Kevin Brockmeier - The Brief History of the Dead

And so he would move once more into the crowds, and start over again, and wait for the people to gather around him.

The people were created in the image of God, and thus they were within the precinct of His grace, even the ones who did not know Him, the ones who withdrew themselves from His presence. It was something he had to remind himself of when they ignored him, or jeered at him, or parroted his voice, or even, as had happened once or twice in the other world, when they arrested him, handcuffed him, and confiscated his sign. Sometimes, when he sensed the spirit of God moving inside him, turning over like a soft bundle of clothing, he would feel so satiated that he would forget to feed himself, and late in the day his legs would buckle underneath him inside the swim of his own hunger. There was a mail carrier, a good man named Joseph, who would offer him a hot dog or a slice of pizza at such times and wait with him until he could stand again without feeling faint. Today, though, he had filled his pockets with bread sticks before he left for the city. He ate them sitting on an iron bench in sight of the obelisk, where he watched the shadows of the birds as they collided with the shadows of the clouds.

It was late in the day when he saw the two men – boys, really, no older than twenty – holding hands and kissing beneath the awning of a deserted hardware store. One of them was gripping a hank of the other's hair, and the second was squirming and rocking inside his blue jeans, and when the first one whispered into the second one's ear, they both began to laugh. He approached them at a rush beneath the awning, where he tried to tell them something about the Bridge of Jesus and the Translation of the Elect. But they struggled against him and would not listen.

"Fuck off," one of them said, and the other snapped, "Get your hand off me, you old cocksucker," and then they batted his sign with their arms and open hands and it lurched back and hit him in the jaw.

When he opened his eyes, he was lying flat on the pavement, and the boys were gone. He could feel something hard between his gums and his cheek. It was a tooth. When he rolled it over onto his tongue and spat it out, it came out dark red, like the stone of a cherry. On his way home he buried it in the soil of a churchyard, marking it with a crossed pair of bread sticks, so that when he died again and was gathered unto himself he would be made whole. And that was one day.

REPENT, FOR THE TIME IS AT HAND, his next day's sign read, and he inscribed it, YOURS VERY TRULY, followed by his name, which was Coleman Kinzler, Ph.D. He had conferred the Ph.D. upon himself the same day he finished reading his Bible, at the age of thirty-three, for he knew that though he had never actually been to college, he was a doctor now in the eyes of the Lord. At that time, his Bible was the same one he had been given as a boy, a pocket-sized edition with silver edging and fine white paper and a blue leather cover that wrapped around on itself and snapped together in the front. He had carried it everywhere with him until the day he met a woman who had never read it, a Hindu woman in a robe the color of bricks and dark coffee, and he asked her, "If I offer this book to you, will you study it and keep it sacred?" and she promised that she would, so he gave it to her, though it hurt him to let it go.

But he was convinced that he was doing what the Lord would ask of him. The world was brimming over with Bibles, so many Bibles that they came spilling from the shelf of every drugstore and hotel room in the country, and he knew he could always find a new one for himself. As for the woman, though, he would probably never see her again. It might be her only chance to receive the Word of God.

He thought about the woman often after that, and also about his Bible, though indeed he never saw either one of them again.

This was the incident he was remembering as he toted his sign through the district. The sky was overcast with a dimensionless table of gray clouds, and the banners and traffic lights hung slack in the stillness of the air. Two of the Laura birds hopped from beneath a parked car into the path of his feet. They settled between his ankles, where they attempted to make him stumble, but he did not lose his balance, and he did not drop his sign. He yelled at them and whirled his arms around and stomped his heavy shoes until they flew away and landed down the block.

The newspaperman and his girlfriend were standing by the door of Bristow's Restaurant, as they did every morning, handing out the latest edition of the Sims Sheet, MORE EVIDENCE FOR BYRD HYPOTHESIS, the headline read, and when the newspaperman gave him a copy, he folded it into quarters and put it inside his jacket pocket. The girlfriend noticed the bandage covering his chin and asked, "Jesus, what happened to you?" She touched her own chin involuntarily.

"Yes," he said. "Jesus. I have been bruised in the name of the Lord." And he told her about his tooth and the breaking of his sign and the boys who had left him on the street to fall, and when he finished, she said, "Oh, you poor man," and gave him a second copy of the paper, which he folded into quarters and put inside his pocket with the first.

"The rich shall be made poor, and the poor shall be made rich," he answered, and he left the newspaperman and his girlfriend outside the restaurant and continued on his walk through the city.

On H Street, he stopped to talk with a doorman, and when he asked him if he knew the Word of God, a tiny smile creased the doorman's face. He removed the cross from the neck of his shirt and let it sway back and forth on its thin strand of chain. "God's blessings," Coleman wished the doorman, and the doorman offered his own blessing in return, and the small silver cross turned slowly between his fingers, stopped, and began spinning the other way, winking at Coleman as it caught the light from a nearby sign.

Coleman put the placard to his shoulder and continued on. He had forgotten to bring his bread sticks along with him, and though he was hungry, he did not stop to eat. He was thrust out of a home furnishings store by a pair of security guards, and afterward he gathered a small crowd around him when he climbed onto the lip of the fountain in the shopping plaza, and then the crowd scattered and he spent twenty minutes preaching to a woman who seemed to be listening to him with perfect transport until he asked her for her name and she answered in a flurry of Italian. Though the clouds kept rumbling with thunder, it did not rain, or if it did, the rain never reached the ground. There were times when the sky would growl and then his stomach would growl and then the sky would growl again, and he could almost imagine that the two of them were speaking to each other.

He was nearing his own apartment again when he passed a booth distributing T-shirts that read GOD IS LOVE, stacks and stacks of them, in red and white and black, and as the phrase moved in and out of his vision, it provoked a dialogue. There was one part of him that believed that God truly was love, that the equation was really that simple. But there was another part of him that believed that love was too small a force: too small for God and too small for what people needed of Him.

The first part said that the love of God was like sunlight and water to us: it strengthened us, filled us out, gave us color. It was only when we rejected that love, when we shut ourselves away from it, that we withered in on ourselves and lost our joy in Creation.

Foolishness! said the second part. It's not the love of God that nourishes us, it's the hope of God. It is hope of any kind. Hope and love are two separate forces, whether you're talking about God or whether you're talking about human beings.

But doesn't love offer everything that hope does and more? the first part asked.