Bible Stories for Adults

by James Morrow

  DECEMBER 20, 1999

  YOU WILL NEVER GET RID OF US, GUNTHER BLACK, OUR BOMBS ARE INEVITABLE, BUT YOU ARE NOT.

  TEN…NINE…EIGHT…SEVEN…SIX…FIVE…FOUR…THREE…TWO…

  ONE, GUNTHER.

  ONE, EH?

  JANUARY 1, 2000

  And so I am born.

  I, Gabriel White, have come to stay.

  Now that the terrible hole in my head has begun to heal, I can get down to business. I wish the doctors would release me. My wound troubles them far less than their fear that I might still be a pathetic psychoneurotic. I am not. Gunther Black is dead.

  Oh, to have seen Izzard’s expression when Proletaria detonated its atomic bomb! But, alas, self-awareness did not reach me until after the shock wave had fissured Black’s skull, and by then Izzard sat huddled in the corner, his face buried in his arms. A most spectacular advent, mine. The blast tore a piece of Black’s brow away. It flew across the office like a pebble from a slingshot. Some brain dribbled out. Nothing crucial, the doctors tell me. French lessons, they think.

  I am doing fine. The explosion has welded my fractured self whole. I am in command. Jeremy Green, Thomas Brown, Angela Lavender, Harry Silver…all five million of them know me and love me.

  Happy New Year, everyone.

  I must get to work. My people need direction and discipline—and occasionally a bit of torment. I’m going to start with Bernie Gold and his family.

  Are you there, Bernie Gold? This is Gabriel White. I am the Lord thy God, who brought you out of the house of bondage. First of all, you will have no gods except me…

  Are you getting this, Bernie? Do you hear me?

  Yes?

  Good.

  Arms and the Woman

  “WHAT did you do in the war, Mommy?”

  The last long shadow has slipped from the sundial’s face, melting into the hot Egyptian night. My children should be asleep. Instead they’re bouncing on their straw pallets, stalling for time.

  “It’s late,” I reply. “Nine o’clock already.”

  “Please,” the twins implore me in a single voice.

  “You have school tomorrow.”

  “You haven’t told us a story all week,” insists Damon, the whiner.

  “The war is such a great story,” explains Daphne, the wheedler.

  “Kaptah’s mother tells him a story every night,” whines Damon.

  “Tell us about the war,” wheedles Daphne, “and we’ll clean the whole cottage tomorrow, top to bottom.”

  I realize I’m going to give in—not because I enjoy spoiling my children (though I do) or because the story itself will consume less time than further negotiations (though it will) but because I actually want the twins to hear this particular tale. It has a point. I’ve told it before, of course, a dozen times perhaps, but I’m still not sure they get it.

  I snatch up the egg timer and invert it on the nightstand, the tiny grains of sand spilling into the lower chamber like seeds from a farmer’s palm. “Be ready for bed in three minutes,” I warn my children, “or no story.”

  They scurry off, frantically brushing their teeth and slipping on their flaxen nightshirts. Silently I glide about the cottage, dousing the lamps and curtaining the moon, until only one candle lights the twins’ room, like the campfire of some small, pathetic army, an army of mice or scarab beetles.

  “So you want to know what I did in the war,” I intone, singsong, as my children climb into their beds.

  “Oh, yes,” says Damon, pulling up his fleecy coverlet.

  “You bet,” says Daphne, fluffing her goose-feather pillow.

  “Once upon a time,” I begin, “I lived as both princess and prisoner in the great city of Troy.” Even in this feeble light, I’m struck by how handsome Damon is, how beautiful Daphne. “Every evening, I would sit in my boudoir, looking into my polished bronze mirror…”

  Helen of Troy, princess and prisoner, sits in her boudoir, looking into her polished bronze mirror and scanning her world-class face for symptoms of age—for wrinkles, wattles, pouches, crow’s-feet, and the crenelated corpses of hairs. She feels like crying, and not just because these past ten years in Ilium are starting to show. She’s sick of the whole sordid arrangement, sick of being cooped up in this overheated acropolis like a pet cockatoo. Whispers haunt the citadel. The servants are gossiping, even her own handmaids. The whore of Hisarlik, they call her. The slut from Sparta. The Lakedaimon lay.

  Then there’s Paris. Sure, she’s madly in love with him, sure, they have great sex, but can’t they ever talk?

  Sighing, Helen trolls her hairdo with her lean, exquisitely manicured fingers. A silver strand lies amid the folds like a predatory snake. Slowly she winds the offending filament around her index finger, then gives a sudden tug. “Ouch,” she cries, more from despair than pain. There are times when Helen feels like tearing all her lovely tresses out, every last lock, not simply these graying threads. If I have to spend one more pointless day in Hisarlik, she tells herself, I’ll go mad.

  Every morning, she and Paris enact the same depressing ritual. She escorts him to the Skaian Gate, hands him his spear and his lunch bucket, and with a tepid kiss sends him off to work. Paris’s job is killing people. At sundown he arrives home grubby with blood and redolent of funeral pyres, his spear wrapped in bits of drying viscera. There’s a war going on out there; Paris won’t tell her anything more. “Who are we fighting?” she asks each evening as they lie together in bed. “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it,” he replies, slipping on a sheep-gut condom, the brand with the plumed and helmeted soldier on the box.

  Until this year, Paris had wanted her to walk Troy’s high walls each morning, waving encouragement to the troops, blowing them kisses as they marched off to battle. “Your face inspires them,” he would insist. “An airy kiss from you is worth a thousand nights of passion with a nymph.” But in recent months Paris’s priorities have changed. As soon as they say good-bye, Helen is supposed to retire to the citadel, speaking with no other Hisarlikan, not even a brief coffee klatch with one of Paris’s forty-nine sisters-in-law. She’s expected to spend her whole day weaving rugs, carding flax, and being beautiful. It is not a life.

  Can the gods help? Helen is skeptical, but anything is worth a try. Tomorrow, she resolves, she will go to the temple of Apollo and beg him to relieve her boredom, perhaps buttressing her appeal with an offering—a ram, a bull, whatever—though an offering strikes her as rather like a deal, and Helen is sick of deals. Her husband—pseudohusband, nonhusband—made a deal. She keeps thinking of the Apple of Discord, and what Aphrodite might have done with it after bribing Paris. Did she drop it in her fruit bowl…put it on her mantel…impale it on her crown? Why did Aphrodite take the damn thing seriously? Why did any of them take it seriously? Hi, I’m the fairest goddess in the universe—see, it says so right here on my apple.

  Damn—another gray hair, another weed in the garden of her pulchritude. She reaches toward the villain—and stops. Why bother? These hairs are like the Hydra’s heads, endless, cancerous, and besides, it’s high time Paris realized there’s a mind under that coiffure.

  Whereupon Paris comes in, sweating and snorting. His helmet is awry; his spear is gory; his greaves are sticky with other men’s flesh.

  “Hard day, dear?”

  “Don’t ask.” Her nonhusband unfastens his breastplate. “Pour us some wine. Looking in the speculum, were you? Good.”

  Helen sets the mirror down, uncorks the bottle, and fills two bejeweled goblets with Chateau Samothrace.

  “Today I heard about some techniques you might try,” says Paris. “Ways for a woman to retain her beauty.”

  “You mean—you talk on the battlefield?”

  “During the lulls.”

  “I wish you’d talk to we.”

  “Wax,” says Paris, lifting the goblet to his lips. “Wax is the thing.” His heavy jowls undulate as he drinks. Their affair, Helen will admit, still gives her a kick.
In the past ten years, her lover has moved beyond the surpassing prettiness of an Adonis into something equally appealing, an authoritative, no-frills masculinity suggestive of an aging matinee idol. “Take some melted wax and work it into the lines in your brow—presto, they’re gone.”

  “I like my lines,” Helen insists with a quick but audible snort.

  “When mixed with ox blood, the dark silt from the River Minyeios is indelible, they say. You can dye your silver hairs back to auburn. A Grecian formula.” Paris sips his wine. “As for these redundant ounces on your thighs, well, dear, we both know there’s no cure like exercise.”

  “Look who’s talking,” Helen snaps. “Your skin is no bowl of cream. Your head is no garden of sargasso. As for your stomach, it’s a safe bet that Paris of Troy can walk through the rain without getting his belt buckle wet.”

  The prince finishes his wine and sighs. “Where’s the girl I married? You used to care about your looks.”

  “The girl you married,” Helen replies pointedly, “is not your wife.”

  “Well, yes, of course not. Technically, you’re still his.”

  “I want a wedding.” Helen takes a gluttonous swallow of Samothrace and sets the goblet on the mirror. “You could go to my husband,” she suggests. “You could present yourself to high-minded Menelaus and try to talk things out.” Reflected in the mirror’s wobbly face, the goblet grows weird, twisted, as if seen through a drunkard’s eyes. “Hey, listen, I’ll bet he’s found another maid by now—he’s something of a catch, after all. So maybe you actually did him a favor. Maybe he isn’t even mad.”

  “He’s mad,” Paris insists. “The man is angry.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know.”

  Heedless of her royal station, Helen consumes her wine with the crude insouciance of a galley slave. “I want a baby,” she says.

  “What?”

  “You know, a baby. Baby: a highly young person. My goal, dear Paris, is to be pregnant.”

  “Fatherhood is for losers.” Paris chucks his spear onto the bed. Striking the mattress, the oaken shaft disappears into the soft down. “Go easy on the vino, love. Alcohol is awfully fattening.”

  “Don’t you understand? Pm losing my mind. A pregnancy would give me a sense of purpose.”

  “Any idiot can sire a child. It takes a hero to defend a citadel.”

  “Have you found someone else, Paris? Is that it? Someone younger and thinner?”

  “Don’t be foolish. Throughout the whole of time, in days gone by and eras yet to come, no man will love a woman as much as Paris loves Helen.”

  “I’ll bet the plains of Ilium are crawling with camp followers. They must swoon over you.”

  “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it,” says Paris, unwrapping a plumed-soldier condom.

  If he ever says that to me again, Helen vows as they tumble drunkenly into bed, I’ll scream so loud the walls of Troy will fall.

  The slaughter is not going well, and Paris is depressed. By his best reckoning, he’s dispatched only fifteen Achaians to the house of Hades this morning: strong-greaved Machaon, iron-muscled Euchenor, ax-wielding Deichos, a dozen more—fifteen noble warriors sent to the dark depths, fifteen breathless bodies left to nourish the dogs and ravens. It is not enough.

  All along the front, Priam’s army is giving ground without a fight. Their morale is low, their esprit spent. They haven’t seen Helen in a year, and they don’t much feel like fighting anymore.

  With a deep Aeolian sigh, the prince seats himself atop his pile of confiscated armor and begins his lunch break.

  Does he have a choice? Must he continue keeping her in the shadows? Yes, by Poseidon’s trident—yes. Exhibiting Helen as she looks now would just make matters worse. Once upon a time, her face launched a thousand ships. Today it couldn’t get a Theban fishing schooner out of dry dock. Let the troops catch only a glimpse of her wrinkles, let them but glance at her aging hair, and they’ll start deserting like rats leaving a foundering trireme.

  He’s polishing off a peach—since delivering his famous verdict and awarding Aphrodite her prize, Paris no longer cares for apples—when two of the finest horses in Hisarlik, Aithon and Xanthos, gallop up pulling his brother’s war chariot. He expects to see Hector holding the reins, but no: the driver, he notes with a pang of surprise, is Helen.

  “Helen? What are you doing here?”

  Brandishing a cowhide whip, his lover jumps down. “You won’t tell me what this war is about,” she gasps, panting inside her armor, “so I’m investigating on my own. I just came from the swift-flowing Menderes, where your enemies are preparing to launch a cavalry charge against the camp of Epistrophos.”

  “Go back to the citadel, Helen. Go back to Pergamos.”

  “Paris, this army you’re battling—they’re Greeks. Idomeneus, Diomedes, Sthenelos, Euryalos, Odysseus—I know these men. Know them? By Pan’s flute, I’ve dated half of them. You’ll never guess who’s about to lead that cavalry charge.”

  Paris takes a stab. “Agamemnon?”

  “Agamemnon!” Sweat leaks from beneath Helen’s helmet like blood from a scalp wound. “My own brother-in-law! Next you’ll be telling me Menelaus himself has taken the field against Troy!”

  Paris coughs and says, “Menelaus himself has taken the field against Troy.”

  “He’s here?” wails Helen, thumping her breastplate. “My husband is here?”

  “Correct.”

  “What’s going on, Paris? For what purpose have the men of horse-pasturing Argos come all the way to Ilium?”

  The prince bounces his peach pit off Helen’s breastplate. Angrily he fishes for epithets. Mule-minded Helen, he calls her beneath his breath. Leather-skinned Lakedaimon. He feels beaten and bettered, trapped and tethered. “Very well, sweetheart, very well…” Helen of the iron will, the hard ass, the bronze bottom. “They’ve come for you, love.”

  “What?”

  “For you.”

  “Me? What are you talking about?”

  “They want to steal you back.” As Paris speaks, Helen’s waning beauty seems to drop another notch. Her face darkens with an unfathomable mix of anger, hurt, and confusion. “They’re pledged to it. King Tyndareus made your suitors swear they’d be loyal to whomever you selected as husband.”

  “Me?” Helen leaps into the chariot. “You’re fighting an entire, stupid, disgusting war for me?”

  “Well, not for you per se. For honor, for glory, for arete. Now hurry off to Pergamos—that’s an order.”

  “I’m hurrying off, dear”—she raises her whip—“but not to Pergamos. On, Aithon!” She snaps the lash. “On, Xanthos!”

  “Then where?”

  Instead of answering, Paris’s lover speeds away, leaving him to devour her dust.

  Dizzy with outrage, trembling with remorse, Helen charges across the plains of Ilium. On all sides, an astonishing drama unfolds, a spectacle of shattered senses and violated flesh: soldiers with eyes gouged out, tongues cut loose, limbs hacked off, bellies ripped open; soldiers, as it were, giving birth to their own bowels—all because of her. She weeps openly, profusely, the large gemlike tears running down her wrinkled cheeks and striking her breastplate. The agonies of Prometheus are a picnic compared to the weight of her guilt, the Pillars of Herakles are feathers when balanced against the crushing tonnage of her conscience.

  Honor, glory, arete: I’m missing something, Helen realizes as she surveys the carnage. The essence eludes me.

  She reaches the thick and stinking Lisgar Marsh and reins up before a foot soldier sitting in the mud, a young Myrmidon with what she assumes are a particularly honorable spear hole in his breastplate and a singularly glorious lack of a right hand.

  “Can you tell me where I might find your king?” she asks.

  “By Hera’s eyes, you’re easy to look at,” gasps the soldier as, arete in full bloom, he binds his bleeding stump with linen.

  “I need to find Menelaus.”r />
  “Try the harbor,” he says, gesturing with his wound. The bandaged stump drips like a leaky faucet. “His ship is the Arkadia.”

  Helen thanks the soldier and aims her horses toward the wine-dark sea.

  “Are you Helen’s mother, by any chance?” he calls as she races off. “What a face you’ve got!”

  Twenty minutes later, reeling with thirst and smelling of horse sweat, Helen pulls within view of the crashing waves. In the harbor beyond, a thousand strong-hulled ships lie at anchor, their masts jutting into the sky like a forest of denuded trees. All along the beach, Helen’s countrymen are raising a stout wooden wall, evidently fearful that, if the line is ever pushed back this far, the Trojans will not hesitate to burn the fleet. The briny air rings with the Achaians’ axes—with the thud and crunch of acacias being felled, palisades being whittled, stockade posts sharpened, breastworks shaped, a cacophony muffling the flutter of the sails and the growl of the surf.

  Helen starts along the wharf, soon spotting the Arkadia, a stout penteconter with half a hundred oars bristling from her sides like quills on a hedgehog. No sooner has she crossed the gangplank than she comes upon her husband, older now, striated by wrinkles, but still unquestionably he. Plumed like a peacock, Menelaus stands atop the forecastle, speaking with a burly construction brigade, tutoring them in the proper placement of the impalement stakes. A handsome man, she decides, much like the warrior on the condom boxes. She can see why she picked him over Sthenelos, Euryalos, and her other beaus.

  As the workers set off to plant their spiky groves, Helen saunters up behind Menelaus and taps his shoulder.

  “Hi,” she says.

  He was always a wan fellow, but now his face loses whatever small quantity of blood it once possessed. “Helen?” he says, gasping and blinking like a man who’s just been doused with a bucket of slop. “Is that you?”

  “Right.”

  “You’ve, er…aged.”

  “You too, sweetheart.”

  He pulls off his plumed helmet, stomps his foot on the forecastle, and says, angrily, “You ran out on me.”

  “Yes, Quite so.”