The Living End (10 page)

Something beyond even repression that the faithful could get past but not she. Not herself. Not Mary.

Something beyond even revulsion.

She liked children well enough (though she could never look at one without being reminded of where it had come from, how it had got there, and “Yes,” God the Father had beamed, “that’s one of the reasons you were chosen”) and had even, by her lights, been a good enough mother, though she couldn’t have managed without Joseph. Who changed him, cleaned him, Maryshe couldn’t help it, she’d have been otherwise if she could-not up to it, unable in her fastidious purity even to wipe his nose or brush his lips with a cloth when he spit up let alone deal with the infant’s bowels and urine. If it had been possible she’d have had Joseph nurse it, too. That had been one of her more difficult ordeals, harder for her than the pregnancy, harder than the birth itself, harder even than the Crucifixion (Mary in the limelight too, her pie th postures and public tabloid grief real, felt-she’d loved him, she’d done more, she believed his story, not only mother to the Messiah but his first convert too, her belief antecedent even to Joseph’s who’d had a prophecy off an angel, some tout of the Lord, although-who knew?-he may have dismissed the report or, what was more likely, rationalized it, his belief defensive, self protective as if it had come from some tout of psychology, while she believed what she believed because the event had only confirmed what her body already knew-though the loss was everyone’s by that time, ownerless as band soap), the nursing terrible for her, her breast offered reluctantly to those cunning lips, the strange, greedy mouth-the poor thing must have been starving; he wouldn’t accept the breasts of wet nurses, you couldn’t fool it with goat’s milk-the nibbling repulsive to her, awful.

“Sure,” God had said, “that’s why I chose you.” (Because there was something no one knew, not Joseph, not Jesus, God, of course, though He never spoke of it. It was just that she didn’t understand either, as the savages hadn’t, as children didn’t, the mystery that was beyond the range even of the missionaries, of the popes, of the saints and martyrs. It was how He had done it, how it had been done. She had thought-it was silly, it was crazy, but God didn’t draw pictures, He didn’t make explanations- she had thought-it was stupid, she was ashamed, she was being alannist she thought-it was blaspbemous-that the child had done it, that the Christ was somehow father to himself, had fertilized the egg himself, that he’d lived down there always, in the warm female bath, till even the milk he sucked was his own, milk he’d made, first passing it through all the loops and ligatures of her body, the body they shared.) But she couldn’t have done it without Joseph. And that’s why he’d been chosen, the marriage, as they’d all been then, arranged, made by their parents, the young man timid as herself, with as little desire, more brother than husband, more good friend than brother.

They had never touched each other. Something beyond purity and beyond aversion, too. (What am I?

she wondered. What’s Joseph?) It had been comfortable to think that they lived under some proscription.

It was, she knew, what the world thought. But nothing had been proscribed. The fact was that Joseph was frightened, the fact was that she was.

(She was too old now, of course. But God wasn’t. Not Him, not the Lord. He was the Creator and He’d been around the block a few times. With Leda, with Semele, with Alcmene, with Ino and Europa and Dana& In all His kinky ava tars and golden bough Being and beginnings. He was a resourceful lover and came at you as holy livestock or moved in like a front of gilded weather. Who knew but what there wasn’t life in the old dog yet?) So the Queen of Heaven and Joseph, her consort, lived at court under a sort of house arrest. Coming and going in politest society, leash less as God Himself, or Christ, or the Holy Ghost too, given free rein, carte blanche, but neither of them ever testing the waters of that freedom.

They said miracles still happened, that from time to time her statues wept. Why not? She knew how they felt.

She summoned a page.

“Ma’am?”

“You’re the new boy,” said the Holy Mother.

“I’m Flanoy, Ma’am.”

“Flanoy, yes. How do you like Heaven, Flanoy?” The cherub flushed. (More places one must not stare, Mary thought. New parts one must avoid. Where the wings were joined to the back. The space they fit into between the shoulder blades when they were retracted. The complicated secret parts of seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominations, virtues, powers, principalities, archangels and angels, saints, the elect, and all the ordinary saved. Stigmata. One must not look at stigmata. The inner edge of the nimbus. The fabulous scalare of God.) “Not used to us yet?”

“I miss my friends,” Flanoy said.

“I miss my parents.”

“Ah,” said the Virgin.

“Well, they must be very proud you’re here.”

“Yes, Ma’am. If they know.”

“They’re not believers?” Flanoy shifted uneasily. The coverts of his wings thickened with color.

“It’s all right,” said the Virgin Mary, “I’ve no say in these things.”

“I don’t know, Ma’am,” Flanoy said.

She wanted to say something else to him. She liked to be on good terms with the help.

“Well you mustn’t be frightened,” she said.

“Heaven is quite nice really.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” Flanoy said uncertainly, “it’s just that-” “Yes?”

“Ies so high.”

The Holy Virgin smiled.

“Yes. Heaven is very high,” she said.

“Play something for us please, Flanoy.”

“Play?”

“Your music.”

“I’m only in the second book of Suzuki.”

“Play something for us while we nap,” said the Virgin Mother gently.

The child raised his fiddle.

Quiz, in Hell, heard the first faint strains of “Sheep May Safely Graze” and looked in the direction of the music. The others, unaware of it, flared by like tracers, like comets, like shooting stars, like some unquenched astronomy white with reentry. Look at them, Quiz thought. Like teams of horses.

Runaways, their harness on fire. No longer in pain himself, he could enjoy the spectacle, their aurora boreal tic frenzy and lasered essence charming as fireworks to the appreciative ex-groundskeeper.

“Hey,” he called, “hey. You guys are beautiful, you know? You look like a World Premier.” He laughed.

“You look like fucking Chinese New Year’s. Come on,” he said when they snarled at him, “you got to stop and smell the flowers.” One of the damned, infuriated, came raging to embrace him, uselessly attempting to ignite him.

“No you don’t,” Quiz said, “it won’t work. I’m asbestos now, I’m cool as a cucumber.”

“You’re a dud,” the tormented man screamed, “you’re a dud,” he said, helplessly weeping.

“Yeah,” Quiz said, not without kindness, “I’m a dud. I won’t go off.”

The lost soul beat at him with his fiery fists, then, looking at Quiz with wonder, opened his hands and touched him, not with hatred now but as if struck by a sudden solace.

“What?” Quiz asked.

“What?”

The man smiled and continued to hold him, relief moving across his face like sunset.

“You’re cool,” he said.

“You’re cool. I can douse myself in you. He’s cool,” he shouted.

“My hands are cool where I touch him.”

“Hey,” Quiz said, “hey.”

Others moved toward him, groping for space on his body, desperate to get at least a finger on him. And

“Hey,” Quiz called, “hey. There isn’t enough of me. I ain’t any HeIrs olly olly Ashen free. Let go. Hey.

Let go. Hey, get me out of here,” he cried, and suddenly the music was louder in his head and he felt himself floating free of Hell.

“I’m being translated,” he called as he rose above them, their heat lending him lift, loft, the demon aerodynamics of Hell. He rose. He rose and rose. Climbing the Gothic spaces of the Underworld, floating up beyond the eaves of Hell, carried high impossible distances, escaped as a balloon from the grip of a child.

His stepson had already seen him.

“Pop,” Christ said, “how are you?”

The old man shrugged and the boy embraced him, kissed his cheek.

“You need anything, Pop? Are they taking care of you?”

“What I need I got,” he said.

“So,” said the stepson cheerfully, “what’s doing, Pop?” The old man made a sly deprecative gesture.

“You should have been up there on the Cross with me,” he kidded.

“No fooling, Pop, I mean it. You’ve got miles on me long- suffering wise Joseph looked at him steadily, sizing him up, measuring him as he might, in the old days, have measured wood.

“Say it,” said the stepson.

“Shoot.”

“Why should I say it? I said it already a million times. Why should I say it? You like hearing it so much?”

“A million this, a million that. What is it, Pop? That the only number you know?”

“I’m a humble fella. A humble fella says a million he’s got in mind maybe six or seven.”

“Humble shmumble,” said Jesus.

“Tinhorn,” said Joseph.

“There you go, Pop. I knew you’d get round to it.”

“You started.”

“Me?” the Christ said innocently.

“You. You. With your vaudeville Yiddish, your Pop’s and What’s doing’s, your mocky mockery. You, Tinhorn, you.”

“Come on, Pop. Look around. Be a little realistic please.”

“Get your legs fixed.”

“Here we go,” Christ said wearily.

“Get your legs fixed, take a therapy for your hands you shouldn’t go in the streets like you have on boxing gloves.” Pop.”

“You wanted to hear it? So hear. You ain’t him.”

“That’s not what He says.”

“When the Holy One, Blessed be He, makes a joke He shakes the world with His laughter.”

“I’m him, Pop.”

“Sure, and I’m the contractor who built this place.”

Quiz, in Heaven, feeling good, his felicity only a little tempered by the fact that no one had met him. In life, too, no one had much met him. He’d carried his own suitcases, stopped at the “Y”-not a churchgoer, it was this, he believed, which had saved him, his decision to sleep among Christians at Y.M.C.A.s- seen L.A. and Chicago and other cities from air-conditioned tour buses. Indeed, he had come away from these towns with the vague impression that they had a slightly greenish cast to them. Heaven had no such cast.

Heaven was pure light, its palaces and streets, its skies and landscapes primary as acrylic, lustered as lipstick. There was nothing of Hell’s dinge or filtered, mitigate shade. It struck him that Heaven was like nothing so much as one of those swell new cities in the Sun Belt-Phoenix, Tucson.

It was a gradual thing, his growing uneasiness. Not much offended at not being met, he nevertheless felt that he’d like to get settled and had determined to start looking around for a “Y” when this cripple came loping up.

“God bless you,” said the cripple.

“Sorry, buddy, I don’t give handouts,” said Quiz, and a magnificent nimbus suddenly bloomed behind the Christ’s head like the fanned tail of a peacock.

Quiz, in Heaven, on his knees before the Master, making rapid signs of the cross, his fingers flashing from forehead to breastbone, breastbone to left shoulder, left shoulder to right, boxing the compass, sending pious semaphore.

“Come see God,” Christ said, and the man who gave no handouts offered the Saviour his arm and they were in God’s throne room and God Himself up on the bench and Quiz all lavish, choreographed humility, prostrate in Moslem effacement, his nose burrowing a jeweled treasury of floor, but put upon, wondering if this were any position for an American, even a dead one, to be in. Barely hearing Christ’s words, their meaning slurred by his fear. “-the man You smote… redeemed from Hell… thought You would want…

perfect act of contrition.”

And Quiz, daring at last to raise his head, to poke it up like someone strafers have made a pass at and missed, marshaling his features, managing to look wounded, injured, aggrieved, forgiving but not quite forgetting.

“You go too far,” God told His son.

Because he don’t love me, Joseph thought. Because he’s adopted. He goes around like that to spite Him, to get His attention, His goat he’s after. What do I care he ain’t perfect? What do I care he ain’t him?

What a business. We walked around on eggshells with each other, nervous even when we were alone.

Sure. Could I watch her undress? Could I hold her in my arms whom the Lord had His eye on? What a business. Because I’m old- fashioned, a zealot of the Lord, and take from Him what a real man wouldn’t take from nobody. They call me cuckold and saint me for it. I know what I know if I don’t know my rights. He ain’t him. I love him, but he ain’t. What can I do but go along if He in His infinite wisdom Abrahams me and Isaacs the kid, the one time testing a father, the next a husband? Loyalty oaths He wants, guarantees every fifty thousand miles. All right, He has them. So when does He call me in?

When does He say “Well done, good and faithful servant? It was a hoax, my little two- thousand-year joke. Go home. Cleave unto Mary. If she’ll still have you.” What a business. What a business.

In Hell, Quiz’s translation was much discussed.

“He burnt up.”

“He never did. You don’t burn up down here.”

“We’re eternal lights.”

“He flew off. I saw his contrail in what we have for sky.”

“He was never one of us.”

“He was an omen,” Lesefario said.

“Is that Flanoy? Do you remember me, Flanoy? It’s Mr. Quiz.”

“Hi, Mr. Quiz.”

“What a shame. A kid like you. Dead as a doornail, as dodo dead. How’d they get you? D’you go against? D’you. break their rules? Eat too much sweets or touch yourself ? Whatcha in for, what’s the charge? How’d they get you? Dead to rights?” “Jesus wants me for a sunbeam.”

Lesefario was a thinking man. A long time dead-they had time; they had minutes, seconds, hours, years; what they lacked were calendars, clocks, only the Speidel niceties, digital readouts, the quartz accounts, only the Greenwich and atomic certainties-he had begun to speculate about the meaning of death. He had never questioned life’s meaning. He had assumed it had none. Life was its own gloss. Where conditions changed you didn’t look for explanations.