Book of Jim: Agnostic Parables and Dick Jokes From Lucifer's Paradise (12 page)

“Does he have a name?”

“Nope!”

“How do we know he’s a he?”

“Science!”

And Jim beheld the fetus of his brother.  He tried to imagine where the arms and legs would have grown, and where the head would have taken shape.  He imagined eyes full of wonder and a mat of messy hair.

“Can I take him away from this place?  Like, if he had a home?”

“Sorry, Jim, but that’s impossible!  It’s against company policy to let copyrighted material walk out the door!”

“Copyrighted?”

“Copyrighted!”

“Walt Disney copyrighted my mother’s abortion.”  Neither a question nor a statement, it fell from Jim’s face.

“He’s an entrepreneur!  But you can chat with your brother any time you like!”

“I can talk to him?”

“Sure!  Here’s his Skype id!”

So Jim entered the Skype id of his aborted brother into his phone.  He thought for a long time about what to say.

4

Jim

Hi

01101010 01101111 01100101

Wat

Jim

We’ve never met before, but I’m your little brother.  We have the same mom.  I’m Jim.

01101010 01101111 01100101

dafuq?

Jim

Yeah, I know it’s pretty weird.  But it’s true.  I just found out about you a few hours ago.  Mom is a princess and my big brother is floating in a jar in the tallest tower of the Disney castle.  I would have visited sooner but I didn’t know you existed.  We’re brothers.

01101010
01101111
01100101

cool story bro

Jim

Do you like it here?  In the tower?  Is Mickey treating you alright?

01101010
01101111
01100101

I guess you could say they

( •_•)

( •_•)>⌐■-■

(⌐■_■)

fetus well

Jim

Oh, I get it.  Feed us well.  And it’s like a well of fetuses.  You know I’m not sure I believe Mickey about this consciousness thing.  I would think if you can make a pun you can be a person.

01101010
01101111
01100101

fag

Jim

What?!

01101010
01101111
01100101

FAG

Jim

All I’m saying is if you want me to I’ll punch Mickey in the nose and we can bust out of here and maybe get you some legs.  Get Einstein or Jesus to take a look at you, see if anything can be done.

01101010
01101111
01100101

3edgy5me

Jim

What the hell does that even mean?

01101010
01101111
01100101

u don’t even

Jim

Don’t even what?

01101010
01101111
01100101

bro

Jim

Are you fucking with me?  Are you alive?  Are you conscious?

01101010
01101111
01100101

nice try, socrates

Jim

I’m just trying to help my brother out.  Say something meaningful if you’re in there.

01101010
01101111
01100101

hi every1 im dead!!!!! shivers in jar I dont have a name but you can call me t3h PuNt3d EmBuRRiTo!!!!! lol i mexicant eat food!! thats why i came here, 2 meat ppl like me . . . im a tiny ball of goo (twisted 4 prenatal tho!!) i like 2 watch chefwars cuz they make SOOOOOO much food_ u always want what you cant have lol!!!  its my fav show =) i dont have many friends bcuz goos h8 food \o/  BOOOOO!!!!!  Boos 4 t3h goos h8in food!!  lol .. neways theres no scapin 4 me so plz dont give me false hopeses );

EmBuRRRRRRRRRiTo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! <----- me gettin twisted o.O  haha .. byebye

5

When Jim came out of the castle Cinderella was waiting for him.  She was the magical Cinderella now and her pink marshmallow dress filled the pumpkin carriage.  Jim climbed in and the white mares pulled them away.

“I thought you were entertaining a prince,” Jim said.

“Oh Jim!  He was such an adorable little thing!  He demanded to know why Aladdin didn’t just wish for happiness.  He said, maybe Aladdin would get Jasmine, maybe not, but at least he’d be happy about it, and he wouldn’t have to do all that dancing and singing.  I tried to explain to him, that’s just not how it works, that’s not how any of it works, but he wouldn’t have it.  Absolutely adorable!  Did you talk to your brother?”

Jim nodded.  “Yeah.  We had a, uh, conversation.”

“Isn’t he the sweetest thing you ever saw?  I wish I could just eat him up!”

“He called me a fag.”

She slapped his leg.  “That’s between brothers.  I don’t need to hear that sort of thing.  So tell me everything.  What did you two talk about?”

“I’m not sure.  I really have no idea what just happened.  I mean, you’ve talked to him before.  Do you think there’s a person in there?”

“He’s your big brother.  Isn’t that enough?”

“No.”

“It should be.”

“It isn’t.”

“Well what do you know about it?  You don’t know.  Nobody knows anything about anything.  You’re just like your father, always taking things so seriously.  Except you’re not really serious at all, are you?  Oh I don’t want to talk about your father, it makes me sad.  We are not talking about him.  Your brother, mommy’s little angel, is beautiful and he’s happy and Mickey Mouse is taking good care of him.  And that’s how it works.  That’s the way of the world.”

Her anger was
sudden
.  Jim waited for some moments to pass.  Then he said,

“Mom, I’m sorry.”

“He’s happy, Jim.”

“Yeah, of course he is.”

So Jim looked out the window.  The white mares clopped down a path through some trees and came beside a pond.  It was a lonely pond at twilight.  It was the kind of pond where a wandering hero might see something new in his reflection.  Jim wondered what he would see if he looked down into the water.  He wondered if he would see happiness there, or the same old confusion.

“I love you, Mom,” he said. 

“I love you too, Jim.  Don’t be angry with me.  I’d hate myself if you were angry with me.”

“He misses you.”  Jim kept his eyes on the pond, for he could
not
look upon his mother.  “He said he wishes you’d visit more often.”

“Oh, did he really say that?  I told you he was sweet.  There was never a sweeter child, Jim, in all the world.  He misses his mommy.  My baby misses me.”  She squeezed his fingers with her hand.  “Where would you like to go, Jim?  I can give you a ride, but the magic only lasts until midnight.”

6

Jim knocked at the door and the old man answered with beer in hand. 

“Well?” the old man said.

And Jim stood with shoulders squared.  “I’m here because I want to get drunk.”

The old man considered him
thoroughly
.  Then he opened the door for Jim to step inside.  He said, “I guess that calls for the good stuff.”

The backyard was cut to the same quarter-inch perfection and high rows of hedges made it private.  There was a vegetable garden and a wood shed, a pit for fires and a rusty old charcoal grill.  When the old man came out with a bottle of Irish whiskey and two tumblers, Jim was looking upon the weather.

“Does it ever rain here?” he said.

“On schedule.”  The old man sat down in the plastic chair next to Jim.  He poured the Irish whiskey into the two tumblers.  “Gonna be a thunder storm on the fifth.  Sounds like a real blower.  I suppose I’ll have to get all of this into the garage.  Might tape up the windows.  I’ll have to go down to Hank’s for a tarp for the garden.  That kind of rain, it just brutalizes your tomatoes.  If you’re around, I could always use an extra hand.”

Jim took the offered tumbler.  He tipped it in the old man’s direction.  “Thanks, Dad,” he said.

They drank.

They didn’t speak for a long time.  It was a comfortable silence.  The old man didn’t have any questions and Jim didn’t have any answers and they drank and they looked at the
quiet
.  They were three tumbles into the night when Jim said,

“I guess you could be happy here.”

“Happy?”  The old man peered into his empty glass.  “Happy isn’t anything I would know about.  Always sounded like a lot of bullshit to me.  There isn’t any suffering here, though, if that’s what you mean.  You don’t get punched in the gut for no damn reason.”

“Mom leaving wasn’t a punch?”

“She had her reasons.”

“Yeah, I guess she did.”

“You went to see her?”

Jim nodded.

“That’s good.”

“I think she’s happy.”

“Well of course she is.  She’s in
paradise
for Chrissake.”

They filled their tumblers and drank to
that
.  And two tumbles later they were hashing out economics, ethics, and a precise definition for fascism.  They were less than a miracle away from solving all three in a single tumble, but a remark was made and they were forced to arm-wrestle until dawn.  Jim passed out in the quarter-inch perfection, heavy under fading stars.

XII

1

“So.  Jim.  Why do you want to become an angel?”

“I think I’m pretty good with people,” Jim said.  “I’ve had to deal with various people types during my time here.  Scientists, novelists, world leaders, philosophers, actors.”  He counted these
upon
his fingers.  “If you look under recent job history there, I just helped the devil fix
paradise
.  We had to bring a lot of different people together and get them motivated towards a unified goal.  Like a, uh,
facilitator
.  I
facilitated
a big project.”

This was his first job interview in three hundred years.  And, like Hitler, he was a little rusty.  The executive woman who sat on the other side of the desk wore thin lips and thick glasses.  She looked at him over the rims.

“A
facilitator
?” she said.

“Yeah.  You know, a bringer-together.  I brought all those people types together and we patched the hole in the firmament.  Everyone went away happy.”

“Do you even know what angels do, Jim?”

“Well, sure I do.”

“What do angels do, Jim?”

The executive woman never blinked.  In her office there was only the desk and a bookshelf.  And the bookshelf had no books, for it was filled with potted cactuses.  A clock without numbers ticked on the wall.

Jim cleared his throat.  “They roll out the welcome mat,” he said.  “They keep the peace.  Sometimes, anyway.  When it suits them.  The main thing about being an angel seems to be people.  They’re really good with people and they can bring people together.  They’re
facilitators
.”

“That’s it?  They keep the peace?  They
facilitate
?”

“Well, I’ve met a few that just seem to party and get high all the time.  Heh.”

But the executive woman was
not
amused.  She removed her glasses and set them on the desk.  She spoke with restraint through her teeth.

“Angels do not get high.”  She flipped through his file.  “I’ve been screening applicants for a long time, Jim, and you’re the worst I’ve ever seen.  By far.  You’re reckless.  You’re aimless.  Your libido is a tornado.  The devil sought your
facilitation
because you set off a nuclear chain reaction in your girlfriend’s
vagina
and started a religious war.”

She used the word
vagina
like an axe.  The blade hung in the air and over Jim’s head.  His body tensed and he waited for the blade to fall.

“And according to my records, after you nuked your girlfriend’s
vagina
you just
left her there
.  You haven’t even called her back.  Not even a text.  Does that sort of behavior sound angelic to you?”

Jim gulped.  “Cherry’s cool,” he said.

“The only reason I accepted to see you today was morbid curiosity.  I asked myself, what sort of man spends the first three hundred years of eternity playing with his dick, and then applies to be an angel?  What sort of ego?  Does he really think he can walk into my office with nothing but a cock and a smile, and walk out with wings?”

Jim smiled.  The executive woman slapped him through the face. 

“Hey!”

“You’re a pig.”

“A pig in
paradise
.”

She slapped him through the face.

“Dammit!  Why are you hitting me?”

“Why are you here, Jim?  Why have you come into my office and applied to be an angel?”

“I don’t know.  Maybe I’m just sick of wandering around.  It would be nice to be useful, you know?  I’ve never been useful.  I never had a purpose before.  When I was alive I wandered around and everything sucked, and now that I’m dead I wander around and everything is awesome – but I’m still just wandering around.  Being an angel, I figure it’s worth a shot.  Maybe I can be shiny and useful, too.”

These words surprised Jim as much as they surprised the executive woman.  She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms and beheld him.  Jim beheld her back while he rubbed his cheek.

“Vulnerability suits you,” she said. 

So Jim said, “Thanks.”

“But it doesn’t wash away three hundred years of cocking around.”

“Maybe not.”

She walked to the bookshelf.  After she sized Jim up, she chose from the shelf a cactus that was
six inches
tall and fairly thick.  It wobbled when she set it upon the desk.

“Do you know what fascinates me about the cactus?” she said.

Jim shook his head.

“It’s strong.  It’s resilient.  It will quietly endure almost any environment, and stand resolute in the face of every adversity.  I haven’t fed this one in months and still it survives.”  She pricked her finger on one of its needles and showed Jim the blood.  “And of course, it won’t be tamed.  Resilient, violent, and useless.”

Then she took up a pair of scissors from her desk drawer.  With the scissors she cut the cactus in half.  Jim gulped again.

“Useless until you break it,” she said.  “Only then do you discover its utility.”  She lifted the cactus nub over her tongue, and from the nub there dribbled a pulpy white goo.  The pulpy white goo dribbled into her mouth.  It also dribbled down her chin.  What dribbled down her chin she pushed back into her mouth, and then she swallowed.

Jim said, “I, uh, I want to be useful.  But that’s not how mine works.”

The executive woman took out a pencil and some paper from the desk drawer.  She wrote something on the paper and gave the paper to Jim.

“Before you take the entrance exam to become an angel, you’ll have to take a course on modern women issues.  Go to that address.  They’ll set you up.”

And upon the paper was written, Nil Cunt Court – Sylvia Plath’s Bottomless Pit of Feminist Revenge.

2

At the end of a middle class cul-de-sac Jim found a hole in the ground.  It was large enough to swallow a house, and when he peered over the edge he couldn’t see the bottom.  He plugged his nose and jumped in.

He fell for a long time.  Then he fell for a while longer.  The circle of middle class light shrank above the gravity of the hole until darkness came.  He splashed down into something warm and sticky.

And it
was
a pool.  The pool was surrounded by high walls and lit by torches.  The liquid had the texture of mucus and the smell of warm metal.  Jim treaded.

“Why have you disturbed the sacred pool?”  It was a woman’s voice, soft but amplified by the acoustics of the cavern.  Jim beheld a pale woman standing upon the wall.

“I’m here to take the modern woman course,” he said.

“For what reason?”

“I applied to be an angel.  They said I had to come here first.”

“What do you know of the modern woman?”

“She’s new?”

“Lesson one: The modern woman of
paradise
does not bleed.  Her menstrual cycle is tuned to a secret frequency, transmitted over radio waves, and the fluids are collected in this pool.”

Now Jim saw the outlet valves upon the walls.  They spurted out more of the viscous fluid at irregular intervals.  He thought, I got some in my mouth.

“There is only one way up,” the pale woman said.  She lifted her skirt and her bush rolled down the side of the wall like a banner.  It was a bush of
centuries
.

Jim swam over to it, grabbed a fistful of the gnarled hair, pulled himself out of the menstrual goop.  His hands were slick with the blood-mucus and the bush was unwashed and greasy.  Lint and crumbs and flakes fell from the bush, to pepper the pool below.

In my mouth, he thought again.

When at last he pulled himself over the top of the wall, he was sticky with menstrual blood and fuzzy with the pale woman’s bush lint.  He
was
tarred and feathered. 

He said, “Do all angles get their wings this way?”

“Some,” the pale woman said.  She jerked her leg and the bush rolled back up between her legs.  She took down a torch from the wall.  “Follow me.”

3

The tunnels were dark and labyrinthine.  The only light came from the pale woman’s torch.

“Are you Sylvia Plath?” Jim said.

“No,” the pale woman said.

“Where are we going?”

“You will see.”

“Will there be a shower?”

“Perhaps.”

They turned and turned again.  Some turns they didn’t take.  They went lower and lower.  Jim was uncomfortable in the sticky silence, but he could summon no cues to conversation.  Then, after many turns, he said,

“So, what’s with the zero?  In the address. 
Nil Cunt Court
, it’s a funny address.  I’d have thought you’d be on something like, Women Are Awesome Avenue.  But you’re at the court of zero cunts.  It’s a little weird.”

“We are
nil
because all other numbers are either phallic or lesbian,” the pale woman said.  She walked like a ghost and spoke sharply.  “Zero is a woman’s only refuge from the chauvinist math of men.”

Jim pictured the numbers in his head: 1234567890.  The one was a
forthright
phallus, and so was the seven.  But the others were mysterious to him.

“Is the two phallic or lesbian?”

“The two is an inverted ballsack and phallus,” she said.

“Huh.  And three?”

“Just balls.”

“Four?”

“Three phalluses.”

“A four is three dicks?”

“Yes.”

“What’s five?”

“Regular ballsack and phallus.”

Jim mulled it over.  The pale woman walked.

“So eight’s the lesbian,” he said.  “What about six and nine?”

“You know very well what six and nine are doing.”

“Well, there you go.  That’s mutual.  They’re both having fun.”

“Please.  Six is obviously the woman, and nine the man.  Six is worth less and is upturned and submissive.  She is a gagged bitch hanging from her ankles and she is ever at the mercy of the rapist nine.”

And as the pale woman led him deeper into the feminist cavern, Jim quietly exercised his brain with the strange new arithmetic.  He thought, A hard dick plus a pussy
is
a hard dick, but a hard dick
times
a pussy is a
pussy
.  And a hard dick squared is itself.  But two hard dicks added together is an inverted ballsack and limp dick, which if squared becomes three dicks.  And three dicks squared is one hard dick and a gagged bitch.

“Huh,” he said.  “The square root of a rapist is balls.”

“And every vagina increases a number’s value by an order of magnitude,” the pale woman said.  “At least men got that much right.”

Jim thought, If that’s true for pussies it’s probably true for balls and lesbians and rapists too.  And magnitudes come in multiples of hard-dick-and-pussy, together.  He kept his reservations to himself and said,

“I had no idea that feminists had to learn math all over again.”

Then they came to a round door.  The pale woman opened it and Jim went through.

4

These are the courses that Jim took in the caverns of the Bottomless Pit of Feminist Revenge:  Entrenched Symbolism as a Justified Means of the Objectification of All Women Everywhere, The Importance of Being Sensitive but not
too
Sensitive because that’s Patronizing you Entitled Sonofabitch, Emotional Awareness and Dating the Empowered Woman, Pillow Talk 101, and Pillow Talk 201.  He tested out of Feminist Mathematics.

And the final course was Natural Beauty and the Institutional Shaming of the Female Form.  It was taught by a horrible fat woman who drooled and was also ugly.  Jim sat at a kindergarten desk and looked at her with bloodshot eyes.

Now the horrible fat woman held up two pictures.  In one picture there was a hot chick, and in the other there was a fat chick.  And the horrible fat woman said, “Which of these do you prefer?”

“The hot chick,” Jim said.

The horrible fat woman
whapped
his knuckles with a phallus.  It
was
a ruler, but according to the Entrenched Symbolism course book it was also a phallus.  The horrible fat woman said, “The correct answer is, I do not have enough information.”

So Jim pointed to the picture of the fat chick.  “That’s a lot of information.”

Whap!

“Beauty is a totality,” she said.  “And that totality has been fragmented by the misogynist media, hyper-sexualized at the expense of the Natural Woman, packed up and airbrushed for the gratification of Abusive Men.  Did you even read the chapter on the commercialization of the female form?  Open your book to page six hundred and seventy-two.  No, seventy-
two.
  Read the first sentence.  Aloud.”