Beware of God (2 page)

A
T
9:37 in the otherwise ordinary morning of May 25, Bobo, a small male chimpanzee in the Monkey House of the Bronx Zoo, achieved total conscious self-awareness.

God.

Death.

Shame.

Guilt.

Each one dropped like a boulder onto his tiny primitive skull. He grabbed his head in his hands and ran shrieking around the Monkey House, overturning the water bowls and tearing branches off the trees. He threw himself to the ground, kicking and screaming. He grabbed a fallen branch and began chasing the smaller chimps around the old oak tree.

Suddenly he froze. Bobo closed his eyes and leaned against the tree for support. It was as if he had been somehow transported to the top of the tallest tree in the forest and was looking down upon himself below. Bobo saw a brute, a beast, a dim, half-finished creature using his newly acquired skills not to build or to better, but to brandish a weapon. He also noticed he was sporting a bright red erection. Shame filled his soul.

Shame?

That was new.

The children who were gathered around Bobo's cage began to scream and cry, tears streaming down their faces. Horrified elfin jurors, they pointed their little fingers at Bobo's hideous primate penis.

The mortified teachers skipped right over Explanation and went straight to Denial.

“He's just happy, children!” tried one teacher.

“Happy, yay!” clapped the other.

They quickly led the little innocents outside. Management had no choice. The Monkey House was closed for the day, and Bobo was sedated.

The Monkey House is located a short walk away from the last Skyfari stop, just across the way from the World of Reptiles. For the past year and a half there had been the constant hammering, sawing and diesel-engine-starting of facility improvements. RV parking had been added near Wild Asia, and they had spruced up the water fountain outside Giraffe World with real Mexican tiles. Administration East got new computers.

The Monkey House restoration was the most recent, and most elaborate, of them all. Those monkeys made their numbers. “They pull in the crowds,” said management.

Renovations began in early March in order to be finished in time for the Memorial Day rush. The chain link fences were gone, replaced by clear, high-tensile strength glass. The first week many of the chimps smashed into the glass midswing, but soon learned. Gone, too, was the drab decor, replaced with exotic white birch trees, maple trees, an even grander, older oak and the crown jewel of the empire, Chimpanzee Bay, a freshwater pool that was built to look like an ocean, complete with a Deluxe WaveMaker 3000. Judging by the crowds pressing their faces to the glass on opening day, it didn't seem to bother anyone that chimpanzees can't actually swim.

The humans outside the glass all seemed quite pleased with themselves, but for the lesser primates inside, the renovations caused nothing but anxiety. Beebee, Shirley, Topo and Sweetface were all on anti-depressants, Ladybird had mysteriously stopped menstruating and Koko had to be sent to a small animal farm in Northern New Jersey for recuperation. The doctors expected this.

“We expected this,” they said.

And so, when Bobo made the same astonishing evolutionary leap as our primate ancestors made so very long ago, the doctors quickly misdiagnosed it as posttraumatic stress disorder, discontinued his Viagra, and scripted him for a month of Paxil, five milligrams a day.

Bobo awoke some time later to find himself in a small steel box. His head felt heavy. The front wall of the box was a metal grid, through which Bobo could see many similar boxes across the way.

He wanted out.

A lab technician at the far end of the room was enjoying her morning feeding and a cup of coffee as she read the
New York Post
. He would appeal to her humanity. “You and I are indeed different,” he would say. “But surely the awareness of our own mortality and the unique self-perception we share more than compensate for the fraction of a fraction of a difference in our physical genetic makeup.”

Bobo's mind may have evolved, but his larynx had not. And so, in place of an impassioned plea for understanding, he grabbed the cage with both hands and legs and shrieked as loudly as he could.

Bobo was sedated.

The next morning, the zookeepers decided to see if Bobo could be safely reintroduced to the Monkey House. Bobo was no fool; he knew what they wanted. They wanted Curious George. They wanted Megillah Gorilla. They wanted Monchichi.

They wanted Monkey.

Bobo held the vet's hand as she walked him back inside the house. They loved it when he did that. Elbows high, hands scratching his armpits, Bobo did an exaggerated chimp walk over to the food bin and peeled a bright yellow banana.

“Ooo ooo ooo! Ah ah ah!”

The zookeepers smiled, nodded and wrote on their clipboards.

Bobo walked back and forth, scratched his ass and rubbed his crotch. He swung from a low birch branch. “Ooo ooo ooo! Ah ah ah!”

The zookeepers smiled, nodded and wrote on their clipboards.

He sat down next to a female chimp named Esmeralda. Esmeralda stood up and bent over. Bobo mounted her.

The zookeepers smiled, nodded and wrote on their clipboards.

“I'm sorry,” Bobo said to Esmeralda when the zookeepers had gone. “That was wrong of me.” He sat down and sighed heavily. Esmeralda moved behind him and began picking the bugs from his hair.

“I know you probably don't understand the concept of right and wrong,” said Bobo, “at least not in the Judeo-Christian sense of the words. I didn't myself until just recently. Still, I used you. Selfishly. I objectified you. And for what? To save my own hide? Or perhaps still worse, out of some violent animus, some stubborn genetic trait of survivalism that even nature can't filter out? Damn all my high philosophies! I deserve to be locked in this cage with you monkeys.”

Esmeralda pulled a yellow-winged bug from Bobo's shoulder, examined it closely for a moment and stuck it in her mouth. She stood up, brushed herself off and walked away.

“Wait!” called Bobo.

There was something about this Esmeralda, something in her eyes. Maybe she was different. Bobo wondered if they could someday leave this zoo together, get a place nearby in Rye, maybe Larchmont, something with a fence and a swing set for the kids.

Bobo scrambled after her but he was too late. Esmeralda swung from tree to tree, straight across to the far end of the Monkey House where Mongo, one of the house's larger males, was closely examining his scrotum. Esmeralda nudged Mongo, turned her back to him and bent over with all the ceremony of someone who'd just dropped a quarter. Mongo mounted her.

Bobo instantly loathed her. Then he immediately regretted loathing her.

Regret?

That was new.

Bobo watched with contempt as Mongo humped away at Esmeralda, his ridiculous testicles bouncing this way and that like terrified children on the back of a runaway camel in the African Safari park. “Help!” they seemed to shout. “Get us out of here!”

Bobo knew how they felt. Look at us, Bobo thought, shaking his head sadly. A bunch of fucking monkeys. Where is our dignity? Where is our pride? Where are our pants?

Mongo finished with Esmeralda, walked over to where Bobo was sitting and shat.

A typical leader.

Bobo could not believe the amount of shit in this tiny chimpanzee world. There was shit on the floor, shit in the cave, shit by the sunflowers. There was shit in the water bowls, and shit on the jungle gym.

As Mongo lumbered back to his bed on the far side of the cage, Bobo grabbed a handful of Mongo's shit and threw it at him as best he could. Bobo didn't have much of a pitching arm, or opposable thumbs, and the turd sailed sloppily past Mongo and landed with a wet thud on the wall just beyond him. It held there for a moment, and Bobo scratched his head.

“Huh,” Bobo thought. “Kinda looks like a chimp.”

And with that, Bobo scooped up another handful of shit, walked over to the glass and began to paint.

By the end of his first week of consciousness, Bobo had painted large Expressionistic shit murals on every wall of the Monkey House. He began with simple studies: an apple, a monorail, cotton candy. By the end of the first week, he was creating sweeping tableaus which he saw as scathingly satirical attacks on chimpanzee culture and primate mores. His
SelfPortrait
was a devastating attack on racism, his
Unhuman Stain
a poignant plea for self-respect and dignity, his
Life in the Monkey House
a searing assault on political power and corporate gain.

Bobo's paintings not only exhibited true artistic promise, they were—at $35,000 a pop—a much-needed additional revenue stream for the zoo. Management gently steered him toward Werthmeyer oil paints and hand-stretched canvases (they had, after all, spent almost $3 million on those glass walls). They even splurged for a mahogany easel with height adjustment and bonus stowaway paint tray.

This wasn't nearly as therapeutic for Bobo as it may have appeared. He was tortured. His mind was expanding at a phenomenal rate. All he could see was the shit around him, and all the paint in the world could never cover it up.

His paintings grew darker with every passing day. Reds became blues, greens became blacks. While the humans took snapshots, Bobo wrestled with existence and meaning and death.

And Esmeralda.

Of course she would prefer Mongo over him! Why not? It was a mutually selfish relationship; he only wanted to fuck, she only wanted to breed. They were perfect for each other!

Let them, he thought.

Let them sniff and poke and prod, let them debase themselves and all chimpkind.

Bobo was spending much of his time alone, curled up in the darkest corner he could find. “Aww,” said the tourists tapping loudly on the glass, “you're an angry little monkey, aren't you? Yes, you are!”

He stopped painting. Management optimistically distributed Bobo's art supplies to the rest of the chimps, albeit with little success: Mongo tore apart the canvases to make himself a bed, and Esmeralda had to be hospitalized after eating a half dozen tubes of Cadmium Yellow. Her skin tone was never the same again.

On June 12, just two weeks after he first gained consciousness, Bobo stood up and walked calmly to the edge of Chimpanzee Bay.

He put one foot in, then the other. The humans waved and smiled. Bobo walked further into the water, one step after another.

He didn't struggle or flail.

He made no attempt to swim.

Bobo stayed below the waves for some time. The rest of the chimps stood by and watched with anxioius curiosity.

Esmeralda bent over.

Mongo mounted her.

After some time, Bobo's body bobbed gently up to the surface. The Wavemaker 3000 nudged it slowly back to shore.

A small chimp named Kato stood on a large, flat quarry stone that extended out into the Bay.

God.

Death.

Shame.

Guilt.

Each one dropped like a boulder onto his tiny primitive skull. He grabbed his head in his hands and shrieked. All of a sudden, it was as if Kato had been somehow transported to the top of the tallest tree in the forest, and was looking down upon himself below. Kato saw a group of God's first drafts sitting complacently by as one of their own took his life, not only unable to offer any assistance but unable even to relate, to understand, to get beyond bananas and shit and Esmeralda's vagina.

“Look at us,” Kato thought. “A bunch of fucking monkeys.”

He grabbed a long, bare branch from the Monkey House floor and used it to gently pull Bobo's body back to shore.

Nobody else seemed to mourn. No one else seemed to feel. Shame filled Kato's soul.

Shame?

That was new.

B
LOOM'S
Volvo finally came to rest upside down on the right-hand shoulder of the New York State Thruway. The roof was collapsed, the front end was crushed, and the driver's side door was torn nearly in half.

The policeman shook his head.

“You're very lucky.”

Bloom nodded.

“Somebody up there likes you.”

Bloom nodded.

Whatever dying mechanism was coughing black smoke from the underside of the car soon ignited.

The car filled with flames, incinerating Bloom's insurance papers, his registration, the picture of his deceased grandparents that hung from his rearview mirror and his Coach Executive briefcase, which contained the 300-page report on emerging Asian markets he'd promised to have in by Monday morning and the only copy of a screenplay he'd been secretly working on. It was a romantic comedy.

The fireman shook his head.

“You're very lucky.”

Bloom nodded.

“Saved by an angel.”

Bloom nodded.

Sirens screamed, radios crackled.

Bloom was leaning against the guardrail, trying to catch his breath, when from some dark, dusty distant part of his mind, some cobwebbed corner of forgotten phylacteries and skullcaps, came words Bloom hadn't said or heard or even thought in the past thirty years:

Shema Yisroel Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad

 

F
UCK
,” said God.

The angels stood quietly at the back of His office, their eyes locked nervously on the place where their feet would have been. The Angel of Death—the bearer of the afternoon's cosmically bad news—wrung his hands nervously as he stood before God's enormous oak desk. Lucifer stood behind God, calmly cleaning his gun.

“What do you mean he walked away from it?” asked God.

Death shrugged. “I don't know, Boss. Not a scratch on him.”

The angels sang, their sweet, melodic voices ascending as one. “Hallelu …”

“Not now,” said God.

He closed His eyes and massaged His temples, trying to stave off the migraine He knew was coming. He was getting tired of this. Tired of the whole damn business.

Heaven fell silent, from the Pearly Gates out front to the steel service door out back. You could practically hear Hell.

“Something about side impact protection or something,” offered Death.

“What was he driving?” asked Lucifer. “Volvo or some shit, right?”

“S40 sedan,” said Death.

Lucifer nudged God. “See? What'd I tell you about those things? Pain in the ass.”

“Hummers are even worse,” said Death.

“Yeah, but at least you can flip a Hummer,” said Lucifer.

“I've flipped plenty of Hummers,” said Death, “don't tell me about flipping Hummers. Flipping a Hummer isn't good for killing anybody.”

“Are you telling me that flipping a Hummer isn't going to injure the driver?”

“It's not a question of injuring,” said Death, “it's a question of
critically
injuring.”

“But you could definitely flip a Hummer, that's my point.”

“Enough,” said God. “Enough.” They never seemed to tire of it.

He pulled open the top drawer of his desk, took out his handgun, and shoved a few cartridges into his pocket.

“Lucifer,” He said. “Get the car.”

The angels sang, their sweet, melodic voices ascending up as one. “Hallelu …”

“Not now,” said God.

···

T
HE
question troubled Bloom deeply. Did somebody up there like him, as the rescue workers had suggested, or did somebody up there dislike him? Was somebody up there trying to save him, or was somebody up there trying to kill him?

Was it a miracle, or was it a warning?

And didn't anybody up there like Luis Soto, the drunk driver they'd just dragged off the bloody hood of Bloom's car?

Surely, Bloom reasoned, if God wanted to kill him, God could kill him. Then again, if God wanted him dead, why the Volvo? If death is predetermined, wouldn't automobile purchases be predetermined? Didn't the Volvo—the prudence, the zero percent financing—didn't they all collectively prove that someone up there liked Bloom?

On the other hand, it was possible that God had been trying to kill Bloom—that nobody up there liked Bloom and that something had simply gone wrong. It was a big operation, there were bound to be some mistakes. Sometimes Bloom sent Amanda out for a cappuccino and she came back with a latte. It happens. A file misfiled. A printer misprinting. A celestial goof. A Jehovian cock-up.

The cab came to a stop outside his apartment building. “Eighteen dollars even,” said the driver. Eighteen, thought Bloom. The numerical value of the Hebrew word for “life.” He was eschatologically spiraling. Bloom paid the driver, went inside and phoned his mother.

 

L
UCIFER
floored it until they reached Manhattan, but even for archangels, crosstown traffic on a Friday evening was treacherously slow-going.

God stared sullenly out the passenger side window. He hated coming down here.

“What a dump,” he thought.

This micromanaging bullshit depressed him. Fucking Bloom. Scheduled for death over six months ago, the guy was still strolling around the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It was supposed to have been a simple mugging, nothing fancy: Bloom gets on a downtown train, some kid pulls a knife, Bloom gets it in the stomach. Death pulled off a thousand of those things a week. But that day, of all days, Bloom oversleeps. Late for his appointment, he runs outside and instead of taking the train, he jumps in a cab.

One botched death, and there was no end of problems. Bloom's death had taken months to reschedule, and now it had gone wrong once again.

“Defibrillators,” Lucifer was saying. “That's the problem. Before defibrillators, keeping on schedule was a piece of cake.”

“It's not the defibrillators,” said Death. “It's the multinational pharmaceutical industry.”

“Sure, the multinational pharmaceutical industry,” said Lucifer. “But without defibrillators, there wouldn't be any need for the multinational pharmaceutical industry, that's all I'm saying.”

“What about CPR?”

“CPR? Please. I'd take CPR over defibrillators any day.”

God lit a cigarette and rolled down His window. People thought His job was easy. All their preposterous prayers, like He was some great big Fonzarelli in the sky, walking around, snapping His fingers and slapping jukeboxes.

Save me, heal me, cure me.

Like He could if He wanted to. They were all part of the same cosmic continuum, Himself included. They couldn't even begin to appreciate the amount of work that went into just one single death. And not just human deaths: animal, plant, insect, alien, on all the planets in all the universes. And not just now, but in the past, the present, the future.

Creation was a production nightmare.

Could they ever in their limited minds conceive of the number of scheduling difficulties involved in getting just the right people, on just the right days, at just the right locations, death after death after death? It was an antemortem house of cards, one missed death upsetting the entire birth/death/birth cycle for every universe in every dimension. All those shouldbe deads walking the Earth, saying things never meant to be said, to people never meant to be met, a catastrophic ripple effect through the story structure of an infinite number of lives after lives after lives.

And all the while,
“Heal us, O Lord, bring recovery for our ailments! For you are God, King, the faithful and compassionate healer!”

Pains in the ass.

 

Y
OU
should give a little charity,” Bloom's mother was saying. “It's Shabbos tomorrow, would it kill you to have a Shabbos? Maybe go to shul tonight, give a little thanks?”

He hated the way she pushed religion on him. Like it was drugs. Like one hit off her crack pipe of belief and she'd hook him for life.

Now it seemed she'd been right all along.

All of them—his mother, his father, his rabbis, his friends—they'd all been right about God.

About His wrath, anyway.

“I'll go to shul,” he promised his mother before putting down the phone. “I will.”

Bloom hadn't been to a synagogue in years, didn't even know where the synagogue was.

What a fool he had been!

One day a week, was that too much for God to ask? God forbid he should miss a Yankee game, but an opportunity to do a mitzvah, that he could miss. Here he was, a member of a health club, a video club, a member of American Express. But was he a member of a synagogue? What a waste he had made of his life!

His
life, that made him laugh.

His Volvo.

His doorman apartment.

His Prada shoes and his Rossignol skis.

His, his, his!

Would they save him from God's wrath? Could he bribe his way out of Gehenom with his Hugo Boss suit and his Mont Blanc pen?

“Don't anger Him,” his mother had begged.

“Do what He says and nobody gets hurt,” the rabbis had warned.

“Honk if you love God,” the bumper sticker had urged.

But had Bloom ever honked? No. He hadn't honked once.

Bloom needed air.

And he needed a synagogue.

 

W
HAT
about cancer?” asked Lucifer.

“Cancer was good for a while,” said Death, “but now there's chemotherapy.”

“Only with early detection.”

“True” said Death. “But they're detecting it earlier and earlier.”

“Listen,” argued Lucifer, “you can't discount the entire time-honored concept of disease as an effective killer simply because some men—in First World countries only, mind you—are having their balls checked a few years earlier.”

“I'm not discounting the entire concept of disease as an effective killer,” said Death, “I'm just saying cancer's overrated.”

“Oh, yes, well, I'll give you that,” said Lucifer. “Tuberculosis. Now that was a disease.”

Lately the should-be-deads were everywhere. Medication, heart transplants, chemotherapy, triple bypasses, MediVac, brain surgery. No amount of wars or disease, it seemed, could keep God on schedule.

He was just trying to keep the ball spinning. There were rules. There were regulations. People needed to be born, and people needed to die, and as passionately as they embraced the former they stubbornly resisted the latter.

“Don't blame me!” God wanted to shout from the top of the tallest mountain. Everest. K2. No Sinai bullshit this time. Don't blame me for the fires. Don't blame me for the floods, for the famines, for the plagues. Don't blame me.

I'm just doing my job.

I can't save you.

My hands are tied.

The car screeched to a stop in front of Bloom's building. God took out His gun, switched off the safety and tucked it inside His blazer.

“Let's get this over with,” He said.

 

A
ND
Abraham awoke in the morning, and he went forth.

Bloom didn't know how long he had been walking before he discovered the old synagogue. He wasn't even sure what street he was on. But even after all these years, he still recognized the ancient Hebrew writing above the door:
Repentance, prayer and charity remove the evil of His decree.

After all this time, there was still some time.

Wasn't that the beauty of religion?

Wasn't that the majesty of Hashem?

A life like Bloom's, wasted on the material and the superficial, redeemed with the simplest of actions—repentance, prayer, a bit of charity. God in His Neverending Mercy asked nothing more than that.

Would your boss forgive you so easily?

Would your wife or girlfriend take you back so readily after so many years of neglect?

It had been a long time since Bloom had been inside a synagogue. Over the years, he'd made sure to avoid any places that even vaguely resembled one. The New York Public Library, for instance, completely creeped him out. The gothic archways, the high ceilings, row after row of old tattered books. Even the Metropolitan Museum of Art disturbed him. He could stomach the exhibitions, but he stayed well away from the bookstore.