Killing the Buddha Read online

  Job could also be a movie. It’s a hard pitch, I know. The story’s sort of a down, and there’s no action in the second act. Here’s my idea: Move the story from Uz—where the hell is Uz?—to Washington. Make Job a CIA agent, played by Sly Stallone; Sly could use a comeback role. He’s a “black op” who goes behind the lines, in Central America, Afghanistan, Iraq, doing our country’s dirty work. We need to establish from the get-go that this is a guy with balls, a man’s man. But also vulnerable, sensitive: We should see him playing with his kids. His only connection to the Company is his Handler, the agent who briefs him for missions and covers his ass with the bureaucrats. Job is absolutely loyal to this guy, even though—here’s the gimmick—he’s never seen him. The audience doesn’t see the handler, either. He’s just a voice on the phone. I’m thinking Sir Tony Hopkins.

  Anyway, one day Job comes home and walks right into an ambush. The house is crawling with terrorists. There’s a huge gunfight, and at the end of it Sly’s place is a smoking hole in the ground, his wife and kids are dead—make that one kid, we don’t want people slashing their wrists. Sly tries to contact his Handler for help, but suddenly Sir Tony’s not returning his calls. Maybe They’ve gotten him. Maybe he’s switched sides. Job doesn’t know. He’s totally alone. Except maybe we give him these three sidekicks, like the Joe Pesci character in the Lethal Weapon series, who keep pestering him with lousy advice. A little comic relief. Okay, so Job tracks the Handler down to a secret headquarters, a stately old mansion in the Virginia countryside, heavily guarded. He makes it onto the grounds, but someone spots him. All hell breaks loose: alarms, guns, rottweilers. I’m seeing a helicopter chase. Finally he’s outside the mansion, on the portico, exhausted, wounded, bloody, in tatters. He falls to his knees and hollers up at the balcony, begging the Handler to talk to him, give him some explanation. He’s sobbing. “God!” he wants to yell. “God!” But all that comes out is “Gaahhh!”

  There are still some third-act problems that need to be worked out.

  Well, you can see how there would be. Not that Hollywood would find it all that hard to represent God; special effects have come a long way since The Ten Commandments. It’s that there’s no resolution, or rather, the resolution is so antithetical to Hollywood’s cult of warmth. When God finally reveals Himself to Job, we want Him to explain: “That’s for coveting your neighbor’s wife.” But the voice from the whirlwind explains nothing. It asks. “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Who laid the cornerstone thereof; When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Or who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb?”

  There’s no poetry that can compete with this. There’s no argument that can refute it. Job asks, “How could you do this to me?” And God answers, “Because I can.” Only not so matter-of-factly. This isn’t an answer so much as it is a rebuke, thunderous, terrifying, sarcastic—sarcastic in a way that’s recognizably Jewish. (I don’t know if anyone remembers the old Allen’s Alley radio program: “Vas you dere, Sharlie?”) All poor Job can say in response is “Behold, I am vile. I will lay mine hand upon my mouth.” This is where most glosses of Job end, with man’s pathetic longing for justice coming up against the unfathomable power and mystery of the divine. Job wants to know why the world is unfair, and the Lord shows him the world—the entire world. The staggering vastness of earth and ocean, the secret dwelling places of light and darkness, the lion and the raven and the wild goat, the horse of the terrible nostrils, the monsters behemoth and leviathan. They’re all here, not so much described as revealed. God slaps them down on the table, like poker chips of some impossibly large denomination. A bet you can’t raise. What can Job do but fold?

  I’d also like to mention some creatures that God leaves out of His peroration, though they’re just as much His handiwork: the centipede with its poisonous fangs; the tarantula and the lung fluke; “tapeworms thirty feet long and roundworms so big and fat they block up your big intestine.” This last is from John Updike’s Witches of Eastwick. At the novel’s climax, the devil—going by the rather obvious name Darryl Van Horne—delivers a sermon at a New England church. The title of the sermon is “This Is a Terrible Creation.” He’s right, of course; the devil is right. Creation is terrible, at least by human standards. But then, if you go back to the Creator’s catalog of wonders, you’ll notice that man is barely mentioned in it. He’s a mote on the periphery, an afterthought. That’s why Creation is so terrible. It wasn’t designed for us—not for our comfort or even for our instruction. Not for our wise use. It is, in the deepest sense, inhuman.

  Hey, what about Satan? Where the hell did he run off to? If Job were a conventional narrative, he’d come slinking back at this point, crestfallen, shame-faced: because he’s lost the bet. Hasn’t he? Job, of course, has passed the hideous stress test that was crafted for him; he’s held on to his integrity. It’s God who’s been tempted, who’s failed. We can’t really say that He’s failed Job. That would imply some preexisting obligation, and if this story makes anything clear it’s that the Almighty owes no one. But no interpretation can disguise the fact that He’s very nearly killed His servant, or allowed him to be nearly killed, out of, well, pride. The Lord Himself appears to realize this; He tells Satan: “And still he holdeth fast his integrity, although thou movest me against him, to destroy him without cause.” For one moment He acknowledges the dreadful consequences of His whim. A moment later He disavows them: The devil made Him do it. Any literal reading of Job leaves us with the queasy intimation that God may be susceptible to demonic influence—that at any moment He may be conned into becoming our Adversary.

  But the Lord deserves more credit, I think. Clement of Rome taught that He rules the world with a right hand and a left hand, the right being Christ, the left Satan. Father, Son, and Adversary: What if this is the true Trinity, a Trinity that both Jews and Christians once recognized but then discarded and ultimately repressed? Personally, I never got the bird. What if the wager between God and Satan is a contest between two aspects of a single Being? We might call them the Creator and the Destroyer, as Hindus call Brahma and Shiva. At the outset of the contest these alternate personalities are separate and opposed; by the contest’s end they are one being. The Destroyer has been absorbed into the Creator. The Book of Job describes this wager from the point of view of its unhappy human marker—the die that is thrown, the coin that is flipped, the card that is turned over and over and over until its corners are torn off and its image worn almost beyond recognition. For Job the wager is a tragedy. For God, of course, it’s a game.

  Another way of putting it is that what to Job seems hideously unfair is, from God’s perspective, just. Martin Buber says that human justice “intends to give everyone what is due to him,” while divine justice “gives to everyone what he is.” God gives each thing its nature, a gift even greater than existence. It is the nature of the world that creation coexist with destruction, that each mother forth the other. Magma boils up and cools to rock; plates of rock grind together like teeth, throw up mountains, collapse in trenches, are drawn down to the pit of the earth to become magma once more. Oceans drown whole continents. Everything splits and burns and rends. Lions with dusty golden skins eat defenseless grazing animals with liquid eyes. The raven feeds its young with rotten flesh. Somewhere in America religious psychopaths crash airplanes into skyscrapers and burn and crush three thousand strangers to death. And on the other side of the world American tanks roll through the streets of an ancient city and kill thousands of its inhabitants. It’s all happening in a single instant, horrible and perfectly just. And God saw that it was good.

  So say you’ve got a Jew, a Lakota, and a Tutsi. And they’re hanging out comparing their tribulations. The Jew says, “I saw my whole family exterminated at Belsen. Mama, Papa, aunts, my sisters, two tiny girls. They were taken away to the gas chambers; they were burned in ovens, and their soot fell on me.”

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sp; The Lakota says: “I saw many dead men, women, and children lying in the ravine. When I went a little way up, I heard singing, and going a little way farther, I came upon my mother. She was moving slowly, and I could see that she was very badly wounded. A strange thing: She had a soldier’s revolver in her hand, swinging it as she went. I do not know how she got it. When I caught up to her, she said, ‘My son, pass by me; I am going to fall down now.’ As she went up, the bluecoats shot at her and killed her.”

  The Tutsi says: “The militia had the people line up in the churchyard, in rows. Then they would walk among the rows and cut us with their pangas, swish, swish, swish, like they are chopping down maize. There is blood everywhere. At midday they get tired, they want to rest for a while. But they don’t want any of the people to get away. So they find the ones who are still alive and sever the tendons behind their knees. This way they cannot run, and the militia can finish them later. Then they go off and eat lunch in the shade of the rectory.”

  I know what you’re going to say: That’s not funny! But wait. It gets better, I promise.

  An Orange Grove, Somewhere in Florida

  I am weary of my crying: my throat is dried:

  mine eyes fail while I wait for my God.

  PSALM 69:3

  WE were driving north, away from Miami, but not on the coastal highways. Instead we’d opted for the marrow of Florida, the flat, hot interior where oranges actually grow, on trees lined up like soldiers, in groves like regiments and divisions. Where the juice is actually made. Factories—Tropicana, Minute Maid, Sunny Delight—darken the road every few miles, and they stink worse than gas stations. Mashed pulp, tons of it, smells like anything else that has once been alive and isn’t anymore. Rotten.

  There wasn’t much to look at besides the oranges. So when we spotted a school bus pulled over to the side, we watched it grow large in our windshield, transfixed. It was painted white with trim the color of a robin’s egg, highlighted in rust. Across its backdoor someone had painted in a cursive hand, “Get your praise on!” But with its hood propped open like the beak of a hungry bird, the bus couldn’t even get itself back on the road.

  With visions of stranded gospel choirs shaking the trees with song just to pass the time, we pulled a U-turn and went back to give aid. But the bus seemed deserted. Maybe the choir had sought shade in the orange groves— the sky was the flat gray of old bedsheets, but the sun’s heat filtered through intensified. We walked closer, looking for clues, listening for hymns, but we heard nothing besides the tick-tick-tick of our car’s engine cooling.

  And then we saw the bus driver: a skeleton wearing skin like ratty leather, sitting at the wheel, staring through a bug-blurred windshield, watching us approach with what looked like lidless eyes. Then his bones rose as if pulled up by strings. He stood, crouched for the door, and emerged from the bus he apparently called home.

  “James Simpson,” he croaked. His tongue was too big for his mouth, and a white paste of dried sweat and salt ringed his lips. He wore high-top sneakers caked black with grease, oily blue jeans, and a dirty white T-shirt, out of which his bone-thin arms hung heavy as sash weights. His skin was sunned red and his tangle of hair was as orange as the fruit on the trees.

  He looked like he needed more help than anyone could give. “Lord will provide,” he said. He blinked, the pale, hot light of late afternoon proving too much for his cloudy blue eyes.

  “Provide what?” we said.

  “Gas,” said James. “I ran out. I figured a police officer might come along, give me some.” James looked over our shoulders, as if expecting to see a Florida state trooper glide to a stop in front of the bus, unfold himself out of his cruiser, and walk through the shimmering heat with his hands cupped full of gas. We couldn’t help ourselves; we looked, too, even as James shuffled forward in his laceless sneakers, toward us or the angel in mirror shades only he could see. His eyes twitched back to us and our empty hands.

  “That your church?” we asked, nodding to the inscription on the side of the bus. “Antioch Missionary Baptist Church, Opelika, Alabama, Jerry Dowdell, Pastor.”

  “I have come from Alabama,” agreed James, “but I ain’t from Antioch.” He did not explain how he happened to be at Antioch’s wheel. The Lord, he said, had taught him not to ask questions or particularly to answer them. He simply drove, waiting to be delivered to the church to which he said God had sworn his services. When he ran out of gas, he rolled to a stop and waited some more. Four days one time, he claimed, with neither food nor water. “Twenty-three hours behind a supermarket another time,” he said. Sitting at that big, black wheel with its polish worn thin by his hands, waiting for God to refuel him through a sympathetic state trooper, or a grocery clerk with a heart for the Lord. Or us. Lord will provide.

  “I aim to be a preacher,” he said. “Soon. I’m studying. I ain’t ready to start preachin’ though. Word’s still buildin’.” One hand rose to his stomach. “In here,” he said. He let his hand fall and stared at us, squinting in the sun. Something stirred the dust beneath the bus: a dehydrated white-and-brown pit bull. “Crybaby,” said James. “That’s his name.” Crybaby lay spread-eagled, panting and struggling to keep his eyes from rolling to white.

  “I’m hungry,” said James.

  The night before we’d stopped at a ramshackle Christian commune for junkies and winos, a compound of low, one-story buildings washed in gray paint known as the Circle of Love Ministries. Inside the circle—actually, a square of fencing topped with barbed wire—we had met a curly-haired drifter named Dennis, who’d plumped up on Jesus and government-issue cheese since he’d stopped “geeking”—smoking crack. He had strummed, with twisted hands, a few of his own songs for us on his guitar. Southern rock ballads, lyrics about a river that had lifted him off the streets of Jacksonville and carried him to this mosquito-infested dormitory-church just outside of Heaven. There were songs about loving the needle, and about being loved by Jesus, and about finally deciding he had to choose between them. “You can’t just take,” he’d said, eyeing the notebooks in which we’d scribbled his words.

  “You gotta give. Give something back to Jesus.”

  Easy for Dennis to say now that he lived in the Circle of Love, where giving and receiving was as simple as strumming a guitar. Beyond the Circle’s borders, the transactions weren’t so clear. It was hard to say what you should give and whether it would be received.

  Not that James was proud. So hungry he said so, he looked ready to beg if only he could have found the words. But he couldn’t. He was lost in a faith beyond asking, a black hole. He was inside it, in the dark, and he didn’t even know that the air he breathed was suffering. What we call agony, he called God.

  We put our notebooks away and gave James what we had, some twenty-five-cent packages of peanut butter crackers we found in our backseat and a bottle of water. He didn’t want money, but when we offered to buy him some gas, he climbed into the bus and came out with a red plastic jug. As he handed it to us, we noticed the faded blue tattoo on his left hand. L-O-V-E, one letter per finger.

  “How much do you need?” we asked.

  “Whatever you can give,” said James.

  “No problem,” we said, but it was. Neither of us had shaken his hand, and we were both afraid to ask him to drive along. Afraid of what? He was dizzy from the heat and his dog could barely stand. Together they might have weighed a hundred pounds. Maybe he had a knife, but not likely—it didn’t look like he could’ve afforded one sharp enough to quarter an orange. Maybe he had a disease. Back at Circle of Love, Dennis had recited an alphabet of afflictions shared by him and his brothers, ticking them off on his fingers: “TB, hep C, HIV…” And yet we had been glad to take his hand and would’ve been honored to eat at his table if we hadn’t arrived too late for dinner. James was different. Dennis’s ministry may have been just a few cinder-block buildings, but at least it was real. James’s church was running on fumes. His flesh had withered on his bones. His dog was too ti
red to protect him. The sun, hiding behind clouds, still managed to burn him. And he was sitting on the side of the road waiting for God in the form of a state trooper.

  But the Lord didn’t show. Just us, and we were scared of him, frightened of getting too close to his faith, of getting lost, of getting hurt like he had. He’d given his heart to God and God had spurned him; he was unlucky in love. He was an abandoned woman, a knocked-around wife, a child not so much forgotten as willfully ignored; he was a dog turned out on the road. Yet he trailed after his master: “I’ve been to churches,” he told us. “But God ain’t in those houses.

  “Yesterday,” he said, “I stopped at a Baptist church back there. You probably seen it. They gave me a sandwich and gas, too. They said they was a church. But there wasn’t no God in their house. They just gave me the food and the gas so I’d go away. I didn’t even ask them for it. I don’t ask for nothing, I just take what God gives me. I told them I wouldn’t ask for an invitation to come into their church and they didn’t give it to me. They called law on me and preacher said, ‘You got the wrong church, son.’ ”