by Scott Edelman
If Benjamin had been doing this by the letter, he supposed he should have begun by heading back to the old country — and not his own old country, either, as that would have only gotten him as far from his current home as New Jersey — but one of the old countries of his grandfathers — or maybe even the birthplaces of the great-grandfathers he’d never met.
But he also supposed — and if there’s one thing this quixotic project required, it was supposing — he had no interest in conversing with any God who insisted on doing things by the letter, who would care whether the clay Benjamin gathered had come from Poland or Czechoslovakia or some other spot in his family’s history he’d never been curious enough to visit.
And if there’s one thing Benjamin’s seventy-three years had taught him, it was that a God who demanded things be done by the letter would have no interest in speaking with him either.
More than seven decades of silence — with neither God nor man budging, neither willing to be the one to utter the first word and break the ice — had taught him that much.
So the raw material with which he intended to sculpt what his despair demanded hadn’t been excavated from lands thousands of miles away, as the ancient stories would also seem to demand. He’d carried his shovel first to the park where he and Ruth had met, that hallowed patch of ground remembered as if the moment had been yesterday, rather than a lifetime ago, molded that treasured earth to the soil which he’d dug from around the footings of the synagogue where they’d married, merged them both with what he’d knelt to scoop from beside her grave, and decided …
This would have to do.
If God were truly all about forgiveness, let him forgive that.
It hadn’t been easy gathering the amount of mud and clay as he thought he’d needed, at least not based on the plan as originally conceived, but the art classes he’d taken at the adult education center, his first concrete step toward this final moment, gave him a different idea. As well as the sculpting skills he’d need to bring that revised plan to fruition.
He’d at first assumed, based on his studies, his golem would need to be a solid creation through and through. But as Rachel, their weekly instructor, led them through other methods, he realized he could get by with wrapping a thin shell about a supporting armature. That his humanoid artifact would be hollow mattered little. Strength wasn’t a requirement for the vessel he was dreaming into being. Besides, unless there was a hollow within, how could there possibly be a space to fill with what his own hollowness deemed necessary?
To begin, he stripped his suits and collared shirts from their hangers — he was retired, anyway, with no need any longer to dress for others. And besides, what was the point of more formal clothing at all without Ruth there to smile when she saw him, to pat his lapel before he headed to the shop? She was the only one whose judgement mattered.
So he bent the wire and nailed together the wood into an approximation of human form, then began slapping clay against the ragged skeleton he’d constructed upon a chair in the living room of his echoing apartment.
Those first attempts at shaping the repository for the needed void were a disaster, looking nothing like what he needed, and barely even human. Even once he progressed, and his sculpture began to approximate a true human form, the arms kept ending up inhumanly spindly and the chest impossibly concave — and neither at all in the way the years had carved Benjamin himself. As for the face, the eyes, as he began, were sometimes so close together he felt as if he’d almost accidentally crafted a Cyclops, or else so far apart, he could have believed he was staring at a fish. He’d had to repeatedly dampen the drying clay so he could peel it away and start over, eventually losing track of the number of his attempts.
Time wasn’t the only thing of which he’d lost track. During the birthing process, he rarely answered the phone, and no longer allowed Leonard into his apartment whenever the silence would cause him to drop by and check all was well. Some of that was due to the intensity of Benjamin’s purpose, but also, he knew he couldn’t let his son see what was coming to life — well, a sort of life — on a chair he’d dragged from around the kitchen table. He knew the wall he’d built between them recently — strengthened recently, actually — worried Lennie, but better to let the boy — Benjamin still thought of him as a boy, even though he’d almost caught up with his father to become an old man himself — think it was because he was ashamed of a mess which came from mourning rather than that he’d been hiding a chaos made of madness. He didn’t want to have to explain.
He knew he couldn’t explain.
Finally, after many long nights spent looking from clay to mirror, from mirror to clay, Benjamin decided what sat in the chair across from him had at long last come to resemble what his soul insisted was required.
He leaned back with slick hands, and nodded, for what was before Benjamin was indeed … Benjamin.
There was his broken nose, there the ever-expanding forehead, there the jawline which jutted out crookedly when he smiled. It hadn’t a reason to jut out for a long while, not since he’d lost Ruth, the only one who’d ever found that crookedness endearing. But his success that night caused it to jut out once more, so as he studied both it and himself, that aspect this day matched the vessel he’d made.
Rachel, a good teacher, had taught him well how to capture his own image, first on paper, and then with all three dimensions. And his own image, he’d decided, was what was called for here.
For had not God revealed in sacred texts He had made Man in His own image?
If that were truly so, why shouldn’t Benjamin return the favor, and make God — or that which would summon God, would contain God, would amplify God’s voice so it could at last be heard — in his?
Benjamin wiped his hands dry on a rag and prepared himself for what would come next, what would come last — the placing of the word.
His word.
It wasn’t the world’s word, not any of the words which according to myth and legend had come before to animate creatures such as these (but never, not ever, a creature such as this), but instead one purely his own, called into being by his desire and desperation, yet another way he refused to follow the traditions of his faith by the letter.
For what good were traditions anyway, if after having survived this far into a life, he was alone?
He grasped a scraper and scratched the word across his own newly born forehead — a word he had been mumbling to himself often in recent weeks, ever since this mission began. And then he prayed — a prayer deeper and more honest even than the ones he’d prayed since Ruth’s death — for the form to be imbued with the breath of God.
It was long past time they talked. And since Benjamin had received no answers to any of his other attempts at conversation with a Higher Power, he saw this as the only way.
The instant Benjamin’s final stroke etched the word to completion, God tilted his head and opened his mouth. A puff of dust exited those lips before He uttered a single word, dust made from all the places which had mattered most in Benjamin’s life.
Benjamin inhaled that dust.
And remembered those places.
And waited for the words he hoped would follow.
“Hello, Benjamin,” said God, not with the booming voice he’d expected from He who’d formed the universe, but with Benjamin’s own.
Benjamin had never liked the sound of his own voice, and hearing it used as a tool by the Supreme Being washed all of his carefully rehearsed questions from his head. They were stripped from him, and it was suddenly as if he’d never prepared for this encounter at all. He sought words, different words, any words.
“You came,” he finally said. Stating the obvious was all that remained to him.
“Of course I came,” said God. “You called, didn’t you? So I could not help but come, even though this is not the way these things are usually done. You called, and whatever you might think, no, I do not insist on doing things by the letter. You called, and because you shouldn’t always believe what you hear from the lips of those who claim to speak in My name, yes, I came.”
God smiled, and Benjamin was greatly discomforted to see his smile issue through His lips.
“You say that,” answered Benjamin. “But surely you have better things to do than come when I call. That’s what your actions, your inactions, have proven, again, and again, and again. I cried out for you before, yet you never came. Where were you then?”
“I was beside you, Benjamin. I came, and you refused to recognize I’d come. And as for the other things you believe I should be doing rather than speaking with you … I am doing them. I am here … but I am there as well. I am everywhere. But then, you know that.”
Benjamin had no idea how to respond, as all of the words he’d rehearsed suddenly seemed false, became pointless, which meant even after all of his efforts to get to this moment in time, he could do no more than sit in silence.
A silence God was the first to break.
“You had questions, Benjamin?”
Benjamin did.
Benjamin had.
Many questions.
Questions which were, for all their verbosity, really but one question.
A question which ultimately was truly only a single word.
And since it was a word God had surely heard a hundred, a thousand, a billion times before, uttered by every organism since the first had dared crawl out of the oceans, and likely even those which had come before as well —
Why even utter it?
Benjamin had felt despair before in his life, but that which consumed him then — because he’d invested so much hope in what would happen on the day he finally faced his Maker — overwhelmed all he’d ever felt before.
He realized, even in the face of such a miracle as what sat across from him, that this entire exercise had been pointless.
He decided he should end what he should never have begun. But as he was about to stretch out his thumb and smear away the word he’d written, the Lord Himself leaned forward and erased the invisible word on Benjamin’s forehead, the one the man had never known was there, the one which none of us ever knows is there.
Benjamin froze.
Then God rose.
And went walking to and fro upon the Earth.
* * *
God left Benjamin in his apartment, knowing that because he had become as still as if he’d never known His breath of life, the man could come to no harm, would in fact have no awareness of the passage of time, nor even a sense of his slumbering state. He walked to the rec center where Benjamin had spent many months learning to mold the vessel He now inhabited.
He arrived as that night’s art class was breaking up. As the other students slipped from the room, they nodded while He made His way by them in the hall, knowing them as Benjamin never had, never could. Not merely because He was God, but because the man had been too grief-stricken from his loss to even try to come out of his shell, bereft of anything but the energy to learn how to force the conversation he then rejected.
Rachel’s back was to the door as He entered her classroom. She was folding up easels and wiping down turntables as He entered, but she looked back over one shoulder as she heard His approach.
“Benjamin!” she said with a laugh and a smile. “It’s good to see you.”
“It is good to see you, too, Rachel.”
Rachel paused in her puttering, but continued to smile in a manner God fully understood, but to which Benjamin had chosen to remain blind.
“I’m glad you decided to return. It’s been … what? A month?”
“I have been busy,” said the Lord.
“Who isn’t?” said Rachel. “But after you told me you felt you’d learned all you needed to learn here, I wasn’t sure whether I’d ever see you again.”
“I thought better of that,” said God. “One could always stand to learn a little more.”
“True,” said Rachel. “‘I am still learning,’ right?”
The Lord nodded. He had heard those words when they were first spoken, long before anyone had ever thought to quote them.
“Is everything OK, Benjamin? How are you feeling? You seem … different. You look … ”
Rachel turned to her desk and grabbed a sketchpad, the one in which she’d drawn portraits of each of her students as part of her lessons. She flipped to the page with Benjamin’s face on it, the real Benjamin’s face, ran her fingers across her loving lines, then held the book up beside His face.
“Yes, there’s definitely something different. The smile perhaps … “
“Yes,” said the Lord. “The smile.”
But it wasn’t the smile.
Because for all Benjamin had remembered, all the knowledge he’d picked up from Rachel, he’d forgotten one thing.
When his fingers sculpted a vessel for what he thought he needed, the result perfectly matched what he saw in the mirror he’d consulted for reference — which meant that though Benjamin had been satisfied, he shouldn’t have been, for the face he’d beheld was not his own. What he’d created … was reversed. Benjamin had made a beginners mistake, not having paid as much attention to Rachel’s art lessons as he thought he had.
And as to another lesson Rachel was attempting to teach, he’d been paying no attention at all.
“So what brings you back, Benjamin?”
“I thought you should see the result of all your hard work.”
Rachel looked puzzled for a moment, but then —
“Oh, you mean your smile today? Well, if you’re happier now than when you first started coming to my class, I’m glad. Creating art can bring that out in a person, and you’re … you’re very talented. Does this mean you’re ready for more lessons?”
“I am. I realized there’s much more I have to learn. But what I also realized is … I believe I was being held back being taught in a group. Have you considered giving private lessons?”
Rachel laughed a musical laugh, one she’d been careful to keep suppressed in the classroom until now.
“I haven’t, not before, no. But in your case, I’d be willing to make an exception.”
God smiled.
“You don’t seem as troubled as usual, Benjamin. May I ask what happened? What’s changed?”
God’s only answer was to continue to smile.
He told Rachel he looked forward to seeing her the following day.
* * *
Leonard was shocked when the receptionist told him his father was waiting on a couch in the lobby of his law firm. The old man had never visited him at work before, had always claimed running the shop kept him too busy. Even after he’d let the business go, though, he’d just never shown an interest.
And showing up unexpectedly like that, what with Leonard’s father no longer answering most of his calls … he had no idea what to think.
“I decided I’d come by and surprise you,” said God, as He rose to greet Benjamin’s son.
“You did surprise me. Of course you did.”
He looked at his father, and it seemed to him he saw an odd tilt of the head there he’d never seen before. Something seemed off, but surely not …
“Have you been drinking, Dad?”
God shook his head.
“No … merely thinking.”
“About … ?“
“Maybe you could drop by tomorrow. I’ll tell you then. I’ll make dinner. And we’ll talk.”
“Are you sure you haven’t been drinking?” said Leonard, but then quickly added, “I’d like that.”
God gave Leonard a hug, and then, as he was about to leave, turned.
“I’m sorry your mother and I loved each other so much there wasn’t enough room for you.”
And then He was gone.
Stunned, Leonard almost dropped to the couch in the lobby, but managed to hold himself together until he could get back to his office and weep behind a closed door.
* * *
God sat down across from Benjamin and extended His finger to restore the word He had previously smudged out with a thumb. Benjamin shivered, then looked at the Lord, confused, knowing nothing of what had transpired between God reaching out His hand and God pulling His hand back.
“What just happened?” Benjamin asked.
God did not answer. He let the voices which came from the other side of the door to Benjamin’s apartment, subdued at first, but rising as the speakers approached, be his only response. Benjamin was horrified to hear Rachel’s and his son’s voices.
“Is that Rachel?” said Benjamin, with a wail that was almost a whisper. “Is that my son?”
The doorbell rang, and Benjamin glared at the Lord with a great anger. He had not asked for this. He had not wanted this. All he’d hoped for were ears to hear as he unburdened himself of his rage, and for eyes which would acknowledge that rage was deserved.
But not this.
“What have you done?” whispered Benjamin. “My grief … my grief is all I have.”
Benjamin flung out his arms and erased the word on the forehead of the vessel he’d carefully crafted, and his creation once again became nothing more than mere sculpture, emptied of the breath of the divine.
There was a knock at the door, followed quickly by another. Benjamin answered those with a knock of his own, grabbing up a hammer, and with one great swipe, smashing the Lord to shards.
* * *
Leonard arrived at what he still thought of as his parents’ apartment building to find an unfamiliar woman in the lobby, her thumb on the button above his father’s name. As far as Leonard knew, though, there was no woman in his father’s life other than his late mother, and the customers he knew from his shop. And this one, with her over-stuffed backpack and paint-stained jeans, didn’t seem like someone who had much use for dry cleaning in her life.
“May I help you?” he asked.
She turned to him, and was about to speak, but as she took in his face, she paused — then nodded as if she recognized him.
“Oh, you must be Benjamin’s son,” she said. “I’m Rachel, your Dad’s art teacher.”
“Ah, yes, he mentioned something about signing up for lessons. Which was a surprise. He’d never expressed interest in anything like that before … before … “
“I understand,” she said, putting her hand over his. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
He allowed her hand to rest there as long as deemed polite, but no longer, then pulled his hand away.
“So what brings you here?”
“When your father came to see me yesterday, he told me he felt could make a great leap forward with a few one-on-one lessons. So here I am! Only — he hasn’t been answering.”
Looking back and forth between Rachel and the buzzer, Leonard sighed.
“Well, you might as well come on up,” he said.
He used his key to open the lobby door, then took the elevator up to his father’s floor, wondering, as they rose in that confined space, whether it was wise to bring a stranger along. His father had always been a private person. But it was soon late to back out now.
He rang the the bell at his father’s front door, but there was no answer to that buzzing either, nor to his repeated knocking.
He shouted for his father, then pressed his ear to the door, worried about what he might hear, but even more worried he might hear nothing. He looked at Rachel, hesitating for a moment, then realized he had no other option than to unlock the door.
“Wait here,” he said. He’d only just met this woman, he had no idea what he might find. “Please.”
Leonard had his fears. His father had been depressed lately — which was understandable — and had taken to acting strangely. How he’d acted during the previous day’s visit to the law firm was the strangest of all. But best not to think about going down that road until he had to.
He entered the living room, which when his mother was alive, had been kept pristine. But now there seemed to be mud everywhere: some scattered in clumps, some smeared across the carpeting, some in shards, some hanging loosely among twisted metal and shattered wood. It was almost as if something had exploded. He could find no clear spot of floor, but carefully picked his way through the mess anyway to stand in the center of the room.
“Dad?” he called out. There was no answer. He shouted again, and when still no answer came, pushed through the debris to search the bathroom and bedroom, hoping he might find his father there, dreading he might finding his father there … but he was gone.
“Dad,” he said again, low and weak, in a voice which could have been a child’s.
“What’s going on in there, Leonard?” Rachel called from the hallway. “Is everything OK? I’m coming in now.”
Leonard did not want a stranger to see this, see how his father had obviously lost it, but before he could bring himself to answer, Rachel entered the apartment.
“Well, well,” she said, surveying the mess. “Your father has been busy.”
“Do you know anything about this?” he asked, his voice trembling. “Is this why you’re here?”
“I know nothing about this,” she said, as she scanned the wood and wire and earth which surrounded them. “I’m only here because your father asked me to meet him here. I’m here because — “
Rachel spotted something amid the rubble, something which froze her words. She knelt, reaching for a curve of clay which had been sculpted to form part of a mouth. It looked like Benjamin’s mouth. And it almost was Benjamin’s mouth.
Almost. But not quite.
“What was going on here?” asked Leonard. “What did my father think he was doing?”
Rachel pulled her sketchpad from her backpack and swiped an arm across the floor to create a bare patch of carpeting. She laid the sketchpad down and flipped to the page where she’d months before drawn Benjamin, the page she’d examined carefully, but not carefully enough, the night before. She placed the shard of clay beside her pencil drawing, seeing then what she’d failed to see before. And then hurriedly began rummaging through the wreckage.
“What are you looking for?” asked Leonard.
“I don’t know,” she said, even though … she knew. But it sounded too ridiculous even in her head to ever say aloud.
She soon found other fragments which bore the impressions of a face — a fractured ear, a dented cheek, a nose she thought she’d come to know in life — and carefully set them by the lips she’d found as if assembling a puzzle. She also saw, across three pieces she could tell had once been a forehead, a smudge, as if something had been written there, then erased. She could only just make out it had been there, but not what it had been.
Her fingers attempted to trace the exact markings which had been, but those marks were lost. She could make no sense of them.
“Help me,” she asked Leonard, her fingers shaking as she pointing at what she’d already assembled. “See if you can find anything which looks as if it might have been part of a face.”
She continued poring through the pieces to see what else could be recovered, but most of the slivers were too small to hold meaning. She kept searching until she found, hidden beneath chunks of familiar knuckles, a hammer, and then — a second set of lips.
She held them against the first she’d found, and realized to her horror — they were mirror images.
“What does it mean?” asked Leonard, looking down over her shoulder, but not seeing.
“God only knows,” said Rachel, ripping from her sketchbook the portrait of the Benjamin which once had been. With shaking fingers, she offered it to Leonard, knowing without knowing how she knew, or why she knew — neither of them would ever see either of those smiles again.
* * *
Scott Edelman has published 125+ short stories in magazines such as Lightspeed, Analog, Apex, and The Twilight Zone, and in anthologies such as Why New Yorkers Smoke, Crossroads: Southern Tales of the Fantastic, and MetaHorror. He has been a Stoker Award finalist eight times, both in the category of Short Story and Long Fiction. He was the founding editor of Science Fiction Age, which he edited during its entire eight-year run and has been a four-time Hugo Award finalist for Best Editor.