My Name is Joe Black (Part 2 of 2)
Note: This story contains some language and themes that may not be suitable for younger readers.
III
Two weeks later I sat on the loveseat in my townhome off McDonald Drive in Scottsdale. A beer rested in my right hand. The ball Martin had given me rested on the coffee table in front of me. The blinds were closed to keep the merciless sun at bay. My eyes were stuck on the ball. A bit too much beer was stuck in my gut. I felt bloated and a little drunk.
I decided to pick up the ball and work it over. I don’t know if I would have ever done it had I not been a shade on the tipsy side. I didn’t drink much. And, I didn’t think much of the crazy, obsessed bald guy’s interruption of my steak dinner.
But, I couldn’t get the meeting out of my head, and so I couldn’t get the baseball out of my head either.
When my daughter was six, she was a bit precocious. When she caught a little bit of a radio show or a TV program aimed at an adult audience (not porn, mind you, just an adult drama or whatever), she’d say days later, “This is not for someone my age, but I can’t get it out of my brain!”
That’s what I felt sitting there on the love seat staring at the ball. I felt as if I’d encountered something that made me feel like I was a small child. I was flirting with something weird and beyond me, and I couldn’t shake it from my mind. With my thoughts racing and the alcohol doing what it does, I decided to rub-up the ball and be disappointed and relieved all at once when nothing happened. At least then I could dismiss it all from my mind and get back to being old and watching baseball.
I drained the beer, put the bottle on the table, picked up the ball and started to work it over. I started to rub it vigorously and violently in the cupped palms of my hands. I treated it just as I had treated thousands of balls during my life in baseball. By friction and pressure and the oil of my skin I prepared the ball to be thrown with force and art into a catcher’s extended mitt.
Nothing happened at first. Then, as I rubbed the ball, wedges of blue light started extending out from the gaps between my fingers. At the same moment I felt a quick-building cold fire course through my hands. It was like I held a ball of dry ice.
With the same reflex that pushes your hand away from the burner of a hot stove, I dropped the ball. But it did not fall to the floor. Instead it rose.
It rose from the area in front of my waist and suspended itself before my eyes a foot or so back from my face. It settled there for a moment, slowly rotated, and, as buckshit crazy as this sounds, I sensed that the ball contemplated me, measured me, took stock of me.
The ball was still a ball, but it no longer was associated with baseball in any visible way. It glowed an electric blue. The squiggled signatures had disappeared, as had the stitching and the yellowed cover scuffed by impact with the barrel of a baseball bat and the dirt of Ebbets Field.
Perhaps bored with me, the ball drew back into the center of the room and elevated itself to a height of about seven feet. Then it ruptured. It exploded. It didn’t explode like a bomb with violent force. It exploded like a flare powered by nuclear energy. It exploded with light. There was no wave rolling off it that shook my bones, just light that drove me to cover my face.
A few moments of blindness fell over me as my pummeled eyes scrambled to adjust. I trembled with fear and had mad thoughts of terrorism and death.
After my eyes settled down, I saw that the ball had disappeared. What stood in its place, written in the same radiating blue light was a vast spiral that circled, swooped, and filled my living-room from the tile floor to the tip-top of my vaulted ceiling some twenty feet above.
The spiral resembled the clichéd image of a metal coil or a perfectly proportioned strand of kinky hair. Or, maybe most accurately, it resembled one of those beachside shells, the ones that begin at a point and spiral up and out in perfect proportion as you move up the side of the shell.
Along the line of the widening blue spiral were what looked to be beads, hundreds of them, each interlocked with the next bead along the coil. The beads of blue light rose from a single sphere resting on my living room floor to a crowded string of beads covering the broad final swoop of the coil that damn near covered my entire ceiling.
Looking at the spheres, I realized that the blue ball had not disappeared after hovering before my face. Instead it had multiplied into the chain of beads winding up the spiral and filling my home.
(I want whoever is reading this to know that I am able to write this to you with such sober attention to detail only because of the thousands of years I’ve had to look back on these moments and collect my thoughts.
(I can assure you that in the actual moment I was, to put it rudely but accurately, scared shitless. I saw all these details, but I could not reckon them in the moment. It was too much. I was overwhelmed, as overwhelmed as everyone first called up into my line of work is. I was scared as shitless as you would be in my shoes.
(Some of the people in my field do a better job than others of hiding their initial fear. Each time we move through life in each of the versions of the universe, there are a few of us around to swap stories. On these sweet occasions when I have time to meet and talk with my colleagues about our strange, shared vocation, we swap stories about our “Call-Ups”. And we just as surely tell tales and folklore about the legendary Call-Ups of names more well-known than ours.
(But I digress. And I apologize.)
IV
As I trembled at what had become of my living room, I felt the sudden press of a left thigh against my right thigh as two asses suddenly were crammed into the narrow space of my love seat. I sensed the wood of the loveseat groan and adjust under a great weight. In the same moment, a voice filled my right ear.
“Joe, shalom. Don’t be alarmed. What you see is simply a map.”
One syllable into the stranger’s line, in a single act of instinct, I spun my head and saw a hairless, tanned scalp. In the same instant I launched a backhanded punch with my right fist toward the form. In the thin slice of time the bald head had time to react, he did. Quick. Easy. Effortless.
Martin’s two hands extended, or rather appeared, and caught my fist between them. He gripped my fist like I had just held the baseball, or whatever it was. He squeezed with pressure that bordered on pain but did no harm, a possibility of violence that simply bore notice that he had enormous untapped strength in reserve.
“Joe, can we move to the sofa?” Martin said. “The loveseat is tight, and this feels a little strange, a little too intimate. Don’t you think?”
Still holding my hand, with gentleness he lifted me and led me to the side of the loveseat where the sofa meets it to form an “L”. He released my hand, and I stumbled back onto the sofa, but Martin remained standing. Instead of sitting, he backed into the blue-beaded spiral of light and took a spot beside the first bead, the one that rested on the floor and anchored the whole kinky swirl.
“Joe, I know our first meeting, the one where I interrupted your meal at The Pink Pony, must have struck you as one of your Top-10 strangest encounters of all time. And now this meeting is even stranger. I know that. You know that. And God, the Power-That-Is, knows that. And that’s OK. You’ll remember what I’m telling you better than you think you will. You can handle this, Joe. I wouldn’t be here if we had any doubt you can handle this, Joe.”
At this point I concluded that I was in a dream, and since in so many of my dreams I sit and watch the action unfold around me, that is exactly what I did. I simply sat there and stared and listened for whatever would come next.
“Joe, I wasn’t kidding. The ball is a map. Deep in this map we could find New Jersey where you were born. Or Brooklyn where you played pro ball. Or Arizona where you’ve chosen to escape humidity, retire, and die. It’s all in here.” He tapped the blue bead at the base of the chain with his foot. “It’s all here in Version One.”
“But,” Martin went on, “this map has so much more in it. Now, Joe, stay with me. You see, you could say that this is a map of the mind of God. It is a map of what is and a map of what will be.” He raised his hands high and gestured up the chain. He turned in a circle as he gazed upward into the beads and beyond. He seemed reverent.
Martin spoke to me for a long time. For exactly how long, I have no idea. Time passed, but it also felt paralyzed. At points along the way, Martin encouraged me to take a bathroom break. At a few other points he paused to let me grab a beer or make a chicken salad sandwich.
When Martin finally left with my signed agreement in hand, I poked my head outside convinced eons had transpired while we spoke. Had the apes evolved and put people in zoos? Did everyone finally have their flying cars? Had the Chicago Cubs at last won the World Series?
But my handyman neighbor across the street, the one who had popped his car hood to tinker just a few moments before I popped that freak baseball/map/living thing into my hands, was still poking and prodding his classic Thunderbird’s engine. The sun still stood as high in the sky as it had before Martin showed up, and I’d signed away what even then felt like my eternity.
But so much had happened. So much had been shared.
I will try to give you a sample of what I received, and it will be more than enough. Of that I am sure.
V
How to say this?
Many of you still have some memory of the classic Bible verse John 3:16. Maybe your grandma made you memorize it. Maybe you picked it up at some Bible School you trudged through long ago as a child. Maybe you follow Jesus and that one verse has dug its graceful claws into your gut and changed your life inside–out and right-side-up.
Or, maybe on the opposite end of the spiritual spectrum, you simply saw a sign at a football game with that chapter and verse splashed across it, curiosity got the best of you, and you looked it up.
No matter. Many of us have heard it before. The verse always begins something like this: For God so loved the world….”
Martin affirmed to me that God loves Joe Black, and this is wonderful and true. But he then said that God also loves the world, and that “world” is more than we think. It includes our blue and green ball, but it is more than even that. Martin said that the word “world” in the verse actually refers to the cosmos, to the universe.
Then he asked if I had heard the new-fangled idea that there is more than one cosmos, more than one universe. He said maybe I’d heard about it through some genius from MIT or perhaps just by way of some wacky sci-fi show on the Fox Network.
In any case, he said that the idea was fundamentally correct.
But, Martin said, if I had heard that there were infinite universes, well, that idea was fundamentally incorrect.
He said there are three hundred and sixty universes. (Or maybe there “will be 360” is more correct. I apologize. Verb tenses start to run together and become largely meaningless in my field of work.) At any rate, Martin was clear that there were and there will be no more and no less than 360 versions of the world God loves.
Martin said that everything in the world is made from a template – a baseball glove, a suit coat, and, as it turns out, all the worlds that exist and will exist within the mind of God. And for the creation of all the worlds, the template God employed is the perfection of a circle. So 360 degrees. 360 different iterations of the world. And then all is complete.
Somehow I was able to squeeze out a weak question and ask Martin why this was so. He gestured to the beer in my hand and said, “Why do you like dark beer and detest light beer, Joe? You just do. It is part of your individuality. Why circles and not squares by which to measure all things, as far as God is concerned? Same reason, Joe. Same reason. It’s simply part of divine individuality.”
I will leave it to the theoreticians of physics to argue why 360 is a good idea for how many universes to have. Or perhaps they will argue that it is not. God is odd and meticulous about allowing us freedom, even if that freedom includes the freedom to argue with God. Along those same lines, I will leave it up to the theologians of God to suggest why the Power-That-Is gets such a kick out of circles.
I simply remain Joe Black, and I am just a laborer among the worlds. I was told on high authority that there are to be 360. Since being told this, and promising to play my part in as many as possible, I have lived, loved, and mucked through 358 of them. I pray I have not been misled. Two more and no more after that is what I need. I have held it together, but I am tired and ready for my rest.
VI
My mind is drifting back to that second meeting with Martin. We are in my living room, bathed in the blue light of the map, and he is telling me the secrets of time and space. Then, out of nowhere, he mentions Jackie Robinson.
I interrupt him. “Did you just mention Jack?”
“Jackie was tired, Joe. He didn’t feel he could carry on and carry through. He didn’t feel he was able to move on up the spiral until all things are made complete. He didn’t even feel up to doing what he did for one more world, Joe. Jackie was tired of the death threats and, eventually, he was tired of the veneration. He was done. Just done.”
I can now tell you from experience that what Martin said appears to be true.
Things work like dominoes. As I said, I am from Version One, and now you can probably guess what that means. I am from the originator world, the first domino. As are you. Our world bumps the second into being and the second bumps the third and so on until all 360 worlds are set in motion and all is complete.
If you’ll allow me to mix the hell out of my images, the best way I can put it is that what happens in one world provides the seed for the next. The next world will be its own, but it still will in many ways look like the one before it. One universe hatches out of the previous universe as a new generation. The baby chick is so much like its momma, but it’s also clearly its own bird.
Lord, I sound like an idiot. But, I hope you get the gist of it. If you do, you will have understood as much as I do, and I have clocked a combined (and, yes, Jesus, I’m just gonna round up) 29000 years moving along with the domino wave of worlds. Jesus Christ Almighty.
Let me get back to the nitty-gritty.
In my world, in your world, Jackie did his thing. He withstood the spit and insult. He broke the color barrier in baseball. He became a statesman for blackness. And, in due time, he got the commendations and the gilded Hollywood movie treatments.
It was ugly and awful, but it was also good and holy. And, quite literally, God was pleased with the work Mr. Robinson had performed, the service Jackie had rendered the world God loves.
So the Power-That-Is also decided in that circle-loving mind of His that what Jackie had done was essential to the future of all the worlds to spring from ours. Usually God will leave the work of making the next world move along to people from that next world. A person does his peace, moves creation along the spiral of cosmoses, and goes to her rest in her own world.
But once in a while, the Power-That-Is pulls out another move. The PTI steps in and asks someone who has done an especially good job with what we call in my business a Critical Issue Scenario (CIS) to come back for another life in the next world and do it again. And, if God’s little, bald helpers like Martin can negotiate a good deal for God, maybe that person will come back again and again and again and – well, you get the idea.
So in January of 1970, as Jackie was nearing the fifty-first candle on his birthday cake, the PTI sent Martin to Jackie and laid out the deal. For us baseball guys it feels like the most ridiculous contract extension offer imaginable. Martin, the angel of the Lord, told Jackie how well he had done and asked Jackie to re-up and go around again and again and again.
And Jackie said, with all due respect and reverence, “Fuck no.”
So here I am. And so, in every other world but yours and mine, Joe Black broke the color barrier in baseball and entered the halls of history.
VII
In God’s weird way of doing things, a freedom of movement, an unpredictability to life is afforded to even the smallest particles of our universe. No matter how close you look at them, and no matter how simple they seem when you take that look, there is an irreducible touch of mystery about where they will dance next.
That same spirit is granted to the bodies that those particles form, to us, to you and me. There is an ineffable freedom of movement granted by the PTI to you and to me.
Such is also the case with the bodies we in part comprise, the universes themselves. The cosmoses may be guided, but they are not dictated to or kept in lockstep by chains jerked by the anal-retentive hand of a geriatric, puppeteer god. They float and bounce and do as they please and sometimes God cries because of it, but most of the time the PTI laughs and makes do.
This liberating and maddening reality has a huge impact on how I move through the worlds and do my job. What I mean is that when I move from universe to universe, I pop in at different points each time. The universes flow into each other in different ways and cross paths in different places.
I entered universe V162 in mid-pitch, a Dodgers hat already on my head and a Pirates batter already in the batter’s box waiting to swing. (He grounded out to second, if you care to know.)
I entered V9 feeling my mother’s soft right hand rustling my hair and her even softer voice exclaiming, “Good job, Joseph,” as I read the word “cat” successfully for the first time.
I entered V326 already an old man with my life’s labor behind me. That was the most disturbing entry I’ve experienced so far. I panicked and wondered if anything had been screwed up in my absence. And once I had confirmation that all was well, once I knew that the Joe Black of this world, a Joe Black unaided by the added force of my eons coursing through his veins, had carried it through well, I danced a feeble but joyous jig. I danced in small part because the Joe Black of this version (Him? Me?) had been a blessing and pulled his (my?) weight.
But for the most part in V326 I danced because I’d gotten a freebie, a whole life to cross off the list without once being spit in the face or teased about watermelons and fried chicken.
Most times I enter a new version while I am in early childhood. Best as I understand it, the reason for this is that even with their great freedom, the universes fall into certain normally predictable patterns (not unlike sub-atomic particles or individual people, I suppose).
Most times I enter a new universe while I am asleep or not doing much of importance for me or for anyone else. The reason for that is obvious. Most of our lives are spent asleep or doing nothing particularly important.
But each time I enter a new version of the world that God loves, I do so in order to do something very particular and apparently important, at least to God. And each time I’ve entered a new world, I have done what I came to do. 358 times I have done it. I have done it over and over again, and I am tired.
Just two more. Just two more. Just two more.
VIII
As I close this letter, I realize I am a fool. This is disheartening because I know I will die very soon. Even if you have another life to walk into, who wants to walk out of a life with the taste of foolishness on his lips?
I am a fool because, even though over the accumulating centuries my mind has been stuffed full of the mysteries of the universe, I am still an idiot who can miss the obvious.
This letter will never reach you. This is so obvious to me now. I am in each world so long that even I can forget that there is more than the one I happen to be in at that moment. I am such an old goon, such a dumb jock at my core.
I sit in my car and feel my heart start to flutter and fail here in Version 358. My pointless hope and prayer has been that this letter will magically somehow be passed on and read by you, a brother or sister from my universe, from V1.
But there is no way. No damn way. V1 is long gone. My home is long gone. You are long gone. Your particular globe of blue fire on the celestial map of God’s mind has long since burned out and faded away. My desire for community, my yearning for confession to someone from home, my bone-deep fatigue of thirty thousand years has made me a fool.
Perhaps there is value in finally writing this letter, even if it’s never read by you. Perhaps there are freedoms and flexibilities that even I cannot imagine. Perhaps the PTI has desires and plans beyond what I can conceive. Perhaps your V1 eyes somehow meeting the words on this page are part of something larger than even the things I have come to know.
But, I’m still going to guess that my words will never be read by someone who was taught the name and legend of Jackie Robinson back in grade school. And I’ll have you know that I’m usually a really good guesser about what’s going to happen. Almost 30 millennia of life can make someone a good guesser that way.
Nonetheless, I will follow this charade to the end. So I close and sign this letter with the name that has followed me up through the spiral of the worlds.
Faithfully Yours Until All Is Complete,
Joe Black
Two weeks later I sat on the loveseat in my townhome off McDonald Drive in Scottsdale. A beer rested in my right hand. The ball Martin had given me rested on the coffee table in front of me. The blinds were closed to keep the merciless sun at bay. My eyes were stuck on the ball. A bit too much beer was stuck in my gut. I felt bloated and a little drunk.
I decided to pick up the ball and work it over. I don’t know if I would have ever done it had I not been a shade on the tipsy side. I didn’t drink much. And, I didn’t think much of the crazy, obsessed bald guy’s interruption of my steak dinner.
But, I couldn’t get the meeting out of my head, and so I couldn’t get the baseball out of my head either.
When my daughter was six, she was a bit precocious. When she caught a little bit of a radio show or a TV program aimed at an adult audience (not porn, mind you, just an adult drama or whatever), she’d say days later, “This is not for someone my age, but I can’t get it out of my brain!”
That’s what I felt sitting there on the love seat staring at the ball. I felt as if I’d encountered something that made me feel like I was a small child. I was flirting with something weird and beyond me, and I couldn’t shake it from my mind. With my thoughts racing and the alcohol doing what it does, I decided to rub-up the ball and be disappointed and relieved all at once when nothing happened. At least then I could dismiss it all from my mind and get back to being old and watching baseball.
I drained the beer, put the bottle on the table, picked up the ball and started to work it over. I started to rub it vigorously and violently in the cupped palms of my hands. I treated it just as I had treated thousands of balls during my life in baseball. By friction and pressure and the oil of my skin I prepared the ball to be thrown with force and art into a catcher’s extended mitt.
Nothing happened at first. Then, as I rubbed the ball, wedges of blue light started extending out from the gaps between my fingers. At the same moment I felt a quick-building cold fire course through my hands. It was like I held a ball of dry ice.
With the same reflex that pushes your hand away from the burner of a hot stove, I dropped the ball. But it did not fall to the floor. Instead it rose.
It rose from the area in front of my waist and suspended itself before my eyes a foot or so back from my face. It settled there for a moment, slowly rotated, and, as buckshit crazy as this sounds, I sensed that the ball contemplated me, measured me, took stock of me.
The ball was still a ball, but it no longer was associated with baseball in any visible way. It glowed an electric blue. The squiggled signatures had disappeared, as had the stitching and the yellowed cover scuffed by impact with the barrel of a baseball bat and the dirt of Ebbets Field.
Perhaps bored with me, the ball drew back into the center of the room and elevated itself to a height of about seven feet. Then it ruptured. It exploded. It didn’t explode like a bomb with violent force. It exploded like a flare powered by nuclear energy. It exploded with light. There was no wave rolling off it that shook my bones, just light that drove me to cover my face.
A few moments of blindness fell over me as my pummeled eyes scrambled to adjust. I trembled with fear and had mad thoughts of terrorism and death.
After my eyes settled down, I saw that the ball had disappeared. What stood in its place, written in the same radiating blue light was a vast spiral that circled, swooped, and filled my living-room from the tile floor to the tip-top of my vaulted ceiling some twenty feet above.
The spiral resembled the clichéd image of a metal coil or a perfectly proportioned strand of kinky hair. Or, maybe most accurately, it resembled one of those beachside shells, the ones that begin at a point and spiral up and out in perfect proportion as you move up the side of the shell.
Along the line of the widening blue spiral were what looked to be beads, hundreds of them, each interlocked with the next bead along the coil. The beads of blue light rose from a single sphere resting on my living room floor to a crowded string of beads covering the broad final swoop of the coil that damn near covered my entire ceiling.
Looking at the spheres, I realized that the blue ball had not disappeared after hovering before my face. Instead it had multiplied into the chain of beads winding up the spiral and filling my home.
(I want whoever is reading this to know that I am able to write this to you with such sober attention to detail only because of the thousands of years I’ve had to look back on these moments and collect my thoughts.
(I can assure you that in the actual moment I was, to put it rudely but accurately, scared shitless. I saw all these details, but I could not reckon them in the moment. It was too much. I was overwhelmed, as overwhelmed as everyone first called up into my line of work is. I was scared as shitless as you would be in my shoes.
(Some of the people in my field do a better job than others of hiding their initial fear. Each time we move through life in each of the versions of the universe, there are a few of us around to swap stories. On these sweet occasions when I have time to meet and talk with my colleagues about our strange, shared vocation, we swap stories about our “Call-Ups”. And we just as surely tell tales and folklore about the legendary Call-Ups of names more well-known than ours.
(But I digress. And I apologize.)
IV
As I trembled at what had become of my living room, I felt the sudden press of a left thigh against my right thigh as two asses suddenly were crammed into the narrow space of my love seat. I sensed the wood of the loveseat groan and adjust under a great weight. In the same moment, a voice filled my right ear.
“Joe, shalom. Don’t be alarmed. What you see is simply a map.”
One syllable into the stranger’s line, in a single act of instinct, I spun my head and saw a hairless, tanned scalp. In the same instant I launched a backhanded punch with my right fist toward the form. In the thin slice of time the bald head had time to react, he did. Quick. Easy. Effortless.
Martin’s two hands extended, or rather appeared, and caught my fist between them. He gripped my fist like I had just held the baseball, or whatever it was. He squeezed with pressure that bordered on pain but did no harm, a possibility of violence that simply bore notice that he had enormous untapped strength in reserve.
“Joe, can we move to the sofa?” Martin said. “The loveseat is tight, and this feels a little strange, a little too intimate. Don’t you think?”
Still holding my hand, with gentleness he lifted me and led me to the side of the loveseat where the sofa meets it to form an “L”. He released my hand, and I stumbled back onto the sofa, but Martin remained standing. Instead of sitting, he backed into the blue-beaded spiral of light and took a spot beside the first bead, the one that rested on the floor and anchored the whole kinky swirl.
“Joe, I know our first meeting, the one where I interrupted your meal at The Pink Pony, must have struck you as one of your Top-10 strangest encounters of all time. And now this meeting is even stranger. I know that. You know that. And God, the Power-That-Is, knows that. And that’s OK. You’ll remember what I’m telling you better than you think you will. You can handle this, Joe. I wouldn’t be here if we had any doubt you can handle this, Joe.”
At this point I concluded that I was in a dream, and since in so many of my dreams I sit and watch the action unfold around me, that is exactly what I did. I simply sat there and stared and listened for whatever would come next.
“Joe, I wasn’t kidding. The ball is a map. Deep in this map we could find New Jersey where you were born. Or Brooklyn where you played pro ball. Or Arizona where you’ve chosen to escape humidity, retire, and die. It’s all in here.” He tapped the blue bead at the base of the chain with his foot. “It’s all here in Version One.”
“But,” Martin went on, “this map has so much more in it. Now, Joe, stay with me. You see, you could say that this is a map of the mind of God. It is a map of what is and a map of what will be.” He raised his hands high and gestured up the chain. He turned in a circle as he gazed upward into the beads and beyond. He seemed reverent.
Martin spoke to me for a long time. For exactly how long, I have no idea. Time passed, but it also felt paralyzed. At points along the way, Martin encouraged me to take a bathroom break. At a few other points he paused to let me grab a beer or make a chicken salad sandwich.
When Martin finally left with my signed agreement in hand, I poked my head outside convinced eons had transpired while we spoke. Had the apes evolved and put people in zoos? Did everyone finally have their flying cars? Had the Chicago Cubs at last won the World Series?
But my handyman neighbor across the street, the one who had popped his car hood to tinker just a few moments before I popped that freak baseball/map/living thing into my hands, was still poking and prodding his classic Thunderbird’s engine. The sun still stood as high in the sky as it had before Martin showed up, and I’d signed away what even then felt like my eternity.
But so much had happened. So much had been shared.
I will try to give you a sample of what I received, and it will be more than enough. Of that I am sure.
V
How to say this?
Many of you still have some memory of the classic Bible verse John 3:16. Maybe your grandma made you memorize it. Maybe you picked it up at some Bible School you trudged through long ago as a child. Maybe you follow Jesus and that one verse has dug its graceful claws into your gut and changed your life inside–out and right-side-up.
Or, maybe on the opposite end of the spiritual spectrum, you simply saw a sign at a football game with that chapter and verse splashed across it, curiosity got the best of you, and you looked it up.
No matter. Many of us have heard it before. The verse always begins something like this: For God so loved the world….”
Martin affirmed to me that God loves Joe Black, and this is wonderful and true. But he then said that God also loves the world, and that “world” is more than we think. It includes our blue and green ball, but it is more than even that. Martin said that the word “world” in the verse actually refers to the cosmos, to the universe.
Then he asked if I had heard the new-fangled idea that there is more than one cosmos, more than one universe. He said maybe I’d heard about it through some genius from MIT or perhaps just by way of some wacky sci-fi show on the Fox Network.
In any case, he said that the idea was fundamentally correct.
But, Martin said, if I had heard that there were infinite universes, well, that idea was fundamentally incorrect.
He said there are three hundred and sixty universes. (Or maybe there “will be 360” is more correct. I apologize. Verb tenses start to run together and become largely meaningless in my field of work.) At any rate, Martin was clear that there were and there will be no more and no less than 360 versions of the world God loves.
Martin said that everything in the world is made from a template – a baseball glove, a suit coat, and, as it turns out, all the worlds that exist and will exist within the mind of God. And for the creation of all the worlds, the template God employed is the perfection of a circle. So 360 degrees. 360 different iterations of the world. And then all is complete.
Somehow I was able to squeeze out a weak question and ask Martin why this was so. He gestured to the beer in my hand and said, “Why do you like dark beer and detest light beer, Joe? You just do. It is part of your individuality. Why circles and not squares by which to measure all things, as far as God is concerned? Same reason, Joe. Same reason. It’s simply part of divine individuality.”
I will leave it to the theoreticians of physics to argue why 360 is a good idea for how many universes to have. Or perhaps they will argue that it is not. God is odd and meticulous about allowing us freedom, even if that freedom includes the freedom to argue with God. Along those same lines, I will leave it up to the theologians of God to suggest why the Power-That-Is gets such a kick out of circles.
I simply remain Joe Black, and I am just a laborer among the worlds. I was told on high authority that there are to be 360. Since being told this, and promising to play my part in as many as possible, I have lived, loved, and mucked through 358 of them. I pray I have not been misled. Two more and no more after that is what I need. I have held it together, but I am tired and ready for my rest.
VI
My mind is drifting back to that second meeting with Martin. We are in my living room, bathed in the blue light of the map, and he is telling me the secrets of time and space. Then, out of nowhere, he mentions Jackie Robinson.
I interrupt him. “Did you just mention Jack?”
“Jackie was tired, Joe. He didn’t feel he could carry on and carry through. He didn’t feel he was able to move on up the spiral until all things are made complete. He didn’t even feel up to doing what he did for one more world, Joe. Jackie was tired of the death threats and, eventually, he was tired of the veneration. He was done. Just done.”
I can now tell you from experience that what Martin said appears to be true.
Things work like dominoes. As I said, I am from Version One, and now you can probably guess what that means. I am from the originator world, the first domino. As are you. Our world bumps the second into being and the second bumps the third and so on until all 360 worlds are set in motion and all is complete.
If you’ll allow me to mix the hell out of my images, the best way I can put it is that what happens in one world provides the seed for the next. The next world will be its own, but it still will in many ways look like the one before it. One universe hatches out of the previous universe as a new generation. The baby chick is so much like its momma, but it’s also clearly its own bird.
Lord, I sound like an idiot. But, I hope you get the gist of it. If you do, you will have understood as much as I do, and I have clocked a combined (and, yes, Jesus, I’m just gonna round up) 29000 years moving along with the domino wave of worlds. Jesus Christ Almighty.
Let me get back to the nitty-gritty.
In my world, in your world, Jackie did his thing. He withstood the spit and insult. He broke the color barrier in baseball. He became a statesman for blackness. And, in due time, he got the commendations and the gilded Hollywood movie treatments.
It was ugly and awful, but it was also good and holy. And, quite literally, God was pleased with the work Mr. Robinson had performed, the service Jackie had rendered the world God loves.
So the Power-That-Is also decided in that circle-loving mind of His that what Jackie had done was essential to the future of all the worlds to spring from ours. Usually God will leave the work of making the next world move along to people from that next world. A person does his peace, moves creation along the spiral of cosmoses, and goes to her rest in her own world.
But once in a while, the Power-That-Is pulls out another move. The PTI steps in and asks someone who has done an especially good job with what we call in my business a Critical Issue Scenario (CIS) to come back for another life in the next world and do it again. And, if God’s little, bald helpers like Martin can negotiate a good deal for God, maybe that person will come back again and again and again and – well, you get the idea.
So in January of 1970, as Jackie was nearing the fifty-first candle on his birthday cake, the PTI sent Martin to Jackie and laid out the deal. For us baseball guys it feels like the most ridiculous contract extension offer imaginable. Martin, the angel of the Lord, told Jackie how well he had done and asked Jackie to re-up and go around again and again and again.
And Jackie said, with all due respect and reverence, “Fuck no.”
So here I am. And so, in every other world but yours and mine, Joe Black broke the color barrier in baseball and entered the halls of history.
VII
In God’s weird way of doing things, a freedom of movement, an unpredictability to life is afforded to even the smallest particles of our universe. No matter how close you look at them, and no matter how simple they seem when you take that look, there is an irreducible touch of mystery about where they will dance next.
That same spirit is granted to the bodies that those particles form, to us, to you and me. There is an ineffable freedom of movement granted by the PTI to you and to me.
Such is also the case with the bodies we in part comprise, the universes themselves. The cosmoses may be guided, but they are not dictated to or kept in lockstep by chains jerked by the anal-retentive hand of a geriatric, puppeteer god. They float and bounce and do as they please and sometimes God cries because of it, but most of the time the PTI laughs and makes do.
This liberating and maddening reality has a huge impact on how I move through the worlds and do my job. What I mean is that when I move from universe to universe, I pop in at different points each time. The universes flow into each other in different ways and cross paths in different places.
I entered universe V162 in mid-pitch, a Dodgers hat already on my head and a Pirates batter already in the batter’s box waiting to swing. (He grounded out to second, if you care to know.)
I entered V9 feeling my mother’s soft right hand rustling my hair and her even softer voice exclaiming, “Good job, Joseph,” as I read the word “cat” successfully for the first time.
I entered V326 already an old man with my life’s labor behind me. That was the most disturbing entry I’ve experienced so far. I panicked and wondered if anything had been screwed up in my absence. And once I had confirmation that all was well, once I knew that the Joe Black of this world, a Joe Black unaided by the added force of my eons coursing through his veins, had carried it through well, I danced a feeble but joyous jig. I danced in small part because the Joe Black of this version (Him? Me?) had been a blessing and pulled his (my?) weight.
But for the most part in V326 I danced because I’d gotten a freebie, a whole life to cross off the list without once being spit in the face or teased about watermelons and fried chicken.
Most times I enter a new version while I am in early childhood. Best as I understand it, the reason for this is that even with their great freedom, the universes fall into certain normally predictable patterns (not unlike sub-atomic particles or individual people, I suppose).
Most times I enter a new universe while I am asleep or not doing much of importance for me or for anyone else. The reason for that is obvious. Most of our lives are spent asleep or doing nothing particularly important.
But each time I enter a new version of the world that God loves, I do so in order to do something very particular and apparently important, at least to God. And each time I’ve entered a new world, I have done what I came to do. 358 times I have done it. I have done it over and over again, and I am tired.
Just two more. Just two more. Just two more.
VIII
As I close this letter, I realize I am a fool. This is disheartening because I know I will die very soon. Even if you have another life to walk into, who wants to walk out of a life with the taste of foolishness on his lips?
I am a fool because, even though over the accumulating centuries my mind has been stuffed full of the mysteries of the universe, I am still an idiot who can miss the obvious.
This letter will never reach you. This is so obvious to me now. I am in each world so long that even I can forget that there is more than the one I happen to be in at that moment. I am such an old goon, such a dumb jock at my core.
I sit in my car and feel my heart start to flutter and fail here in Version 358. My pointless hope and prayer has been that this letter will magically somehow be passed on and read by you, a brother or sister from my universe, from V1.
But there is no way. No damn way. V1 is long gone. My home is long gone. You are long gone. Your particular globe of blue fire on the celestial map of God’s mind has long since burned out and faded away. My desire for community, my yearning for confession to someone from home, my bone-deep fatigue of thirty thousand years has made me a fool.
Perhaps there is value in finally writing this letter, even if it’s never read by you. Perhaps there are freedoms and flexibilities that even I cannot imagine. Perhaps the PTI has desires and plans beyond what I can conceive. Perhaps your V1 eyes somehow meeting the words on this page are part of something larger than even the things I have come to know.
But, I’m still going to guess that my words will never be read by someone who was taught the name and legend of Jackie Robinson back in grade school. And I’ll have you know that I’m usually a really good guesser about what’s going to happen. Almost 30 millennia of life can make someone a good guesser that way.
Nonetheless, I will follow this charade to the end. So I close and sign this letter with the name that has followed me up through the spiral of the worlds.
Faithfully Yours Until All Is Complete,
Joe Black