Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (29 page)

“Who told you this crap?”

“It’s common knowledge. Most of it comes from
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
, which has been around forever. You haven’t read it?”

“I don’t waste my time reading junk like that,” Jimmy says with outright contempt.

“Oh, like those
Flash Gordon
and
Green Hornet
comic books you collect are so deep. They teach you everything you need to know about life and death, right?”

“Eat shit, Gordon.”

“No, you eat shit, Jimmy-Toad.”

They sit in silence for a spell, encased in separate cocoons of spiteful pride, although they both know they can’t stay mad at each other for long because they have a whole trip to get through together. Besides, on some level they recognize each other as kindred spirits–yin and yang, two sides of the same coin. Gordon suspects they knew each other in previous lives–but again, that’s not something he’s willing to voice.

Miles pass. At the junction where North Academy Road turns into Highway 168, they look out the rear window and see a roadside stand selling gaudy Mexican garden statues: frogs pushing flower carts, burros wearing sombreros, muscle-bound jungle cats, bejeweled Indian elephants, hooded gnomes, and crouching, fat-bellied Easter Bunnies. Toward the center of this menagerie, towering above everything else, is a four-foot-tall plaster Virgin Mary. A bow-legged baby Jesus with a bloody crown of thorns lies half-buried in gravel at her feet. Gordon suddenly experiences a sensation like
déjà vu
, only stranger–an intimation that something there will be important to him in the future.

Trying to get a new conversation started, Gordon asks, “Do you think Jesus ever talked back to the Virgin Mary when he was a teenager?”

“Well, she was his mom. He would’ve
had
to’ve given her some shit every now and then, if he wasn’t a total wuss. But I don’t remember hearing about it. What’s it say in the Bible?” Jimmy shoots Gordon a hard look. “I know. You’ve probably read
that
from cover-to-cover, too, haven’t you?”

Actually, Gordon has–despite the fact that his parents made fun of him for doing so. Reclining on his bed in the foggy evenings of last winter reading a King James Bible, Gordon looked up on more than one occasion to find Cynthia and Mal peering in at him from the bedroom doorway, smirking. Gordon didn’t understand why they thought it was such a big deal. He wasn’t turning into some kind of a religious fanatic. He just had an interest in the Bible as literature. Frankly, he found most of it on the dull side–especially the Old Testament. He couldn’t keep track of who begat whom; there was an appalling amount of self-righteously justified violence on the part of Jehovah and almost everyone else; and a phrase kept cropping up–“he pisseth against the wall”–that really started to annoy Gordon because it seemed to mean something other than what he thought it meant, but he couldn’t figure out what.

“The Bible hardly says anything at all about Jesus as a teenager,” Gordon says. “It’s kind of weird, don’t you think? Like he didn’t exist for all that time.”

“Someone should write a book about it. They could call it:
CHRIST!
The Lost Teen Years
. It could be all about how Jesus learned kung fu and ended up scoring chicks like Mary Magdalene.”

“Maybe you should write it.” Gordon is having a hard enough time with
Blind and Hairless,
now approaching 200 manuscript pages
.
He can’t imagine Jimmy having the patience to write a novel of his own someday.

“Maybe I will,” Jimmy says. “You don’t think I can, but I might surprise you.”

“That’d be cool. Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority would probably have you crucified, if you do.”

Twenty or thirty miles later, the air starts to get thinner as Mr. Marrsden drives them through switchbacks high up in the mountains. All that jostling around in the back of the pick-up is making them both feel dizzy and sick. Jimmy suggests they eat some Pepto-Bismol tablets that he saw in one of the grocery bags. The chalky, too-sweet taste of the little pink tablets makes Gordon feel worse, but he chews up four of them, anyway. Jimmy eats eight. “I think I’m gonna barf,” he complains.

“That’s Jesus getting back at you for making fun of him,” says Gordon, although he feels on the verge of puking as well.

“That guy needs to get a sense of humor,” says Jimmy after he clutches his stomach and lets out out a sick-smelling burp.

“If your dad made you die for the sins of the world, you’d probably end up a little moody, too.”

Outside the rear window, they can see a swaying panorama of Ponderosa Pines and Incense Cedars–almost enough to make a forest–but neither of them feels well enough to appreciate the change in scenery. Instead, their gazing turns inward. Jimmy asks, “Did you ever read
Childhood’s End
by Arthur C. Clarke?”

“Yeah. In third grade. That’s the one where aliens called the Overlords park their giant spaceships over every major city in the world and stop all the wars–but then they don’t show their faces for fifty years. And when they finally do, they turn out to look just like devils.”

“Horns, batwings, red skin, everything! That was so cool!”

“So what’s your point?”

“The aliens weren’t evil, they were good. They just had advanced technology–and that scared everybody.”

“‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’”

“Right. Like I said.”

“Actually, Arthur Clarke said that… and his idea was that the arrival of the Overlords heralded a paradigm shift in the evolution of the human species, when all the children on the planet would be leaving to join the Overmind. Any major change like that scares the crap out of people, so the collective unconscious somehow looked into the future and saw what the Overlords looked like, then turned them into a symbol for evil, thousands of years before they actually showed up.”

“That guy had just totally awesome ideas. Maybe everything we’re afraid of is actually good for us.”

“I don’t know if the Overlords were all that ‘good.’ But Rilke wrote something about that idea. He said, ‘Maybe all the dragons in our lives are really princesses, who are just waiting for us to be beautiful and brave. And maybe everything terrible is deep down something helpless that wants help from us.’ That’s not it exactly, but you get the gist.”

“That’s so
pussyfied!”

“I didn’t say it–Rilke did. And William Blake said a lot of things that were similar. He said God is like an ‘absentee landlord’ and at least Satan is on the side of progress and increased knowledge for mankind, like Prometheus.”

“Prometheus is that guy who stole fire from the gods, right?”

“Right.”

“See? I’m not totally lame.”

“Have you ever heard of Gnosticism?”

“Isn’t that the religion for those guys who smoke all the pot down in Jamaica?”

“No. That’s something else. Gnosticism is… well, it’s kind of hard to explain. It’s an old religion that believes we can get to heaven by acquiring knowledge, through intuition and experience. The Gnostics think this world was created by a bad god–a
Demiurge
–who wandered too far from the True God and somehow got perverted. The Demiurge acts like Jehovah in the Old Testament and believes he’s the only God, but he’s not. He’s still carrying around half the True God’s essence, but he’s forgotten about that part of himself. The Demiurge made this world with his other, less divine half. That’s why things are so screwed up, why the world is full of pain and suffering. The Demiurge rules this world through beings called
Archons,
which are kind of like evil genies that enslave mankind, either by giving people what they want or by fucking them over in the worst ways possible. Archons can be good or bad, like the Overlords in
Childhood’s End
, but mostly they’re bad, because they’ve forgotten they’re part of the True God, too. The True God is also part of us. In us it’s called the Divine Spark. Like Jesus said, ‘The Kingdom of God is within.’ It’s our job, through Gnosis, to liberate our Divine Spark from the trap of the material world and rejoin our Angelic Twin in heaven. But before we can do that, we have to go through a series of freaky dreams and mystical experiences that modify our astral and physical bodies.”

There’s more, of course–the role of Sophia (Wisdom) in creating the world and the Demiurge; the recent English translation of the Nag Hammadi Library (which contains Gnostic papyrus books dating back to the third- and fourth-centuries); Mary Magdalene as Jesus’ earthly consort, or maybe even his wife–but Gordon is feeling far too sick to get into it at the moment and Jimmy, frankly, doesn’t seem all that interested.

A hint of malice glints in Jimmy’s eye as he says, “That’s the biggest load of bullshit I ever heard.”

“Glad you liked it.”

“The only thing I liked was that part about the Archons. If they’re really like genies, could you say some magic words and get them to do stuff for you?”

“Only if you promised to help them mess up the world even more. I’m guessing Joseph Coors probably has Archons hanging around him all the time now.” It’s really starting to bother Gordon that every bottle of Coors that people drink helps to further Joseph Coors’ world-screwing agenda.

Jimmy croons the chorus from John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High” until they lurch through a sudden hairpin turn and he has to open the rear window and stick his head out so he can puke like a dog over the pick-up’s tailgate. Shasta Root Beer, stomach acid, half-digested Froot Loops, chunks of bubble gum and licorice, and a distinctive pink spume of Pepto-Bismol all land in the road with a frothy plop. The sour mist of Jimmy’s barf gets blown back into Gordon’s face. He joins Jimmy at the tailgate, hurling his guts out as they pass through a pine-crowded canyon.

And that’s how they arrive at Dinkey Creek.

□ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □

That night, in the army surplus tent that Gordon and Jimmy pitched under the pine boughs and twinkling stars (several yards away from the bigger blue nylon tent sheltering Jimmy’s parents), Gordon dreams he’s sitting on the edge of a high cliff. Jimmy sits next to him on his left and a friendly plesiosaur with maternal eyes sits in a shallow cave just behind them. In the canyon below, the land is marshy, dotted with small ponds. Gordon points out one pond in particular to Jimmy, where a large rattlesnake is emerging from the water. As the snake slithers onto dry land, it transforms into a dinosaur with muscular hind legs. The dinosaur walks on all fours for a while, then starts walking upright as it transforms once again. It becomes a giant reptileman with a cowled and bulbous head like a malevolent octopus. It reminds Gordon of the big-headed, cloven-brained aliens in spangled bathrobes depicted in science fiction movies from the fifties. Gordon has a camera with him (a Mamiya RZ67) and he takes the reptileman’s picture with it. The giant reptileman walks over to stand inside a dark cavern in the far cliff wall, where he’s joined by others just like him. Three of them leave the cavern and walk in formation past the far side of the pond where the snake first emerged. Gordon gets more pictures. He’s not sure his F-stop is set correctly and he’s anxious to develop the film, to make sure he has the image. He’s about to go off in search of a film lab when he looks down and sees Jimmy running up to the reptilemen, waving a small red book.

He wants their autographs.

□ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □

I guess it’s only natural that Gordon would be thinking about religion after the death of our biological father. I mean, I never really knew the guy (at least not in this incarnation), so growing up without him doesn’t seem like that big a deal to me. But for Gordon the concept of not having a dad must be kind of freaky, because he was so used to having Mal around. So what do you do when you’re experiencing a sense of loss and feeling like you’re living in an absurd, malicious universe? You turn to religion for the answers.

Basically, what Gordon wants to know is: “Why does evil shit happen?”

Almost all anger boils down to us being pissed off at God for not running the show better. Yeah I know, “God is great, God is good,” “The Lord works in mysterious ways,” and blah, blah, fucking blah… but look–if the God of this world is all-powerful and all-good, then how do you account for all the heinous crap that’s been going on throughout history? Original Sin? I don’t think so. I mean, animals have been eating other animals since way before man showed up. Do you think a merciful God would deliberately create a planet that’s one big predatory snack bar? Being eaten hurts. I should know. Around 1838, I fell out of a whaling schooner off the coast of Nantucket (crow’s nest, sudden gale) and a shark came along and ate me raw. It hurt like hell, believe me–especially that first bite taken out of my ass while I was still dogpaddling.

And that’s just dumb animal suffering, which is bad enough, but what about the ravages of premeditated evil? I’m talking about war atrocities, mob lynchings, burning witches at the stake. I’m talking about poisoning a town’s drinking water for the sake of corporate profits, causing children to grow up with brain tumors and liver disease. I’m talking about rape and murder and arson–acts that are consciously intended to cause suffering to other innocent human beings. Why would an almighty, loving God put up with any of that? I mean, really… what the hell is up?

I’ll tell you what’s up: the Gnostics have it right–or as nearly right as anyone. This world was created by a bad god. A Demiurge. Only a flawed creator would create a flawed world. Original Sin exists, but not as most people understand it. The Original Sin was the creation of this world by a half-assed god who’d wandered too far from the True God’s influence. Pumped up on the sins of pride and hubris, like Lucifer (way too much like Lucifer, actually), this half-assed god created a world that was a mixture of good and evil. A world in which every creature born to it is bound to suffer.

Suffering is the existential manifestation of evil in the world. And suffering exists. We know that. But what we sometimes forget is that the world is also full of good. Which is kind of amazing when you think about it. If we’re all just a collection of soulless atoms–random bundles of self-serving biology–then we should always be running around trying to fulfil our own greedy desires while we screw over everyone else in the process. But that isn’t always what happens, is it? How do you explain giving to charity, or extreme acts of self-sacrifice? Some people have given up their lives for the sake of others. It’s a mixed-up, fucked-up, crazy-making world, but at least there’s love in it, and a certain amount of the True God’s benevolent influence.