James Gardner: Muffin Explains Teleology to the World at Large

I told my kid sister Muffin this joke.

There was this orchestra, and they were playing music, and all the violins were bowing and moving their fingers, except for this one guy who just played the same note over and over again. Someone asked the guy why he wasn’t playing like the others and he said, "They’re all looking for the note. I’ve found it."

Muffin, who’s only six, told me the joke wasn’t funny if you understood teleology.

I never know where she gets words like that. I had to go look it up.

TELEOLOGY [teli- ol oji] n doctrine or belief that all things or actions are designed to achieve some end.

"Okay," I said when I found her again, "now I understand teleology. Why isn’t the joke funny?"

"You’ll find out next week," she said.

I talked to Uncle Dave that night. He’s in university and real smart, even though he’s going to be a minister instead of something interesting. "What’s so great about teleology?" I said. He looked at me kind of weird, so I explained, "Muffin’s been talking about it."

"So have my professors," he said. "It’s, uhh, you know, God has a purpose for everything, even if we can’t understand it. We’re all heading toward some goal."

"We took that in Sunday school," I said.

"Well, Jamie, we go into it in a bit more detail."

"Yeah, I guess."

He was quiet for a bit, then asked, "What’s Muffin say about it?"

"Something big is happening next week."

"Teleologically speaking?"

"That’s what she says."

Muffin was in the next room with her crayons. Uncle Dave called her in to talk and she showed him what she was working on. She’d colored Big Bird black. She has all these crayons and the only ones she ever uses are black and gray.

"What’s happening next week?" Uncle Dave asked.

"It’s a secret," she said.

"Not even a hint?"

"No."

"Little tiny hint? Please?"

She thought about it a minute, then whispered in his ear. After that, she giggled and ran upstairs.

"What did she say?" I asked.

"She told me we’d get where we’re going." He shrugged and made a face. We were both pretty used to Muffin saying things we didn’t understand.

The next day I answered the front doorbell and found three guys wearing gray robes. They’d shaved their heads too.

"We are looking for her gloriousness," one of them said with a little bow. He had an accent.

"Uh, Mom’s gone down the block to get some bread," I answered.

"It’s okay," Muffin said, coming from the TV room. "They’re here for me."

All three of the men fell facedown on the porch, making a kind of high whining sound in their throats.

"You know these guys?" I asked.

"They’re here to talk about teleology."

"Well, take them into the backyard. Mom doesn’t like people in the house when she’s not here."

"Okay." She told the guys to get up and they followed her around the side of the house, talking in some foreign language.

When Mom got home, I told her what happened and she flat-out ran to the kitchen window to see what was going on. Muffin was sitting on the swing set and the guys were cross-legged on the ground in front of her, nodding their heads at every word she spoke. Mom took a deep breath, the way she does just before she yells at one of us, then stomped out the back door. I was sure she was going to shout at Muffin, but she bent over and talked quiet enough that I couldn’t hear what she said. Muffin talked and Mom talked and one of the bald guys said something, and finally Mom came in all pale-looking.

"They want lemonade," she said. "Take them out some lemonade. And plastic glasses. I’m going to lie down." Then Mom went upstairs.

I took out a pitcher of lemonade. When I got there, one of the bald guys got up to meet me and asked Muffin, "Is this the boy?"

She said yes.

"Most wondrous, most wondrous!"

He put both hands on my shoulders as if he was going to hug me, but Muffin said, "You’ll spill the lemonade." He let me go but kept staring at me with big weepy eyes.

"What’s going on?" I asked.

"The culmination of a thousand thousand years of aimless wandering," the guy said.

"Not aimless," Muffin cut in.

"Your pardon," he answered, quickly lowering his head. "But at times it seemed so."

"You’ll be in the temple when it happens," Muffin said to him.

"A million praises!" he shouted, throwing himself flat-faced on the ground. "A billion trillion praises!" And he started to cry into our lawn. The other two bald guys bowed in the direction of our garage, over and over again.

"You want to pour me a glass of that?" Muffin said to me.

The next day it was a different guy, with a big beard and carrying a sword almost as tall as me. When I opened the door, he grabbed the front of my T-shirt and yelled, "Where is the Liar, the Deceiver, the Blasphemer, the She-Whore Who Mocks the Most High?"

"She went with Uncle Dave down to the Dairy Queen."

"Thank you," he said, and walked off down the street. Later, I heard on the radio the cops had arrested him in the parking lot of the mall.

The next day Muffin told me I had to take her down to the boatyards. I told her I didn’t have to do it if I didn’t want.

"Shows how much you know," she said. "You don’t know anything about teleology or fate or anything."

"I know how to cross streets and take buses and all, which is more than I can say for some people."

"I have ten dollars," she said, pulling a bill out of the pocket of her jeans.

That surprised me. I mean, I maybe have ten dollars in my pocket twice a year, just after Christmas and just after my birthday. "Where’d you get the money?" I asked.

"The monks gave it to me."

"Those bald guys?"

"They like me."

"Jeez, Muffin, don’t let Mom know you took money from strangers. She’d have a fit."

"They aren’t strangers. They’re the Holy Order of the Imminent Eschaton — the Muffin Chapter."

"Oh, go ahead, lie to me."

"You want the ten dollars or not?"

Which wasn’t what I ended up with, because she expected me to pay the bus fare out of it.

When we got to the boatyards, I thought we’d head down to the water, but Muffin took out a piece of paper and stood there frowning at it. I looked over her shoulder and saw it was torn from a map of the city. There was a small red X drawn in at a place about a block from where we were. "Where’d you get that? The monks?"

"Mm-hmm. Is this where we are?" She pointed at a street corner. I looked and moved her finger till it was aiming the right place. "You should learn to read some time, Muffin."

She shook her head. "Might wreck my insight. Maybe after."

I pointed down the street. "If you want to go where X marks the spot, it’s that way."

We walked along, with sailboats and yachts and things on one side and warehouses on the other. The buildings looked pretty run-down, with brown rusty spots dripping from their metal roofs and lots of broken windows covered with plywood or cardboard. It was a pretty narrow street and there was no sidewalk, but the only traffic we saw was a Shell oil truck coming out of the marina a ways ahead and it turned off before it got to us.

When we reached the X spot, it was just another warehouse. Muffin closed her eyes a second, then said, "Around the back and up the stairs."

"I bet there are rats around the back," I said.

"I bet there aren’t."

"You go first."

"Okay." She started down an alley between one warehouse and the next. There was lots of broken glass lying around and grass growing up through the pavement.

"I bet there are snakes," I said, following her.