by Dan Cluchey
“Now, Mr. Jones,” I began with no ending. Mostly I just wanted to find out what his voice sounded like—a tremendous foghorn, I imagined.
“Tom,” he grunted powerfully, not disappointing me in the least. “Tom, or Tom Jones, is fine, son. None of this ‘mister.’”
“Tom Jones,” I repeated, blankly.
“That’s right,” he said.
“Oh! Like the singer?” asked a delighted Rachel.
“Yup. Same name as the singer. Pretty strange, I suppose.”
“It’s not unusual,” I replied without thinking. “Sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“Was that a crack about Tom Jones?” growled Tom Jones.
“No sir!” I answered stiffly.
Tom and June eased into smiles at the same moment.
“That’s a pretty good one, son. But I heard ’em all. And I like him fine. I like the singer version of Tom Jones fine. What’s new, pussycat?”
And June chimed in: “Whoa-ooh-whoa-whoa-oh.”
We spoke for another minute, the check came and went, and Rachel and I stood to leave the Joneses to their adorable caterwauls.
“Excuse me?” June called after us. “If the judge decides that … I mean, if they do decide that they’re gonna … you know—when does that … do you know when?”
“You mean when would the execution be?” I replied without thinking, and she shuddered. “Sorry. I’m sorry. It would happen quickly, though—a few days after the appeal comes down. That’s usually how it goes.”
“Will you be seeing him soon?” she asked longingly.
“Headed there now,” I said.
She gave us a crumb cake packed inside a small cooler that had been stashed beside her. Three hours later, we watched as Michael picked at it delicately in the neon-lit room of the prison.
“Monophysitism,” he repeated, pinching another lost speck of cake between his fingers. “Mono. Fizza. Tism. It’s basically just the school of thought where Christ, he walks around like any other human, but he’s a divine creature. Not some sort of … split … between a person—a regular person like you or me, that is—and a deity. Then opposite of that there’s kenosis, and that’s just the idea that Christ emptied himself of his divine side once he took on a human form.”
“Uh-huh,” we nodded back, flummoxed.
“And never the twain shall meet, and all that,” Tiegs went on.
“Right,” said Rachel.
“So it’s a matter of great debate and uproar amongst all them Christian scholars: what was the nature of Christ when he lived, and when he died?”
“Can I ask,” I asked, “why it’s so important to you? Or to everyone, I guess? I mean, the end result is the same, right? He’s born, and he’s either all human, or all deity, or some sort of a hybrid, and then he dies, and then at some point he comes back, right?”
“That’s about the long and short of it, Brother Leo,” he replied.
“Okay, so, what’s the difference if he was completely like us or not?”
“The difference is in the resurrection. It’s in the dying and coming back. If you’re divine, you can pretty much basically just come and go as you please. It’s no big whoop if you arise again after you’ve departed.”
“But if you’re human—” started Rachel.
“Yes ma’am. If you’re human, the rule has always been that once you’re gone, you’re gone. And though Heaven may be your ultimate reward,” he drawled, slinking his index finger through the last crumbs of the cake, “you don’t get to come back here. Not ever.”
Tiegs looked even sicklier than usual, his face seemingly hollow, the gears of his bloodless body churning lamely to hold him upright in his chair. Though he spoke with his standard gusto, I sensed that at any moment he might collapse in front of us. Here was this waif, this wraith, and I couldn’t escape his description of kenosis, the human Christ: emptied out of everything divine that was once inside.
Why was his sadness like my sadness? I found myself wondering that. Well, alright, for one thing, we were both locked away with nothing but our questions, heirs to a mystery so remote as to be almost comically untouchable. That was one thing. Of course, I had been sealed off merely by Fiona, whereas he had been sealed off by the thing he called God. But then again: he was probably in prison (in actual prison) because a person had betrayed him, too—because of Therese. And maybe I had been sealed off by something cosmic as well, maybe even something as cosmic as myself, which, if true, would flip our situations in reverse of each other. In any event, I was growing increasingly certain that we shared questions, and that the only person who could deliver us the answers we respectively sought was desperately out of reach. We shared, at the very least, some fundamental mystery; we were dying to understand.
“Now outside Abrahamic tradition,” he maundered on, “you’ve got yourself some options. You can die, and you can pretty much come back as a bug or a bird. That’s your reincarnation, of course. You got your Buddhism, your Hinduism, your Jainism, Taoism, the Celts and the Druids, even some strands of Norse mythology. Lotta folks came up with this, across the ages, all over the world. I understand it, too. I mean, it’s basically the next best thing to eternal salvation—getting another go around on the Lord’s green Earth. Nobody nowhere’s real good with endings, as it turns out.”
Tiegs let out a series of furious hacking coughs, spit a long sedimentary strand of dark blood and sputum onto the floor beside him, then smiled up at us bashfully.
“What about coming back not in another form, but just as yourself?” I asked, a little too eagerly. I didn’t know what possessed me; I was thinking about everything Fiona had once explained regarding the promises of infinity, and this sick man—in the moment, I thought that maybe he’d know. Take the bait, you lunatic, I thought to myself. Share my question.
“What about that?” I continued. “Not reincarnation, but, I guess, recursion, so that it’s still you, just … coming around again. Reiteration. Does anybody believe in that? I mean, if time is infinite, isn’t there a chance that if we just waited long enough for every eventuality to cycle through, the conditions would have to come around again for a place exactly like Earth, and from there, we could…”
I heard myself, and trailed off. It occurred to me that I’d crossed the line from merely playing along with Tiegs’s cosmic folly to participating in it; Rachel looked at me as though I’d just belched the alphabet.
“Not as much, Brother Leo, though the thought’s most definitely an intriguing one. No, I can’t recall off the top of my head a civilization that ever landed on that particular idea.”
He looked at me as if to apologize for something, and Rachel’s bemused expression slacked away.
“So what do you believe, then?” she asked him begrudgingly.
“Well, I believe in the eternal grace and power of Christ, Sister Rachel—be he divine or human. That’s more or less where I’m at. I believe I will ascend.”
“So, only one trip around the Earth, then?” I prodded, and Rachel shot me another bewildered look.
“Seems more than enough, Brother Leo, though some may disagree. Course mine appears to have come to an end in scandal and disrepute, so I wager once was plenty. I’d rather the heavenly kingdom than another turn as a bug or a bird, or even as a wiser, freer M. R. Tiegs.”
He spat again, and leaned back in his chair conclusively. I wasn’t ready for the conversation to be over. I knew that he knew what I meant, that he had to have once lurched along the same grim steppe where my life had now left me. Hadn’t he been through it all in here at least once?
“Okay, but,” I started in, “imagine that, assuming that time is infinite, imagine that—billions of years from now—imagine that the exact circumstances that led to your creation conspire to happen again. I mean, they’d have to, right? Given enough time, a person would have to—”
“Leo,” Rachel cut me off, “Leo, we’re getting way off target here. Can we go back to the—”
“Let me just ask this,” I pleaded, a small frenzy beginning to build in the edges of my skull. “Let me just ask him about—”
“Ecclesiasticus!” he interrupted, and Rachel rolled her eyes in opposition to the unfolding scene.
“I’m sorry?” I said.
“You’re talking about coming around again. What’d you call it? Recursion. Well hey, maybe it’s a possibility; I’m in no kind of position to say it ain’t. Anyway, you won’t find out if it’s gonna happen until it happens, right? You sure can’t bank on it, at least, is all I’m saying. Heck, that’s all of religion for you; that’s why folks hedge their bets here on Earth. Well, you asked me what my thinking is about that. And if you want my advice on that particular matter—well, I always find a form of an answer in scripture, so here’s what I got for advice. Ecclesiasticus. Chapter five. Verse eleven.”
And he leaned in again.
“‘Let thy life be sincere.’”
SEVEN
“IT’S THURSDAY, IT’S EIGHT O’CLOCK, SO YOU KNOW that it’s GOT to be…”
Ba-da-da da-da-doo-dahhhhh! Ba-da-da da-da-doo-dop-doo-dahhhhh!
“Hollywood Update!”
Ba-da-da day-bo-doo-deeeee! Ba-da-da day-bo-doo-dop-doo-deeeee!
“I’m Terri Robbins!”
“And I’m Scott Flukes!”
“Now let’s get you caught up with the latest!”
“Hahaha! Let’s do it, Terri!”
I slumped into the pinewood of a rattletrap stool, in a Brooklyn bar much too bright for the dim times. There was no one there to see me—just the fat bartender washing steins with a gray rag. The television was on.
“Celebrated director Marcus Wimms has signed on to pilot Operation Mastermind, the highly anticipated spy thriller due out next summer from DreamScope Atlantis Pictures.”
The fat bartender looked up at me with an impish smirk, rivulets of sweat streaming down the double hemispheres of his low-slung cheeks.
“I don’t normally watch this crap, you know,” he chirped. “This was just on.”
“It’s okay.”
“If you wanna change it—”
“No,” I said. “It’s fine.”
“Hey Scott?!”
“Yeah Terri?!”
“Can you guess which award-winning singer was seen canoodling with her new beau outside a posh LA nightclub?”
“Haha! I can’t, Terri!”
I finished my porter, and the fat bartender poured me another without being asked. The television blathered still, and I sipped intermittently while pulling wiry black dog hairs from the sleeves of my jacket.
“Scott, wedding bells are ringing for one Hollywood power couple this weekend!”
“That’s right, Terri! None other than Briefs leading man Mark Renard will be tying the knot on Saturday with Fiona Fox, star of the upcoming blockbuster Dreamstalker 2.”
“Oh man. Did you see the first Dreamstalker? So good.”
The fat bartender stretched his back noisily, let out a prolific yawn, and wiped his forehead with the same rag he’d been using to dry the glassware.
“She was good in it, too. When she killed that bald guy with her shoe? Oh man. That was awesome.”
“The talented duo will wed in London’s fabulous Westcott Gardens, and our sources tell us that the honeymoon is set for southern Spain!”
“Well, chip-cheerio to the two of them, Terri!”
“Indubitably, Scott! Hahaha!”
Without peeling his eyes from the screen, the fat bartender sank both elbows onto the wet countertop and began to shake his head as prologue to a petty thought.
“You know, it’s funny, because the word Renard actually means—”
“I know,” I said.
“I don’t know if you know this, but in French, I mean, it means—”
“I know.”
“I just mean what are the odds that—”
“They’re terrible.”
Ba-da-da da-da-doo-dahhhhh! Ba-da-da da-da-doo-dop-doo-dahhhhh!
Okay.
Ba-da-da day-bo-doo-deeeee! Ba-da-da day-bo-doo-dop-doo-deeeee!
This is okay.
I left my porter and stepped out into the failing light. When things get away from you, and when it happens so quickly, you begin to lose faith in basic bits of chronology. Fiona couldn’t be a star yet—not this quickly. How many months had passed? A big-time movie star? When must that have happened? And married? This had to be the future. On the television, she looked young, still young, still someone’s crisp, unlovable daughter. But gone was the grateful weirdo, the knotty, tender blackbird who once traced circles on my arm. Her star was rising. It made me think of a fact I knew about stars—did you know that most of the ones you see in the night sky have actually been dead for many millions of years? It’s only because they are so far away that you’re able to see them as they were in the past. Distance is like memory in that way—like my memories, like this one. I ducked back in and looked again; here was my star. How far from me? Unknown. My star, my bird, my bug, my snake. The opposite of a snake: she shed her insides.
* * *
“Tell us about John Jasper,” Rachel urged Tiegs on the morning of our ninth visit to the prison.
It was December, and the time we had left to save Michael was drawing short. Rachel and I were sharing a bed now, free from the pretense of the mai tais, and I have to admit that it brought me comfort to be near her—temporary comfort from the two ghosts who followed me around, just a step or two behind me, whenever I was alone. One was Fiona, not dead, but gone; when I was with Rachel, in all of her pleasant neutrality, Fiona’s memory ebbed steadily away towards an asymptote: receding towards zero, but never, ever arriving there. The other was Michael, or rather the ghost he would become if we couldn’t save—not save—stave. If we couldn’t stave off death. Death, my oldest fixation, older even than Fiona—older than the universe—had come back into my arena, had slipped through the crevices and set up shop in the neon-lit room.
“How do you mean?” Michael drawled back at Rachel’s inquiry.
“I mean what kind of a person was he. We know you didn’t like him very much, but—a lot of people felt the same way, right? A lot of the other residents at Willow Creek? Certainly Therese felt that way—well, eventually, at least. We’ve read all of the stuff from the courtroom; we know all that. I’m just curious what you remember about him, maybe why it was that he inspired such … strong feelings.”
Michael sat up a bit in his folding chair, gripped with two dry hands the sides of his heavy head, and painstakingly cracked his neck in four directions, the frangible bones cuing a choir of hideous gunshots. Rachel shivered, and I looked quickly away from the both of them.
“I don’t much like to speak ill of the departed,” he replied. “You know what you know from the records and whatnot—John Jasper, he had his share of trouble with sin.”
“He was a bad man?” I prodded, unhelpfully.
“Hardly for me to say,” answered Tiegs, “but I can tell you he was troubled. I can say ’smuch as that.”
“What do you remember about what he was like?” Rachel ventured on. “Apart from the negative feelings. What was he like just in the day-to-day?”
The cloughs below his cheekbones grew chasmal as he drew in breath, and he held himself there, hollow, for a brief moment in thought.
“Well, in the beginning,” he began, then paused. “In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth.”
“Jesus, Michael,” Rachel loosed.
“I’m answering your question,” he replied placidly.
“You are not,” she quibbled. “You just aren’t. The Book of Genesis is not relevant here.”
“Can we hear him out?” I asked as gently as I could.
“Are you serious, Leo?” she countered. “He isn’t answering any of our questions.”
“I’m answering your question in my own way, Sister Rachel—in my own way, but I’m answering it just the same.�
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“Alright,” she sighed.
“The Book of Genesis is relevant here indeed, my dear sweet sister in Being a Touch Frustrated with Me Right Now, if you’d be so kind as to listen.”
“Alright,” she acquiesced.
“Where was I now? That’s it, yes ma’am—the beginning. Well, as I mentioned, God created the Heaven and the Earth.”
“Yep,” I confirmed, “we’ve … we’ve heard.”
“Please go on,” Rachel pleaded with him.
“Well, that right there is the start of a story—the first story, in fact—the story of the Garden of Eden, of course is what I mean.”
“Of course,” I said.
“Of course. Now, that story—I won’t bore you with the details of creation, but that story posits a man, name of Adam, formed of the dust of the ground. Can you believe that? Dust of the ground! And God, he went and breathed into Adam’s nostrils the breath of life—”
And here Michael blissfully engorged a long, unsteady breath, awash with rhinal whinnies and a look of full joy.
“—Breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and Adam became alive—a living soul.”
“That’s fantastic,” said Rachel, straining for patience, “but what happens next?”
“Well, naturally, next comes Eve,” he responded delightedly, peering directly into her eyes. “Torn from the rib, and the pair of them—man and woman—is all there is for a time, people-wise. Just the two of them, together, naked and unashamed in the garden.”
I swung one glance at Rachel, recalling the two of us, together in the Biblical sense, that very morning in the Jackson Days Inn. She didn’t seem to register the analogy.
“We were happy, Therese and me, I mean, at Willow Creek and for a time after that. Not perfectly so—ain’t nobody is, near as I can tell—but we were happy enough. We were clean, you understand? We were new, and maybe it felt like something of a new start for us.”
“And then…” I began.
