“In its encounter with the core of Israelite faith, the Canaanite cosmos was emptied of divinity; the heavens, until now studded with gods, became the handiwork of YHWH; the gods died; living myth became poetic metaphor and decorative motifs; forms were filled with new content. So we are told by many scholars.”
– Chaim Potok, Wanderings
YHWH stands in the congregation of the mighty, rendering his judgment among the gods.
“How long,” he asks them, “will you defend the wicked? You should side with the weak and the fatherless. You should take up the cause of the poor and the oppressed. You know nothing; you walk about in darkness and the foundations of the earth are shaken. Once I called you gods: immortal children of the Most High. But you will perish like men.”
“Listen,” says Baal Haddad. “We’re trying our best.”
At last YHWH storms from the hall, and the thunder follows. For three thousand years the Elohim sit in silence, and then it is Enki who speaks.
“Well,” he says, “that was awkward.” Enki, lord who rides the storm, lion of heaven, looks down at his fingernails. The others wait for him to speak again, but he does not. Mighty waters flow upon his shoulders; an eagle perches at his arm. He smiles apologetically.
Enki’s reticence troubles Baal Haddad. How have they come to this? Tongues tied, every one of them. He ought to drown the world in his wrath, but his wrath will not come. “I guess we’ll talk about this at the next meeting,” he says, though it is clear to him already that there will be no more meetings of the Elohim.
Anat drives him home. “I’ll put a boot up his ass,” she says. “I’ll bathe in his blood.”
“Watch the light,” says Baal Haddad.
“I mean, who does he think he is?”
“The light.”
They clear the intersection late; a red-light camera flashes behind them.
“Oh wait,” says Anat, sarcastically: “I mean, who does He think He is?”
“He is who he is,” says Baal Haddad.
“He wants to talk about the fatherless. As if we had never known what it is to lose the favor of a father. And the oppressed. But look how they multiply, on his watch!” Droplets fly from her glossed lips. The tendons in her neck are taut.
Baal Haddad loves his sister with a ferocity equaled only by the force of her own temper. But he is tired, and there is a tension at the base of his skull and behind his eyes; already he knows that he is in for three days of miserable headaches. He presses his fingertips against his brow; he does not respond.
The car swerves as Anat gestures. “I’ll cut off his head and wear it as a jewel,” she says.
“Anat —”
“But You,” she says, turning to face Baal Haddad. “What are You going to do about it?”
He sighs. “What do you want me to do about it?”
“Passive,” she spits, and she turns her eyes to the road again, just soon enough to avoid colliding with the median. “Apathetic. Letting him steal your thunder.”
“I’m not saying —”
“You, who vanquished Yam and took his body to pieces, You the very conqueror of Death —”
“Anat,” says Baal Haddad. “I’m not in the mood for a pep talk.”
She leaves him at the bottom of the hill. Baal Haddad slouches up the steps toward his house. Its great cedar timbers no longer inspire him; all he can think about is what a bitch the place is to winterize. Especially the windows, which he thundered into being without considering the kind of maintenance they would require. You make a lot of mistakes with your first house, thinks Baal Haddad. But it’s one thing to understand the mistakes. It’s another thing having to live with them.
Shala is in the kitchen, baking. Her tablet is propped on the counter in front of her, and she is speaking to it. As Baal Haddad passes, she smiles at him — kindly, but so quickly that few of her viewers will notice. Her clever fingers go on weaving strips of dough.
In the bedroom, Baal Haddad removes his shoes and his great horned headdress and spreads himself atop the duvet. The bed, in a pool of moonlight by the windows of the big dark room, is bright and fresh; the pillows are scented with lavender. He regrets the fact that the blinds are open, but he does not move to close them. He closes his eyes instead. Is this what it feels like? he wonders. Is this how it begins? Perhaps after all he really is susceptible to the kind of emotional oblivion he has seen in others — something he has long feared, but never quite believed. He has always been a moody god, but until now his moods have ranged across the full spectrum: sullenness and despair, yes, but also ecstasy, also passion, also joy. And wrath, of course. Vigorous, righteous anger. Once again he tries to summon it, but still his wrath does not come. Probably this is for the better. Anger, so admirable in youth, does not become the elderly. Of course he is not yet so aged, but what comfort is that? He has reached a strange juncture in his existence: no longer a god, nor yet an old man. Just Haddad, on a bed, feeling nothing.
***
At the end of the street, Anat does not turn right, toward home. Instead she turns left, onto a long strip of divided highway flanked by gas stations and fast-food restaurants and half-lit strip malls and discount stores. She slides a Dead Kennedys CD into her aging hatchback’s audio system, turns up the volume, cracks the window, lights a cigarette, and picks up a ragged Nietzsche paperback, which she holds against the steering wheel with her right hand while she smokes with her left, periodically tipping ashes into the cold stream of air and glancing every so often from the page to the road. She lets her foot fall heavily on the gas, easing up at intersections to time the traffic signals. Alternating bands of light and shadow drift across her as she drives.
There is an acid feeling in her stomach, not from hunger or indigestion, but from the always-loathsome exercise of bucking her brother up with false credit for deeds which were really her own. It was she, after all, who slew Death and fed his entrails to the birds, while Haddad was sulking in the underworld. And could Haddad have vanquished Yam without her? Without her, would he have that magnificent house upon the hill? No, and no again. But if her brother is nothing without her, the fact of her station within the patriarchy of the gods is that neither can she, for all her might, rule without him. And anyway she loves him — she really does, and it kills her to see him like this.
The value of a thing, she reads, sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it.
Fuuuuck, she thinks. Fucking Nietzsche. I could have told him that.
Now that she thinks of it, she’s sure she did tell him that. For all the whispering she did into the old bastard’s ear, he ought to have paid her royalties.
None of them understand this. Degenerate lazy leftover gods: if they’d ever paid the slightest attention they might have noticed that the source of her strength — the strength with which she has propped up their whole rotting dynasty — is the very price she has paid for exercising it. The paradox of her divinity, lacking the entitlement of masculinity, is how it grows in the gap between their dependence upon her and the respect they owe her. But there’s no point in trying to explain it to them — she’s seen enough blank gazes to last an eternity.
The CD skips and she pounds the player with a fist. She tosses the spent cigarette out the window and lights another.
Even the few who understand that she has paid a price do not understand the price she’s paid. Shala pities her, for example, because Shala abhors the thought of Anat’s empty apartment, her solo nights out at the bars, her perpetual partnerlessness; Shala thinks it must be lonely to love one’s brother and no one else — and no doubt there’s a touch of jealousy in her feelings about the bond between her husband and Anat, but Shala is a creature of such kindness and sympathy that the jealousy must be buried somewhere deep: down wherever it is she buries the truth about her marriage to Haddad, which is that it’s only a footnote to the story of a mighty god whose sister is the source of his might. Shala, sweet goddess of the grains, does not understand that for Anat the price is the power, and the power is the price, nor can she see how the apathy of the Elohim threatens to make it all — the power and the sacrifices alike — worth nothing. Maybe I’m the only one left with anything to lose, Anat thinks.
War trumpets sounding in her veins, Anat cuts off an SUV in the center lane, hoping to provoke a road rage incident. But the SUV yields without returning her challenge.
The arrogance of YHWH, claiming sole representation of the eternal!
She’s too angry now to keep this all in her head. Squeezing the cigarette between two fingers, she picks up her phone and selects a number from the contacts, the Nietzsche book still propped against the wheel, the old hatchback making fifteen over the limit down a dark stretch of highway out past the mall. The phone rings six times and dumps her into voicemail.
“It’s Anat,” she says. “Listen. This fucking Tetragram motherfucker needs to stay in his lane. I need to know why you didn’t say anything back there. Like, are you even mad about this? Motherfucker’s trying to son you. He’s trying to be the whole band. I mean, how can there be only one avatar of the Almighty? What a piss-poor universe that would be! One mind, one personality, one stupid…face. You know what: you should have listened; you should have perked up those big ugly ears — I told you this — you should have paid attention when he said his people were talking about monotheism. Like, I know you don’t do big words, big guy, but that should have caught your attention. I told you. Mono, motherfucker. Means one. What did you think was gonna happen? I told Haddad; I said to him, Nip this shit in the bud. But he’s been moping around like —”
Here the voicemail app cuts her off.
She throws the cigarette out the window and lights another. She calls again; again she is sent to voicemail.
“And you know what? Let’s get honest about who’s been holding it all together. The motherfucking war goddess has been holding it all together. Did fucking Tetragram slay the serpent with the seven heads? Did YHWH get rid of the Quarrelsome One, or Zabib, or Ishat the Bitch of the Gods? No. I did. The motherfucking war goddess did. So if y’all don’t want to do your jobs anymore, maybe you can at least have my fucking back for once so I can straighten this shit out.”
She ends the call, and calls once again, and once again she is greeted by the voicemail.
“I know you’re there,” she says. “Pick up, you coward.”
Giving up at last, she drops the phone and the book onto the passenger seat, turns off the stereo, and drives hard into the chilly night, thinking.
YHWH means to claim creation for his own; he means to drive the Elohim from their own story, and none of the others can be moved to oppose him. Only Anat understands the cost of it. Only she sees how the Elohim are needed. Who but she can manifest the blood-hunger that moves the world? Whose voice but hers could carry the cries of war, the call to glory, the savage songs of change? What stupor would consume the lives of men without her? Why will no one fight for her, as she has fought for them?
***
High in a tower sits Moloch, devourer of innocence: Moloch of the seven stomachs; Moloch whose skin glistens with the blood of infants and the tears of their parents; dread Moloch with the body of a man and the terrible head of a bull; Moloch unto whom children are passed through the fire, or used to be, at least; Moloch the abominable, the insatiable. He leans his enormous chest forward, bending at the waist, and he sighs at the pain in his hip, and he pulls great fuzzy slippers onto each of his horrible feet. He sits up, looks at the broken door to his bedroom closet, and sighs again. Creaking at the knees, he stands, walks to his desk, and rummages around, looking for his keys.
The keys are beneath the book he has been reading — Learn to Code in 30 Days. Moloch despises this book. It confounds him. He hurls it across the room. The book crashes against the closet door, which falls from its last hinge and collapses against the row of loincloths hung within. On his computer monitor, a conference call is entering its third hour. No one knows that he isn’t paying attention: his mic is muted and his camera is off.
Beside the monitor, his phone begins to vibrate.
Anat.
Moloch ignores her call. He picks up the bathrobe hanging over the back of his desk chair, slips it on, and leaves his apartment.
The woman from 34A, the one with the French bulldog, is at the elevator bank. She sees him coming and retreats to her apartment, head down. Moloch, who has never said a word to her besides hello, feels an emptiness in each of his seven stomachs. He waits for the elevator to come, aware of the eyes upon him from nearby peepholes. It comes, and he rides down alone, averting his gaze from the reflection in the polished doors.
The lobby is a high-ceilinged white-lit place, with long crystalline chandeliers and walls of shining stone: an ersatz temple. The plastic soles of his slippers make a zip-zip sound on the carpet. The Bald One is here, behind the desk. He does not look upon Moloch. None of them ever do, except for Charles, who works the morning shift. Moloch likes Charles.
At the far end of the lobby is the Bodega™. This is not an actual shop, but an enormous vending machine stocked with snacks, toiletries, cleaning supplies, over-the-counter medications, and other provisions. Between the Bodega™ and the delivery apps on his phone, Moloch has access to almost everything he needs, leaving him more time to devote to his labors. Moloch is working for an internet startup. His boss is 22 years old. Moloch’s boss uses expressions like disruption and growth hacker and ninja and iterate and platform agnostic. Moloch would like to hurl his boss across the room, as he did with the book. He would like to, but he cannot. Moloch works from home.
Indeed, were it not for the meetings of the Elohim, Moloch would never leave his apartment building at all. But he has begun to prefer it this way. He is ill at ease in the world of men.
From the Bodega™ Moloch purchases a packet of Little Debbie brownies and a tube of toothpaste. His enormous fingers tear at the packet as his slippers zip back across the lobby, and he shovels the first of the brownies into his mouth. By the time he reaches his apartment, he has consumed them all.
On his monitor, the call continues. His boss is talking about game changers. Ageless Moloch has lately come to learn new definitions of eternity. He watches his boss for a moment. Some of them whom I have devoured, he thinks, were little younger than you.
He checks his phone: three missed calls; three voicemails. All Anat.
Moloch removes his robe and slippers. He shuffles to the wreckage of his closet door and picks up Learn to Code in 30 Days. He puts on his glasses, sits on the bed, and begins to read.
***
Enki is on his second vodka tonic when Anat calls. He hesitates. It would be hard to hear her, anyway, over the unmelodious wailing from the end of the bar. But it’s no use putting her off.
She snaps at him before he can say hello: “Why are you all avoiding me?”
“I answered on the second ring.”
“Where are you? What’s that noise in the background?”
“I believe it’s meant to be Tiny Dancer.”
“You’re at Winnie’s.”
“Yes. Why don’t you join me?”
Winnie’s is a little karaoke joint downtown: once fashionable, then for a time so resolutely unfashionable that it has lately become fashionable again. Mortal fashions, like mortal fates, change so quickly that to Enki’s eye they are almost imperceptible. But he is training himself to see them. Here, for instance: a low ceiling; phony wood paneling on the walls and on the front of the long bar; leaded glass lamps hanging like little umbrellas above red vinyl booths; a black-and-red checkered floor; bottles all along the back of the bar, illuminated by the light reflecting from the mirror behind them as well as the light glowing down through faux-stained-glass panels above; a big vase stuffed with wilting chrysanthemums. And of course the laser-disc music machine and the enormous, scratched-up screen on which the lyrics to pop standards scroll over images of young Chinese lovers wandering about in gardens. The appeal of it all, thinks Enki, derives neither from the general nor the specific, but somehow from the interplay of the two. He likes Winnie’s for what it is, for its homely dissimilarity to any palace in the sky. But for the mortals around him, he has come to understand, there is an additional appeal to a place like this one: in some sense it relieves the trauma of their passage through time. It suggests that what once was beautiful will one day be beautiful again.
Anat strides in sooner than he was expecting, given how far away she was when she called. She’s wearing dented armor and she reeks of cigarette smoke. The night’s chill still clings to her. He recognizes the expression in her eyes: it is the look they take when she has been chasing an enemy who refuses to give her battle.
“Sit,” he says. “Dark & Stormy?”
“Always.”
Enki waves to Joy Ann, the bartender, who has learned this drink specially for Anat. Joy Ann makes the drink and sets it atop a cocktail napkin. Anat puts the cherry to her amaranthine lips, and she swallows it whole, stem and all.
“Well?” she says.
“Well?” says Enki.
“What’s the matter with you? What’s the matter with all of you?”
“Nothing’s the matter.”
“The Enki I know rolls over for no god. The Enki I know doesn’t just sit there looking at his hands —”
“I’m still the Enki you know.”
“Hardly.”
“The difference between us is that I pick my battles. Whereas you pick all of them.”
“But this is the only battle. If you don’t pick this one, it’s over. I can’t get my head around all of you sitting there letting him berate us like that. Just sitting there like statues.”
“Okay,” he says, “but I didn’t hear you say anything, either.”
Anat laughs bitterly. “Well that’s just fucking it, isn’t it? I have been saying something. But none of you will listen.”
“I’m not talking about sidebar conversations. I’m specifically saying that you didn’t speak up in the meeting. When you had your chance.”
“Enki. You’ve seen what happens when I speak up. I’m answered with eye rolls, if I get any reaction at all.”
“Not from me.”
“I can see why you’re defensive. I don’t think any of you want me to say anything. Because the truth is you’re afraid I’d win the argument. And no one likes a winning goddess. You know what happens to goddesses who win too much? First they fight you. Then they laugh at you. Eventually they just start ignoring you.” She stirs her drink, and the rage leaks from her eyes, until only misery remains. “So here we are. Our Götterdämmerung. Our Ragnarök. And I’m the only one who gives a damn, and you all find it embarrassing that I do. You find it funny.”
“I don’t find it funny.”
“You do. I’ve become a comic fucking figure, because I have the audacity to give a shit. Don’t you see what’s happening? We are no longer writing destiny. We are being written. And the Author has decided to play me for laughs. Pretty soon He’s going to cut me out of the story altogether. And then the rest of you. Me first, because no one finds war goddesses believable anymore. But when I’m gone, He’ll be coming for the rest of you.”
Enki understands that she wants the fight itself as much as she wants the victory. He could argue all night, just to keep her happy. But all the same, she has a point. “You’re right,” he says. “It’s unfair. It’s been unfair since long before this business with YHWH —”
“It wasn’t always this way —”
“It wasn’t. And we’re to blame. All of us, not just…Him. Or him, lower-case: whatever. You’re right. You’ve been right. We haven’t been listening.”
“Well, it’s too late now.”
“Is that what you really believe?”
“It’s what you believe, O God of Wisdom. Who am I to second-guess you?”
“A peer. A friend. A goddess. Speak: I’m listening.”
Anat signals to Joy Ann, and waits silently for her second drink to arrive. She swallows the cherry, and then she speaks.
The gods gave men life, she says, and it was men who gave the gods their immortality. Each order authored the other, and in so doing, each was author of itself. And from this collaboration sprang the infinitude of stories through which men and gods alike created the universe in all its colors and dimensions, in all its faces and all its manifestations of the divine will; and there is no greater blasphemy, no more monstrous form of oppression, no worse sin against gods or men than to —
“For fuck’s sake,” she says, interrupting herself. “What is that horrible noise?”
“That,” says Enki, “is someone’s best attempt at Tears in Heaven, by Eric Clapton.”
“I don’t know how you know so much about this shit.”
“I’ve been trying to learn a little more about the world.”
Anat snorts. “My point,” she says, “is that we can’t let a single voice claim ownership of the whole story.”
“‛It is not the voice that commands the story,’” says Enki, “‛It is the ear.’”
“Is that from your guy?”
“Calvino. Yes.”
“It sounds suspiciously like an apologetic to me.”
“Does it?”
“Have you noticed how his people are always apologizing for him? Why do you think that is? It’s because he alone is insufficient to explain the universe.”
“I suppose that’s true.”
Anat leans forward, frowning ferociously, her hand on the lip of the bar. “But don’t you think immortality is worth fighting for?”
“I think,” says Enki, navigating his words carefully, “that we are perhaps less immortal than we had believed. And the same will go for him, eventually.”
“He speaks as if we commit some injustice by growing old.”
“He’s young. That’s how he sees things. That’s how we once saw things.”
Anat does not reply. She orders another drink.
“Do you want to sing?” asks Enki.
“No,” says Anat.
“I’ll go up there with you.”
“No.”
Now there is another voice: a young woman’s, singing Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time, bringing something from the song Enki has never heard in it before, something at once tremulous and brave. Enki watches her. She glows — only faintly, but it reminds him of the aura about YHWH. Anat, perhaps accidentally, has made the critical distinction: their trouble is not that they are becoming mortal, but that they are growing old. No army, no warrior, no god can fight it.
Anat broods, watchfully, like a general deciding whether to call in her last reserves. Finally he sees a flicker of retreat in her eyes.
“He’s going to fuck it up,” she says.
“Probably,” says Enki.
Anat sighs. She stirs her drink and watches the singer with semi-seeing eyes. When the
song is finished, she turns her gaze back to Enki.
“Tell me,” she says, settling back into her seat. “How have you been spending your time?
Now that you have decided to spend it.”
“Well,” says Enki. “I’m seeing someone.”
“Who?”
“His name is Todd.”
“A man?”
Enki shrugs.
“A mortal,” says Anat.
“He’s an anesthesiologist.”
“Well,” says Anat, “we’re all mortals now, I suppose.”
They drink together, the god of waters and the goddess of blood, and they talk: first
haltingly, about the world as it is, and then fluently, about the world as it was. They tell each
other stories of the dawn-days, of the immortal deeds by which they made their names.
“Remember when you got yourself pregnant?” asks Anat.
“We don’t speak of that,” says Enki.
“I mean, it worked out okay in the end.”
Six drinks into the abyss, Enki at last persuades Anat to join him for a duet. They sing
with their eyes locked together, smiling despite themselves, swaying at the hips.
Islands in the stream, they sing,
That is what we are
To her own surprise, Anat knows all the lyrics.
***
Haddad alone understands: hereafter, they are waiting to die. They busy themselves with charity and sporting pursuits and second careers and eccentric hobbies, but the Elohim are an obsolescent aristocracy, and all it amounts to is killing time. Haddad has little taste for such busywork; he passes his time with long naps and occasional home maintenance. His excursions are limited mainly to the supermarket and the hardware store. And while his closest friends and family still address him as Baal, the honorific has begun to embarrass him. In public, and in his own mind, he is simply Haddad.
But they do not die. Instead, little by little, they fade from view. They who once shone as brightly as the heavenly spheres now stand in line with everyone else: they are turned away at velvet ropes; they scan their own groceries in the self-checkout lane, utterly ignored. “It’s nothing like the fate of men,” rants Anat. “It’s more terrible than that.” But Haddad suspects that it is more like the fate of men than men themselves would care to admit.
Some of the gods are bothered by Haddad’s fatalism. Anat calls him daily, shouting through the phone about one outrage or another: politics, or the injustices of the academic job market, or the absurd cost of traffic tickets. Enki drops by sometimes for a late-night beer; he asks Haddad probing questions disguised as casual inquiries. Moloch sends Haddad a book: Learn to Code in 30 Days. A thoughtful gesture, but the book is unintelligible and anyway Haddad does not need it. He has wealth enough left for a mortal lifetime. Only Shala lets him be. They have always let each other be: it’s the secret to their marriage.
Haddad is at his most content in long late-summer afternoons, in bed beside the open window. He lies still, with a half-read book propped open on his chest, listening to the noises of the world: the murmur of wind in the leaves, the hum of traffic on a distant road, the shouts of his children in the yard. And now and then the call of ravens; and now and then the sound, so faint it might only be a memory, of thunder.
Image: by Chutipon Pattanatitonon on Unsplash, licensed under CC.20
- Karaoke in the Lounge of the Gods - August 4, 2023