overlooking the fire and gently pushed him down. The gorilla, as if still doped and continually wringing his head on his neck, sat tamely. The boy resumed his toasting of the bread. As each piece of bread was thoroughly blackened he dropped it into the flames. Then, as the bread burned, he bowed all the way down to the ground in front of the gorilla, who sat like a hairy mystified Buddha on the shallow ledge, his greedy eyes wide in awe of the flames. Each time the boy took out a new piece of bread from the bag and the odor of rye reached him the gorilla made a move forward, slowly and hopelessly, like a turtle. The boy kept toasting the bread, then dropping it in the fire, then bowing his head to the ground. The gorilla watched. The boy mumbled all the while. When he got to the last piece of bread he halted in his prayers and reached behind him for the wine. He opened the bottle and the scent, like roses and vinegar, wafted up in the air and reached the gorilla, who became thoroughly awake for the first time. The boy bowed his dark woolly head to the ground once more, mumble, mumble, mumble, then toasted the endpiece of bread. Then, holding the bread in his hand, burned to a crisp, he poured the half-bottle of wine into the fire. The gorilla, who had watched everything as if spellbound, gave a gruff howl of fierce disapproval.
With his back to the sodden embers the boy bowed on his knees, still mumbling his long fervent prayer. On his knees he dragged his body up to the gorilla’s feet. The gorilla’s feet were black and rough like his own, with long scaly toes and straight silken hair on top that was not like his. Reverently, he lay the burnt offering at the feet of his savage idol. And the gorilla’s feet, powerful and large and twitching with impatience, were the last things he saw before he was hurled out of the violent jungle of the world into nothingness and a blinding light. And the gorilla, snorting with disgust, grabbed the bread.
2
The life of John’s father, another place, ending.
John’s father had heard that in that last miserable second your whole life passed before your eyes. But he and the plain black girl who was his second wife moved into the moment itself with few reflections to spare. When they heard the twister coming, like twenty wild trains slamming through the houses on their block, she grabbed the baby and he the small boy and hardly noticing that the other moved each ran toward the refrigerator, frantically pulling out the meager dishes of food, flinging a half-empty carton of milk across the room, and making a place where the vegetables and fruits should have been for the two children to crouch. With no tears, no warnings, no good-byes, they slammed the door.
Minutes after the cyclone had leveled the street to the ground searchers would come and find the children still huddled inside the refrigerator. Almost dead, cold, the baby crying and gasping for air, the small boy numb with horror and with chill. They would peer out not into the familiar shabby kitchen but into an open field. Perhaps the church or the Red Cross or a kind neighbor would take them in, bed them down among other children similarly lost, and in twenty years the plain black girl and the man who was their father would be forgotten, recalled, if even briefly, by sudden forceful enclosures in damp and chilly places.
This, too, the future, passed before his eyes, and not one past life but two. He wondered, in that moment, only fleetingly of the God he’d sworn to serve and of the wife he held now in his arms, and thought instead of his first wife, the librarian, and of their son, John.
He had married his first wife in a gigantic two-ring ceremony, in a church, and his wife had had the wedding pictures touched up so that he did not resemble himself. In the pictures his skin was olive brown and smooth when in fact it was black and stubbly and rough. He had married his wife because she was light and loose and fun and because
With his back to the sodden embers the boy bowed on his knees, still mumbling his long fervent prayer. On his knees he dragged his body up to the gorilla’s feet. The gorilla’s feet were black and rough like his own, with long scaly toes and straight silken hair on top that was not like his. Reverently, he lay the burnt offering at the feet of his savage idol. And the gorilla’s feet, powerful and large and twitching with impatience, were the last things he saw before he was hurled out of the violent jungle of the world into nothingness and a blinding light. And the gorilla, snorting with disgust, grabbed the bread.
2
The life of John’s father, another place, ending.
John’s father had heard that in that last miserable second your whole life passed before your eyes. But he and the plain black girl who was his second wife moved into the moment itself with few reflections to spare. When they heard the twister coming, like twenty wild trains slamming through the houses on their block, she grabbed the baby and he the small boy and hardly noticing that the other moved each ran toward the refrigerator, frantically pulling out the meager dishes of food, flinging a half-empty carton of milk across the room, and making a place where the vegetables and fruits should have been for the two children to crouch. With no tears, no warnings, no good-byes, they slammed the door.
Minutes after the cyclone had leveled the street to the ground searchers would come and find the children still huddled inside the refrigerator. Almost dead, cold, the baby crying and gasping for air, the small boy numb with horror and with chill. They would peer out not into the familiar shabby kitchen but into an open field. Perhaps the church or the Red Cross or a kind neighbor would take them in, bed them down among other children similarly lost, and in twenty years the plain black girl and the man who was their father would be forgotten, recalled, if even briefly, by sudden forceful enclosures in damp and chilly places.
This, too, the future, passed before his eyes, and not one past life but two. He wondered, in that moment, only fleetingly of the God he’d sworn to serve and of the wife he held now in his arms, and thought instead of his first wife, the librarian, and of their son, John.
He had married his first wife in a gigantic two-ring ceremony, in a church, and his wife had had the wedding pictures touched up so that he did not resemble himself. In the pictures his skin was olive brown and smooth when in fact it was black and stubbly and rough. He had married his wife because she was light and loose and fun and because
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