I foolishly lost my reading glasses--
didn't lose them.
I just walked off without them.
And so this is going to be from memory.
I guess I ought to tell you upfront that--
is this-- is this thing working?
I can't hear-- that this reading is long.
It takes an hour and a half.
I'll give you a five-minute break
when it's a little bit better than half through.
And the second thing is that when I've read it in the past,
some people have been offended by it.
All I can suggest other than walking out is to hang tough.
It all comes out all right.
It's called The State of the Art.
Quiz in Hell was making the point that he had been slain.
"You're dead.
You're a dead man.
Just one more goner," Lesefario said.
"No, no.
My pop's a dead man.
All the folks on the old man's side with their bad histories
and amok blood counts, they're dead men.
I was definitely slain, smited, blasted.
Here today.
Gone today, slain absolutely.
And none of the amenities, let me tell you.
No last words or final cigarette, the blindfold
unoffered.
It was as if I'd gotten in to start my car
and, boom, like someone ambushed,
snuffed by unions, eating in restaurants,
and rushed by hitmen."
"Do you know who did it?"
"No.
I've got my suspicions.
I'm working on it.
I have some leads.
I've-- hey.
Hey, where are you going?
Hey."
But Lesefario was gone, vanished in Hell's vast smokescreen,
the fiery fog that was its climate.
Because it was the fate of the damned to run, of course, not
jog, run, their piss on fire and their shit molten,
boiling sperm and their ovaries frying,
what they were permitted of body sprinting at full throttle,
wounded gallop, burning not fat.
Fat sizzled off in the first seconds, bubbled like bacon
and disappeared, evaporative steam.
Though the weight was still there, still with you.
Its fricative drag subversive as a tear in a kite,
and not even muscle, which blazed
like wick, but the organs themselves,
like the liver scorching and the heart and brains at flashpoint,
combusting the chemistries, the irons and phosphates, the atoms
and elements, conflagrating vitamin, essence, soul,
yet somehow everything still within the limits
if not of endurance then of existence,
damnation strictly physical, nothing personal,
Hell's lawless marathon removed from character.
"Sure," someone had said.
"We hit the wall with every step.
It's all wall down here.
It's wall-to-wall wall.
What?
Did you think Hell would be like some old-time baker's oven
that all you had to do was lie down on a pan like dough,
the insignificant heat bringing you out,
fluffing you up like bread or oatmeal cookies?
You think we're birthday cake?
We're fucking stars.
Damnation is hard work, eternity, lousy hours."
So if Lesefario ran, it was his fate to do so,
only his body's kindled imperative.
But he might have run anyway, getting as far as he could
from Quiz and his crazy talk about suspicions and leads,
angrier at who'd put him there than at his oiled-rag presence
itself, holding a grudge which in others went
up faster than fat, resentment as useless
in these primed Mideast circumstances
as hope or apology.
Also, it made less Lesefario wistful, nostalgic,
all that talk of slaying and snuffing.
It was George's own last memory.
He'd been a clerk in Ellebee's Liquor Store in Minneapolis,
an employee who'd worked for the younger man
15 years, whose crimes were almost victimless,
a little harmless chiseling making change and once
the purchase of some hijacked wine at discount, certainly
nothing that would warrant the final confrontation
with the stickup men who'd taken first Ellebee's money
and then his clerk's life, shooting him down for no reason
for target practice.
"To teach you a lesson," his killer
had said and taught him his death.
It wasn't much as these things went,
but it was Lesefario's last human contact,
and he treasured it.
Meanwhile, Quiz collared everyone he could,
fixing them with the tale of his unexpected end, sudden
his comeuppance.
"I make no charges," he screamed,
as they double-timed through firestorm in their Dresden
tantrum.
"I make no charges.
I've got no proof.
But a thing like that, all that wrath,
those terrible-swift-sword arrangements,
that's the MO of God himself."
God overheard Quiz's complaints.
They were true and briefly surprised
him, which also surprised him, who, unaccustomed to surprise,
did not immediately recognize the emotion, for whom the world
and history were fixed as house odds, who
knew the grooves in phonograph records
and numbered the knots in string, which
was a little silly, of course, not without truth, but silly,
as though I were the microfiche God, Lord of the punched cards.
That he had smited Quiz struck him as odd,
an act like an oversight.
The man had been a groundskeeper in a high school stadium.
God had stopped by to hear some children in a summer recital,
and Quiz had interrupted the performance.
"I overreacted," thought God, as mildly bemused
as he had been briefly surprised.
Because he was no street brawler, not really,
though people didn't appreciate this.
He'd made his reputation in the old days.
It was all there in the Bible.
"Now, that was a good book," he thought.
He thought.
"He does so much thinking," he thought,
"because he has no one to talk to," he thought.
But we were always a good listener.
Folks were constantly sending him their prayers, tykes in Dr.
Denton's, people in churches, all the bowed-head, locker room
theology of teams in contention, the invocations at rallies,
the moments of silent prayer, the grace
notes at a hundred billion supper
tables, all the laymen of Rotary, Elks, Shrine,
and Jaycees.
"God," God thought, needs din its mumbled gimmes."
And he used to listen.
He had taken requests.
He had smote the Egyptians, knocked off this tribe or that.
Well, it was the worship.
He was a sucker for worship.
To this day, a pilgrimage turned his heart, the legless,
like athletes, pulling themselves
up the steps of great cathedrals,
the prostrate humble face down in dog shit.
He summoned his only begotten son,
a young man in his early 30s, a solid, handsome figure
who in life might once have had skills.
He appeared in the doorway of the mansion.
There was about him a peculiar, expectant attitude,
alerted but ambivalent, not nervous but deferential,
like a new cabinet minister standing by microphones
near his president.
He wore a plain but clearly expensive
loose-fitting robe cinched at the waist.
A small, carefully crafted cross with a half-nude figure
not so much suspended from it as vaguely buckled to it,
the back arched and the knees slightly raised,
flexed as an astronaut's on his couch, hung about his throat.
The hands, pinioned to the transverse,
were nailed at the lifeline and along the forward edges
of the palms, rendering it impossible to make a fist.
The ankles were crossed, beveled,
studded with thick, crude nails.
His father glanced without pleasure from his only begotten
son's jewelry to the hands crippled
at his sides, each hand still in that same stiff, equivocal
position, neither open nor shut and holding nothing, giving
the impression that they had once been folded
and had just now been pulled apart.
God nodded for the son to approach
and winced as the young man staggered forward
in that odd, rolling gait of the lame, each sandaled foot
briefly and ultimately visible beneath the long robes
as he labored toward him, the toes crushed, twisted, almost
braided, suggesting a satyr orthopedics,
the wrongly angled, badly-set bones of hidden legs.
"Please," God said, "sit down."
The son of God paused, looked around,
spotted what he'd been looking for.
"So," he said, "you kept it."
"Of course," God said.
Jesus lowered himself onto the crude, groundless stool.
It was almost a parody of furniture, a kid's first effort
in shop, the badly turned spindles
dropsical, rough-caulked at their holes with shim.
"He"ll hurt himself," God thought.
But the son had the cripple's tropism, his lurching,
awkward truce with gravity.
"Well, it holds me," he said.
"Yes," God said.
"That"s right," Christ said.
He looked down.
"You know, I couldn't make apprentice today,"
he said softly.
"You did your crucifix well enough," God said.
The son smiled.
What?
This old thing, he seemed to say.
Then in a moment, he did speak.
"I raised the dead," he said.
"I ran them up like flags on poles.
I gave the blind 20/20 and lepers
the complexions of debutantes.
Miracle was my [INAUDIBLE]."
This he said brushing the crucifix with fingers
that would never be straight.
"Nothing to it.
It was wished into being.
It's snapshot is all, a Christ's gilded baby shoe,
sentimental as a lock of hair.
You like it?
It's a true cross, by the way, but no hands made it."
God said, "You've no forgiveness, have you?
There isn't enough love in you to flesh out a song."
"Well, the apple doesn't fall"--
"Stop that," the father said.
"Wondering where you went wrong, Papa,
why I'm such a surly savior?
Look at it this way.
These things happen in the holiest families."
"No, you've no forgiveness."
"Me?"
Christ said.
"I was built to forgive.
I give away dispensation like a lost leader.
There isn't a horror they can dream up
I don't change it to cheesecake in the blink of an eye.
I go to Yankee Stadium when the home team's away,
and the evangelist comes, and it's standing room only
for the fans of salvation.
And I do it there under the light's, hitting
the walled fields, God's designated hitter.
And it's forgive and forget and bygones be bygones.
So don't tell me I have no forgiveness.
Why, I'm made of pardon and commutation and forgiveness
like the laws of bankruptcy or the statute of limitations.
And why not?
What did any of those poor bastards ever do to me?"
"All right," God said.
I want you to take my case."
"Your case?"
"I smote a man."
"You?"
"His name was Quiz.
He irritated me.
He made a disturbance during a recital
and ruined my concentration.
I overreacted."
"You smote him?"
"I already told you," the Lord said irritably.
The Christ giggled.
"So?"
God said.
"So?"
"So do what you do to those other poor bastards.
Absolve me.
Shrive me.
Wipe my slate.
Put me on your tab.
Pick up my check.
Carry me. 'Forgive us our debts as we
forgive our debtors' love."
Though the words were flippant, there
was a sort of urgency behind them,
a sense he gave off not of rage but of rage cornered,
its energy turned to reason.
"Poor Quiz," Christ thought.
"Sure," Christ said finally, "for the slaying of Quiz,
I forgive you."
"You never understood anything, did you?"
the Lord asked murderously.
"You never got into the spirit of things."
"I thought I was the spirit of things,"
the young man said meekly.
"Lamb!"
God roared.
"We were talking about Quiz."
"We were never talking about Quiz."
"No," Jesus said softly, rising awkwardly from the stool
as his father watched.
He used his body to steady himself
and, turning, stamped the floor like a tap dancer,
kicking at leverage, purchase with his cripple's volitionless
two-step.
"I loved it there," he said.
"I loved being alive."
God looked at his son thoughtfully.
"Well," the Lord said, "at least in conversation, you
can still turn the other cheek.
How's your mother?"
"Ah," said the Christ.
Quiz was making a name for himself among the damned.
He never let up ranting, each day bringing his charges.
It could not have been madness.
Paranoia was vaporized even more swiftly than grudge.
So after a while, they began to believe him
and, in despite of their own pain, even to take his side.
Quiz seemed to be everywhere at once,
like a celebrity in a small town.
"I was Pearl Harbored," he might scream,
"December 7 by the Lord.
Is that fair?
I ask you.
Men die, have heart attacks, wear out, mostly wear out.
The junk men won't touch them, Detroit recall them.
And, yes, I grant that some go sudden.
There are accidents.
Accidents happen.
Mother nature fucks up.
Kids dart into traffic.
Balls roll in the street.
But that's only physics.
It's physics is all.
Guys bite it in war.
and that's physics too.
And a crime of passion's a flexing of glands.
It's physics.
It's science.
Been stung by a wasp, by hornets, crazed bees?
They were doing their duty, following law.
With me, it was different.
God came from his hive.
I was stung by the Lord."
Then one day, he was calmer, changed.
"It don't hurt anymore," he announced.
They looked at him in wonder.
"The pain, I can't feel it.
It must pay to complain."
He felt himself carefully, dabbing experimentally
at his wounds, the steaming sores and third-degree skin.
He poked his fingers in the flaming craters
of his flesh, the smoking, dormant cones of erupt boils.
"They've turned off the juice.
Look," he said.
Look," and stooping, gathered a bolus of fire
and placed it on his tongue.
"See?" he said, chewing the flame,
moving it about like a mouthwash,
snapping it like gum.
"See?
It ain't any more spice to it than a bite of hot dinner.
I frolic in fire.
I hi-ho in heat."
He played with brimstone for them.
He waded in flames like a child of the shore.
"I think they've decided to do something for me.
I think they're afraid I might sue."
Lesefario and the others who saw him
crossed themselves in the presence of the miracle.
But all they got for their pains was
pain, their foreheads and breasts
like so many blazing crosses on so many lawns.
She was a modest woman, self-effacing, old fashioned,
downright shy, intact, a virgin by temperament and inclination
as much as compulsion or circumstance; more, something
actually spinster in her nature, the quality not of maiden,
since that term had about it a smell of the conditional,
but of the permanently chaste, something
beyond chastity; however, chastity, in her case,
at least not so much a choice as a quality,
like the shade of her skin or the height
she would be, fixed as her overbite, something
beyond chastity, beyond even repression.
It was one of the reasons she'd been chosen,
of course, as Saint Joan had been
chosen for the breadth of her shoulders, her sinewy arms.
It was one of the reasons she'd been chosen,
he'd reminded her in their rare interviews.
It was one of the reasons she'd been chosen.
Yes, she agreed.
It was the cruelest reason.
To have to listen to her, to the ironic litany,
unceasing, continuous as the noise of summer,
she would never get used to it, over it.
The humiliation is stinging after 2,000 years
as the first time she'd heard it and realized it was she
they meant.
Hail, Mary, she heard, full of grace.
Blessed art thou among women, and blessed
is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
"Nice," she thought, "a fine way to pray,"
her most intimate parts called out as familiarly as her name,
associating her with a femaleness she not only did not
understand but actually repudiated,
freezing her forever not just in fecundity
but in a kind of sluggishness.
And for all the world, she was the Virgin Mary,
the capital letters an epithet like something
scrawled in phone booths or spray painted in subways,
the snide oxymorons repugnant to her,
Virgin Mother, Immaculate Conception, her story known
throughout the world, carried by missionaries to hinterland,
boondock, clearing, sticks, parsed by savages,
riddled by New Guinea stone-ages.
All the bare-breasted and loinclothed who stood
for whatever she could not stand,
almost the first thing they were told after the distribution
of gifts, the shiny mirrors in which they could see
their nakedness, their dark, rubbery genitalia,
their snarled and matted wool, the fierce,
ropy nipples flaring against the stained,
gross coronas of breasts prickled as strawberries,
almost the first thing they were told--
her shame, a story; her story, a legend;
her legend, an apotheosis told through translators
or in the broken pigeons of a thousand tongues
or with actual hand signs, the complicated history.
There was this woman, a girl, not even a woman, Mary,
the wife of Joseph, betrothed of Joseph,
the union not consummated, who learned that she
was to bear God's child.
God's?
Yes, God the Father.
The father?
Of Jesus, our savior.
Wait.
So this wife, this Mary, a virgin big
with child in a stable in Bethlehem.
A stable?
For the horses, in the straw, in the horse's straw,
in the pissed hay of the cows and the camels.
And this Mary, this virgin went into labor.
You know about labor.
Look.
Watch.
Labor.
They were poor, humble people, ragged.
Her clothes didn't fit.
Her shift was mean, tight across the burden of her belly
for she couldn't afford to hide what
would have been obvious even in commodious clothing.
It was crowded.
The town, people came from all over to watch her,
to stare into her womb where the fruit was, strangers, high-ups
from great distances, shepherds, locals who'd
seen the bleeding, dilated cunts of 1,000 [INAUDIBLE] dames,
dams, but who'd never seen anything like this,
an actual woman on actual straw, wreathing not
as an animal would, accustomed to straw, but wildly
thrashing, bucking, not understanding what
was happening her, not really, a virgin, recall,
who not only had never known a man
but who had never even touched herself,
understand, who wasn't even curious about such things,
anything but, and all this in the presence of eyewitnesses,
her bewildered husband who knew he had nothing to do with it,
who felt sold, if you want to know.
And then the child came, pushing himself,
I mean doing the pushing, having to climb up
out of that fruity womb practically single-handed
because she was still more virgin than mother,
more virgin even than woman, who knew nothing of contracting,
pressing, pushing, such exercise not only alien to her
but obscene.
And but if she was still a virgin,
how did God the Father--
well, that part's the mystery but accomplished
in a series of filthy, almost humorous gestures,
broad as actors, that even the missionaries knew,
would have to have mastered or actually
invent, practicing them like a blasphemous sign
language behind their own backs if they
had to just to make them understand,
give them something of the graphic, hardcore detail they
would almost certainly have to know if their attention was
to be engaged later for the theology parts.
So she was the hook, sex was, the Queen of Heaven.
Some queen.
Some Heaven-- 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 came from,
how it got there.
And yes, God the Father had beamed.
"That"s one of the reasons you were chosen"--
and had even, by her likes, 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 pieta
postures and public tabloid grief reel 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 of 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.
Well, 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 to her, her breast
offered reluctantly to those cunning lips,
the strange 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 children didn't, as the savages hadn't, the mystery
that was beyond the range even of the missionaries,
of the popes, of the saints, and the 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.
He 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 Lita, with Samali, with Almini,
with Ino and Europa and Dani in all
his kinky avatars and golden bough of 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 that 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 reign, carte blanche,
but neither of them ever testing the waters of that freedom.
They said, miracles still happen, 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.
And 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 elects, and all the ordinary saved.
Stigmata, one must not stare at stigmata,
the inner edge of the nimbus, the fabulous scalara 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 culverts 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?"
"Well, it's too high."
The Holy Virgin smiled.
"Yes, Heaven is very high," she said.
"Play something for us, please, Flanoy."
"Play?"
"Your music."
"Well, 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 unclenched astronomy white with re-entry.
"Look at them," Quiz thought, "like
teams of horses, runaways, their harness on fire."
No longer in pain himself, he can
enjoy the spectacle, their aurora-borealic frenzy
and lasered essence charming as fireworks
to the appreciative exgroundskeeper.
"Hey," he called.
"Hey.
Hey, you guys are beautiful, you know?
You look like a world premiere."
He laughed.
"You look like fucking Chinese New Year's You know that?
Come on," he said when they snarled at him.
"Come on.
You gotta 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 said.
"You're a dud," he said.
"Oh, 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 said.
"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.
Hey, 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.
Hey, I ain't any Hell's olley olley oxen free.
Let go.
Hey, let go.
Hey, 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 balloon
from the grip of a child.
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.
"Oh, 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 of 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 fellow.
A humble fellow says a million, he's
got in mind maybe three, four."
"Humble, shmumble," said Jesus.
"Tinhorn, 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 Pops and what's
doings, your mucky 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 your 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 YMCAs,
seeing LA and Chicago and other cities
from air-conditioned tour buses.
Indeed, he'd come away from those 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 fan 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 Savior 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 Moslim effacement, his nose
burrowing a jeweled treasury afloor,
but put upon, wondering if this was
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 smited, 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 you don't love me," Joseph thought.
"Because he's adopted, who goes around
like that to spite him, to get his attention, [INAUDIBLE]..
What do I care he ain't perfect?
What do I care we ain't Him?
What a business.
We walked around on eggshells with each other,
nervous even when we were alone.
Sure.
Did I watch her undress?
Did I hold her in my arms when the Lord
has Zion 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 called me cuckold and thanked 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 the husband.
And loyalty oaths he wants, guarantees
every 50,000 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 2,000-year joke.
Go home.
Cleave unto Mary.
See 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 light."
"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 door nail,
as dodo dead.
How'd they get you?
Do you go against?
Did you break their rules, eat too much sweets,
or touch yourself?
What are you in for?
What's the charge?
How they get you, dead to rights?"
"Jesus wants me for a sunbeam."
And we take a break now.
[APPLAUSE]