The Living End

by Stanley Elkin

  “You have wondered,” He said, “why things are as they are. You have wondered, you have speculated.

  You have questioned My motives.” Groans of denial went up from the saints. He ignored them. ““Why,”

  the philosophers ask, ‘so piecemeal? Why His fits and starts theology, His stop and go arrangements?

  Can’t He make up His mind? Why the carrot, why the stick? Why the evenings and mornings of those consecutive days? Why only after first fashioning them could He see that they were good? Why, having landscaped an Eden, having leached and prepared the precious pious soils, having His fell swoop harvests and sweet successful bumper crops, did He need the farmer and plant the man, set him upright, a scarecrow essence in the holy field? Why first an Adam then an Eve, or Eve at all, or if an Eve why torn from that depleted man who, image of his maker once removed removes again to blur the reciprocities in that deserving girl? Why a serpent, why a tree? Why fine print at all so near the start of things? Why codicils and conditions, all that lawyerly qualm? Why strings? Why that Miranda decision hocus mumbo jumbo pocus, reading rights to a man and a woman who not only do not know that they are already in trouble but do not even know what trouble is? And ain’t exile cruel and unusual punishment when there’s no place to go?”

  “Of course they fell. Who wouldn’t fall in such a place? Who wouldn’t fall where the gravity was a thousand and two in just the shade? Who wouldn’t fall when the thickest crop in that garden was just gravity?”

  Flanoy had come out of his sulk. He smiled but Mother Mary would not look at him. Gosh, he thought, one moment comforted in Mother Mary’s lap, the next tumbled, spilled, knocked from it as one might clumsy milk.

  “Adam and Eve on the rock pile now, the chain gang. Working off their offense and raising kids, extra hands, till it was all cultivated now, if not a peaceable kingdom then at least a trained one, the old indebtedness paid up like mortgage. And then a flood. A flood! The whole earth disaster area. The spoiled corn and wetted wheat, the fruit and flooded fields all mash and only Father Noah’s ark afloat in all that liquorish sea, sailing the farms, cruising the ruined hectares, versts and acreage, and Noah unclear, everyone unclear, about the nature of the charges this time, taI straw that broke the actual camel’s back unspecified. “Yes Flanoy thought, with me, too, and moved closer to Quiz” “And then the covenant again, the old instrument which by this time even man knew was the only way God ever did business, never just by handshake let alone by the binding, even honored, nod or raised finger or tickled ear which perhaps only the auctioneer ever sees and which, nevertheless, always seems to be good enough even for him, but a contract, a compact, something a little more official than trust and less flimsy than faith, yet not an actual agreement at all and even the single simple seeming layman’s conditions-“Behave, play nice, be good”-and down home language a pitch beyond understanding.

  “Reprieved from oceans. Starting over. Breaking clean. Almost sophisticated now, almost used to it, a kind of emigre’, Ellis Islanded, the culture not so shocking, for all were greenhorns, greenhorns everywhere, and you’d think that maybe the ironic point of all this vagabondage was just to keep folks busy, hold them still.”

  Shima Yisroel Adonoi Elohenu, Adonoi Echod, Joseph mumbled. He pounded his breast with the hand that had just been resting in Mary’s.

  He looks like someone driving nails, Christ thought.

  “A tinker God, you’d think, Someone editorial, nuts for amendment. Or even God at all, do you suppose, with His second and third chances, His governor’s fond delight in commutation, reprieve? A father indeed, a daddy, a pop, Who counts to three perhaps, gets past two and goes to fractions-“Two and a half, two and three quarters, four fifths…”

  “Fond of mountains, a thing for heights. Ararat, Sinai. (Who ever delighted in the nature He had made, crouching perhaps, making frames of His hands, scouting location like a director, His shingle hung in garden, ocean, wilderness, and the higher elevations, a sort of majestic Fop posed on postcard and practicing His Law only where there was a view, never on just ordinary earth.) ““Another covenant. This time in writing. Elegant, He may have thought, powerful but elegant, and showed man something in a stone tablet. (Who worked always in His chosen mediums earth water, fire. Moses on the mountain would be air.) The terms terminal, one through ten. (Who was God again now He could get past three.) Dealing always, note, with leaders, as He had dealt with Points of Interest, oblique angle, off- center prospect, steep vision like a goat’s purchase, His summit conferees the elect of earth, its leading men, God’s chosen persons, ho ho ho. And Moses not two minutes at sea level but the people He had never deigned to deal with directly were at it again, doing the golden calf like a new dance. And Moses outraged as God at their loose talk and their sweet tooth for leeks and garlic, Egypt’s spectacular shade.

  “But what did He do? Nothing. As always. Nothing. Who made the world in six days and flooded it in forty but couldn’t count to three Wait Wait. Nothing. Nothing!

  “Unless you count a covenant.

  “I’ll give you Christ,” as if to say.

  “Just pledge belief. If being good was hard, forget it, just pledge belief. Believe.”

  Most of them were praying now. Even Mary had lowered her head, as Joseph had though he had ceased to sway, whose strident orthodoxy had bleached to something almost episcopal, who stood bareheaded, his yarlmulke fallen, and in phylacteries undone as laces.

  “So,” God said, “what do you make of Me, eh? What do you make of Me now you understand that finally it takes two to break a contract as well as to make one? What do you make of Me Who could have gotten it all right the -first time, saved everyone trouble and left Hell unstocked? Do you love Me? Do you forgive and forget as easily as I do? Do you?”

  Mother Mary peeked at the fluted piping of His nimbus, the sacred, secret rim, like icing on pastry, where the helix tucked into His golden head. She held her belly in her hands and hoped this one would be a girl.

  “Do you’ “Yes,” they cried.

  “Yes!”

  “Why do I do it then? Why?”

  “So we might choose,” said one of the saved.

  “What? Speak up.”

  “So we might choose.”

  “Never,” God thundered.

  “What do I care for the sanctity of your will? Never!”

  “Goodness,” a saint shouted.

  “You get off on goodness.”

  “On goodness? Me?” God laughed.

  “On goodness? Is that what you think Is that what you think Were you born yesterday? You’ve been in the world. Is that how you explain trial and error, history by increment, God’s long Slap and Tickle, His Indian-gift wrath? Goodness? No. It was Art! It was always Art. I work by the contrasts and metrics, by beats and the silences. It was all Art. Because it makes a better story is why.”

  Christ held up his damaged hands.

  “It makes a better story?” He was furious.

  “Because it makes a better story? Is this true? Is it?”

  “Sure it’s true,” God said. Then, pausing, He saw Quiz hold back a yawn. —teen one hundredths,” He said, “nineteen one hundredths, twenty one hundredths. All right, that’s it! Kairos! Doomsday!”

  Lesefario, in Hell, did not know at first that he had stopped burning. He thought pain’s absence some new pain, something eye of the hurricane or the heavy peace before the firing squad takes aim. He shook himself. He seemed, like the scabbed and crusted others, like an animal, a bear perhaps, after winter’s long somnolence. Instinct, memory, did not work that fast. It needed its bearings and landmarks, it required its surveyors’ grapples, some alphabet of location.

  “How long? How long did it take?” asked the fellow who’d told him his counting was a fad.

  “What? How long?”

  “Death. How long did it take?”

  I stopped counting,” he said.

  “Shame,” the man said.

  “Yes,” sa
id Lesefario, his heart breaking.

  Bodies rose to the surface of the seas and began swimming. They were released from faded, colorless flags, stove ships, hidden pilings where they had snagged for years. They came up out of shoals and split sandbars. The drowned and murdered floated up from the bottoms of lakes, their faces and bodies in the same dishabille in which they had died. They seeped out of riverbanks, they surfaced in wells. A rising tide of the dead.

  In woods and rain forests they quickened, corpses lost years. They came to in deserts, they waked up on mountains, a treasury of jigsaw death. One could not have suspected their numbers, that so many random had fallen. These were merely the discards, the old boot dead, stochastic as beer can, deposit bottle.

  They woke up in battlefields. They gathered themselves where they had exploded. They got up in hospitals, their deaths not yet discovered. They still wore identification bracelets, IVs dangled from their wrists like slack banderillas. They woke up in archeology, cities done in by earthquake, fire, and time.

  They climbed out of eaves, out of canyons, geology.

  Up out of mine shafts they came, comrades in cave-ins.

  They worked their way through holes they had melted in glaciers.

  All earth gave up its dead.

  They strained against coffin lids, against sealers. Stymied as escape artists they banged encumbrance.

  They swarmed, they popped through, the hatched, frantic chicks of death.

  A man named Ladlehaus climbed out of his grave like someone backing out a window.

  Like elopers they left their burials. They touched their tombs and niches as if they were the old rooms of childhood, brushing them lightly, as if they were dusting. They scrutinized their plots and read their markers like people hunting addresses. They loitered in their graveyards as if they were keeping appointments. Already they missed their deaths. There were complaints. They were cold in just sunlight after the heat of Hell. Those who had donated organs had lost them forever. They could feel the cavities and hollows, the terrible gouged and amputate absentness A woman who had given her eyes away stirred her fingers in her weeping holes.

  “So grotesque,” she moaned, “death grotesque as life. All, all grotesque.”

  They came down from churchyards on hillsides and in from cemeteries on the outskirts of town. They bestirred themselves in the celebrated tombs and sepulchers of the big-shot dead.

  Their bodies shone with gore like wet paint, They sooted the world as if it were carpet. The living and dead were thrown together, and the dead looked away first.

  Tribes covered the earth now, families did, clans, races. Mary, squeamish in the press of population, could not bear the stench. It’s morning sickness, she told herself. Joseph couldn’t get over how much things had changed, and Christ flinched when he saw soldiers. Quiz, looking for sanctuary, pulled Flanoy into a Y.M.C.A.

  Into the Valley of jehoshaphat they came and along all the coasts of Palestine. They covered the ranges of Samaria and Judea, of Abilene and Gilead, and stood in the Plains of jezreel and Sharon and spread out by Kinnereth’s Sea and the salted waters between Idumea and Moab. And were a million deep all about the tough shores of the ruined Mediterranean circle.

  They seemed a kind of vegetation, their burnt skin a smear of sullen growth. Pressed together, Coney Island’d, Woodstock’d, Tivoli Garden’d, jonestownd, they seemed spectators at some game less stadium, vast as the world.

  They waited. They did not know what was going to happen. They consulted the religious among them but they didn’t know either.

  Then God was there and, strangely, all could see Him. There was not a bad seat in the house. It was short and sweet.

  “Because I never found My audience,” God said.

  “Because I never found My audience.” He looked at the assembled dead, at the living billions anxious at ground zero.

  “You gave me, some of you, your ooh’s and aah’s, the Jew’s hooray and Catholic’s Latin deference-all theology’s pious wow. But I never found My audience.” He looked at Mary, who had feared Him, victim to His blue ribbon force, distrustful still, savoring the ordinary who had been taken out of all that.

  “I never found My audience. What had you,” He asked His audience, “to complain of? You had the respect of peers. You had peers.” He looked at Jesus.

  “You were no audience. You had all the advantages. You were only God’s clone.” And at Joseph.

  “You were a carpenter,” He said.

  “You did things with your hands. Why didn’t you admire Me more?” At the damned.

  “I gave you pain. Do you appreciate the miracle? To make it up out of thin air, deep, free-fall space, the gifted, driven atoms of remonstrance? Trickier than orange juice or the taste of Brie. Because I never found My audience,” said God and annihilated, Mother Mary and Christ and Lesefario and Flanoy and Quiz in their Y.M.C.A. sea front room in Piraeus and all Hell’s troubled sighed, everything.