GOD IS NO WHERE
GOD IS NOW HERE
Actually, these matters were pointed out to me by Beth, who never took Fat's religious experiences seriously until she saw him write down phonetically several words of the koine, which she knew he had no experience with and could not recognize even as a genuine language. What Fat claimed was -- well, Fat claimed plenty. I must not start any sentence with, "What Fat claimed was." During the years -- outright years! -- that he labored on his exegesis, Fat must have come up with more theories than there are stars in the universe. Every day he developed a new one, more cunning, more exciting and more fucked. God, however, remained a constant theme. Fat ventured away from belief in God the way a timid dog I once owned had ventured off its front lawn. He -- both of them -- would go first one step, then another, then perhaps a third and then turn tail and run frantically back to familiar territory. God, to Fat, constituted a territory which he had staked out. Unfortunately for him, following the initial experience, Fat could not find his way back to that territory.
They ought to make it a binding clause that if you find God you get to keep him. For Fat, finding God (if indeed he did find God) became, ultimately, a bummer, a constantly diminishing supply of joy, sinking lower and lower like the contents of a bag of uppers. Who deals God? Fat knew that the churches couldn't help, although he did consult with one of David's priests. It didn't work. Nothing worked. Kevin suggested dope. Being involved with literature, I recommended he read the English seventeenth century minor metaphysical poets such as Vaughan and Herbert:
"He knows he hath a home, but scarce knows where, He sayes it is so far
That he hath quite forgot how to go there."
Which is from Vaughan's poem "Man." As nearly as I could make out, Fat had devolved to the level of those poets, and had, for these times, become an anachronism. The universe has a habit of deleting anachronisms. I saw this coming for Fat if he didn't get his shit together.
Of all the suggestions given to Fat, the one that seemed most promising came from Sherri, who still lingered on with us in a state of remission. "What you should do," she told Fat during one of his darker hours, "is get into studying the characteristics of the T-34."
Fat asked what that was. It turned out that Sherri had read a book on Russian armor during World War Two. The T-34 tank had been the Soviet Union's salvation and thereby the salvation of all the Allied Powers -- and, by extension, Horselover Fat's, since without the T-34 he would be speaking -- not English or Latin or the koine -- but German.
"The T-34," Sherri explained, "moved very rapidly. At Kursk they knocked out even Porsche Elefants. You have no idea what they did to the Fourth Panzer Army." She then started drawing sketches of the situation at Kursk in 1943, giving figures. Fat and the rest of us were mystified. This was a side of Sherri we hadn't known. "It took Zhukov himself to turn the tide against the Panzers," Sherri wheezed on. "Vatutin screwed up. He was later murdered by pro-Nazi partisans. Now, consider the Tiger tank the Germans had and their Panthers." She showed us photographs of various tanks and related with relish how General Koniev had successfully crossed the Dniester and Prut Rivers by March twenty-sixth.
Basically, Sherri's idea had to do with bringing Fat's mind down from the cosmic and the abstract to the particular. She had hatched out the practical notion that nothing is more real than a large World War Two Soviet tank. She wanted to provide an antitoxin to Fat's madness. However, her recitation, complete with maps and photographs, only served to remind him of the night he and Bob had seen the movie Patton before attending Gloria's graveside service. Naturally, Sherri had not known about that.
"I think he should take up sewing," Kevin said. "Don't you have a sewing machine, Sherri? Teach him to use it."
Sherri, showing a high degree of stubbornness, continued, "The tank battles at Kursk involved over four thousand armored vehicles. It was the greatest battle of armor in history. Everyone knows about Stalingrad, but nobody knows about Kursk. The real victory by the Soviet Union took place at Kursk. When you consider -- "
"Kevin," David interrupted, "what the Germans should have done was show the Russians a dead cat and ask them to explain it."
"That would have stopped the Soviet offensive right there," I said. "Zhukov would still be trying to account for the cat's death."
To Kevin, Sherri said, "In view of the stunning victory by the good side at Kursk, how can you complain about one cat?"
"There's something in the Bible about falling sparrows," Kevin said. "About his eye being on them. That's what's wrong with God; he only has one eye."
"Did God win the battle at Kursk?" I said to Sherri. "That must be news to the Russians, especially the ones who built the tanks and drove them and got killed."
Sherri said patiently, "God uses us as instruments through which he works."
"Well," Kevin said, "regarding Horse, God has a defective instrument. Or maybe they're both defective, like an eighty-year-old lady driving a Pinto with a drop-in gas tank."
"The Germans would have had to hold up Kevin's dead cat," Fat said. "Not just any dead cat. All Kevin cares about is that one cat."
"That cat," Kevin said, "did not exist during World War Two."
"Did you grieve over him then?" Fat said.
"How could I?" Kevin said. "He didn't exist."
"Then his condition was the same as now," Fat said.
"Wrong," Kevin said.
"Wrong in what way?" Fat said. "How did his nonexistence then differ from his nonexistence now?"
"Kevin's got the corpse now," David said. "To hold up. That was the whole point of the cat's existence. He lived to become a corpse by which Kevin could refute the goodness of God."
"Kevin," Fat said, "Who created your cat?"
"God did," Kevin said.
"So God created a refutation of his own goodness," Sherri said. "By your logic."
"God is stupid," Kevin said. "We have a stupid deity. I've said that before."
Sherri said, "Does it take much skill to create a cat?"
"You just need two cats," Kevin said. "One male and one female." But he could obviously see where she was leading him. "It takes -- " He paused, grinning. "Okay, it takes skill, if you presume purpose in the universe."
"You don't see any purpose?" Sherri said.
Hesitating, Kevin said, "Living creatures have purpose."
"Who puts the purpose in them?" Sherri said.
"They -- " Again Kevin hesitated. "They are their purpose. They and their purpose can't be separated."
"So an animal is an expression of purpose," Sherri said. "So there is purpose in the universe."
"In small parts of it."