Stanley Elkin - The Living End

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, Mary—she 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 pietà 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 hand 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 alarmist—she thought—it was blasphemous—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 Danaë. In all His kinky avatars 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, leashless 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?”

“It’s 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 borealtic 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 Hell’s olly olly okshen 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.