The Rainbreaker: A Somewhat - Historical Novel in Three Parts
1. the Scion King
2. Eternity - the Sequel
3. the Second Garden

By Steve Simon

You just watched the 6 o'clock news. Now ask yourself, "When is God going to throw in the towel?" God came close once before: The Flood of Genesis. And John, in the last book of the Bible, wrote the newscast for the Armageddon. So where do we stand right now?

Steve Simon doesn't presume to know. After all, he's an agnostic. But he does choose to believe in God. However, he's losing his faith in man. On the other hand, he hasn't lost his sense of humor and he has a cat to guide him through the hard times. Makes sense.

The Rainbreaker is a fable that attacks some tough moral issues with a lot of good-natured fun. Lest you think that the author is poking fun at God, rest assured. God always comes out on top. It's "stupid human tricks" (such as the failure of nearly all human institutions) that convince Steve Simon that God will not destroy the world but simply replace humans with animals. Or something like that. Adults who've enjoyed "Marley & Me" and the satire of Amrose Bierce, P.J. O'Rourke, and Chris Buckley will laugh out loud at this genre-bender with a message.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 2, 2007
• ISBN: 9780595882724

Steve Simon

Born in New York City in 1943, Steve Simon was occasionally educated at a Jesuit high school, NYU, Notre Dame, and the University of Iowa. He?s been published in The Journal of Irreproducible Results and twice won the Foster City (CA) International Writers? Contest.

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Copyright © 2007 by Steve Simon

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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

ISBN: 978-0-595-43952-2 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-0-595-88272-4 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

THE SCION KING

ETERNITY—THE SEQUEL

INTRODUCTION

THE SECOND GARDEN

EPILOGUE

Acknowledgements

To Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit, for graciously supplying one of his great quotes and sticking to his promise NOT to use it in his appearance on Oprah so that I could use it first.

To Thomas Aquinas, a real saint, who turned down 60 Minutes (in his words, not enough time to explain God) but did grant ME an interview and bowled me over with his near-proofs for the existence of the Deity and his explanation for the staying power of Regis Philbin on network TV, doing both while imbibing 8 liters of Mad Dog 20-20 straight from the bottle and ending with, Do you want me to play it again in Sanskrit and Swahili? And doing it! Certifiable genius.

To musicians Jimmy Buffett and Mac Davis whose sounds will survive Kooch’s studio explosions in the Tree of the Knowledge of Good, Evil, and the Lack of Harmonious Federal Reserve Policy.

To Mel Brooks, Jerry Seinfield, and Matt Groening who gave me hours of mirth and frivolity, rendering relief from otherwise gainful employment and parenting my children. The kids turned out pretty bad but they would have anyway. Bad genes. As for work, where DOES it get you: tired, injured, depressed, taxed, and angry. That can’t be good. Then you die. That can’t be as good as the Holy Folks say it is if, in heaven, you just meet the same jack asses you had to contend with down here. Single room, please. Better yet, I’ll take a room behind the inn with the three wise men who were able to take it with them. Keep the frankincense and myrrh, fellas, but that gold never gets old.

Thanks too to (in Greek, that’s kudos dittos) Gary Larson, artist, philosopher, and linquist, who taught us all that animals are far more intelligent than homo imbecilis and probably a lot funnier.

To my cat, Scampy, who drew the divinely-inspired self-portrait cover illustration in her spare time despite the absence of an opposable thumb. This is a tribute to homo animalia (and the disabled) and shows what one can do when one has an incredible amount of spare time. By the way, the rest of these pages were typed by Scampy. Recall: elemental logic dictates that an infinite number of cats typing on an infinite number of word processors will produce all the answers to all the questions brought up in this novella. When you are tempted to doubt the superior intelligence of cats, note that no cat has disgraced the feline race by sitting on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Bank or occupying a chair at a university. Game, set, match. Vaya con gatos, amigos!

Foreword

Some of you will view The Rainbreaker as Animal Farm for agnostics. It’s hard to tell, just as this story was. A former friend of mine read the draft and critiqued, with two thumbs south, my Herculean effort: Where’d you come up with this crap? Such a detailed, thoughtful analysis deserves an answer. My reply was pithy but I’m no Dorothy Parker so what I said at the time was not funny. Nor was it suitable for small children and the hopelessly holy among you, so allow me to liberally edit and expand upon my rejoinder.

I’m a deeply religious person, having often seen the visage of Mel Gibson radiant in the stained-glass transparentness of a 1.75 liter Jose Cuervo tequila bottle. I’m not really a drinking man—actually, I am; I just don’t do it that well—but I do consume copious quantities of the offerings of sainted figures such as Mr. Gibson. Granted, I’ve never really seen Mel, at least not in person, so it requires a leap of faith to even believe he exists and is the wonderful person depicted in the magazine rack of my grocery store checkout. But I digress. The issue was, How did I come up with this?

It’s easier to answer the how question by addressing the question when.

I have a cat named Scampy. One evening she approached me with an appropriate Christian request: would I feed the hungry. Of course I would. So I descended to the basement sanctuary of said cat to do my duty. Unfortunately for me, either as a result of my doing God’s work or the effect of a margarita-induced epiphany, I slipped on the stairs and landed on my keister, bouncing down several more steps in the process. I did not feel blessed. At this point I may have been in such pain and so close to death that I saw God. Maybe I was unconscious so long that this entire story, like some elongated dream sequence, unfolded before help arrived in the form of my guardian gato, the aforementioned Scampy. I’m not sure; I’m an agnostic.

But at some point during this near death experience, I was conscious enough to recall great animal rescues of the past. I particularly noted the 1950s TV series, Lassie, where the signature scene in each episode features some human doing something really stupid (i.e., human). Lassie, the collie, would arrive at the scene of the injured human; act as though she really cared; and then unlock and open several doors, pick up the phone, dial the operator and bark. Then, realizing that humans weren’t bright enough to have yet invented 9-1-1 or caller I.D., she would run 12 miles to the local ranger station where she was sure to find a man who could understand rudimentary dog language and collie dialect (which can be tricky). Naturally, her directions to the accident scene were always impeccable and the human victim, who probably didn’t deserve to live (thereby continuing to marginalize an already suspect race by procreating) was redeemed, if you will, by one of the beasts.

I don’t own a dog. I have a cat, one cat, as noted. Cats, especially Scampy, are different than dogs. Cats like to dwell at the scene of the human disaster much as doctors, for reasons known only to them, like to hang around your bed in a hospital and ask all manner of embarrassing questions, offering little hope that he or she can undo a patient’s lifetime of negligence on the one hand and excesses on the other. Thus, Scampy found me at the bottom of the stairs still stunned by my fall. Having made a thorough examination of the scene, she licked my face for an extended period of time. For those of you who do not own a cat, the purpose of this exercise is not to soothe the injured person. It is to acquire the recommended daily allowance of salt fix. Never mind that what you are getting in exchange is saliva from a tongue that has been in … let’s just say, some unseemly places. (However, I’m not a cat and do not pretend to understand the cat world so I withdraw this negative assessment since it was clearly judgmental, arbitrary, and unworthy of someone annually re-educated in sensitivity and diversity by a Fortune 500 company).

Scampy was quite upset by the whole ordeal. No, she wasn’t concerned about my leg, hip, elbow, and spleen or the possibility of an embolism, aneurysm, or stroke. Rather, she was totally concerned about her food. As with dog, I don’t speak or understand cat language but, like any observant alien in a foreign land, I at least sensed in those eyes an attitude. Yes, that was it; in human terms, something like, OK, you’ve been lying there napping for awhile. I can appreciate that. Now, GET THE HELL UP AND FILL THAT BOWL!

I managed to get to my feet and do what God put me on earth to do: feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, and render to Caesar. I felt good about it. Actually, I didn’t feel THAT good, just good about it. And thankful that the facial bacteria that was multiplying and metastasizing would probably only shorten by a few years a life not all that worthy of living anyway.

I’m sure there are dreamers amongst you who see this animal-human thing somewhat differently. Perhaps you’ve seen Hollywood movies or TV shows where a third-world leopard drags booty weighing twice as much as she does up a tree to keep this fresh kill away from poachers. Thus you’d expect your house cat to at least pull you up the stairs and out of the front door so some other human could see there was a problem and call the authorities within a reasonable number of days. In my case at least, this wouldn’t work. For one, the neighbors are used to seeing me in questionable condition, generally in the supine mode, on my front porch, usually late at night. So they are not going to want to become involved. Second, if a post-menopausal cat sinks her teeth into something, it’s to eat it and it had better be edible. To most animals, humans are right down there with carp in the food chain. Even bears, alligators, and sharks who will gladly bite and chew on humans, refrain from dieting regularly on homo imbecilis. Maybe it’s because we eat so much fast food and they are always eating something slower than themselves, but when you do find human remains in an animal’s stomach you also find one nauseous patron. This is why the authorities then kill the animal—to put it out of its misery.

I tell you this because just as 500 years ago, when we had to admit that the earth was NOT the center of the universe, today man is not (nor has he ever been) the center of the universe. It is the animals. There is a reason or two for this and this book pretty much explains it. At first you will doubt. That is natural. Most of the books, TV programs, and movies you’ve seen all your life depict a God in love with humans so He (She or It) put this superior animal with the fabulous intellect right up there at the top of the pyramid. Religionists and atheists alike share this homocentric view. The atheists should be ashamed of themselves; they find believing abhorrent so why believe this? But the folks who say they firmly believe in God are the more problematic. Man has just enough intelligence to realize he can never know or understand God. God is a spirit. An eternal spirit who does not exist in time. The Spirit is perfect. The Spirit is not matter, material, or earthly. Yet man thinks he can understand this?

Wow, that’s arrogance. So what have we done? We’ve brought God down to the human level. God talks in the Old Testament. God takes on human form in the New Testament, then acts strangely imperfect at times. For instance, why would Jesus agonize in the garden the night before His death? He knew what was going to happen; He’d signed off on The Plan. As a result He was about to redeem man as only He could. What’s to agonize over? Only humans could do this to God.

I take you back to Genesis and the Flood. Was God really serious when He said He’d never do that again? What exactly would He never do again? Destroy man? Destroy all living things? (He hadn’t really done either of these in the Flood). And what about the Armageddon in John’s Revelation? Isn’t everything destroyed?

As if it isn’t difficult enough taking the Bible at face value, there are the homo imbecilis among us who have to embellish it (something I certainly would never do). How much mass wine had Dan DaVinci Man Brown mainlined when he assumed Jesus married Mary Magdalene and moved to Hollywood? Let’s do the math: Jesus wants to A) save the world and B) marry a whore. Mary, Jesus’ mother, like every Jewish mother, likes a son with big dreams so A is OK, almost de rigueur, but no Jewish mother is going to let her son marry a whore, certainly not one from a family without title or property. My husband may be tinkering around with a small business that isn’t going anywhere but WE ARE THE HOUSE OF DAVID and I’m not going to let anyone forget that … Oh, and by the way, my Son’s God. Friends, the Da Vinci scenario just don’t add up—bad English but my math is flawless.

The Rainbreaker is composed of three parts. The Scion King is followed by Eternity—the Sequel and The Second Garden. Read. Enjoy. Believe … in something.

THE SCION KING  

It was the best of eternity; it was the worst of eternity; it was the ying and yang of Yahweh. Thus began the Death Valley scrolls which my father unearthed in 1947 and kept in Chock Full O’ Nuts coffee cans in the basement crawl space of our California desert home.

Dad passed away … no, he DIED, let’s be truthful because the scrolls are about eternal verities, or at least as much veritas as 4 litres of vino can produce at one sitting … and so, in dying, he passed along these verses which I hope inspire you as they did me. Now, where was I … oh, yes, let’s roll out the scrolls …

There’s been a marked decrease in the quantity and quality of your toadying, The First Father began.

I hate it when He quotes Montgomery Burns. It demeans the office, Lucy the Littlest Angel muttered from the back row to no one in particular.

"I heard that … I may be old but my hearing is just great. This is an excellent example of the ungodly attitude of you angels. That’s why I’ve called this session. I hated to interrupt your busy schedule of alternately sleeping