George Saunders - In Persuasion Nation

Was selling what all that suffering was about? Selling? Selling RugBrite, selling AllerNase?

Oh, how should he know? He's just a polar bear, and half the time he's got an axe in his head, which doesn't exactly tend to maximize one's analytical abilities, and usually is laying around his house with the icepack on, thinking basically nothing but Ouch Ouch Ouch.

The polar bear leans against a Christmas tree, trying to catch his breath.

It can't be true. It simply can't be.

But it is true. He feels it in his heart.

The polar bear stumbles past the penguins. Noting his agitation, and the fact that he goes right instead of left at the large tuft of tundra grass, the penguins waddle around excitedly, gossiping among themselves.

All gossiping ceases when the polar bear steps to the edge of the huge glacial cliff.

Then he throws himself off.

Falling, his only fear is that the green symbol will appear and miraculously save him. But no. The green symbol, it would appear, is not truly omniscient after all.

Which means, the polar bear realizes with a start, that the green symbol may not actually be GOD at alt. That is, the symbol may not be the real actual GOD. He may just be a very powerful faker. He may have a touch of GOD, which he has distorted. He may be, in other words, a kind of secondary GOD, a being so powerful, relative to him, the polar bear, that he appears to be a GOD. The real actual GOD may not even know about the way His universe is being run roughshod over by this twisted, false GOD! The real actual GOD, the polar bear realizes in his last instant of life, has been heretofore entirely unknown to him! And yet this true GOD must exist, and be knowable, since the idea of this perfect and merciful GOD is emanating, fully formed, from within him, the polar bear! He has, in fact, already taken his first step toward knowledge of the true GOD, via his rejection of the false GOD!

Shoot, dang it, if only he could live!

The polar bear hits the ground and, because no one in this sub-universe can die without the express consent of certain important parties, does not die, but bounces.

As the penguins stand on the edge of the cliff, looking cautiously down, he rockets up past them.

"GOD is real!" he shouts. "And we may know Him!"

The penguins watch him reach the apex of his bounce and start back down.

"The green symbol is a false GOD!" he shouts. "A false GOD, obsessed with violence and domination! Reject him! Let us begin anew! Free your minds! Free your minds and live! There is a gentler and more generous GOD within us, if only we will look!"

The penguins, always easily embarrassed, are especially embarrassed by this, and, looking around to verify that the tundra's vast emptiness precludes anyone having witnessed them actually listening to this heretical subversive nonsense, waddle away to sit on their large ugly eggs and gossip about the fact that the polar bear, about whom they've always had their doubts, has finally gone completely insane.

"Talk about crazy," one of them finally says, in what they all instantaneously recognize as the sacred first utterance of an entirely new blessed vignette. "I myself am completely crazy for Skittles."

Then they all stand. As in a beautiful dream, their eggs have been miraculously transformed beneath them into large colorful Skittles. The penguins look heavenward in deep gratitude, then manically begin dancing the mindless penguin dance of joy.

In a lovely urban coincidence, the last two houses on our block were both occupied by widows who had lost their husbands in Eastern European pogroms. Dad called them the Bohemians. He called anyone white with an accent a Bohemian. Whenever he saw one of the Bohemians, he greeted her by mispronouncing the Czech word for "door." Neither Bohemian was Czech, but both were polite, so when Dad said "door" to them they answered cordially, as if he weren't perennially schlockered.

Mrs. Poltoi, the stouter Bohemian, had spent the war in a crawl space, splitting a daily potato with five cousins. Consequently she was bitter and claustrophobic and loved food. If you ate something while standing near her, she stared at it going into your mouth. She wore only black. She said the Catholic Church was a jewelled harlot drinking the blood of the poor. She said America was a spoiled child ignorant of grief. When our ball rolled onto her property, she seized it and waddled into her back yard and pitched it into the quarry.

Mrs. Hopanlitski, on the other hand, was thin, and joyfully made pipe-cleaner animals. When I brought home one of her crude dogs in top hats, Mom said, "Take over your Mold-A-Hero. To her, it will seem like the toy of a king." To Mom, the camps, massacres, and railroad sidings of twenty years before were as unreal as covered wagons. When Mrs. H. claimed her family had once owned serfs, Mom's attention wandered. She had a tract house in mind. No way was she getting one. We were renting a remodelled garage behind the Giancarlos, and Dad was basically drinking up the sporting-goods store. His N.F.L. helmets were years out of date. I'd stop by after school and find the store closed and Dad getting sloshed among the fake legs with Bennie Delmonico at Prosthetics World.

Using the Mold-A-Hero, I cast Mrs. H. a plastic Lafayette, and she said she'd keep it forever on her sill. Within a week, she'd given it to Elizabeth the Raccoon. I didn't mind. Raccoon, an only child like me, had nothing. The Kletz brothers called her Raccoon for the bags she had under her eyes from never sleeping. Her parents fought non-stop. They fought over breakfast. They fought in the yard in their underwear. At dusk they stood on their porch whacking each other with lengths of weather stripping. Raccoon practically had spinal curvature from spending so much time slumped over with misery. When the Kletz brothers called her Raccoon, she indulged them by rubbing her hands together ferally. The nickname was the most attention she'd ever had. Sometimes she'd wish to be hit by a car so she could come back as a true raccoon and track down the Kletzes and give them rabies.

"Never wish harm on yourself or others," Mrs. H. said. "You are a lovely child." Her English was flat and clear, almost like ours.

"Raccoon, you mean," Raccoon said. "A lovely raccoon."

"A lovely child of God," Mrs. H. said.

"Yeah, right," Raccoon said. "Tell again about the prince."

So Mrs. H. told again how she'd stood rapt in her yard watching an actual prince powder his birthmark to invisibility. She remembered the smell of burning compost from the fields, and men in colorful leggings dragging a gutted boar across a wooden bridge. This was before she was forced to become a human pack animal in the Carpathians, carrying the personal belongings of cruel officers. At night, they chained her to a tree. Sometimes they burned her calves with a machine-gun barrel for fun. Which was why she always wore kneesocks. After three years, she'd come home to find her babies in tiny graves. They were, she would say, short-lived but wonderful gifts. She did not now begrudge God for taking them. A falling star is brief, but isn't one nonetheless glad to have seen it? Her grace made us hate Mrs. Poltoi all the more. What was eating a sixth of a potato every day compared to being chained to a tree? What was being crammed in with a bunch of your cousins compared to having your kids killed?