1. You Remember Sitting Across from God
While you are being interrogated — there must be a hundred loud-voiced questioners — the room cold and nearly dark, you are told in no uncertain terms that God is in the room silently observing your behaviour, and you suddenly remember sitting across from God on another occasion. It was long ago and dissimilar from this interrogation. You seriously doubt God’s appearance this time and do not have complete faith in your remembering, not the seriousness of God’s existence. But the eyes now looking at you are beyond description, then and in memory, especially in memory, the colour not anything you’ve ever seen. You know, however, what they can do with contact lenses, and you’ve seen movies full of unexplainable eyes; furthermore, you’ve seen natural phenomena that defy sense and the ways of movies, even movies with incomparable special effects. You have dreamed of life-long fasts and exalted pilgrimages to the farthest, most remote areas of the world, then far into the Heavens, brought on by yearning for conversations with God. You have described your dreams as gut-wrenching, soul-stirring, thought-provoking, mind-expanding experiences, unsatisfied with your common, unexalted words. You try to think rationally, clearly, but you know that your dreams and your yearning affect your perceptions and beliefs.
“God,” you whisper, “provide me with a food to end my dream fasts.” You have never felt so isolated and desperate. You attempt to block out the voices of the interrogators, the extraneous, horrible voices.
“God,” you whisper even softer, “provide me with a destination to complete my dream journeys.” Your isolation and desperation, to your great sadness, are not alleviated. Your interrogators raise their voices, their mouths loudspeakers, their words obtuse but hard as concrete: “Answer us, answer us…” The concrete words make evasion and holiness difficult but not impossible.
You return to thoughts of God seated across from you, then you attempt to repeat what you had said and it makes no sense, not then, not now, as the interrogators speak louder. How is such loudness possible? you wonder. The room grows darker, darker than squeezing your eyes shut and pressing your hands over your eyelids. Is there such a darkness, darkness that erases the claims of modern science or a four-billion-year-old or older sun? Everyone in the cold interrogation room, except you, claims to be God, but you cannot see their eyes in the dark.
2. Exactitude Is for Suckers
“Exactitude is for suckers and physicists nearing retirement,” I hear a wild-bearded street preacher declaim on a centre-of-the-city street corner. Nearby a busker, a neat beard, strumming a guitar that once belonged to a former superstar, singing songs about loving outcasts and defying unfairness. It is starting to rain, a light drizzle, and the already thin crowd disperses, heading for a shopping spree in a close-by shopping mall.
I hear the busker sing a song from my past, when I still had dreams and ideals, so I sing along, forget I have obligations and errands: the funeral of someone illustrious to go to, then I need to pick up skim milk and something for a late-night snack, and I promised my dearest friend that later I would knock on as many doors as I could and warn about the end of something or the other.
The rain intensifies, the wild-bearded street preacher becoming wild-eyed, maybe annoyed about being upstaged, asking: “What will our age be remembered for? Bad television shows? Countless weapons? Inaccurate forecasts of the heart’s desires? Pimple creams? Headache remedies?”
Stabbed by inexactitude, I offer: “The history of the world should be written as to what we remember and what we forget, what we kill and what we pass over, what we love, what we hate, yes, and what we want and what gets thrown into our lives unwanted.”
The street preacher looks puzzled and the busker looks disappointed. I am standing still, neither preaching nor singing nor appearing frightened by the emptiness of the centre-of-the-city street corner.
The rain turns torrential and even the street preacher and busker flee down a side street slick with rain and remorse, the emptiness now my captive audience, and leaving me certain about uncertainty.
3. What Do You Do for an Encore?
Everyone should have a major crisis or two on an off day, a slow, leisurely day when meaning and purpose are not at issue, when religion and stock-market fluctuations are not pressing, when there are no significant jail breaks or must-hear CD launches, no big-budget must-see mega-movies, no big lottery winner who can finally quit a job that has been robbing the soul for half a lifetime, no equally big lottery winner who’s going to return to a job because routine is soul-saving.
Yep, an oversize, rip-the-firmament-apart crisis on a no-never-mind day, when the scandals are hardly noteworthy, the betrayals subdued, when even major thinkers are at a loss for words or their words are not worth a tinker’s damn or a rat’s ass, don’t even bother to strive for precision in your description.
The nature of the aforementioned major crisis? Use your imagination, plot the course of the ride through the tunnel of doubt: near death or a taste of death, perhaps a loss of faith or a loss of love, something deeply unsettling and unnerving. Tell yourself you have a day to live, discard all your worldly goods, say goodbye to everyone who ever slighted you or questioned that you had a place here on the planet. Stand alone in defiance of everything, be a momentary visionary, strip off everything and anything that made you crave or yearn or long for purpose, be unseen in the arms of eternity, and afterward go back to your day-to-day life penniless, friendless, purposeless, but with a smile on your face because you have seen the worst and it wasn’t nearly as uproarious or cataclysmic as you thought.
Then the real question, the monstrous crisis — drum roll, please — What do you do for an encore?
These three microfictions were first published in the short-fiction chapbook Curiosity to Satisfy and Fear to Placate (Mercutio Press, Montreal, 2003) by J. J. Steinfeld.
