Little Gods

by Pratt, Tim

  After countless days of travel, we reached the beach. I think we were somewhere in Alaska. Mountains crumbled into the sea, forming a protected cove. Gunmetal clouds filled the sky. The sound of waves crashing on rocks overwhelmed everything. I had never seen any place so simultaneously loud and desolate.

  I'd never seen anything to compare to Leviathan, either.

  Behemoth's vision had done nothing to prepare me for her size. Leviathan stretched long as a freight train, a hundred feet of her length exposed, the rest disappearing into the cold ocean. She thrashed in the shallows, her wet scales shining, every one a yellow jewel. White shore birds screamed and wheeled around her huge head. Whenever she moved, gouts of white water sprayed into the air, soaking jagged black rocks. The air stank of blood and salt.

  Behemoth shrank as he approached. Eventually I had to cling to his shoulders to keep from falling off.

  Leviathan lifted her golden, whiskered head. Her eyes were as vast as Behemoth's, but darker. She thrashed her way closer to shore. I saw the wounds on her underside as she heaved herself forward, ragged tears with white edges. Everything inside her spilled out as the earth scored her, and she crept forward along a path of blood.

  Behemoth stopped a dozen yards away. The water lapped at his feet, and smoke rose where it touched him. I smelled burnt meat. He stepped forward again.

  “No, Behemoth, don't,” I said, gripping the loose skin behind his head. “It won't do any good.” Wet, salty wind blew into my face, stinging my eyes and making them water.

  Behemoth showed me a pair of images, parallel: The familiar love-embrace of Leviathan twining around his body, and an image of them melting into blood and meat together. He wanted to join her.

  “Please, Behemoth,” I whispered.

  Leviathan lifted her head again and heaved. She came within ten feet of us. She blinked and exhaled, her head dropping. Her enormous jaw crashed into the rocky shore. The bones in her face splintered on impact, with a sound like dead trees falling. I squeezed Behemoth's skin harder. Leviathan's teeth, gleaming white pillars, broke against the ground. Her eyes, dark as tidepools in black sand, looked at Behemoth longingly.

  He didn't move.

  Her left eye closed, then the right. Her golden eyelids dropped as irrevocably as coffin lids closing. She didn't move again.

  Behemoth wailed. I can't describe the sound, but I still hear it, almost, echoing off the rocks and the water. Echoing off the sky.

  Leviathan's broken head brought it home for me. They would never twine together in the last days. Her blood had failed to make a path. If Behemoth wanted to die, all he had to do was step into the water. I imagined his blood mixing with Leviathan's, and that mixture somehow saving them both, repairing Leviathan's torn scales and his burned legs. I imagined resurrection and, prompted by their willing sacrifice, the long-awaited apocalypse.

  But there were to be no more deaths that day, and no resurrections. I don't know why Behemoth didn't go in after her. His mind provided no visions.

  He sank to his knees, shrinking, and rested his alligator's jaw on the ground. He stared at Leviathan. I touched his head, feeling the rough skin under my fingers. I shivered and coughed wetly. Shore birds landed on Leviathan's body and began to strut.

  I looked away. “Come on, Behemoth,” I said.

  He stood, looked one last time at Leviathan's broken body, and trudged back the way we came.

  Behemoth remained small on the return trip, never reaching the towering proportions he had on the way to Alaska. I rode his back the whole way, and he didn't communicate with me at all.

  We eventually reached the woods. Behemoth settled down into his familiar depression in the dirt. He didn't send me an image for days.

  The acolytes told me Dean had died shortly after we left. They wouldn't say how. They snapped at each other and walked on eggshells around me, and seemed relieved when I sent them away this morning. I told them to come back in a month with fresh supplies for me. They revere me as their founder (that was a kind legacy for Dean to provide, at least), so they obeyed. The willowy girl, crying, kissed Behemoth on the snout before she left.

  This morning I went to Dean's grave. The acolytes marked it with a big water-rounded rock. I wonder if he enjoyed the life he chose, waiting to serve in ways Behemoth never required, providing for a creature that had no needs except love. Dean told me he'd made the right choice, and I hope he still felt that way at the end.

  I sat by the rock for a while, trying to call up childhood memories, but nothing came. I never understood Dean's devotion. I chose other loves, and while I'll never know if I made the wiser decisions, I own those choices and accept them.

  I returned to the clearing.

  “Behemoth,” I said. “I'm going to die soon, I imagine. I'm going to stay with you until I do.” I spread my blanket and leaned against his side.

  It's the middle of the night now. I woke myself up coughing. My back and kidneys ache, and my lungs burn with every breath. Death will come quickly if I stay in the woods, but I'm old, and I can imagine worse things than dying.

  Like dying alone.

  I wonder about the powers-that-be, whoever placed Behemoth and Leviathan on earth to await an apocalypse deferred, and why they let Leviathan die so pointlessly. If the powers intended it as a lesson, I don't understand the moral. Maybe in death I'll find some answers. If not, I hope the questions won't trouble me any more.

  After I told him I planned to stay, Behemoth stirred a little. A moment later he showed me this: Me, leaning against him, sleeping while he slept.

  “Good night, Behemoth,” I said, and closed my eyes.

  Bone Sigh

  * * *

  1

  I sit at the table and work on my bonsai scar. I press the silver head of the meat tenderizer into my left thigh, stippling the skin. I do not feel pain; I scarcely feel the pressure. My nerves are dead, there on my left thigh, where I grow my scar. Matches, hot needles, knives, and time. I tend my scar, I do not control it. Skin and muscle are unpredictable—this is not like painting a picture, carving a piece of wood. The flesh knows its own logic, the bruises come strangely, the healing proceeds unevenly. I collaborate with my flesh.

  The space between intention and accident, that is the place where God lives.

  I put the tenderizer down on the white formica table and look at my bonsai scar. It is like a flower, a jellyfish, a pinwheel of raised flesh, yellow bruises, subcutaneous hemorrhaging.

  Is it process, nothing but process, or someday will I be finished? Will I see the face of God, the expression of revelation? Or will I see the back parts of God, as Moses saw?

  Only time and painful tenderness will tell.

  * * *

  2

  I sit on a bench with a bored officer of the court while my daughter Crystal goes down the slide in the park, over and over.

  My ex-wife was the only person who knew about my bonsai scar, my single devotion. When she decided to leave me, she told the court about my scar. She had taken pictures of my scar, while I slept, and she showed them to the judge.

  The court decided that someone like me, who hurts himself so methodically, might try to hurt his own child. As if I do not understand the division between self and other, the difference between personal sacrifice and inexcusable attack.

  My ex-wife left me and took Crystal, and now I only see my daughter in the park, with a chaperone, every few weeks.

  My ex-wife has a new husband, a thin man who sells insurance, a thin man with a thin mustache and black hair slicked back with something oily that shines. He is secretly a monster, and I fear for my daughter, living in his house. I hope my scar will take a final shape soon, and guide me, for I feel close upon despair.

  I have stepped up my devotions, and my whole left leg aches.

  Crystal slides. Her pigtails fly behind her. She cries “Banzai!” as she slides.

  * * *

  3

  My ex-wife has died. The brakes failed
on her car and she plunged over a bridge, into a swamp. They found water in her lungs. She did not die on impact. She had to inhale swamp water, trapped upside-down in her car, before she could die.

  I go to the funeral, in a small country church we never attended. The monster, my dead ex-wife's husband, sits in the first pew, holding my daughter's hand. I can see the truth about him crawling under his skin; his scalp bulges and ripples as the monster inside him shifts. No one else notices; perhaps God has given me the power to see monsters.

  Perhaps God wants me to help myself.

  The monster and my daughter walk past the coffin. Crystal weeps; the monster holds her hand and will not release her.

  I realize that the monster cut my ex-wife's brakes, so that he could have Crystal all to himself. For some terrible purpose.

  I wish my scar would advise me.

  * * *

  4

  We named her Crystal because crystals start small, and then grow. Because they begin simple and beautiful and, over time, become complex and beautiful.

  Like my scar. But we couldn't call our daughter Scar, and even if we could have, my dead ex-wife would have refused.

  * * *

  5

  The scar does not guide me. I lash myself with coathangers and burn myself with lye, but more than ever before the window into revelation seems hopelessly opaque. I feel I have reached an impasse, that I have done all I can—now all my work is the equivalent of useless cross-hatching, obsessive shading, adding irrelevant details.

  If my scar will not guide me, I must guide myself.

  I will go to the monster's lair.

  * * *

  6

  The front door is unlocked, and I go inside. There is some light from the windows, but it is dimmed by curtains. This is a squalid little house. My dead ex-wife was an excellent housekeeper, but in her absence the monster's house has reverted to type. I almost expect to see a heap of gnawed bones in the corner, a pallet made of rotting animal skins. But there are only old newspapers, empty aluminum cans. He is a subtle monster.

  I have never been here before, so I creep in the dimness toward a hallway. The house smells of meat, of fat boiled with beans. I listen, and hear a voice. Crystal's. I want to scoop her up and take her away to freedom, away from the monster. But what if he is with her, right now? Who else would she be talking to?

  I step softly to a half-closed door in the hallway and look inside. Crystal is sitting on the floor, talking seriously to a red-haired doll. Crystal's dress is soiled and torn. The monster is trying to dress her as if she were his own offspring, a monster herself.

  “What the hell?” the monster says, behind me.

  I turn. The monster stands in the hallway, dressed in boxer shorts and a dirty white t-shirt. He is unshaven, and his eyes are red. I can see the fires smoking inside his head, the tentacles coiled in his belly, the monster under his thin flesh disguise.

  He has a large knife in his hand.

  “Stay away from her!” he shouts, and runs at me. I throw up my hands to ward him off. He stumbles, tripping on an empty whiskey bottle on the floor.

  I know what will happen before it does; it is like God grants me the vision, as a warning, or a courtesy.

  When the monster falls, he stumbles into me, and drives his knife into my thigh. Into the heart of my bonsai scar.

  Imagine a gardener, devoted to his bonsai, controlling its water, its nourishment, its temperature, its access to light—and then the bonsai is infested with woodlice, shredded by cat's claws, smashed with a fire poker, chopped with a hatchet. Imagine how I feel.

  The knife sticks in my thigh, and all the dead nerves come to life, wake up and scream pain at me. There are arteries in the thigh, blood highways—did the monster cut one? Will I die? Will I see God's face (or even his back parts) when I die?

  Crystal is screaming. The monster is on the floor, but he is getting up.

  I pull the knife out of my thigh. That hurts worse than it did going in.

  The monster turns his face to me.

  His eyes are full of smoke, blood, fangs, shards of glass.

  I put the knife into one of his eyes.

  * * *

  7

  “Did he ever hurt you?” I ask.

  Crystal sits on the edge of the bathtub, her eyes wide and vacant as I bandage my thigh, cover the bloody remnants of my ruined bonsai scar.

  “Did he ever touch you, in a bad way?” I ask.

  “No,” she says.

  But I know he would have.

  * * *

  8

  Weeks after I saved Crystal from the monster, we sit in a motel room. She is better; talking more, glad to be with me. She feels we are on a grand adventure.

  I have been careful not to let her see my bonsai scar, only changing the bandages in the bathroom, when she sleeps. But today I am taking the bandages off for good, and Crystal is curious to see my healed wound.

  I remove the wrapping and look at the scar. There is a large, pale knot of scar tissue in the center, where the monster's knife went in. I look at my thigh sadly. The waste of all my work. The face of God, marred forever.

  “Daddy,” Crystal says, touching my scar gently. “It's an eye."

  I look at her, then at my scar, and I begin to smile.

  She's right. The monster's stabbing wound has not ruined my bonsai scar, but has instead completed it, provided the final touch, formed the pupil of an eye.

  “One eye. Like a Cyclops,” Crystal says.

  I think of the monster, the way I stabbed his eye out. Monsters have only a single eye, but my scar is not meant to reveal a monster's face.

  I am blessed. The face of God is forming on my body, responding to my devotions.

  But I have vastly underestimated the size of God's face. I will need more than one thigh to reveal it.

  I will need my entire body; chest, arms, head, legs.

  Looking at my daughter, at the fascination in her face, I realize something else—that the revelation is not meant for me. I am only the medium for revelation. I am the book, not the reader.

  My body will become the face of God, and my daughter will look upon me and know the secrets of life, the ways and means of earth and heaven.

  My disappointment is brief and selfish, and then I am glad. For what more could a father want? What better reason is there to sacrifice, but for the good of your child?

  “Bring me my bag, darling,” I say, and when she does, I take out a knife.

  Daughter and Moon

  The moon disappeared last week and the world is shuddering like a wet cat. Cows sleep badly and the milk is sour. The tides have gone insane, arriving and departing without reason, like a secret alcoholic with a part-time job. Blood flows (or doesn't flow) in unusual ways, streams rush uphill and lovers bicker on park benches everywhere.

  The moon is in my house. It is no bigger than a dinner plate or a basketball, and is much grittier than it appears in the sky.

  My daughter says she lured it with a trail of jelly beans (no black ones) and that it will go home when it gets bored.

  Meanwhile it eats the fresh butter, nestles in the bathtub, rolls across the shag rug and chases our dog, who howls.

  The farmers don't know when to plant. Our president suspects the Arabs. Dubious astronomers check and re-check foolproof instruments. People on the street shout that the end is near, but the economy has never been better. All the spells chanted under the dark of the moon are coming undone. My daughter dresses our satellite in bonnets and her dead mother's scarves.

  Today I asked her (she is nine, with pig-tails and crooked teeth) what it all means, why the moon came to us, and she laughed. She ran down the hillside this morning and the moon floated behind her. They play tag like old friends.

  My daughter will never be this young again. I wonder if the moon is telling her secrets. I suspect that it is.

  Captain Fantasy and the Secret Masters

  Shortly before I met Captain Fan
tasy, I sliced the end of my forefinger off while dicing cucumber for a salad. I shouted and shook my hand, splashing blood on the counter and tearing the thin strip of skin that held my fingertip on. The tiny lump of flesh tore loose and flew into the sink, down the garbage disposal, gone.

  I cursed, then concentrated on my nerve endings, switching off the pain. My whole finger went numb. I had trouble controlling the nerves on such a small scale. Holding my finger in the air like a “we're-number-one” fan at a basketball game, I urged new flesh to grow over the wound. I'd make a few big hamburgers to go with my salad, supply some mass and calories for the healing ... my new fingertip should be grown by morning, though the nail would take longer, and I'd have to either keep the nerves dead or be careful not to scrape the sensitive under-nail skin.

  The phone rang. I answered it left-handed, clumsily. I expected my director, Jack Harrah, to call and remind me of that night's dress rehearsal, as if I'd forget. I was playing Orestes, the lead, at Harrah's Greek Revival theater. “Hello?"

  “Hi, Li,” Brady Doolittle said.

  I almost hung up. But why bother? They'd found me. “Boss,” I said, neutrally. “I tendered my resignation."

  “Not accepted,” Brady said cheerfully. “We need the best Metamorph available, and that's you. We let you run loose for nearly a year, never bothered you. Be grateful for that."

  So they'd kept tabs on me all along. Well, of course. The Facility didn't lose track of people. “Tomorrow's opening night. Can't it wait until—"

  “Your understudy, Bill Monroe, he can handle it. By tomorrow night, you'll be playing a much more important part."

  Brady knew everything. Always. That's why he ran the Facility. I looked at the spots of blood on the counter and gave in. “When can I expect you?"

  “A car's waiting outside. Pack a bag.” He paused. “I think you'll like this one, Li."