In The Lap Of The Gods Read online

  He looked into Shub’s eyes. The boy didn’t suspect a thing. Noah felt a pang in his chest. He clutched his hand to the spot and took a hesitant breath.

  Not dead yet.

  Noah was the only person on the planet who knew the true secret to a long life. It had nothing to do with eating better, or exercise, or avoiding stress.

  It was all in the dates.

  No, it wasn’t a change in the way people kept track of time.

  You had to eat the fruit of the Judah date palms.

  Those dates had not only been delicious and went nicely with a tall bottle of fermented ale, but the fruit kept you going, healthy and smiling, for a thousand years. Noah had kept a secret stash, and the sweet fruit was almost gone.

  The Flood had killed all the Judah date palms. Jehovah’s last smack on the ass of the impertinent race of man.

  Cush traced the outline of the print on the label with his finger.

  Noah smiled. He liked to talk about wine, almost as much as he liked to drink the wine. “The wine bottle has the Noah family logo,” he said. “An ark with crossed twigs of ivy. My wife with no name came up with that. You don’t happen to know her name, do you Shub?”

  Cush shook his head.

  “That’s too bad. I wish someone remembered. The family business is a successful one, young man. Of course, after the Flood and all, we were in on the ground floor.” Noah tugged the cork from the bottle and took a pull. “Shub, do you remember what I told you about my final conversation with the Angel Raphael?”

  Cush groaned and rolled his eyes deeply into the farthest depths of his skull. Old people and their tales. He plopped down on the floor, sighing with the entire length and breadth of his body.

  Chapter 9[9]

  I am a simple man that has a wife with no name, and three sons of various calibers. There was a time when we were greatly involved with the community. Baked good sales, keep our community clean programs and the like. As time passed, things that occurred for the common good began to fade away, replaced by activities that were more aimed at the personal good. Sodomy, for example. Now, I’m by no means a prude, and like any other man at my level of virility, I really like sodomy, but not 24 hours a day and definitely not from just any Moab, Ezra or Harry that knocks on my door with a jug of wine and a pair of sheepskin kneepads. Things went to the lowest common denominator in a very quick slide.

  One quiet afternoon I was sitting in a grove, cleaning out from underneath my toenails when a tall, rather attractive man approached me.

  “Noah, I command you to prostrate yourself.”

  “I beg your pardon? I don’t go for that, sir, despite your rather compelling attractiveness. For me to consider such a thing would take a whole lot of wine. You didn’t bring wine, did you?”

  The man looked around the grove, his head tilting back and forth, a quizzical look growing on his smooth, yet masculine face.

  “You are Noah, aren’t you?” he asked, pulling out a long papyrus pad, flipping through the pages. “N-O-A-H.”

  “Yes, I am Noah,” I admitted. “Husband to my wife, father to my sons, and so on.”

  “Good!” the man proclaimed, “for I am Raphael, First Angel of the Lord.” Giant wings unfurled from his back, gracefully arching out, an albino peacock. “I bring you news from your Creator!”

  I looked at him closely. “Uh-huh.”

  “Thou do not believe me?” the man who claimed to be the angel Raphael said incredulously, his delicate eyebrows arching in a seductive manner. “You should fall to your knees in fear and great despair.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Now we’re back to that again. No means no, and I mean that.”

  Raphael’s shoulders slumped, his wings drooping and folding back behind him. The anger in his bright, sky-blue eyes fizzled.

  “Listen, Noah. Do you mind if I sit down?”

  “Sure,” I said, scooting over a bit. Raphael sunk to the ground and leaned languorously against the scaly tree trunk. He sighed. He was gazing off at the herd of sheep in the nearby field. He appeared to get misty-eyed, or it could have been allergies. He turned slowly and looked at me. He had very nice hair.

  “Noah, I’m very sorry about the first impression I gave you. Obviously, there are still some anger issues residing with the Adam situation and me. Jehovah’s pet and all of that. Anyway, I thought I had grown beyond all of that jealousy, but I guess not. All I wanted to do was punch you in your clay man nose.”

  I scooted over just a little bit more, out of sucker punch range. A bird trilled. Raphael took a deep breath.

  “Okay, let start over,” Raphael said. He extended his perfectly manicured hand and I shook it. He had a good, firm, dry grip. He smelled good. “Do you want the good news,” he said, “or the bad news?”

  Raphael wasn’t a bad angel after talking to him for a while. Keep in mind, he was delivering news about the destruction of the entire world by flood, killing practically every man, woman, child, dog, cat, lizard, panda, dinosaur and tiger.

  “What about flies?” I asked. “Can you get rid of all the damned flies?”

  “Yeah, right,” Raphael laughed. “Right after we get rid of all the cockroaches.” He laughed again, sensuously.

  He gave me the word. In a short time, the rains would come and not stop, lasting for forty days and forty nights, give or take a day or two. Water would cover the Earth until even the peaks of the tallest mountains were submerged.

  There would only be a few survivors. Me and the family.

  First, though, we had to build a big boat, gather up all the animals we could find to help repopulate the world, and ride the storm out.

  “Sure,” I said.

  What a horrible cruise that turned out to be.

  Chapter 10[10]

  “Shub, would you wake up!”

  Cush bolted upright, sleep drool spraying wildly. “What? I wasn’t even there. I was at Jeremiah’s studying.” Cush toppled over like a sack of wet rags.

  Noah sighed. Youth has truly been wasted on the young. Hey, that’s a good one. He pulled out a well-worn papyrus pad from his pouch. A parting gift from Raphael. Noah used it for jotting down his various personal musings about the aftermath of the Deluge. He caught a few phrases as he flipped through it.

  Our first two weeks on the ark: “Jumping Jehovah, what is that horrible smell?”

  Our first day on dry land: “Jumping Jehovah, what is that horrible smell?”

  Wife with no name’s Lizard Mince Pie: “Jumping Jehovah, what is that horrible smell?”

  He still couldn’t decide which one of the three smelled the worst.

  Barbecue recipes. Funny things Shem had said. Homonyms. His first stab at poetry.

  “There once was a man from Senis…”

  And the Secret.

  Noah went to page fourteen and reread it. Sweat began beading on his forehead and he wiped it off quickly, rubbing his coarse sleeve across his ruddy face, fighting the urge to scrub his skin off. He looked at the notebook, then at Shub. He still couldn’t decide. Maybe he had more time. After all, he was only 900 years old. Or was he a 1000 years old? He popped a shriveled date into his mouth and counted the remainder. Six to go. Maybe he needed to decide now. Just in case.

  Chapter 11[11]

  Noah was on his deathbed. He considered it his regular bed, feeling that if he called it his deathbed, he would just be giving in, and Noah was still a stubborn man.

  Regardless, he was out of Judean date palms and no matter what he called where he slept, he wasn’t going to last much longer.

  Cush was in and out, bringing him wine and fanning him with gigantic palm leaves. He is a good kid, that Cush. Still too bad about the name, though.

  Noah had been having visions for the last few days. He didn’t know if they were prophetic or just delusional. Time would tell but it wouldn’t tell him. The evening shadows stretched lazily outside and his eyes were heavy. His memories danced in front of his eyes, swaying back and forth like one o
f the dancers he so loved in his youth. He thought about all the mistakes he had made. No toilet paper on the ark, drinking just a little too much and passing out naked, and forgetting his wife’s name for the last 700 years came to mind. You live and learn. At any rate, you live. Boy, that sounds pretty good, he mused, reaching for his quill and pad. A form appeared in the doorway. “Shub? Do we have any of that wine left? The good year?”

  “I’m not Shub, whoever that is,” the man said. “Noah, it’s Enoch, your great-grandfather.”

  Noah sat up on his elbow. The stranger bore a certain family resemblance, with the chin and all, except for the fact that Enoch was long dead. “Another delusion complete with dead ancestors,” he said dreamily. “Hello, sweet hallucination.”

  Enoch shook his head sadly. If only that were true. An angel had saved him from certain death at the hand of an aggrieved lender, and had spirited him directly to Heaven. The entrance was a gate made of the finest pearl, and the City of God was made of gold. A man had taken him directly to a room with a silver table where they did a series of things to him with sharp instruments and had put him into a box that hummed like a swarm of incensed hornets. When he got out of it, he didn’t see an insect anywhere but he felt better that he had in years.

  There were so many angels it took him months to get all of their names right. And best of all, he got to spend many an hour listening to his creator, Jehovah, and taking many notes about the history of the world and some of Jehovah’s inner thoughts and secrets.

  Enoch later compiled all these notes into a compendium he immodestly called “The Book of Enoch.” When Jehovah found out, he was not pleased. The Creator didn’t tolerate egos bigger than his own, and for him to be angry about such a thing said a lot about the size of Enoch’s. “Maybe walking the Earth for eternity will cut you down a notch,” Jehovah had said. Two burly Seraphim escorted Enoch out of Heaven and left him to his own devices on the streets of Jerusalem. It got old rather quickly and Enoch, with nothing better to occupy his time, decided he had to figure out how long he would have to wander or it would drive him insane.

  Enoch found out through bar scuttlebutt that Noah had been pals with the angel Raphael. Often, Enoch had seen that Raphael was in private meetings with Jehovah, so the angel may have had some insight into how long this thing called earthly existence would continue its wandering path and perhaps had imparted some information to his buddy Noah. However, the sallow appearance of his descendent made it clear that he may be too late. Noah was teetering on the brink of meeting Jehovah in person.

  “Noah, this is important,” Enoch said. “I need your help. Do you remember Raphael?”

  “Raphael, yes, quite a handsome being,” Noah said.

  “Of course,” Enoch said. “Noah, listen to me. Did Raphael ever tell you when the world would end?”

  Noah’s eyes widened and then rolled into the back of his head. He fell backwards onto what would now be very accurately described as his deathbed and even Noah couldn’t disagree at this point. Enoch groaned and looked around the room.

  “Not much stuff for a guy that lived a millennium,” Enoch said aloud, shuffling through some papers on the bed. A few bills, a note from Noah’s dentist/butcher, and a long papyrus notepad full of doodling and dirty limericks.

  “Who are you?” asked Cush, brandishing a bottle of wine like a blackjack.

  “An ancestor of yours, apparently,” Enoch said, noting the chin on the youth. “My name is Enoch.”

  “Never heard of you,” Cush said.

  “I’m pretty big on the oral tradition circuit,” said Enoch. What are they teaching kids these days?

  “Put down that notepad,” Cush said. “Father Noah bequeathed it to me. He said it was very important and needed to be handed down through the generations.” Cush gestured at himself. “DOWN through the generations, oldster. Not backwards to one of my alleged living dead ancestors.” He tried to snatch the notepad from Enoch, who moved quickly, jerking his knee straight up into Cush’s family chin and knocking him cold. Enoch opened the notepad and flipped through a few pages of it until he reached page fourteen. He stopped, reread it, and grinned briefly.

  “Provocative,” he said, and started reading more closely.

  Chapter 12[12]

  Greetings, dear reader. As I mentioned earlier, Jehovah really enjoyed informal discussions with different groups of angels. The other day, Jehovah was speaking about something new he was considering that he called the guardian angel division. It seemed very cumbersome to me, assigning one angel for each person on earth just to keep them from hurting themselves. “It’s a working compromise between ‘free will’ and ‘divine plan,’” he had ventured. Sounds like a lot of overtime to me.

  The talk went to the promise he had made to Noah that I had passed on to him personally, speaking for Jehovah, of course. I wouldn’t presume otherwise. Angel Madan asked Jehovah about the covenant and if Jehovah would consider other means to destroy the earth, or was the promise an all-encompassing guarantee that covered no more plague, fire, famine, or re-directed asteroids. “I phrased it in a way that Noah would understand that I would never have a direct hand in destroying Mankind again,” Jehovah said. “A laundry list of the ways I would not destroy the Earth would make for very boring lessons for future generations of children trying to learn the Word.” This got a chuckle. “Now, go work on your assignments,” Jehovah said. “Raphael, can you stay a minute?” he asked me.

  When the room had cleared, Jehovah said quietly to me. “There will come a time when the Earth will end. Man will take care of that himself and won’t need my or your help to finish it off.” He looked me square in the eye. “Raphael, you’ve been my most loyal angel. You stuck with me against Lucifer, you’ve carried countless messages to people for me, and your work on Sodom and Gomorrah was flawless.”

  Allow me to digress for a moment, dear reader. Sodom and Gomorrah. Jehovah was in one of his “Why don’t they worship me like they should?” moods, and decided to send a few others and myself down to snoop around a little bit in the Cities of the Plain. We looked all around the towns and found out that it wasn’t much different than any other towns we had even been to; same kind of restaurants, same kind of stores, same kind of sexual deviancy and lack of Creator worship. The only person we found that was in any way different was Lot, and he really wasn’t Much, having offered up his teenage girls to be raped when horny Sodomites interrupted us. That shows you the quality level of the citizens when Lot was the cream of the crop.

  Our report back to Jehovah did not please him. He stomped his feet and threw things for a while. He could throw quite a tantrum.

  “Destroy the cities!” he commanded, “and make it spectacular.”

  Keep in mind, our job as angels had always been a pretty basic one. We were mainly messengers, most often being harbingers of some kind of imminent problem. We had never destroyed anything of any consequence; it just wasn’t in our job description.

  The obvious answer was to burn the place down, but there was always a chance that the people would put it out, dampening the notion that Jehovah-the-Almighty was greatly angered and that his wrath was absolute. So angel Mamarao came up with a notion. Fire that can’t be put out with water, that in fact, water would make it burn. We had a good laugh over that at first, but Mamarao was adamant about its feasibility and he worked it inside and out until he came up with something he called “angel-fire.”

  We flew over the cities and dumped the angel-fire on the rooftops of the houses of Sodom and Gomorrah. It smelled nasty; sulphur, naphtha, quicklime. People scurried out of their homes to see what was going on. Mamarao gave the thumbs up and dumped a bucket of water on the first house. A gigantic heat flash that rivaled a solar flare exploded from the roof and soon the entire city was aflame. Fire crews in the town attempted to douse the flames with water, increasing the intensity of the conflagration. Everything went up so quickly, there was no chance for anyone to escape, killing every man, wom
an, and child. The place burned for days, reducing the entire place to cinders.

  Lot and his family had been spirited away in advance, but Lot’s wife had run back for some family heirlooms. She was instantly incinerated when she caught a splash of angel fire. Later on, I found out that Lot, on a drunken bender, had sex with his two previously mentioned daughters. I still believe he should have gotten a bucketful of angel-fire on his head instead of his wife.

  Back to the original narrative, where Jehovah is getting ready to make a big point.

  He handed me a gift-wrapped box. Great bow and ribbon. No card.

  “Go ahead, open it,” he told me, and I lifted the lid warily. A golden trumpet was nestled in velvet. I took it out and rubbed my fingers over it.

  “Thanks,” I said warily. Jehovah, as is well known, is the master of strings attached. This gift proved to be no exception.

  I picked it up and fingered the buttons. I’m sure it was full of golden dulcet tones, so I was going to give it a blow when Jehovah said, “Not now.” I lowered the horn.

  “When you blow the trumpet, it will be the signal for the world to end,” he said. I quickly put the trumpet back into the box and slapped the lid on it.

  “No thanks,” I said. “That’s way over my pay grade.”

  Jehovah said, “Sorry, but I’ve decided. You’re the one that’s going to announce the beginning of the end.”

  I was truly dumbfounded. “How will I know when to blow it?”

  “You won’t. I’ll let you know. You are the harbinger. I am the Creator.” Jehovah smiled grimly. “Don’t worry. I think you still have a few thousand years.” He wandered off whistling and left me holding the box.