Little Aleppo kept God in all His iterations penned up on Rose Street, which was on the Upside, and all the corpses in Foole’s Yard, which was on the Downside, so funeral processions ran south down the Main Drag. Praise the dead in the church, and bury them in the graveyard; in between, there was a parade. When Larry Shambles the banjo player played his last chord, half the musicians in the neighborhood stepped sprightly behind the casket with their trombones and bass drums; the trumpeters had the traditional fistfight. Lana Lynn delivered for Vafunculo’s before a Chevy sideswiped her into oncoming traffic, and all the other pizza boys painted their scooters black and weaved through traffic to count coup against the hearse’s windows. Gilroy Catcher’s liver fell out of his asshole at the Armadillo Room, and his buddies made the driver go real slow so they could walk behind because none of them had driver’s licenses anymore.
The processions proceeded. One a day, sometimes. Sidewalk kept bustling, commerce continued. Old men removed their hats, but not always. Life went on for Little Aleppians, even when they were presented with concrete evidence that it didn’t.
But not when it was a kid.
“The rabbi spoke really well. I never heard that story before.”
“It’s not a Bible story. It’s from the Midrash.”
“I don’t know what that is,” Deacon Blue said. He and the Reverend Arcade Jones were trying to–gently, o so gently–pull the sheet off of the larger-than-life-sized Jesus suspended over the pulpit of the First Church of the Infinite Christ. The congregation from Torah, Torah, Torah had been worshiping there since their synagogue burned down, and the crucifix was covered during their services. The reverend and the deacon had discussed whether or not cloaking Christ was a sin; they came to the conclusion that it might be, but He would forgive them.
The sheet had gotten stuck on the Crown of Thorns.
“The Midrash is a commentary. Ancient rabbis read the Old Testament, and they argued about it, and they wrote down the arguments.”
“The Jews are a contentious people.”
“Mm-hmm.”
Both men had removed their black suit jackets. Revered Jones tried holding the end of the sheet and flipping his hands up real quick, so that an amplitude wave would travel through the fabric, but he couldn’t get the angle right and there was just a noise SNAP SNAP in the empty church.
Rabbi Levy was in the first car of the procession, which was a Mercedes that Eugene and Imogene Teitel had borrowed from her uncle, Manny, because their Camry was beige, and had dents in it. The Mercedes was big, and it was black, and it was perfect to drive behind your boy’s body. That’s the kind of situation that calls for vehicular gravitas. The Rabbi sat in the back with Imogene. Eugene was in the passenger seat. They hated each other. The cancer had spread beyond its wildest dreams.
A woman named Bruriah met her husband at the door of their home. He was rabbi, and he had been at study.
“Husband, something was lent to me many years ago. Today, the man who made the loan came to reclaim what was his.”
The rabbi did not understand.
“If it was lent to you, then you must return it. You have no choice in the matter.”
“But, husband, that which I was lent is dear to me. I do not know whether I will be able to go on without its presence in my life.”
“But, my wife, it was never yours in the first place. You should praise this man for his generosity, and receive joy from the fact that he will surely enjoy it as much as you did.”
She took the rabbi’s hand and led him into the house, where lay the body of their son.
That was the story Rabbi Levy told to the congregation.
The hearse was a Cadillac, because most of the caskets it carried contained Americans, and Americans go to their graves in Cadillacs. Immaculate inside and out. No fingerprints at all on the chrome. Sign of respect. Bench seat up front. Crushed velour, not leather. Counter-intuitively, it is easier to get odors out of velour than leather. The rear compartment had no fabric at all. It could be hosed out. Funeral business is full of secrets, and one of them is that there is far more leakage than one would expect. Metal shelf slid out–well-oiled, noiseless–and the coffin went on the shelf, and the shelf slid back in. The platform was grown-up size, but little caskets fit on it just fine.
“He was two?”
“Almost.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah, you could blame Him,” Augusta O. Incandescente-Ponui, whom everyone called Gussy, said.
Julio Montez was a Catholic, and he crossed himself when she said that. Gussy had been sending him up and down the aisles of The Tahitian with a coffee can for months. The can had a black-and-white copy of a picture of Baby Al taped to it. People threw in a buck, five, nothing, some change. Gussy did it a few times, but she’d lose it halfway through and start bawling, so she made Julio do the job. She ran the cash over to Rose Street at the end of the week. People like to feel like they’re helping, even when they can’t.
“There’s a God.”
“I dunno,” she said.
“No, there’s a God. There is.”
Julio was sure of God’s existence. Every authority figure he’d ever encountered had assured him of the fact. He continued,
“But I don’t understand how He lets kids get sick.”
“Maybe He’s a mean drunk.”
They stood on the sidewalk underneath the jutting marquee of The Tahitian, with black block letters all uppercase against the illuminated white background and reading UNIVERSAL MONSTER MARATHON. Gussy screened ’em all once a year, and sold out the house. Dracula, and Wolfman, and Frankenstein, and Lagoon Creature. Each represented a different primal fear: sex, night, birth, lagoons. They were barely an hour apiece, and so could make up one long night’s programming. The house cheered the monsters, and heckled the decent burghers trying to stop them. Everyone loves movie monsters, because movie monsters get theirs in the end. Gussy wished the screen was a prison, and she could keep the wicked trapped in light. It was silly to wish, she thought. She still did.
First came the cop car, with the green light flashing, and then the Cadillac, long and discreet, and then the Mercedes, thick and rumbling. The procession followed. Cousins in a Datsun passing around a bottle of vodka, and the Montreal contingent of the family in rented mini-vans. Dr. Cho and two oncology nurses from St Agatha’s in his Beemer. The Melted Fucktoads spent most of their days dealing meth and hitting each other with pool cues, but they had a soft spot for kids and had done several charity motorcycle rides for Baby Al; they rode their Harleys two abreast; they had removed all the swastikas from their jackets out of respect.
All four grandparents. They were not very old at all.
Past Randy’s Record Barn, which was playing no music at all from the speakers Randy Plaster dragged out onto the sidewalk every morning, and past Mendoza’s, where Mundy Proft ignored her tacos al carbon to stand and watch the child go by, and past Leslie Easterbrook and his wife, Leslie, in the doorway of the sock rental place, and shoppers and barkeeps and secret perverts and the unconscionably tall. The poor who had commuted to the Upside to work, or steal; the rich who belonged on the Upside because of how hard they worked, or stole. Pavement stopped, frozen and heads bowed and openly wailing. If there were pickpockets present, they did not practice their craft.
Midden Street divides Little Aleppo between Upside and Downside, and was named by someone who did not know what “midden” means.
“All is random, and all is terrible. This is the only possible conclusion.”
“Mlaaaargh.”
“No, I cannot imagine. I do not want to. Desperately, I do not want to,” Mr. Venable said.
“Plep.”
The cat had no name, and she was a tortoiseshell, all black on her belly and legs, and mixed black and gray on her back and head. She leaned her right shoulder into his left shin. The sidewalk was not part of her territory, and she had not marked her surroundings with her scent; she was fearful outside, but still followed Mr. Venable outside. He was wearing his customary suit, and a black tie that he kept in the bottom drawer of his desk. It was not tightened, and the top button of his oxblood shirt was not done. There were still customers in the bookstore with no title, but they would be fine. (Unless they wandered into the Circular Annex, which contained the Maps Section; the maps had eidetically transcoagulated themselves into the territory, and it was easy to get lost.)
“I’ve asked. I’ve asked a thousand times,” he said.
“Mlaaaargh.”
“No answer. Never an answer.”
“Plep.”
“Of course I’ll keep asking.”
“Plep.”
The Cadillac brumbling in first gear. Barely feathering the accelerator. Mercedes behind with Eugene in the front, who be divorced in ten months, and Imogene, who will be divorced in ten months and dead in thirteen, in the back with Rabbi Levy. He is holding her hand. My hand is bigger than his, Imogene notices. She can see his fingernails, which are very neat, and she wonders if the rabbi gets manicures, and then the loathing–towering and rushing forward like that famous Japanese wave–swept over her. She should be thinking about her boy. He needed his mother right now. He would always need his mother.
The nurses and doctors from St. Agatha’s were outside the Emergency Room, and its brick entrance that bore the inscription Quid hoc fecisti, ut tibi chiseled above the electric doors. Rest of the staff, too, and some of the ambulatory patients. Cop gripping the upper arm of a handcuffed drunk. Two drug reps with tight, short skirts and enormous, rolling briefcases. Barry Cho from the Cenotaph was there. He was Dr. Cho’s brother. He wrote the first story about Baby Al. Young couple, Eugene and Imogene, just starting out in the world. They both worked at a bar called Fiddlerhead’s, which had a Canadian theme. He was from Outremont, and it reminded him of home. She was from the neighborhood, needed a job, and didn’t mind Rush. They met, fell in love. Five months after the marriage came the baby. Albert Holiday Teitel. Albert after his uncle Avi. Holiday for Holiday Rhodes, He proposed at The Snug’s annual Christmas show at the Absalom Ballroom, and she said “yes” there. Happy baby for a year, and then his eyes went blurry and he began to scream. He wouldn’t stop screaming.
It all hurt so much.
“Worst thing I ever seen, and I seen some fucked-up shit.”
“The boy died for our sins,” said the man who demanded to be called Captain Thumbfucker.
And since he had bought the last four rounds and slipped her a handful of pills, Tiresias Richardson was going along with his choice of names. She had promised herself that she would not go to the Armadillo Room any more; it wasn’t the sort of joint you wanted to be a regular at. There was a non-zero chance of being human trafficked every time you walked into the Armadillo. The pool table was mined. Two of the urinals have been indicted for manslaughter, though both cases fell apart before trial.
“No, he didn’t. That’s bullshit.”
“Are you calling me bullshit?”
“I’m calling this whole thing bullshit. All of it.”
“I am not bullshit!”
Captain Thumbfucker started windmilling his sloppy arms at her, leaning forward at waist with his head down. Tiresias slapped back and forth at him. She was tall and strong, he was short and liked sticking his thumb in assholes, and both were shitfaced: it was an even brawl.
The Cadillac rolled on, rolled south, still on the Main Drag, and now it makes a left to head east on Chambers Street. The procession follows, and the sidewalk halts here too. All kinds of buyers and sellers, and the lonely, and mechanics of all sorts. Students, teachers, truants, the dogs who ate the homework. Beer-Cooler Ethel closes the lid of the cooler strapped ’round her neck. Con men stop conning, and shoplifters stop lifting, and there is a pause in postal service. Behind the Cadillac with Baby Al in the back is the Mercedes, and then the family and the friends and the coworkers and the Melted Fucktoads and another cop car, two, three.
East on Chambers Street into the foothills, and the land undulates beneath you like fortune.
“How old is two?”
“Two is two. I don’t follow.”
“What can they do? A baby. When it’s two. What do they do?”
“Talk,” Precarious Lee said. He was a retired roadie and Romeo Rodriguez was a ghost cop, and they were standing by the entrance to Foole’s Yard. Technically, Romeo was floating. Precarious was wearing a black suit and a tie. Romeo was in the patrol outfit he always wore because he was a ghost and stuck in the same clothes for eternity.
“Yeah?”
“Not real good, though,” Precarious continued. “Words, not sentences. But they get the concept that things have names. And they know what they like and what they don’t. Two-year-olds got real strong preferences. Haven’t quite figured out wiping their ass.”
“That ain’t fair.”
“Who told you life was fair?”
Romeo was quiet for a moment.
“No one ever did,” he finally said.
“They were right.”
The hearse turned south again, onto Carrier Place where the entrance to Foole’s Yard is, and then the families’ cars, and the rest of the procession. Everyone would park, and Rabbi Levy would chant in a language that no one but he understood. The shovel was there, sticking out of the loose soil by the fresh grave. Eugene first, and then Imogene. The dirt went FUNCH when it hit the casket. It was a high-pitched sound, and it would not stop ringing all across the valley and up and down the Main Drag of Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.
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