Saul stood mute as the doctor mouthed words at him, but none of it meant anything more than the foggy x-ray image on the backlighted board. He’d stopped listening. He only stared into this black and white picture that hazily hinted at the contents of his insides. Sure as shit, he thought. The cancer was back. The doctor’s drone followed him as he turned and walked through the double doors and back into the waiting room. Its lilt peaked at certain intervals, as the white-coated bastard tried to turn the old man’s attention back to treatment plans that could be tried, even as Saul continued on through the ruined bodies lingering there for permission to die and out into the adjacent waiting area for the ER. “Though at this stage, and with your history, I have to be honest—” the man said before Saul was out on the sidewalk, in front of the emergency entrance, with his foot wedged against the door to prevent the doctor from following. The doctor continued, as though he hadn’t realized he’d been trapped inside his own hospital. But through the glass, it was just a murmur. Saul lit a cigarette, half intended to piss off Doctor Death, and half because he hadn’t had one since just before he’d arrived for his appointment hours ago, and it was damn well time to burn some stress.
He dragged hard and exhaled the fog out into the daylight. He watched it rise slowly, a loose cumulus, to the roof, over the ambulance drive-in, where it spilled out across the breadth of the awning, like a drink poured out upside down, before it swept out and joined the ruined world beyond the confines of his tragedy. He chuckled at his pity for himself and dragged again as he moved away from the door. The white coat on the other side of it had disappeared with its recommendations and concerns, and a gurney was coming, pushed by two EMTs with bloodied uniforms, one of them with reddened rubber gloves still on. He looked on as they rolled it by, a man strapped to it with three bands, shoulders, thighs, and ankles, moaning curses, as the EMT with the gloves held a small clump of reddened rags over an oozing wound in the man’s chest. Blood dripped from the gurney and left a trail that followed them all the way inside. Things could always be worse, Saul thought, as he stared into the drops nearest him. One looked like a sunburst, one like a bird, and one like a profiled face with a long beard. And he thought of Abraham.
He’d always thought of him as the kid he’d never had, and it was true, there was a kind of kinship between them, an understanding, maybe even a friendship. But even as a kid, Abraham had seemed hollow somehow. He spoke passionlessly, always, as if whatever he was talking about didn’t really matter or might not be true, as if everything he said, even about himself, was quoted from somewhere else or bore some dry irony Saul wasn’t in on. His gaze always fell flat, his eyes cold and staring, like the glass ones they stick in a ventriloquist’s dummy. He was a cypher, like those military codes he’d heard about, the ones that are only there, only transmitted at all, so that they could throw off enemy intelligence. Underneath there was nothing. He was a ringer, a drone, a sad mud-monster like he’d heard about as a child, a golem. He was capable of anything, but he was a depthless doll. “What’s sadder than that?” Saul asked himself, not realizing he said it aloud.
An ancient man not far from him, whose trembling right hand held a cigarette to a hole in his throat, as the left fiddled with the tubes that leashed his face to an oxygen tank strapped into some kind of wheeled apparatus responded, his voice demonic, “Not much. Some guys have all the luck.” The man laughed, as though not to would have been beyond his control. He laughed in trembling sputters and rattling wheezes and then just broke into coughs and gasps. Then his eyes grew serious. They were wet and rimmed in red, and dark greasy bags hung under them like wads of filthy dough.
Saul locked eyes with the man, then flicked his smoked-out butt at him. “Fuck off,” he said, holding his gaze for a few seconds more before walking off.
“Some guys have all the luck,” the man croaked again after Saul when he’d finally caught his breath. Saul got to his car and put his head on the steering wheel. Another ambulance pulled in noiselessly. It stopped and Saul watched as two men in uniforms unloaded a dead man. Dusk was settling in and it began to rain.
A fetid yellow ice-cream truck crunched into the gravel and idled outside the fenced microwave tower, about a mile outside of Cisco, Illinois. Aside from the few glaring grain bins in the distance, and the winking cyclopean eye of the elevator at the Coop in town, the buzzing tower was the only vertical sign of human progress in the broad labyrinth of grains, beans, and stands of trees, black roads cutting a skewed crosshatch into the countryside.
“Babel,” Abraham Jacobsen said to himself as he killed the engine and climbed down from the driver-side. From within the truck, some ranting nonsense roared out the cracked window. Abraham opened the passenger-side, rolled up the window, grabbed a small wooden guitar, and slammed the door shut. The sound persisted. “No-no!” he barked, banging his fist on the side of the vehicle. The sound quit. Abraham lit a cigarette, sat on the crooked back bumper, tinkered the guitar into tune, and looked up. A large dark bird rode the wind down from the tower, its wings pumping and stretching out as it landed by the road.
Abraham caught himself thinking for a moment how different his life would be if he could fly, stopping only to perch briefly in the high places. But if such a fiction were truth, he thought, he would almost certainly be finding himself where he was now, stuck on top of the tower instead of at its foot. He was a flightless bird. This life was his life, and even if it were different, it would still be very much the same. He strummed the open chord. “Vanity, vanity,” he said. “Vain-tee, vain-tee,” a voice echoed from inside the ice-cream truck. Abraham peered out into the black, beyond the fading yellow that burned from the top of the lamppost above the truck and gave in to the darkness after a hundred feet or so, just past the bobbing shadow-dance of the black bird digging into something dead in the gravel. The roar of nonsense began again. He sighed a plume of smoke and closed his eyes.
Abraham was born early, feet first, five months after his mother had discovered she was pregnant, and by that time his father was already dead and, moments later, so was the spindly, twisted sibling with whom he’d shared his mother’s womb. Abraham was early for everything. Spoke sentences by the seventh month, was walking by the ninth, and just after his first birthday, he’d begun to put on little plays for his mother. He was labeled a “child prodigy” after his mother discovered him sitting in bed with his crippled great-grandfather, the ancient man’s head pillowed by Abraham’s legs, the infant reading to him from the book of Job in a large-print King James Bible balanced atop the broad side of the old man’s head.
His mother showed him off to friends in her parish in Oxford, and before long, at the suggestion of the Father Appleby, she found young Abraham a tutor, Randolph Stevens, PhD, a fellow parishioner who had quit his university job to make his mother’s last few years easier on her. When the boy was seven, the tutor gave up. “I don’t know what else to do with him,” Dr. Stevens had said. And then, half-jokingly, “I suggest you find him an agent.”
Abraham’s mind was a warehouse of diverse gifts, but the one act that stuck was as easy for Abraham to carry off as it was for him to count backwards in multiples of seven or recite pi to a hundred digits beyond the decimal or rehearse the birth and death dates of every American president. His mother encouraged him to read the Bible, and he took to the practice of reading to his mother, grandmother, or, if no one else was to be found, his decrepit great-grandfather. He soon discovered that the text itself had become a superfluous prop. This became the root of Abraham’s act; the plays he had performed as an infant transformed into off-the-cuff recitations of portions of Exodus, Leviticus, Chronicles, or whatever. The act only became popular when Saul, the agent Abraham’s mother had secured, failing to catch Dr. Stevens’ tone, suggested a certain dramatic flair and began testing show names in each of the boy’s performances. As The Young Rabbi, Abraham dressed the part and took requests or challenges for entire chapters, sometimes entire books, of holy writ. He once performed a stirringly naive rendition of the Book of Revelation under the name The Little Revelator. This sort of thing proved to be impressive in the abstract but boring in the concrete; after an hour or so, even the pious were leaving for the restroom and not coming back.
Saul finally struck gold, after numerous such attempts, with The Dyslexic Jew. This was a novelty act that played well in the Bible Belt, but one with a “human element,” as Saul put it: “They’ll be amazed by you, but they’ll also pity you and feel better than you, all at the same time!” He was banking on the undercurrent of anti-Semitism that he felt had always been stitched into the curious attraction in the run-of-the-mill evangelical imagination to the first children of Father Abraham.
And this was Saul’s armchair definition of dyslexia: whatever Abraham said or recited, he had to do it backwards. Saul had a tailor friend make a Hasidic costume, and Saul himself manufactured a number of tattered scrolls, scrawled with gibberish, for Abraham to carry around in a converted golf bag, a quiver of swollen, blunted arrows. Saul became convinced that the “dyslexic aspect” required everything Abraham said, did, and wore to be backwards. So, by the time of his performance on “The Tonight Show” when Abraham was seventeen, his clothes were on backwards; he walked backwards; and he shook hands using a trick that one of Saul’s contortionist acts, Bob Bend, had taught him, wrenching his elbow around like a loose hinge. But after the biggest moment of both of their careers, Saul found himself still waiting for his protégé in the car hours after Mr. Carson himself had hailed a cab. Something sank and stuck in Saul’s gut, reached up and gripped his throat, as he realized that he would have to pay the boy’s mom a visit to explain how he had lost her son. He stabbed cigarette number ten into the cup-holder.
Abraham had disappeared himself. But as much as he had tried to cut loose from his life, it bore the black shadow of his act, as though he had been typecast for the role he was playing in the real world. He settled. He married, had a kid, bought a house, and tried to live a normal life, built upon the scaffolding of carefully constructed fictions about his age, his past, his childhood, and his family. He worked as a file clerk in a nondescript, low-ceilinged ad agency under the alias Jacob Abrams.
Whatever troubles lay simmering under the surface came to a boil when his boy was seven or eight. One afternoon, the boy found a little manila envelope with a number of photographs inside hidden behind some books on a high shelf. Struck by an impulse thirsty for fire, the boy, after carefully looking through the contents, took them to the bathtub and carefully held them to matches, one by one, as his mother pinned laundry to the line strung in the backyard. He crouched next to the tub, watching the images shrink, crinkle, and curl. He gazed dumbly at the smooth cursive words from a black indelible marker, “Loved your bit, Johnny,” on a picture of a man with a turban and an Alfred E. Neuman face, standing on a stage next to a tall boy with a false beard and a black hat and his clothes on backwards, and the boy’s eyes fluttered when those words ignited and blazed across the rest of the photo, as though the note had been written in gasoline.
The boy stood mute as Abraham lectured him on right and wrong, on justice and mercy and vengeance, on darkness and light, and, though the mother protested and threatened, the boy stood silently crying as Abraham took up his son’s treasured possession, a hamster, explained his purpose, and wrung the furry little thing like a dirty rag. As he dropped it on the floor between the mother and child, he muttered, “This is what you’ve done.” The mother came at him, but he knocked her down with one blow. And he went off to pack a bag and catch a bus.
There are only rumors, echoes really, of what happened to him during his time in the ether. What the real contents were of the years between the murder of the hamster and his phone call to Saul is a mystery. Bob Bend thought he saw a gaunt version of him on the streets, begging change with a hat and a guitar in Vancouver, but he had disappeared into a train station before the contortionist could unwind himself and catch up. Harry the Great swore he saw him for a moment in the middle of a chalked outline at a crime scene he happened by in Baltimore. The cops had traced the oozed circle of dark blood around him, such that, when they bagged the body, about the time Harry got there, the sketch left behind looked like a pregnant gingerbread man. And someone saw him with a needle in his arm in a back booth in dark bar in Iowa, and another was just shy of certain that he was working fields in California. Others spied him as a clown in a firefighter gag at some state fair, or maybe in a bare-knuckles prizefight in a barn in Kentucky, and so forth, on down to the one who was pretty sure the dancing preacher, entwined in rattlers, in a tongue-speaking church in Georgia was “the Jew.” Wherever he’d been, when he limped into Saul’s office two weeks after the phone call, he looked like a bent, rumpled, graying original of the parody he had once played as a child performer: faded black shirt under a threadbare black sport coat, crumpled black fedora, a salt-and-pepper beard down past his shirt-pockets—the hollow look of a wounded prophet. Saul saw opportunity.
“Great Tales from the Bible!” would be the name of the new act, Saul said. “Wait here. I gotta make some calls and see what pans out.”
Abraham fell asleep in the old man’s office. When he awoke, three clown dwarves were staring at him, leaning in to inspect him more closely. One of them, who was rasping gruffly to the others in what sounded like Italian, had a bent, thumb-like index finger extended towards the scar on Abraham’s throat and was about to poke him. The contorted little clown dropped his arm when Saul emerged from a back room, picked up a call he’d put on hold, and said to the party on the other end, “Three hundred is the offer. Who else are you going to sell it to?” He paused as a voice chirped from the earpiece. “I understand that, but that’s as high as I can go. What’re you gonna use it for now?” Saul clapped a hand over the phone, “Pederasts,” he said, as though he’d been dealing with them all day. Pause. “Alrighty, then, it’s a deal.”
Saul hung up the phone triumphantly and asked Abraham if he wanted to go for a drive. The dwarves looked quizzically at Saul. Saul pointed to the clock on the wall. “We’ll be back when the long hand goes one time around,” he enunciated, jabbing his finger at the face of the clock.
“Go one time round,” one of the dwarves repeated matter-of-factly.
“That’s right,” Saul said with a cigarette in his mouth. He lit it. “Now you boys be good.”
Saul took Abraham to pick up his “touring bus.” They arrived at a dusty trailer parked, forever, on top of a makeshift foundation of cinderblocks and two-by-fours. A paunchy man in a soiled white tank-top pleaded with Saul in twangy whispers that leaked out through a wispy brown mustache. The man wrung his hands at certain intervals when his whisper became emphatic, after which he would cross his arms as though to comfort himself, and then look back to where Abraham was smoking at the picnic table, in front of the trailer, to ensure that he couldn’t hear the details of the conversation. Abraham watched as this sequence repeated three or four times: whisper, whimper, hand-wringing, self-hugging, nervous glance, as Saul kept saying, “A deal’s a deal” and “That’s not my problem” and “Damn it, we’re already here!” The man’s tangled grey poodle sat in the dirt driveway between them, inclining its snub-snouted Lenin-like face towards whoever was speaking. Finally, the man tearfully relented and took Saul’s three hundred dollars, signed over the title, and gave him a set of keys.
“It’s in the back,” the man whined. He gestured with a thumb and stared off at a blank white billboard across the street. The Russian dog stood at his feet and barked at nothing.
Saul explained that the man had been an ice-cream man for twenty years and was having a hard time letting go of that life. He was some kind of pedophile, and the law had finally caught up to him and sent him away for a while. Now, the ice-cream man was out on parole, but to ply his trade in the ice-cream-man business would be a major parole violation, given that his clientele would be predominantly under the age of eighteen.
“All that to say,” Saul summed up cheerfully, “son, I got you a touring bus for a steal!”
Saul pointed here and there in the back of the truck, impressed at the “roominess” of the ice-chests: “Space for costumes. Bolt a fold-up cot to the wall over here, a hot plate over there. This is it!”
Abraham started the ice-cream truck after pumping the pedal a couple of times, and after the thing coughed and chugged out rich white smoke for a few minutes, he followed his agent back past where the ice-cream man stood by the trailer, still whimpering into the void, little Lenin curled in the dirt, licking neuter scars. The entertainers drove back through town to the office where the dwarves were waiting for them.
When Saul ushered Abraham through the door, the dwarves stood, one of them barking complaints that Abraham could not understand, waving his pretzel hand at the clock. Another simply queried, “One time round?” Saul issued apologies, smoothed their feathers down. He was a professional.
“Abraham, these fine fellows will be your troupe,” he said.
Abraham studied the dwarves. He had worked with dwarves some in the past and knew their versatility and history in the business. Saul had taken on these particular dwarves as clients when they had lost their jobs in mainstream circuses due to recent shifts in middle-class consciousness that had turned toward pitying their “handicap,” robbing from them their livelihood and the opportunity to practice the arts to which they had dedicated their lives.
The dwarves could sense that Saul was going to make the necessary introductions, and, accordingly, for the sake of propriety, they began to remove their clown wigs and false noses and ears, leaving their makeup without the other accoutrements of their characters. The one with the sad-clown getup smiled within a painted frown, whereas another stood deadpan, though his makeup smiled against his will. The third, with somewhat maniacal painted-on features, a mouth smeared like an open wound and thick, angry black checkmarks for eyebrows, shrugged at Saul and said again, “One time round?”
Saul introduced them. Since the trio was Italian, Saul had given them names that seemed to him Italian-sounding names, but that also seemed to capture their essences, so he wouldn’t mix them up. Eco, with the crazy clown paint, was an even-tempered man of an indeterminate age. He had attempted to learn English, though his method of scholarship had simply been to repeat the words he heard people say. He looked about like anyone else, just smaller, as if he had stopped growing at the age of four or five but continued aging. Grotto’s appearance bore some of the more extreme signs of dwarfism, and he seemed altogether twisted up. He was older than the other two and quite slow but was never any trouble. Saul had named him according to his tendency to let his mouth gape when he wasn’t speaking, and he almost never spoke. Even as Saul introduced him, Grotto’s painted mouth hung open, a slack cave. The most irritable and vociferous of the three men was No-no. He babbled a gravelly rumble of Italian most of the time. No-no seemed to be the spokesperson of the group, which was, perhaps, unfortunate, because he spoke no English. Saul remarked that he was almost certain the man was capable of speaking and understanding the language perfectly well but refused to because he enjoyed the idiotic ways in which people attempted to communicate with him. No-no was an angry drunk and something of an alcoholic. He’d once crippled a sideshow giant in a bar scuffle over a gypsy fortune-teller by dragging a hunting knife across his Achilles tendon and then stabbing the balled-up calf muscle where it had nested behind the giant’s knee. “Loyal but merciless,” Saul said of him.
Abraham gazed at these bonsai pretenders. He fingered his coat pocket for a cigarette, lit it as he glanced at the wall, and told them with vacant ceremoniousness that he would be honored to work with them. Each reciprocated with a nod or grunt.
Over the next couple of days, Saul helped his “prodigal son,” as he called Abraham, and the troupe of dwarves, gather the necessary accommodations for their travels, trim out the ice-cream truck, and work through the generalities of what the productions would entail. Then, while Abraham wrote loose scripts at a typewriter in the back room, Saul spent a whole day making calls to churches, camps, private schools, Bible colleges, small-town theaters, community groups, and even a few church-affiliated universities, and by the end of the day, he had gigs for “Great Tales from the Bible!” for the next six months.
“I can make one more call if you like,” Saul said to Abraham as they prepared the bus for embarking on an all-night drive south. “Your mom still lives around here. I’m sure by this time she thinks you’re dead. She’d be glad for a resurrection.”
“We’re both better off. A prophet and his home, and all that.” Abraham turned to load a garbage bag stuffed with wigs. “Time is a cure for distance,” he said, but Saul had gone back to the office and had not heard.
“Great Tales from the Bible!” proved to be a success. Nothing to the degree of “The Dyslexic Jew,” but it was steady work, enough to keep fresh oil in the ice-cream truck and enough that Abraham and the dwarves hadn’t needed to stop anywhere more than two weeks in the past two-and-a-half years. They had done dramatic versions of any tale from the Bible that had drama to be squeezed from it. Audiences seemed especially sucked into the stories Abraham had tried as jokes and knew were shit. No-no had recently played leads in “Post-Tumble Sampson” and “Lazarus Wakes.” As Sampson, he struggled, cried out, and died over a half-hour narration from Abraham’s guard. As Lazarus, No-no simply lay in the grave, trying not to fall asleep, as Abraham and Eco (as “child”) paced around weeping loudly and filling in the details. These Christians really are artless suckers, Abraham thought, but a shepherd to his flock is as a master to his slave, and the other way around. Each has his role to play. Each, in a way, needs the other, in order to become what he truly is. It’s playground wisdom. Nobody plays follow the leader alone.
Cisco, Illinois, would be no different. As the sun rose, Abraham drank some coffee by the fence, smoked a couple cigarettes, strummed a little on the beat-up guitar, and watched as the dwarves emerged and stretched in the cool morning sunlight. “Good morning,” he said, and each of his brothers responded in ways he’d become accustomed to: one with a nod, one with a grunt, and one with a kindly, “Morning.” Abraham explained the day’s performance, Babel, which they would play at the Methodist Church in town. Eco sat up front as they drove, which Abraham preferred, since the little man had a way of repeating what he said to him back in a broken-down form that made it seem like some vague prophecy.
The little man pointed to his wrist.
“We’ll be on time. Don’t worry,” Abraham said. He thought for a moment and continued, “You know, maybe this life is God’s crucifixion of time and place. Maybe that’s what Jesus is supposed to be.”
Eco silently stared out the half-opened window, at the mazing rows of corn on the plain, as the cool air whispered into the truck and eddied the long, thin, straw-colored hair atop his head into a little tongue of fire that leapt up and down.
The Babel-themed drama went just as planned. That is, right up until the end. After the close of the play, it was a matter of course to turn things back over to whoever was in charge: the head of the ladies’ group, the lead camp counselor, the alpha male at the men’s breakfast, or as in this case, the pastor. There was often a chance, particularly if pastors closed out, for an altar call, a “love offering,” or an opportunity for parishioners to share their own stories of God’s faithfulness, or other such bullshit. So, this time, as with all of the others, when the pastor took over, Abraham stood at the front of the sanctuary with his troupe. He smiled a practiced smile, one designed to come off as meek, without turning the corner to unctuous, hoping for the “love offering.” He got an altar call.
As a few weary souls made their way down the worn strips of carpet that led to the altar, Abraham and the dwarves stood and tried, then, to look pleasant, though not so pleasant that someone would pull them into whatever pathetic crisis had urged them there. As the recommitted faithful trickled back to their pews, Abraham noticed one young woman remaining. She mumbled in an audible baritone, her hands clasped tightly, her neck bent, her face crushed into her double-fisted hands, as she rocked her body back and forth. Abraham looked out at the gathered townsfolk and discovered mostly patient gazes, the kinds of gazes people have formed over time, when they have become accustomed to something that might otherwise be out of place. Then his gaze met with a pair of cold, hard eyes.
“She’s a retard,” the boy with the eyes said. And then, as the boy contorted his face and mimed what physical abnormalities he thought accompanied “a retard,” he added, “Duhh! Ugh, ugh.”
An old man made his way over and scolded the boy in an angry whisper.
“She don’t pray,” the boy said. “She don’t even talk!”
Then he was marched out.
Abraham looked around nervously, and, to wrench the tension a turn more, he realized that the girl was clumsily making her way toward the altar space, behind which he and the dwarves were standing. Someone stopped her on the way and gently recommended that she go sit down, but the girl mumbled and ran toward Abraham, sliding on her knees the last couple of feet, as she took her place at the altar in front of the performers. “Shit,” Abraham sighed under his breath. The girl removed her thick, black-rimmed glasses and gestured with her hand at Abraham. He hesitated, but then bent to listen when she clutched his sleeve and thrust her hand into his. Eco leaned in to hear the conversation. The girl mumbled on interminably, it must have been a matter of minutes, while Abraham nodded and said, “Uh huh” and “Mm hmm.” Then she released him.
The faces of all in the congregation were fixed on Abraham. He stared back. What did they want from him? He had not an inkling of what she thought she had conveyed through her grunts, mums, and buhs. Then, noticing Eco, she grabbed him and mumbled into his ear, laughed, and released him. The faces turned collectively to Eco, and there was silence while the girl mumbled and giggled at the altar.
Then Eco recited aloud in his pleasant, old-man-child voice, “Life is crucifixion of time and place. This Jesus is.”
Eco smiled at the girl, cleared his throat, and led the other two dwarves backstage. A woman from the congregation stood and came forward, weeping, holding a tissue over her mouth to muffle her bleating sobs. Abraham watched a number of women gather around the altar, sniffles and horrible joyful moans rising from the lot. A few glassy-eyed men kept their vigils in pews. One of them honked loudly into a handkerchief. The pastor shook Abraham’s hand, grabbing his arm just above the elbow, then just gave him a full hug, which Abraham confusedly reciprocated with a pat on the man’s back when, after a generous three-count, he thought the hug needed to be murdered.
“You just have to be one of us to understand,” the pastor whispered, as he slipped a check into the prophet’s hand and started whimpering to himself in a high whine.
Abraham rallied his men, quickly packed the ice-cream truck, and departed. He parked at the rest stop off of I72, a couple miles outside of the limits of the township. He dialed a number at the payphone, lighting a cigarette as he waited for an answer.
“Saul,” he said as a swirl of smoke trailed from his lips. “Where to next?”