Stanley Elkin - The Living End

Why He’s talking to me, Quiz thought. These other folks couldn’t ever have had any use for this stuff. He’s talking to me. Quiz was right, but He had something for everyone. He was unloading, giving off wisdom like radioactivity, plumbing the mysteries, and now His voice was reasonable, not the voice of a grandfather but of a king, a chief, someone unelectable, there always, whose very robes and signals of office were not expensive or even rare so much as His, as if He wore electricity or mountain range or clothed Himself in waterfall. He explained—”I am the Manitou, too”—how the rain dance worked. They were charmed. He described how He had divided the light from the darkness on the morning of the first day. They were impressed. He demonstrated how He had done Hell. They were awed.

“You have wondered,” He said, “why things are as they are. You have wondered, you have speculated. You have questioned My motives.” Groans of denial went up from the saints. He ignored them. “ ‘Why,’ the philosophers ask, ‘so piecemeal? Why His fits and starts theology, His stop and go arrangements? Can’t He make up His mind? Why the carrot, why the stick? Why the evenings and mornings of those consecutive days? Why only after first fashioning them could He see that they were good? Why, having landscaped an Eden, having leached and prepared the precious pious soils, having His fell swoop harvests and sweet successful bumper crops, did He need the farmer and plant the man, set him upright, a scarecrow essence in the holy field? Why first an Adam then an Eve, or Eve at all, or if an Eve why torn from that depleted man who, image of his maker once removed removes again to blur the reciprocities in that deserving girl? Why a serpent, why a tree? Why fine print at all so near the start of things? Why codicils and conditions, all that lawyerly qualm? Why strings? Why that Miranda decision hocus mumbo jumbo pocus, reading rights to a man and a woman who not only do not know that they are already in trouble but do not even know what trouble is? And ain’t exile cruel and unusual punishment when there’s no place to go?

“ ‘Of course they fell. Who wouldn’t fall in such a place? Who wouldn’t fall where the gravity was a thousand and two in just the shade? Who wouldn’t fall when the thickest crop in that garden was just gravity?’ ”

Flanoy had come out of his sulk. He smiled but Mother Mary would not look at him. Gosh, he thought, one moment comforted in Mother Mary’s lap, the next tumbled, spilled, knocked from it as one might clumsy milk.

“ ‘Adam and Eve on the rock pile now, the chain gang. Working off their offense and raising kids, extra hands, till it was all cultivated now, if not a peaceable kingdom then at least a trained one, the old indebtedness paid up like mortgage. And then a flood. A flood! The whole earth disaster area. The spoiled corn and wetted wheat, the fruit and flooded fields all mash and only Father Noah’s ark afloat in all that liquorish sea, sailing the farms, cruising the ruined hectares, versts and acreage, and Noah unclear, everyone unclear, about the nature of the charges this time, the actual straw that broke the actual camel’s back unspecified.’ ”—Yes, Flanoy thought, with me, too, and moved closer to Quiz—“ ‘And then the covenant again, the old instrument which by this time even man knew was the only way God ever did business, never just by handshake let alone by the binding, even honored, nod or raised finger or tickled ear which perhaps only the auctioneer ever sees and which, nevertheless, always seems to be good enough even for him, but a contract, a compact, something a little more official than trust and less flimsy than faith, yet not an actual agreement at all and even the single simple seeming layman’s conditions—”Behave, play nice, be good”—and down home language a pitch beyond understanding.

“ ‘Reprieved from oceans. Starting over. Breaking clean. Almost sophisticated now, almost used to it, a kind of emigré, Ellis Islanded, the culture not so shocking, for all were greenhorns, greenhorns everywhere, and you’d think that maybe the ironic point of all this vagabondage was just to keep folks busy, hold them still.’ ”

Sh’ma Yisroel Adonoi Elohenu, Adonoi Echod, Joseph mumbled. He pounded his breast with the hand that had just been resting in Mary’s.

He looks like someone driving nails, Christ thought.

“ ‘A tinker God, you’d think, Someone editorial, nuts for amendment. Or even God at all, do you suppose, with His second and third chances, His governor’s fond delight in commutation, reprieve? A father indeed, a daddy, a pop, Who counts to three perhaps, gets past two and goes to fractions—”Two and a half, two and three quarters, four fifths…”

“ ‘Fond of mountains, a thing for heights. Ararat, Sinai. (Who ever delighted in the nature He had made, crouching perhaps, making frames of His hands, scouting location like a director, His shingle hung in garden, ocean, wilderness, and the higher elevations, a sort of majestic Fop posed on postcard and practicing His Law only where there was a view, never on just ordinary earth.)

“ ‘Another covenant. This time in writing. Elegant, He may have thought, powerful but elegant, and showed man something in a stone tablet. (Who worked always in His chosen mediums—earth, water, fire. Moses on the mountain would be air.) The terms terminal, one through ten. (Who was God again now He could get past three.) Dealing always, note, with leaders, as He had dealt with Points of Interest, oblique angle, off-center prospect, steep vision like a goat’s purchase, His summit conferees the elect of earth, its leading men, God’s chosen persons, ho ho ho. And Moses not two minutes at sea level but the people He had never deigned to deal with directly were at it again, doing the golden calf like a new dance. And Moses outraged as God at their loose talk and their sweet tooth for leeks and garlic, Egypt’s spectacular shade.

“ ‘But what did He do? Nothing. As always. Nothing. Who made the world in six days and flooded it in forty but couldn’t count to three—Wait. Wait. Nothing. Nothing!

“ ‘Unless you count a covenant. I’ll give you Christ,” as if to say. “Just pledge belief. If being good was hard, forget it, just pledge belief. Believe.” ’ ”

Most of them were praying now. Even Mary had lowered her head, as Joseph had though he had ceased to sway, whose strident orthodoxy had bleached to something almost episcopal, who stood bareheaded, his yarlmulke fallen, and in phylacteries undone as laces.

“So,” God said, “what do you make of Me, eh? What do you make of Me now you understand that finally it takes two to break a contract as well as to make one? What do you make of Me Who could have gotten it all right the first time, saved everyone trouble and left Hell unstocked? Do you love Me? Do you forgive and forget as easily as I do? Do you?”

Mother Mary peeked at the fluted piping of His nimbus, the sacred, secret rim, like icing on pastry, where the helix tucked into His golden head. She held her belly in her hands and hoped this one would be a girl.

“Do you?”

“Yes,” they cried. “Yes!”

“Why do I do it then? Why?”

“So we might choose,” said one of the saved.

“What? Speak up.”

“So we might choose.”

“Never,” God thundered. “What do I care for the sanctity of your will? Never!”

“Goodness,” a saint shouted. “You get off on goodness.”

“On goodness? Me?” God laughed. “On goodness? Is that what you think? Is that what you think? Were you born yesterday? You’ve been in the world. Is that how you explain trial and error, history by increment, God’s long Slap and Tickle, His Indian-gift wrath? Goodness? No. It was Art! It was always Art. It work by the contrasts and metrics, by beats and the silences. It was all Art. Because it makes a better story is why.”