Book of Jim: Agnostic Parables and Dick Jokes From Lucifer's Paradise (10 page)

Jim sat down next to her.  He was unsure about their relationship, for she was both the devil who had blown him and the angel who had harangued the Christian elite.  He said, “It’s the ones that aren’t fighting that you should be worried about.  They’re itching to go to hell.”  But it was a
feeble
joke, and it fell upon the blasted ground and died.

“Would I lie to you, Jim?” she said.

“I don’t know.”

“If I did, would you be angry?  If the lie gave you
paradise
, if it gave you everything you ever dreamed of, would you still be angry?”

“I guess so.”

“Why?”

“I mean, things are either real or they aren’t.  You want things to be real.”

There was some silence.  Jim watched the light play upon the angel and the shade upon the devil.  He found in his pocket the card she had given him when they first met.  He stared at the address, 1 Truth Road.  Then he said,

“You know what.  To hell with the Truth.  It can wait.  I’m gonna go find Jesus.”

She laughed.  The light made a diagonal cut through her face, and there was sadness in the angel and fury in the devil.  She laughed in the middle.

“I
wouldn’t
lie to you, Jim,” she said.  “Not because I wouldn’t lie, but because the lie wouldn’t work.  You’re a man who can’t be lied to.”  She gave him a folded and tattered paper that was yellow with age.

He unfolded a map of
paradise
.  It was marked with triangle trees and up-arrow mountains, poofy clouds and asterisk cities.  There were also dotted-line highways and snaky rivers.  And left of center there was scrawled an X with the caption,
Christ be here
.

X

1

Now Jim came to the place where the X was Jesus.  It was a lake.  He rented a canoe and rowed about on the
surface
of the lake, and he looked about on the
surface
, but he couldn’t find Jesus.  There were many trees and rocks and there was a great deal of sky, but there weren’t any ripples in the water.

Then he came to where the lake became narrow.  It twisted through roots and shallows and opened up into an austere cove.  The water looked like a block of metal that reflected the sky.  In the middle of it a small man fished from a wooden raft.

Jim paddled up to him.  “Uh, Mr. Christ?”

The man didn’t move.  He sat upon the wooden raft with the wooden pole.  He looked into the water.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Christ,” Jim said.  “I know you’re retired.  And I really don’t believe in you.  Or at you.  On you.  However that works.  I came out here and I’m bothering you because there’s a lot of people that
do
believe, and they’re pretty mixed up about it.  Like, they’re blowing
paradise
to hell because of some things you said once.  I’ve heard it was mostly nice things, and I don’t really get it, but I thought maybe you could, I don’t know, give them the business.  Set them straight.  Or something.”

The man said, “I’ve been fishing this spot for three hundred years.  Three hundred years, and I haven’t caught a single fish.”

“That sucks.”

“If a man casts his pole into a pond that has no fish, does he deserve to eat?”

Jim thought, Man, not this shit again.  He said, “I’ll be completely honest with you, Mr. Christ.  I don’t care.  Questions like that have been getting me shot out of cannons and sucked into black holes.  I’m done with them.  I mean, your followers are ripping
paradise
apart, and you’re out here fishing.”

“Josh.”

“What?”

“My name.”

“Well, alright Josh, I’m Jim.”

“I’m glad to meet you, Jim.  But the politics of
paradise
no longer interest me.”

“The fuck they don’t!”  Then Jim realized he just yelled fuck at Jesus, who was Josh, and he pulled back a little.  “I’m sorry.  Maybe that wasn’t called for.  But you’re the guy at the center of the whole thing.  They’re all fighting for different versions of
you.
”

“No they aren’t.”

“Yes they are.”

“Not really.”

“Goddammit they are!  Sorry.”

Josh pulled up his wooden pole and the hook and the lure came out of the water.  He opened his tackle box, changed the lure, and cast off again.

He said, “They’d rather die for the things they can’t see, than live with the ones they can.  One look at me and they’ll say, Oh well that’s not really
him
, and they’ll go right on dying.”

“That’s the problem.  Nobody’s dying,” Jim said.  “And isn’t that why
you
died?”

Josh laughed at this.  It was a deep laugh that came from his gut.  “You know, I tried doing it for a while,” he said.  “Playing the savior.  There was this one time, I went to some Pope or another, just to talk.  I don’t remember why.  And he believed who I was, or at least who I
had been
.  And suddenly, in the middle of our conversation, he looked at me and said, Listen buddy, all I need to know is, are you a Catholic?  When I said no, he had me thrown into a sack and they buried me under the Stupid Fucking Mountain.  It took me a decade to crawl out.”

“Hey,” said Jim.  “I climbed that mountain.”

“Everyone climbs the Stupid Fucking Mountain.”

“Well, I climbed it too.”

“The point is, none of it has anything to do with me.  So I’m done with it.  And I told her that those firmaments were a bad idea, but she was desperate.  I’m curious, what finally brought them down?”

“It’s not important,” Jim said.  “They’re down and nobody is special anymore and they’re pissed off about it.  I came here to get you to talk to them, but evidently it’s hopeless.”

They stared together at the place where the fishing line met the metal block of water.  Jim expected the line to jerk at any moment, and for Josh to finally catch his fish.  But though they stared for a long time, nothing broke the
surface
.

And Josh said, “What did you do in life?”

“What do you mean?” said Jim.

“What work did you do?  How did you eat?”

“Well, I just worked, really.  Welding was good money.  I did some roofing and drywalling.  Whatever I could find.”

“We are not so different.  I also just worked.  Mending ploughs, building houses.  I even did some roofing.”  Josh looked Jim in the eye for the first time.  “Would you give another man the road because he had clean hands?  Would you accept his whip when you didn’t give it fast enough?”

“No,” Jim said.  “I’d shove that whip right up his ass.”

“Well, we had hammers and empty stomachs, and the Romans had armor and feasts.  They were chosen by many colorful gods and we were slaves to a dark one.  So one day, after three Roman soldiers raped and killed a friend of mine, I stood on a crate and said, I am a son of God.

“Between the Aramaic of the people, and the Hebrew of the Scholars, and the Greek of Romans, the
a
became a
the.
  Articles don’t translate so well.  I became
the
son of God, and a few years later the fuckers nailed me to a cross.”

It was Jim’s turn to laugh, a deep laugh that came from the gut.

“I can’t help you,” Josh said.

“Seriously though, you’ve got to give me something.  I came a long way.”

“Work.”

“Huh?”

“You said you were a roofer.  The firmament is a roof.”

“There’s a war in
paradise
because the devil lied, and now that the lie is broken the advice of Jesus Christ is that I
board it up
?”

“My name is Josh.”

So Jim took his leave of the small man on the wooden raft.  When he reached the edge of the cove, the man called out some parting words:

“Jim!  Before you cast off, make sure there’s fish!”

2

With a bag full of nails, a good hammer, and planks of wood donated by the Presbyterian Church of Canada, Jim went to work.  He started where the crack in the firmament met the ground and he worked his way up.  And though he doubted that the advice of Jesus who was Josh had been sincere, it felt good to hammer in the nails.  It felt good to
work
.

And he worked for a long time.  Days and then weeks and then years came to pass.  He went through thousands of boards and millions of nails.  He didn’t eat and he didn’t sleep.  He didn’t look up because it discouraged him, and he didn’t look down because it frightened him.  He looked at his hands and at the place where the hammer met the nail.

But then one day the hammer broke and Jim looked around.  He was a mile high over the shredded fields of war.  His labor trailed behind him as a wooden rainbow.  Then he put his eyes forward and beheld that he had the whole sky to go.

“I don’t think this is gonna work,” he said.

Now a friendly and wise old face popped in through the crack in the firmament.  “Jim!” it said.  “You goddamn crazy hillbilly!  You can’t fix the sky with wood!”

“Einstein.  Well, your dice didn’t work for shit, either,” Jim said.

Einstein pulled himself up and mounted the firmament like a horse.  “I’ll make it up to you,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“This breach is distorting the
antiverse
as well.  Since it occurred my findings have been entirely anomalous.  But I think I’ve found a way to patch it.”

“Alright.”

“Do you remember what I said about philosophy, Jim?  The thoughts that can’t produce phenomena and the hyper-expansion of
paradise
?  It turns out that all thought, phenomenally charged or not, travels through the vacuum at exactly the speed of light.  I have observed in the antiverse for the first time the velocity of philosophy, and against all intuition the non-phenomenal traverses the plane at the same speed as the phenomenal.  The difference is, the non-phenomenal – philosophy – is constantly changing direction, with such frequency and redundancy that it never gets to where it is going.  All of this churning and digressing eventually feeds back on itself, and the resulting energy is proportional to the square of the value of the original asininity.  And though each individual asininity is very small, the cumulative effect is what we observe as the hyper-expansion of the phenomenal sphere.  I have discovered the Paradisial Constant!”

Jim scratched his head.  “Didn’t we go over this before?”

“And here is the homerun kicker.”  Einstein spurred the firmament with the heel of his boot.  “The physical reason that philosophy cannot produce phenomena, is that non-phenomenal thoughts propagate entirely on waves.  Without the particle-wave duality of phenomena, these philosophical waves cannot collapse.  They can form nothing of substance.”

Jim understood none of it.  He said, “Is there any fish back there?  Jesus said we should get some fish.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Fish?”

“Yeah.”

“Anyway, I’ve examined what’s left of this firmament, and I believe I understand its function.  Religious philosophy, like all philosophy, is based on several core asininities.  While these asininities cannot produce phenomena, the waves carry a certain frequency.  It is usually undetectable, but within a particular religion the same asininity is produced by a billion minds and the signal is strong enough to detect.  The firmament is fitted to receive these signals, identify the religion of origin, and then filter out whatever phenomena that religion opposes.  It’s simple and ingenious, and I may be able to improve upon it.”

But it did not sound so simple to Jim.  He said, “So what do you need me for?”

“I’m coming to that, hillbilly.”  Einstein pointed through the crack.  “Some of these religious waves have seeped into my
antiverse
.  Apparently, in the
antiverse
they can take form, and they’re goddamn crazier than you are.  I have succeeded in collecting them and I’ve gathered them into the gravity well of a dark star.  After I infuse them with super particles and charm quarks I intend to ignite the quasar and point the energy beam directly at this breach.  And that’s where you come in.”

“Of course it is.”

“I need a distraction, Jim.  I need you to distract every soul within the visual radius of the aberration.  If a single pair of eyes looks up it will be a disaster.”

“Well, wait a minute.  That all sounds kind of awesome.  Why can’t we watch?”

And Einstein took Jim by the shirt and shook him.  “Because!  You goddamn crazy hillbilly.  When your nut nuked a hole in the firmament you gave form to the madness of humankind!  If it is observed before reentering the phenomenal sphere, the wave function will collapse and the heavens will be enslaved by the Immoveable Asininity!”

“Are you telling me God is back there?”

“Not God.  The half-baked and ill-founded mutation dreamed up by the intellectually perverted.  Now, take this walkie-talkie and contact me when the distraction is in play.”

“You’re fucking with me.”

“Do you know the difference between science and religion, Jim?”

“Kind of.”

“Results!  Get me that distraction, and I’ll get us a firmament.”

3

So Jim sought out the one man he knew of that might supply such a distraction.  He found the man in a cabin surrounded by autumnal woods.  Jim explained to him that there was a crack in the firmament, and its mending required the stirring of the Christian fold.

“I won’t do it,” Hitler said.

“Oh come on.”

“It’s a bad idea.”

Hitler sat upon a lawn chair on the deck of the cabin.  The deck overlooked a creek that whispered through oak and pine.  On the table beside the chair there
was
a paperback novel, and the Fuhrer sipped on a pineapple pina colada.

“I golf now,” Hitler said.  “I tell jokes.  I read books.  I no longer incite calamity.”

“Just do it one more time.  That’s all I’m asking.  Just one more.”

“It’s too reckless.  You couldn’t even get Jesus to do it.”

“So you’re gonna bitch out just cause that’s what Jesus did?”

“I am
not
a bitch.”  Hitler sipped on his pineapple pina colada.  He looked out upon the autumnal woods.  “Though I must admit, all of this relaxing can get very tiresome.  Sometimes I wonder if a
little bit
of calamity might do me some good.”

“That’s what I’m talking about.”

“So all I have to do is distract them?  I don’t have to holocaust anybody?”