Book of Jim: Agnostic Parables and Dick Jokes From Lucifer's Paradise (9 page)

I guess they might.  Or they do.

I have it here that you were even present for the diplomacies.

I was.

Well?  Perhaps you could give us the upshot.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around it, man.

Give us the old college try.

Alright, well uh, the devil, or I mean not the devil.  Gabriella.  I don’t know, I think she’s transgender.  She came to me in tears and said me and Cherry put a crack in the firmament.  Evidently the angels put up this firmament so the different kinds of Christians couldn’t see each other.  That’s part of their
paradise
, I guess, is knowing they’re the ones that got it right.  Cherry’s the girl I’m seeing, by the way.  As far as you can see a girl around here.  Anyway, we had this epic fifteen-rounder and we blasted a hole in the firmament.  Gabriella tells me I have to help her fix it.  So we
whoomf
on over to the cloud where they’re doing the diplomacies and Gabriella gives these guys the bad news.  You know, that
paradise
is for everybody and there’s a lot of relativism going around.  They weren’t too happy about that.  So Gabriella tells them there’s a whole ocean to swim around in and they’re just fighting over a drop.  Which, like, totally floored me, but it went right past these guys.  They didn’t give two shits, man.  It turned out that the Catholics were playing dirty, anyway, so none of it really even mattered.  Everything just went to hell.

What an utterly useless response.  If it was of any importance I’d call it tragic.  To those of you still with us, I salute your resilience and I’m humbled by your endurance.  I’ll try to reward it with a retelling – with an editorial – more worthy of your auditory canals.  Though I doubt the irony can be missed by anybody, there are some important subtleties that might escape the first glance.  It’s fairly well established – the one-two punch of sexual repression and deviancy that infests the institutions of religion – Hey!  You can’t come in here!  I am a journalist.  We are protected under international –

6

The Anglican sheathed his sword, apologized to Jim for the intrusion, and departed.  Christopher’s head lay on the desk next to a decanter of red wine and a half-empty glass.  His body lay on the floor.

“I’m under the impression he hasn’t read the articles of the Geneva Convention,” Christopher’s head said.

Outside the makeshift studio there were the
clangs
and
bangs
of war.  Jim heard the thunder of the hooves of cavalry charge into the booms of modern artillery.  He heard trumpets battle drums and megaphone Revelations. 

Christopher’s head bit at the stem of the half-empty wine glass.  But without hands he could not
get at
the wine.  Jim thought, Nobody up here is going to die.

“Are they going to fight forever?” he said.

“Oh, I’m sure they’ll come to an accord before eternity’s end,” Christopher’s head said.  “Even the religious can’t escape the strangeness of infinity.  If it can happen, it will.”  He curled his tongue around the stem, yawed back and forth, then gave up.  “Do me a favor?”

Jim picked up the glass and poured the wine into the head’s mouth.  He said, “Why can’t they all just be special together?”

“The war of the ages is being fought all around me, and I’m trapped in a windowless room with a pacifist,” Christopher’s head said.  “Let me try it this way.  We’re pattern-seekers, Jim.  Nothing thrills us more than the seventh note of the scale followed by the eighth.  It’s coded into our genetics through a hundred thousand years of survival and evolution.  To understand the world is to manufacture order out of chaos.  But – how did you put it? – with all this relativism going around, order isn’t so easy to manufacture.  And in the absence of order, the reptilian brain will smash a million square pegs through the proverbial round hole.  You’re simple so I’ll put it even more plainly:  These men invented God that they might shovel their doubts up his ass, and your coital nuke stabbed him in the guts and now it’s raining shit.”

“Pattern seekers?”

“Fuck me.”

“Well, help me out, then.  Because what you just laid out sounds like a pattern.”

“Some patterns exist.  A few examples of false pattern recognition don’t convict the thought processes of the entire species.”

“You’re an atheist.”

“By default.”

“So where do the angels fit in?  The clouds and eternity?  Afterlife?  An atheist in
paradise
is a contradiction.”

“I have certain suspicions in that regard.  The ever-expanding thought-reality of this place is reminiscent of Lewis: 
Hell is a state of mind.
  I’m sure even you’ve heard that before.  This freedom-loving devil sounds an awful lot like she walked out of the pages of Paradise Lost, and all this gallivanting around with dead celebrities is straight out of the pages of Dante. 
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.
  I scarcely need mention the central conflict, this Paradise-sans-Truth tension, a trope as old and quaint as Eden.  Throw in the haphazard philosophies, the hipster irony, the cheap jokes – It’s almost as if some publicly educated and under-employed ass is having literary spasms.”

The eyes of Christopher’s head roamed about the studio until they found the place where the studio met the page.  And they looked up off the page and at
me
.  I looked away, for I
was
guilty.  I stepped outside and I smoked a cigarette.  I poured myself another coffee.  I thought about giving up.  But I really wanted to know how Jim was going to fix the firmament, so I went back.  I expected to martyr myself against the edges of Christopher’s rhetoric, but when I sat back down he had already moved on.

“As for the angels,” he said, “If apes can graduate, so too can men.  It would be a cosmic travesty if we were evolution’s final product.”

“So everybody’s got a pattern for everything,” Jim said.  He stole a drink from the half-empty glass, and he nearly spit it back out.  “Ughh, that’s bitter.”

“It’s Amarone.”

“It’s bitter.”  Jim set down the glass.  “So what do we do?  Nothing?  Just pull up a chair and mock what passes?”

“Carry me,” Christopher said.

“What?”

“I don’t need a body to give these demagogues what-for.  Even the invicted heart draws blood from the brain.  We’ll divest them of these superstitions with reason, with the dynamics of logic and argument.  We’ll scour the fields of battle with the ink of a thousand years of secular thought.  Carry me, Jim!  I’ll eat in
paradise
what I merely disdained on Earth.”

“I don’t think it will work,” Jim said.

“Carry me,” the head said.

Jim squatted and met Christopher’s gaze with his own.  He said, “These religious guys might be a little silly, but Immanuel Kant is a fucking
dick
.”  Then he made for the door.

“Jim!  What humanity lost through submission it will win back through progress and irony!  Mark those words, Jim.  One day!”

7

So Jim wandered upon the fields of battle.  While he wandered he beheld many feats of violence and insanity.  He saw the pointy hat of a bishop that wobbled in the hatch of a Sherman tank, and the tank rolled at the head of a legion armed with shovels and pitchforks.  He saw great volleys of arrows exchanged between clouds.  He saw the shells of artillery rip into a battalion whose armor was duct tape and Bible paper.

And the angels kept a loose perimeter in the sky and on the ground.  Some of them were confused or concerned, but most of them pointed and laughed and had a pretty good time.

The crack in the firmament streaked over the war.  It glowed.

It came to pass that Jim came to a place between three hills.  The place was sheltered by trees and a river.  It was open and flat, occupied by a peaceful throng.  A middle-aged woman in a conservative summer dress met him as he entered.

“Welcome,” she said.

“What’s going on here?” Jim said.  “There’s a war going on, you know.”

“Well, we are the Presbyterian Church of Canada, and we’d much rather have a picnic.  Would you like some juice or some coffee?  There will be cake and cookies afterwards, but you’re welcome to some coffee now.  I could introduce you to the boys.  Oh, excuse me. 
Men.
  You’re not boys anymore, are you?  My son is about your age.”

“Afterwards?  After what?”  Jim made his suspicions known with a
squint.

“Oh, we have a very special speaker.”  Then she leaned in and spoke confidentially.  “It’s top secret, but I’ll give you a hint.  His name is John Calvin.”

The name didn’t mean anything to Jim, but he understood from her tone that it
was
impressive.  “Holy buckets,” he said.  He retained the
squint
.

“The holiest,” she said.  “Can I bring you to my son?  The two of you will get on just great.”

“Sure.”

She led him to a small group of
men
at the edge of the peaceful throng.  She introduced them and Jim introduced himself and then she left.  Her son had thick shoulders and a good handshake.  His name was Michael.  Jim liked him, and the liking intensified his suspicions.

“So Jim,” Michael said, “Are you looking to buy something, or just hiding from the weather?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, do you have any interest in becoming a Presbyterian?”

“Oh, well, not really.  I’m not very religious.”

“That’s quite alright, Jim.  No worries, really.  You know, I’ve got this theory about Jesus.  Not sure how original it is, but it goes like this:  Don’t shove Him down anybody’s throat, and He won’t fly out of anybody’s ass.”  He slapped Jim on the shoulder.  “You alright?  Looks like you’ve got something in your eye.”

For Jim had
squinted
too far.  He relaxed his face.  “You seem alright,” he said.

“Yeah, I know we get a bad rap once in a while.  Hell, we deserve it.  And I’ll be honest with you, I only believe in half of this stuff myself.  But I really
do
believe in that half.”

“Which half?”

“Redemption.  The idea that no matter what you’ve done, you can come back around.  You can get clean and be good in the eyes of God.  Like, we all fuck up sometimes, you know?  And sometimes it gets pretty ugly.  But you can always come back here, and as long as you come with an open heart, you can get back to even.”

Jim considered these words, for he
had
nuked the firmament, and he felt pretty bad about it.  And the peaceful throng
was
nice and wholesome.  They would probably even forgive him. 

Maybe I’m a Presbyterian, he thought.

John Calvin arrived.  He elevated himself on a tree stump in the center of the throng.  He spoke for twenty minutes.  He condemned the war but not those who fought in it, and he asked everyone to pray for their misguided brothers and sisters.  He spoke eloquently about the difficulties of moral absolutes and the mysteries of eternity.  As he neared the end of his speaking, he said there remained a single theological problem to resolve, and Jim was hanging on his words.

Calvin said, “As we know, God in His wisdom and His mercy granted Grace Everlasting to some of us, and Damnation to others.  We are all mortally bound to the Original Sin and we share equally in the depravity of the Human Condition, and His choice has nothing to do with our little worlds, and everything to do with His mercy.  The difficulty we face, following the crack in the firmament, is that everyone is now in Paradise.  It has been theologically established that this is not the will of the Creator, and something must be done.

“Lacking the authority to deliver Damnation, and being naturally opposed to it for the frailty of our Condition, there is but one path to Reconciliation with God.  Some of our number must reject Paradise through voluntary discomfiture.  The discomfort must not be too severe, for through pride and vanity we would flay ourselves and abuse God’s dignity.  Nor must it be too trifling, for through gluttony we would abuse His mercy.  Therefore, one third of our number must wear scratchy undergarments and abstain from wi-fi for the duration of the breach of the firmament.  We shall endure this discomfiture together, in rotation, in shifts not less than twelve and not exceeding forty days.  We thank God for His patience and for giving us this wisdom.  Amen.

“Oh, and if anyone has a skin condition, or is otherwise ill-disposed to the wearing of scratchy undergarments, please give your name to Mrs. Roy.  We’ll find you a more suitable discomfiture.”

Michael stopped Jim at the exit.  “Jim!” he said.  “At least stay for some cake!”

“It’s too sweet,” Jim said.

8

She sat in a mortar hole in the charred and blasted ground.  Light played upon her through the branches of a broken tree.  She was Gabriella where the light touched her, and she was Lucy in the shade.

“They love this war,” she said.  “They love it more than the lie.  They will never stop fighting.”