99 Stories of God (7 page)

“Was it …” the child hesitated, searching for the right word “…
consoling
?”

“Yes,” the lion said. “An inexplicably consoling irony filled my heart.”

“Will I experience the same, do you think?”

“I don’t know,” the lion said, a little afraid for them both for the first time. “Perhaps not.”

“I would not know what irony is,” the child said.

There was a game they liked to play when they were midway in life’s journey, but still healthy, still lustful and keen.

It was: Who could get you to cry in the fewest words?

Of course, some of the best effects were made when everyone was drunk.

He remembered this girl had a good one once.

The last whale swam deeper …

But one of the best was a line from Chekhov’s
Three Sisters.

You mean, I’m being left behind?

He couldn’t remember many others. They hadn’t played the game in years.

The Lord was living with a great colony of bats in a cave. Two boys with BB guns found the cave and killed many of the bats outright, leaving many more to die of their injuries. The boys didn’t see the Lord. He didn’t make His presence known to them.

On the other hand, the Lord was very fond of the bats but had done nothing to save them.

He was becoming harder and harder to comprehend.

He liked to hang with the animals, everyone knew that, the whales and bears, the elephants and bighorn sheep and wolves. They were rather wishing He wasn’t so partial to their company.

Hang more in the world of men, they begged Him.

But the Lord said He was lonely there.

He was in the chapel, waiting. He was a little early.

A man came in, genuflected carelessly before the altar, and sat down beside him. “How’s it going?” he said.

“My mother has to do something in the undercroft,” the boy said. “She’ll be up shortly.”

“You know that’s just the basement,” the man said, “another word for
basement
.”

“I’m here for the blessing of the backpacks. It’s the blessing of the backpacks today.”

The man grinned. “What a lovely idea. Reverend Margaret has the loveliest ideas. What’s in your backpack?”

“Nothing. Some pencils.”

“Gum.”

“Gum too,” he admitted.

“My name’s Joe,” the man said. “You ever hear the song?”

Hello! My name is Joe.

And I work at the button factory!

I have a house and a dog and a family!

One day my boss came to me.

He said: Joe! Are you busy?

I said No!

He said …

“I don’t know it,” the boy said.

“What’s your name?”

“Tobias.”

“You ever seen the painting
Tobias and the Three Archangels
? Botticini. Fifteenth century. Listen, I want to tell you something, because this blessing of the backpacks or whatever silliness Margaret has dreamed up will happen any minute. I want to tell you: Christ and Jesus were separate souls. Okay?”

“I guess,” Tobias said.

“Jesus prepared his physical body to receive Christ, and at a certain point in his life vacated this body so as to allow Christ to take it over and preach to the world. Christ was such a highly evolved soul that it would have been impossible for him to have incarnated as a baby, and even if he could have done so, it would have been a waste of precious time to have to go through childhood.”

“Sometimes I wish I wasn’t going into just the second grade,” Tobias said.

“Exactly! Childhood is unnecessary for certain individuals.”

Joe patted him on the shoulder. “Maybe I’ll see you around,” he said. “Maybe we’ll talk again.” He went out just as a half a dozen children were coming in, through the big red doors. Tobias knew them and all their pretty, friendly mothers. His own mother appeared then, too, along with the Reverend Margaret.

I wish I was going into the fourth grade, Tobias thought.

Jesus spoke in Aramaic, but His sayings were transcribed in Greek, a generation after His time on earth. Aramaic and Greek are different languages. Very different. The differences are profound. This fact cannot be emphasized enough.

But none of Jesus’s teachings were written down in Aramaic.

She was reading a review of a book about the life of Houdini. No one knew how he had made the elephant disappear. She was at that moment in the review where this was discussed for the first time. It was in 1918. The elephant’s name was Jennie, not with a
Y
. She thought she might buy this book, but even then she would not learn how Houdini had made Jennie disappear, because it simply was not known. And no illusionist had managed to reproduce the trick or even put forth a plausible explanation of how it had been accomplished.

She was reading a broadside that reviewed a number of books. The reviews were extremely intelligent and gracefully presented. She read about a cluster of works by Thomas Bernhard, the cranky genius of Austrian literature, works that had just been translated into English. She doubted that she would buy these books. She learned that he always referred to his lifelong companion, Hedwig Stavianicek, as his “aunt.” She was thirty-seven years older than Bernhard. She couldn’t imagine that she had been his lifelong companion for long.

She had had a fever for several days and she was loafing around, drinking fluids and reading. With her fever, the act of reading became ever stranger to her. First the words were solid, sternly limiting her perception of them to what she already knew. Then they became more frighteningly expansive, tapping into twisting arteries of memory. Then they became transparent, rendering them invisible.

She liked her fevers. They brought her information she could not express to others.

Then she thought that the gangster phrase
If I told you, I’d have to kill you
came directly from the Gnostic Book of Thomas.

Five days before his death on May 16, 1958, the writer and film critic James Agee wrote a letter to his beloved longtime correspondent the Reverend James Harold Flye. The letter, never mailed, speaks of a film Agee wished to make concerning elephants.

He was haunted by the cruel death of a circus elephant in Tennessee in 1916. The elephant had gone berserk and killed three men. It was decided that she should be hung, and thousands of people turned out for the execution. She was strung to a railroad derrick and, after several hours, died.

This would be the basis for the film, but he also envisioned the choreographer George Balanchine training a troupe of elephants in a corps de ballet who perform their duties to the music of Stravinsky while a crowd roars with laughter. So humiliated are the elephants that they later set themselves ablaze, whereupon “their huge souls, light as clouds, settle like doves, in the great secret cemetery back in Africa.”

Agee never explained how he would go about making such a film.

My father’s fourth wife lived the long death, as they say. In other words, she became mad as a hatter while still quite young. She believed my father, a novelist, had quite imagined every aspect of her life before they met and there was nothing for her to do other than thwart this unholy talent and become brutishly mad, quite unlike the gracious creature he had imagined. She lived in soiled pajamas, collected rocks, and drank staggeringly inventive gin concoctions all day long.

My father had imagined his other wives as well, even my mother, but rather than take such dramatic measures to command their own fate, they had simply divorced him. The fourth wife, however, found her own way and stuck with it. Our days are as grass and our years as a tale that is told, she quite rightly believed.

She just did not want her tale to be my father’s.

He could have written another novel, of course—he was always writing—in which a fourth young wife became quite mad, but this would be quite after the fact, she was clever enough to realize, and quite irrelevant.

There was a famous writer who had a house on the coast. He was entertaining another writer for the weekend, this one less well known, but nonetheless with a name that was recognized by many. A third writer, whose husband had died unexpectedly only two days before, had also been invited for the evening. This was done
at the last minute,
an act of graciousness, as the woman was on her way south, on a trip she and her husband had long intended.

This writer was the least famous of the three. People couldn’t get a handle on her stuff.

The famous writer and his wife made fish baked in salt for supper. There were many bottles of wine. The third writer’s husband was remembered off and on, fondly.

There was a guest house on the property, and she was invited to spend the night there. Her dog, however, would have to stay in a kennel that was also on the acreage. Or, if she preferred, her car. But not in the guest house.

But she wanted the dog to be with her. It was only the third night of her husband’s death. She probably just should have driven off and found a motel somewhere. But it was late. So late.

She didn’t want the dog to sleep on the cold earth of the kennel. He was old, almost thirteen years old. She and her husband had had him all that time.

Finally, irritably, the famous writer allowed them to stay in one small room in the guest house. The rather known writer said nothing during this battle of wills. She smiled and shrugged. She herself had never had a dog, though she used them freely in her fiction, where they appeared real enough.

The widow lay in the smallest room of the guest house with her dog. Never had she felt so bereft. She had signed a number of papers only that morning at the funeral home. Cremation is not reversible, someone there said. She couldn’t imagine why they would say such a thing. She wished she had requested his belt. And the black cashmere sweater the medics had ripped in half when they first arrived.

He had worn that belt every day for years. Sometimes she’d put some leather preservative on it. And now she didn’t have it.

Oh God, she thought.

Over the years, our succession of beloved dogs were always losing their identification tags.

Since we traveled frequently and often chose areas to pass through where the dogs could run free and tussle, our dogs lost their identification tags in at least a dozen states. Frequently these tags, which included our home address as well as a telephone number, would be returned to us through the mail with a short note of greeting and good wishes.

With the exception of one finder who was not a realtor or an insurance agent, all the finders who contacted us were realtors or insurance agents who enclosed their business cards.

Late in every summer, our local paper prints an article about recreational hiking in the desert. Each year several hikers die of dehydration in our scenic mountains. The question the article always addresses is: How much water should be shared with a needy stranger gasping trailside from the heat?

“If it came down to having enough for myself or helping someone, I’d have to drink my own water,” a Phoenix businesswoman said most recently, adding that for her it was an
ethical
decision, with a bit of belief in the survival of the fittest mixed in.

She liked traveling through the American Southwest and staying in the rooms of old hotels in forgotten towns. The questionable cleanliness of the rooms did not bother her, nor did the indifferent food served at erratic times in the local cafés. She went to markets and churches, bought trinkets and the occasional rug. She never had any real experiences, but she was content. This was how she spent her monthlong vacation year after year. She was a teacher of history and mathematics, though not a particularly dedicated one. She moved them along, the little ones.

One evening, in a particularly garish room of awkward dimension, jammed with oak furniture, with prints of long-ago parades covering the walls, after preparing a drinking a cup of tea—she always brought the supplies for tea time with her, including a heating coil—she realized she had no idea who she was or why the end of a day would find her in this close room. She felt anxious but did not give in to the temptation of making herself a stronger cup. Instead she decided to remove the few articles of clothing she had placed in the bureau drawer and return them to her valise. This gave her the feeling she would soon be on her way again.

Removing the cargo pants with just the touch of spandex to add stretch and the linen shirt with hidden button-front placket—garments as yet unworn, which added to the sense of unfamiliarity and unease—she noticed writing in the bottom of the drawer. Under the sensible beam of the flashlight she always carried with her, she read: