That Dammed Beaver, page 22
It was with his powers as a public speaker at his command that Mibzar undertook what he decided would be his true calling. He would pitch the people of Babel on the idea of building a great monolith. A tower whose top echelons, in the event of another flood, they could flee to. He would oversee its construction and call it “the Tower of Mibzar.”
When he first waved over the crowd passing outside the front of his family’s butcher shop, Mibzar knew he would need a strong opening line.
“God killed your grandpa,” he said. “Don’t let him kill your kids. Rainbows and lollipops are one thing, but what I’m proposing is security.”
“Is that off the rump or a cutlet?” asked a soft-headed roofer named Emile as he peered into the butcher shop.
“This has nothing to do with meat,” screamed Mibzar, and one of his brothers came outside and shot him a look that said “Pipe down.”
“Look,” continued Mibzar, making his voice calm, “I would not even presume to know what the Almighty is thinking. That would be preposterous, but we do have imaginations. It is the way the Fat One in the Sky constructed us, and so we imagine. And I will tell you this: it is my imagining that on the day He drowned the whole world, He could not have been feeling very good about himself. It just isn’t the behavior of a very self-actualized Almighty. All I’m saying is, who knows what goes through This Guy’s head? He’s whimsical!”
Mibzar explained his idea for the tower and as he spoke, the crowd around him grew, and as it grew, he became emboldened, explaining it through metaphor, saying it was not so much a prayer to God as it was a prayer to man – a celebration of their humanness. And also their penises.
Along with all of this celebrating, Mibzar offered something else as well: the world’s first insurance policy. It would help them sleep better at night. And for Mibzar, it gave him the sense of importance he’d been after his whole life.
The people of Babel were smitten with the idea of a tower and they set to work on it with vigor and purpose. One shift worked all through the morning and another worked through the night. Because of various chronic pains, Mibzar could not actually perform any manual labor, but he stood off to the side for hours, watching the workers as they toiled. When their pace slackened, he threw a few inspirational words their way and, where he saw fit, he peppered his talk with personal anecdotes – about his lifelong battle with foot odor or his childhood fancy for girls with crooked teeth.
On the day he had to stand on his tiptoes to reach the blossoming tower’s tops, he did a hand-clapping jig that was so pure and unself-conscious that those around him were embarrassed to watch.
“The tower’s shade alone will provide a spectacular getaway for a midafternoon siesta,” he said, his buttocks gyrating behind him.
In the months that followed, whenever it started to rain, everyone would scramble up the tower laughing like children. Wheee, they’d yell, whizzing up the steps. They knew that whoever got the highest had the best chance of surviving the flood, so there was a fair bit of good-natured jostling.
As the tower grew taller, it could be seen in nearby towns. Curious neighbouring villagers came to check it out and once Mibzar explained it all to them in his back-slapping way – making generous mention of his difficult relationship with his father and his problems with mucus in the morning – soon enough, they were immigrating to Babel to work on the tower and take their place in history. And the higher it got, the farther news of the tower spread – and news was spreading far, for now the tower almost poked straight into the clouds.
At night when Mibzar dreamed, it was no longer terrible images of the flood that he saw; it was of himself, ascending the tower. At the very top, he would step onto Heaven’s carpet.
“I love what you’ve done with the place,” he’d say to God. Even in dreams, even when standing before the Creator of the Universe, he knew to open with something casual.
The tower slowly grew and as it did, there never seemed any good reason to stop. Everyone was working well together. From Babel and beyond, they all felt like brothers working toward a common goal, and that goal, which had begun as a mere escape ladder, had now become something else – something less easy to define. It had something to do with being more than just a workaday human. It had to do with questing after the infinite. Flood or no flood, they knew their time on Earth would only last so long, and after that – eternal darkness. But with the tower, they’d leave their mark.
As the men worked, Mibzar watched. Making speeches had become exhausting, and so he took to wearing a whistle around his neck, which he blew into to make his wishes known. One toot meant work faster, two toots meant work faster still, and three toots meant send for the lad who scrubs my feet.
Mibzar took to perching himself at the top of the tower and watching the world below. He felt like he could actually breathe up there.
“Sometimes it is simpler to gaze upon bald spots than faces,” he thought. “Faces always need to be talked to.
Things looked so small down there. The butcher shop, where he had toiled thanklessly for so many years, the site of all his humiliations and petty triumphs – as puny as an ant hill.
“I can crush it with a finger,” he said, lifting a pinkie to his eyes.
Mibzar wondered if that was a little how God felt sometimes. Crushy. He wondered, too, if He might like how the tower was bringing the two of them closer together.
He wanted to stay up there all day, in silence, just thinking his thoughts while looking down and allowing his joyous laborers to carry him ever higher, ever closer to God.
But it was on one particularly glorious day of fraternal labor that Mibzar, watching from on high, noticed something was not right. Whereas usually the harmonious sound of men happily working together could be heard – cries of “pass me that bucket of mortar, friend” and “throw me a pickax, my bosom” – now all he could hear were sounds that were garbled, weird, more animal than human. What’s more, the jumble sounded panicked – terrified, even.
Mibzar raced down the tower’s steps and with his whistle, summoned one of his foremen. Mibzar looked at him quizzically.
“Quelque chose de bizarre s’arrive,” said the foreman.
Annoyed by the man’s insubordinate gobbledygook, Mibzar blew his whistle at three men hauling rocks on their backs. The men dropped their loads and trotted over.
“¿Qué pasa?... ¡Qué raro! ¿Qué está saliendo de mi boca?” said the first man.
“Hakka Nee-ay shong dong teeyong nee oy eyow,” said the second.
“Sento come ho mangiato il fungo magico,” said the third.
Mibzar tore the whistle from around his neck and spoke.
“Alk-tay ormal-nay!”
Upon hearing the strange sounds that escaped his lips, Mibzar covered his mouth as though having emitted a long series of burps. Waiting a few seconds, he tried again.
“Ut-whay e-thay ell-hay is-way oing-gay on-way?” he cried. It was as though there was a hand in his mouth, bending and curving his tongue against his will.
For a long while, none of the men dared to speak. For Mibzar, it was the first time in his life that his mouth felt like an enemy. The men all stood staring at one another, not knowing what to do. Finally, Mibzar broke the silence. Looking into the heavens, he said in a very quiet voice: “Od-Gay, ou-yay in-way.”
And as he stared up at the tower, the noonday wind blew through the whistle in his hand in gusts that sounded like high-pitched laughter.
During the days that followed, in the absence of a common language, there was a lot of awkward bowing and smiling – people trying to make themselves understood by talking really loudly and slowly – but it did no good, and after only a week, work on the tower ground to a complete halt. In resigned silence, everyone packed up his tools and journeyed back to his home.
It was hard to return to tending sheep and planting vegetables, though. The work they had done on the tower awakened new hungers in them, hungers they had never known before. They now wanted to create things in the world that were bigger than they were – that would outlast them and instill wonder in the generations to come.
And so they cooked up new ideas. Not high things (they had learned their lesson and wouldn’t be opening that can of worms any time soon) but other things. Li wanted to build the world’s longest wall; Costa wanted to build a place where hundreds of people could sit in a circle and watch marvelous events; and Bastet, a real cat person, wanted to sculpt the world’s biggest feline.
In the months after the men and women of the neighbouring towns left, because of how inexperienced they were, most of Babel’s tower crumbled away. In the very end, out of the whole thing, only one floor remained – the ground floor – and it was here that Mibzar made his home, opening the world’s first language school. Inside, he taught Aramaic as a second language. Mibzar was the kind of teacher who always kept the students way past the end of class, continuing to yak away about himself, or whatever else it was that pleased him.
WILLARD AND KATE
BARRY CALLAGHAN
Willard Cowley lived with his wife Kate in a sandstone house. There was a sun parlour at the back of the house and the windows of the parlour opened on to a twisted old apple tree.
“Everything alters,” he often told her, “under the apple tree. One by one we drop away.” He was a well-known scholar, big boned and tall, with closely cropped grey hair. “It’s the job of wizened old teachers like myself,” he said, smiling indulgently at his students, “to tell the young all about tomorrow’s sorrow.” He was officially required to stop teaching, to retire. He was sixty-five. Kate came down to his office. “You needn’t have come,” he said, but he was comforted to see her. She said the sorrowful look in his eye made him even more handsome than he was. “A lady killer, Willard, that’s what you are.”
“I’ve never felt younger,” he said, as they walked home together.
As the weeks went by, they went for a long walk every day, and he talked about everything that was on his mind. “A mind at play,” he said to her one afternoon, “and I don’t know whether I’ve told you this before, but it is not a question of right or wrong, really – a mind at play is a mind at work.” She had soft grey eyes and a wistful smile. “Yes, you’ve told me that before, Willard, but I adore everything you tell me, even when you tell me twice.” They often stopped for a hot chocolate fudge sundae at a lunch counter that had been in the basement of the Household Trust building since their childhood. She loved digging the long silver spoon down into the dark syrup at the bottom of the glass.
“You and your sweet tooth,” he said. “It’ll be the death of you.”
“Someday you’ll take death seriously,” she said.
“I do. I do,” he said.
“How?”
“I think I’d like to die somewhere else.”
“Wherever in the world would you like to die?”
“It’s strange,” he said, “we’ve always lived in this city but now I think I’d be happier somewhere else, out in the desert.”
“There’s no ice cream in the desert,” she laughed, softly humouring him.
“Well, it’s only a daydream,” he said. “It’s not how I dream at night.”
“What do you dream at night?”
“About you,” he said.
“But I’m always right here beside you.”
“Yes, yes,” he said, “but think of where we could go in our dreams, think of what it would be like watching wild she-camels vanish into the dunes.”
She threw her arms around his neck and said, “Yes,” kissing him until they were out of breath.
“What a couple of crazy old loons we are,” she said.
“Thank God,” he said.
Her eyesight was failing, so at night he began to read the newspapers to her. They got into bed and he read to her as she lay curled against his shoulder. “Oh, I like this,” he said. “‘A politician is like a football coach. He has to be smart enough to understand the game and stupid enough to take it seriously.’”
“I like that too,” she said, laughing. “I don’t like football but I like that.”
“That’s why you’ll never be a politician,” he said, “thank God.” He linked his hands behind his head, letting his mind wander, suddenly perplexed because he couldn’t remember the name of the pharaoh at the time of Moses. He heard her heavy breathing. Before turning out the light, leaning on his elbow, he looked down into her face, astonished that she had fallen so easily into such a sound sleep because in her younger years she had often wakened in a clammy sweat, panic-stricken, mumbling about loss, about eyes that had not opened, saying she could hear her own screaming though she was not making a sound. He couldn’t imagine what dreadful fear had welled up within her during those nights, what darkness she had sunk into, and he wondered how she had managed over the years to stifle that fear, tamp it down. Perhaps in her fear she had gotten a dream-glimpse of their stillborn child. He had forgotten why they had never tried to have another child. He only knew he had never wanted another woman. This gave him sudden joy and a sense of completion in her. He was close to tears as he looked into her sleeping face, afraid that she would go down into a darkness where she would not waken and he whispered:
Child, do not go
into the dark places
of the soul,
there the grey wolves whine,
the lean grey wolves…
In the morning, after he had two cups of strong black coffee, he read the newspapers aloud. Any story about old ruins and the past lost in the dunes of time caught his eye. A few months before he’d retired he had written in Scholastics: A Journal of New Modes that the psalms of David were actually based on a much older Egyptian sacred text, now almost entirely lost. This meant that David was just a reporter of what he had heard somewhere on the desert trails, and so Willard was pleased one morning to read in the paper that nearly all the archaeologists at a conference in Boston had agreed that the Bible was not history, that no one should pay any historical attention to anything written before the Book of Kings. “The whole thing,” he said to Kate, “may just be theological dreaming. The whole of our lives, our ethical and spiritual lives, may be a dream. A wonder-filled dream in which we defeat death by turning lies into the truth.” When she asked him how a lie could be the truth, and how everything that was true could be a dream, he said, “I think that maybe all through history we have become our own gods in our dreams. We create them and then they turn around and taunt us. Maybe Christ on the cross is really a taunting dream of death and redemption, a dream in which Christ has to stay nailed to the cross because we don’t dare let him come back to us again. We don’t dare let him come back and live among us like a normal man because then there’d only be a dreamless silence out there without him in it, a great dark silence.” As he said this he felt a lurch in the pit of his stomach, a slow opening up of an old hollow deep in himself, but this hollow didn’t frighten him. It was an absence that he had long ago accepted, just as he had accepted the absence of children in their life. He had learned to live with this absence but he could not bear to see Kate in pain. One morning when he was wakened by her moaning in her sleep he felt a frightened pity as he looked down into her sleeping face, pity that she had had to suffer her own attacks of darkness, attacks of absence, in her sleep. He touched her cheek and whispered, “Kate, you’re my whole life. Thank God.”
One afternoon, when the apple tree was in bud and the hired gardener, who had tattoos on his arms, was cleaning out the peony beds, Willard laughed and pointed at the gardener. He told Kate that he’d been studying a book of maps of the Middle East that a friend had given him years ago, and he’d discovered that there was a small city near the Turkish border that was called, after Cain’s nephew, Enos, and since the men there had always marked themselves with tattoos, he said, “The mark of Cain was probably just a tattoo.”
“You mean Cain’s pruning our rose bushes?”
“Yes.”
“Willard,” she said, “you are a notion,” and she smiled with such genuine amused pleasure and admiration that tears filled his eyes. He held her hand, breathing in the heavy musk of the early spring garden.
“With you, Kate,” he said, “I always feel like it’s going to be possible to get a grip on something really big about life before I die. I’m very grateful.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “No one in love should be grateful.”
“I can’t help it,” he said, and felt such an ache for her that he had to take several deep breaths, as if he were sighing with sudden exasperation.
“Don’t be impatient,” she said.
“I’m not. I was just suddenly out of breath.”
“And soon you’ll be telling me you’re out of your mind.”
“That goes without saying,” he said, laughing.
“That’s what everybody says happened to Adam and Eve,” she said. “That she drove Adam out of his mind because he wanted the apple and she ate it…”
“And look at us now.”
“A couple of old lunatics,” she said, lifting his hand to her lips. “And that’s not gratitude, that’s love, Willard. You’ve always been the apple of my eye.”
He stood beside her with tears in his eyes.
“Some day,” she said, brushing his tears away with her hand, “I’ll tell you what I really think.”
“I bet you will,” he said.
“Yes.”
To distract her, to hide his emotions, he riffled through a sheaf of papers on a side table. “You know what? You’ll never guess,” he said, fumbling the papers. He was excited. He wanted to please her. “I’ve come across the most wonderful creation story…”
“Creation?”
“Yes, yes,” he said, flattening a piece of tawny onionskin paper on the table. “Professor Shotspar translated this for me years ago, from a flood story. It was written down somewhere around 1800 BC, in Akkadian, which in case you don’t know is one of the oldest languages in the world, and it’s exactly the same flood you’ll find in Gilgamesh. But this is about the gods and how they got around to creating man – Lullu, they called him. How do you like that? And it’s about how they created all of us so we’d knuckle under and do their dirty work, their mucking up…
