Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible! Read online

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  The brothers continued to live their lives, but all the while Cain felt a new sadness. It was there all the time. It ate with him, worked with him, and in the morning it rose from his bed with him.

  Dying! It just didn’t make any sense. He knew this deep in his heart. He thought nothing was more important than making God change his mind—nothing. He began to take his sacrifices more seriously. They became elaborate and garish. They involved richly choreographed interpretive dances, colorful oblong facial masks, and the very best of his legumes.

  But God never answered.

  Cain started to change. When he got a splinter, he cursed the Heavens all out of proportion.

  “Back in the Garden of Eden, there were no splinters,” Cain said to Abel. “Instead of splinters they had trees that hung with fried eggs and home fries.”

  He even started to resent his parents. He spoke of them as though they had gambled away his inheritance.

  “If it hadn’t been for ignoramus number one tempting ignoramus number two, we’d be living in luxury!”

  Cain tried to get Abel worked up about the whole thing, too, but Abel had an easy-come-easy-go-we-all-have-to-die-someday attitude that drove his brother crazy. As long as he had his sheep, as long as he could rub his naked feet through their wool, Abel felt that things were really not so bad.

  Cain invented a game that he called Get the Hell Out of Eden. He always insisted on playing God.

  “Get your naked asses out of here,” yelled God.

  “What? But we just got here,” yelled Adam and Eve. “Maybe there’s some kind of mistake.”

  “The Lord does not make mistakes.”

  God would then kick his brother in the ass. He would fall to the ground and, holding his ass, say, “Please, please have mercy on me, let’s play something else,” and God would laugh.

  Now that he was older, every week Abel would choose the fattest, firstborn sheep and sacrifice them to God. Everything Abel did in life was for a reason—he ate so he would not be hungry, he made clothes so he would not be cold—but making sacrifices to God, he did it for reasons he could never know. He did it simply because he was told to. There was something about that that made him feel clean and deep.

  Adam and Eve made their sacrifices out of fear of being further punished and Cain was pleading for answers and changes, but Abel fulfilled his obligation and walked away expecting nothing from God. Of all the people who’d been created, he was glad with the way things were, and God could not have helped liking that.

  Meanwhile, Cain decided to test out a new approach with the Lord. He believed that God would have greater respect for him if he did not kowtow. He’s going to kill us! he thought. He wanted God to understand that he couldn’t walk all over people and then still have them come crawling back with their arms loaded up with gifts. No, they had to get tough. They had to show Him what was what. So Cain’s sacrifices became more and more lackadaisical. He did not even check to see whether his gifts were being received or not. That would look like he was caving.

  Then one day, while Cain was lying in a field, Abel came running over.

  “God spoke to me,” cried Abel.

  Cain shot up and looked at his brother.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he was a great fan of my sheep. He told me to keep up the good work.”

  “Was my name mentioned?” asked Cain.

  “It didn’t come up.”

  “What was it like to hear His voice?” asked Cain.

  “Look at me,” said Abel, “I’m still shaking.”

  There was a certain pang that Cain started to feel. It was in his stomach. He felt the pang grow sharpest when he looked upon his brother. He could hardly speak with him without having to hunch over in pain. Since the world was still new, and no one had yet felt this way, Cain did not know that it was jealousy he was feeling. Instead, he decided that his stomach no longer wanted to be his stomach. It wanted to escape his rib cage; it wanted to be Abel’s stomach. This was because he wanted to be Abel. There was no shame in this. Being Abel meant being happy. Being Cain meant being wretched. Being Cain had brought him nothing.

  He had a plan. He approached Abel with it. He decided to just spring it on him.

  “I am no longer Cain,” said Cain. “I am now Abel. We are both Abel.”

  “All right,” said Abel.

  The two Abels performed routines for the amusement of their brothers and sisters.

  “How is that apple, Abel?”

  “It is fine, Abel.”

  “Abel, could you pass it over so that I may have a bite?”

  “I, Abel, don’t see why not, Abel.”

  Then one day, things became more grave.

  “If I am Abel,” said Cain, “then I am just as much Abel as you yourself are Abel.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” said Abel.

  “Before God are we not both Abel?” asked Cain.

  “Well, in the case of being before God, I think at that time I would be Abel and you would go back to being Cain. At all other times, though, like when we’re climbing trees, making pottage, and flirting with our sisters, you are just as much Abel as I myself am Abel.”

  “That won’t do,” said Cain. His eyes lingered on his brother. He looked at this other Abel as standing in the way of who he was. He was Abel. He knew this in his heart. He simply wanted it more.

  When he heard his father call out for Abel and he saw his brother go forth, it made him feel like he was nothing. He couldn’t even say that he felt like Cain anymore. One could not feel like Cain because it had no flavor. Cain was the absence of flavor. Cain was like saliva or a Wednesday.

  This way God will have to show himself. This way God will have to stop playing possum and get directly involved in what is going on. These were Cain’s thoughts.

  Abel was among his flock when Cain neared him. Slowly, Cain pulled out his stick and slowly, he lifted it into the air. Still, though, there was no sign of God. He looked at the back of Abel’s head. Then he looked into the sky. Just in case God was reading his mind, he thought to himself, I’m really, really going to do it.

  He brought his stick down onto his brother’s head; he could hear no sound at all. Abel just toppled over. He toppled over the way he did everything—with an easygoing acceptance. He sank to the earth, as though thinking, I must fall, so I will fall. I am falling. I have fallen.

  Cain grabbed his brother by the shoulder and turned him over. His brother’s eyes were wide open. It was like Abel was looking past him, over his shoulder and up into the sky. When they were kids, there was a game they played where Cain would do something, something bad, and Abel would look over just behind him, as though spying their father who’d been watching. Cain, full of fear, would slowly turn to meet his father’s gaze. When he’d see that there was really no one there, he would laugh. It was like Abel was playing at their game, but this time, he did not move a muscle even to smile. Even when Cain pinched his cheek, pulling his face this way and that, his brother just lay there.

  Here it was: death. Cain couldn’t believe it. He’d been sure that at the last moment, God would step in. He would have thought that only God could have taken a person’s life. But it was as simple as killing a sheep.

  Abel, his eyes wide and unblinking, stared directly into the mystery of life and death, and he was not saying a word about any of it.

  Cain sat back and waited. The sheep continued to graze and the sun continued to shine. There were no bolts of lightning, no booming voice from behind the clouds. Life went on.

  * * *

  That night, God appeared before Cain in a dream.

  “Where is your brother?” asked God.

  “It’s always about my brother,” said Cain. “Do you ever ask me where I am? No, that you don’t think of.”

  “What have you done?” asked God. “Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.”

  “Am I my brother’s keeper?” as
ked Cain.

  God did not answer. He just gave him a look. It made Cain feel naked and small. He then felt the finger of God upon his forehead. It sank through his head and into his brain, where it spoke.

  “The Earth shall scorn you,” said the voice from the finger. “I shall scorn you. You will wander the Earth and death will not come. There will be no escape from your guilt. All will look upon you and none will dare kill you, for they will know you by your mark.”

  God withdrew his finger, leaving behind a fingerprint on Cain’s forehead that was shaped like a teardrop. At first, he tried to convince himself that the mark was to protect him, that he had a secret pact with God, that they understood each other. For a while he would wake up in the morning and pretend to be immortal and famous, but he was not very good at pretending.

  And so the Earth then did scorn him. Where once his hands withdrew berries and tomatoes, now they produced tobacco, ragweed, and alfalfa sprouts—things the world had never seen before.

  So as the centuries passed, Cain abandoned farming and roamed the Earth. He walked with a sense of purpose, just in case anyone was watching, but in his heart he knew he had nowhere to go. He became so lonely and full of regret that instead of fearing death, he became yearnful of it. He would chase after bears, and they would scamper away.

  “They haven’t the balls,” he’d say.

  “Run, you little bitches,” he’d call out to the tigers.

  “Run, you yellow turd,” he’d cry into the face of an alligator as he tried in vain to pry open its jaws.

  More centuries passed, and Cain’s desire for death became nearly constant.

  He came to understand what jealousy was and he saw it everywhere. The grass was jealous of the trees, the trees were jealous of the butterflies, the butterflies were jealous of the birds. Cain was jealous of all of them for their ability to die.

  He would think about Abel, flying through the clouds on God’s shoulders while he was left to futz around for hundreds of years, begging his own children to drive tree branches through his heart.

  In life, Cain had been jealous of his brother; but it was in death that he became more jealous than he ever thought was possible.

  He would feel Abel up there, looking down on him.

  “You should see the look on your face,” he would hear his brother say. “Trying to be all serious. You look like a gorilla.”

  Over time, Cain could no longer remember very much at all. Twenty years after the death of his brother, it seemed like it was only yesterday, but after two hundred years, it felt like something that might have happened in a dream. There were details he remembered that now seemed improbable, like the way he saw his brother’s soul leave his body, and the way it waved good-bye to him and winked.

  After three and then four hundred years, it all felt so long ago that who he was back then felt like someone else. When people he met asked him questions about the old days he just made stuff up.

  “We had wings,” he said.

  They would ask him what Adam was like, and he would say that he was strict. Other times he would say he was jolly, that he loved his children.

  After five hundred years, his story was repeated so often, that he only remembered the repeating, not the events themselves. It sounded like a fable, something that might have just as easily happened to an ass and a weasel as to himself and his brother. He began to doubt everything. He even began to wonder whether he had ever actually heard God’s voice, whether the mark on his forehead was the mark of God and not just another liver spot. Was this a part of his punishment, he wondered, to be left so uncertain of whether God really was, or whether God was only something inside his own head? As he wandered, he met many people who had never talked to God, and who seemed unsure if God existed, and he thought how things had changed since he was a boy.

  After seven hundred years, when he told his story to himself, or heard it told by others, he felt nothing. He was too old to feel guilt, or remorse, or anything. He didn’t even miss his brother anymore. He wanted nothing from God. He wanted nothing from the world. The world was what it was and he didn’t need it to change. And in this way, he’d finally gotten his wish: to be just like Abel.

  And then God let him die.

  Noah and the Ark

  Contrary to what most people think, the years leading up to the Great Flood were actually quite joyful. The preflood generation saw that the random smitings, the slavery, and the backbreaking labor of the early days had left their forefathers bitter and hateful, and so they collectively resolved to live lives of greater ease. Work, they realized, was overrated. Two days of toil a week were plenty—and this way, they had time for hobbies! People drew pictures, played music, and danced. It was a golden age of art, and the preflood generation really felt like they were on to something.

  One man, though, felt that this whole business was ass-backwards and off track. His name was Noah. He was over six hundred years old and was used to the work ethic of the good old days. He had lived long enough to see that craftsmanship was going down the toilet and he vowed never to become one of the “dancing dummies.”

  Not that he had much of a choice in the matter. Noah did not have any artistic inclination. He could not draw nor could he sing—and when he attempted to dance, he moved as though he were being pelted with apples. On the odd occasion on which he attempted to execute a jig, people would ask him if he had just stepped on something pointy, or if he was in need of the toilet. Then they would laugh.

  Noah swore in his wrath that he, for one, would always remain old-school—and he would keep his children old-school, by teaching them about the value of good, hard work.

  In those early days, people lived lives that were much longer than the puny ones we have now. It was possible for a man to live hundreds of years, and because of this, people matured at a much slower rate. Oftentimes, it took them a hundred years just to get going—to figure out what they wanted to be when they grew up. It was customary for children to live with their parents until they were married and, usually, marriage only occurred well after one had reached the century mark. This meant Noah had many years to instruct his children in the folly and danger of the lazy world around them. It also meant, for his children, a century of curfews, groundings, and slaps upon the head for finishing the last of the jellies. They lived by Noah’s law—his wife and three sons, Shem, ninety-five, Japheth, ninety-three, and Ham the baby, eighty-seven.

  Noah and his sons were contractors. They built huts for people. Officially, the company name was Noah & Son & Son & Son, though in private, Noah referred to his outfit as “Noah and the Dummies.” He called his sons dummies at least a hundred times a day. There were worse names he could use—babbling Assyrian, locust thighs, harlot of the hills—but for his sons, “dummy” stung the worst—especially when there were girls around.

  Noah saw the chain of command this way: God, the angels, Noah, his wife, his poodle Brandy, “the brothers Dummy,” and then the tools they built houses with. He was not sure where the nails went on the chain, but the idea of placing them below his sons did not gibe with his sense of justice. When his wife said that he was being cruel, too hard on the boys, he would say that he was just being honest. At such times he referred to himself as “Mr. Reality.”

  Noah knew he disciplined his boys with great ferocity, but he also knew it was a necessity. During those dark, evil days one had to teach one’s children right from wrong, and if that involved the use of strops, riding crops, thick branches, throat punches, and leg locks, so be it. Without his brand of tough love, he feared they’d end up eating daisies and making out with dolphins. He was not going to be a sentimental old idiot. He was going to prepare his sons for a life of righteousness and hardship. That was what a father had to do.

  “When I die and they must head the household, they will see that the injustice and folly of the world will beat them down far worse than my mouth, feet, and fists of wrath ever could. I will not be around forever.”

>   Noah would spend hours soliloquizing about his lost youth and impending death. It would get his sons all revved up, licking their chops and dreaming of their future release.

  “Ah, youth,” Noah would say, all moist-eyed on a wine drunk, “ye has passed on like the fickle bitch-goddess that doth tickle the feet as she lops off the legs. Where once whipped my masculine mane of thick hair now lies the age-spotted dome of a deathbed sickie. Ah, me! The worms are readying themselves to crawl through my eye sockets! How can I venture out to the crocodile fights stinking of geriatric ointment?”

  The thing was, though, that Noah wasn’t anywhere close to dying. He was already six hundred years old and his stropping arm was as strong as that of a man half his age. When he landed his thick leather lash upon the calves of his sons they knew of his presence.

  Noah sometimes thought back to the beatings his own father had doled out. Lamech was a giant of a man, with a beard you could climb and swing from like a jungle vine. When he was drunk, he paid neighboring boys to plant kicks in his ribs and stomach. Pain was the only thing that was real in life, Lamech would say. He saw the kicks as an invitation to meditate on the true essence of the universe. As the blood leaked from his mouth and navel, his face wore an expression of beatitude. Noah held the image of that face in his heart with the kind of nostalgic warmth that his countrymen only felt when remembering the birth of their children.

  One day Noah heard a voice. He could only hear it faintly, under his own words. At first he thought it was a whistling in his nose hairs. He pressed a finger to each side of his nose and shotgunned mucus onto the ground, but still the ghostly voice below the surface of his speech persisted. When he stopped to try to hear it better, the little voice would cease. Noah looked at his sons. Had it been them, bad-mouthing him in whispers under their breath?