Stanley Elkin - The Living End

“You did your crucifix well enough.”

The son smiled. “What, this old thing?” he seemed to say. Then, in a moment, he did speak. “I raised the dead,” he said. “I ran them up like flags on poles. I gave the blind 20/20 and lepers the complexions of debutantes. Miracle was my métier. This,” he said, brushing the crucifix with fingers that would never be straight, “nothing to it. It was wished into being. It’s a snapshot is all, a Christ’s gilded baby shoe, sentimental as a lock of hair. Like it? It’s True Cross by the way. But no hands made it.”

“You’ve no forgiveness, have you? There isn’t enough love in you to flesh out a song.”

“The apple doesn’t fall—”

“Stop that,” the Father said.

“Wondering where You went wrong, Papa? Why I’m such a surly saviour? Look at it this way. These things happen in the holiest of families.”

“No. You’ve no forgiveness.”

“Me?” Christ said, “I was built to forgive. I give away dispensation like a loss leader. There isn’t a horror they can dream up I don’t change into cheesecake in the blink of an eye. I go to Yankee Stadium when the home team’s away and the evangelist comes and it’s standing room only for the fans of salvation, and I do it there, under the lights, hitting to all fields, God’s designated hitter, and it’s forgive and forget and bygones be bygones. So don’t tell me I’ve no forgiveness. Why, I’m made of pardon and commutation and forgiveness like the laws of bankruptcy or the statue of limitations. And why not? What did any of those poor bastards ever do to me?”

“All right,” God said, “I want you to take My case.”

“Your case?”

“I smote a man.”

“You—?”

“His name was Quiz. He irritated Me. He made a disturbance during a recital and ruined My concentration. I overreacted.”

“You smote him?”

“I already told you,” the Lord said irritably. The Christ giggled. “So?” God said.

“So?”

“Do what you do to those other poor bastards. Absolve Me, shrive Me, wipe My slate. Put Me on your tab, pick up My check. Carry Me. Forgive Us Our debts as We forgive Our debtors, Luv.”

Though the words were flippant, there was a sort of urgency behind them, a sense He gave off not of rage but of rage cornered, its energy turned to reason. Poor Quiz, Christ thought. “Sure,” Christ said finally, “for the slaying of Quiz I forgive You.”

“You never understood anything, did you?” the Lord asked murderously. “You never got into the spirit of things.”

“I thought I was the Spirit of things,” the young man said meekly.

“Lamb!” God roared.

“We were talking about Quiz.”

“We were never talking about Quiz.”

“No,” he said softly, rising awkwardly from the stool as his Father watched. He used his body to steady himself and, turning, stamped the floor like a tap dancer, kicking at leverage, purchase, with his cripple’s volitionless two-step. “I loved it there,” he said. “I loved being alive.”

God looked at His son thoughtfully. “Well,” the Lord said, “in conversation at least you can still turn the other cheek. How’s your mother?”

“Ah,” said the Christ.

Quiz was making a name for himself among the damned. He never let up ranting, each day bringing his charges. It could not have been madness. Paranoia was vaporized even more swiftly than grudge. So, after a while, they began to believe him and, in spite of their own pain, even to take his side. Quiz seemed to be everywhere at once, like a celebrity in a small town.

“I was Pearl Harbor’d,” he might scream, “December Seventh’d by the Lord. Is that fair? I ask you. Men die, have heart attacks, wear out. Mostly wear out. The junkman won’t touch them, Detroit recall them. And, yes, I grant that some go sudden. There are accidents. Accidents happen. Mother Nature fucks up. Kids dart into traffic, balls roll in the street. But that’s only physics, it’s physics is all. Guys buy it in war and that’s physics, too. And a crime of passion’s a flexing of glands. It’s physics, it’s science.

“Been stung by a wasp? By hornets, crazed bees? They were doing their duty, following Law. With me it was different. God came from His hive. I was stung by the Lord!”

Then one day he was calmer, changed. “It don’t hurt anymore,” he announced. They looked at him curiously. “The pain, I can’t feel it. It must pay to complain.” He felt himself carefully, dabbing experimentally at his wounds, the steaming sores and third-degree skin. He poked his fingers in the flaming craters of his flesh, the smoking, dormant cones of erupted boils. “They’ve turned off the juice. Look,” he said, “look.” And, stooping, gathered a bolus of fire and placed it on his tongue. “See?” he said, chewing the flame, moving it about like mouthwash, snapping it like gum. “See? It ain’t any more spice to it than a bite of hot dinner. I frolic in fire, I heigh-ho in heat!” He played with brimstone for them, he waded in flames like a child at the shore. “I think they’ve decided to do something for me, I think they’re afraid I might sue.”

Lesefario and the others who saw him crossed themselves in the presence of the miracle, but all they got for their pains was pain, their foreheads and breasts like so many blazing crosses on so many lawns.

She was a modest woman, self-effacing, old- fashioned, downright shy. Intact. A virgin by temperament and inclination as much as compulsion or circumstance. More. Something actually spinster in her nature, a quality not of maiden since that term had about it a smell of the conditional, but of the permanently chaste. Something beyond chastity, however—chastity, in her case at least, not so much a choice as a quality, like the shade of her skin or the height she would be, fixed as her overbite. Something beyond chastity, beyond even repression.

It was one of the reasons she’d been chosen, of course. As Saint Joan had been chosen for the breadth of her shoulders, her sinewy arms. It was one of the reasons she’d been chosen, He’d reminded her, in their rare interviews. It was one of the reasons she’d been chosen. Yes. She agreed. It was the cruelest reason. To have to listen to the—to her—ironic litany, unceasing, continuous as the noise of summer. She would never get used to it, over it, the humiliation as stinging after two thousand years as the first time she’d heard it and realized it was she they meant. “Hail Mary,” she heard, “full of grace, blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.” Nice, she thought. A fine way to talk, excuse me, pray. Her most intimate parts called out as familiarly as her name, associating her with a femaleness she not only did not understand but actually repudiated, freezing her forever not just in fecundity but in a kind of sluttishness.

And for all the world she was The Virgin Mary, the capital letters and epithet like something scrawled in phone booths or spray-painted in subways. The snide oxymorons repugnant to her. Virgin Mother, Immaculate Conception. Her story known throughout the world, carried by missionaries to hinterland, boondock, clearing, sticks; parsed by savages, riddled by New Guinea stone- agers, all the bare-breasted and loinclothed who stood for whatever she could not stand, almost the first thing they were told after the distribution of gifts, the shiny mirrors in which they could see their nakedness, their dark, rubbery genitalia, their snarled and matted wool, the fierce, ropy nipples flaring against the stained, gross coronas of breasts prickled as strawberries, almost the first thing they were told, her shame a story, her story a legend, her legend an apotheosis, told through translators or in the broken pidgins of a thousand tongues, or with actual hand signs, the complicated history—“There was this woman, a girl, not even a woman, Mary, the wife of Joseph, betrothed of Joseph, the union not consummated, who learned that she was to bear God’s child.” “God’s?” “Yes. God the Father.” “The father?” “Oh Jesus, our Saviour. Wait. So this wife, this Mary, a virgin big with child. In a stable in Bethlehem.” “A stable?” “For the horses. In the straw. In the horses’ straw, in the pissed hay of the cows and camels. And this Mary, this Virgin, went into labor. You know about labor? Look, watch. Labor. They were poor. Humble people. Ragged. Her clothes didn’t fit, her shift was mean, tight across the burden of her belly, for she couldn’t afford to hide what would have been obvious even in commodious clothing. It was crowded. The town. People came from all over to watch her, to stare into her womb where the fruit was. Strangers. High-ups from great distances. Shepherds, locals who’d seen the bleeding, dilated cunts of a thousand enceinte dames but who’d never seen anything like this, an actual woman on actual straw, writhing not as an animal accustomed to straw would but wildly thrashing, bucking, not understanding what was happening to her, not really, a virgin, recall, who not only had never known a man but who had never even touched herself, understand, who wasn’t even curious about such things, anything but, and all this in the presence of eyewitnesses, her bewildered husband who knew he’d had nothing to do with it, who felt sold if you want to know, and then the Child came, pushing himself, I mean doing the pushing, having to climb up out of that fruity womb practically single-handed because she was still more virgin than mother, more virgin even than woman, who knew nothing of contracting, pressing, pushing, such exercise not only alien to her but obscene. And—” “But if she was still a virgin, how did God the father—” “Well that part’s the mystery, but—” —accomplished in a series of filthy, almost humorous gestures broad as actors’ that even the missionaries knew, would have to have mastered or actually invent, practicing them like a blasphemous sign language, behind their own backs if they had to, just to make them understand, give them something of the graphic hard-core detail they would almost certainly have to know if their attention was to be engaged later for the theology parts. So she was the Hook. Sex was. The Queen of Heaven. Some Queen. Some Heaven.