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 The same ultimately withdrawn, ostensibly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.