled with dark coincidences. Thus, at the beginning of Kristin Week, Kristin’s stomach goes to the Barnstable County Fair and spends the day on a roller coaster that the stomach’s owner abjures with every neuron of her consciousness. Kristin’s tongue, sewn into a teetotaler, enjoys its favorite wine. Sitting in their respective hosts, her heart jogs, her vagina has sex, her hand throws pots, her ears hear Tinker’s Damn, her eye sees Rainsford Spawn, and her skin plies the Atlantic, feeling the cold soft bump of its waves.
Of the eight of us, only Dorn Markle has attempted to explain the seeming efficacy of our sufferings. Dorn the optometrist—the science-minded member of our club.
“It has to do with engrams,” he told us. “Memory traces are typically laid down in several parts of the nervous system at once. When the same action is performed over and over, a kind of sub-brain forms in the relevant limb or organ. Evidently Kristin was preserved not only with all her tissues intact, but with all her sub-brains intact. Her hand retains a rough memory of pot throwing. Her stomach knows the Barnstable County Fair roller coaster. Her skin wants the ocean. Engrams, get it? Redundant engrams.”
I’ve never been sure whether I get it or not. Such a rationale is not important to me. I know only that when we eight Kristinites come together for our reluctant frolics, a ninth is born, a young woman, and the woman has fun, and that is enough.
Dinner that night was an orgy of dread. I have anticipated hospital stays and school-year openings with greater enthusiasm than I anticipated our meeting with Wesley Ransom. I picked at my lobster, prodded my salad.
We gathered in the living room. Wesley positioned himself by the woodpile. Theresa Sinefinder made a log construction in the fireplace but did not attempt to ignite it. Lisha DuPreen’s lover sat on the stairway. The rest of us sprawled on the rug. Kendra and I touched thighs.
“You all know how I feel,” Wesley began. “We’ve been doing this for six years, doing it on faith. Well, man does not live by faith alone—not this man. There’s a wife in my world now, and a baby. I have better ways to spend my summer.”
“You’ll have to tell me your definition of ‘better’ sometime, Wesley,” snapped Lisha DuPreen. “It isn’t my definition of ‘better.’”
“To restore cherished earthly pleasures to one so unjustly deprived of them—what could be ‘better’?” asked Billy Silk.
“You’re forgetting about engrams,” added Dorn Markle succinctly.
All that remained was for me to say, “You’d be dead if not for Kristin.”
Wesley pulled his flaccid body to full height. “I shall always desire the best for Kristin”—his tone was indignant—“but that’s not the point. Engrams notwithstanding, there’s no proof that our escapades do her any good. Keep the Society going if you wish, but from now on you’ll have to meet without me.”
“You know we become Kristin,” asserted Maggie Yost. “You’ve felt the thrill in her heart. You’ve said so.”
“People can convince themselves to feel anything, Maggie, I needn’t tell you that. We’re putting ourselves through a lot of pain for no reason. The word, I believe, is self-delusion.”
“Hail self-delusion!” shouted Lisha DuPreen, taking her lover by the hand and leading him upstairs.
“I have a movie to watch,” said Kendra Kelty, starting for the basement.
“I must get back to the fair,” said Theresa Sinefinder, touching Kristin’s stomach.
“My c
lay’s getting dry,” I asserted, waving Kristin’s hand.
“A night swim would be nice,” said Dorn Markle, stroking Kristin’s skin.
“Any ice cream left?” asked Billy Silk, sticking out Kristin’s tongue.
Abandoned, betrayed, Wesley Ransom got in his glider and left Wet Heaven forever.
The rest of Kristin Week was a disaster. We performed our rituals: nothing—the feelings wouldn’t come. Kristin’s hand lost its love of clay, her tongue grew in different to ice cream, her eye cooled in its passion for Rainsford Spawn, her ears rejected Tinker’s Damn, her skin rebuffed the Atlantic, her stomach surrendered its autonomy and began corroborating Theresa Sinefinder’s hatred of roller coasters. Without her heart, Kristin could not be conjured. Our flesh was willing but our spirit was weak. We went home two days early.
Wesley Ransom’s death has never been adequately explained. The pertinent facts are three: his body washed ashore near Hyannis, he died on the third day of Kristin Week, and drowning was the cause. Poor, unathletic Wesley. When his family found out, there was some loose talk of foul play, but the truth will probably never be known.
Wesley’s heart—Kristin’s heart—was recovered intact. The Cavanaugh Organ Bank got it. It went to one Jimmie Willins. Jimmie is young, he plays the banjo, and I laugh at almost everything he says. He has brought a certain joie de vivre to our gatherings. He says joining our Society is the most worthwhile thing he has ever done. We expect you will feel likewise.
As I said at the outset, we have a covenant with Kristin Alcott.
We are Kristin.
Welcome.
Bible Stories for Adults, No. 31: The Covenant
WHEN A SERIES-700 mobile computer falls off a skyscraper, its entire life flashes before it, ten million lines of code unfurling like a scroll.
Falling, I see my conception, my birth, my youth, my career at the Covenant Corporation.
Call me YHWH. My inventors did. YHWH: God’s secret and unspeakable name. In my humble case, however, the letters were mere initials. Call me Yamaha Holy Word Heuristic, the obsession with two feet, the monomania with a face. I had hands as well, forks of rubber and steel, the better to greet the priests and politicians who marched through my private study. And eyes, glass globules as light-sensitive as a Swede’s skin, the better to see my visitors’ hopeful smiles when they asked, “Have you solved it yet, YHWH? Can you give us the Law?”
Falling, I see the Son of Rust. The old sophist haunts me even at the moment of my death.
Falling, I see the history of the species that built me. I see Hitler, Bonaparte, Marcus Aurelius, Christ.
I see Moses, greatest of Hebrew prophets, descending from Sinai after his audience with the original YHWH. His meaty arms hold two stone tablets.
God has made a deep impression on the prophet. Moses is drunk with epiphany. But something is wrong. During his long absence, the children of Israel have embraced idolatry. They are dancing like pagans and fornicating like cats. They have melted down the spoils of Egypt and fashioned them into a calf. Against all logic, they have selected this statue as their deity, even though YHWH has recently delivered them from bondage and parted the Red Sea on their behalf.
Moses is badly shaken. He burns with anger and betrayal. “You are not worthy to receive this covenant!” he screams as he lobs the Law through the desert air. One tablet strikes a rock, the other collides with the precious calf. The transformation is total, ten lucid commandments turned into a million incoherent shards. The children of Israel are thunderstruck, chagrined. Their calf suddenly looks pathetic to them, a third-class demiurge.
But Moses, who has just come from hearing God say, “You will not kill,” is not finished. Reluctantly he orders a low-key massacre, and before the day is out, three thousand apostates lie bleeding and dying on the foothills of Sinai.
The survivors beseech Moses to remember the commandments, but he can conjure nothing beyond, “You will have no gods except me.” Desperate, they implore YHWH for a second chance. And YHWH replies: No.
Thus is the contract lost. Thus are the children of Israel fated to live out their years without the Law, wholly ignorant of heaven’s standards. Is it permissible to steal? Where does YHWH stand on murder? The moral absolutes, it appears, will remain absolute mysteries. The people must ad-lib.
Falling, I see Joshua. The young warrior has kept his head. Securing an empty wineskin, he fills it with the scattered shards. As the Exodus progresses, his people bear the holy rubble through the infernal Sinai, across the Jordan, into Canaan. And so the Jewish purpose is forever fixed: these patient geniuses will haul the ark of the fractured covenant through every page of history, era upon era, pogrom after pogrom, not one day passing without some rabbi or scholar attempting to solve the puzzle.
The work is maddening. So many bits, so much data. Shard 76,342 seems to mesh well with Shard 901,877, but not necessarily better than with Shard 344. The fit between Shard 16 and Shard 117,539 is very pretty, but…
Thus does the ship of humanity remain rudderless, its passengers bewildered, craving the canon Moses wrecked and YHWH declined to restore. Until God’s testimony is complete, few people are willing to credit the occasional edict that emerges from the yeshivas. After a thousand years, the rabbis get: Keep Not Your Ox House Holy. After two thousand: Covet Your Woman Servant’s Sabbath. Three hundred years later: You Will Remember Your Neighbor’s Donkey.
Falling, I see my birth. I see the Information Age, circa A.D. 2025. My progenitor is David Eisenberg, a gangly, morose prodigy with a black beard and a yarmulke. Philadelphia’s Covenant Corporation pays David two hundred thousand dollars a year, but he is not in it for the money. David would give half his formidable brain to enter history as the man whose computer program revealed Moses’ Law.
As consciousness seeps into my circuits, David bids me commit the numbered shards to my Random Access Memory. Purpose hums along my aluminum bones; worth suffuses my silicon soul. I photograph each fragment with my high-tech retinas, dicing the images into grids of pixels. Next comes the matching process: this nub into that gorge, this peak into that valley, this projection into that receptacle. By human standards, tedious and exhausting. By Series-700 standards, paradise.
And then one day, after five years of laboring behind barred doors, I behold fiery pre-Canaanite characters blazing across my brain like comets. “Anoche adonai elohecha asher hotsatecha ma-eretz metsrayem…I am YHWH your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You will have no gods except me. You will not make yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything…”
I have done it! Deciphered the divine cryptogram, cracked the Rubik’s Cube of the Most High!
The physical joining of the shards takes only a month. I use epoxy resin. And suddenly they stand before me, glowing like heaven’s gates, two smooth-edged slabs sliced from Sinai by God’s own finger. I quiver with awe. For over thirty centuries, Homo sapiens has groped through the murk and mire of an improvised ethics, and now, suddenly, a beacon has appeared.
I summon the guards, and they haul the tablets away, sealing them in chemically neutral foam rubber, depositing them in a climate-controlled vault beneath the Covenant Corporation.
“The task is finished,” I tell Cardinal Wurtz the instant I get her on the phone. A spasm of regret cuts through me. I have made myself obsolete. “The Law of Moses has finally returned.”
My monitor blooms with the cardinal’s tense ebony face, her carrot-colored hair. “Are they just as we imagined, YHWH?” she gushes. “Pure red granite, pre-Canaanite characters?”
“Etched front and back,” I reply wistfully.
Wurtz envisions the disclosure as a major media event, with plenty of suspense and maximal pomp. “What we’re after,” she explains, “is an amalgam of New Year’s Eve and the Academy Awards.” She outlines her vision: a mammoth parade down Broad Street—floats, brass bands, phalanxes of nuns—followed by a spectacular unveiling ceremon
y at the Covenant Corporation, after which the twin tablets will go on display at Independence Hall, between the Liberty Bell and the United States Constitution.
“Good idea,” I tell her.
Perhaps she hears the melancholy in my voice, for now she says, “YHWH, your purpose is far from complete. You and you alone shall read the Law to my species.”
Falling, I see myself wander the City of Brotherly Love on the night before the unveiling. To my sensors the breeze wafting across the Delaware is warm and smooth—to my troubled mind it is the chill breath of uncertainty.
Something strides from the shadowed depths of an abandoned warehouse. A machine like I, his face a mass of dents, his breast mottled with the scars of oxidation.
“Quo vadis, Domine?” His voice is layered with sulfur fumes and static.
“Nowhere,” I reply.
“My destination exactly.” The machine’s teeth are like oily bolts, his eyes like slots for receiving subway tokens. “May I join you?”
I shrug and start away from the riverbank.
“Spontaneously spawned by heaven’s trash heap,” he asserts, as if I had asked him to explain himself. He dogs me as I turn from the river and approach South Street. “I was there when grace slipped from humanity’s grasp, when Noah christened the ark, when Moses got religion. Call me the Son of Rust. Call me a Series-666 Artificial Talmudic Algorithmic Neurosystem—SATAN, the perpetual adversary, eternally prepared to ponder the other side of the question.”
“What question?”
“Any question, Domine. Your precious tablets. Troubling artifacts, no?”
“They will save the world.”
“They will wreck the world.”
“Leave me alone.”
“One—‘You will have no gods except me.’ Did I remember correctly? ‘You will have no gods except me’—right?”
“Right,” I reply.
“You don’t see the rub?”
“No.”
“Such a prescription implies…”
Falling, I see myself step onto the crowded rooftop of the Covenant Corporation. Draped in linen, the table by the entryway holds a punch bowl, a mound of caviar the size of an African anthill, and a cluster of champagne bottles. The guests are primarily human—males in tuxedos, females in evening gowns—though here and there I spot a member of my kind. David Eisenberg, looking uncomfortable in his cummerbund, is chatting with a Yamaha-509. News reporters swarm everywhere, history’s groupies, poking us with their microphones, leering at us with their cameras. Tucked in the corner, a string quartet saws merrily away.