Joy Williams: 99 Stories of God

Even though our suspicions are usually aroused by those people who profess too much interest in saving the environment, people who harvest the water and the sun and so forth and maintain steaming mulch piles and kitchen gardens, we do on occasion visit the Lancasters, because oddly enough they give very pleasant cocktail parties. They had made quite a lush oasis around their home and were proud of the variety of wildlife that was attracted to it. They were also of the belief that birds wanted their privacy, and they strove to provide the illusion of privacy so that even with all the feeders and tree guilds provided, the birds were as invisible as God when we went over to visit the Lancasters for cocktails at dusk.

Our houseguest, who had been responsible for Victoria Secret’s water bra marketing fiasco of the decade before but still pulled down a good salary in retail, was astonished that the Lancasters would put up bird feeders where no one — neither the Lancasters nor the guests they were ostensibly entertaining— could see the birds. She said it was contrary to the very wiring of the modern brain, even the altruistic part of the brain. In her position of analyzing consumers’ habits and decisions, she took pleasure in attending seminars on the brain. She did grant, however, that there was a great deal about the brain and consumers’ buying and leisure habits — particularly consumers who owned their own homes — that she did not know. That was why hers was such a fascinating field.

The child wanted to name the rabbit Actually, and could not be dissuaded from this.

It was the first time one of our pets was named after an adverb.

It made us uncomfortable. We thought it to be bad luck.

But no ill befell any of us nor did any ill befall the people who visited our home.

Everything proceeded beautifully, in fact, until Actually died.

The girl from the pharmacy who delivered Darvon to Philip K. Dick, the science fiction writer, wore a golden fish necklace.

“What does that mean?” asked Dick.

She touched it and said, “This is a sign worn by the early Christians so that they would recognize one another.”

“In that instant,” Dick writes, “I suddenly experienced anamnesis, a Greek word meaning, literally, loss of forgetfulness.”

Anamnesis is brought on by the action of the Holy Spirit. The person remembers his true identity throughout all his lives. The person recognizes the world for what it is — his own prior thought formations — and this generates the flash . He now knows where he is.

She was a brilliant painter, really an exceptional, exceptional artist, and she suffered a lot of pain. She’d been in a car accident that injured her pelvis and spine, and although she initially seemed to recover from her injuries, her body was really broken beyond repair. She had numerous operations and amputations, none of which did her any good, but she continued to paint. At the end, critics point out, her work became looser, hastier, almost careless, probably because of all the painkillers she had to take. All she could paint was still lifes of fruits and vegetables. Even so, she insisted upon referring to these as naturaleza viva instead of naturaleza muerta . At the very end her attempts at painting consisted of only a few dabs.

I was in jail for shoplifting. It was so stupid. Really, I must have wanted to get caught and I was. It was a ring.

But the point of my story is that there was a woman in my cell. She was there before I got there. I was afraid she’d been arrested for something heinous.

Are you acquainted with the Bible? she asked me.

If I had had something to pull over my head like a hoodie and be concealed I would have, but I didn’t.

I know the Lord’s Prayer, I said.

What about the Book of Q? she asked.

There is no Book of Q, I said.

Vanity, vanity, she said. All is vanity.

Oh yes, I said. That’s Ecclesiastes.

Ecclesiastes just means one who assembles. Qoheleth was the assembler. So it is the Book of Q. Most modern scholars use the untranslated Hebrew name of Qoheleth, who was the writer. I bet you think vanity means pride or conceit, I would bet that.

Yes, I said. Sure.

In the original the word means “breath,” the merest breath, vapor, something utterly insubstantial and transient. Some translators even suggest the word means futility or absurdity.

Yes, yes. I don’t know, I said.

The Book of Q invites us to contemplate the fleeting duration of all that we cherish, the brevity of life and the inexorability of death.

Help, help, help, I thought. Please.

She stopped talking for a few moments. But still nobody came. Then she said, Chrysalis is the same as pupa, but the one word is so much more lovely and promising, wouldn’t you say?

Then she seemed to fall asleep and said nothing further. When someone finally did arrive, it was her they came for. They let her go first.

The Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg wrote a book called Heaven and Hell in which he describes the afterlife.

After dropping the physical body, souls transit into an intermediate realm where they meet dead friends and relatives.

Following a period of self-examination, they are compelled to go to a particular afterlife world — either a “heaven” or a “hell.”

Hell is unpleasant.

Heaven is more pleasant.

In heaven as well as hell, people work, play, get married, and even indulge in war and crime. Both realms also have social structures and government.

One may progress through various levels of heaven or hell, with the exception that one is never able to leave heaven or hell.

They had been married for thirty-five years.

When the occasion arose, she preferred to use the word pantomnesia, he the term déjà vu .

She argued that pantomnesia has Greek roots meaning “all” or “universal”— panto —and “mind” or “memory”— mnesia —and therefore is a more technically accurate term.

He suggested that she was a snob.

She said that déjà vu simply means “already seen” and refers specifically to visual experience, when there is so much, so very much more in experiencing the unfamiliar as familiar.

He reminded her that they had had this conversation before.

A doctor of veterinary medicine who adored cats and frequently treated them at the expense of his other patients, some of whom actually died for lack of immediate care while he was attending to the cats, was killed in a one-car accident while driving home at vesper time when he swerved to avoid hitting a cat and struck a tree.

The cat was inexplicably sitting in the middle of the road.

In 1994, in Beverly Hills, California, a former football star, O. J. Simpson, was accused of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and a luckless young man who had gone to her house to return a pair of sunglasses she had left at a restaurant. The murders were particularly brutal. The woman’s throat was cut from ear to ear, resulting in partial decapitation. The young waiter, Ronald Goldman, also had his throat severed.