Simple Things

By Steven Popkes

Jesus and his adopted son live in a small house in Higbee, Missouri and play cards with Satan.
A sarcastic elephant and her boy search post-apocalyptic Tennessee for a home.
A retired clerk smokes off-brand cigarettes and is transformed into an opera star.

Simple Things: stories where nothing is simple.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bookview Cafe
• Release date: Dec 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9781611388589

Steven Popkes

Steven Popkes lives in Massachusetts on two acres of land where he and his wife garden, grow bananas and breed turtles. His day job consists of writing support software for space and ballistic systems. He insists he is not a rocket scientist. He is a rocket engineer.

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Simple Things

Collected Stories

Steven Popkes

Walking Rocks Publications

Book View Cafe

Walking Rocks Publications in association with Book View Café

www.bookviewcafe.com

Book View Café Edition

December 3, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-61138-858-9

Copyright © 2019 Steven Popkes

For Wendy and Ben.

The following stories were published previously:

10 Things I know about Jesus, On Spec, 2012.

The Crocodiles, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May-June 2010.

Boulder Country, Realms of Fantasy, June 2002.

Jackie’s Boy, Asimov’s Science Fiction, April-May 2010.

Fable for Savior and Reptile, Realms of Fantasy, February 2002.

The Secret Lives of Fairy Tales, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January-February 2010.

Sudden, Broken and Unexpected, Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 2012.

The Great Caruso, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 2005.

The Sweet Warm Earth, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September-October 2019.

The Two of us, After, Daily Science Fiction, December 2010.

10 Things I know About Jesus

#1: Jesus doesn’t have a lot of parties.

We don’t have a lot of friends over. Every now and then I bring home someone from school. Jesus is always very nice and makes cookies. Jesus makes tremendous cookies. Nothing beats them. Except maybe his cakes. But he doesn’t like crowds of people.

Even so, every few weeks there is poker night. Then, Satan, Lazarus and Albert come over. They play poker in the den. Jesus normally doesn’t allow smoking in the house but Satan smokes like a chimney. Jesus insists that Satan confine the smoke to the den, which he does reluctantly. It gives the room a weird effect to stand just outside and see the wall of smoke stop in the doorway.

On poker night I serve the food and the beer. I can stay in and listen—Jesus doesn’t mind. I think it makes Lazarus uncomfortable. But he’s so quiet you can never tell. Albert ignores me. Albert’s all about the cards. Usually, I bring the food or the beer to the den door and hand it through the smoke. The next morning you can’t even smell it.

Satan plays to win. A good night for Satan is when he manages to take home the pot. Then, he laughs at the rest of them. Sometimes he smiles wickedly at me. We’ll play for you next, boy. You’re going in the pot! And Jesus will chuckle a certain way so I know he would never allow it.

Most nights, though, Satan doesn’t win that much. As soon as he starts getting enough ahead that Jesus disapproves the cards change on him and he’ll lose back to just barely over the others. Satan’s accused Jesus of cheating more than once. But I’ve seen Satan try all sorts of ways to cheat. They never work. He’ll win for a while and then, out of the blue, Lazarus will hit a streak. Or Albert. Sometimes Jesus wins a few hands but never in a streak.

They play until very late—I’m usually asleep on the sofa when they file clumsily past, trying not to wake me. Satan always leaves first, peels rubber and is off down the street. Lazarus and Albert follow. Jesus stays and cleans up.

I often pretend to be asleep so I can catch him in a miracle. I never do.

#2: Jesus lives in Higbee, Missouri.

I live there, too. It’s a little five room house. Higbee is a little town near Moberly. I have my room. Jesus has his. There’s a kitchen, a living room and a den. There’s a barn where we keep the car. Jesus drives me to school every day.

We have about a hundred acres of farmland and forty acres of wood lot. Jesus rents out most of the farmland to our neighbors.

We have a garden. Every spring, Jesus plants a square about the size of the house in nothing but sunflowers. In the fall, he harvests the seeds. We snack on sunflower seeds all through the winter.

In the spring, we cut a couple of trees down in the woodlot, too. Every fall we harvest the driest of those trees, from perhaps four or five years ago, to use in the woodstove over the winter.

We have music but no television. We have a piano, a banjo and a guitar but no video games. I can play the piano and guitar. Jesus plays the banjo.

I’ve seen television and played video games at the houses of friends.

I wish we had an X-Box.

#3: Jesus was crucified.

Jesus says that myths often come up exactly the opposite of what actually happened. He’s seen it before. Somebody will drown crossing a river and a hundred years later there’s a folktale about a knight crossing a river to die mysteriously on the other side. A hundred years after that the knight will cross the river by walking on water in his search for the Holy Grail. Actual events mean nothing. The story is shaped to some other need and only a seed remains.

Here’s what happened to him.

Jesus was nailed up on the cross—that part was true. But he didn’t die quickly and come back in three days. His side wasn’t speared or any of that. Jesus hung on that cross for two weeks, three weeks, a month, and didn’t die. Finally, there was enough muttering about it that Pilate had him cut down and brought to him. A few days later, Jesus walked out still alive. He left Jerusalem and the savior business behind. A month hanging on iron nails was enough. It would have been easier to die.

#4: Jesus saved me.

I don’t know who my parents were. Jesus says he found me in a dumpster, newborn and bloody. He took me to the hospital and they checked me over pretty good. He held me while they tested me. They wanted to take me away, he says. But he’d decided he liked the feel of me sitting in his lap. It had been a while since he’d held a baby.

He decided to adopt me. That’s the way he says it, too. Like it was as simple as adopting a cat or taking in a stray dog. For him, I guess, it was. Papers were suddenly signed and records changed mysteriously until he walked out of the hospital with me.

I don’t know if I’m the first baby Jesus ever adopted or the hundred and first. I don’t think it matters.

Jesus is my guardian. It says so on my birth certificate.

#5: Jesus doesn’t perform miracles.

Or, at least, not often.

He’s been around for a couple of thousand years. There’s not much need for him to change any water into wine or raise the dead.

Jesus said that what led up to the crucifixion was his first and last foray into wholesale politics. He thinks of people like mules. They are very receptive to conversation if you can get their attention. In the case of a mule, attention is usually by the application of a two-by-four. In the case of people, miracles serve the same purpose.

One time when I was small I lost the use of my right hand. Jesus took me to the hospital. I had abscesses in my brain. No one could figure out where they came from. There was a kid down the hall that had been admitted for the same thing. I got worse and there came a point where I just don’t remember anything.

I woke up in the hospital bed. Jesus was sitting next to the bed reading. I felt okay, though my right hand didn’t work right.

That will get better with time, Jesus said. He was pretty calm about it.

I asked about the kid down the hall. Jesus told me he had died.

I thought about it for a long time. Did Jesus save me with a miracle? If he did, why didn’t he save the kid down the hall? I was glad to be alive but I wished the kid wasn’t dead. The more I thought about it the more I thought that I didn’t like the idea of Jesus saving one kid (me) and letting another kid die. He should save everybody.

But then, I thought, what if it was just random? What if he didn’t do anything? What if it was just chance that I got better and that nameless kid died? My abscesses were a little smaller than his, maybe. Or weaker. Or in different parts of my brain.

After a while, I figured it must be random because Jesus making a choice between us made me feel too sad.

I never asked him which it was.

#6: Jesus doesn’t go to church.

I’ve been a to church couple of times but I don’t like it. The pictures of Jesus don’t look like him. What the preachers say Jesus said doesn’t sound like him. I keep quiet about Jesus in a church. He never told me to, but you get the idea.

I asked him about churches once. He said he’d lived too long to go to church. He said he had nothing to do with them. After all, they were invented long after he’d left that whole business behind him.

How did they all get started? I asked.

He said it was like a long game of whispers—telephone, people called it now. That what came out of the end of the telephone didn’t bear much resemblance to what went in. He said after a while, the story got so strong it drowned out the facts. People always believed a good story whether it had anything behind it at all.

What I didn’t like about the church was the way they always showed Jesus, hanging from the nails on the cross. In the Baptist or the Methodist church, he looked sleepy or stunned. Sometimes he looked peaceful. In the Catholic Church, though, he looked like he was screaming.

So, I said. The Crucifixion. What was it like?

Jesus shook his head. You don’t want to know.

#7: Jesus doesn’t tell stories.

Jesus doesn’t talk about himself much but he’ll answer any question I ask him. He doesn’t hide anything. But he won’t talk about himself unless I ask him first. He says that I can say whatever I want to. Nobody will believe me. As it is, Jesus being pretty dark, people think he’s descended from Mexicans. I’m in the habit of not correcting them.

I went over to my friend Beryl’s house one day. Her father used to work on the river down near Saint Louis and he told story after story until we were laughing so hard we were crying and Beryl had to run to the bathroom so she didn’t pee her pants. As it was, I don’t think she made it but she never let on.

I came home and I asked Jesus how come he never told stories?

He shrugged. He said nobody likes the stories he has to tell.

#8: Jesus is the Son of God.

Here in Missouri you can’t throw a cat so you won’t hit a preacher and you can’t hit a baseball that it doesn’t land in the yard of a church. One time coming back from Kansas City I counted seventeen billboards advertising churches and nineteen billboards advertising XXX dancing. I asked Jesus how come dancers outnumbered churches. He said Vox Populi. That was in October. Around July there were more billboards advertising fireworks than the churches and dancers put together.

So you can’t walk around here without Jesus and God coming out in the same breath. When I finally understood how churches worked—Jesus, God and the Holy Spirit all welded together—I was pretty confused. I had this image of a Siamese twin sort of creature with four legs, four arms and two heads and a pigeon glued on the back. I drew it out in class one day and the teacher wanted me to talk to Jesus all about it. That afternoon. Before dinner.

When I asked Jesus if he was the Son of God he said yes. But, he said calling someone the Son of God was similar to labeling that painful red flickering stuff fire and be done with it. The words don’t tell you much. Of course, he said, the title did get you the opportunity to be hung up on nails for a month so you could contemplate the nature of things.

What about God? I asked.

God’s the black box where you put things you don’t understand, he said.

What about you? I asked. You’ve been around forever. You were crucified. They named churches after you.

He shrugged. I know how to open the box.

#9: Jesus has friends.

I don’t know that Satan is Jesus’ best friend. They don’t always get along so well. But Satan does come around more often than anyone else. He always comes with a six pack or two, a quart of whisky and a cigar. Unless it’s poker night, Jesus insists Satan smoke outside. Satan likes to sit in a rocking chair on the porch, smoke his cigar and drink until he’s too drunk to stand. I’ve heard tell in churches that Satan is a supernatural creature—an angel gone bad. I’m familiar with the gone bad part, as I’ve had to clean up after him when he’s drunk too much. The angel part is pretty hard to see.

But he’s not like Jesus. Satan doesn’t have any problem performing miracles. A goat walks by and he snaps his fingers and all of a sudden it’s got five legs instead of four. Satan laughs until he chokes. There was a dead coyote up the road from the house just covered in flies. It caused Satan no end of delight to bring those flies all the way to the porch and have them spell out bad words on the walkway. After a while, the flies got so they couldn’t spell the words right. Satan figured the flies were stupid but then he realized Jesus must have been interfering. So, he swore and snapped his fingers and the flies disappeared in little bottle rocket pops and nothing was left but a bad smell.

Satan is perfectly willing to take credit for anything bad I’ve heard about. There was a tidal wave in Indonesia that killed thousands of people. Sure, says Satan. I did that. There were these guys in Washington that drove around and shot people dead. Them’s my boys, says Satan.

According to the churches I’ve been to, he is responsible for everything that’s bad and God is responsible for everything that is good. But if Beryl and I end up kissing in the barn and she shows me her parts and I show her mine, I can’t figure Satan is anywhere in the picture. For that matter, that’s something I can see no end of good and I can’t see Jesus having any part of it.

What I have seen is Satan, drunk and still smelling of puke, passed out in the rocking chair when Jesus came out on the porch and tucked a blanket around him so he didn’t get cold.

#10: Jesus loves me.

Jesus is not my father. It doesn’t say father next to his name on my birth certificate.

My father was probably some guy who knocked up my mother and ran off. My mother was some young girl who was so scared she tossed me in the dumpster so no one knew she was pregnant. That’s the nicest story I can come up with.

Jesus heard me crying and took me in.

So I know Jesus.

But I can’t figure out who he is to the rest of you.

The Crocodiles

I could not make a silk purse from a sow’s ear. But I went over the data again to see if I could find a tiny tatter of bright thread in the otherwise disappointing results. There had to be a better use of a well-educated chemical engineer than cannon fodder. Willem, my wife’s uncle, called me.

Max, he said, a happy, disembodied voice over the phone. Very sorry about your work and all that. How was it going?

It didn’t surprise me he already knew. We didn’t get the results we’d hoped for, I said. But there are other areas in the Reich where fuel filtration research would be entirely applicable. Aircraft engines, for instance—

No doubt, he said, chuckling. However, by an astonishing coincidence I was planning to call you anyway. I have a good use for your skills.

Oh, really? I said with a sinking feeling. I had no desire to work for the Gestapo. Uncomfortable work at the very least.

Yes. There’s a Doctor Otto Weber doing some very interesting biological work in Buchenwald. He can use your help.

What sort of work?

I’m sure I’d be the wrong person to discuss it with you, not being a scientist or an engineer. I’ll work out the details of the transfer and send round the papers and tickets.

I really ought to find out how I can be of service—

There’s always the regular army. I’m sure a man of your caliber—

I’ll be looking for your messenger.

Fine. Oh, and Max?

Yes?

Weekly reports. On everything and everybody. All right?

Of course, I said.

You don’t argue with the Gestapo. Even personified in my Elsa’s uncle.

oOo

Otto Weber was a thin, elderly gentleman. Once he had been quite tall. He was now stooped with age. His eyes were washed out and watery, like blue glass underwater. But his hands were steady as he first lit my cigarette, then his own.

Weber called his subjects tote Männer. Once he showed me their decomposing condition and single-minded hunger, I thought the term apt.

Weber was brought the first host in 1938 and had to keep the disease alive with new hosts from the Gestapo—which they were always willing to supply, though in small lots so he never had more than a few laboratory subjects at a time. He was never told where that first host came from but he surmised South America. Later, in 1940 when the laboratory was at Buchenwald, the Gestapo supplied him with a slow but steady trickle of Gypsies.

What he had discovered when I joined the project in 1941 was that infection was only successful by fluid transport from the infected host, infection was in two phases, and there were at least two components to the disease.

In one experiment, Weber took fluid from a toter Mann and filtered three samples, one through a 100 micron filter, one through a 50 micron filter, and one through a Chamberland filter. The 100 micron wash caused full infection. The 50 micron also caused a partial infection involving quick and sudden pain, followed by an inevitably fatal stroke. He called this partial infection type I-A. The Chamberland wash caused a particularly quick and painful neurological degeneration—Weber referred to that as type I-B. Hence, Weber’s hypothesis of two components for a full infection, one large and unknown and the other a tiny unknown virus. He had isolated a parasite as the possible large component. When collected and washed of any contaminants, the parasite seemed to cause a I-A infection similar to the infection caused by the 50 micron wash. When the Chamberland wash was recombined with the parasite, full infection ensued.

Weber had even characterized the partial infections and the stages of the full infection. I found it interesting that the partial infections were both dismal, painful affairs, while the full infection showed up first as euphoria, followed by sleepiness and coma. The subject awoke in a few days as a toter Mann.

Even so, I was surprised that there hadn’t been more discovered in four years. After all, Weber had the tote Männer themselves and their inherent ability to infect others. The Gestapo was willing to provide a constant, if limited, supply of hosts. But Weber’s horror of contagion was so strong that every step had to be examined minutely until he had determined to his satisfaction that he could properly protect himself and his staff. Dissection was a long and tedious process; vivisection was almost impossible. I suppose I could not blame him. Even a partial infection would be fatal and full infection always resulted in another toter Mann. No one wanted to risk that.

Thus, my first task was the design and construction of a dissection and histology laboratory where Weber could disassemble the subjects in safety. It was not a difficult task. I came to Buchenwald in July. By the end of the month I had the design and began construction. Weber dissected his first wriggling subject by the first of September.

My fuel work had been much more interesting. That was exacting, exciting work with great applications. Here, I was barely more than a foreman. The war in Russia seemed to be going well and I wondered if I should have protested more to Willem.

But Elsa and our son Helmut loved Weimar. The city was pretty in a storybook way. It didn’t hurt that the bombers left Weimar largely undisturbed, instead striking in Germany proper. It lent the city a relative calm. Several young couples had taken over the empty housing. This was early in the war and food and petrol, though rationed, were still plentiful.

I didn’t work weekends and the three of us spent many summer days in the Park on the Ilm. It occurred to me, during those pleasant hours watching Helmut playing in front of Goethe’s House, that this was, perhaps, a better use of my time than the factory or the lab.

oOo

Within a week of opening the new facilities, Weber made some astonishing discoveries. Histological examination of the brain tissue of the tote Männer showed how the parasites nested deep in the higher functioning brain—clearly explaining why there were only tote Männer and not tote rats and tote cats. He speculated that there could be tote gorillas and tote chimpanzees and went so far as to request animals from the Berlin Zoo. The Zoo was not cooperative. Weber reconsidered his New World origin of the disease and attributed it to Africa or Indonesia where the great apes lived. It stood to reason that a complex disease found suddenly in humans would require a similar host in which to evolve prior to human infection.

However, the parasites were only one half of the disease. The virus followed the nervous system through the body, enabling parasite entry into the brain but also enabling the growth of strong cords throughout the body. This was further proof of the two-component infection model Weber had developed. In the case of partial infections of the parasite or the virus, the process only went so far. Forced by the absence of the virus to remain within the body’s major cavities, the parasite caused fevers and paralysis, blocking blood vessels mechanically, causing a heart attack or stroke. The virus enabled the parasite to penetrate directly into the brain, leaving the heart and circulatory system intact—at least for a while. Without the parasite, the virus merely crippled the nervous system, causing fevers, seizures, and great pain. The cords only appeared when both were present. Weber was convinced by the pathology of the disease that the tote Männer virus was a variant of rabies, but the biological history of the virus, the parasite, and the virus-parasite combination was mysteriously speculative.

I dutifully reported this to Willem, along with descriptions of Weber, his assistant, Brung, and his mistress, Josephine, whom we had met at dinner in Weimar earlier in the summer. Unsure whether Willem’s desire for detail extended to the subjects, I included the names of the last couple of Gypsy hosts left from the Buchenwald experiments and the newer Jews we had appropriated from the main population of the camp. Weber was curiously reluctant to use the handicapped and mentally deficient and he hated using Poles. Perhaps this stemmed from some event in his past of which I was unaware.

oOo

Willem paid us a Christmas visit, visiting the laboratory only coincidentally. He was impressed with our progress. With the tote Männer we will crush Russia, he said over drinks that evening.

Weber paled. There will be problems using the tote Männer in winter, he said obliquely.

Eh? Willem looked at me. Speak plainly.

The tote Männer cannot thermoregulate. This doesn’t show up in laboratory conditions but below ten degrees Celsius the parasites do not function properly. If they freeze they die and the host dies with them.

Willem considered that. We can clothe them.

Weber grew excited. They do not generate enough heat. Humans maintain temperature. Cats maintain temperature. Crocodiles do not. They do not eat—the biting is no more than the desire of the disease to perpetuate the infection—the way horsehair parasites cause crickets to drown themselves. They do not consume what they put in their mouths. Metabolism keeps the body temperature above ambient somewhat like large lizards. Clothing lizards would have no more effect than clothing tote Männer.

I see, Willem said. He patted down his vest until he located his cigarettes and lighter. I’m going out on the porch for a smoke. Max, will you join me?

Weber looked as if he’d swallowed a lemon. He rose as if to join us but Willem waved him back. Don’t bother. This gives Max and me a chance to exchange a little gossip.

Outside, we lit our cigarettes and watched the snow fall.

It’s true what Weber said? We can’t use them as soldiers?

I thought for a moment before answering. Comparing them to crocodiles is apt. You can’t make a soldier out of an animal. And it’s too cold for them in the east.

Then what good are they? Is this all for nothing?

I did not say they could not be a weapon.

Tell me.

The crocodile simile is better than you know. They are very fast and very strong. There is so little to their metabolism that they are hard to kill. And they are terrifying—you’ve seen them. You know. We must be able to make some use of them. I shook my head. I don’t know enough yet. I need to perform some experiments. Weber has discovered the basic science. Now it is time to apply some good German engineering.

Willem nodded. I’ll do what I can. He grimaced. Two weeks ago the Japanese attacked the Americans. The Americans declared war on Japan. We declared war on each other. They allied themselves with the British, which brings them into the war in Europe.

The Americans are too far away. They don’t have the strength of mind to make much difference.

So we thought in the last war. The point is I may not have much time to give.

oOo

The goal was to deploy tote Männer to a suitable front and have them wreak havoc on the enemy while leaving our own troops alone. The tote Männer would terrify and demoralize the enemy. Our troops would march in behind them, clearing the area of enemy soldiers and tote Männer alike. Simple.

We did not have a means by which we could create a large number of tote Männer simultaneously or a means by which we could be sure they would discriminate between our soldiers and the enemy.

Weber attacked the discrimination problem while I considered issues of scale.

Buchenwald was too small and low volume to be useful to us. Auschwitz was more appropriate to our needs. However, Auschwitz was already overwhelmed with the volume of its operation.

In October, the Birkenau expansion of Auschwitz had begun. It was scheduled to be complete in the spring. Willem had shown me copies of the plans. It was clear that only minor modifications to the Birkenau plans would accommodate our needs much more easily than building an addition to Buchenwald or moving to Auschwitz proper.