The Living End

Part III 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 hit men.”

“Do you know who did it?”

“I’ve got my suspicions, I’m working on it, I have some leads. I’ve-Hey- Where are you going? Hey.”

But Lesefario was gone, vanished in Hell’s vast smoke screen, 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, evaporate as steam, though the weight was still there, still with you, its frictive drag subversive as a tear in a kite and not even muscle, which blazed like wick, but the organs themselves, the liver scorching and the heart and brains at flash point, 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 f*cking stars. Damnation is hard work, eternity lousy hours.”

So if Lesefario ran it was his fate to do so, only his body’s kindled imperatives. 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 Lesefario wistful, nostalgic, all that talk of slaying and snuffing. It was George’s own last memory. He’d been a clerk in Ellerbee’s liquor store in Minneapolis, an employee who’d worked for the younger man fifteen 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 Ellerbee’s money, 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 as comeuppance.

I make no charges,” he screamed as they double-timed through fire storm 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 M.O. 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 He were the Microfiche God, Lord of the Punched Cards.

That He had smote 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 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 thought. He does so much thinking He thought because He has no one to talk to, He thought.

Though We were always a good listener. Folks were constantly sending Him their prayers. Tykes in Dr.

Dentons. 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 suppertimes, all the laymen of Rotary, Elks, Shrine, and Jaycees. God, God thought, needs din, its mumbled gimme’s.

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 thirties, 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 alternately 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 the hidden legs.

“Please,” God said, “sit.”

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 round less 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. Hell hurt himself, God thought, but the son had the cripple’s tropism, his lurching, awkward truce with gravity.

“It holds me,” he said. Yes

“That’s right,” Christ said. He looked down.

“I couldn’t make apprentice today,” he said softly.

“You did your crucifix well enough.”

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 metier. This,” he said, brushing the crucifix with fingers that would never be straight,

“nothing to it. It was wished into being. It’s a snapshot is all, a Christ’s gilded baby shoe, sentimental as a lock of hair. Like it? It’s True Cross by the way. But no hands made it.”

“You’ve no forgiveness, have you? There isn’t enough love in you to flesh out a song.”

“The apple doesn’t fall-” “Stop that,” the Father said.

“Wondering where You went wrong, Papa? Why I’m such a surly saviour? Look at it this way. These things happen in the holiest of families.” No. You’ve no forgiveness.”

“Me?” Christ said, “I was built to forgive. I give away dispensation like a loss leader. There isn’t a horror they can dream up I don’t change into 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 lights, hitting to all fields, God’s designated hitter, and it’s forgive and forget and bygones be bygones. So don’t tell me I’ve 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?”

“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, Luv.”

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,” he 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 volition less two-step. I loved it there,” he said.

“I loved being alive.”

God looked at His son thoughtfully.

“Well,” the Lord said, “in conversation at least 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 spite 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 Harbor’d,” he might scream, “December Seventh’d by the Lord. Is that fair? I ask you. Men die, have heart attacks, wear out. Mostly wear out. The junk man won’t touch them, Detroit recall them.

And, yes, I grant that some go sudden. There are accidents. Accidents happen. Mother Nature f*cks up.

Kids dart into traffic, balls roll in the street. But that’s only physics, it’s physics is all. Guys buy 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 curiously.

“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 erupted 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 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 heigh-ho in heatl” He played with brimstone for them, he waded in flames like a child at 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, oldfashioned, downright shy. Intact. A virgin by temperament and inclination as much as compulsion or circumstance. More. Something actually spinster in her nature, a 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 over bite 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 the-to her-ironic litany, unceasing, continuous as the noise of summer. She would never get used to it, over it, the humiliation as stinging after two thousand 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 talk, excuse me, 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 sluttishness.

And for all the world she was The Virgin Mary, the capital letters and 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, boon dock clearing, sticks; parsed by savages, riddled by New Guinea stone- agers, all the bare-breasted and loin clothed 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 pidgins 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?”

“Oh Jesus, our Saviour. 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 horses’ straw, in the pissed hay of the cows and 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 a thousand enceinte dams but who’d never seen anything like this, an actual woman on actual straw, writhing not as an animal accustomed to straw would but wildly thrashing, bucking, not understanding what was happening to her, not really, a virgin, recall, who not only had never known a man but who had ill 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’d 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 singlehanded 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 pares 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 hard-core 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 had come from, how it had got there, and “Yes,” God the Father had beamed, “that’s one of the reasons you were chosen”) and had even, by her lights, been a good enough mother, though she couldn’t have managed without Joseph. Who changed him, cleaned him, Maryshe 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 pie th postures and public tabloid grief real, 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 off 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, while 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 band soap), the nursing terrible for her, her breast offered reluctantly to those cunning lips, the strange, greedy 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 the savages hadn’t, as children didn’t, the mystery that was beyond the range even of the missionaries, of the popes, of the saints and 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- she had thought-it was stupid, she was ashamed, she was being alannist she thought-it was blaspbemous-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 Leda, with Semele, with Alcmene, with Ino and Europa and Dana& In all His kinky ava tars and golden bough 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 what 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, leash less as God Himself, or Christ, or the Holy Ghost too, given free rein, carte blanche, but neither of them ever testing the waters of that freedom.

They said miracles still happened, 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. 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 elect, and all the ordinary saved. Stigmata. One must not look at stigmata. The inner edge of the nimbus. The fabulous scalare 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 coverts 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?”

“Ies so high.”

The Holy Virgin smiled.

“Yes. Heaven is very high,” she said.

“Play something for us please, Flanoy.”

“Play?”

“Your music.”

“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 unquenched astronomy white with reentry. Look at them, Quiz thought. Like teams of horses.

Runaways, their harness on fire. No longer in pain himself, he could enjoy the spectacle, their aurora boreal tic frenzy and lasered essence charming as fireworks to the appreciative ex-groundskeeper.

“Hey,” he called, “hey. You guys are beautiful, you know? You look like a World Premier.” He laughed.

“You look like f*cking Chinese New Year’s. Come on,” he said when they snarled at him, “you got to 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 screamed, “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 asked.

“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. 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. I ain’t any HeIrs olly olly Ashen free. Let go. Hey.

Let go. 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 a 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.

“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, have 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 fella. A humble fella says a million he’s got in mind maybe six or seven.”

“Humble shmumble,” said Jesus.

“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 Pop’s and What’s doing’s, your mocky 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 a 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 Y.M.C.A.s- seen L.A. and Chicago and other cities from air-conditioned tour buses. Indeed, he had come away from these 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 fanned 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 Saviour 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 Moslem effacement, his nose burrowing a jeweled treasury of floor, but put upon, wondering if this were 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 smote… 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 he don’t love me, Joseph thought. Because he’s adopted. He goes around like that to spite Him, to get His attention, His goat he’s after. What do I care he ain’t perfect? What do I care he ain’t him?

What a business. We walked around on eggshells with each other, nervous even when we were alone.

Sure. Could I watch her undress? Could I hold her in my arms whom the Lord had His eye on? 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 call me cuckold and saint 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 a husband? Loyalty oaths He wants, guarantees every fifty thousand 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 two- thousand-year joke. Go home. Cleave unto Mary. 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 lights.”

“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 doornail, as dodo dead. How’d they get you? D’you go against? D’you. break their rules? Eat too much sweets or touch yourself ? Whatcha in for, what’s the charge? How’d they get you? Dead to rights?” “Jesus wants me for a sunbeam.”

Lesefario was a thinking man. A long time dead-they had time; they had minutes, seconds, hours, years; what they lacked were calendars, clocks, only the Speidel niceties, digital readouts, the quartz accounts, only the Greenwich and atomic certainties-he had begun to speculate about the meaning of death. He had never questioned life’s meaning. He had assumed it had none. Life was its own gloss. Where conditions changed you didn’t look for explanations.

He’d lived in Minnesota, a Minneapolis kid, schoolboy, adult. He’d had his friends and later his cronies.

He’d had his shot at stuff, enjoyed much and been disappointed by the rest. He had liked television, a wonderful invention, but had not known when he’d married her that his wife would turn out to be a depressive, a woman who -she couldn’t help it, he guessed, but it made things awful and spoiled everything that should have been fun: their trips to restaurants, their cruise to the islands, their daughter’s childhood was never to be pleased by things, who wore her melancholy like a rash. Life had not signified.

Death was another story, so time-consuming-they had time-so draining, demanding, taking not just his but all their attentions, given over to pain, not causeless sadness like his wife’s but to a suffering like Wallenda stage fright to not knowing from one moment to the next-they had time-whether what had to be endured and would be endured even could be endured. Death made no sense but it meant something.

When Lesefario formulated this last proposition he decided that he must try to save them, to become heroic in Hell who had been a clerk in a Minneapolis liquor store in a red-lined neighborhood, who had opened up in the morning always a little seared of the winos around the entrance, always a little scared of the blacks, always a little scared of people who asked him to cash their checks, always a little scared of teenagers, of minors who showed him phony I.D. cards, of the big, beefy delivery men, of customers, of anyone who would come into a liquor store.

What could he do he asked himself, and why should he do it? Who was he, stuck away down here, stashed for the duration in some nameless base camp of Hell, a thoughtful fraidycat formerly in the liquor trade, or, no, not even the liquor trade, a clerk in the making change trade, whose last human contact would be, had been, with the trigger-happy jerk Lesefario had known was coming for fifteen years? And so seared he knew-because he knew as soon as the guy came through the door he was the last human being he’d ever see, trying to size him up though fear hurt his eyes and Lesefario lost his face like a center fielder a ball in the sun- that even if he lived he would never be able to pick the thug out of a lineup.

Acknowledging even in that first brief bruised view of him all that he and his murderer-did they get goodTeviews? were their names household words? was their health all it should be, or their children top-drawer?-had in common, and if this was the fellow, and if this was it, why shouldn’t the killer be made to feel the force of that astonishing fact?

“If you’re all I have for deathbed-” Lesefario had said.

“Wha?”

“-then I want your attention. I guess most folks die out of their element, D.O.A.”d by circumstance and only-” “Hey you, no tricks.”

“-the night shift in attendance.”

“No tricks I said. Hands high and shut up.”

“Because-” “I’m going to have to teach you a lesson,” the killer said, and cut him down before he could teach the killer one, his last word “because” in a life he’d already decided didn’t make sense. And a good thing, too, Lesefario thought, groping for the last words he still couldn’t formulate, that given months, years, he could not finally have put together. (Though he had an idea they would have been simple. Why had he wanted to make the point that he would have been fifty-two years old on his next birthday?) So who in hell ha ha, he thought-was he, who had missed out on life’s, to discover death’s meaning, or to try to save them? just who in hell did he think he was-the Christ of the Boonies?

So he grabbed the first one he saw, stinging him with his temperature.

“Aargh,” the fellow shrieked, pushing Lesefario off.

“It’s all right,” Lesefario said from where he had fallen in HeR.

“It’s all right. Listen to me. Are you listening? It’s Four fifty-three P.m.” Tuesday, June 27th, Seven thousand, eight hundred four.”

“Say what?”

“The time. Quiz told me the time when he was translated. I’ve been keeping track.”

“The time?”

“Four fifty-four. Yes. It’s too big a job for one man. Tell the others. We’ve got to keep track.”

“Why?”

“Hurry. (Twelve one hundredths, thirteen one hundredths, fourteen one hundredths) Please (Sixteen one hundredths.)” “Why do we have to know the time?”

“Don’t argue. Because the meaning of death -(Twenty one hundredths. And start again one hundredths)-

The meaning of death is how long it takes.”

Quiz was a queer, funny man, Flanoy thought. Still, he might be all right or he wouldn’t be here, would he? He’d been down in Hell with the bad men. Was it a sin not to like an angel? He’d ask Mother Mary.

Maybe he’d tell her some of the wicked things he’d done. Still, he thought, he’d better not say anything that could get Mr. Quiz in trouble. He was the only one who’d known Flanoy.

He knew me when I lived. He heard me laugh, he saw me throw.

In Hell they were chanting the time. The Bakhtiari nomads were chanting, the Finns were chanting.

Frenchmen chanted in French, Dutchmen in Dutch. All over Hell the billions who had died, each in his own mnemonic way, sometimes to himself, often aloud, uttered the special syllables he’d learned would fill up seconds.

“Michigan hydrangeas, Cleveland for its tea,” a woman from the Australian Outback said, while her companion, a performing dwarf for Spanish mercenaries, kept a silent, running tab.

Ellerbee was chanting too.

“Heaven is a theme park,” he tolled, “May was once my wife.”

Lesefario, who had given a downbeat which was already obsolete by the time it reached a party of Greek skiers killed in avalanche and actual days behindhand when it got to a Soviet film star dead of a fever on a trip to Japan and declared he was in contact with Quiz, that though their techniques were primitive he received periodic corrections from Quiz, himself in communication with the sacred authorities, pleading their case, an eyewitness, he told them, to their Devil’s Island circumstance-an eyewitness, a brother.

They must keep counting, Lesefario said. Two A.M. Sunday, July 10th, Seven thousand, eight hundred four. (Four one hundredths, five one hundredths, six one him dr-) Count, count, it’s Houston Control here. The state of the art isn’t so hot yet, but so long as we keep counting we’ll get corrections from Quiz.

Count, any second may be the last.”

“What’s that? Astrology?” said this ancient denizen of Hell.

“No, no,” Lesefario said feelingly.

“It’s important.”

“I’ve seen it all and it’s just another fad,” the tortured man said.

“It’s some self-help, do-it-yourself scam. It don’t mean shit. Crazy Ellerbee had us praying, knees bowed in brimstone. Praying! Turned Hell into bloody Sunday school.

“Sacred authorities’ my third-degree burns!” And Lesefario wondered: Ellerbee? Is that my Ellerbee? Is Ellerbee dead? In hell?

“(Eighteen one hundredths, nineteen one hundredths-)” (But not even his own heart in it, his flash-in-the-pan hopes and heroics extinguished, though he would probably keep counting awhile-they had time-someone trying to keep a rally alive, a plant in an audience milking ovation, a guy at a party gone sour suggesting the song which would bring them together again.) “Mother Mary?”

“Yes, Flanoy?”

“Was Jesus lonely?”

“Lonely?”

“Because he didn’t have brothers. Because he didn’t have sisters.”

“I don’t think he was lonely.”

“Were there kids to play with?”

“It was so long ago. I hardly remember.”

“You could do lots of stuff in the desert. It’d be just like the beach.”

“Yes?”

“You could go barefoot. You could bury kids in the sand. With a pail of water from the oasis you could make things. Did Jesus do that stuff?”

“I hardly remember.”

“Maybe he didn’t have anyone to play with. Maybe that’s why you don’t remember.”

“He worked with his father. He helped his father.”

“His father?”

“He helped my husband,” Mary said, blushing.

Flanoy nodded.

“Back home there was always plenty to do.”

“Do you miss being home?”

I miss my mother,” Flanoy said.

“Oh, Flanoy,” Mary said, and held out her arms.

The Virgin comforted the sobbing child. She cupped the back of Flanoy’s head in her large soft hand.

His legs, between her knees, his small, slim body pressed against her bosom, made a discrete, comfortable weight. Mary, touched by the child’s sweet, ultimate homesickness, reached around him and took all his weight now, gathering the little boy onto her lap, both their bodies shedding angle, temperature and impediment resolved into the soft symbiotics of need and competence, the tongue and groove aptitudes of love.

This is heresy, she thought, indifferent to the idea, and hugged him closer, all her supple maternals alive, returned from helplessness, fetched back intact two thousand years. Soon his body will begin to bite, she thought, his tears to chafe, yet she made no adjustments, no move to kiss him off with a final squeeze. It was not even a pieta’, no long, lame lapful. Literally, she cradled him in her arms, his knees near his chest, as one might carry a child high up in water.

“Better?” she asked.

“Yes, Ma’am.”

He climbed down from her lap and seated himself cross-legged beside her like a child in short pants. She stroked his head, her fingers trailing a forgetful, comfortable doodle in his fine hair. She dozed.

Christ was there, Joseph was. Flanoy was gone.

“Where’s the child?” she asked.

“Flanoy? Gone off,” her son said.

“He’s a good boy.”

“You’re good to him, Madonna. I was in time for the tableau.”

“He wanted to know if you had playmates. He wanted to know if you were lonely.”

“Who is this kid, Mary?” her husband asked.

“What do we know about him anyway?”

“His name’s Flamoy,” she told him wearily.

“He’s from Minnesota. He’s dead.”

“Big deal. Who ain’t dead?”

“Mother is comfortable with the dead.”

“With you maybe not so comfortable,” Joseph said. “Bamboozler. Do you know how tired the woman gets? What a strain? Come clean, why don’t you? Admit you ain’t him.”

“Please, Joseph. I have a mouth.”

“You got a mouth? Use it. Tell him. Go on. What, you’re so crazy about these people it makes a difference he ain’t Messiah?”

“Oh, please,” Christ said.

“Both of you,” Mary said, “You’re tired,” Joseph said.

“He woke you. This one. Your son, the magic cripple, who bumps into things.”

“Both of you, please,” Mary said.

“We’re going,” Joseph said.

“Get some rest.”

“Flanoy,” she called softly when they had gone, “Flanoy-” Who no longer brought his violin, she noticed, who came now whenever she felt need of him, who seemed to feel her need even before she did, who anticipated it and suddenly appeared and climbed into her lap and asked about them, questions about Jesus, about Joseph, herself, things not in the Bible, how she’d felt when she found out who her son was, if they’d taken vacations together as his family had, if it was always religious, if she’d heard from Jesus when he was in the wilderness all that time, whether she’d believed she’d see him again after they killed him, and trading his history for hers, filling her in on the world, if only his limited experience of it, but knowing more real history from his brief decade on earth than she knew for all her millennia in the sky, and what could she know, Flanoy asked -did history say its prayers?-did she know the slaves had been freed, or the names of state capitals, did she know there was television now, movies-he told her movies he’d seen, breaking her heart as he recounted sad stories about children, their animals, faithful dogs and noble horses, how the children had to put them away themselves when they were injured, the lessons they’d learned, and making her laugh when he told her the comedies-saying, though she knew all about this, how loved she was, how honored, winning her over, as she did him, with confidences, telling his secrets, climbing on her lap as he grew tired, his soft, comfortable body almost meant to be there-and now maybe Jesus had a right to be jealous-and all manner of things spoken of which she had never spoken of, and one day bringing his violin.

“I’ve been practicing,” he said shyly, and played to perfection grand compositions she had never heard, even in Heaven, “Why, you’re so good,” she said, surprised.

“Yes,” he said. I don’t know where it comes from. I think I’m inspired,” and played a melody that left them both in tears, the child so wracked by the beauty that he could not finish.

“Come,” she said, “sit in my lap.”

And Flanoy climbed up and Mary held him, the lovely melody still echoing somewhere in memory, the both of them still listening.

“Ah,” she said.

“Ah,” sighed Flanoy. And afterwards, in the stillness-as if they both heard together not only the melody but when it had stopped Flanoy asked his question.

“Was it like that?”

“What?”

“When God- You know.”

“When God?”

He toyed with the collar of her gown, his gentle fingers lightly tracing the line of her throat, and it was as if she blossomed itch just as he assuaged it, need just as he answered it.

“When God put Jesus in you?”

“When God-?”

“Do you know how He did it? Did you know it was Him? I mean you were a virgin, did you never suspect?”

“You!” she screamed. She Rung him from her lap.

“But what did I do?”

“You’re at me again. Wasn’t one time enough?”

“What did I do? Flanoy asked, crying. I didn’t do anything. What did I do?” he sobbed, and ran from the room.

“I’m carrying His child?” shrieked the Virgin Mary.

God gave a gala, a levee at the Lord’s.

All Heaven turned out.

“Gimme,” He said, that old time religion.” His audience beamed. They cheered, they ate it up. They nudged each other in Paradise.

“What did I tell you?” He demanded over their enthusiasm.

“It’s terrific, isn’t it? I told you it would be terrific. All you ever had to do was play nice. Are you disappointed? Is this Heaven? Is this God’s country? In your wildest dreams-let Me hear it. Good-in your wildest dreams, did you dream such a Treasury, this museum Paradise? Did you dream My thrones and dominions, My angels in fly-over? My seraphim disporting like dolphins, tumbling God’s sky in high Heaven’s high acrobacy? Did you imagine the miracles casual as card tricks, or ever suspect free lunch could taste so good? They should see you now, eh? They should see you now, trembling in rapture like neurological rut. Delicious, correct? Piety a la mode! That’s it, that’s right. Sing hallelujah! Sing Hizzoner’s hosannas, Jehovah’s gee whiz! Well,” God said, .1 that’s enough, that will do.” He looked toward the Holy Family, studying them for a moment.

“Not like the creche, eh?” He said.

“Well is it? Is it?” He demanded of Jesus.

“No,” Christ said softly.

“No,” God said, “not like the creche. just look at this place- the dancing waters and indirect lighting. I could put gambling in here, off-track betting. Oh, oh, My costume jewelry ways, My game show vision.

Well, it’s the public. You’ve got to give it what it wants. Yes, Jesus?”

“Yes,” Jesus said.

“It just doesn’t look lived in, is that what you think

“Call on someone else,” Christ said.

“Sure,” God said.

“I’m Hero of Heaven. I call on Myself.”

That was when He began His explanations. He revealed the secrets of books, of pictures and music, telling them all manner of things-why marches were more selfish than anthems, lieder less stirring than scat, why landscapes were to be preferred over portraits, how statues of women were superior to statues of men but less impressive than engravings on postage. He explained why dentistry was a purer science than astronomy, biography a higher form than dance. He told them how to choose wines and why solos were more acceptable to Him than duets. He told them the secret causes of inflation-“It’s the markup,” He said-and which was the best color and how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. He explained why English was the first language at Miss Universe pageants and recited highlights from the eighteen-minute gap.

Mary, wondering if she showed yet, was glad Joseph was seated next to her. Determined to look proud, she deliberately took her husband’s hand. So rough, she thought, such stubby fingers. He explained why children suffered and showed them how to do the latest disco steps. He showed them how to square the circle, cautioning afterwards that it would be wrong.

He revealed the name of Kennedy’s assassin and told how to shop for used cars.

Why He’s talking to me, Quiz thought. These other folks couldn’t ever have had any use for this stuff.

He’s talking to me. Quiz was right, but He had something for everyone. He was unloading, giving off wisdom like radioactivity, plumbing the mysteries, and now His voice was reasonable, not the voice of a grandfather but of a king, a chief, someone un electable there always, whose very robes and signals of office were not expensive or even rare so much as His, as if He wore electricity or mountain range or clothed Himself in waterfall. He explained-1 am the Manitou, too” how the rain dance worked. They were charmed. He described how He had divided the light from the darkness on the morning of the first day. They were impressed. He demonstrated how He had done Hell. They were awed.

“You have wondered,” He said, “why things are as they are. You have wondered, you have speculated.

You have questioned My motives.” Groans of denial went up from the saints. He ignored them. ““Why,”

the philosophers ask, ‘so piecemeal? Why His fits and starts theology, His stop and go arrangements?

Can’t He make up His mind? Why the carrot, why the stick? Why the evenings and mornings of those consecutive days? Why only after first fashioning them could He see that they were good? Why, having landscaped an Eden, having leached and prepared the precious pious soils, having His fell swoop harvests and sweet successful bumper crops, did He need the farmer and plant the man, set him upright, a scarecrow essence in the holy field? Why first an Adam then an Eve, or Eve at all, or if an Eve why torn from that depleted man who, image of his maker once removed removes again to blur the reciprocities in that deserving girl? Why a serpent, why a tree? Why fine print at all so near the start of things? Why codicils and conditions, all that lawyerly qualm? Why strings? Why that Miranda decision hocus mumbo jumbo pocus, reading rights to a man and a woman who not only do not know that they are already in trouble but do not even know what trouble is? And ain’t exile cruel and unusual punishment when there’s no place to go?”

“Of course they fell. Who wouldn’t fall in such a place? Who wouldn’t fall where the gravity was a thousand and two in just the shade? Who wouldn’t fall when the thickest crop in that garden was just gravity?”

Flanoy had come out of his sulk. He smiled but Mother Mary would not look at him. Gosh, he thought, one moment comforted in Mother Mary’s lap, the next tumbled, spilled, knocked from it as one might clumsy milk.

“Adam and Eve on the rock pile now, the chain gang. Working off their offense and raising kids, extra hands, till it was all cultivated now, if not a peaceable kingdom then at least a trained one, the old indebtedness paid up like mortgage. And then a flood. A flood! The whole earth disaster area. The spoiled corn and wetted wheat, the fruit and flooded fields all mash and only Father Noah’s ark afloat in all that liquorish sea, sailing the farms, cruising the ruined hectares, versts and acreage, and Noah unclear, everyone unclear, about the nature of the charges this time, taI straw that broke the actual camel’s back unspecified. “Yes Flanoy thought, with me, too, and moved closer to Quiz” “And then the covenant again, the old instrument which by this time even man knew was the only way God ever did business, never just by handshake let alone by the binding, even honored, nod or raised finger or tickled ear which perhaps only the auctioneer ever sees and which, nevertheless, always seems to be good enough even for him, but a contract, a compact, something a little more official than trust and less flimsy than faith, yet not an actual agreement at all and even the single simple seeming layman’s conditions-“Behave, play nice, be good”-and down home language a pitch beyond understanding.

“Reprieved from oceans. Starting over. Breaking clean. Almost sophisticated now, almost used to it, a kind of emigre’, Ellis Islanded, the culture not so shocking, for all were greenhorns, greenhorns everywhere, and you’d think that maybe the ironic point of all this vagabondage was just to keep folks busy, hold them still.”

Shima Yisroel Adonoi Elohenu, Adonoi Echod, Joseph mumbled. He pounded his breast with the hand that had just been resting in Mary’s.

He looks like someone driving nails, Christ thought.

“A tinker God, you’d think, Someone editorial, nuts for amendment. Or even God at all, do you suppose, with His second and third chances, His governor’s fond delight in commutation, reprieve? A father indeed, a daddy, a pop, Who counts to three perhaps, gets past two and goes to fractions-“Two and a half, two and three quarters, four fifths…”

“Fond of mountains, a thing for heights. Ararat, Sinai. (Who ever delighted in the nature He had made, crouching perhaps, making frames of His hands, scouting location like a director, His shingle hung in garden, ocean, wilderness, and the higher elevations, a sort of majestic Fop posed on postcard and practicing His Law only where there was a view, never on just ordinary earth.) ““Another covenant. This time in writing. Elegant, He may have thought, powerful but elegant, and showed man something in a stone tablet. (Who worked always in His chosen mediums earth water, fire. Moses on the mountain would be air.) The terms terminal, one through ten. (Who was God again now He could get past three.) Dealing always, note, with leaders, as He had dealt with Points of Interest, oblique angle, off- center prospect, steep vision like a goat’s purchase, His summit conferees the elect of earth, its leading men, God’s chosen persons, ho ho ho. And Moses not two minutes at sea level but the people He had never deigned to deal with directly were at it again, doing the golden calf like a new dance. And Moses outraged as God at their loose talk and their sweet tooth for leeks and garlic, Egypt’s spectacular shade.

“But what did He do? Nothing. As always. Nothing. Who made the world in six days and flooded it in forty but couldn’t count to three Wait Wait. Nothing. Nothing!

“Unless you count a covenant.

“I’ll give you Christ,” as if to say.

“Just pledge belief. If being good was hard, forget it, just pledge belief. Believe.”

Most of them were praying now. Even Mary had lowered her head, as Joseph had though he had ceased to sway, whose strident orthodoxy had bleached to something almost episcopal, who stood bareheaded, his yarlmulke fallen, and in phylacteries undone as laces.

“So,” God said, “what do you make of Me, eh? What do you make of Me now you understand that finally it takes two to break a contract as well as to make one? What do you make of Me Who could have gotten it all right the -first time, saved everyone trouble and left Hell unstocked? Do you love Me? Do you forgive and forget as easily as I do? Do you?”

Mother Mary peeked at the fluted piping of His nimbus, the sacred, secret rim, like icing on pastry, where the helix tucked into His golden head. She held her belly in her hands and hoped this one would be a girl.

“Do you’ “Yes,” they cried.

“Yes!”

“Why do I do it then? Why?”

“So we might choose,” said one of the saved.

“What? Speak up.”

“So we might choose.”

“Never,” God thundered.

“What do I care for the sanctity of your will? Never!”

“Goodness,” a saint shouted.

“You get off on goodness.”

“On goodness? Me?” God laughed.

“On goodness? Is that what you think Is that what you think Were you born yesterday? You’ve been in the world. Is that how you explain trial and error, history by increment, God’s long Slap and Tickle, His Indian-gift wrath? Goodness? No. It was Art! It was always Art. I work by the contrasts and metrics, by beats and the silences. It was all Art. Because it makes a better story is why.”

Christ held up his damaged hands.

“It makes a better story?” He was furious.

“Because it makes a better story? Is this true? Is it?”

“Sure it’s true,” God said. Then, pausing, He saw Quiz hold back a yawn. —teen one hundredths,” He said, “nineteen one hundredths, twenty one hundredths. All right, that’s it! Kairos! Doomsday!”

Lesefario, in Hell, did not know at first that he had stopped burning. He thought pain’s absence some new pain, something eye of the hurricane or the heavy peace before the firing squad takes aim. He shook himself. He seemed, like the scabbed and crusted others, like an animal, a bear perhaps, after winter’s long somnolence. Instinct, memory, did not work that fast. It needed its bearings and landmarks, it required its surveyors’ grapples, some alphabet of location.

“How long? How long did it take?” asked the fellow who’d told him his counting was a fad.

“What? How long?”

“Death. How long did it take?”

I stopped counting,” he said.

“Shame,” the man said.

“Yes,” said Lesefario, his heart breaking.

Bodies rose to the surface of the seas and began swimming. They were released from faded, colorless flags, stove ships, hidden pilings where they had snagged for years. They came up out of shoals and split sandbars. The drowned and murdered floated up from the bottoms of lakes, their faces and bodies in the same dishabille in which they had died. They seeped out of riverbanks, they surfaced in wells. A rising tide of the dead.

In woods and rain forests they quickened, corpses lost years. They came to in deserts, they waked up on mountains, a treasury of jigsaw death. One could not have suspected their numbers, that so many random had fallen. These were merely the discards, the old boot dead, stochastic as beer can, deposit bottle.

They woke up in battlefields. They gathered themselves where they had exploded. They got up in hospitals, their deaths not yet discovered. They still wore identification bracelets, IVs dangled from their wrists like slack banderillas. They woke up in archeology, cities done in by earthquake, fire, and time.

They climbed out of eaves, out of canyons, geology.

Up out of mine shafts they came, comrades in cave-ins.

They worked their way through holes they had melted in glaciers.

All earth gave up its dead.

They strained against coffin lids, against sealers. Stymied as escape artists they banged encumbrance.

They swarmed, they popped through, the hatched, frantic chicks of death.

A man named Ladlehaus climbed out of his grave like someone backing out a window.

Like elopers they left their burials. They touched their tombs and niches as if they were the old rooms of childhood, brushing them lightly, as if they were dusting. They scrutinized their plots and read their markers like people hunting addresses. They loitered in their graveyards as if they were keeping appointments. Already they missed their deaths. There were complaints. They were cold in just sunlight after the heat of Hell. Those who had donated organs had lost them forever. They could feel the cavities and hollows, the terrible gouged and amputate absentness A woman who had given her eyes away stirred her fingers in her weeping holes.

“So grotesque,” she moaned, “death grotesque as life. All, all grotesque.”

They came down from churchyards on hillsides and in from cemeteries on the outskirts of town. They bestirred themselves in the celebrated tombs and sepulchers of the big-shot dead.

Their bodies shone with gore like wet paint, They sooted the world as if it were carpet. The living and dead were thrown together, and the dead looked away first.

Tribes covered the earth now, families did, clans, races. Mary, squeamish in the press of population, could not bear the stench. It’s morning sickness, she told herself. Joseph couldn’t get over how much things had changed, and Christ flinched when he saw soldiers. Quiz, looking for sanctuary, pulled Flanoy into a Y.M.C.A.

Into the Valley of jehoshaphat they came and along all the coasts of Palestine. They covered the ranges of Samaria and Judea, of Abilene and Gilead, and stood in the Plains of jezreel and Sharon and spread out by Kinnereth’s Sea and the salted waters between Idumea and Moab. And were a million deep all about the tough shores of the ruined Mediterranean circle.

They seemed a kind of vegetation, their burnt skin a smear of sullen growth. Pressed together, Coney Island’d, Woodstock’d, Tivoli Garden’d, jonestownd, they seemed spectators at some game less stadium, vast as the world.

They waited. They did not know what was going to happen. They consulted the religious among them but they didn’t know either.

Then God was there and, strangely, all could see Him. There was not a bad seat in the house. It was short and sweet.

“Because I never found My audience,” God said.

“Because I never found My audience.” He looked at the assembled dead, at the living billions anxious at ground zero.

“You gave me, some of you, your ooh’s and aah’s, the Jew’s hooray and Catholic’s Latin deference-all theology’s pious wow. But I never found My audience.” He looked at Mary, who had feared Him, victim to His blue ribbon force, distrustful still, savoring the ordinary who had been taken out of all that.

“I never found My audience. What had you,” He asked His audience, “to complain of? You had the respect of peers. You had peers.” He looked at Jesus.

“You were no audience. You had all the advantages. You were only God’s clone.” And at Joseph.

“You were a carpenter,” He said.

“You did things with your hands. Why didn’t you admire Me more?” At the damned.

“I gave you pain. Do you appreciate the miracle? To make it up out of thin air, deep, free-fall space, the gifted, driven atoms of remonstrance? Trickier than orange juice or the taste of Brie. Because I never found My audience,” said God and annihilated, Mother Mary and Christ and Lesefario and Flanoy and Quiz in their Y.M.C.A. sea front room in Piraeus and all Hell’s troubled sighed, everything.