In Persuasion Nation (18 page)

He does not want to mess with that green thing, not ever.

He
knows what he has to do. He has to get up, go into the bathroom, take
a shower. During the shower, the axe in his head will miraculously
disappear. Then he will get hungry, very hungry, specifically, for
Cheetos. He will walk out of town, cursing himself under his breath,
simultaneously ashamed and aroused. The landscape will suddenly go
arctic. An igloo will appear. Will anyone be home? They will not. He
will begin madly salivating.

Oh, he can't stand it. It makes him so nervous. He must have some
kind of anxiety disorder. He remembers the enraged expression on
the father Eskimo's face as he draws back the axe, the frightened
yipping of the Malamute puppy, the shocked way the Eskimo kids cover
their O-shaped mouths with their mittens.

His alarm clock goes off.

I really don't want to do this, he thinks. Please, God, send me a
sign, tell me I don't have to do this, show me that you are a gentle
loving God, who desires good things for me.

Suddenly the roof of the house flies off, the room fills with green
light, and a pulsing muscular green limb, like an arm/ hand but more
fluid, extends rapidly down from the hovering green symbol and flings
the bed aside, revealing the trembling polar bear, ass-up.

The polar bear gets to his feet, wets his paw, pats down his hair.

"I was just, uh, cleaning under that bed?" he says.

"Of course I desire good things for you!" the green symbol
intones. "Such as, I desire that you have the deep feeling of
pleasure that comes from doing your job and doing it well."

"You can read my mind?" the polar bear says.

"Do you sometimes have a sexual fantasy involving a vulnerable
reindeer who comes to you asking for help fending off a mean cougar?"
says the green symbol.

"Ha, well, ha," says the polar bear.

"Get to work now," the green symbol says. "And don't
think about it so deep. Don't be so negative. Try to be positive. Try
to be a productive part of our team. Do you have any questions?"

"I can ask you a question?" says the polar bear.

"Sure, of course," says the green symbol. "Ask me
anything."

"Are you GOD?" says the polar bear.

"I can read your mind," says the symbol. "I can raise
the dead. I can rip off your roof. Any other questions?"

The polar bear has, actually, a number of other questions. First,
what did that penisless guy mean when he referred to devising an
approach "in which the sacred things in life are no longer
appropriated in the service of selling what are, after all, etc.,
etc.?" The polar bear distinctly remembers him saying the word
"selling." What is being sold? Who is doing the selling? If
there is "selling," musn't there be "buying"? Who
is doing the "buying"? Are their vignettes somehow intended
to influence this "buying"? Are the instances of
elaborate cruelty he has witnessed ever since he was a small cub
believed to somehow positively impact the ability of the
vignettes to cause "buying"? If so, how?

"How dare you even think of asking me that!" thunders the
green symbol. "How dare you get all up in my business?"

"You said I could ask you anything," says the polar bear.

Every vase in the house explodes, all the flowers die. The kitchen
table collapses, then bursts into flames.

The polar bear, blushing, gets his towel, goes quickly into the
shower.

When he gets out, there's no axe in his head, and no scar. The green
symbol is gone, the roof is back on the house. The vases are intact,
the flowers alive, the kitchen table is fine, and actually has a nice
new tablecloth.

No problem, the polar bear thinks, in case the symbol is reading his
mind at that moment, no problem, no problem at all, just going to
work now.

The polar bear walks for miles through the desert, mumbling
encouragement to himself. Yes, okay, that moment when the axe goes in
is bad. The moment immediately after, when the Eskimo says something
in the Eskimo language, and the Eskimo kids laugh at him as he
stumbles out of the igloo blinded by pain, and the subtitle appears
("Yo, Keep Yet Pawz Off My Cheetz"), not so great either.
The long walk home, dripping blood into the fresh white snow, okay,
also not the best.

But what's he supposed to do? Fight with GOD?

He feels a chill. It starts to snow. Everything goes arctic. On his
left is the familiar glacial cliff.

The penguins he always passes nod gravely.

The igloo comes into sight.

Is anyone home? They are not. He begins madly salivating.

Filled with dread, he enters the igloo, takes the usual single
handful of Cheetos, waits.

In
rush the Eskimo children, fresh from sledding. Behind them comes
their father, with axe, enraged. But for the first time the polar
bear also notices, in the man's eyes, a deep sadness. Of course, of
course, it makes perfect sense! How much fun can it be, driving an
axe into the head of a perfectly nice polar bear, day after day, in
front of your kids? He's heard through the grapevine that the Eskimo
father drinks heavily and has lately started having violent
nightmares in which he turns the axe on his own wife and children.

The truth is, this stupid system causes suffering wherever you look.
He's seen the puppet-boy returning from work, sobbing from his
excruciating leg bums. He's watched Voltaire, blinded by the bright
sun shining in his extremely wide-open eyes, struggling to find the
store where he buys his French bread. He's heard the wives of the
headless working-class guys fall silent whenever one of the headless
working-class guys insists he's perfectly capable of driving the
kids to school.

And
the crazy thing is, it's not just the victims who suffer. He's seen
the
T. rex
moping around the quarry, asking passersby if
the working-class guys are still mad at him. He's seen the can of
Raid absentmindedly spraying its contents around, even when there
aren't any bugs, because it feels so bad about what it did to
Voltaire, whose work it actually admires.

The polar bear looks directly into the Eskimo father's face.

I
know you don't want to do this
, he tries to communicate with his
eyes
. I forgive you. And please forgive me for my part in this. I
am, after all, breaking and entering.

With
his eyes the Eskimo father communicates:
Same here, totally. This
whole thing is just a big crock of shit as far as I'm concerned.

The
polar bear communicates:
Better swing that axe, friend. It's
getting late
.

The
Eskimo communicates:
I know, I know it.

And then he does it.

As the polar bear stumbles out of the igloo, blinded by pain, he
thinks about his mother, who, all through his childhood, again
and again, while out gathering flowers, nearly collided with a
guy in jodhpurs, who then shot her, and after being shot, she was
made into a rug, which was then, in montage, sold and resold many
times, until finally it was shown being cleaned, decades later, with
RugBrite, by hippies, after a big hippie party. He thinks about his
father, who, every day of his working life, was given a rectal exam
by Santa Claus, in the middle of which Santa Claus, who had
allergies, sneezed. That was the big joke: When Santa sneezed, Dad
winced.

Was
selling
what all that suffering was about? Selling? Selling
RugBrite, selling AllerNase?

Oh, how should he know? He's just a polar bear, and half the time
he's got an axe in his head, which doesn't exactly tend to maximize
one's analytical abilities, and usually is laying around his
house with the icepack on, thinking basically nothing but Ouch Ouch
Ouch.

The polar bear leans against a Christmas tree, trying to catch his
breath.

It can't be true. It simply can't be.

But it is true. He feels it in his heart.

The polar bear stumbles past the penguins. Noting his agitation,
and the fact that he goes right instead of left at the large tuft of
tundra grass, the penguins waddle around excitedly, gossiping
among themselves.

All gossiping ceases when the polar bear steps to the edge of the
huge glacial cliff.

Then he throws himself off.

Falling, his only fear is that the green symbol will appear and
miraculously save him. But no. The green symbol, it would appear, is
not truly omniscient after all.

Which
means, the polar bear realizes with a start, that the green symbol
may not actually be GOD at alt. That is, the symbol may not be the
real actual GOD. He may just be a very powerful faker. He may have a
touch of GOD, which he has distorted. He may be, in other words, a
kind of secondary GOD, a being so powerful, relative to him, the
polar bear, that he
appears
to be a GOD. The real actual
GOD may not even know about the way His universe is being run
roughshod over by this twisted, false GOD! The real actual GOD, the
polar bear realizes in his last instant of life, has been heretofore
entirely unknown to him! And yet this true GOD must exist, and be
knowable, since the idea of this perfect and merciful GOD is
emanating, fully formed, from within him, the polar bear! He has, in
fact, already taken his first step toward knowledge of the true GOD,
via his rejection of the false GOD!

Shoot, dang it, if only he could live!

The polar bear hits the ground and, because no one in this
sub-universe can die without the express consent of certain important
parties, does not die, but bounces.

As the penguins stand on the edge of the cliff, looking cautiously
down, he rockets up past them.

"GOD is real!" he shouts. "And we may know Him!"

The penguins watch him reach the apex of his bounce and start back
down.

"The green symbol is a false GOD!" he shouts. "A false
GOD, obsessed with violence and domination! Reject him! Let us begin
anew! Free your minds! Free your minds and live! There is a gentler
and more generous GOD within us, if only we will look!"

The penguins, always easily embarrassed, are especially embarrassed
by this, and, looking around to verify that the tundra's vast
emptiness precludes anyone having witnessed them actually listening
to this heretical subversive nonsense, waddle away to sit on their
large ugly eggs and gossip about the fact that the polar bear, about
whom they've always had their doubts, has finally gone completely
insane.

"Talk about crazy," one of them finally says, in what they
all instantaneously recognize as the sacred first utterance of an
entirely new blessed vignette. "I myself am completely crazy for
Skittles."

Then they all stand. As in a beautiful dream, their eggs have been
miraculously transformed beneath them into large colorful Skittles.
The penguins look heavenward in deep gratitude, then manically
begin dancing the mindless penguin dance of joy.

When they come to destroy us, they will not use force, but will turn
our words against us; therefore we must not be slaves to what we have
previously said, or claimed to be true, or know to be true, but
instead must choose our words and our truths such that these will
yield the most effective and desirable results. Because, in the end,
what is more honest than preserving one's preferred way of life? What
is truth, if not an ongoing faith in, and continuing hope for, that
which one feels and knows in one's heart to be right, all temporary
and ephemeral contraindications notwithstanding?

—
Bernard
"Ed" Alton,

Taskbook for the New Nation,

Chapter 9. "Shortfalls of
the Honesty Paradigm"

In a lovely urban
coincidence, the last two houses on our block were both occupied by
widows who had lost their husbands in Eastern European pogroms. Dad
called them the Bohemians. He called anyone white with an accent a
Bohemian. Whenever he saw one of the Bohemians, he greeted her by
mispronouncing the Czech word for "door." Neither Bohemian
was Czech, but both were polite, so when Dad said "door" to
them they answered cordially, as if he weren't perennially
schlockered.

Mrs.
Poltoi, the stouter Bohemian, had spent the war in a crawl space,
splitting a daily potato with five cousins. Consequently she was
bitter and claustrophobic and loved food. If you ate something while
standing near her, she stared at it going into your mouth. She wore
only black. She said the Catholic Church was a jewelled harlot
drinking the blood of the poor. She said America was a spoiled child
ignorant of grief. When our ball rolled onto her property, she seized
it and waddled into her back yard and pitched it into the quarry.

Mrs.
Hopanlitski, on the other hand, was thin, and joyfully made
pipe-cleaner animals. When I brought home one of her crude dogs in
top hats, Mom said, "Take over your Mold-A-Hero. To her, it will
seem like the toy of a king." To Mom, the camps, massacres, and
railroad sidings of twenty years before were as unreal as covered
wagons. When Mrs. H. claimed her family had once owned serfs, Mom's
attention wandered. She had a tract house in mind. No way was she
getting one. We were renting a remodelled garage behind the
Giancarlos, and Dad was basically drinking up the sporting-goods
store. His N.F.L. helmets were years out of date. I'd stop by after
school and find the store closed and Dad getting sloshed among the
fake legs with Bennie Delmonico at Prosthetics World.

Using
the Mold-A-Hero, I cast Mrs. H. a plastic Lafayette, and she said
she'd keep it forever on her sill. Within a week, she'd given it to
Elizabeth the Raccoon. I didn't mind. Raccoon, an only child like me,
had nothing. The Kletz brothers called her Raccoon for the bags she
had under her eyes from never sleeping. Her parents fought non-stop.
They fought over breakfast. They fought in the yard in their
underwear. At dusk they stood on their porch whacking each other with
lengths of weather stripping. Raccoon practically had spinal
curvature from spending so much time slumped over with misery. When
the Kletz brothers called her Raccoon, she indulged them by rubbing
her hands together ferally. The nickname was the most attention she'd
ever had. Sometimes she'd wish to be hit by a car so she could come
back as a true raccoon and track down the Kletzes and give them
rabies.