by Robert Johnson.
“Sumerians,” he answered when Katie queried the kid, walking with him to the post box at block’s end and in response to Katie’s request “Who’s on, today?” This was a warm July afternoon before Internets and social media, so the kid sent off all his queries by snail mail, stamps licked and palmed onto the envelope. Hefty envelopes, too, they were, salvaged, apparently, from a box of oddments the boy’s father had brought home from his last indoor job.
Katie and the kid met at the neighborhood library’s research section, where Katie shelved books and answered questions as a summer job, between heaves in her chasing a degree at the state university. The Kennedy assassination, all its attendant gut-wrenching and national political circus not far distant yet in time, a longtime boyfriend lost, Katie found working in the library comforting, even if afternoons were hypnagogic—a word she heard used by the kid.
When Katie first had walked past the boy’s table, her eye had been caught by the array of references laid out and from which the lad, apparently, was taking notes. Arcane texts. Even the encyclopedia volumes, esoteric—Eliade and the like, she noticed. No Americana or Collier’s volumes to be seen. Katie stood watching for a moment as the kid scribbled away, churning orderly rows of data into a legal tablet, and then she rolled on.
In following days, though, Katie would make a point of pausing when she pushed her trolley by, laden with volumes on the way back to their proper shelves and thus arm-wearying to shove across the old, worn, library rugs, product of Depression-era largesse of local patrons. On the wall was a mural painted, she had been told, in conjunction with the rugs’ arrival and featuring shirt-sleeved American workers banding together to sweat their marvelous country back from the brink.
The kid took recorded data in tiny, carefully wrought print, a text “worthy of engineers,” Katie told friends. Eventually, she and the boy, an eighth-grader, too became friends. She actually grew protective about the weird little kid. And though trying not to push too hard, over a series of brief conversations Katie got the boy to reveal his business.
No, he was not “working up a paper for class.” His “project” was “personal.” Katie asked what, and the boy told her, shooting glances around the room, “Well, I guess . . . chasing a dog’s tail.”
The last was, Katie learned eventually—the kid was quite bright—a pun. The boy was researching stories of God—actually gods—from all over the world. Then, in an epic of postal fury, he was trying to make contact, he eventually revealed . . . find out “who was really who.” He was “sorting pretenders from the powerful,” he confided.
“By mail?” Katie asked the kid, sliding into a chair next to him, on the day of the revelation. “Can’t mail, I mean, well . . . get lost?”
“It’s a trick,” the boy confessed, with a grin, leveling his glasses on his nose.
“I’ll bite,” Katie replied.
More glances about him. Then the boy added, “A test of omnipotence.”
Katie tried to look solemn. “Oh,” she asked, “how’s that work?”
“Simple,” the kid argued. “I am making my way through a list, charting backgrounds—you know, powers, abilities, claims of followers, evidence of presence . . . the whole inventory.”
“And . . . ?” Katie offered, trying to keep a straight face.
“I use the post,” the boy said, “simply because any real god will see it coming and intervene. False ones will not, and the letter will be lost, along with all the letters to Santa, Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, and the like.”
Katie sat stunned.
“Sometimes,” the kid added, “lost letters are burned, and that gives me a second shot.”
Katie looked attentive.
“Remember the Greeks?” the kid asked.
Katie nodded.
“Well, they burned cattle as sacrifices, you’ll recall,” the boy explained, “and the rising smoke was thought to attract the gods’ curiosity.”
Katie was amazed.
“The hard part is the typing,” the kid went on. “Takes forever. But I have worked up a standard letter into which I plug individual bits of data to make it personal. Any god worth his, or her, salt will spot the ruse. But that’s the point.”
Katie’s mind leaped to a lecture she had heard at school about the growing power of computers, their abilities to take a set pattern, repeat it indefinitely. Maybe the kid wasn’t crazy, she registered . . . he just was ahead of his times.
“So . . . you type up letters to gods . . . send them off by post . . . figuring, what? A real god will see it coming . . . and . . .”
“Intervene,” the kid finished, retrieving his earlier vocabulary.
“Like magic,” Katie offered.
“Precisely,” the kid summed. “It’s what gods do . . . magic.”
“Lightning and thunder,” Katie offered.
“No,” the boy replied, sounding a bit as if losing patience. “I was thinking more like poof. Spotted in the mail trail, and gone.”
“But how will you know?” Katie asked.
The boy leaned to Katie, offered a smile, told her, “I have included a question I want answered.”
Katie considered a moment, added, “But, wait . . . any real god would be prescient . . . see the letter coming before you wrote it . . . know what you want even as you wanted it. So the letter would not be needed, right? You can’t trick gods!”
Here, the kid nodded happily, though, told her, “That is the whole deal. You got it. That’s what I meant by ‘worth his or her salt.’ You’re not as thick as you look.”
Once more, Katie was stunned. Couldn’t quite grasp with what she had engaged—innocence or mania. Maybe the boy just needed counseling, or a hobby. “So,” she offered the kid in sum, “what you’re doing is setting a kind of trap. Tempting God’s curiosity?”
The boy smiled once more.
Katie sat a moment. She shifted around a couple books on the table, waved at the head librarian, who sat staring from her desk. “Why don’t you just talk to God somehow,” Katie finally asked, allowing her voice to soften, to sound friendly, and recalling a spiritual she had heard on the radio in her car. “Wouldn’t that be easier than all this research . . . and the typing? You even own a typewriter?”
“Naw . . . I use the typing room downstairs,” the boy said. “Two bits an hour. All slick new electrics. Ca-chunk . . . ca-chunk . . . I love the sound. And the research, well, that’s my commitment, my devotion . . . all the great mystics had their practices.”
And so, as Katie marched along beside the kid, down to the corner post box, on that warm July afternoon, her mind swirled with the boy’s pursuit of divinity by logical ambush.
“Which actual Sumerian are you after today?” she asked, realizing the kid was in better shape than was she and had set a pace that would tire immensely, should their jaunt extend past the corner.
“An,” the kid said.
“’An’ what?” Katie asked.
The kid stopped abruptly. He looked up and instructed, “Let’s not do vaudeville—it’s the great Sumerian sky power An, or sometimes Anu. Predecessor of Marduk. You know, Gilgamesh . . . all of that flooding and so forth?”
Katie recalled, though vaguely, something in a humanities lecture at school. “Oh, sure, that An,” she lied.
The kid stared, then turned and restarted his march to the post box, Katie now slightly behind.
Trying to re-establish some trust, and simply slow the boy down, for that matter, Katie offered, “Lemme ask you this.”
The kid stopped, looked up.
“Why not try simpler targets?”
“Like?” the kid asked.
“You know, Jewish . . . Christian . . . maybe Lord Buddha. Folks more along your own, say, cultural street,” she qualified, hoping for a joke as she gestured down the hill toward the box, and recalled a recent news story about the rebirth of Buddhism in the US.
“The first two I tried. No response,” the kid said. “No sense of connection. Maybe they’re just too busy. The third is not a god at all, of course, just a teacher. He was actually sort of like me, you know. He tried all the available paths of his day, gave up and invented his own. Born massively rich, he died poor, you know. Gave up everything, for just a touch at the truth. Probably died of a stomach infection. Much to be admired, of course. But not what I am after.”
The boy did not immediately move on,
so Katie took advantage, caught an extra breath by posing another
question. “And what are you after, anyway—when will you know?
The boy went inside someplace,
Katie registered. “Answers that do not
sound like they came from people,” the kid finally replied, absolutely solemn. “My whole life, people have been telling what
I am supposed to believe, to trust, to admire.
And everybody’s got a version.”
“Do tell,” Katie returned.
“Well, it’s simple . . . people make up all the stories they need just so that they can justify their own lives, place their mistakes in boxes . . . put them on shelves. Otherwise, how could they live with themselves. I don’t want any more of that,” the kid summed. “I want the real deal. Something I know wasn’t born of humans.”
Thinking back to her own parents’ struggles, their fighting, their throwing things at each other in the kitchen, Katie again stood dumb. The kid, despite his age, seemed so much more adult than, of late, felt she.
“You get my drift?” the boy asked. Now he did spin and returned to his march down the hill.
“But wait a minute,” Katie demanded. The kid stopped, looked her way, and Katie asked, “How many of these gods, so far, have replied . . . even if only flickers?”
Looking and marching straight forward but somehow tossing his voice over a shoulder ahead of her, he said, “None.”
The abruptness of the reply was like a blow. Katie’s knees buckled as she followed, almost pitching her headlong into the sidewalk. Striding back into balance, she wanted to reach out, offer the kid some comfort, but the boy didn’t break pace. When Katie again was parallel, she saw that the kid, though, did not look appreciably crestfallen. If anything, he seemed more secure. Seemed to take strength from his statement.
At a loss, Katie asked, softly, not wanting to sound judgmental, feeling her words fall into cadence with her stride, “Then why . . . do you . . . go on?”
The kid laughed in return and stepped up to the post box, to which they now had arrived. “Well,” he said, as he popped the letter into the waiting slot, “it’s all downhill really.” Again the grin.
Katie turned and looked up at the stretch they just had descended, front of the library’s entrance barely visible around a stand of bushes at the hill’s far crest.
“As I told you, way back,” the kid said, “the typing . . . the asking . . . it’s my practice. It’s what I do.”
Katie’s mind billowed into memories from recent times and the implacable power with which her family had fallen apart in the wake of her parents’ divorce. The petty squabbles about who got what, her current basement quarters offering but temporary bastion against the loss of place in her father and mother’s lives, as in the world. Her newly rented apartment, she realized, never would feel like any kind of a home.
Her mental clouds, however, abruptly parted with the blare of the horn on a rattle-bang pick-up that just had jerked to a stop at the curb next to the boy and her. Heavy on its ancient suspension, the truck lurched forward and then back as its brakes grabbed, front wheels offering a brief chirp as they scraped against the up-curled, concrete lip of the street.
The boy looked over through the front screen, and back at Katie. “It’s my father,” he identified. “I need to leave.”
“See you next time?” Katie asked, as the boy stepped toward the dilapidated vehicle.
The kid paused in the street while reaching for the near door’s handle, “I’m not sure,” he answered, then turned to pull.
“Really?” Katie replied, surprised.
“Yeah,” the kid told her. “my father . . .”
Here, the man inside laid a palm heavily upon the horn, held it for a moment, staring straight ahead, as if the kid still were on the curb.
The boy looked inside, then back at Katie, told her, “My father’s work has died down again. We are moving to his family’s land, over in . . .” And here, the horn once more, though Katie thought she read from lip cues the name of a rural town an hour or so across the nearby state line.
“They don’t have a library,” the boy continued, as he finally jerked back on the passenger door.
Katie could not figure why but she suddenly was feeling really sad.
The boy’s expression, however, had not changed.
“They have a post office, at least?” she asked the kid.
The boy was climbing in now, and the man inside had reached across, grabbed him by his shoulder, and was dragging him. Then, as the man leaned over the boy, who had his note pad pressed against his chest, and latched onto the door to yank it closed, Katie thought she heard the kid shout “I think so.”
The lad fully inside and door secured, the man glared at his son and at Katie, ground the truck’s transmission into reverse, and the vehicle reared back from the curb and into mid-street. The driver revved the engine twice, grabbed another gear, and like a drunk falling into his bearing the truck lurched down the road, settling on its old and wearied springs. The back of the thing clattered with an assortment of shovels, rakes, hoses, a small wheelbarrow lashed down over the bunch with a rope. Out the truck’s rear window, Katie saw the back of the kid’s hand rise, offer a wave, then fall.
Next, came quiet. The sky hung hot and dead as the pavement. Even time seemed to seize as she watched the truck shake into the distance. A moment passed. Two. But then, out of who knows where, a wave of a breeze rushed past Katie, and out of the corner of her eye she caught a brief flicker of reflected light. Katie looked down and saw a small white wedge in the mouth of the post box.
The boy’s letter, evidently, had not fallen fully into the container’s maw.
A moment more passed. “What are the odds?” she asked herself, lifting her eyes and again glancing down the street in the direction the boy had disappeared.
Katie reached out and with the flip of a finger knocked the letter home. Shaking her head, she turned and walked slowly back up the hill.
Oddly enough, she realized, though, stepping into the climb, she never heard the letter hit bottom.
Just a flip . . . a silence, and poof, it was gone.