Imaginary Jesus

by Matt Mikalatos

  Luckily (providentially?) a small bump in the ice redirected me and I shot through the trees with unparalleled speed, the snow forming a blind wall of unknowing around me. I could see dim shapes of trees whizzing by on either side and feel the occasional branch smack me in the face or arms. Then I shot up and over the embankment and found myself miraculously and mercifully back on track. The two Jesuses came zipping in from either side of the death forest I had just navigated by sheer plot convenience. They immediately latched on to me again, grinning with those perfect, white, even teeth.

  Free Will Jesus smiled gently. “The important point here is that Meticulous Jesus chose for your baby to die. He says he didn’t want it, but he secretly did. This is the best of all possible worlds, he says.”

  Meticulous Jesus shook his head. “You say it the wrong way. The fact is, when something terrible happens—a cruel, unexpected divorce, for instance—you can say, ‘Jesus is in control, he knew this would happen, I can trust him.’ If you were the real Jesus,” he said, pointing at Free Will Jesus, “they could just say, ‘Jesus lets people do evil things to me.’ Nice.”

  Free Will Jesus snorted. “True, I allowed your baby to die. Meticulous Jesus chose for your baby to die.”

  “Do you claim responsibility for everything that happens in this world?” I asked Meticulous Jesus.

  “Not responsibility. But I did choose this world. In the end I will be maximally glorified by the events of this world, even those things that appear to work against my will.”

  “My child’s death glorifies you,” I said levelly.

  “Yes. In the end it will.”

  Suddenly, a giant brown bear came lumbering out of the woods. It scented us, turned, and hustled its ton of fur, fat, and muscle in our direction. “Is that bear chasing us?”

  Meticulous Jesus smiled. “Yes. He’s starving to death and is looking for something to eat. I arranged for him to scent you to help speed up your choice.”

  The snow was icy enough that the massive bear could slide toward us, and that’s precisely what he was doing, his thick arms spread wide and his lengthy black claws reaching for our tubes. His big black tongue lolled out and a warm cloud of bear exhalation floated over my head.

  “Are you insane?” I asked, kicking my feet along the ice in an effort to somehow get more speed so we could put some distance between us and the hungry bear carpet sliding along behind us.

  “Which Jesus would you rather have?” Meticulous Jesus yelled. “One that’s in control or one that’s going to give you a libertarian free choice right now?”

  “I DON’T KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS!” I shouted. The bear took a swipe at me again and his paw glanced off my inner tube. Fortunately it was just enough of a shove to send us a few feet out of the bear’s reach.

  “Libertarian free will,” Free Will Jesus said, “means that in any given situation you can choose to do anything you want, and that if you somehow were given that precise same decision again, you could make a different choice.”

  “On the other hand,” Meticulous Jesus continued, “I also believe in free will, but I believe that you choose what you most deeply want to do and that in the same situation you would always make the same choice no matter how many opportunities you are given.”

  The bear breath was hot on my neck.

  “So which way do you want to go?” asked Free Will Jesus. “Who are you going to trust when a voracious bear is trying to eat you?”

  The wind whipped through us and the bear growled behind us, scrabbling through the snow and snapping at Jesus’ scarf. I didn’t know what to do, and the only criterion I could think of was Which Jesus is least likely to get me eaten? Free Will Jesus might allow me to make a poor decision that would end with me getting eaten by a bear. On the other hand, Meticulous Jesus might be maximally glorified by a mouthful of steaming Mikalatos entrails hanging from a bear’s maw. I reached into my pocket and felt the Frog of Hate and a few coins. I pulled out a coin and held it up for them to see. “Let fate decide.” I flipped the coin into the air. “CALL IT!”

  “He has freely chosen to flip a coin!” Free Will Jesus shouted.

  “He most deeply wanted my meticulous control of all things to decide!” Meticulous Jesus yelled.

  The coin described a perfect, shining arc above us, sparkling in the sunlight. I reached up and it descended in slow motion to touch my outstretched fingers, bounce, and fly backward. I leaned for it and my inner tube tilted. The bear’s mouth opened wider still and slobber came gushing toward me, the coin, Jesus, and Jesus. As I fell off my tube and slid on my back toward the bear, Meticulous Jesus reached for me and fell off his tube as well. The bear bore down upon us and a mountain of muscle, hair, and teeth overshadowed me. Free Will Jesus snatched me up from the snow and pulled me across his lap. The bear grabbed hold of Meticulous Jesus by the thigh and immediately started to slow himself by digging his thick legs into the snow, which piled up around them.

  “METICULOUS JESUS!” I shouted as the bear trotted off into the woods, dragging Meticulous Jesus by the leg.

  He raised his chin so we could see his upside-down face. He grinned at us and gave us two thumbs up. “Don’t worry. I’ve got it all under control!” Then they disappeared into the trees.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Return of the Frog of Hate

  We didn’t have time to mourn Meticulous Jesus, because now Free Will Jesus and I were wedged onto one inner tube and our speed had doubled. Tiny figures in the distance rapidly became full-size people stumbling over one another, trying to get out of our way. I grabbed hold of Free Will Jesus’ neck and curled myself up tight. A crowd of people gathered at the bottom of the hill, pointing up toward where the bear had been. They had lined themselves up like ninepins.

  “Incoming!” I cried. But they didn’t move.

  “They are choosing to ignore us,” Free Will Jesus said. “Isn’t libertarian free will beautiful?” At that same moment we plowed through the crowd and they scattered through the air, jackets and hats and scarves and goggles and ski poles flinging up into the sky like a dozen real-life Charlie Browns, and landing in an explosive pattern of discarded clothing and human beings. A nimbus of snowbound bodies encircled us, and another few people piled on top of us.

  The inner tube gave the illusion of coming to a stop, but it was still creeping forward. It edged toward another incline, this one leading to the parking lot. I grunted for everyone to get off, but since my lungs were collapsed beneath the mountain of people on top of me, no one gave any indication of having heard me. We were picking up speed. Someone on top of the pile saw our impending doom and leaped to safety. I heard the rumbling of a large truck and tried to lift my head to see better. A snowplow was lumbering directly into our path.

  “We’re all going to die,” I shouted, but it came out as a squeak.

  “Insightful and true.” As Free Will Jesus said this, we hit the front of the snowplow, scraping all the strangers off my body just as our inner tube finally protested all the violence done to it and popped with a bang and a sigh. We continued our forward motion on Free Will Jesus’ rump, but I rolled to the side and slowly came to rest by bumping into a motorcycle at the far end of the parking lot. It was Motorcycle Guy and Pete, both of them leaning against the motorcycle, looking unimpressed.

  “So that’s your choice,” Pete commented. Free Will Jesus lay splayed out in the center of the parking lot, his hair in a haphazard halo around him, snow and mud spattered across his face and chest.

  “I guess so. He must be the real Jesus, since he won the contest.”

  “Nah,” Motorcycle Guy said. “You wanted him to win, that’s all. I had hoped you might come down the mountain alone.”

  Free Will Jesus—my Imaginary Jesus—stood up and limped over to us, smiling broadly. “Quite a ride,” he said, “but here we are, together again.” He helped me to my feet. “You had me worried when that bear came out of the woods.” He laughed. “And when Meticulous Provide
nce Jesus kicked Can’t-See-the-Future-Because-It’s-Unknowable Jesus over the side of the cliff . . . ha-ha . . . Hilarious!”

  I raised an eyebrow and considered Free Will/Imaginary Jesus carefully. “You haven’t really given a compelling answer about our miscarriage.”

  “Yes, I have,” he said indignantly. “The free actions of moral agents—that’s humans—cause bad things to happen. Sometimes I intervene, and sometimes I don’t, because if I always intervened, then you wouldn’t have free choice.”

  “So you chose not to intervene, for instance, during the slaughter of the Armenians by the Ottoman Empire, even though many Armenians were Christians? You chose not to interfere when the Nazis killed the Jews?”

  “I interfered here and there, but I didn’t change the overall shape of things, no.”

  “You have an enormous capacity for human suffering,” I said.

  “And you whine a lot about suffering. Oh, it’s so sad. I can’t find a parking space. Boo hoo, I wrecked my car, which costs more than most people in the world make in their lifetimes.”

  “So those are my three choices,” I said flatly. Up the slope I could see Can’t-See-the-Future-Because-It’s-Unknowable Jesus being skied away on a stretcher, and it appeared that Meticulous Jesus was being dragged toward us by the bear. I wondered if I would be better off with one of them. I wondered why none of their answers satisfied me.

  “Those are the choices you’ve come up with,” Pete answered. “Some of them are more theologically solid than others, but the only person who can answer this definitively is God himself. Why are you wasting your time like this? Why don’t you ask the real Jesus?”

  “I did ask him, Pete, you know that. But he never answered. I guess that’s why I invented this guy.”

  Imaginary Jesus unzipped his snow clothes and stepped out, now in his familiar robe and sandals. He shook his hair out and combed it back with his fingers, then cracked his neck and stretched his arms. “Matt, you designed me to represent Jesus to you. I know now that I’m not real. And even though you’re outgrowing me, you made me enough like the real Jesus that I want what’s best for you.” He dropped his head and rubbed his hands together, his scars white against the snow. “I think it’s time for you to let me go.”

  “What?” I looked to Motorcycle Guy or Pete for help, but they turned their heads away. I stared at Imaginary Jesus, dumbfounded. I had that feeling in the pit of my stomach when you say “I love you” to your girlfriend and she replies, “We need to talk.” I wanted to say, “You’re breaking up with me?”

  “You say you want to get rid of me, but every time you send me away you call me back. The first problem you face, the first time you pray and don’t get an immediate answer, you call me back, your own extrapolated answers to your own questions. You’re praying to yourself, Matt. Even an imaginary Jesus doesn’t like to see that.”

  I clenched my teeth and glared at him. I didn’t like his implication that I was the problem. I had tried to get rid of him, after all. On the other hand, when I couldn’t help Pete’s sick mother-in-law, the first thing I had done was ask him to come and bring me some medicine.

  “I don’t know how to stop calling you up,” I said. “I don’t want to stop calling you.”

  “The problem is that you honestly like me. You can compare me to the Jesus in the Bible and see that I’m not real. You can compare me to your own experience of the real Jesus and see that I’m a fake. Your own friends point out my inconsistencies. Logic pokes holes in my reality. But time after time, you keep returning to me because deep down you prefer me to the real thing.”

  I nodded. It actually made sense. The real Jesus was frightening sometimes, and he said things I didn’t like. He required sacrifice. He scared me by doing things I didn’t believe he could. He was a better person than me. I preferred my fake Jesus.

  “Remember that time in high school,” I said, “when you told me I should start dating Jenny Smith because you said she was hot, and then when she wanted me to sit with her at lunch every day you pointed out that Cheryl Jones was way prettier, so I told Jenny, ‘I prayed about it and God doesn’t want me to be with you anymore’ and then I started going out with Cheryl?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That was fun.”

  “For you, I guess.”

  “Remember that time in college when I hadn’t studied for biology and you told me it would be okay to cheat because you had created biology and if I ever had questions about it in the future, I could just pray and you would tell me?”

  “Yup.”

  “Do you remember when I saw those homeless people and you told me I could ignore them because they were dirty smelly bums?”

  “Sure do.”

  “We’ve had some good times,” I said, and it was true. I could have listed a hundred other exploits together. He had taught me that I didn’t have to tithe when my credit card debt got to be too high and had encouraged me to pick apart my pastor’s sermons and criticize my leaders because I was a “good American.” He showed me how to find out things that weren’t my business by saying, “Is there something I can pray for?” and assured me that I was just like everyone else when I hardly prayed at all. And there were those little unacknowledged moments I could savor when someone I disliked revealed a flaw or inconsistency, and Imaginary Jesus and I could sit back together and talk about how much better I was than them.

  “Great times,” he said.

  “I don’t want you to go away.”

  “I know.”

  “But at the same time you’re not who I really want. I want the real Jesus. I want the startling, bizarre, amazing relationship with the God who created the whole universe, the one who heals my wife’s hands in the dark, the one who loves me even though I’m a screwup, the one who sends apostles and talking donkeys and strangers on motorcycles to bring me back to him.”

  Jesus grabbed my shoulders. “He’s not me,” he said. “I’m just you. You’re a lonely man who talks to himself in the dark.”

  “How do I get rid of you, then? How do I send you away if deep down I don’t want to get rid of you?”

  Imaginary Jesus shook me gently. “I think you know the answer to that.”

  “I have to stop loving you and wait patiently for the real Jesus.”

  “He’s not a lapdog. He doesn’t come anytime you whistle. But he never leaves you, either. He’s with you right now, Matt.”

  “I’m afraid,” I said. I put my hands in my pockets and felt the Frog of Hate there. I pulled it out. His spots shone in the white sunlight. I knew what I had to do. This symbol of deepest annoyance and pure, undistilled hate was the answer. “Would you like to see this?” I asked.

  “What is it?” Imaginary Jesus asked, and he put out his hand. I set the frog in it, and he turned it over, looking at the simple Magic Marker inscription of HATE. “Is this . . . the Frog of Hate?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “I always wanted the best for you,” he murmured sadly.

  “I hate you,” I said, mustering as much conviction as I could. “I never want to see you again.” He just stood there and said nothing, the Frog of Hate in his hand. I told Motorcycle Guy to get on the motorcycle and I climbed on behind him. I nodded at Pete as we pulled out of the parking lot, and when I turned to look over my shoulder, I could see Jesus standing there, contemplating the frog. A dark cloud had rolled in, and the first plump snowflakes began to fall. I saw the snow sticking to his hair, his eyelashes, his robe. And he didn’t move, didn’t raise his hand in farewell. He just gazed at that frog like it was a crystal ball, like it had answers, like it could take him somewhere safe and warm, a place where he wouldn’t face the betrayal of his own creator.

  I put my face against Motorcycle Guy’s back and watched the snow and trees and road and everything I had ever known going past us. A deep pain crawled inside of me, a certainty that the world was broken like so much expensive pottery and that the answers I knew to explain why God c
ould stand there and watch it were neither significant nor sufficient. I asked God why he wasn’t answering me, but there was only silence. A melancholy sadness rode alongside us.

  By the time we got off the mountain, I was shaking from the cold. Motorcycle Guy shouted back, “We’ll stop at Multnomah Falls Lodge and get you something hot to drink.” I tried to answer but could only shiver. The world was a cold, dark place. I didn’t see any reason why I shouldn’t feel cold and dark myself.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  A Burning in the Bosom

  Two months passed with no sign of Imaginary Jesus. I hadn’t seen Pete since the parking lot on the mountain. I hadn’t seen talking animals of any sort, let alone my friend Daisy. I had driven through town once looking for Sandy, but I couldn’t remember exactly where she lived, so I settled into life with my wife and daughters again. I waited with skeptical patience for Jesus to show himself. I had begun to doubt that he would. I worked, I read books, I watched television, I hung out with my family, I planned elaborate traps for Houdini Dog.

  Then the doorbell rang. As always, my girls scampered from their various hidey-holes around the house and looked out the window to shout out what visitor might await us.

  “It’s two guys!” Zoey called.

  “In suits!” Allie added.

  I flung the door open to see two young men in black suits. They were, perhaps, twenty years old. They looked like a young Laurel and Hardy. One was skinny and tall, and the other was wide and taller, with dark hair combed forward on his head. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m Elder Hardy,” the wide one said. “And this is Elder Laurel. We’re here in the neighborhood helping people find the real Jesus.” What a coincidence, I thought. I’m here in the neighborhood hoping to find him. “We’re from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” They even had nameplates showing that their names were, indeed, Laurel and Hardy.