BLOOM’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
FUCK ,” 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.
···
THE 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.
LUCIFER 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.
YOU 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.
WHAT 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.
AND 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.
He opened a dusty old prayer book, and turned to the evening service.
“Forgive us, our Father, for we have erred. Pardon us, our King, for we have willfully sinned.”
A droplet fell onto the page before him, and Bloom realized that he was crying.
“Blessed are you, O Lord, the Gracious One who pardons abundantly.”
FUCK,” said God.
Bloom’s apartment had been empty, and they were back in the car, heading across town.
“He could be anywhere,” said Death.
“I hate this goddamn city,” said Lucifer.
“Turn left here,” said God.
God knew where Bloom was. He was where they all went when they wanted to make His job more difficult than it had to be.
“Right here,” said God.“Pull over.”
Bloom gently closed his prayer book, kissed the cover and walked silently out to the lobby. He felt a new, keener sense of his place in the world, as if by sparing his body, God had reawakened his soul.
As Bloom pushed on the heavy synagogue door that led to the chaotic, Godless city beyond, he noticed a small shelf hanging humbly beside the doorway. The shelf was lined with a number of charity collection boxes—for children in Israel, for the poor, for the UJA.
Repentance, prayer and charity remove the evil of His decree.
Bloom reached into his pocket, and divided whatever money he had between them.
What was the value of money in the face of God’s eternal judgment?
The night was warm and muggy, but Bloom felt more alive than he had in years. He smiled, put his hands in his pockets and headed across the street.
He heard the squeal of tires behind him, but there wasn’t even time to turn around before the car slammed into his back, throwing him up in the air and into oncoming traffic. A taxicab coming the other way couldn’t stop, and hit Bloom a second time before his body finally crumpled to the ground.
Death checked out the back window.
“Got him,” he said.
Lucifer nodded.
“Got him.”
CIGARETTES?” asked Lucifer. “You’re going to tell me that cigarettes are a more efficient killer than tuberculosis?”
Death and Lucifer sat in God’s office, playing poker and sharing a bottle of wine.
“It’s not a question of efficiency,” said Death, “it’s a question of precision. You give one person TB, you give a thousand people TB. Then you spend the next hundred years rebirthing all the people who weren’t supposed to die in the first place. You’re just creating more work for yourself. I’m saying, you get your guy hooked on Camels, boom—you got yourself one dead guy. No fuss, no muss.”
“Yeah, but what about secondhand smoke?”
“You’re comparing a couple of accidental kills off secondhand smoke to a viral plague that wiped out half of Europe?”
“If you’re talking accuracy,” said Lucifer, “I’ll give you cigarettes over tuberculosis. But efficiency-wise—I’m talking bang for the buck—TB wins hands down. That’s my point.”
Death looked around.
“Where’s God, anyway?” he asked.
“At the funeral,” said Lucifer.
“He still goes to those?” asked Death.
Lucifer shrugged. “Full house,” he said, laying down his cards.
“Damn.”
FUCK,” said God.
The angels stood quietly at the back of the cemetery, their eyes locked nervously on the place where their feet would have been.
As Bloom’s body was lowered into the grave, the rabbi stood and prayed aloud:
“The Rock! Perfect in every way. Who can say to Him, “What have you done?” He rules above and below, brings death and resuscitates, brings down to the grave and rises up! God gave and God took away, Blessed is the name of Hashem!”
The angels sang, their sweet, melodic voices ascending as one.—Hallelu …”
“Not now,” said God.
Bloom’s mother began to weep.
God 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.