Book of Jim: Agnostic Parables and Dick Jokes From Lucifer's Paradise (7 page)

“Just follow the rainbow,” Plato said.

Jim no longer trusted philosophy, and he had his doubts about the French horn and the rainbow, but he needed an answer to the Hitler question.  Therefore he stepped off the cloud and onto rainbow.

And he fell right through it.  The ground of the valley in the shadow of Plato rushed up and kicked him in the head.

4

“Do you see your error now?” said Plato.  For he stood beside Jim in the shadows of the valley.

“Error?”  Jim rubbed the temples of his head with the palms of his hands.  “The only error I made was coming here.  I shoulda just said fuck it.”

“Why did you
fall
?”

“I fell because you’re a dick.  You’re all a bunch of fucking dicks.”

“Why did
you
fall?”

“I just want to know why Hitler’s off the hook, man.  It’s a fair question.”

“
Why
did you fall?”

“Because Cleopatra’s a fat whore, Bogart’s a goddamn cheat, and Hitler plays golf and tells jokes and is generally a pretty nice guy.”

“Mmmmm.”  Plato shook his French horn and a few tired notes dribbled out.  “I have an alternate theory.”

“I’m all ears.”

“You tried to enter an imaginary city by walking on the rainbow that I blew out of my cock.  That’s why you fell.”

Jim waited for more, but there
was
no more. 

“Get it?” Plato said.

“No, Plato, I don’t get it.”

“Mmmmm.”  Plato chewed the air.  “Well, Hitler gets it.  I suppose that’s the important thing,”

And Plato walked out from the shadows in the valley of his shadow.  The sun made the
glinting
upon his horn.

VIII

1

Jim became depressed.  For though he was Jim in his heart, and Jim in his head, and Jim in his balls, he
had
no direction.  He slept for seven years.

He wondered if a man could nap through eternity.  He wondered if sadness was the jinx of free will, or the weight of an implacable environment.  He wondered if his wondering was killing
paradise
.

One day, in the seventh year of sadness and napping, Jim received a text from Cherry.  These are the texts that were exchanged between Jim and Cherry in the seventh year of sadness and napping:

Happy hundo Jim! ;)

hundo?

A hundred years!  Lets party!

that was a hundred years?

The centennial man.  So what’s it gonna be?  I say we get a bucket full of coke and duck till we’re insane.

*fuck

i don’t think i’m up for it

I’ll bring some more girls.

na u go ahead I’m tired

What’s up with you lately?

just taking a break

I know what you need.

don’t

Too late!  :P

dammit

I know how you can thank me.

i don’t even know what u did

I want you to nuke my pussy.

2

The door to Jim’s bedroom banged open.  He sat up and blinked away the fuzz of years.  A wild man with shining eyes grabbed him by the ankles and pulled him off the bed.  His head bounced on the floor.

“Art thou Jim?” the wild man said.

Jim blinked away the fuzz of the bounce.  “I art,” he said.

The wild man picked up the bed and threw it out the window.  Glass shattered.  The frame of the bed clattered on the walk below.  The mattress hung in the window, for it was
impaled
by a shard of glass.

“Then I am Marco Polo.”  He kicked over the night stand.  “And you are fortunate in the company you keep.  I am neither cheap nor easily persuaded.”

With a fist he made three neat holes in the wall.  Then he unzipped his trousers and began to piss in the corner.  He spoke over his shoulder while he pissed.

“You have three minutes to dress yourself.  In that time you will also pack a single bag.  The bag may not weigh more than a stone, and it ought to contain clothing for all seasons and terrain.”

“I’m not packing a bag,” Jim said.  “Did Cherry send you?  Tell her she owes me a bed.  I’m not going anywhere.  I don’t care about the years.  I just need to sleep for a while.”

“Two minutes and forty-two seconds.”  Marco shook and zipped and then he kicked another hole in the wall.  He tore the light fixture from the ceiling and smashed it on the floor.

“Please stop doing that,” Jim said.

“Two minutes and fifteen seconds.”  Marco pulled the flatscreen from the wall and cracked it over his knee.  He threw the remains out the window, along with a lamp and a chair.

“Alright,” Jim said.  “I’m getting up.  I’m up, alright?  Just give me a second here.  I’ll take a shower and get my shit together.  Like, half an hour.  I’ll go.  I’m going.  You hear me?  Just let me get sorted, you psycho.”

“Too late.”  Marco grabbed Jim by the shoulders.  “Look at this place.  It’s untenable.  I’ve scheduled it for demolition.  One minute.”

“You what?!”

And Marco walked out the door.  Jim struggled into a pair of jeans and stumbled after him.

“What does that mean, demolition?  You’re not serious.  I like this house.  What’s wrong with a house?  People live in houses.  Goddammit.”

When he breached the front door the white wall of daylight staggered him.  Marco pulled him out to the edge of the property.  Then a tank rolled through the fence and onto the yard and Marco gave it a thumbs up.  The tank fired a shell and the house exploded.  The tank fired another shell and the house fell over.  Jim thought the third shell was probably gratuitous.

“This isn’t funny,” he said.  “I was just taking some time off, man.  Is it a crime to get sad once in a while?  I had stuff in there.”

The eyes of Marco shined.  “Was it the stuff of dreams, Jim?  The stuff of adventure?  Did it smell like the dead salt of acrid seas or the sour sweat of the jungle?  Was it a fist raised against winter and the hot blood of glory?”

Jim swallowed.  “Uh, no.  It was, like, albums and stuff.”

“Art thou yet a man?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sign this.”

“What is it?”

“Sign it.”

Jim signed it.

“It’s settled, then.  We hoist sail at midday.”

3

So Jim sailed with Marco into the
bleakness
.  The waters were calm and shrouded.  Then they became choppy and the shroud began to lift and Jim beheld the dark wall of storm.

“Is that where we’re going?” he said.

Marco heaved the wheel of the ship.  “To the mountain behind it.”

“Can’t we go around?”

“There is only one way through the storm.  There is only one way up the mountain.”

“What’s the point?  We’re already dead.”

“That’s why they call it the Stupid Fucking Mountain.”  Marco steered the ship head on and into crush of the rising waves.  The ship climbed and crashed and climbed again.  “No man has a reason to climb it, yet all men
must
.  And after the climbing, in spite of all sanguinity, you find that the top is just another rock.”

“So what’s the point, man?  What’s the difference between taking a nap and climbing a stupid fucking mountain?”

“
The
Stupid Fucking Mountain.”

They came upon the storm and the storm came upon them.  Jim clung to a crossbeam.  Marco commanded the helm.  Waves and rains and winds of storm tossed the ship that moved through the
bleakness
. 

Then the waters were calm again.  The crags of the base of the mountain rose out of the waters and climbed into the shroud of distance.  Jim looked long at the shroud.

“How tall is it?” he said.

“It’s never been measured.”  Marco dropped anchor and lowered the mainsail.  He cut loose a lifeboat that splashed down in the waters.  “And you wouldn’t be the first to try.  Just remember to keep going up.”

“I really don’t feel like climbing it.”

“You
must
climb it.”

“Yeah, I don’t think I’m gonna.”

Marco gave Jim the thing that Jim had signed.  “Read the last paragraph,” he said.

So Jim read,

The undersigned hereby agrees that, upon failure to reach the peak of the Stupid Fucking Mountain in full compliance with the rules stated above, all freedoms shall be forfeit for one year and one day, during which period the undersigned shall be placed into the custody of lechers and psychotics and sadists.  The undersigned shall have experiences including, but not limited to: rape, torture, and mutilation.

“You’re bluffing,” Jim said.

The eyes of Marco shined.  “Then call it,” he said.

Jim stepped into the lifeboat.

4

So Jim climbed up the Stupid Fucking Mountain.  It was also a
big
fucking mountain, and he climbed for many months.  His shoes wore out and his feet became hard.  His jeans and his T-shirt withered and his skin become rough.  His hands became strong.

He thought, Man this sucks.

Then a sound from the
bleakness
came to him.  He searched for it.  He found a young man who sat in a shallow cave and played a haggard guitar.  Blonde hair hid the edges of his face as he strummed with brutal sincerity.

The young man looked up and moved the hair from his eyes.  Jim knew his eyes, just as he knew his sound.

“Hi,” Cobain said.

“Hey,” Jim said.  He stepped with caution, for he felt like a gazelle coming upon a lion.  “I, uh, heard you playing.”

Cobain ran his fingers over the haggard body of the guitar.  “I never thought I’d play again,” he said.  “Everything got so fucked up the first time around.  But there’s something about this place.  The
bleakness
.  Like, this guitar, I hacked the wood for the body out of a tree with a sharp rock.  The tuning pegs are hawk bones.  The strings are guts.  It’s the best guitar I ever played.”

Jim sat down on a bare rock in the shallow cave.  Cobain strummed his guitar.  The cave reverberated the imperfections of the sound and the
bleakness
hid in the cracks of the mountain.

“It’s raw,” Jim said.

Cobain moved the hair from his eyes.  “It’s strange.  When you get everything you’ve got nothing.  I had everything once, and then
paradise
was just everything all over again.  It took somebody to come along and take it all away, and now I’ve got something again.”  He played a single chord.  “I got raw again.”

“Can I ask you something?  I guess it’s kind of personal.”

“That’s alright.”

“Why did you kill yourself?”

A smile played between Cobain’s teeth.  “It seemed important at the time,” he said.  “And there was a lot of pain.  The useless kind of pain, the kind that just sits in your head and makes you heavy and takes the color out of everything.  It makes you ugly.  I guess the worst part is being able to see how ugly you’ve gotten, and not being able to do anything about it.  So I did something about it.”  He turned a hawk-bone peg and the tone of the deepest gut-string fell.  “I didn’t kill myself for any special reason.  I killed myself because I wanted to die.”   

Jim tried to think of something to say.  He couldn’t.  Then Cobain said,

“It was crazy to see it.  I just expected darkness.  Then I was standing there over my body, looking at the chunks of my brain mashed into the ceiling.  Like, the mess never occurred to me.  The pain was all cerebral.  Metaphysical.  Seeing your metaphysics splattered around the room, gushing out of the back of your head, it’s a pretty harsh trip.

“But what really fucked with me was when the angel popped up next to me.  He said, I bet you’d have written a kick-ass song about that.”

“Did you?”

Cobain plucked a few notes.  “It’s a little rough around the edges,” he said.

And he played a song.

5

The peak of the Stupid Fucking Mountain
was
just another rock.  Jim kicked it down the side of the mountain and watched it roll.  With the song of Cobain in his head he showed his balls to the
bleakness,
and his heart drummed four beats at a measure. 

He pulled out his smart phone and texted to Cherry,

the nuke is hot