A Farce To Be Reckoned With

Chapter 2

Azzie arrived at Aretino's door one week to the minute after he had first talked with him. Aretino welcomed the demon to his home and led him to an upper sitting room where they could take their ease on brocaded chairs and enjoy the spectacle of the lights of Venice outlining the canals. Aretino served a wine he had chosen carefully for the occasion. A servant brought in little cakes for refreshment.

A soft blue twilight lay across the city, increasing by a hundredfold its air of magic and mystery. From below came the sound of a boating song: "Ho for the life of a gondolier!" Man and demon listened to it in silence for a few moments.

Azzie was experiencing one of the finest times in his life. This was the first moment of the launching of a new enterprise. The next words he spoke would make a great change in many lives; he was about to experience his own importance as a prime mover. Azzie was to become one who shaped events rather than being shaped by them. Power, self-aggrandizement, that was what it was all about.

In Azzie's imagination the new project swelled into immediate completion. It almost seemed done immediately after it had been conceived. His vision of it was vague but grand.

It took him a moment to come back to himself and realize that everything still remained to be accomplished. "I have experienced some impatience, my dear Aretino, waiting to hear what you might come up with. Or do you consider the matter of my play beyond your competence?"

"I think I'm the only man for the job," Aretino said boldly. "But you'll judge for yourself when I tell you the legend I would like to base the play upon."

"A legend? Oh, good!" Azzie said. "I love legends. Is it about anyone I know?"

"God is in my story, and Adam, and Lucifer."

"All old friends. Do proceed, Pietro."

Aretino settled back, and, taking a sip of wine to clear his throat, began talking…

Adam was lying beside a brook in Eden when God came to him and said, "Adam, what have you been up to?"

"Me?" Adam sat up. "I've just been sitting here thinking good thoughts."

"I know you've been thinking good thoughts," God said. "I tune in on you every once in a while just to see how you're doing. That's personal God involvement at its finest. But what were you doing before those good thoughts?"

"I'm not sure."

"Try to remember. You were with Eve, weren't you?"

"Well, yeah, sure. That's all right, isn't it? I mean, she's my wife, you know."

"Nobody's trying to make anything of it, Adam. I'm just trying to establish a fact. You were talking with Eve, weren't you?"

"All right, I was. She was going on about something the birds told her. You know, God, just between you and me, for a grown woman she does go on a lot about birds.

"What else were you doing with Eve?"

"Just talking about birds. With her it's birds all the time. Tell me frankly, do you think the lady is all there?

I mean, is she normal? Of course I don't have anyone to compare her to because I've never met another lady. You didn't even give me a mother, not that I'm complaining. But still, talking about birds all the time, I mean, come on already."

"Eve happens to be very innocent," God said. "Nothing wrong in that, is there?"

"I guess not," Adam said.

"What's the matter? Have I offended you?"

"You? Offend me? Don't be silly. You're God, so how could you offend me?"

"What else did you do with Eve other than talk with her?"

Adam shook his head. "Frankly, you wouldn't want to know. I mean, where is it written that a man should talk dirty in front of his God?"

"I'm not talking about the sex thing," God said contemptuously.

"Look, if you know what I did and what I didn't do, why do you even bother asking me?"

"I'm trying to make a point," God said.

Adam added something in a voice so low that God had to ask him to speak up.

"I said that you shouldn't get so angry at me. After all, you made me in your image, so what do you expect?"

"Oh, that's 'what you think, is it? And you think that my creating you in my image excuses any sort of behavior on your part?"

"I gave you everything, all of it, life, intelligence, good looks, a cute wife, imagination, good food, a mild climate, good taste in literary matters, skill at many sports, artistic aptitude, the ability to add and subtract, and quite a lot else.

I could have put you on the Earth with one finger and left you spending all your time counting up to one.

Instead I gave you ten fingers and the ability to count all the way up to infinity. I did it all for you. All I asked was that you play with the stuff I gave you but leave alone the stuff I didn't want you to touch. Is that right or is that not right?"

"Yeah, it's right," Adam mumbled.

"All I said was, that tree over there, what we call the Tree of Life, see that apple on it? And you said you saw it. And I said to you, 'Just do me a favor, don't eat that apple, got it?' And you said, 'Sure, God, I've got it and it's no big deal.' But yesterday, with Eve, you were eating the forbidden apple, weren't you?"

"Apple?" Adam asked, with a puzzled tone.

"You know very well what apples are," God said. "They're round and red and they taste sweet, only you shouldn't know how they taste because I told you not to taste one."

"I never understood why we weren't supposed to eat it."

"I told you that, too," God said, "If you had bothered to listen. It would give you knowledge of Good and Evil. That's why you weren't supposed to eat it."

"What's so bad about knowledge of Good and Evil?" Adam asked.

"Hey, any kind of knowledge is wonderful," God said. "But you have to have some knowledge to be able to handle knowledge. I was bringing you and Eve along nice and slow to the point where you could eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge without freaking out or thinking you knew everything. But she had to go tempt you with that apple, didn't she?"

"It was my own idea," Adam said. "Don't go blaming Eve. All she knows about is birds."

"But she put you up to it, didn't she?"

"Maybe she did. But so what? There's a rumor around here that you wouldn't be so angry if one of us did eat the apple."

"Where'd you hear that?"

"I don't remember," Adam said. "Birds and bees, maybe. But Eve and I had to taste the apple sometime or other. The law of dramatic necessity says you can't just leave a loaded apple on the mantel without using it sometime. Can't just stay in the Garden of Eden forever, can we?"

"No, you can't," God said. "As a matter of fact, you're leaving at once. And don't think you're coming back."

So God put Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden. He sent an angel with a flaming sword to do the job. And so it was that first man and first woman met first eviction officer. Adam and Eve took one long last look at the place that was home and then walked away. They'd live in a lot of places after that, but none of them would be home.

It was only when they were out of Eden that Adam noticed that Eve didn't have any clothes on.

"Holy cow!" Adam cried, staring at Eve. "You're stark naked!"

"So are you," Eve said.

They stared all they wanted to at each other's private parts. And then they burst out laughing. And so sexual humor was born.

When they had finished laughing at each other's private parts, Adam said, "I think maybe we'd better cover up the hardware. We've got too much hanging out, if you know what I mean."

"Funny we never noticed it before," Eve said.

"All you ever used to notice was birds," Adam said.

"I can't imagine why," Eve said.

"What's that up there ahead?" Adam asked.

Eve said slowly, "If I didn't know it was impossible I'd say it was other people."

"How can that be?" Adam said. "We're the only people."

"Not anymore," Eve told him. "You remember, we talked about this possibility."

"Of course," Adam said. "I remember now. We agreed that other people was a prerequisite to having an affair."

"You would remember that," Eve said.

"I just never thought He'd actually do it," Adam said. "I always thought He meant for us to be the only people."

God had moved fast. At the beginning they had been the only people. But they'd done something wrong.

Disobeyed orders. And so God punished them by making other people. It "was hard to know what He meant by it.

They walked until they came to a town, until they came to a certain house.

Adam asked the first person he saw, "What is the name of this town?"

"This," the man said, "is Next Best."

"That's an interesting name for a town," Adam said. "What does it mean?"

"It means that Eden's best, but no one can get back there, so we live in Next Best."

"How do you know about Eden?" Adam asked. "I never saw you there."

"Hey, you don't have to have actually lived there to know it was good."

Adam and Eve settled down in Next Best. They soon met their next-door neighbor, Gordon Lucifer, a devil who had set up the first law practice in town.

We never got an eviction notice, for one thing. We never had a proper hearing in a court of law. We were not represented by counsel."

"You've come to the right place," Lucifer said, leading them into his office. "To right all wrongs, that is the motto of the Forces of Dark, the firm I work for. Understand, I'm not claiming there's anything wrong with the Big Fellow. God mostly means well, but He's entirely too high-handed about this sort of thing. I think you've got a good case. I shall file a claim with Ananke, whose obscure judgments govern us all."

Ananke, the Faceless One, heard Lucifer's plea in her chamber of gray clouds, where the great casement window faced out on the ocean of time, and the winds of eternity blew the white curtains.

Ananke ruled that Adam had been evicted unfairly and should be allowed to return to Eden. Adam was elated, thanked everybody, told Eve to wait, and went off to regain Eden. He searched in vain for the way to his former Paradise, but couldn't even find the end of his nose; God had covered the area with a thick darkness. Adam called upon Gordon Lucifer and told him what had happened. Gordon shook his head and summoned his boss.

"Well, that's not really fair," Satan said. "He is begging the question. But I'll tell you what. Here are seven tall candlesticks with magical properties. Use them wisely and you can light your own way back to Paradise."

Adam set forth, carrying six of the candlesticks in a camel's skin on his back, and holding the seventh in front of him, where its unearthly bluewhite light cut through the gloom with surrealistic precision. This light afforded Adam unparalleled views of the way ahead and he proceeded boldly.

After progressing for a distance, with his candle in its noble holder dispelling the dark on all sides, Adam came to a low wall with ivy on it, a still pool of water nearby. It seemed to him that this was the place where he had napped and dreamed so often back in the days of Eden when life had been simple. He stopped and looked around, and at once his candle went out. "Drat!" said Adam, because he knew no stronger word than that, this being an age before the birth of true invective, and plucked a second candlestick out of his pack.

The candle lighted itself, and Adam went on again. This time when the darkness was dispelled he came to a glowing beach at twilight, with a little island in the distance, and warm air flowing smoothly over all of it.

And again he stopped, and again darkness descended as the candle flame went out.

Time and time again this happened, God's darkness confusing Adam's mind, presenting him with places that seemed for a moment like his lost Paradise, but, upon extinguishing the candle, proved to be otherwise. When the final candle went out, Adam found himself back where he had started, and there, willy-nilly, he stayed.

After Adam's seventh failure, Ananke ruled that that was how it was going to be, and overruled her own previous judgment. She pointed out that despite her own decree, Adam could not be returned to Eden, because his expulsion marked the first turning of the wheel of dharma and his failure to get back despite the help of the seven candlesticks revealed some of the fundamental code of the possibilities of the universe. It seemed, Ananke pointed out, that the entire world of sentient beings was based on a mistake made at the beginning, when the code governing the karmic machinery was set forth. Adam could be considered the first victim of divine cause and effect.