Sometimes life can surprise us. Sometimes, just when you think you
have life by the tail, life turns around and kicks you in the balls
and suddenly everything that can go wrong, indeed has. I wrote the
following story in response to a request for a "happy story."
It was written during a depressed period, however, and can only
be described as all we can ask for when we are
Far from Power
A YOUNG GIRL sat at her window in deep depression, staring out blankly
past her desk into the night sky which seemed empty of any hope or
promise. She sat, hearing without listening at an empty void without
sounds of happiness or pleasure. And she thought that, for tonight,
anyway, the world was one stinking, awful mess.
GOD WAS FEELING particularly melancholy one day; and, wont of
entertainment in a Heaven devoid of playgrounds and television sets, He
deigned to inspect the world of His creation and see what he could see.
And so it was that on the quiet night of October 10, 1994, God descended
past the layers of misty troposphere and glided to a gentle hover
somewhere above Central Park in New York. From there He began His tour
of the works His hands had wrought.
The first place He visited was, quite naturally, a church. A midnight
service was being held at the First National Baptist Church of America, a
tiny little building right inside the limits of Manhattan. God watched as
the preacher spoke, his arms wildly gesticulating, his face a contorted
mask of anger, his body writhing in religious ecstasy. Then God watched as
the well-dressed preacher looked out into the tear-stained audience,
gestured to the two ushers standing nearby, and secretly smiled as the
offering plates going around became fatter and fatter. God blinked in
anger, and the preacher fell over, victim to a sudden heart attack.
In the fog was a lovely bridge. Underneath the bridge flowed the waters
of the polluted Hudson River, the waters of the sewage systems pumping
rotting waste into the murky green depths. God sighed, and with an
imperceptible gesture of His pinky, turned the waters into a deadly
poison. The carcasses of dead fish floated to the surface as He thought
in satisfaction that nobody would ever come near that river
again. The parched grasses on the high banks were tinged a dying yellow.
On the bridge was a teenage drug user. His arms were lacerated with the
marks of past abuses of all the worst substances modern chemistry could
offer. He was now out of money and, for the first time in weeks, coldly
sober. He had decided to kill himself and end his destructiveness, which
(as God in His omniscience slowly absorbed) had already brought himself,
his family, and even a few of his friends to both financial and
emotional ruin. There was nobody to blame but himself. God darkly
agreed, and with a vindictive node of His head, a sudden gust of wind
blew the adolescent into the murky depths of the newly poisonous Hudson
River.
God continued on to Ohio, where in Akron he saw a police imposter shoot
one of the citizens his uniform declared he was here to protect. With
a twitch of His eyebrow the policeman fell into a convenient manhole and
was drowned.
In Gary, Indiana, a husband was beating his wife in a drunken fury. God
lifted His index finger and the husband fell to the ground, victim of a
sudden and inexplicable cerebral blood clot.
In inner-city Chicago, God watched as two gang members methodically placed
old rags around the base of a dilapidated old house and set them on fire.
As flames licked around the base of the building, the two youths watched
in grim triumph. Suddenly, two wails pierced the previously silent night;
sirens in the distance heralded the arrival of the police, and--peering
out terrified from a window on the third floor--a toddler left alone at
home on this night of nights sounded his fear as the fire raged ever
stronger. One of the gang members fled at the approaching sirens; the
other instinctively ran inside the building and, as God watched, one
figure clutching another staggered out from the flames minutes later. The
larger of the two fell to the ground, dead from smoke inhalation, as the
toddler struggled out of his arms and stared blankly at the police cars
collecting around the area.
In bewilderment, God drifted back to Gary, where He saw the wife whose
life He had just saved standing crying over the dead body of her
husband. God hardened momentarily, thought back to what He had just
seen, and then watched with a melting heart as the husband suddenly
revived, victim of nothing more than a sudden, nasty migraine.
In Akron, a muddied criminal dressed as a policeman and covered with
shit crawled out of the manhole into which he had fallen and, facing for
the first time his imminent mortality, turned himself in to the nearest
police station. His sentence would be relatively light, and for the rest
of his life his atonement came in the form of a loving family life.
Above a stone bridge spanning part of the Hudson River, a boy looked
down at the river into which he had been about to jump when, reflected
in the strangely green river, a shooting star fell past the image of his
head as if aimed at his soul. He looked up at the lights above him, broke
down in tears, and walked, weeping, to the nearest drug treatment
center, where he would break his dependency on crack, decide to become a
substance abuse counselor, and eventually heal more lives than he could
ever have broken.
The smooth green surface of the river that the young man had been staring
morosely into just minutes ago broke as if sprayed with buckshot as a
gentle, life-giving rain began to fall. Fish which had seconds ago
floated as if dead suddenly flipped their fins and dove back into the
depths. A moving current washed the poisons of industrial sewage to the
edges of the river, where they would eventually collect on the concrete
pylons and be cleaned away by the annual Department of Sanitation river
cleanup program. As the sudden shower continued, the grasses at the edge
of the banks began to grow anew.
At the First National Baptist Church of America, the Reverend James
Johnson, who had tripped over his lectern and fallen to the floor a few
minutes ago when his indigestion had thrown off his reflexes, had picked
himself up off the floor, nursing his bruised head and taking in the
spectacle of the offering sitting up. He looked greedily out into his
audience when, for a second, his eye caught a glimpse of the dignified
face of a raggedly dressed baby in the arms of one of his impoverished
parishioners. At the end of the service, Ms. Agnes Matthews and her five
children would look up in surprise as their pastor discreetly slipped a
check into her purse as she left. For almost a year, the children would
receive enough to eat each week.
A YOUNG GIRL sat at her window in deep depression, staring out blankly
past her desk into the night sky. But, as she watched, a thousand stars
appeared as if Someone had flicked a cosmic switch; the clouds hiding
the moon drifted gently away, and the gentle glow of the city lights in
the distance suddenly bore a strange resemblance to a chorus of angels.
Above the pitter-patter of the raindrops, church bells pealed nearby,
bringing sounds of life, sounds of hope. She cradled her head in her
hands, strangely touched, and, despite herself, she had to think that,
for tonight anyway, the world wasn't such a bad place to be.
HIGH ABOVE THE human plane, God looked down through the falling rain at
what He had created, and saw that it was good.
total accesses since 2:00pm February 4, 1996.
Illustrations by Edward Hopper
Andrew Ho
(ag-ho@uiuc.edu) |
writings