Stanley Elkin - The Living End

But he did not know that the caretaker’s death had come at a point in the recital when God knew that those children who had already performed would be getting restless, beloved.

Quiz, in Hell, was making the point that he had been slain. “You’re dead, you’re a dead man, just one more goner,” Lesefario said.

“No, no. My pop’s a dead man, all the folks on the old man’s side with their bad histories and amok blood counts—they’re dead men. I was definitely slain. Smited. Blasted. Here today gone today. Slain absolutely. And none of the amenities, let me tell you, no last words or final cigarette, the blindfold unoffered. It was as if I’d gotten in to start my car and—boom! Like someone ambushed, snuffed by unions, eating in restaurants and rushed by hit men.”

“Do you know who did it?”

“I’ve got my suspicions, I’m working on it, I have some leads. I’ve—Hey—Where are you going? Hey.”

But Lesefario was gone, vanished in Hell’s vast smoke screen, the fiery fog that was its climate.

Because it was the fate of the damned to run of course, not jog, run, their piss on fire and their shit molten, boiling sperm and their ovaries frying; what they were permitted of body sprinting at full throttle, wounded gallop, burning not fat—fat sizzled off in the first seconds, bubbled like bacon and disappeared, evaporate as steam, though the weight was still there, still with you, its frictive drag subversive as a tear in a kite—and not even muscle, which blazed like wick, but the organs themselves, the liver scorching and the heart and brains at flash point, combusting the chemistries, the irons and phosphates, the atoms and elements, conflagrating vitamin, essence, soul, yet somehow everything still within the limits if not of endurance then of existence. Damnation strictly physical, nothing personal, Hell’s lawless marathon removed from character. “Sure,” someone had said, “we hit the Wall with every step. It’s all Wall down here. It’s wall-to-wall Wall. What, did you think Hell would be like some old-time baker’s oven? That all you had to do was lie down on a pan like dough, the insignificant heat bringing you out, fluffing you up like bread or oatmeal cookies? You think we’re birthday cake? We’re fucking stars. Damnation is hard work, eternity lousy hours.”

So if Lesefario ran it was his fate to do so, only his body’s kindled imperatives. But he might have run anyway, getting as far as he could from Quiz and his crazy talk about suspicions and leads, angrier at who’d put him there than at his oiled rag presence itself, holding a grudge which in others went up faster than fat, resentment as useless in these primed, mideast circumstances as hope or apology. Also, it made Lesefario wistful, nostalgic, all that talk of slaying and snuffing. It was George’s own last memory. He’d been a clerk in Ellerbee’s liquor store in Minneapolis, an employee who’d worked for the younger man fifteen years, whose crimes were almost victimless, a little harmless chiseling making change and, once, the purchase of some hijacked wine at discount. Certainly nothing that would warrant the final confrontation with the stickup men who’d taken first Ellerbee’s money, then his clerk’s life, shooting him down for no reason, for target practice. “To teach you a lesson,” his killer had said, and taught him his death. It wasn’t much as these things went, but it was Lesefario’s last human contact and he treasured it.

Meanwhile Quiz collared everyone he could, fixing them with the tale of his unexpected end, sudden as comeuppance.

“I make no charges,” he screamed as they double-timed through fire storm in their Dresden tantrum. “I make no charges, I’ve got no proof, but a thing like that, all that wrath, those terrible swift sword arrangements, that’s the M.O. of God Himself!”

God overheard Quiz’s complaints. They were true and, briefly, surprised Him. Which also surprised Him, Who, unaccustomed to surprise, did not immediately recognize the emotion, for Whom the world and history were fixed as house odds, Who knew the grooves in phonograph records and numbered the knots in string. Which was a little silly of course. Not without truth, but silly. As though He were the Microfiche God, Lord of the Punched Cards.

That He had smote Quiz struck Him as odd, an act like an oversight. The man had been a groundskeeper in a high school stadium. God had stopped by to hear some children in a summer recital and Quiz had interrupted the performance. I overreacted, thought God, as mildly bemused as He had been briefly surprised.

Because He was no street brawler, not really, though people didn’t appreciate this. He made His reputation in the old days. It was all there in the Bible. Now that was a good book, He thought. He thought. He thought. He does so much thinking He thought because He has no one to talk to, He thought. Though We were always a good listener. Folks were constantly sending Him their prayers. Tykes in Dr. Dentons. People in churches. All the bowed-head, locker room theology of teams in contention, the invocations at rallies, the moments of silent prayer, the grace notes at a hundred billion suppertimes, all the laymen of Rotary, Elks, Shrine, and Jaycees. God, God thought, needs din, its mumbled gimme’s.

And He used to listen. He had taken requests. He had smote the Egyptians, knocked off this tribe or that. Well, it was the worship. He was a sucker for worship. To this day a pilgrimage turned His heart, the legless, like athletes, pulling themselves up the steps of great cathedrals, the prostrate humble face down in dog shit.

He summoned His only begotten son, a young man in his early thirties, a solid, handsome figure who, in life, might once have had skills. He appeared in the doorway of the mansion. There was about him a peculiar, expectant attitude, alerted but ambivalent, not nervous but deferential, like a new cabinet minister standing by microphones near his president. He wore a plain but clearly expensive, loose-fitting robe cinched at the waist. A small, carefully crafted Cross with a half-nude figure not so much suspended from it as vaguely buckled to it, the back arched and the knees slightly raised, flexed as an astronaut’s on his couch, hung about his throat. The hands, pinioned to the transverse, were nailed at the lifeline and along the forward edges of the palms, rendering it impossible to make a fist. The ankles were crossed, beveled, studded with thick, crude nails.

His Father glanced without pleasure from His only begotten son’s jewelry to the hands crippled at his sides, each hand still in that same stiff equivocal position, neither open nor shut and, holding nothing, giving the impression that they had once been folded and had just now been pulled apart.

God nodded for the son to approach and winced as the young man staggered forward in that odd rolling gait of the lame, each sandaled foot briefly and alternately visible beneath the long robes as he labored toward Him, the toes crushed, twisted, almost braided, suggesting a satyr orthopedics, the wrongly angled, badly set bones of the hidden legs.

“Please,” God said, “sit.”

The son of God paused, looked around, spotted what he’d been looking for. “So,” he said, “You kept it.”

“Of course,” God said.

Jesus lowered himself onto the crude roundless stool. It was almost a parody of furniture, a kid’s first effort in Shop, the badly turned spindles dropsical, rough, caulked at their holes with shim. He’ll hurt himself, God thought, but the son had the cripple’s tropism, his lurching, awkward truce with gravity. “It holds me,” he said.

“Yes.”

“That’s right,” Christ said. He looked down. “I couldn’t make apprentice today,” he said softly.