Book of Numbers and Deuteronomy
Happy Easter. This wraps up the Torah. —ed
It was a grand pyramid scheme, and it spread through the camp—math Camp Sine—like wildfire. All you had to do was send $15, which everybody had because this was no broken-down, children of the unemployed math camp. $15! $15 and some recruits for exponential profit. The letter promised riches and adventure and stipulations, but who had time to read the words after “promised” and “riches”?
Moses went around to each bunk and woke people up. They sat up and stared at the serious young man with the serene eyes who had followed Commutative around until Commutative left to God knew where.
“Gee, what time is it?”
“It doesn’t matter, we have to leave.”
The other shoe, the shoe labeled “stipulations,” dropped for 60.4% of the Camp Siners. And in case you couldn’t hear the soft THUD of the shoe as it landed, Moses was happy in his own righteous way to wave the contract you had signed so quickly, in which you entrusted Moses with your already-hazy future. So it all boiled down to, again and again,
“Why?”
Because Camp Sine had grown too large. Because the bug juice was running out when it shouldn’t have been. Because the bunk cabins had expanded to the point where you could walk from the Tree of Knowledge to the Sea of Life by skedaddling across the roofs; you’d never have to once touch the ground. Wood plank to wood plank, Camp Sine’s population density had increased—exponentially—until it was hardly any fun to go out on Tuesdays and shoot the bluebirds that flitted and lived on the Tree of Knowledge. But this was home, and nobody wanted to leave and nobody wanted to believe there was consequences for actions.
“Bring the firearms,” Moses told everybody. What was it like, hearing that before you had even put on your socks and blink twice in the dark? What sort of “Good morning, starlight.” was that? Nobody knew, and the confusion among the select pyramid elite was mounting—exponentially. Moses was facing some hard numbers.
What was amazing was that Moses was extraordinarily young for a person, much less a leader and a visionary for the type of people attracted to summer camps of any persuasion: math, science, band, concentration, density. The same ultimately withdrawn, ostensibly gregarious, innately outcast, and really solemn people that glared at you with those beautiful blues. The type of people who thought “mess hall” and “bug juice” constituted a good lexicon, and that physical and meaningless activities were a good idea when it was summertime in the middle of a forest. The type of people who believed summer was allotted to escapism all along because if it weren’t, would we ever be happy and now that we’re here, are we happy?
Moses was unhappy. The forest and then mountains and then desert that surrounded Camp Sine had instilled in his group a profound sense of regret and homesickness and dysentery, although that might have been the rotting provisions. Miriam and Aaron, who came from a fancy upstate section of a fancy cosmopolitan city in a fancy East Coast city, provoked Moses to no end. People called them the Regal Couple; it was a compliment when they were in earshot and, when they were gone, a disgusted condemnation of their arrogant opulence. Moses was quiet and poor, which people found amid all his quirks and solitude … honorable, which baffled Miriam and Aaron who believed a human’s worth was a weird way of spelling “wealth.” They called him names and jeered when he tried to give speeches. It only intensified Moses’ stage fright. They ate more than their rations. They stole. They bullied the younger campers. Moses gritted his teeth; none of the other campers could do anything because Aaron’s family was rich and pulled strings when strings needed pulling. One time a kid nearly drowned because Aaron held him underwater and was too busy laughing to feel the tiny body going limp in his laughing, laughing hands. Only a handful of kids saw it; one kid reported it anonymously. The counselors relayed it to Aaron’s well-to-do father. The news came gently, of course, in a way to not prevent future donations to Camp Sine. The kids involved never appeared again at Camp Sine. And Aaron got away with it because money still spoke around here and sometimes it spoke very menacingly. Nobody liked to talk about that incident although people still heard Miriam’s tinkling laughing from time to time on that very subject, the laughter exuding from that pretty, vengeful face of hers.
So Moses was unhappy.
There were almonds everywhere. This didn’t help.
Was there ever a hope of finding a better summer camp? Moses would never entertain the one horrifying possibility, and he refused to discuss it. The kids that followed him, out of loyalty or contract law or whatever it was that binded them together when the sun above them threatened to dissolve everything it touched and the desert floor seemed to suck the moisture out of their mouths and lips and eyes and canteens and hands and feet. They stuck together because they had to stop the journey from taking everything they had. They stuck together because even the lazy, thin, and spineless clouds above them swooped and leered at them. Trailing behind them walked Sin and Death; they too were holding hands.
People were collapsing and not getting up.
At last Moses called an assembly. Desperation hung thick in the air. “Look, guys, there are some rules you have to follow. One: We need to ration the food. I don’t have an exit strategy, but this excursion should only take about six months—”
Groans drowned out Moses and his brilliant military strategy.
“We want to go back to Camp Sine!” one camper said. Many around him agreed this was a smart idea and demonstrated their support by starting a riot. They threw what little food and drink they had left at each other, most of which evaporated immediately in the chimerical daylight and floated upward toward a cruel God. Sin and Death watched without movement or noise from far away, perched upon a hill.
In one last attempt to bring order and hope to the tribe, Moses screamed, “No groin attacks! For God’s sake, no groin attacks!” Moses put everything he had into those screams and what came out was hope followed by anger, entrails, pride, hubris, almonds, and then a smidgen of peanut butter. He felt the weight of the world on his shoulder and the force of a yet to be invented combustion engine explode within his chest and he turned around. Moses stared at the person holding his shoulder. Death stared back because Death had yet to lose a staring match and wasn’t planning to start. Moses exhaled and followed Death away from the riot, away from sand, and to another desert kingdom.
“Shouldn’t your … companion be following us?” Moses said, after a long period of silence. There’s nothing akin to “What’s up?” when you’re in the company of an ageless, barely personified force.
/* She Has Work To Do */
“Ah.” Moses didn’t want to press the point.
/* I Think She Will Be Very Busy For The Next Few Centuries */
Moses nodded politely.
/* Women, Am I Right? */
It started to rain, not again but for the first time in a long time.