O l i v e r B e n j a m i n
only to end up with a dead goose. The pages of human history were
soiled with dead gooses. He found it alternately fascinating and
horrifying to discover the things men had done in his name. Sitting
there, in a red vinyl booth at Shecky’s, he drank decaf and pored over
a pile of books, studying the Crusades, the Inquisition, Calvinism,
and the American Evangelical movement. Sometimes he laughed,
sometimes he winced, sometimes he just wanted to go back to where
he had come from.
But it was the same with the others as well. Gautama had
remarked in a phone call from Java that there was an enormous
temple there with no less than fourteen thousand statues of him on
it, a creation so directly opposed to his original teachings that he
wondered if maybe it was in honor of some entirely different guy. Not
to mention the seven-story, gold-plated Buddha monstrosities in
Thailand that were ostensibly supposed to symbolize his humble
quest for the immaterial.
And poor Mohammed. His followers were among the most
devout and determined the world had yet known, but the things some
of them did in the his name were so ghastly, so horrifying, that he
nearly backed-out of the whole operation, vowing never to
participate in such a mission ever again. The other five prophets had
to hold him down and remind him of the Law of Moral Vacillation:
From shit, there grow pretty plants. Pretty plants become food for
ambitious creatures and ambitious creatures become food for more
ambitious creatures and the whole mess returns to the earth in the
form of shit. In so many ways, shit ultimately occurs. But in the midst
of the cycle, great genius and beauty often flash hot and wild across
the landscape.
It was difficult to say what Krishna’s opinion on the matter was.
Apparently he had been spending much of his time picking up on
women and hadn’t been seen in weeks. Blue skin or no, he was still a
lascivious fellow. Truly, they were all quite sentimental about reliving
their past glories. Yeshua himself had spent much of his time back on
earth hanging around Jerusalem, until a bus he was on was blown to
smithereens by one of Mohammed’s lot. That really ruined his mood,
and sent him packing to America. Here he could really see what the
final fruits of his labors were, just in time for Christmas.
He had no idea it would come to this.
The approaching 25th of December wasn’t really his birthday,
but a day chosen long ago by his followers to compete with the
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