The God Game by Gerald Coleman

“If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing
Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.“
Pascal’s Wager

Brother Kyron’s junior year religion class, The Mystery and Meaning of The Holy Bible, was his latest dodge in the God Game—an odyssey through time, through chaos and order, from Genesis to Revelations, to the dismissal bell.

Brother Kyron sat under three rows of florescent lights, a breaker to a tide of boys rushing into Room 215 to their assigned seats. He was 55 years old, overweight, and had grown unattractive in black. As a young man, he had spun the wheel of fortune with his everlasting soul  over the existence of God. It was the only question worth asking. Either He is or He isn’t. Kyron’s ante? His vocation into The Teaching Brothers of The Holy Cross. And if God turned out to be a howling gargoyle or nothing at all, or a Presbyterian, well, Brother Kyron would be dead either way.

He knew “his boys” had no skin in the game and didn’t care a shit about his behind-the-scenes motives. He also knew his teaching style was plodding and dreary, too calculated to appeal to energetic teenage boys after being caged all day.

After attendance, Brother Kyron announced the formation of a Bible Studies Club he would advise. It was part of his plan. “The Club will have, as it were, an open agenda based upon student input.”

No one admitted interest in the Club, perhaps they would think about it. As it were.

He started the day’s lesson: “Genesis reveals the very process of God in an emerging universe.” What did that mean to a 16-year-old? Today, he vowed to do better.

“Let us explore the Story of Creation.”

Kyron stood taller.

“Genesis takes us by tiny steps over the six days, like a movie short of the creation of the light, the world, animals, and man. Did you guys see Disney’s The Living Desert?”

 He froze a smile a few moments too long. They either hadn’t or didn’t see the point in saying they had.

 “The time-lapse work? How they sped seasons into a minute? If we close our eyes (he closed his eyes) we can almost picture The Beginning gathering in Genesis, building day to day until it’s a living Universe. Complete. And it’s done in a few concise pages. Look.”

He flipped the pages of Genesis as if summoning reluctant kittens. He looked around. They looked at their texts. What was the question?

Some boys responded to something by the windows, perhaps a comment behind a cupped hand? Was that a blowjob parodied by a thumb and a mouth near the door? A sound surely came from the back.

Kyron stopped.

Deep silence. No one dared bring attention to himself. Some snuck back to math homework, others stifled laughter, or telepathed jokes. The class communicated like prisoners in penitentiary cells through mimed transmissions and pencil-hockeyed notes along the aisles

Brother Kyron picked up the pace.

“Did reading Genesis inspire you in any way?”

They sat knowing saying nothing was the shortest course to the end of the period.

 The kaw-kaw of mid-afternoon seagulls followed a mooring ferry churning into the pier along the waters of The Narrows across the street.

“‘Let there be light and there was light.’ That’s all!  Why just a sentence?  Someone? Whom was God talking to, anyway, when He said, ‘Let there be light?”

This question was not in his plan, perhaps intended for his Bible Club or judgement day. Kyron seized upon a random boy.

“Mr. Di Paolo. What do you think?”

“I’m sorry. What do I think about what, Brother?”

“Anything! Genesis, for example. What you had for lunch. Or who God was talking to when he said, ‘Let there be light.’”

“That’s a good question Brother. Himself?”

In the back of the room, someone blew an unintended lip-trumpet. Doodles were buried into texts sensing trouble. Edward Costa, a wise-ass kid with Cerebral Palsy, spasmed in a corner seat. His right arm, virtually useless except as a kind of air rudder, began to bend. His IQ was 135, but that was a base estimate. Edward’s state of mind was undeterminable. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good.

But Eddie was popular, due as much to his contempt of authority as for the sad circumstances of his condition, which could be comical if accompanied by a sputtered wise crack or obscene gesture. Eddie was one-of-the-gang in his neighborhood, kept them laughing for a decade from the curbside while they played stickball in the streets. He unzipped the back of Marianne Ahern’s dress in the sixth grade and did MAD Magazine faces outside Sister Teresa’s classroom window. He was attention dependent.

Kyron chose to ignore Eddie. Certainly, learning and teaching were unconnected disciplines.

“Mr. Di Paolo, why does the Bible say it took Almighty God six days to create this world?”

“Because it took that long, Brother?”

Kyron’s fist clenched in his cassock.

“Mr. Di Paolo, did you read The Creation section in our text? About the notion of time held by the inspired writers of the Bible?”

“It said time was different then, didn’t it?”

“You didn’t read it, did you Di Paolo?”

“I did. About ancient times. The sun was kind of faster, I think, back then Brother.”

Eddie Costa entertained a band of boys casting an imaginary penis through his fly toward Kyron, reeling it out like a lure with his feeble right hand. Several boys near the windows followed pigeons across the street cooing and spinning in front of hens falling in and out of pigeon-sleep.

“You didn’t read it, did you?”

“No Brother. I was sick.”

“You were sick.”

“My mother wouldn’t let me.”

“Your mother wouldn’t let you.”

“Yes.”

Brother Kyron invited Vinnie to discuss matters in the hall. Kyron understood the primacy of sound. He would have attacked Vinnie in front of the class if he wanted to create fear or clarity. Instead, smashing Vinnie’s head unseen into the wall would provoke creativity—like the tread at night of a chipmunk across a forest floor became a bear in imagination. The sounds in the hall of shuffling feet, unintelligible questions, and attempts to respond would become amplified in the boys’ minds.

Eddie never had a thought once he spotted it. He rose into his splayed shuffle to progress like a hurrying merman to the front desk where he held it above his head—Brother Kyron’s Holy Bible.

“I have Gah’s wh-word,” he said. His voice took time to warm up. His diaphragm and lungs bellowed air through his larynx, like a bagpipe with melody and drone pipes pushing and sucking. When the queued words began to arrive through the fine reeds and sounding pipes of his throat, he opened The Book.

“It says when the Seven Seals bark, The Big Lamb will shout, ‘Eat this Ky-Ron!’”

He grabbed his crotch, shot a lizard eye at the door then back and forth at the class. The intertwining of these events made it uncomfortably funny and perilous. The absurdity of what was happening, with the full effect of Eddie’s disabilities, gave it a Jerry Lewis-like mock-madness. Along with the sporadic thump of Vinnie’s head and Kyron’s derisive demands half-heard in the hall were an irresistible call for rollicking anarchy.

 Laughing at the handicapped freed the reptilian brain. Particularly when a mob was involved which included the disabled person. At such moments, citizens stormed soccer pitches and burned orphanages in limbic hilarity. Sober men danced to executioners’ songs.

Eddie scanned the Book’s early pages sitting on Kyron’s desk.

“Get bent!” He looked up. “Here’s Adam and Eve. Adam’s what?  A couple of days old?  Eve’s an ex-bone. Don’t eat from this apple tree, God says. There’s a snake in it!”

He tried to make a snake sound.

“It says, the tree is the Tree of The Knowledge of What’s Good and Bad. What does God expect? Adam doesn’t know Good from Bad because he hasn’t eaten the apple yet. Here’s this douche walking around Eden with his girlfriend, dum-de-dum, and doesn’t know right from wrong, so naturally he takes a bite. He has to take a bite to know what’s right from wrong and when he does, he finds it’s wrong. He can’t win.”

The class began to hear sounds from the hall and wandered back to daydreams and homework. Eddie’s Eden riff bored them as much as Kyron. His deal was Jerry Lewis not Lenny Bruce, so he started again. He opened Kyron’s Bible to where it was ribboned. Some pages may have bent. His friend Jack Dunne winced, but there was no way Eddie would stop.

“When Moses moveth through the Land of Sand, they went without food,” he said. “God dropped by smoking a joint, ‘Hey man. What’s up, Moe? Be-eth thou hungry?’”

With that the Bible flew from his hand, splayed face down, putting indentations in Psalms 75 through 122. Several pages may have ripped. Eddie turned to locate the book as a sound came from the hall. The knob turned. Kyron pushed Vinnie in, his head splotched red, face snotty, and hair knotted by fist holds.

A calmness settled over Eddie, who breathed in and breathed out.

Kyron paused at the door to swish his cassock several times before turning to face his boys. Instead of twenty reflective souls, he saw Eddie blinking at him from the front desk. Then, he saw what he saw on the floor.           

He moved toward it in slow frames, bent to pet straight the pages of Psalms. He moved towards Eddie until their noses touched. Ahab eyes searched deep into the unreadable Eddie. Perhaps Kyron would tell him to leave, or perhaps Kyron would leave, or would find something in Eddie’s eyes to indicate purpose or mitigating intent and he would say, “I forgive you as Jesus would.”

Kyron straightened Eddie’s head with the front of The Bible, then plugged him across the ear with the book’s spine, spinning him off the desk.

Leaves of Holy Scripture began to fly into the air from their bindings upon the front rows. Chronicles, Zechariah, Luke and Matthew, Acts, Timothy 1 & 2, and most of Romans drifted down as Kyron hacked.

 Eddie raised his clog shoes in hopeless resistance, while Kyron continued to rip the book to shreds on whatever he could hit, then prepared to pitch what was left at Eddie’s head like an emptied revolver with nothing left but scant pages of Genesis and John’s Revelations clinging to the bindings.

Static clicks came from the gray box on the wall.

Freshmen track practice is cancelled today but will resume Thursday. The Chemistry Club will meet this afternoon for boys still working on their projects.

Hearts stopped in horror.

The Sodality of the Blessed Sacrament will meet this Thursday after class to plan next month’s field trip to St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Kyron, excommunicated from his senses, struggled to comprehend.

All was still in Room 215 where Eddie lay curled like a smashed spider on the floor.

Junior Varsity Basketball consent forms are due at the end of the week.

Eddie tried to resuscitate in Jack’s lap like Jesus in Mother Mary’s embrace or General Wolfe on The Plains of Abraham.

 The dismissal bell trumpeted the clang of time as the class rushed for departing buses, freed like adolescent wolves into the surrounding neighborhoods. Jack let Eddie slide to the floor. Several boys with after-school detention, including Dunne, swore Eddie slowly untangled, limb by limb, to edge across the floor to what was left of Kyron’s Bible, snatch it with his bad hand, and crawl until he stood looking again into Kyron’s eyes. Eddie opened the Book where a few rumpled pages clung and read: “And God said, ‘Let there be light, and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness.”

Eddie might have kissed The Book or not, yet all the boys at the door agreed what happened next. Like Saint Thomas’s hand in Jesus’s wounds, Kyron’s fingertips probed Eddie Costa’s battered face.

“It doesn’t say who He was talking to,” Eddie said.

After detention, Di Paolo and Dunne returned to their spot by the door. On the desk were Bible pages parsed neatly into Books and Chapters, New versus Old. Brother Kyron and Eddie Costa sat on the floor holding themselves up with their hands around their knees.

Vinnie was standing in front of Kyron before Jack noticed him missing.

“I want to join your Bible Club,” he said. 

“That was a bad idea.”

“Maybe. I want to join. We have a lot of work to do.”

Vinnie sat with them on the floor and asked a question that had been festering.

“Brother, how do you know it happened like Genesis says?”

“The authors were inspired by God.”

 “What were their names?”

“We don’t know.”

“Why so many authors nobody knows their names? Why not God tell us Himself how He made the world? Why are things so mysterious, told by guys without names who weren’t there? So filtered sideways? Why’s there so many people like you?”

 “I don’t know.”

“Maybe Creation was a mistake. Look at Eddie here. No offense.”

 “Hey fuck you. My mother made me read the whole Bible, then made me read it again, while you played stickball in the street. God made Adam and Eve and a Garden and, in a few days, just for being themselves, He kicked them out. Everything is fucked up, not just me.”

 Vinnie leaned back looking into the fluorescent lights with his hands under his head. Then, looking at Kyron, said, “You got some anger shit to root out, you know that?”

“Yes,”   Kyron agreed.

“No offense,” Vinnie asked, “but…how do you know any of this stuff that supposed to have happened in The Bible happened?”

“I studied very hard. In seminary. We all studied.”

“That’s what faith is?”

“I don’t know.”

“So, you pick God. God don’t pick you. Like choosing up sides for a ballgame.”

 Kyron shrugged.

Jack was about to leave his post by the door to join them when he heard Brother Claude, the school’s Disciplinarian, and the Principal, Brother Fabian, rattling up the stairs, the rosaries around their waists jangling stride for stride up and down their thighs. Jack ran down the hall to wait for Vinnie and Eddie outside.

There never was a Bible Studies Club. Eddie and Vinnie were expelled the next day. Brother Kyron was told to wait for Brother Fabian and pray for heavenly guidance in the school’s chapel. Instead, he went out the front door heading for the Staten Island Ferry Pier, two blocks away. The chiming of the school’s flagpole’s grommets pinged in the wind, metal on metal, providing senseless tympani to the commotion and the traffic noise. Jack followed at a distance like the sixteen-year-old snoop he was.

The slip was designed as a battering ram for ferries to smash into while thrown into reverse, bouncing side to side by momentum and the tide against the pier’s wooden pilings—a little, steel ducky in a tub.

 Children ran to watch whirlpools and seagulls cry like flying pigs in hopes of murdered fish and discarded trash. Dunne stepped aside for clusters of people in and out of the ferry dock to pass, but when he tried to pick up Kyron’s tracks, he was gone. Surely, he got on in the confusion, but what would he do in Staten Island without a car? When Jack leaned against the railing to watch the boat depart, he spotted Kyron under the surface of the water. His eyes, opened in death, stared sightless through a curtain of bubbles and ocean froth. His black cassock lifted his arms above his head in the tide like he was trying to think of something or had forgotten the point of whatever it was.  

In a few minutes, a crowd gathered as ferry personnel retrieved Kyron’s body. Jack walked back to tell Brother Fabian what happened. How Brother Kyron probably tripped on the pier’s planks into the water and hit his head on a pilon.

“It looked like he was taking the ferry to think about something and must of fell in”

“You think?”

“Yes.”

“Sure?”

“Yeah.”

 Later, after a memorial mass at the high school, a photograph of Brother Kyron holding his Bible to his chest was installed, next to photos of several other brothers, in the school’s lobby with a simple inscription: BROTHER KYRON. 1909 – 1964.

Jack was looking at it, when Brother Fabian appeared behind him.

“Hello Mr. Dunne, what do you think?”

They looked for a while.

“We’re still trying to come up with a proper epitaph for it. Any ideas?”

“He was on about ‘Let there be light’ right before the end. But we ended up talking about who God was talking to and how come just one day.”

“What did he say?”

 “We ended up talking whether God picks you or you pick Him. But we never got anywhere. Maybe you should leave it blank.”

“You think?”

“Yeah.”

They did.

Gerry Coleman