This is an excerpt from one of the first chapters of Ginger Smoke:
Let’s go right to the beginning. Right to where it all started. God created the heavens and the earth. Cain killed Abel. The Lord obliterated Sodom and Gomorrah. Noah built an ark. I gently flip through the dog-eared pages of Genesis, skipping centuries at a time. They feel thin and fragile between my finger tips, ready to rip if I time travel too quickly.
The first books of the Old Testament cover pages thin enough to dissolve on your tongue. Thin as communion wafers. The dim light passes through each chapter and verse and filters onto the old oak desk that Michelle and I bought two years ago at a yard sale instead of lunch on our way home. It was wide enough to cover the indents in the carpeting that were left by the crib. Its finish complemented the walls after we ripped down the wallpaper patterned with pink and blue farm animals and painted them the color Autumn Russet or Roasted Sepia or Amber Sienna. Our therapist suggested something warm and soothing.
I thumb through these ancient stories and time stands still. Everything stops. The second hand, on its trip past the twelve, holds there just a moment too long. It stands straight up against gravity and fights the winding gears behind it and hangs there still, defying time itself. Inside that unmeasured second, my chest started to hurt the way it does when you hold your breath underwater. Just a moment too long. The moment before the walls ripped in half.
All of a sudden the drywall firecrackers at the edges and showers the room in plaster dust and splintered studs. The skylight wanes shut and the wooden cross beams that line the ceiling rot away. The walls drift around the room and make new right angles, forming new corners in a new room around me while I catch my breath. The paint on the walls, the Golden Avocado or Honeysuckle Beige, it peels away and leaves it whitewashed underneath. The carpeting rips up at the corners to put in the hardwood floors. My oak desk shrinks into something elementary right in front of me with a slick plastic top and a fake wood finish. That same little desk breaks like fish and bread across the wooden floor and the pieces set up in neat rows around me. Each one is complete with a grade-schooler decorated in a frilly summer dress or a pin-striped collared shirt. Heads of blonde and brunette pinned back into perfect patterns or combed into perfect parts. An entire classroom dressed in Sunday’s best.
The tattered, hard-cover Bible that was surrounded by piles of manila folders on top of composition notebooks on top of unpaid bills and sticky notes covered in phone numbers and grocery lists is now a brand new edition of God’s Word. Surrounded by a zoo of cracker animals fenced in by crayons, square in the middle of my new desk, the leather-bound book lays think and crisp. Gold engraving spells out my name in bold, gothic letters. Derek Fincher. I turn my name onto the desk and the binding cracks as it stretches wide open for the first time, and this moment stored deep in the broken pockets of my memory feels new. I’m reliving a moment that I never experienced before and I know the endings of these stories without knowing how.
The ending is what mattered in Sunday school. That’s what I remember. Jesus forgave all of our sins. Noah saw a rainbow. Terrible things happened in these biblical stories, but the focus was always on the happy endings. God saw the world. He saw it corrupted and evil and he said fuck it. He hit the restart button and flushed away everything that he created, but all we hear about is the rainbow— the promise God made after that apocalyptic April shower. Lord knows what happened before Adam and Eve.
Terrible things have to happen. Sacrifices have to be made. Jesus washed away the sins of man the way God washed away man for his sins centuries before His son came. But Jesus had to be beaten and whipped, spat on and nailed to a cross and ran through with a spear, and he had to spend the next weekend in hell. They hardly ever tell you what these biblical characters actually had to go through to get to their happy ending.
The teacher already passed out our snack, gearing us up for the story she decided to share this week. I’m sitting here, six years old and I hear the story of Abraham and Isaac for the first time. It’s always the first time. I’m chewing on the head of a giraffe while the teacher shows us the pictures of an altar Abraham built for an offering. An altar Abraham built because God told him to offer his only son. Offer meant slaughter. It meant tie up, stab to death, set on fire, and watch burn. This is the same God that already turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt for not listening, but I’m too busy devouring the legs of a lion to wrap my head around what God was asking.
The teacher pulls out a picture of Abraham holding a knife over his unknowing son, and she places it on the easel. I’m six years old, sitting in God’s house and I’m staring at cartoons winding up for homicide. I’ve never been in this classroom before. I’ve never heard this story or seen these pictures or drank this juice. This is all new. The first time, the opposite of déjà vu. But I still know how everything is going to happen. I know that an angel of God will swoop down at the last possible moment and tell Abraham not to sacrifice his only son. This angel will wait until Abraham is ready to slaughter Issac like a lamb and cook him like a roast. This angel will come and Abraham will be blessed for the rest of his life because he listened to God and followed his plan.
God from a machine. That’s what this type of ending literally translates into from Latin. Dues ex Machina. The ancient Greeks popularized this plot device as a way to imply a tragic ending without bumming out the audience. The playwrights of the time would drop a costumed god through the ceiling with a crane in the last minutes of the show and resolve the unsolvable crisis. God from a machine. But according to the author of Genesis, it was the Almighty Dues that created it.
Reading these stories, I already know how they end. All the rainbows and happily ever afters. The benefits of hindsight. But how does anybody have that much faith in anything to just say, Okay? What was Noah really thinking when God told him to build an ark? What exactly went through his head when God told him to make it 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high? Noah, I’m going to wipe everything I created from the face of the earth. I need you to find two of every animal on the planet. You have to repopulate the world.
Okay.
Build the wooden Titanic. Okay.
Kill your son. Okay.
How does anybody do anything like this without knowing how it is absolutely going to end? Without being promised a rainbow or an angel ahead of time?
Just follow the plan.
In God we trust.
I’m gnawing on the head of a rhinoceros, and something hits the back of mine. And my neck. And my shoulder. A light tap, tap, tapping. I toss the carcass into my mouth and casually glance back without catching the teacher’s attention. She puts the picture of the angel rushing down from the heavens on the easel, but my eyes are still buried in their corners, peeking back over my shoulder. All I can manage without causing a scene is the lacy white hem of a summer dress and a pair of stockinged legs kicking underneath it. The teacher is telling the ending that I already know, but I can’t hear it over the giggling building up behind me. From a little girl behind me. I can’t hear it over the elephant grinding between my teeth either. Animals turn to dust while the teacher puts up the next pictures of the story. The angel stopping the slaughter. Abraham untying Issac. And every new picture comes with a small blow to my head. The story continues along with the tapping.
The tap, tap, tapping.
The giggling sneaks out from behind the little girl’s hand. Slips through her fingers and escapes out into the open. I throw a band of gorillas into the back of my throat to drown it out. My teeth crash down on the family and their cracker bodies crunch as loud as if I were walking across a floor covered in them. My jaw works so hard that my ears pop. Her laugh still seeps in through the mashing, oscillating between chews like a police car’s siren. The giggling and gnashing of teeth.
Tap.
Tap.
Tapping on the back of my head.
My teeth are clenched so tight that they might fuse together. All the gaps and tiny spaces may just meld into a solid block of animal cracker-coated enamel. That would be the only way I’m not going to scream at the girl giggling behind me. I swear to God. Tap. I want to turn around and throw the rest of my snack at her. Fistfuls of circus animals. Lions and tigers and bears. Tap. I want God to throw animals at her too. Frogs and locusts. I pray for the plagues. Tap. I pray she is the first born. Tap. One more and I’m going to turn around and let her have it. One more time and whoever is sitting behind me is going to receive all the wrath that I can throw. One more time.
I swear to God…
Tap.
And I snap my head around.
About half a sheet of notebook paper’s worth of little crumpled balls fall free from my parted hair. They land next to the other half on the floor. I’m six and turned around in my chair at Sunday school, and I’m looking at her for the first time. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Michelle. The first time I ever looked into her eyes. The darkest blue shattered by a blast of gold flecks. Midnight interrupted by a solar flare. God introducing light into the darkness. And I want to be mad. I want brimstone and fire and forty days of rain. I want frogs and locusts and hail. I want all of it to come crashing down on her pretty little head. All over her sun-drenched, golden hair and her flowered, green sun dress. Her wrinkled nose and each cratered dimple. The last thing I want to do is smile back. That’s the last thing I want to do. I want to be so mad, but I can’t. And the stupid smile smears itself across my face.
“Derek,” the teacher yells from the front of the room, “Look at me!”
She holds the last word and it crescendos into the deafening scream of an air-raid siren. The glass windows rattle inside their frames and I spin around in my chair and clap my hands over my ears just before they implode under the sonic pressure and spray the room in a blast of transparent shrapnel. The floorboards earthquake apart and send bookcases and tables staggering to all ends of the room while carpeting rises through the cracks. Posters of the Ten Commandments and the Twelve Disciples burn black against the whitewashed walls. Leading men from blockbuster movies and cover art for graphic novels develop in their place like old Polaroid photos. Moses and Jesus and Judas die together and are reincarnated as the superheroes and public enemies hanging all around me on my office walls. Walls painted Buttered Hazelnut or Almond Glaze.
Something warm. Something soothing.
Entire millennia compact themselves into nanoseconds and the mountains of file folders and composition notebooks move back onto the surface of my desk. The siren fades and I’m sitting in the quiet of the old nursery. My new office. I time travel back to the future and I’m living inside another moment that may or may not have already happened, that I forgot to remember but can’t remember forgetting.
“Derek, look at me,” Michelle echoes.
Everything just changed around me except for her. Everything except for her eyes. Except now they’re surrounded by running mascara. They’re bloated and filled with a tangled web of blood vessels.
“What happened?”
“Did you sign all of the papers yet?” She leans into the door frame like she can’t support her own weight.
I push a few piles around on my desk, “What papers?”
“Never mind,” she says. “I can’t do this right now.” She squeezes the bridge of her nose and closes her eyes. “We’re going to church tomorrow. I asked the pastor if he’ll see us one last time.”
I lift up manila folders and move the phone next to the lamp. I open and close the drawers on the side of my desk. Flip through stacks and stacks, but I don’t know which papers are the right papers.
Michelle looks up from the floor, “Why aren’t you writing any of this down?”
“We’re going to church tomorrow.” I catch her eyes again and then drop them back down to the desk. “I got it.”
“Is that some kind of joke?”
“A joke?”
She stands straight up, “Are you trying to be funny?”
“I’m not trying to be anything.”
Her eyes get shiny and wet, but she doesn’t wipe them. “Well whether you remember or not, we are going to church tomorrow.” She looks at me and sees a lost cause. She sees Sodom and Gomorrah. The entire world before the flood. I can see it in her drowning eyes.
