And He was. He lay over Ladlehaus’s spirit like a flag on a casket.
“I was drawn by the music,” God said. “I come to all the recitals. I’m going to take Dorset. I like what she did with Bach’s Fantasy in C Minor.”
“Hush, no talking,” said the boy who had identified Quiz.
“That one too,” God said more softly. “His ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’ made me all smarmy.”
“No,” Ladlehaus said.
“I give him six months,” He said confidently.
“No,” Ladlehaus pleaded, “it’s Flanoy. Flanoy’s only a child.”
“Oh, please,” said God, “it’s not that I hate children but that I love music.”
Quiz had stationed himself on the bench where he had taken his low-fat, gluten-free, orthomolecular lunches. This was where he heard the disturbance. He rose from the bench and moved beside Ladlehaus’s grave. There, in plain view of the crowd, he began to stomp on Jay Ladlehaus’s marker.
“Hold it down, hold it down, you!”
“Quiz!” Ladlehaus shouted.
The caretaker blanched. He tried to explain to Mazlish, the principal. “He knows,” he cried, “he knows who I am.” On his knees he pounded with his fists on Ladlehaus’s grave. He grabbed divots of hallowed ground, sanctified earth, and smeared them across his stone. They tried to drag him away. Quiz wrapped his arms about the dead man’s marker. “What are you doing?” he screamed, “I’ve got hypertension. I take low-cal minerals, I’m strictly salt-free. I eat corrective lunch!”
“Get him!” Ladlehaus hissed. “Get him. He’s a composer!”
And God, who knew nothing of their quarrel but owed Ladlehaus a favor, struck Quiz dead.
It would not be so bad, he thought in the momentary shock wave of silence that followed the commotion. It would not be so bad at all. He would exist in nexus to track meets, to games, to practices and graduations, and spend his death like a man in a prompter’s box beneath all the ceremonies of innocence the St. Paul Board of Education could dream up, spending it as he had spent his life, accomplice to all the lives that were not his own, accessory to them, accomplice and accessory as God.
A composer, he thought, I told Him he was a composer. Well, He makes mistakes, Ladlehaus thought fondly. Ladlehaus sighed and hoped for good weather.
But he did not know that the caretaker’s death had come at a point in the recital when God knew that those children who had already performed would be getting restless, beloved.
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 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 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.