“Shall I tell you what it felt like?”
The fog was so thick, the child could not see the lion. Still, the fog was pleasant, as was their ascent through it.
“I was possessed, overwhelmed, consumed, filled up by a blessed, utterly unknown presence,” the lion said.
“Was it …” the child hesitated, searching for the right word “… consoling?”
“Yes,” the lion said. “An inexplicably consoling irony filled my heart.”
“Will I experience the same, do you think?”
“I don’t know,” the lion said, a little afraid for them both for the first time. “Perhaps not.”
“I would not know what irony is,” the child said.
72. Whale
There was a game they liked to play when they were midway in life’s journey, but still healthy, still lustful and keen.
It was: Who could get you to cry in the fewest words?
Of course, some of the best effects were made when everyone was drunk.
He remembered this girl had a good one once.
The last whale swam deeper …
But one of the best was a line from Chekhov’s Three Sisters.
You mean, I’m being left behind?
He couldn’t remember many others. They hadn’t played the game in years.
73. A Little Prayer
The Lord was living with a great colony of bats in a cave. Two boys with BB guns found the cave and killed many of the bats outright, leaving many more to die of their injuries. The boys didn’t see the Lord. He didn’t make His presence known to them.
On the other hand, the Lord was very fond of the bats but had done nothing to save them.
He was becoming harder and harder to comprehend.
He liked to hang with the animals, everyone knew that, the whales and bears, the elephants and bighorn sheep and wolves. They were rather wishing He wasn’t so partial to their company.
Hang more in the world of men, they begged Him.
But the Lord said He was lonely there.
74. Walk-In
He was in the chapel, waiting. He was a little early.
A man came in, genuflected carelessly before the altar, and sat down beside him. “How’s it going?” he said.
“My mother has to do something in the undercroft,” the boy said. “She’ll be up shortly.”
“You know that’s just the basement,” the man said, “another word for basement.”
“I’m here for the blessing of the backpacks. It’s the blessing of the backpacks today.”
The man grinned. “What a lovely idea. Reverend Margaret has the loveliest ideas. What’s in your backpack?”
“Nothing. Some pencils.”
“Gum.”
“Gum too,” he admitted.
“My name’s Joe,” the man said. “You ever hear the song?”
Hello! My name is Joe.
And I work at the button factory!
I have a house and a dog and a family!
One day my boss came to me.
He said: Joe! Are you busy?
I said No!
He said …
“I don’t know it,” the boy said.
“What’s your name?”
“Tobias.”
“You ever seen the painting Tobias and the Three Archangels? Botticini. Fifteenth century. Listen, I want to tell you something, because this blessing of the backpacks or whatever silliness Margaret has dreamed up will happen any minute. I want to tell you: Christ and Jesus were separate souls. Okay?”
“I guess,” Tobias said.
“Jesus prepared his physical body to receive Christ, and at a certain point in his life vacated this body so as to allow Christ to take it over and preach to the world. Christ was such a highly evolved soul that it would have been impossible for him to have incarnated as a baby, and even if he could have done so, it would have been a waste of precious time to have to go through childhood.”
“Sometimes I wish I wasn’t going into just the second grade,” Tobias said.
“Exactly! Childhood is unnecessary for certain individuals.”
Joe patted him on the shoulder. “Maybe I’ll see you around,” he said. “Maybe we’ll talk again.” He went out just as a half a dozen children were coming in, through the big red doors. Tobias knew them and all their pretty, friendly mothers. His own mother appeared then, too, along with the Reverend Margaret.
I wish I was going into the fourth grade, Tobias thought.
75. Transition
Jesus spoke in Aramaic, but His sayings were transcribed in Greek, a generation after His time on earth. Aramaic and Greek are different languages. Very different. The differences are profound. This fact cannot be emphasized enough.
But none of Jesus’s teachings were written down in Aramaic.
76. Whatever Is Happening?
She was reading a review of a book about the life of Houdini. No one knew how he had made the elephant disappear. She was at that moment in the review where this was discussed for the first time. It was in 1918. The elephant’s name was Jennie, not with a Y. She thought she might buy this book, but even then she would not learn how Houdini had made Jennie disappear, because it simply was not known. And no illusionist had managed to reproduce the trick or even put forth a plausible explanation of how it had been accomplished.
She was reading a broadside that reviewed a number of books. The reviews were extremely intelligent and gracefully presented. She read about a cluster of works by Thomas Bernhard, the cranky genius of Austrian literature, works that had just been translated into English. She doubted that she would buy these books. She learned that he always referred to his lifelong companion, Hedwig Stavianicek, as his “aunt.” She was thirty-seven years older than Bernhard. She couldn’t imagine that she had been his lifelong companion for long.
She had had a fever for several days and she was loafing around, drinking fluids and reading. With her fever, the act of reading became ever stranger to her. First the words were solid, sternly limiting her perception of them to what she already knew. Then they became more frighteningly expansive, tapping into twisting arteries of memory. Then they became transparent, rendering them invisible.
She liked her fevers. They brought her information she could not express to others.
Then she thought that the gangster phrase If I told you, I’d have to kill you came directly from the Gnostic Book of Thomas.
77. Elephants Never Forget God
Five days before his death on May 16, 1958, the writer and film critic James Agee wrote a letter to his beloved longtime correspondent the Reverend James Harold Flye. The letter, never mailed, speaks of a film Agee wished to make concerning elephants.
He was haunted by the cruel death of a circus elephant in Tennessee in 1916. The elephant had gone berserk and killed three men. It was decided that she should be hung, and thousands of people turned out for the execution. She was strung to a railroad derrick and, after several hours, died.
This would be the basis for the film, but he also envisioned the choreographer George Balanchine training a troupe of elephants in a corps de ballet who perform their duties to the music of Stravinsky while a crowd roars with laughter. So humiliated are the elephants that they later set themselves ablaze, whereupon “their huge souls, light as clouds, settle like doves, in the great secret cemetery back in Africa.”