The Dilemma Faced by Nineteenth-Century Natural Theologians

Me, Sergei, and Maggot Arm Joe are gathering to go over our plans for what happens at Mr. Harry Fudge’s estate down in Orange County. Fudge has called us out there tonight at midnight for reasons I’m unclear about. We may be getting his list, but I’m not sure. He doesn’t like me and he’s taken to Sergei, so I’m on a need-to-know basis, I suppose. Before we head over there, we’re supposed to drop by the experimental clinic and Maggot Arm Joe is going, if everything’s on schedule, to get the wraps off his arm and be maggot-free for the first time in quite a while. They need to make sure that the maggots have cleaned out all of his dead flesh. If so, they’re coming out.

Then we need to kill some time somewhere before we head out to OC and see Harry Fudge.

Sergei puts on a pot of this black-as-tar Russian coffee he likes to force on us. Today, though, I might need some. It smells like oil burning off an engine as Sergei comes back to the living room.

That Mookie’s dead is starting to settle in on me as the three of us sit around Sergei’s glass table as he cuts three fat lines of crushed crystal meth. Just one line each, though they’re fat as index fingers. This is, as Sergei says, for fuel, not for fun; of course, he’s the only one of us who considers meth fun. Maggot Arm Joe’s a narcotic guy and I’m a drinker, but we don’t say anything. This is for fuel, this is for men who have business to attend to. I take two drinks and then start on water to stay in control for later.

I’m thinking about the last time I saw Mookie, down the alley while Sergei fucked up the cowboy. The last time I talked to him was when he said good-bye to me at the pier after he hooked me up with Bondo Bob Lopez, who’s still mad at Sergei for fucking up his bait bicycle. I’m trying to slow down my life, figure out when that was, exactly. It may have been only two days ago, but it feels like it could be a year. My life is dense as a Russian novel, full of names and people that I can’t keep any track or sense of.

I can’t snort anything with my nose the way it is, so I dump the meth in some gin and juice, just a little, swill it with a dirty finger, and swallow hard. It burns the back of my throat and Sergei hands me a box of snuff and a syringe full of ice water to cool the burn. I shoot the ice water up as far back on the throat as I can, then have him blow a hit of the snuff into the back of my throat. It makes a nice cooling and numbing paste.

Sergei takes the straw and does his line in one Texan snort. He shoots the ice water up his nose and does some of the snuff up his nose, the way you’re supposed to, the way guys who can breathe out of their noses do it.

I go quickly to the bathroom to take a couple of the Perco-dans. I can’t let Maggot Arm Joe see them. I know he’s trying to stay away from junk and Peres are pretty much a water flume to the pool of heroin.

I wash my face, try to clear some of the scabby blood away from the lips and my eyelid. My bad eye is swollen shut and full of pressure and looks big as a bloody walnut.

Mookie. Death is something I just can’t get around. It leaves me openmouthed and frightened. It sticks in me, pushing against my insides, and it doesn’t get small and it doesn’t dissolve. I think maybe someday I’ll be old enough or maybe wise enough or maybe plain and simply tired enough that it will just seem like everything’s okay, but that’s not what I’m feeling now.

Death is slippery and death is big and it sits on my chest and I can’t get a grip well enough to get it off of me. I dry what I can of my face, patting over the cuts gently, leaving pink blots on Sergei’s face towel, and go back out to the living room.

Maggot Arm Joe bends over to do his line. Sergei asks if I’m okay.

“I’m still processing the whole thing with Mookie,” I say.

“Mookie in better place, Nick Ray—don’t worry about Mookie—worry about Nick Ray.”

Maggot Arm Joe takes the syringe and shoots ice water up his nostril. “Better place—you believe that shit?”

“Not shit.” Sergei plugs one nostril and blows meth-laced snot into his hand and then rubs his gums with the snot. I look away for a second and my stomach tumbles. “Was not allowed by state to have God,” Sergei says. “My father had secret prayer meetings—men went to jail. This not shit.”

“We go to a better place?” Maggot Arm Joe says.

“We do,” Sergei says. “God make all and all good.”

“I just can’t believe you’re religious,” I say. “What about that cowboy?”

“Cowboy was evil—good fight evil.”

“You’re the good?” I say—I don’t mean to be nasty, but this has me kind of floored.

Sergei looks at me. “I do much good. And I repent for not good things. Everything is good.”

“Fuck, Sergei,” Maggot Arm Joe says. “You sound like a natural theologian.”

“Fuck you, Maggot man—I don’t call you names.”

“Not a name, man—it’s what you are. You believe everything is God’s work? That every sparrow’s wing is brushed with the hand of God and every grain of sand is counted, right?”

Sergei nods.

And Maggot Arm Joe tells us about these nineteenth-century theologians and how they were on a mission to prove that God was good and that there was a reason for all the pain and suffering of the world. Lions killed wildebeests, sure, but they killed them zippy quick, no suffering, and it prevented starvation and disease in the herd. There was a reason for all pain, all suffering, and all the evil that infected the earth was put there by people, they reasoned.

But they couldn’t come up with an argument for the so-called ichneumon fly, which was actually a composite creature representing the habits of a giant tribe of wasps: the ichneumonoidea.

Maggot Arm Joe says, “Dig—the females, they locate a host to house their eggs for larvae, right? Usually a caterpillar or a butterfly. And they convert that butterfly or caterpillar into a living food factory for their young. The mother paralyzes the host—she dumps hers eggs in it. The eggs gestate inside of the paralyzed host. Then, as they develop, the larvae eat the organs selectively so that host stays alive for as long as possible for them to eat off it. If they ate the heart or lungs, or whatever, the host would be dead—so they eat the fat cells and the digestive organs and leave the poor little butterfly alive.”

I make a face. “Man—that’s fierce.”

“What’s really fierce is that the victim is alive through all of this—while these things develop inside of it, eating it from the inside. Eventually—when they’re ready to hatch, they eat the heart and central nervous system.”

“So?” Sergei says.

“So, some things don’t fit. The nineteenth-century theologians couldn’t come up with any explanation why God would create the ichneumon wasp. Some shit is just pure ugly in this world and you can’t make it nice and go away. Mookie lived on the street. Mookie ate garbage and Mookie suffered. And he died. No lesson in it.” Maggot Arm Joe gets up and walks to the balcony, taking out a cigarette as he slides the door open. Sergei didn’t used to let us smoke in his condo, but now he lets us light up on the balcony. I walk out and bum a smoke off of him.

Sergei says from the couch, “Believe what you believe. But Mookie in better place.”

Maggot Arm Joe says, “Mookie got hit by a train and Mookie died. That’s all we know.”

My head hurts. My cuts are throbbing and dry and cracked and I feel something like a migraine coming on. I want to stop it all, these troublesome and problematic irreducible stories we tell one another to make it through our days. I want to shut out the world. I take a drag on the cigarette and look out off the balcony, past the harbor, past the oil islands, past the breakwater that I can’t see but know it’s there, and try to find Catalina, which you can see on a clear day. But today isn’t a clear day, so I try to find where it would be if I could see it.