Cross on Me: A Novel

By Arie Uittenbogaard

Ethel Meyer, a retired literature professor decides to invest her final moments of vision in the raving manuscripts of Qoheleth Qoe Bogenheart, a Bostonian theologian who lost his mind while writing it. With the help of mathematical science and industrial capital, Ethel forms the handwritten loose ends into the unity that they intended to convey.

As we follow Qoe on his Bunyanesque voyage to the arctic shore of Alaska we begin to wonder why any man would seek to forgo his sanity. Could it be to emulate Abraham who left his home, or even Christ who gave His life?

Qoe meets fellow travelers, suffers hallucinations, and even charges God with a baseball bat. Why is he obsessed with flight? Is he searching for gold or knowledge? Who is Anna? Where is he going?

Qoes car is found abandoned in Skagway, Alaska, and the manuscript ends in determinative silence. Ethel is nevertheless convinced that the story should continue, and the only one who may be able to raise Qoe is his wealthy father Karel. Only when his monetary fortune appears to have no bearing on his mission, Karel begins to realize that to raise a person, one has to live his death. Coming to terms with the nature of reality, Karel embraces his sons plight and the howling infinite of fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 7, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462009244

Arie Uittenbogaard

Arie Uittenbogaard holds a degree in maritime engineering and nautical science using it to work on cargo and cruise ships. He also writes for Abarim Publications , Arie’s Travels, and other Internet publications. Although he has written award-winning short stories and poetry, Cross On Me is his first full-length novel.

Book preview

Contents

Part One Two Rivers

Transitions

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1

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2

3

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8

13

Margaret MacDonald, 1901–2000

21

Part Two Awful Rowing

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55

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By the Will of a Man

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Part Three In the Seam of a Cloud

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Part Four Searching for Mercy

Brimstone Corner

Qoheleth

Willow

Harry

Joshua

Solvey

Qoheleth

Angelica

Jack

Angelica

Qoheleth

Qoheleth

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1

1

2

Dr. Shliddel

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5

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Smiles of Meeting

Ludda

Qoheleth

Ludda

Audience

Harvest

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610

987

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The Oath

Φ

Part One Two Rivers

Then God said, Let there be light.

And there was light.

And God saw that the light was good,

and God separated the light from the darkness.

Genesis 1

Two rivers combine beneath her.

The face of a child wrinkles

in the water and is gone forever.

Anne Sexton

It Is a Spring Afternoon

Transitions

Nathaniel Hawthorne was necessary. He was a pleasant necessity, as far as necessities went, and Ethel granted him the status of friend rather than assistant, even though she needed both. The love of her life was slipping away, suffocating like a flame under a bell jar. It was a cruel death, but at least she had the opportunity to say good-bye and to secure a friend to assist her.

The board was shocked, of course. Not least by what to give a retiring literature professor who was rapidly going blind. The traditional wristwatch seemed inconsiderate. So did a rare or antique book, although she would have loved sniffing the scents of the many readers who had held it over the years, aiming her dimmed eyes at their growing minds in retrospect. For minds were Ethel’s garden, and she composed her Eden from them. And Eden, according to Howie Shrank, could always use an extra puppy.

To show you around, he said, and Ethel said he was darling, both he and the dog, a golden retriever pup. And since in her opinion it was fiendish to apply a name like Howie Shrank to any living creature, she gave the dog a name that has enriched all mankind— Nathaniel, Gift of God, and Hawthorn(e), the genus Crataegus of the rose family—the name of one of the finest authors the English-speaking world has produced so far. When Howie remarked that it was daft to give a dog a surname, Ethel reminded him that there was no law against it, and if there were, it would have been her pleasure to transgress it.

Howie Shrank taught the great art of mathematics, as he liked to call it, and he was Ethel’s comrade-in-arms insofar as that term applies to people who passionately embrace ways to describe reality and make them clash from the heart. Mathematics is accuracy, was Howie’s mantra, and whenever Ethel heard him chant it, she would grin and say, Only math is.

And in class she told her students that not accuracy, but confusion lay at the heart of human essence, like a splendid well from which all action sprang, from the most mundane trepidation to the grandest world-shaping affirmation. Life, she used to say, has nothing to do with one and one being two. Math and the number sequence depend heavily on infinity, and infinity does not occur in nature. And while in mathematics a true statement is true always and for everyone, in life ‘colors seen by candlelight are not the same by day.’

But now the day was near when all colors would congeal in black, and although Nathaniel Hawthorne had been trained to be her eyes, Ethel knew that dogs were unable to see color.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, she said, trying to exorcise sensations of Sartre’s Le Mur from her mind as they left the doctor’s office after her weekly examination, sometime this month my eyes will close for good. Let’s walk the park, you and I.

The sounds and smells were of the day, but the sights were of the night. And between the shadows of trees and phantom bicyclists whishing by, was her beloved, whispering farewell in exhausted sighs. As he was disappearing, he drew her heart with him. Whatever gave her joy came to her through her eyes. Any purpose she fulfilled as a professional rested on the merits of her vision. There would be no emeritus guest appearances at the school. No neighborhood reading groups in which to spend her old age. No late nights curled up with an excellent novel. No more movies. No more teaching. A lifetime of pleasant exertion was sinking between lids that were slowly blinking shut, never to open again.

But the hourglass held one more grain of sand, one more book she could read. One more blast of might, a journey or a tale. Once more unto the breach, once more in awe at the gates of heaven, she could stare at light beaming from the pages brighter each time until not even the brightest light could penetrate her nocturnal future.

Ethel sat down on a park bench and tried to decide how to invest her final moments of vision. She could walk over to the bookstore and purchase one of the latest bestsellers, but a commercial success offered no guarantee of literary quality. A long-awaited novel from an already famous author? Too many extra-Heliconian motivations.

The risk of concluding a literary life with an unsatisfying book was too great for her to seek exit among the new, and she began to survey the library in her mind to select a book she had read before. She pondered the titles of books that had nourished the world as it emerged from the melting pot of peoples and given it a common anchor of reference, like a true heart beating in its political chest—Walden, Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, Huckleberry Finn—with their grand, archetypal themes of humanity: triteness and transcendence, individuality and community, suppression and freedom, captivity and escape.

She stood up from the bench, longing to go home and embrace the great works of Western literature lined up on her many shelves while she could still see them. She let Nathaniel Hawthorne lead at his own pace while she fought to recognize everything they passed and allow it to resurrect her memory of the once-lighted world. But when at last she surrendered to her realization that mere memory was not going to be good enough, a surge of angry panic overtook her, extinguishing all remaining optimism, and she urged Nathaniel Hawthorne to quicken his step.

An avalanche of trouble poured over her. Her beloved was leaving, going where she could not follow. She could not hold him anymore. He was going away, and a great chasm would fall between them. To be left in eternal night, with nothing but her recollection to torment her, was too dire a fate.

Her mind searched for a means to escape the reality in which it was caught. She yearned for any kind of unforeseen metamorphosis that would yield communion despite her imminent blindness. She yearned for transition. For transformation. To be redefined. To no longer be human, but thought—a pure kernel of contemplation conjured up by the need of a narrative, light enough to be granted passage on Charon’s ferry into the realm of undiluted mind. She would lay herself on the bosom of her beloved. She would be part of him as he was of her, where one and one equals one. She felt a strange hand, thumbs on her eyebrows, pull her face into a grimace, and she broke into a trot.

Nathaniel Hawthorne loped beside her, looking up at her and out for danger at the same time. She reached home short of breath. With trembling, hasty hands, she retrieved the key from her pocket and searched for the keyhole. Cruel, idle reality. Cruel body to be locked in. Cruel dungeon at the depths, with its walls. Unbearable absence of relief. Unbearable separation.

She opened the door, and Nathaniel Hawthorne went in before her. She began to wish she had never fallen in love with literature and to envy those who had never loved at all, who, upon death, would not know its consequence of utter isolation. As she stepped into the house, she realized that she was terrified of the dark.

The gray blur beneath her stopped moving and picked something from her path. When she stooped down to release the dog from his harness, he handed her a heavy manila envelope. Freed, the gray blur sauntered toward the kitchen.

Ethel could feel that the envelope contained a manuscript. Eternity met Tantalus. There was a letter. She walked into the living room, sat on the edge of her reading chair, switched on the lamp that hung over it, and aimed her magnifying glass at the paper. By the time she had read the letter and random portions of the manuscript, her despair had desiccated and left crystals of brittle hope that excursed and formed conclusions.

It would require redefinition, a death even. But she faced a fate worse than death. And with all its consequences, redefinition was a merciful alternative. It’s how you group the terms, Ethel, Howie would say. The dream doesn’t enter the mind; the mind enters the dream.

Although her beloved had boarded the ferry, he was still there. He was due to cross but had begged the ferryman to wait and extended his hand and invited her to come along. So be it.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ethel said with reinstated calm, and waited for the dog to present himself. It seems we have been called upon.

0

Dordrecht, the Netherlands

August 1996

You’re not crazy, said Dr. Brown. His eyes wandered away from mine and came to rest on th’e fluttering shrubs in the hospital garden. At the same time he lowered his pen onto his notepad and leaned back.

I could have jumped up, grabbed the pen, and jammed it in his neck, taken off through the window onto the shrubs, into the summer, into the light, where cars spoke in parked congruence and every commercial billboard contained secret information that only I could understand and teach to the world. To save it. But I shouldn’t. Being classified as a nonviolent brought certain leniencies: I wasn’t tied up, just locked up. And once a day a nurse took me on a shuffle around the campus. They were drugging me, holding me. I needed to regain my freedom for the sake of mankind, and no one would be served if I were classified as a violent.

We’d been here before. I shouldn’t use the c-word; it’s so negative. And that’s why I used it: to hear him decry it. I knew I wasn’t crazy, and I also knew that Dr. Brown wasn’t a doctor. He was a silly pawn in an organization without self-awareness, a natural phenomenon like an anthill, which had instinctively singled me out as a young child and tried ever since to keep me from fulfilling my mission.

I was on to them, but they didn’t know. They thought I believed them when they said, "You’re not crazy, Qoe, silly Qoe. You’re just psychotic, that’s all. It’s like your mind has caught a cold. It’s like your mind has run a marathon. You’re not crazy. You’re just a little tired. Why don’t you take it easy for a while? Give your mind a rest? You’re a sailor, aren’t you, Qoe? You’ll be back at sea in no time. You’ll see."

I decided not to blow my cover. I wouldn’t kill Dr. Brown just yet. As his eyes returned to me, I chuckled. If he only knew what I knew he wouldn’t be so insolent. And I wouldn’t feel like a zookeeper caught by his animals. They were nothing but clever monkeys to me, all those people that I needed to save. Gullible and inattentive. That’s why it was so easy for me to escape. I fooled them.

Juneau, Alaska

May 1994

Call me Qoe, if you like, but my name is Qoheleth Bogenheart. I was named after my maternal grandfather. We were both named after the king of Jerusalem, the Preacher who cried, Vanity of vanities! All is vanity!

I have recently found myself obligated to come to terms with the fact that the Israel that is now being retrieved from the Palestinian soil is not the Israel of the Bible. That Israel never existed; the ground is as empty as a false grave. There was never a single ancestor, no twelve fraternal tribes. There was no exodus as massive as the Torah tells, no Israelites as numerous as stars in the sky.

There was nothing as splendid and gold-clad as the united monarchy of Solomon. If there ever were a Solomon, his kingdom was too weak to leave a trace in recorded history. His story is fabricated mythology, his Song spiritualized pornography. Bronze and Iron Age Israel was gentilic, incohesive, and polytheistic.

Chosen by no one, we have been tortured, dispersed, and murdered for nothing at all. Our certainty was always futile, our theology folly. We’ve clung to a covenant that was never cut. The Ark wasn’t lost because it never existed.

How can something so apodictic be so false? How can something so blatantly fictitious be so adamant about its own veracity? If Satan’s greatest trick is to make people believe that he doesn’t exist, then God’s greatest trick is to make people believe that He does.

Gethsemane, Jerusalem

May 1996

If ever I had a wish strong enough to keep me awake when I tried to sleep, or numb to the world while I tried to live it, it would be to be made out of nothing. Not even out of air or the memories that flow from shadows or scents from flowers broken in the bud, whispers loping across the plains and folds of history, too weak even to pick up dust or stir the blades of grass that sprout where they do and know nothing else. Because knowing, I realized very early in my life, comes from the poses of clouds dancing in my head, while speaking comes from inspiration. And all inspiration, I was told, comes from God.

But not only inspiration comes from God. So does the scourge of judgment that can land upon us mortals in the shape of wars or diseases or sometimes misery that has no apparent cause but just comes and turns people into weeping wrecks. Sometimes God blesses, sometimes He strikes, and sometimes He closes the heavens so it doesn’t rain and the earth, and all the seeds sown upon it, wither.

If ever I had a wish strong enough to skewer every thought I had, it would be to be able to forget. For how horrible is it to have seen even the slightest outline of a Truth so all-encompassing and profound that it renders everything else folly and excludes the host from anything human.

For as long as I can remember I have wished to be forgiven, or rather to have never lifted the cover of that Book, never have rolled the stone away from the tomb and said, O my God, the Bible is true.

South Hamilton, Massachusetts

July 1995

Fists settled on temples, eyes pierced through parchment lids. Paper waves rolled over me. The ocean had tossed my ship about before, tossed it until deranged shipmates had to be pulled away from the railing by those who still had the strength.

I knew I was at the railing.

All around was the hailstorm of hasty fingers pounding out papers, revisions of theses, the smell of deadline sweat, books on endless shelves, the rosy cheeks of newborns drinking up the thoughts of ancient theologians, learning the speak of their land, the drill of protocols, the taste of hamburgers, the almighty ways of trade.

I lifted my elbows from the table, turned my face away from the screen. Next to the computer were Hebrew dictionaries, notepads full of scribbles, archeology journals, chaos journals, quantum physics, a New American Standard and a New International Version studded with penciled remarks, corrections of the translations, matrixes of cross references. I squinted over the screen through the window and saw trees swaying, green and fluorescent. In the trees were creatures, misshapen goblins, gnarling and chewing on the branches from the inside out. From behind me I heard the approach of a host, the sound urgent, its rhythm close to my heartbeat.

I raised myself on liquid legs, my head clasped in strange hands. Around me were children, left defenseless against dangers they could not assess. I stumbled along the isles, through the glass doors, into the hallway. A few students sat in the corner debating Bonhoeffer. Flat-earth hypothesis. Ethereal universe.

I swam upstream through the corridor against the light that poured in like a river, out the doors into the warmth of the summer, and then on to the parking lot, where the cars met me with grinning plates, hissing sounds I recognized. They told me secrets, strings woven into truth. I began to understand how the universe worked. And how it all would end.

Joy

July 2000

Anna? Arise, my love, and come along—because look, the surface of the earth has no beginning. We can fall from the sky and land on the sphere and call that point Origin. And we can diverge from Origin in all directions over the surface and call it Progress. But all progress will swirl around the sphere and close in on a point opposite Origin, and we will know that we have deceived ourselves and that Origin is arbitrary.

So we wander back in time to find the real Origin, and the earth becomes young again. Then the temperature rises and we are sure we are nearing the spring of the river. But the earth becomes a cloud and spreads out, spiraling around a burning heart that used to be our sun. And we know we have deceived ourselves again. Earth has no point of Origin on its surface and no point of Origin in its history.

We broaden our scope and scrutinize the whole, watching the universe contract as time rolls up like a scroll. Now we will surely find the true point of Origin, we tell ourselves. But we come to learn that the universe began in a Melchizedekian moment, which wasn’t even a real moment because space and thus time began about three hundred thousand extrapolated years later when matter and radiation broke apart, atoms were formed, and the universe became transparent. That was the birthday of reality as we know it, the Independence Day of regular, livable space and time.

A door opens.

You’re writing again, aren’t you? Angelica asks, simultaneously curious and mildly indignant, as if she has caught me in my gravest weakness, her black eyes on me, her hair still in the turmoil of nocturnal journeys, a magnifying glass in her hand. She moves it between us. A huge eye with a grin.

Would you like to come in? I ask the eye, Listen to Dexter Gordon?

Who’s Dexter Gordon?

He’s a jazz musician, I say, But you have to come in, sweetie. You’re letting all the cold air out.

Angelica contemplates. Then she jumps on the seat and pulls the door shut.

You need to clean your car, she says. It has junk in it and mud on the outside.

Yeah, but it’s my mud. I earned it.

It makes her laugh, a half-swallowed, giggling roar of a laugh. You got it! From driving up the road!

Well, I guess you’re right. But it’s still my mud.

I better let you write, she says and opens the door and jumps out.

We’re alone again, my love, secluded, listening to Dexter Gordon, the engine humming to keep the air-conditioning going. It’s a little before noon and eighty degrees already. A shy breeze licks at the foliage. Mosquitoes and dragonflies float on the air, and I hear the quacking of young Miss Willow talking to the ducks near the pond, capturing them with her smile and her crystalline eyes.

On my lap against the steering wheel lies a notepad stained with wine and coffee. My right hand holds the lucky green Heineken pen. In my mind live secrets—silly secrets, profound secrets, secrets that are no secrets at all—and where the three meet, a blue line wobbles across the paper like a star across the sky. And I know it’s not a big star, but it’s my star.

Stars didn’t occupy the young universe until long after the nucleosynthesis and the formation of atoms. Before the nucleosynthesis the universe was an erratic goo of highly energetic particles.

My mouth still tastes of the kiss of Morpheus; my cigars don’t taste any better. I walk over to the store to buy a bottle of water, say hi to Angelica, who sits on the porch and looks at me through her magnifying glass.

Inside, two middle-aged women are talking to Rick.

One of them has an indistinct tattoo like a bruise on her upper left arm, a monochrome cyan-blue rag around her head—dark, short curls, a sharp and bony nose, tenebrous eyes full of wild force—stone-washed jeans, Caterpillar boots, a black sleeveless T-shirt. I notice the handle of a huge revolver sticking out of a black shawl wrapped around her hips. The other woman is dressed in gentle shades of blue, is blond and round, calm and friendly. She sips a root beer from the bottle and nods silently while the wild one waves her fists and roars about bears and truckers and what the heck the world is coming to. I stand in the corner until the wild one clumps out the door and the still one follows like an ovation.

I place a dollar bill on the counter. Were those the notorious Bushwhackers? I ask.

Yep, that’s them, says Rick.

The universe grows like a tree, and we and everything we know is inside that tree, unable to look out of it. The seed from which it sprang is long gone, but ever since the making of atoms—the commencement of a flow of juices and an internal economy—the tree has remained basically the same.

From the corner of my eye I see a shape loom up on my left. Then comes an excited knock on the window. I roll it down.

Peter.

Qoe! You came back!

I longed for the dormant hills of Joy, I say.

And Willow?

And Willow, I admit. But you too.

Did you write about me? Peter asks.

Sure did.

What did you write?

I wrote that Peter tiptoed through the river with the stealth of a true hunter, talking to the fish, arguing them onto the hook.

What did you write about me? Another excited boy suddenly appears.

That Michael jumped off the back of Josh’s truck with a dragonfly net and caught one.

Can I ride your bike? Michael asks.

Go for it, I say and watch them leave, Michael on the seat, Peter on the handlebars. They manage to steer clear of a parked camper, then waggle whooping along the yard and topple over about halfway, blaming each other for it.

I decide I have written enough for one morning. Over breakfast Josh said something about a window that needs fixing and the little garden next to Willow’s log cabin that needs hoeing. Over twenty guests coming this afternoon, he said. We have to clean the place up some.

1

Some of the guests have arrived, and I have moved the car away from the store and parked in front of the log cabin in the forest, where Josh and Solvey and the kids live. Willow has her own cabin among the trees and a little stream with a bridge. Angelica walks by, kicking a soccer ball, pretending she hasn’t seen me. Her magnifying glass dangles on a shoestring from a front belt loop, like a happy dog dancing on a leash.

Before there were atoms, the protouniverse consisted of a wild storm in which three groups of elementary particles lived short and unorganized lives. Short because they would pop into existence and pop right out of it before they had a chance to bind with others and make lasting structures. These three groups are called leptons, quarks, and bosons.

The lepton group had twelve members. One of the smallest leptons, the electron, became the ruler of the universe, not by being forceful in a mechanical sense but by being the ambassador of light. The electron governs all chemical and most physical processes.

The quark group also consisted of twelve. Two of the smallest quarks formed protons and neutrons and thus the various nuclei of the various atoms. The quarks hold the information to make all the materials necessary for a living material world.

I move the seat back, wrestle my feet out the window, and listen to the leaves rustle overhead as I watch white and amber tufts on slender stems sway among the birches. A robin stands motionless on the path and tastes the wind. Strings of dandelions mark the edge of the forest. A lonely log still lies there, awaiting its ignition sometime this fall. Behind me the CD-changer clicks, and as I light another cigar, Dexter’s tenor envelops the world in mellifluous hues emanating from the car doors, wafting through the open windows like spices from a long-ago land.

The boson group also had twelve members. Eight of them—collectively called gluons—bind quarks in atomic nuclei. Three cause unstable particles or compounds to decay. They are the digestive force of the material realm.

The last one is the most famous of all: the photon, what light is made of. This particle is in everything and holds everything together. It keeps the electron connected to the nucleus. It keeps atoms connected to atoms. Light allows all existence and conveys all action. It’s the blood of matter, the soul of the universe.

Angelica positions herself and her bike ostentatiously about four feet away from me, still pretending she hasn’t seen me. As I lean through the open window, the magnifying glass swings to an anticipating halt.

Hi Ange.

O, hi, Qoe, she says, looking at me with a humongous eye.

Is something the matter with your bike?

There’s something wrong with the brake. It makes a noise.

Well, let’s try to fix that. How about later?

Okay. She lowers the glass.

I have to finish my paragraph now, okay?

Okay. She gets on her bike and peddles off. No noise.

In the beginning the differences between the particles were not evident by their behavior because they all ran equally wild and died before achieving anything. That changed in the expanding and thus cooling universe. Step by step identities emerged through a series of events we now call breaches in symmetry.

The first breach separated quarks and leptons. The quarks, receptive for the eight gluons, began to behave quarklike. The leptons, receptive for the other four bosons, began to behave leptonlike.

The second breach in symmetry struck only the leptons. The leptons that were receptive for the photon began to distinguish themselves from the ones that were not.

Then the wars came. Famine. Until the visible universe that remained contained just a few survivors: two quarks, the electron, and a nerdy sibling of the electron called e-neutrino, which cannot see light and will always be alone. The two quarks combined into protons, and the universe continued to expand. At this point individual events had no past and no future, and the particles lived single-moment lives. The universe was not as transparent as we know it, but consisted of a thick fog of unapplied particles.

A man is knocking on my window. To me it’s hardly morning; to him it’s past noon. It makes no real difference here.

Is that Dexter Gordon? he says.

It sure is.

What’ya writing?

A book.

What about?

Death and resurrection.

He looks at me, seems puzzled. I sure like Dexter Gordon, he says.

Yes sir, so do I, I say. After a stylized salute, he mounts his Roadtrek, gets on the highway, and heads north.

Atoms came to pass when individual particles had slowed down enough for the photons to bind the electrons in orbits around the protons. In an instant the entire universe changed from a dark, impenetrable hedge of sizzling, mortal thorns to an eternal, translucent space filled with mostly hydrogen atoms. Slowly they found each other and interacted, leaving legacies and unfolding effects. There were pasts and there were futures. Material death had ceased; space and time had begun.

Now photons could shear unhindered through their realm and set the place ablaze. Huge clouds of hydrogen atoms began to contract, and when pressure was high enough for nucleic fusion, stars were born. Photons were squeezed out of the atoms like juice from an orange and burst forth into space. Behind them, the nuclei fused to forge the elements as far as iron. Stars at this time were larger than they would ever be, and in violent events we call Super Novae multitudes of atoms were combined into elements heavier than iron and spewed out into space in magnificent bursts of power. The various elements began to interact, all according to their needs and nature, and combined into molecules, solar systems, planets, and eventually life.

Why aren’t you wearing your hat? Tonny asks, grinning so wide that it almost seems as if her little, dark head is an egg about to give birth.

I just washed my hair and it has to dry first, I say.

Some of it is sticking up! Lara says, grinning too.

What are you guys up to? I ask with some suspicion.

Look in the mirror! they scream, and I do it. My hair is indeed somewhat wayward. The girls scream with laughter. I stroll back to the car.

The problem with understanding the commencement of life on planet Earth lies largely in the stubborn insistence of some of us that life and matter should be considered two completely unrelated phenomena, hence reaping the farrago of derivations that the axiom is heir to. Where did the supposed breach come from? Who or What instigated it? Like a dog chewing on a bone, mankind has come up with a broad array of mythologies, spawning more troubling mysteries than reaping solutions. And woe to the fool who dares to not believe.

Boo! Tonny hollers through the open window directly into my ear. She snatches the notepad out of my hands, and her mouse-blue eyes subject it to a flash inspection. Then she hurls it back into the car, where it lands with a dry whack against the passenger door. In the mirror I see Josh walking toward me.

We’re celebrating Tonny’s birthday, Qoe. Are you coming?

I plow through laundry and piles of books until I find Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax. Meditating on life must be delayed because I need to explain how the Lorax got lifted away to a blue-eyed Eskimo girl who just turned seven.

Seven is God’s lucky number. Did you know that?

No, says Tonny.

Well it is, I say.

I need poles to grow beans, says Josh.

I can do that, I say, I’ll get the chainsaw and take down some birches. How many?

Josh grabs his beard. It’s about forty square feet, so thirty would be good.

Thirty birches, I repeat.

First rule of Paradise: Have what you want, but don’t take more than you need.

Thirty it is then, I say.

1

Despite the many contradictory theories about how life came to pass, we all pretty much agree that there was some kind of growth from simple life such as algae and fungi to multicellular organisms, to vertebrae, to mammals, and finally to man. And man engineered devices to make his life easier: tools, languages, towns, societies, governments, and mythologies.

Mythologies explain why the sky is blue, why water is wet, and what man’s destiny is among the creatures. One mythology speaks of a man who was eventually named Abraham. He lived approximately four thousand years ago in what we now know as the Middle East. And God paid him a visit. He told Abraham that He would make his offspring like the dust of the earth, to usher humankind into a new reality, a new continuum of its own personality. That dust, we know now, consists of three groups of twelve and only a fraction of these remain.

Abraham had many sons, but Ishmael was the first. He was born of an Egyptian slave, adopted into the household of Abraham and his wife Sarah, and expelled at age thirteen. He married an Egyptian woman and had twelve sons. Abraham’s second son, the only son of Sarah, was Isaac, who in turn had two sons by his wife, the granddaughter of Abraham’s brother Nahor. The youngest son was named Jacob, later Israel, and he also had twelve sons (and a daughter) by wives descended from Nahor.

Nahor, whose name means force or vigor, had twelve sons as well, eight by his wife and