Stanley Elkin - The Living End

His stepson had already seen him.

“Pop,” Christ said, “how are you?”

The old man shrugged and the boy embraced him, kissed his cheek. “You need anything, Pop? Are they taking care of you?”

“What I need I got,” he said.

“So,” said the stepson cheerfully, “what’s doing, Pop?” The old man made a sly deprecative gesture. “You should have been up there on the Cross with me,” he kidded. “No fooling, Pop, I mean it. You’ve got miles on me long-suffering-wise.”

Joseph looked at him steadily, sizing him up, measuring him as he might, in the old days, have measured wood.

“Say it,” said the stepson. “Shoot.”

“Why should I say it? I said it already a million times. Why should I say it? You like hearing it so much?”

“A million this, a million that. What is it, Pop? That the only number you know?”

“I’m a humble fella. A humble fella says a million he’s got in mind maybe six or seven.”

“Humble shmumble,” said Jesus.

“Tinhorn,” said Joseph.

“There you go, Pop. I knew you’d get round to it.”

“You started.”

“Me?” the Christ said innocently.

“You. You. With your vaudeville Yiddish, your Pop’s and What’s doing’s, your mocky mockery. You, Tinhorn, you.”

“Come on, Pop. Look around. Be a little realistic please.”

“Get your legs fixed.”

“Here we go,” Christ said wearily.

“Get your legs fixed, take a therapy for your hands, you shouldn’t go in the streets like you have on boxing gloves.”

“Pop.”

“You wanted to hear it? So hear. You ain’t him.”

“That’s not what He says.”

“When the Holy One, Blessed be He, makes a joke He shakes the world with His laughter.”

“I’m him, Pop.”

“Sure, and I’m the contractor who built this place.”

Quiz, in Heaven, feeling good, his felicity only a little tempered by the fact that no one had met him. In life, too, no one had much met him. He’d carried his own suitcases, stopped at the “Y”—not a churchgoer, it was this, he believed, which had saved him, his decision to sleep among Christians at Y.M.C.A.s—seen L.A. and Chicago and other cities from air-conditioned tour buses. Indeed, he had come away from these towns with the vague impression that they had a slightly greenish cast to them. Heaven had no such cast. Heaven was pure light, its palaces and streets, its skies and landscapes primary as acrylic, lustered as lipstick. There was nothing of Hell’s dinge or filtered, mitigate shade. It struck him that Heaven was like nothing so much as one of those swell new cities in the Sun Belt—Phoenix, Tucson.

It was a gradual thing, his growing uneasiness. Not much offended at not being met, he nevertheless felt that he’d like to get settled and had determined to start looking around for a “Y” when this cripple came loping up.

“God bless you,” said the cripple.

“Sorry, buddy, I don’t give handouts,” said Quiz, and a magnificent nimbus suddenly bloomed behind the Christ’s head like the fanned tail of a peacock.

Quiz, in Heaven, on his knees before the Master, making rapid signs of the cross, his fingers flashing from forehead to breastbone, breastbone to left shoulder, left shoulder to right, boxing the compass, sending pious semaphore.

“Come see God,” Christ said, and the man who gave no handouts offered the Saviour his arm and they were in God’s throne room and God Himself up on the bench and Quiz all lavish, choreographed humility, prostrate in Moslem effacement, his nose burrowing a jeweled treasury of floor, but put upon, wondering if this were any position for an American, even a dead one, to be in. Barely hearing Christ’s words, their meaning slurred by his fear. “—the man You smote…redeemed from Hell…thought You would want…perfect act of contrition.”

And Quiz, daring at last to raise his head, to poke it up like someone strafers have made a pass at and missed, marshaling his features, managing to look wounded, injured, aggrieved, forgiving but not quite forgetting.

“You go too far,” God told His son.

Because he don’t love me, Joseph thought. Because he’s adopted. He goes around like that to spite Him, to get His attention, His goat he’s after. What do I care he ain’t perfect? What do I care he ain’t him? What a business. We walked around on eggshells with each other, nervous even when we were alone. Sure. Could I watch her undress? Could I hold her in my arms whom the Lord had His eye on? What a business. Because I’m old-fashioned, a zealot of the Lord, and take from Him what a real man wouldn’t take from nobody. They call me cuckold and saint me for it. I know what I know if I don’t know my rights. He ain’t him. I love him, but he ain’t. What can I do but go along if He in His infinite wisdom Abrahams me and Isaacs the kid, the one time testing a father, the next a husband? Loyalty oaths He wants, guarantees every fifty thousand miles. All right, He has them. So when does He call me in? When does He say “Well done, good and faithful servant? It was a hoax, my little two-thousand-year joke. Go home. Cleave unto Mary. If she’ll still have you.” What a business. What a business.

In Hell, Quiz’s translation was much discussed.

“He burnt up.”

“He never did. You don’t burn up down here.”

“We’re eternal lights.”

“He flew off. I saw his contrail in what we have for sky.”

“He was never one of us.”

“He was an omen,” Lesefario said.

“Is that Flanoy? Do you remember me, Flanoy? It’s Mr. Quiz.”

“Hi, Mr. Quiz.”

“What a shame. A kid like you. Dead as a doornail, as dodo dead. How’d they get you? D’you go against? D’you break their rules? Eat too much sweets or touch yourself? Whatcha in for, what’s the charge? How’d they get you? Dead to rights?”

“Jesus wants me for a sunbeam.”

Lesefario was a thinking man. A long time dead—they had time; they had minutes, seconds, hours, years; what they lacked were calendars, clocks, only the Speidel niceties, digital readouts, the quartz accounts, only the Greenwich and atomic certainties—he had begun to speculate about the meaning of death. He had never questioned life’s meaning. He had assumed it had none. Life was its own gloss. Where conditions changed you didn’t look for explanations.

He’d lived in Minnesota, a Minneapolis kid, schoolboy, adult. He’d had his friends and later his cronies. He’d had his shot at stuff, enjoyed much and been disappointed by the rest. He had liked television, a wonderful invention, but had not known when he’d married her that his wife would turn out to be a depressive, a woman who—she couldn’t help it, he guessed, but it made things awful and spoiled everything that should have been fun: their trips to restaurants, their cruise to the islands, their daughter’s childhood—was never to be pleased by things, who wore her melancholy like a rash. Life had not signified.

Death was another story, so time-consuming—they had time—so draining, demanding, taking not just his but all their attentions, given over to pain, not causeless sadness like his wife’s but to a suffering like Wallenda stagefright, to not knowing from one moment to the next—they had time—whether what had to be endured and would be endured even could be endured. Death made no sense but it meant something.

When Lesefario formulated this last proposition he decided that he must try to save them, to become heroic in Hell who had been a clerk in a Minneapolis liquor store in a red-lined neighborhood, who had opened up in the morning always a little scared of the winos around the entrance, always a little scared of the blacks, always a little scared of people who asked him to cash their checks, always a little scared of teenagers, of minors who showed him phony I.D. cards, of the big, beefy deliverymen, of customers, of anyone who would come into a liquor store.