The Secret concerns small creatures … the unfinished ones that can’t defend themselves … and also children and small dogs … we were waiting for the Messiach, so we weren’t gonna lay a hand on any little kids, that was obvious … look at the first Jesu, rolling around the manger in his diapers … he had the good animals standing guard, and no doubt old chief Joseph gave a proper going-over to everyone who came bearing gifts or “gifts,” confiscating the juveniles’ knives and turning the adults’ fiendish devices right back into their guts … and sixteen-year-old Mary with long black hair was a mighty sister with a soft, hard gaze, she kept an eye out too … checking Jesu’s lollipops to keep some fool who didn’t know about the contract from handing him a sucker laced with smack … the first Jesu had a good bunch around … customs agents, sturdy carpenters and masons, whores, actors, and Peter the skillful swordsman … and in the end they got him anyway, but that’s just how he was, that was the way he used his power, and as he died his ears and eyes filled with the soft, golden light of God, which in fact according to Bohler and other authorities he was … but having a hotline straight to Starry Bog might not be enough for the Child of today … who knows what cold urban hole our little Messiach is shivering in now … who knows if his plastered dad’s not wavin a carving knife at him as we speak … the Devil knows if his strung-out mom isn’t smotherin him under the sideboard … me and the guys would sometimes wonder, spitting tobacco and nodding our heads … jingling our silver, Bohler fingering his eagle, me patting my Black Madonna … we gotta be careful, Micka summed up every time … no weapons or drugs, no porno with fleas, David spoke the living parts of the contract aloud and Bohler raised his eyes to the heavens … Sure, sure, I’d add at some point when I wasn’t adjusting my mask.
An maybe right this minute those Burmese hunters, with their golden velvet Czech AKs, are sneakin up on some forest hideout where the little Dalai Lama is playin around with the first signs of his power … Bohler said … an they’re soft as tigers, not a claw click on stone … an the little Dalai Lama doesn’t suspect a thing … an he doesn’t have any protection cause his disgusting father’s off in the nearest village gettin tanked on the local Fiery … an his dirty old mom’s out makin bacon … an the hunters’re after his little scalp … Bohler had us hypnotized, standing over the unconscious Goldie, then he whipped out a garrote from under his cassock, ready to terminate the poor guy … we had to step in and subdue the priest.
We went by the contract, and though we decided to use Goldie for the byznys with the gadgets we kept our ears and hearts locked tight against his black chicanery.
Our other American, Shark Stein, was a man of the contract. His dad had been born in Terezín,* and for the first year of his life his world had been confined to the inside of a shoe box, good old Batas,* Sharky said. He survived to have Sharky only thanks to the fact that in every one of those foul camps, where his childish soul had its eyes opened to all the worlds and where those worlds began to merge into reality, he always bumped into people of the contract. He hung around the mass graves, collecting the knowledge that he would later pass on to Sharky. After Shark Stein became a member of the pack, he taught us a few things. Probably the best was the one with the box: the trick is to watch the world from inside, especially when it’s a world of metal-tipped boots and you’re on the smallish, fragile side, and then, when the right moment comes, you climb out and put your power into play.
Taking after his dad, Sharky was a survival artist specializing in the many discomforts of mass graves. You could sense it in every light and heavy move he made. Sharky had a face as sharp as mommy’s morning razor. We all admired him, and Micka glowed, because he was the one who’d brought him in, just like he did David. Only this time we didn’t have to bother with teaching. Sharky already spoke the Organization’s language, along with slang and argot, plus a host of other tongues the usual way. Every language you know makes you another person, Micka lectured us one morning. Every language you know means you can lick my bunghole, I said like a proper actor. Bohler caught on: Hey guys, know this one? This lady goes to the doctor an says, hey doc … I got this like itch in my throat an … I’m all sweaty an dizzy … an I’m sittin there stark naked, Bohler got confused … I broke out in mad laughter, David turned red, Micka opened the door, and in walked Shark Stein, sprightly, swift, and silent, in a pair of black leather shoes.
Sharky knew about the Secret, he knew that you have to treat every unfinished small human creature like a vessel full of light because you never know which one might be the Child, the Messiach. And here in the hostile territory of the spinning wheel, he’s got a mission. Namely, to gather the salvation that’s always going on, gather it into the ultimate noose, and kill the pain. Once he’s had a little stroll through the vale of tears and taken a look around … that Child’s got a real big job waiting for him, namely to persuade the Old Bloodhound, Starry Bog, that Dogass Fuck, in other words his plastered dad, to turn a blind eye to all the filth and murder. And that’s quite a job. So why not make it a little easier on him, huh? On that we all agreed.
Luckily our new buddy wasn’t as overzealous as Bohler, who’d already been to court a few times for snatching sons and daughters away from their plastered degenerate mothers, who in his opinion were treating them cruelly.
Roaming the city parks, Bohler handed out chewing gum and holy pictures to wild boy thieves with keys around their necks and snot running from their noses. Bible in hand, he prowled the city scrap heaps, blessing the runaway brats who went there to lick out cans. A few times they chased him off with bolts cast from their homemade slingshots with fiendish accuracy. Loitering around supermarkets, he kept watch over the little shoplifters whose tricks he’d come to know well. And they came to know him too.
Hey, y’old Cassock, they’d sneer at him. Hey, y’old vampire, Terminator, Alien, Golem, Nosferatu, Medoosa! hurling video lore in his face. Rabble, I bring you God’s word, Bohler would begin when he managed to get hold of a few. Shuddup n fork over the moola, the grins, the jingle, the duckets, ya wormy old Dracula! He gave them the cash every time. But instead of buying soup with it, they’d get smokes or toyfils* or toluene.* I force charitable acts of baptism on em, said Bohler, like with the Apaches. Once he got shot with a police special, and a few times the little do-badders stabbed him. But Bohler would always just sew himself up, rinse himself off, and head back out on his crusade.
When I imagine our little Messiach joltin along on some train right now, Bohler said wistfully, his good, hardworkin carpenter dad an his kind, virtuous mom lookin out for some Egypt-type place to escape the Balkan or Angolan or Kurdish or maybe Cambodian … Herodiad … an the Messiach’s got just one sweater an only one pair of socks … an there isn’t a single country that’ll take the saintly family in, since they’re obviously economic refugees … Bohler let out a savage howl and rushed off to the train station to reward the next trainload of Gypsies from Romania.
But there was one other thing about the scamps that disturbed me, and that was their toys. Those abominable toyfil spiders from space … time flew by so fast in years 1, 2, and 3 … that all of a sudden there were totally different toys … I shook my head in disbelief, and when me and the guys talked it over we reminisced about our own childhood worlds.