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 roundless stool. It was almost a parody of furniture, a kid’s first effort in Shop, the badly turned spindles dropsical, rough, caulked at their holes with shim. He’ll hurt himself, God thought, but the son had the cripple’s tropism, his lurching, awkward truce with gravity. “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 métier. 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 statue 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 volitionless 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 junkman won’t touch them, Detroit recall them. And, yes, I grant that some go sudden. There are accidents. Accidents happen. Mother Nature fucks up. Kids dart into traffic, balls roll in the street. But that’s only physics, it’s physics is all. Guys 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 heat!” 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.”