Originally published in MungBeing.

Sammy came on like a plague of handshakes. “Hey, buddy. How’re you? Say, did you hear about the Wands kid?” I gave him a firm grip and lied that I hadn’t; I barely got the words out before Sammy went plowing ahead. “Yeah, no, he got thrown out of class. Cheated on a test. You ever do that? Had drugs on him, too.” I had no idea how old Sammy was. He acted twelve and looked sixty. Probably somewhere in between. I’d been hearing the story about the Wands kid for a couple of years now, and guessed it was quite a bit older than that. 

“Wow, man,” I said. Sammy always seemed to be discovering conversation. Like a child, he never picked up on the difference between reality and fiction.

“Yeah,” said Sammy.

“See you around, Sammy,” I said. I was late for an appointment with my physician. Sammy tended to hang out in one of two places: the hospital and the food bank. Together, those two places gave him all the human interaction and sustenance he apparently needed. I would often volunteer at the food bank and, before my frequent trips to the hospital had started up, that had been just about enough of a Sammy dose for me. Seeing him in both places made it seem as if he were following me around, like a grade school hanger-on. I tried to gently remind myself that it was more like I had invaded his territory.

“Yeah,” said Sammy. I gave him a grin and edged past into the hospital waiting room. “Do you know him?” I heard him ask a middle-aged lady who had come up the walk behind me. “He’s a good guy. He helps a lot.”
“Why doesn’t he talk to one of you?” I asked my god as I waited for my turn at the admissions desk.

“I was about to commend you on your charitable character,” said my god.

“Well, I sure don’t mind helping him out now and then, if I can, but why doesn’t he spend some of that babble on one of you?”

“I’m not sure,” said my god. “All I can tell you is that he has never spoken to me.”

“Downside of a pantheon,” I said. Through a window, I saw Sammy make an unsuccessful grab for someone else’s hand, and turn the gesture into a gracious unseen wave. As he did, I noticed a cheap, filthy bandage on his hand where his index finger ought to have been, paper towel and packing tape. “Was he in the war?” I asked my god.

“He didn’t talk to me back then, either,” said my god. “I suspect he talks to you more than he does to any of us.”

After my appointment, I stopped at the hospital’s cafeteria for a couple cups of coffee. As I had expected, Sammy was still hanging around the front door. He was picking at the cigarette stubs in the waist-high ashtray, experimenting with putting some of them in his mouth. I held out one of the coffees. “Hey, Sammy,” I said.

He took the coffee and saluted me with it a couple of times. “Hey,” he said. “I don’t drink coffee much, anymore, no. But it’s the thought that counts.” He took a big, scalding gulp and grinned at me. 

“I never noticed your finger before,” I said. 

“It’s good, it’s good,” he said, putting the wounded hand into one of the pockets of his army-green coat. Before he got it hidden, though, I got a glimpse of bright-red blood leaking through the bandage; the cut was fresh. “It’s good,” he said again. He may have meant the coffee.

I gave him a nod in lieu of a wave and said, “See you at the bank, Sammy.”

“All right, take care,” he said. I think he repeated it under his breath.

As I drove home, I talked with my god. A while back, I noticed a tendency in myself not to talk with him unless I was also doing something else. I would chop firewood and talk to my god; I would watch TV and talk to my god; I would write in my journal and talk to my god. At bedtime, when other people would say their prayers and get a little advice on how to improve the following day, I would not talk to my god and he would not talk to me. 

That night, while cooking myself a meal of pasta and pie, I asked about the war, which led to a discussion of the necessity of violence, which was followed by an argument on the relative value of human beings. My god was gentle in his words, but by the end I could hear a near boil in his tone. “You all have different values,” he said. “Empirically divined, but only for us, since you lack the necessary skills.”

“How much am I worth?” I asked as I put on my pajamas.

“You are worth my time,” said my god, after a slight pause. The heat left his voice, and I bundled myself in a cocoon of heavy blankets.

#

When I got to the food bank the next morning there was already a crowd out front. The director of the bank often plead for orderly lines, but he never got anywhere.

I edged my way toward the front door, as politely as possible. Normally, the crowd was only too eager to let me pass through, recognizing my arrival as another step toward a meal; but today, there seemed to be another sort of hunger driving them. A couple regulars got me with their elbows and grumbled at me to keep out of the way. I felt as if I were fighting to the stage at a concert.

Sammy was the object of the crowd’s attention. When I emerged from the press of bodies, he grinned at me. “Did you hear about the Wands kid?” he asked.

“Hey, Sammy,” I said.

“He got locked in a forest, yeah. His dad did it to him.” His eyes were bloodshot and yellow just above the lids. He looked as if he had been rubbing grit into his tear ducts, all the red, scraped skin on his cheeks.

“You feeling all right?” I asked.

“He pissed on the wall,” said someone behind me. “Gonna snap,” said someone else. 

“He cheated on a test,” said Sammy. Then, in one movement, he spun to face the brick wall and flung his left arm across it. With his other hand, he pulled a wide cleaver from inside his army-green jacket. Before I could do much more than realize my blood had gone cold, he brought the knife down on his outstretched wrist. Three sounds came up at once: metal on brick, on flesh, and on bone. He screamed, pulled his good hand back and let it swing again. This time, I only heard metal on brick.

My startled muscles carried me toward him, but I tripped over the curb and went down. Sammy kept flailing with the cleaver, raising it only scant inches before smashing it into the wall, over and over, as if the number of swings were important. He must have passed out before reaching his goal, because as I reached him he toppled over into my arms, and I saw tears of frustration in his eyes, different from tears of pain in that they dried much slower and seemed to glitter much more sharply in the overcast light. 

#

A few days later I had another appointment at the hospital. I went in a little early so I could swing by Sammy’s room. When I asked after him at the nurse’s station, the ward clerk said, “Thank you, god. He’s sure in need of a friendly voice; he’s worn out all the good humor ’round here.”

“She’s been praying for someone to distract him,” said my god as I made my way down the hall toward Sammy’s room. Then, with a note of pride, he added, “I didn’t figure you needed telling.”

The smell of sick exhalations coming from each room combined with the natural vertigo my meds gave me to leave a solid headache. It felt like a brick was resting at the top of my spine.

Sammy was just coming out of his room as I arrived. His gown didn’t fit him well, and his feet were only half-in a pair of hospital-provided slippers. He was holding a brown paper lunch sack in his hand. “I threw up some,” he said, holding the bag out toward me.

“The nurse will probably want to measure it,” I said, taking it from him.

“Well, they can’t,” said Sammy. “You’re a good guy,” he added, as if it were slightly less important.

“You look a little pale, Sammy,” I said. “Let’s sit down, yeah?”

“Okay,” he said. I set the bag of vomit down on the floor as soon as his back was turned.

His room was large enough for two beds, but his was the only one. I could see scuff marks on the tile where the other bed had been. The rest of the space was strewn with his clothes: shirt, torn socks, brown corduroys, tighty-whities, and the big green coat. They were spread out to cover the maximum area. It smelled as if the air hadn’t been stirred in a long, long time.

“They couldn’t get your hand back,” I said. I leaned against the wall. There was something comforting about the smell in the room; it was almost like being in the presence of something much older than myself.

“Think positive,” said Sammy. “Are you thinking positive?”

“I try and keep it up,” I said. “You having any problems? Anything I can help with. I can sneak you some coffee.”

“Hey,” said Sammy. It sounded as if he had just realized I was in the room. “I’ve got a question.”

“What’s that?”

“Where is my soul?” he asked.

I hesitated. “I’m sure your god could answer that a whole lot better than I can,” I said. “I’m not even that clear on my own physiology.”

“It’s not a place,” said my god. I repeated it to Sammy. “It’s hardly even a thing.”

Sammy stroked the bandage that covered the stump of his missing hand. “Cool,” he said. “All right. Think positive.”

“Sorry, man,” I said. “I guess that’s not a lot of help.” Sammy nodded, bobbing his neck kind of like a quail. “Got an easier one for me?” I asked.

“No sir, all right,” said Sammy. “It’s good to see you, hey. I’ll see you around.” He sat down on his bed and kicked off his slippers. His feet didn’t quite reach the floor.

#

The following weekend I had two hundred packages to put together so the food bank regulars would have something special for the upcoming holidays. Cans of spaghetti, small boxes of cereal with prizes inside, some ribbon. It was a big job, but I had somebody to pass the time with.

Thanks to the situation with Sammy, my god was in a lamenting mood.

“There was a time when we gods had power,” he said. “We had our words, yes, but our words could do much more than just spark the neurons in the brains of our worshipers. We could conquer armies with a breath; we could lift mountains with a half-realized whim; we could lift the spirits of the downtrodden as lifting water from a stream in cupped hands.”

“So, what happened?” I asked. My god had often told me this story, but he told it like a gently senile grandfather; details changed at every telling, and each new wrinkle to the story made me feel closer to his true, unedited self.

“What happens to a muscle that goes unused? What happens to a brain submerged in mindless activity? Our power atrophied. We had once been timeless; then, one morning, it was as though we had been pushed from a bridge over the river of time and were now adrift within it — cold, restless, weary in motion.

“We used to feed you as we would the fish, suspended above your strange and uncomfortable world. Then we were among your minds, but held distant from your world, and weakened by some force — or lack of force — that we did not understand.” He pulled all other sounds out of my hearing, filling my head with silence. It was his equivalent of a sigh. “We learned, though,” he continued. “Our power left us because we no longer needed to use it. Not for you, mad people though you are.”
His long monologue added a comfortable dissonance to my work, like an invisible hand keeping the curve of my emotion from exceeding its bounds.

“That sort of power wouldn’t be unwelcome, now,” I said. “Cut down on my medical bills. In fact, I can’t think of a single person who would refuse a miracle.”

“Unfortunately, you do not decide what is necessary, for us gods or for yourselves. That is a balance given over to some science that you are ill-equipped to test.” Silence rolled through my head, again. “Miracles are slow wonders, kid,” he said. “They’re happening, but their birth and growth are far more deliberate than you are capable of seeing.”

#

I read about Sammy’s latest episode in the weekend paper. The dry, journalist prose put a welcome distance between the experience and me. “…white male in mid-thirties reported causing a disturbance on 300 block of Old Elm.” Just a few blocks down from the food bank. I had wondered why Sammy hadn’t shown up for our holiday celebration; I had also wondered about the sirens I had heard, but not so hard.

“He prays to a loner deity,” said my god. I was driving to the hospital to visit Sammy. After the doctors got him stabilized, they had moved him to the mental wing. I had one ribboned package left over from the party, and an empty prescription in need of a refill.

“Which one?” I asked my god.

“Not one I’m familiar with,” said my god. “He refuses to speak with me.”

“Sammy or the loner?”

“Both.”

I parked my car and shoved open the door. There was a solid wind moving over the asphalt like a brusque man in a slow-moving line, all low grumbles and thick skin. The sky was purple and seemed close, as if I could reach up and grab a fistful of lightning.

“Can they reattach his leg?” I asked as I bundled myself, head down, to the front entrance. Inside, the air was thin and smelled of new carpet.

“No,” said my god. “His cut was too ragged and too slow. There was nothing the surgeons could do to save it.”

“That’s a sort of power,” I mused. “Defying the gifts of talented men.”

“That is not the sort of power that would rob us of ours,” my god replied.

Sammy was sleeping off some pain meds when a nurse showed me to his room. He wasn’t classified as dangerous, but his remaining leg and good arm were strapped loosely to the frame of his bed. The straps meant for his other limbs curled limply on the tile floor.

I sat down and waited for him to wake up. I felt my god retreat from my mind. Thunder shook the distance, crossing miles to growl weakly at the window.

I thought about the stories of great, fickle gods of the past — told to me in deadpan by my god — who demanded sacrifice and rewarded it with disinterest. I thought about the unassuming races of history who submitted their wills to the weather and the seasons, believing that there were gods who would take their offerings and transform them into longevity. I wondered if it might have been a temptation, to surrender control, like a child in its mother’s arms.

“Hey, friend.” Sammy rolled his whole head to face me. “What’s your name again?”

“Come on, man,” I said. “You remember me.”

Sammy showed me all his teeth. They were yellow and jagged and did a poor job of hiding his tongue. “I’m asking the wrong questions,” he said.

I smiled. I had a good smile, since I had to use it a lot. Some of the outcasts who would come by the food bank were in such a slur of alcohol, you couldn’t make heads or tails of them. All you could do was smile. I had begun to think of my smile as its own word in the language; it changed its meaning based on inflection and, every so often, it dropped right out of my vocabulary, like when you can’t remember a word that means “uneducated” but you know it starts with an S.

It didn’t matter what I thought my smile was. Sammy was deaf to it; he twisted in his straps showing me his back. I tried some other words.

“Folks miss you at the bank, man,” I said. “I’m supposed to take back good news to ‘em. Have the doctors told you when you can go?”

Sammy grunted. I could see his jaws working, bulging out the skin of his cheeks. I slumped down a little further in my seat. I see his sort of posture all the time in my volunteer work. He was giving up. It was a weighted silence, and seemed a reluctance to respond for fear of being lifted bodily from a comfortable hole. I had often seen it happen when a co-volunteer asked one of the unfortunates to talk about managing what little money the latter had. I hadn’t once seen one of them gladly hand over the decisions that guided their few bills to the educated suggestion of a volunteer. It was about control; they would cling to the tiniest sphere of influence, and I had seen it many times pop like a soap bubble.

Funny, though. I had never pegged Sammy as the master-of-his-own-destiny type. He was always far too generous with his thoughts, his history, his hand shakes.

He made a noise, sort of a sob, and ground his teeth together so hard I thought I could hear the enamel popping. 

“What was that, Sammy?”

He turned his head toward me. Blood stained his chin like a red goatee; he spit a hunk of flesh from between his teeth. It landed on the sheets with the sound of heavy rain. It was the tip of his tongue. “Where is my soul?” he asked in a clotted voice, indistinct, as if he had lost interest in speech.

#

After that, I did a little giving up of my own. I had seen plenty of men and women at the nadir of their lives, but they had all known it. Sammy’s bemused ignorance of the reasons for his self-destruction put a distance between us that I was hesitant to cross back over. 

That’s part of a lie. Sammy didn’t make the distance; I did. I walked out of his room. I rolled my eyes when the nurse asked how he was doing. I tried to spin my mind away from him by counting the seconds between lightning and thunder.

That lasted for as long as the storm did. I had other things to occupy my time — volunteer work, my health, the job that paid the bills — but I kept coming back to Sammy. 

“You have taken your responsibility as far as you need,” said my god. “There are others whose needs are much clearer.” He told me about a few; the ones who had talked to him, at least.

“Why not work a miracle,” I said. I had meant it as a joke, but by the time the words reached my tongue they tasted much more bitter. My mouth twisted. My god couldn’t see it. He backed away and left me in peace for a while. 

I passed the next couple of weeks with the inside of my head feeling like a desert. I could sense the natural mutation of the world around me, but it seemed no more important than the shifting of dunes. When I closed my eyes, even the colors there seemed flat and desaturated, like the screen of a dying television. My responsibility to Sammy had not been fulfilled; there was a contract between us, reaffirmed every time I stopped to listen to him. Breaking that contract would leave me stranded in the desert sensation, which is not so much devoid of water as empty of life. 

My god was the one to break the silence. “You do the things that we can not, you know,” he said one morning as I brushed my teeth. “Your simple handouts are small miracles. Envy is not an emotion becoming of a deity, but perhaps we approach it. The act of raising a loaf of bread in thanksgiving is your greatest power.”

I spit toothpaste into the sink. “I don’t understand the direction of my life,” I said. 

“Life has no direction,” said my god. “Life is not a journey; it is a shape.”

“I don’t quite understand the shape my life is in,” I said.

“Then I am fully jealous,” said my god. “You should be grateful for the chance to understand, because that makes times like this all the more potent.”

“Times like what?” I asked, just as the phone rang. 

“Your doctor,” said my god, and I could hear the play of good humor in his voice.

A little thrill sprang up in my chest. I picked up the phone. 

“Good news!” crowed my doctor on the other end. He was a serious man most of the time, but always had a glint in his eye that suggested he would only be too willing to run wildly through the streets. “It’s my pleasure to tell you that your test results came back and you’re finally in remission. Congratulations!”

My heart pumped a salve through my veins, and I felt the shape of the world begin to soften. I felt relief like the victory of a gambler; it was sudden, unexpected, and I had no immediate idea of what to do with it.

“If I could kiss you, I would,” said my god, with a note of pride in his voice. “But don’t think this lets you off the service hook.” My doctor laughed at something only he could hear.

“Why did you let him tell me?” I asked after I hung up the phone. 

“I don’t abuse what power I have,” said my god.

#

When I went back to visit Sammy, I felt buoyed by my good news. My good intention — the one I pinned down in words — was to share some of my mood with him, to see what minor joy might slough from me to him.

“Don’t,” said my god. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions which were not realized.”

I didn’t pay attention. I felt as if that wide desert in my mind lay between us. There was just a stretch of clean linoleum between Sammy and me. “He deserves as many miracles as I do,” I said. My shoes made a pleasant click on the hospital floor.

The nurses had been able to keep him from losing any more of his parts, but I wasn’t fully prepared to see him again after having stashed him at the back of my mind. He looked thin from underfeeding, and his body couldn’t quite square up with his bed. His head pulled to one side, and his stumps of arm and leg broke all hope of symmetry.

“Don’t,” said my god as I paused outside the door.

“I don’t understand why not,” I said. 

Perfect silence fell around me. “I said that I do not abuse what power I have,” said my god. “Had I the desire, I could ball your emotions up and play with them like a cat with a toy, but I haven’t that desire.”

I stepped back from Sammy’s door and sat down on a nearby bench. “What do you mean?” I asked. 

“Your mood is the lens by which you perceive the shapes of everything. Your mood belongs to me, held entirely in the realm of your mind.”

“I can choose to be happy without your interference,” I said. 

“That is a decision I wouldn’t expect you to make,” said my god. The silence came in, once more, and then my head was filled with his insistent words. If my time earlier had been a desert, this felt like a swamp, all curled decay and thick, complex patterns inside my eyes. “I have found the deity to whom Sammy speaks. He is a child god, a new birth, though old enough to your perception, and he is petty as his youth describes. He spins cruelty about him like carnival sugar, clotted and shapeless. He claims an insatiable curiosity, but my fellow gods do not believe that there is any motivation less than exercising a thoughtless power over the poor souls that trust him to be their guide.”

I sat back against the wall and let my head clear. “You gods are taking advantage of him.”

“I am not,” said my god.

I breathed out a lungful and was slow pulling it back in. “And to think I was in such a good mood this morning.” I rose and entered Sammy’s room. I felt my god withdraw, leaving noise where there had been silence.

Sammy cracked open his eyes to look at me, then slid his focus toward the blank wall. “Hey,” he said. “It’s good to see you, man. Yeah.” His words sounded drunk, coming off his ruined tongue. 

“Hey, Sammy,” I said. I pulled a chair over to his bedside. Neither of us said anything for a while, but you couldn’t hold it against us. After a while, I wasn’t sure if Sammy even remembered I was in the room. I cleared my throat and asked, “Do you believe in a god?” It sounded stupid to ask.

“I hear voices sometimes,” said Sammy. His skin was gray as storm clouds. He coughed and then moaned, trying to lick his lips with the ragged line of his tongue. His lips were chapped and splotched with a deep red where he had been chewing. It looked painful; it looked like the least of his pain. I bent over him, we my own lips, and kissed him lightly. It was all I could do. Sammy just stared at the ceiling.

“Sometimes I hear voices, too,” I said, sitting back in my chair.

A young man in a nurse’s uniform rapped politely on the door and came in. “Hi there, Sammy,” he said with an affected brightness. “Sorry, but it’s time to check on your vitals again.”

“It’s not a good idea,” said Sammy. He scowled, as if unsatisfied with how the words had come out. “It’s not a good idea,” he repeated.

“Well, we’ve got to know how you’re doing, so we can keep you healthy.”

Sammy started to thrash around on his bed. The nurse gave me a look of long suffering. “Want me to give you a hand?” I asked.

“Can’t do blood pressure, now,” said the nurse. “Just hold his head still while I take his temperature.”

I got on my knees next to Sammy’s bed and took his head in both my hands. His skin was rough, unshaven, and blotched with sweat. He stared at me and calmed slightly, our pupils reflected one another in the faint light. The nurse bent over and pushed a thermometer into Sammy’s ear. A short beep, and then he was done. “Ninety-nine,” he said. “Looks like the antibiotics are working, Sammy.” 

Sammy didn’t reply. He just stared at me. “Where is my soul?” he asked, slurred by his slow and damaged tongue.

“I’ll be back to check on your blood pressure, okay, Sammy?” said the nurse. “Thanks,” he said to me. I smiled at him and pulled my hands away from Sammy’s cheeks. 

“Where is my soul?” asked Sammy. He didn’t break his gaze away from me.

I reached up and tapped my temple. “It’s here,” I said. “It’s right here. Keep that, all right? Let them take everything else off you. Let them scream themselves hoarse.” His eyes unfocused. I laid my fingers on his temples. The nerves and tendons all up my arms shuddered with repressed energy, as if they wanted to act out all the things I couldn’t figure how to say. “This wasteland . . . They have to cross it to reach you. It’s yours.” 

My ineloquent muscles — tongue, arms, and heart — sagged from exertion. I let my body sink back into the chair. 

Slowly, Sammy raised his one good hand to his head, index finger and thumb sticking out like a playground gun.