ONCE UPON A WEIRD
“If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.”
Lenny Bruce
MAY 28, 2011. There was a society that consisted of only 20 people. They lived in cottages in a valley.
There was no one else on the planet.
These people had no children, but they lived for a very long time. In fact, no one had ever died.
Above the planet, there were 20 moons. Each person had his own moon. Every night, he/she looked at his/her moon.
Joe told Carol, “You know what? There are only a few things we need. Food, clothing, shelter, and trinkets.”
Carol said, “You just figured that out?”
“It strikes me,” Joe said, “that whatever work I do, it’s about one of those four things. But I want to do something more. Yesterday, I imagined doing much more.”
“And what was that?” Carol said.
“Moving my moon.”
Her mouth fell open.
“That’s impossible. The moons rise and set. That’s it. They’re on their own.”
“I know,” Joe said. “But it’s the only thing I can think of doing that excites me.”
“And if you can move it,” she said, “everything will spin into chaos.”
“Yeah,” Joe said. “That’s what we all think. I mean, nobody talks about it, but we all believe it. Suppose we’re wrong.”
“Then you move a moon. So what? You have to balance that against the possibility of destroying the world.”
“Well,” Joe said, “I’ve figured it out. See, things are in balance. And as long as they are, nothing changes.”
Carol told Mike about this, and Mike told Ethel, and Joe ended up in a locked room in his cottage. A prisoner.
At his trial, he said, “Two things. One, everybody says it’s impossible to move a moon, so why can’t I try? And two, I was just talking to Carol about doing it. Why is that a crime?”
Mike, who was appointed judge, said: “I’ve thought long and hard about this, Joe, and I’ve decided you’ll be confined to quarters for the duration, for the foreseeable future.”
In his room, Joe started painting his moon on sheets of paper. He painted it faithfully, but after a few years, he began making moons that were purple, green, red, orange. He painted flat moons and triangular moons and moons with holes in them. He painted moons that looked like beds, sandwiches, and long horizontal eyeballs.
One day, he painted a moon with saw teeth, and he felt the floor tremble and the walls tremble. Outside his room, a tree fell and huge blue plumes of energy streamed out of the ground, up into the air.
People came to see it.
One man accidentally stepped too close and he was propelled a hundred feet into the air and sat there. He looked around him.
So a woman tried it next, and she was also shot into the air and came to rest a thousand feet above the ground.
Eventually, everyone tried it—and they were all floating at different heights. Then they began drifting. They drifted back to earth and then rose again. They found they could walk through air back to the ground.
That night, they noticed Joe’s moon had moved in the sky. It was higher and off to the left.
And there was a man on that moon. He was waving. He was wearing a robe and it was flapping. He was jumping up and down, and every time he jumped, he shot up into the sky, and then came down. Finally, he jumped off, spread his arms, and flew down to the ground.
He was a large man with a beard.
By this time, somebody had let Joe out of his room and he was there, on the grass, when the man with the beard hit the turf.
“Who are you?” Joe said.
“Moses,” the man said. “I was climbing this hill, see? I had led my people out of Egypt and we were wandering in the desert for a long time, and then I decided to walk up this hill because there were big stones there. I was going to carve laws in the stones and bring them down to the people. It would have been a pretty good deal. You know, some people obey the laws, some don’t. You’ve got arguments, interpretations, recriminations, punishments, revenge, a deal with God.”
Who?” Joe said.
“God,” Moses said. “The Guy. He’s in charge.”
Everybody looked at everybody.
“And then, bang,” Moses said. “I was up on that moon.”
“Where’s this God?” Joe said.
“You make him up as you go along,” Moses said.
Joe thought about that.
“Who made you up?”
Moses smiled.
“I’m a guy in a story. I don’t know who wrote it. I was a slave and then I broke out.”
“Broke out of the story?”
“Yeah…I guess.”
“Weird.”
“I know.”
“You want some coffee?”
“Sure. I’ll have to do something else now. I’m cut loose.”
In the following days and weeks, all sorts of characters from stories began appearing.
They were interesting. There was a man in a red robe with a cross hung around his neck. And a tall hat that looked like a fish. He said he was the Pope. At first, he tried to boss everyone around and get them to build a tower, but then a tough guy in a cheap suit named Mike Hammer told him to back off.
A dapper man emerged from the earth and said he was a critic for The New York Times. Hammer grabbed him by his collar and frog-marched him to a pond and tossed him in.
Then one day, Moses laughed.
The 20 people looked at him and asked what that was.
“I’m not sure,” Moses said, “but I want to do it again. Say something funny.”
“Say something what?”
“Funny. I think it’s like when you shoot up off the ground.”
“Like?”
“You know, when you compare one thing to another.”
The 20 people were bewildered. They considered bringing Moses to trial, but with all the new people around, they were distracted…
JON RAPPOPORT