The Dark Balloon

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Life is precious and God and the Bible.

When Jesus Christ first met Mary Magdalene, they were both seniors at Bethlehem High. They were both in biology, and Jesus felt his heart lubricate and become unstuck.

“You’re Jesus, right? You dropped this pencil,” Mary said as they walked to their next class.

Jesus blushed. He was well-known throughout the school. Not for his vast knowledge of biology but because juicy paternity secrets rarely remain that for long.

“And you’re Mary, right? Pleased to meet you,” Jesus said, shaking hands. Mary’s hands felt small, soft, and warm.

“Anyway,” Mary said, “I have to run. Social studies is so far on the other side it might as well be in Gaza.”

Jesus waved as she ran away. He looked down at the pencil, which he had never seen before.

All throughout high school Jesus wondered where he belonged. Studying late through the nights, Jesus pulled good grades and an even more impressive collection of eyelid bags. His teachers all recommended him for university rather than a life of carpentry. Secretly Jesus wondered why anybody would choose four more years of solitude over the concrete bustle of a carpenter’s shop.

But Mary made it bearable. Jesus met Mary’s friends, found his social circle, and learned to open up. He started hanging out after school instead of walking home. He began to take electives because his friends were taking them rather than picking them at random. And it turned out that Jesus and Mary both wanted to go into politics. Jesus wanted to help the poor underclass while Mary wanted women to have a bigger voice in the government.

“Why would women need a bigger voice to cook in the government’s kitchens?” Jesus asked innocently, dodging a punch to the shoulder. Their friends would laugh, but behind their backs they would exchange exasperated glances.

Gradually Jesus' heart liquefied until it had expanded to fill its container. Later in life he would forget this moment where he came close to being human.

Two years and five minutes passed. Everything remained the same, except the things that were different, which did not.

Jesus stood still in front of OV Biology (Oy Vey Biology, for seniors going to university) as the other students walked around him. He bent to pick up the prom invitation that had been dropped as it was handed back to him. He stared at the card, which would not reveal to him what had been said no matter how long he stared, words he would try to recall for as long as he lived.

Peter walked up to him, having seen everything. He mumbled something, which might’ve been a joke. Jesus moved his face, which might’ve been a smile.

The two stood there well past the bell that rang in the next period, staring at the card, which was pink and hateful.

“Cheer up, Jesus. I hear she’s a whore.”

“Is that true?” Jesus asked, dully.

“No.”

Jesus crumpled the card and threw it as hard as he could against the school’s trophy display, turning it into water.

“My shoes are wet,” Peter said.

Jesus punched the wall as hard as he could, turning it into water. Jesus took off his backpack and ripped it in half, turning it into water. Jesus wrapped his fists in books and punched the glass installed in his biology classroom’s door, turning it into water. Jesus strode into class, picking up desks and chairs and terrariums and lizards and frogs and rats and abacuses and women-in-government pamphlets and tables and chalk, turning it into water.

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St. Barbara-Glass.

Monks on Segways, with fire on the top of their heads, playing “Lightning” by Philip Glass. Good night, everybody. We’ll start storyboarding the next chapter of the internet tomorrow because this one just ended.

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Joshua.

Joshua watched as Moses collapsed on the stage. The desert’s blinding heat grew angry around him. It is well-known that climate will change to mark historical events. And, like Moses, it came and went.

Joshua stared at Moses. Joshua stared at the nothingness. He stared at it as he walked back to his tent. He stared at it when the desert turned cold, then very cold, then deathly cold. He stared at it when he closed his eyes.

He knelt down to pray. The Ten Commandments, he thought. Words from God himself, and not just any God. A decimalized, metric, proper God. To give structure to life, to give hope and beauty and meaning and—Joshua couldn’t stop shaking. The pictures of Moses, splayed dead before a crowd that, now, barely could remember him bubbled above the murk in his head, only to be viciously stuffed down by everything else. His hand twitched.

“Joshua?” A divine voice boomed into Joshua’s head. His hand began to really twitch.

Moses had warned Joshua about this. When Moses first heard the voice of God, he had to wash not only his britches but his socks, his shirts, and even his hat. It had been shocking—explosively shocking. Still, God’s voice came as a surprise to Joshua, whose most religious experience had been watching the execution of a man and then vomiting in a nearby toilet. In the face staring back at him on the porcelain bowl, he gave up, passed out, and saw a shining light.

Joshua stammered.

“Joshua, this is your Lord.”

“Yes, my Lord. What …” Joshua paused. He doubted the English language had the proper words, so he took a random stab. “What can I do for you?” He cringed; the English language cringed; several nearby animals felt the necessity to cringe. One of the continually-starved and therefore incredibly cynical desert lions blushed.

“Joshua, in a few days time, those awful people outside will choose you as your leader.”

“Why me, O Lord?”

“Moses chose you. You’re in his will, you know,” God said. If God had a Face, Joshua imagined that He would be smirking triumphantly in some sense of Cosmic Irony that He knew Joshua could not fully appreciate.

Joshua had reached for the shining light in his moment of depression, but a larger, more suffuse green light had overcome the white light. The light of doubt. He had snapped out of his slumber on the toilet seat, flushed it, and staggered outside. The mob, returning from the execution of the innocent man—the innocent men? Did it matter?—, rushed past him, drunk and happy and ignorant and cruel and happy.

Damn that old man, Joshua secretly thought. I just wanted to say hello. Then he goes and nominates me for some idio—

“I can hear your thoughts, you know.” Joshua stopped, feeling an unsettling combination between embarrassment, shame, and the fear that he might spend eternity in Hell with his soul constantly flambéed by spirits of infinite evil.

“If you have any doubts, Joshua, of the ineffability of it all, please—”

Joshua interrupted, “No. I am a servant of the Lord.”

“Aren’t we all?” God boomed, impassively.

Joshua waited.

“Ha ha,” God laughed, impassively.

Joshua sat, silent.

“It’s funny because I Am Completely Omnipotent.”

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If you stand outside a dorm, you can watch the lights behind the windows go off one by one, knowing somebody is falling asleep, until you die of hypothermia. Happy Yom Kippur.

• Ethane: I think I just watched
• Ethane: Franciscan monk prayersical chairs.
• Me: Prayersical is like a creamsicle except in the middle is Jesus
• Me: waiting, plotting,
• Ethane: being cold

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The valley of dolls.

Adam bent on his knees and asked God for fruit for the coming winter. God frowned, spiritually speaking.

“Fruit. Again?”

“Well, o Lord, it is just that vitamins seem to be especially important in the winter. To fight off colds, flus, you know.”

“Are you saying this is my fault?”

“I’m not saying that you created viruses to hurt me,” Adam hurriedly injected.

“But you know that I created them, right?”

“Yes, yes, yes. It’s just, you’re benevolent and such, and this makes my brain hurt, so could I just have some fruit?”

“I shall think.” And God went away, spiritually speaking.

And Adam sat down and twiddled his thumbs because there wasn’t much to do in Paradise after you talked to all the incredibly horny animals for the umpteenth time.

Then Adam fell back in a paroxysm of intense chest pain. Painfully slowly, the cells of his rib began to agitate and devolve into stem cells at a biologically impossible speed before regressing to a single zygote.

A pause. Adam kept shaking, hoping the eventual shock would render him unconsciousness.

Then the pain elevated as the zygote divided and divided and specialized and divided until a very tiny human (the word “baby”—through all the pain—passed through Adam’s mind) laid still on his chest before transgressing rapidly into childhood, then puberty, and then adulthood.

A very confused woman stood on Adam’s chest, breaking some of his remaining ribs.

A loud voice boomed into Adam’s mind. “Er,”

“I think that went quite well,” God said.

“could somebody heal my chest; maybe an omnipotent being or something” Adam wheezed.

“Oh fine.” And it was so.

Adam pushed Eve to one side and sat up, coughing and reeling from the intense biologically impossible trauma he had just experienced. Eve’s fall was broken by her head because That Was Physics And This Is A Consistent Universe.

And thus God revealed unto Adam and Eve to be kind of a jerk.

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Super Smash Brothers from Solid Snake.

Here’s a normal day for in: I show up at the Central Toybox Station—which by the way has the architectural aesthetic of a pig on fire. I clock in and go to my assigned stage. Then I follow orders: Up-B, Down Tap-A, Held R then A. I knock the living stuffing out of my friends. Sure we’re so doped up on anesthesia that none of us feel anything physically. But that poison latches onto more adverbs: emotionally, romantically. I can’t even make love to my wife anymore. I feel nothing when I look at my children. Sure I’m a tough guy; I’m nothing like my loser Fluid Lizard. I try not to cry. But what’s the point of it all? Am I just here to smash into people. These “characters” are my friends. Do you have any idea how traumatizing it is to violently pummel your friends all day long? We tried unionizing. We tried striking. We tried petty vandalism. None of it worked. I’m making below-minimum wage doing this job to which the government has turned a blind eye. I’m not even winning first place anymore ever since the guy turned the CPU level up to five. I feel like a prostitute, and I can’t keep this up anymore. It’s just me and this gun. Does God even exist anymore?; what’s life after death: more of this? This gun is all I have. This gun is all I have. Give me the courage to kill myself.

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Dial J. for homework help, part 2 of a 10-part series.

Because God gave us this biological Turing machine of a body, we can run all of the algorithms our primordial field of computer science has discovered. This is to say, not many: Quicksort, but that’s O(n log n), which is terribly inefficient; A*, which the brain used for neural pathways until the version 59.32 in the 14th century that prompted the Southern Renaissance; and—most importantly—the Mersenne Twister, a psuedorandom number generator.

Why a PRNG and not skip right to RNG? Stochastic brains were tried in 59.34 but the resulting administrative messes in Heaven led to a series of organizational disasters. These culminated in the Cold War. Imagine it from God’s perspective: Decades of completely irrational behavior that you can’t “divinely tamper.” It was with great angelic relief when humans became deterministic again. Sure the output of PRNGs are notoriously difficult for humans to calculate, but it’s a walk in the park for God because God also invented parks and walking. In the end, it was the illusion that mattered.

Wikipedia, the largest sentient being we know, has this to say about the Mersenne Twister: Matsumoto and Nishimura developed it in 1997 with Monte Carlo simulations in mind. Of course, you can’t summarize years of research in one sentence any more than you can say World War II happened because of three rabbits and a bonfire—even if it is true—because while you’ve addressed the primary cause, you’ve eviscerated the story of all its supporting cast. Matsumoto met Nishimura on a bicycling expedition down the Japura River in the Amazon. Nishimura was drowning in the heady vapors of the Amazon, which would settle on and bite your hand like ferociously emotional mosquitoes. Like you and me, they developed a friendship on the banks of a majestic river yards away from horny alligators. They were never supposed to have met, but that’s what happens when you let loose stochastic humans and the butterfly effect in the same universe. Their two brains, two halves of a quine, colluded to reveal a commented-out Mersenne Twister in a pure and beautiful language no man has ever understood before or after that divine revelation. That language was Haskell, and their algorithm did indeed influence the tiny field of Monte Carlo simulations, but isn’t this story much nicer?

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Dial J. for homework help, part 1 of a 10-part series

J. stood outside his room, staring at the faux oak paneling. He nestled his toes in the brittle gray carpet, which was last cleaned—by accident—back when the only hole the Antarctic had was The Sinkhole. The Sinkhole was and perhaps is still a grungy bar where rugged marine biologists, made cynics by the twin demons of academia and government, chugged down a few beers in between tackling polar bears and ice demons, both external and internal. J. knew none of this. If he had, his thoughts would’ve been quickly drowned out by the thumping bass music playing in the room across the hallway from the time J. tried to fall asleep to the time J. tried to fall awake. To understand J., we must first understand the brain.

The brain is a large biological machine run by God’s chemicals, things with a bunch of carbon in them usually. God likes carbon because he likes the number 12. Jesus once petitioned the people of Aramaia to convert to base 12 with no luck. The mathematic world, faced with this vacuum, chose base 10. By sheer coincidence, base 10 is Satan’s favorite number. Base 10 is Satan’s greatest achievement.

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Heresy is the sincerest form of flattery.

• Ethane: the diarrhea’s in the details
• Ethane: that’s the saying, right?
• Me: Sure, I pray to Diarrhea all the time.

“Wipe us, O Diarrhea, and these, Thy Shits, which we are about to receive from Thy bowels. Through Nausea, our succubus. Achoo.”

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A Scene from “Pokémon: The Real World”

• Team Galactic Guard. Hey, kid, you can’t come in here.
• Main Player. Oh yeah? Says who?
• Guard. Says me! I challenge you to a battle because animal violence is the only way to solve this conflict!
• Battle ensues. Player wins.
• Guard. Aw, fuck, now I have to make a trip to the Pokémon Center.
• Player. Now can I enter?
• Pause.
• Guard. Hell no! What makes you think you can enter now?
• Player. But I beat you! In a battle of Pokémon!
• Guard. Some stupid game with ugly pets ain’t gonna let you enter!
• Player. All right. You made me do this. Pikachu, use your Final Solution attack!
• Guard’s heart asplodes.
• Guard. Aw fuck. I’m Jewish, man, you’re not supposed to say things like that.
• As player walks away, cut to camera following his face with the guard behind him out of focus.
• Player. I’m Jewish too.