by T E. D Klein
The average Jizzmo fan was all of twelve, but this one sounded older. At any rate, he still lived with his mother, and apparently he cared enough about her to erect some kind of scarecrow on the roof, a scarecrow built to Nadelman's design. "It will sure as Hell scare the Bejeesus out of those little pests . . . "Nadelman remembered how, back in Brooklyn, he'd had to keep scaring away the pigeons that would try to roost on the ledge of the window by the baby's bed. lest his son get one of those pigeon-shit diseases Rhoda was always reading about in the Times. Out in Long Beach it was probably seagulls.
"Daddy?" Michael trotted into the kitchen, where Nadelman had been reading the mail. Htfwas now a few months short of eight and seldom content just to walk anymore. "See"' Look what I did.''
Nadelman put down the letter and looked at what his son was holding out. It was an ordinary wooden pencil with a thin wire staple pro-truding from the middle, like a tiny croquet wicket. "And what might that be?"
"It's a pencil with a handle, so you can carry it with vou. I invented it."
"Ah-hah. And very useful, too!" He gave the boy a kiss on his curly hair, remembering how Huntoon had alluded to "a device Ipersonaly invented." Perhaps all men were inventors; hadn't he himself invented a god? Nadelman had no clear mental image of Huntoon, but for a moment he pictured him as a shabbier, more distant version of his son, wonder-struck with the awesome possibilities of bending things, fastening things, wiring together the myriad things of this world.
"I certainly hope you're going to write the child back," said Rhoda at dinner that night.
"Well, I'm not sure that's such a good idea," Nadelman said carefully. "Better not to start with him. Let him think I'm not the Nadelman he wants."
"Aww ..." Rhoda made a concerned tace, the kind that, when she'd made it years ago, at bag ladies and bums, had forced him to realize that she was more than just a sexpot. In some ways he still preferred the sexpot. "Honey, that isn't very nice," she said. "I'll bet it's the first fan letter you've ever gotten."
"And probably the last," said Nadelman, "unless I decide to turn rock star."
"Well, I just think you owe him a reply." "Yes, yes, I guess so," he said, to avert the chance of any more concerned faces, but swayed as well by the image of a forlorn teenaged version of his son waiting somewhere out in Long Beach for a friendly word.
He carried the boy's letter with him to the office the next day and showed it, chuckling but secretly proud, to two of his colleagues. Then he typed a short reply-one that, by raising no questions, would discourage further communication.
Dear Mr. Huntoon:
Many thanks for your kind letter. It's good to know there's someone out there who enjoys my work. No, I'm sorry to say I don't know Mr. Roskone or any other members of the band. I don't as a rule follow rock music. As for the question of what sort of face to give your creation, I'm afraid I may have been a bit imprac-tical in having my hero carve "a leprous-featured visage, hewn from solid rock." Probably the easiest way to make an effective face for the figure would be to buy a rubber Halloween mask and simply put it over one of those melons of yours. Good luck, and hope it accomplishes its purpose! *not "licorice"
He dropped it in the OUT bin on his desk and turned, pleased with his efficiency, to other work-a sheaf of glossy product specs for a new frozen dessert with which he had to familiarize himself for tomorrow's meeting, some copy to approve ("/ cannot tell a lie. The flavor of Holiday Farm Cherry Treets comes right off the Cherry Tree'), a phone call to his broker. Midway through the call, while the broker, never more than a voice on the phone, left to verify the day's prices, a nagging thought assailed Nadelman-Z)o«'f start with these people!-but he was soon distracted by the man's return and a litany of figures that could spell the difference between a vacation in Dubrovnik or one in Vermont. When he thought of the letter again, his OUT bin had already been emptied.
There was no one else at the office he could think of to show Huntoon's letter, no one else who'd be anything but contemptuous. Fan letters from semiliterates were, at best, a dubious honor, and though most of his associates were aware that an old college poem of Nadelman's had lately been turned into a rock song, he wasn't sure it was politically wise to remind them of it. They were all failed writers here, after all, and not inclined to look kindly on a fellow employee who dabbled, however humbly, in the arts.
He slipped Huntoon's letter into his shirt pocket, and that night, after dinner, while his wife and son were in the living room silently absorbed in All Creatures Great and Small, he swung open the hall closet and from its depths, smelling of galoshes and ice skates, dragged the battered suitcase that contained all that was left of his college work. There seemed no more appropriate place to file Huntoon's let-ter. It would never have occurred to him to throw it away; someday it might provide solace, like an old love letter.
The suitcase, inherited from Rhoda's father, had been elegant once and probably expensive, but now the leather bore a zigzag of scrat-ches, as from a mad scribbler, and the pair of brass clamps that held the two sides closed were stiff with age. As he pried them loose, the suitcase fell open like a book, and a cascade of papers spilled out onto the rug. At his feet he recognized the faded pastel covers of the col-lege literary magazine, several legal pads containing early attempts at composition, and a stack of ancient notebooks filled with lecture notes and doodles. Here, in fact, lying amid the pile, was the very issue of she Unicorn in which his poem had first appeared.
Seating himself cross-legged on the rug, he flipped through the magazine's yellowed pages, shaking his head at the thick instiiunonal-lo.jking type (how the crew in the Sheridan-Sussman art department would wince at stuff like that), the uneven leading and margins, the self-important revolutionary rhetoric, and the pretentious "Aesthetick Manifesto" (God, had they realiy spelled it with a "k"?) with which his friend Nicky had prefaced the issue ("We seek no wide audience for the expressions herein contained, but rather the informed understanding of a small band of like-minded amateurs of the writ-ten word . . . ."-Christ, could he ever blackmail Sondheim with this stuff now!). The issue's lead story was a thinly fictionalized sketch by some coed from Connecticut about losing her virginity. Nadelman recalled that both he and Nicky had had the hots for her; that intense, fragile quality of hers had had him drooling in those days, but today he'd probably find it exasperating. Strange, to think that she'd be forty now.
Ah, here was his opus-"Advent of the Prometheans: A Cantata." How in the world had he ever arrived at so pompous a title? He didn't even know what the hell it meant anymore, though he recalled labor-ing over the phrase for hours one night in his dorm room. The "Can-tata" part, at least, he dimly remembered; it was taken from some poem he'd had to read for one of his courses-"The Beggars' Can-tata," something like that. He suspected that his use of the term was technically, at least, incorrect, but no doubt in those days it had struck him as le mot juste.
The poem itself was not entirely pleasant to come back to after all these years; it hardly seemed his own work at all, but rather that of a naive, headstrong young son, tied to him by blood but something of an embarrassment to his old man. He knew that Jizzmo had deleted several portions of the poem from their musical version, but he'd never been interested enough to compare the two.
He scanned it now with some trepidation, wincing as his first glance discovered a typo in the opening section's title: "The Divine Impresonation." Jesus, no wonder he'd gone into advertising! There were ten such sections in all, each with its own lofty title preceded by a Roman numeral. How ambitious he'd been then. To think that he'd set out to bring down God!
Indeed, Part I read like a prosecutor's brief against the Lord: A god who stinks of carrion because Our blood He drinks and on our flesh He gnaws.
He'd had it both ways in those days: capitalizing the pronouns for mystical effect, yet-just for the /WssoH-lower-casing "god" throughout, like one who deliberately mispronounces an enemy's name.
God hadn't really been an
enemy, of course; it had mainly been those damned chapel windows every Sunday, with their saccharine visions of heaven. (He had long ago decided that anyone who could believe in such an afterlife deserved to be sent there forthwith.) His main interest in writing the poem, in fact, had been a simple and earnest desire to blaspheme. In his own adolescent way, Nadelman had been trying to live up to his name: he'd set out to needle God There didn't have to be a reason; young men liked to blaspheme, just as young boys liked to play at being good.
Ironically, for all the passion of his jeremiads, he'd been something of a skeptic even then. Far from actually believing in the cruel new "rival god" described later in the poem, he'd even had his doubts about the old one.
The Lord, in fact, had long since vanished from his life in the same manner as the three gods of his childhood-Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny. Even as a schoolboy, despite the rabbi's tedious sermons and the wonders described in his Hebrew texts, there'd seemed no reason to believe in this one god any more than in the others; all were merely amiable supernatural fictions designed to com-fort childish minds. Later, in high school, when he'd read Freud's "The Future of an Illusion," he had found it old hat.
He had moral doubts about the Lord, as well. He'd been raised not only on Santa Claus, but also on fairy tales, fables, and nursery stories; colorful fantasies in which goodness was invariably rewarded in the end, and evil punished As a child, he'd believed such things were true. He had also believed-thanks to his childhood picture books, the ones filled with fuzzy felt animals-that the only proper response to something furry was to reach out and pet it.
The world, as a result, had proved a bitter disappointment, punc-tuated here and there by nasty surprises. At age three he had reached out in the garden to pet the enticing yellow fur of a passing bumblebee, and had been rewarded with a wicked sting on the palm of his hand that left it swollen twice its size. At school he'd discovered that there were no heroes: that the weakest lived in terror of the strong, and that God seemed to favor the bullies.
Nor that he himself had much to complain of; save for the inevitable pains of growing up in this wor'd. his own life had always been comfortable enough. But the lives ofothers, the ones he saw depicted on the TV news and in the magazines, seemed overwhelmingly tragic.
It was hard to have faith in the justice of things when all around him people were dying in curious and terrible ways.
Sometimes, admittedly, the deaths of his fellow men had been easy to accept, merely demonstrating the good sense of the universe. As a boy, he'd heard about an overeager deer hunter who had stumbled over a root and had blown the top of his head off; the tale had merely confirmed the Tightness of things. Years later he would hear reports about revolutionaries of one stripe or another who blew themselves to bits while building homemade bombs; he found such stories quite cheering. The cosmos was just, after all.
By the time he'd reached high school, he'd discovered that, with a little intellectual effort, he could justify damned near anything-and it certainly helped stave off despair. Innocent people, it turned out, were ill no real danger; it was only the guilty who died. Did cigarette smokers cough their lives away? They'd clearly brought it on themselves. Did some alcoholic poet drink himself to death? It served him right. When a planeload of nuns went down over the Andes, he told himself that this was what happened to people who tried to jam their religion down other people's throats. Pious do-gooders!
With a few small logical contortions, you could take the game still further. Was a socialite found stabbed to death in her apartment? The empty-headed parasite, she deserved it. Was a lawyer mugged? We've got more than enough lawyers, thank you. Selfish bastards! Did a doctor-wreck his private plane? Think of all the money that jerk was making! Another OD'ed rock star? How trite! A father of twelve killed by a hit-and-run driver? The thoughtless asshole, who told him to produce all those children? A family in Utah slain by a tornado? Only schmucks lived out there anyhow.
Sometimes the game became difficult-but doggedly he kept right on playing, if only to preserve his peace of mind. Did old men and women suffer strokes? Maybe they should have exercised more. Were people dying right and left of heart attacks and cancer? Well, he'd make damned sure to watch what he ate.
Then one day, disconcertingly, he'd read about a young Colum-bia student killed by youths in the subway while going to the aid of a stranger. The guy had been the same age as Nadelman, from almost the same background, at the top of his class. They'd even had the same major.
Nadelman, at that point, gave up the game.
Not everyone would have, even then. A Job might have convinced himseif that all human beings were guilty, he as well as the rest; that all were living here on borrowed time; and that the Lord was therefore perfectly justified in killing anyone He damned well chose. But then, Nadelman had always regarded Job as a bit of a lunatic.
He himself had reached a somewhat more reasonable conclusion: rather than worshiping God as a divine and highly arbitrary execu-tioner, it made more sense to see the position as vacant. There was no one in control up there. The office was empty. Nobody home.
Or maybe (and here was the germ of his poem) there was simply another god in charge, deranged and malign, delighting in cruelty and mischief. How else to explain the things he read each day in the headlines in the Post?
Nadelman didn't read the paper itself, having learned how unreliable it was, but the headlines continued to entrance him: the couple in their nineties who had taken their own lives when a new landlord evicted them from their apartment, claiming he needed it for relatives (the law, and God, had done nothing); the high school honor student, returning from her after-school job, who'd been accidentally killed by a stray police bullet (the cop had been firing at a mugger, whom the Lord had helped to escape); the social worker who, on her way home from tutoring a blind man, had been murdered by a psycho with a meat cleaver (he was still at large); the little girl who'd died because her fundamentalist parents refused her the medicine that might have saved her life. (The parents had claimed religious freedom, and saw evidence of "divine justice" at work.)
Today, Nadelman knew, the morons who'd shelled out five hun-dred bucks for a couple of weekends at esr-there were several of them at the office, each creepier than the last-would probably assure him that we are all responsible for everything that happens to us, even tumors or cellulite deposits, even a loose brick tumbling onto our heads as we stroll down the sidewalk. But it had seemed much more satisfying to Nadelman, at that time, to blame it all on God-even one he didn't believe in.
The one low-level religious studies course he'd been pressured into taking at Union had failed to change his mind. (It had also given him his only D.) The God whose praises were sung in the Bible simply didn't seem to square with the reality Nadelman saw all around him. The fellow in the Bible could be cruel, vindictive, and jealous-a mean SOB, in fact, especially in the Old Testament-but at least He was, in some harsh, authoritarian way, a just God. Yet despite the pro-paganda dished out to the students each Sunday, Nadelman had seen evidence that another god was at the wheel-"a furtive god," the poem had said, "a greedy god":
We struggle for an answer, but no god is there -Just the deity of cancer, of anguish and despair.
He frowned now as he read over the verses. They seemed the merest doggerel, like lines from a bad translation. Back in those days he'd apparently thought it cool to stick "ravaged" on the same line as "ravished," and to put accents-grave over the last syllable of words like "punished," so they'd sound more poetic. And to use, heaven help him, words like "foam-fleck'd" and "slime-drench'd." (Had he really gone in for the apostrophes? He checked the magazine and winced. He had.) A lot of the poem, he knew, recorded nothing more meaningful than some youthful experiments with a rhyming dic-tionary. He remembered the dictionary itself, a bar mitzvah present from Aunt Lotte, along with an expensive leather notebook whose corner he saw now, peeking from the bottom of the pile of old paper.
Nadelman had had enough theology for one night. Getting to his feet, he stuffed the papers back into the suitcase, slipped Huntoon's letter inside, and snapped the bag closed. Shoving it to the back of the closet, he went into the living room to catch the end of Creatures. By bedtime the letter was forgotten.
On Thursday of the following week, however, the mail, like a sea forever demanding offerings, casting up new, unexpected objects in return, brought a second letcer from Huntoon. It was shorter than the first, but considerably more unnerving-in part, no doubt, because of the photograph.
Dear Mr. Nadelman,
Thank you for writing back to me so fast. Mama says shes going to frame your letter. Weve never had the autograph of an actual author before though I have shaken hands with Joe Elliott of Def Leppard on several occasions & have a signed photo in the dinette of Eddie Van Halen. The mask is a great idea & looks just fine. Itll scare the living shit out of those BravermansH! (They wont be so "Braverman" then-right?) I couldn't find anything that looked right at the 5 &' dime, its all Star Wars stuff & Gremlins these days, but I bought a big birds head sort of like a rooster head because of that line in the song about how the Creature "comes before cock crow" & I turned it inside out. It looks damn good that way. You can see it in the picture Mama took. I keep the thing on my roof where the sun can get at it & maybe the god will consent to give it life.
