Bible Stories for Adults

by James Morrow

  The lights go out. The stage is dark but for the glowing scoreboards. God: 4,755. Satan: 3.

  JOB. Go to hell, clothes dryer!

  FRANNY. Eat worms, clothes dryer! tucker. Your sister’s ugly, clothes dryer!

  The three mortals continue hurling out curses, voices blending in a cacophony of rage.

  JOB. Go to hell!

  FRANNY. Eat worms!

  TUCKER. Your sister’s ugly!

  JOB. Hell!

  FRANNY. Worms!

  TUCKER. Ugly!

  The storm grows quiet. The lights come up. Job and Franny are nearly nude now, their garments torn off by the wind. Wads of trash cling to their flesh. The clothes dryer is still and empty.

  TUCKER. Hey, you guys are naked!

  JOB. “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb…”

  FRANNY. “And naked shall I return thither…”

  TUCKER. Will you show me what screwing looks like?

  FRANNY. Right now we just want to get out of here.

  TUCKER. Where’re we goin’?

  JOB. I don’t know. East. We’re looking for something.

  TUCKER. What?

  JOB. Better major appliances.

  TUCKER. Anything else?

  FRANNY. “Number Forty-two: Patriot Missile Control Center.”

  JOB. “Number Seventeen: General Colin Powell.”

  FRANNY. I hear Frigidaire has a good product line.

  JOB. I’m told you can’t go wrong with a Maytag.

  Tucker pulls his trading cards from his shirt. Job and Franny join bands and together they start to wheel Tucker away.

  TUCKER. (Studying checklist card) How about “Number Fifty-one: Ready for Takeoff”?

  JOB. We’ll find one.

  TUCKER. And “Number Six: Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney”?

  JOB. Sure, Tucker.

  TUCKER. It’s pretty rare.

  FRANNY. So are you, kid.

  Job, Franny, and Tucker disappear offstage. Their voices drift across the ruins of the dung heap.

  TUCKER. “Number Twenty-three: Midair Refueling”?

  JOB. Of course.

  TUCKER. “Number Thirty-five: Bombs Over Baghdad”?

  FRANNY. Naturally.

  TUCKER. “Number Fifty-eight: Burning Oil Wells”?

  JOB. Right.

  TUCKER. “Number Sixty-five: Mission Accomplished”?

  FRANNY. Yeah…

  Lights fade out.

  Curtain.

  Diary of a Mad Deity

  OCTOBER 17, 1999

  I AWOKE in a strange place. A dark window, speckled with rain, loomed over me like a diseased mirror. The bed was a kind of minimalist arena, large and sunken; I found myself imagining an audience around the perimeter, awaiting the start of some pornographic sports event. I pushed back the silk sheets—what was all this costing me?—and stumbled to the window, staring down at the galaxy of lights. Manhattan? Yes, there stood the World Trade Center, there the Empire State Building. I could even see my old stomping ground, Queens. At least I hadn’t left town. Dawn washed across the city like slow surf.

  “Hello, Jack.”

  A soft, purring voice, as if from a larynx soaked in honey. I turned. On the bed lay a svelte, large-lipped brunette dressed in nothing but a sheet.

  “Ready for another hayride?” the woman asked, patting the mattress. “Now I know why they call you Jack, darling. You could lift a Winnebago with that lever of yours.”

  It is all preposterous, of course. I am no Don Juan, and my name, as you well know, dearest diary, is Gunther Black. In the last year, people have tried to pin “Jeremy Green,”

  “Thomas Brown,” and most improbably, “Ernest Red” on me. Jack? That was a new one.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “Park Avenue. The Mayfair Regent. Your treat, remember?” Alarmed, the woman tore the sheet away. “I’m certainly not paying for it.” Her nipples stared at me accusingly.

  “Park Avenue?” I didn’t remember leaving SoHo. “Really?” I blinked the murk from my eyes. Oriental rug, crystal chandelier, large-screen TV, a champagne bottle buried to the neck in cracked ice: Jack had taste, I’d give him that. My pants were draped across a velour sofa. A few seconds of fumbling produced my wallet. I pulled out two twenties and let them flutter to the mattress like origami birds. “Send out for some breakfast,” I said, dressing. “Don’t worry, I’ll pay for the room.”

  “I should hope so, Jack.”

  I never even learned her name.

  OCTOBER 18, 1999

  Another nightmare about my sister. Brittany and I are in a besieged snow fort. Bloody corpses brush our knees. Snowballs fly toward us like grapeshot canisters. “I hope summer comes soon,” Brittany says.

  “Tomorrow,” I tell her.

  A fearsome ice ball sails over the rampart and strikes her neck. The impact is incredible, cutting through flesh, vertebrae, spinal cord. Her severed head hits a snowdrift, staining the whiteness.

  “Tomorrow will be too late,” her head explains.

  OCTOBER 20, 1999

  After three cups of coffee and an hour watching the Comedy Channel, I finally got a good start on the new novel, tentatively titled Antichrist. Jesus returns, only it’s really Satan in disguise. He gets elected president of the United States by a landslide and turns the White House into a den of perversion, torture, murder, and sadism.

  My editor wants to cash in on the millennium.

  I compose my rough drafts on legal pads. My desk is an upended closet door supported by cinder blocks. Why? What is wrong with me? For years now I’ve been making enough to buy a computer and move uptown, but the maddening leaks in my bank account keep me stuck in this cockroach preserve on Third Street, writing on a door. The building styles itself an artists’ community, so I should feel at home. I don’t. Around here an artist is someone who fashions ten-foot-high phalli from poured concrete, performs in scorched-earth experimental theater, or creates “nonfigurative television” out of synthesized feedback and mutilated videotape. An author of paperback novels for Dungeon Press is automatically consigned to the arrière garde.

  Even after my recent successes—three best-sellers in as many years—I would still rather edit horror novels than write them, but so far no house has kept me for more than a month. I am told that I abuse the authors, writing cruel remarks on their manuscripts. I don’t.

  Except I do, apparently—during my “fugue states,” as Dr. Izzard terms my bouts of amnesia. Tuneless fugues, these. Helplessly I carom between the Scylla of remembered nightmare and the Charybdis of forgotten action. My loft overflows with clothes I did not buy, parking tickets I did not earn, and yogurt of unknown origin. A strange calico cat paces around on my makeshift desk, wearing our mutual address on her collar. Magazines to which I did not subscribe arrive regularly, bearing the names of Jeremy Green, Thomas Brown, and Ernest Red. Evidently these men have nothing in common: Jeremy takes Mother Jones, Thomas gets Forbes, and Mr. Red—wouldn’t you know?—is a Guns and Ammo reader. How long before “Jack” gets hold of my address? How long before Crotch Shots appears in my mailbox?

  For six months I’ve been bringing Dr. Izzard my complaints: blackouts, nightmares, headaches, insomnia, appetite loss. On Friday, finally, he’ll give me his “preliminary diagnosis.” My own preliminary diagnosis is that I am out of my skull and getting farther from its vicinity every day.

  OCTOBER 21, 1999

  We are in a pumpkin patch, selecting a future jack-o’-lantern. Brittany alights on a gigantic specimen, a kind of organic boulder, and stabs it with her penknife. No subconscious invention here—Brittany was a girl who knew about knives.

  The pumpkin is Pandora’s box. Hideous creatures rush out—hornets, dragonflies, bats, ropes of fibrous black smoke—falling on Brittany with carnivorous zeal, shucking the flesh from her bones.

  Last time it was a snowball, before that a sea urchin, before that the globular head of a medieval mace. Why is my sister always kill
ed by a sphere?

  OCTOBER 22, 1999

  This has been the strangest day of my life. My lives, I should say, if I interpret my illness correctly.

  A headache hit me like a jackhammer breaking into my cranium. I collapsed on Izzard’s plush velvet couch. Then: nothingness. Then: “Gunther, is that you?”

  “Who else?”

  “I’m with Gunther now, correct?” Izzard took a long puff. I had spent the morning trying to cleanse Antichrist of clichés only to find myself talking to a psychiatrist with a pipe. “Listen, Gunther, what I’m about to tell you will sound bizarre and perhaps frightening.”

  “It’s hopeless,” I said. “I’m insane.”

  “Hopeless? No. Rare, certainly. No more than two hundred cases ever reported.” Izzard puffed. I don’t believe he enjoys tobacco, but he loves collecting pipes whose bowls are sculpted to resemble movie stars. Today he is smoking Peter Lorre, an actor whose roundish features and poached-egg eyes might have informed the prototype of Izzard himself. “You are certainly not insane. I believe you suffer from dissociation—a severe but treatable psychoneurosis. You’ve heard of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?”

  Had the Pope heard of the Virgin Mary? “I’m a horror writer, remember?” An odd thrill wove through me. I was deranged, but romantically deranged: a good, old-fashioned Gothic monster, hobbling along London’s cobblestone streets, serpents of fog entwining my bent frame and fractured psyche. “One of my favorites.”

  “Stevenson did a remarkable job of anticipating the syndrome, but he got one thing wrong.” Izzard’s accent also owes something to Peter Lorre, a mildly depraved European wheeze. “Jekyll knew about Hyde’s comings and goings, whereas in actual split-personality cases the parasites so resent the body’s true owner that they refuse to enter his consciousness. Do I make sense?” A Möbius strip of smoke rose from my therapist’s pipe. “In the last few weeks I’ve met Jeremy Green, Thomas Brown, Ernest Red, and Jack Silver—introduced them to each other, discussed your case with them. They will always remain strangers to you. You will know them only through inference.”

  “Through their magazine subscriptions, you mean? The food they leave in the refrigerator?”

  “Exactly.”

  I was on the upswing of a roller-coaster plunge, at the point where one’s stomach is riding several feet above one’s heart: dizzy, yet glad to be beyond the worst. “This is hard to absorb.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Split, you said. I sound shattered.”

  “Multiple, we call it. You’re a multiple.”

  A multiple. The beast had a name. I had met the enemy and he was I. No, they—Jeremy and Thomas and the others to whom I was host. “I’d rather be insane.”

  Izzard switched the burning Peter Lorre for a cold Spencer Tracy. “I’ll give you some articles to read, the famous cases—Ansel Bourne, Sally Beauchamp, Billy Milligan. A few became popular books, but most are only in the professional literature.” He slid back a file drawer and, after rummaging around, drew out an issue of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. “As I recall, Sybil Dorsett’s life was done on flat-screen television in the seventies, and Joanne Woodward got an Academy Award for The Three Faces of Eve. Both stories had happy endings, Gunther. The patients were cured.”

  I took the magazine, dated winter of 1993. A multiple personality named Felix Bass had made the cover. “My others—what are they like?”

  “From what he’s told me, I would describe Jeremy Green as a left-wing intellectual. Thomas Brown is a Christian fundamentalist with generally conservative leanings. Ernest Red is a ruffian who fancies himself a big-game hunter and soldier of fortune. Jack Silver—ever wake up with an inexplicable hangover?”

  “Often.”

  “Jack gave them to you. A hedonist.” Izzard filled Spencer Tracy with tobacco, tamped it down. Am I wise to entrust my remaining shreds of sanity to this odd little gnome? “Our goal will be to integrate your separate selves into a single consciousness, someone who has command of his predecessors’ memories.” He lit his pipe. “To do that we must first locate the root of your dissociation.”

  “You’ll hypnotize me?”

  “Hypnosis is a blunt, inelegant tool—I can see why Freud abandoned it. Dream analysis will get us much further. Mere talking will get us furthest of all.”

  “You know about my nightmares.”

  “They always end with your sister’s death, correct?”

  “Always.”

  “In truth she was murdered.”

  I had told him the story twice already. “Stabbed by some punks in Kissena Park,” I said, clipping each syllable, hoping he sensed my impatience.

  “The multiple personality typically suffers from unconscious hatred against a family member. Usually a parent, sometimes a sibling.”

  “I loved my sister.”

  “I don’t doubt it.” Izzard gave Spencer Tracy an emphatic puff. “But only after draining the swamp of your inner life will we have enough solid ground on which to construct the new you—the healed, controlling, omniscient ego.”

  “The new me. And what about the old me?”

  “It will disappear.”

  “Sounds like murder.”

  “No, Gunther. Birth.”

  OCTOBER 26, 1999

  This afternoon I fell asleep trying to provide Antichrist with a Chapter Three. A Brittany dream came—the first I’ve ever had during the daytime.

  We are in a private swimming pool, romping in the turquoise water. A beach ball glides into my hands. “Throw it here,” Brittany calls. I comply. As her arms cradle the ball, it explodes like a grenade, leaving an archipelago of blood on the water.

  I awoke. Chapter Three hovered before me, scrawled in ballpoint on my legal pad. “…as Lucifer’s talons, slashing across her bodice, revealed the lush, forbidden fruits he had craved so long.”

  Which is where I had stopped. The text, however, continued:

  YOU WILL NEVER GET RID OF US, GUNTHER BLACK.

  YOU ARE OUTNUMBERED BEYOND HOPE.

  GIVE UP.

  OCTOBER 29, 1999

  Today Izzard decided to administer Rorschach tests to my other selves. “Let me talk to Thomas, please,” he said, opening a spiral-bound notebook on his knees.

  Was that all it took to evoke one of these characters? Unlikely, I thought.

  A migraine sawed through my skull.

  Fugue state…

  Coming out of it, I immediately sensed Izzard’s distress. His hands lay folded on his lap in a tight, lumpy bundle. Grotesque cartoon faces were doodled across two adjacent pages in his notebook.

  “What’s the problem?” I asked.

  “Am I talking to Gunther now?” Izzard demanded. Even from the couch, I could see that each cartoon face bore a name. “Gunther?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good.”

  “Don’t tell me—they all flunked the Rorschach.”

  “I never administered it,” Izzard confessed. The cartoon faces wore varied expressions. A few smiled. Many frowned. One shed tears. Another had an elaborate grid of teeth, his lips pulled into a grimace. “I couldn’t. Others kept emerging, personalities I hadn’t met before.”

  “Others.” The word stuck in my throat like a burr.

  Izzard scanned his notes. “Amos Indigo. A real bohemian, I’d say. Currently writing a short story about a talking calico cat. Leon Mauve, a homosexual with a passion for midnight screenings of cult films.”

  “That explains the ticket stubs.”

  “Alexander Yellow. A blatant racist, I’m sorry to report. Bernie Gold, however, plans to write an expose of antisemitism in America.”

  I attempted to smile, lost heart at midpoint. “So, including me, we’ve got nine, right? I have nine heads, like the Hydra.”

  Izzard gulped. Repression is not a soothing sign in a psychiatrist.

  “You’re not finished, are you?” I said.

  He flipped a notebook page: dozens of faces, each with a name a
nd a characteristic countenance. “It’s surely the most baroque case ever reported. Sybil Dorsett had seventeen personalities altogether. You’ve got…” He fixed on his notes. “William Orange, Roger Vermilion, Jason Gray, Peter Pink, Ilene Amber, Judith Fuchsia…I’ll be candid, Gunther. A total of fifty-nine separate selves appeared today. And there may be more.”

  “Fifty-nine?”

  “Fifty-nine.”

  “Jesus. Ilene, you said? And Judith? I have women inside me?”

  “If you believe Carl Jung,” said Izzard, “we all have women inside us.”

  NOVEMBER 23, 1999

  This morning I read the first five chapters of Antichrist, a hundred pages coated with ballpoint scrawl. They are uniformly awful. It is hard to believe that the man who wrote Sermons by Satan and Cacodaemon perpetrated this tripe.

  NOVEMBER 5, 1999

  I awoke at three A.M. Brittany and I had been drifting over Queens in a hot-air balloon. A rope had broken, the basket had tilted, and my sister had fallen into the sky…

  “You’re certain it was your sister?” Izzard asked during our session.

  “Positive.”

  “Her death, her real death—let me hear about it once more.”

  I flattened myself against the couch. “It’s a horrible story.”

  “How old was she?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “And you?”

  “Ten. We lived in Queens, a Corona Avenue apartment near 108th Street.” So there I was, tricked by Izzard into telling it again. “One of those hot summer nights when the air feels like a snail’s skin. Mom sent us to buy milk. A safe neighborhood—streetlamps, lots of cops. It should have been okay, but Brittany insisted we hike home through the park. I really don’t like talking about this.”

  “Kissena Park?”

  “Kissena. Right. Suddenly something catches Brittany’s eye, and she charges away. A full moon, but I still can’t find her, not anywhere. Finally I run home. Dad has to slap me before I stop crying. He calls the police, and then everybody goes to the park, and they spot her about an hour later. It took them a while because the bushes were so dense. Two dozen stab wounds.”

  “Did you see the corpse?”

  “Not that night, only at the funeral. By then they’d covered her with cosmetics.”