Divine Dirt Quarterly

–by Susan Gibb-

 

            Cooper stud­ied the com­puter screen and scowled, absent­mind­edly pulling at his mus­tache which he color-combed because, before any hair on his head, it had grown in mostly grey. Another bad day on the stock mar­ket and the web­site revealed his port­fo­lio was get­ting pounded again. When he checked the list of stock win­ners and losers for the day, three of his hold­ings were right up there on the top losers’ list. He noticed POHI had gained 17%, and grunted in dis­gust. Last year, he had made a choice to sell one of two rapidly falling stocks, and he had dumped POHI. What he held onto instead was now 97% down.

“Damn. Why can’t just one of my com­pa­nies do well,” he muttered. 

            The answer came to him quickly. It was because God knew what was in his portfolio. 

            At forty-two, he was feel­ing the need to plan for the future. Cooper was aghast to find that he would do just fine on his 401K and social secu­rity if he man­aged to die within two years after retire­ment. All his life he had worked hard because things didn’t come easy to Cooper. With gal­lons of cof­fee instead of the beer his room­mates drank non-stop, he held onto a B aver­age through­out col­lege. For a while he scut­tled between jobs when it seemed that every com­pany he worked for felt the need to down­size before he had been there long enough to get fully vested. His house had tripled in value, true, but he had already remort­gaged it so many times that he was sure he had already paid that and more. Even now, although he’d been at Hi-Tech for twelve years, there were rum­blings of lay­offs and Cooper wasn’t fool enough to feel secure. 

            He shook his head in dis­be­lief at the refreshed com­puter screen that now showed the Dow at a loss of 270 points. He’d been slow to get into the stock mar­ket, his nor­mally con­ser­v­a­tive nature fairly bristling at the urg­ing of both his fam­ily and friends who were all mak­ing a bun­dle as techs hit their highs. He should have known bet­ter but he plunged in any­way, think­ing that maybe God was too busy watch­ing over more impor­tant goings on in the Mid­dle East to worry now about Cooper’s future.

            Cooper made the dis­cov­ery regard­ing God’s dis­like of him only a few years ago. He used to blame him­self for the divorce, his slow ascent up the cor­po­rate lad­der, the decay­ing house he had bought in the real estate hey­day. He had taken to mum­bling “God’s got it in for me,” or, “God doesn’t want me to be rich,” and it seemed to make him feel bet­ter. He said it out loud once to some of his friends as a joke and one of them asked him why God would bother doing that. He had laughed at the time but then Cooper gave it some seri­ous thought.

            It took him a long time, and he even made him­self think like a Catholic, which he couldn’t really call him­self any­more. While he never received an offi­cial let­ter of excom­mu­ni­ca­tion from the Pope, Cooper was pretty sure that his lack of atten­dance at Sun­day Masses and fail­ure to fol­low up on the Sacra­ments annu­ally fully estab­lished the fact, just as he’d been taught by the Sis­ters of Nazareth through grade school. But it still didn’t answer why God would pick on him in particular—there were so many peo­ple doing bad things to each other these days that Cooper thought he looked like a saint in comparison.

            Then he remem­bered some­thing and it became real clear to him why he was in his predica­ment. Cooper had reneged on a promise he had made to God when he was in the fourth grade. Cooper had promised that if he wasn’t mar­ried by the time he was twenty-one, he would become a martyr.

            Now surely it would seem that God wouldn’t hold him to a promise he had made as a chubby ten-year old, heav­ily influ­enced by Sis­ter Mar­garethe in her reli­gious fer­vor to whip her pre-Communion enfants ter­ri­ble into pious cherubs wor­thy of receiv­ing the Holy Body of Christ into their souls.  Sis­ter Mar­garethe had filled their heads with sto­ries of the host of saints who had gra­ciously and most will­ingly died for their faith in God; St. John, St. Boni­face, and Sebas­t­ian who was beaten to death. Sister’s face glowed with rap­ture as she described the tor­ture of St. Agatha, lain naked on live coals inter­min­gled with glass. She made a per­func­tory ref­er­ence to St. Joan d’Arc but she per­son­ally dis­ap­proved of such a show of fem­i­nism. She suc­cess­fully taught her class to learn by heart four new songs for the big event along with the Act of Con­tri­tion and rev­er­ently took them on dry-runs in the con­fes­sional between April and May. She made it clear that they were to come up with some sins to report at their first con­fes­sion so as not to take up Father Whelan’s time for no good rea­son. It was after he finally received his First Holy Com­mu­nion, kneel­ing on the church pew along­side his class­mates, the lit­tle boys crispy clean in white shirts and bowties; the girls like angels—especially blond and blue-eyed Amy McCoran—in their white dresses and veils that caught the col­ors stream­ing in through the long stained glass win­dows lin­ing the walls of the old church, that Cooper got caught up in the beauty of it all and made his promise.

            Within the year he had for­got­ten about it. It didn’t even come to mind when, end­ing a happy run of bach­e­lor­hood at age thirty-three, he’d mar­ried Gina at the same church in which he’d been bap­tized, made his First Com­mu­nion, and of course, promised God he would become a martyr.

            What both­ered Cooper now was that he wasn’t sure which God he had made the promise to.  He knew he never had spent much time talk­ing with the Holy Spirit, and God the Son, Jesus (who in truth had actu­ally been sent down as the ulti­mate mar­tyr and a fine exam­ple at that), was the most for­giv­ing of the holy tri­umvi­rate, but it seemed more likely that he had gone directly to the top—God the Father, the Old Tes­ta­ment tyran­ni­cal God that the nuns had pushed the most for His fear fac­tor effect. God the Father was the all-seeing, all-knowing, eye-for-an-eye type, which con­vinced Cooper that He indeed was the one with whom Cooper had made his deal. And now, it was pay­back time.

           

            Cooper’s spir­its fol­lowed the Nas­daq in its steady decline for six months, he grew fear­ful after a year, and about nine months after that he began to won­der to him­self why investors hadn’t started jump­ing out of build­ings as they had in the 1929 crash. His sav­ings were dev­as­tated but he knew that he wasn’t alone.  Although Gina had waived rights to his pen­sion plan, she had taken the lion’s share of their sav­ings, and with assis­tance from her evil lawyer and her boyfriend’s realty part­ner, had made sure that Cooper paid yet again for the damn house.  

            He took a breather from the lists of fig­ures on his desk and swiveled his leather chair around to gaze out the win­dow of his office on the twenty-third floor of the Sil­ver Build­ing in lower Man­hat­tan.  Uncon­sciously his fin­gers played with his shirt col­lar, crisply starched by the same lady who cleaned his house weekly and who was cost­ing him almost as much as his ex-wife ever did. He tried to clear his mind, hop­ing the bright blue sky over the city’s sharply defined hori­zon would mel­low his wor­ries.  The sight was awe­some; the sun shot between build­ings with wisps of clouds like angel wings. Cooper was over­come by what he could almost feel as the power of God in the beauty of it. 

            “You lucky stiff,” Jerry said as he wan­dered in. “You have the best view of all of us.”

            “Yes, I sup­pose I do,” said Cooper.  He turned around. “Did you need some­thing, Jerry?”

            “Not really,” Jerry answered. He was look­ing out the win­dow behind Cooper. “Didn’t know if you knew the mar­ket ral­lied a lit­tle an hour ago, but dropped back down to hit a new five-year low just now.  Somebody’s going to have to do some­thing.  Or else we’re going to have another depres­sion in this coun­try.” He shook he head and wan­dered back out.

            Cooper started think­ing.  Somebody’s going to have to do some­thing, Jerry had said. It came to him that he could do some­thing. He could make a state­ment to Wall Street and finally keep the promise he had made to God, maybe redeem­ing his own soul at the same time.

            Cooper got up and walked over to the cor­ner win­dow where the sun was high in the east­ern sky, its light warm­ing and bright. He felt calm and hope­ful.  “Bless me, Father,” he whis­pered as he pushed open the win­dow and leaned too far out.

            When Cooper woke up he looked around as much as he could move his head. He prayed the white sheets were clouds and the woman glar­ing at him was not really his ex-wife. His sigh whis­tled through teeth in a jaw wired shut. God, he guessed, was more pissed than he had thought.

Susan Gibb has art, fic­tion and poetry in tra­di­tional and hyper­text form pub­lished in The Blue Print Review, eli­mae, Bewil­der­ing Sto­ries, The New River Jour­nal, four­pa­per­let­ters, metazen, Lit­snack, otto, Istan­bul Lit­er­ary Review, otolith, and oth­ers. She has pre­sented at a Hyper­text 2008 work­shop as well as locally, and taken part in the 100 Days Project, a col­lec­tion of artists’ offer­ings, and has pub­lished and edited a tra­di­tional archery mag­a­zine and cre­ated and edited a lit­er­ary mag­a­zine for Tunxis Com­mu­nity Col­lege (CT). She writes to live vic­ar­i­ously through her characters.