Verge: Stories

THE ELEVENTH COMMANDMENT

To this day I don’t know why she hung out with me. I was pitiful. Sickly, pale, booger-picking. Braces. Matted hair that argued with itself like crazy. The works. You can imagine: I was the kid who sat in those concrete tunnels by myself all during recess, who wet my pants during social studies in sixth grade. You heard right. Sixth grade. I had already developed several neuroses. I had the stress of a forty-eight-year-old man. Are you getting the picture? Sure you are. Everyone knew a kid like me.

The first time I met her, she came into one of those tunnels and sat down next to me without saying a word. For the whole recess. I didn’t say a word either. I was scared, but also weirdly thankful. She didn’t even look at me.

The next day she got in there with me again. Finally, toward the end of the forty-five minutes, she said, Chris Backstrom has hair around his pecker. That’s all. Then the bell rang and she ran out, and I sat there for a while longer considering this. Chris Backstrom had blond hair, so I tried to picture blond hair growing in beautiful curls around his penis. I shuddered and thought I might vomit. Then I got a splitting headache. I kept checking to see if my nose was bleeding. By the time I made it back to the classroom, I was near fainting with pain, and they sent me to the nurse’s office. After some time my mother picked me up, and I went home. She was very angry.

About a week later, the girl came back down and said she wanted to show me something. She said it was very important and that never in a million years would I get the chance again. Then she asked me if I wanted to see. My mouth was filled with saliva, and my palms were sweaty. I felt an uncontrollable urge to pick my nose; then I thought I might have to pee. I said yes in a wobbly little voice. I thought I might have gone cross-eyed there for a second.

She lifted up her skirt, and she pulled her panties down. This smell filled the concrete tunnel, and it was good but it was also terrifying, and I thought I could somehow taste it.

When I look back, I think of how she saved my life that day.

Her pussy had little red hairs on it, and she said, See, this is very rare. And she took my hand and we petted her together.

Later she coaxed me out of the tunnel, and we walked around to the far end of the field where the goalposts were. Some boys were playing soccer, and true as life the ball ended up clocking me upside the head. My face turned redder than humanly possible; I thought my skull might burst like an overripe fruit. I pictured it exploding there on the field, pictured how everyone would laugh, then stop and stare, stunned, confronting the death laid bare before them, the dull head of a boy in pieces at their feet.

The boys came toward us, and then I pictured another death, death by pulverization, death by soccer players cannibalizing me on the field. Food, I felt like: too-white food.

As always in grade school, they started to taunt me, ignoring her but drawing a tight circle around me until it felt like the oxygen was being sucked right out of my lungs. One of the leaders of the pack came up and stood over me, his chest puffing out, his great mouth opening and closing, his teeth drawing nearer, yelling and spraying spit, his breath hot and burning on my face. Finally his hand drew back and his body moved on me with the weight of an animal.

Then suddenly she was there, between us, stopping the turning of the world. She said, You know about the Eleventh Commandment, don’t you?

The guy tried to shove her aside, but she shouldered her way back in; she was taller than him, as is often the case at that age.

The Eleventh Commandment, she said again. It’s in this secret book that someone found in a clay pot. They kept all the secret stuff out of the real Bible because it scared people too much and it was too difficult for most people to understand. You had to have intelligence, but you also had to have imagination, and most people barely have the one and none of the other. Like you chuckleheads.

Baffled by this development, the gang of soccer players let the insult pass.

In the secret book there is an extra commandment, she went on, and it’s bigger and more serious than all the other ones, because it includes what will happen to you if you sin against it. Some boy to the side yelled out, You’re full of shit, there’s only one Bible, shut up you stupid bitch! She headed over to him, still talking, until her words were breath-close to his face. The reason you don’t know about it, dumbfuck, is that no one thinks you’re smart enough to get it. They don’t let just anyone in on it. You have to prove yourself. You have to show them you’re worthy, mature, that you can handle it. But I’m gonna tell you because you’re all too stupid to get that far, and I think it might save you some trouble later in life.

I don’t know how girls like that get the power to lead people. I don’t know what it was about her—she wasn’t pretty like the popular girls, and she wasn’t athletic either. It was more like she had this tiny bit of craziness that made people scared of her, but, like all disruption, it made you want to look, listen.

Some other schmuck called out, Well, how the hell did you hear about it, then?

Mary Shelley came to me in a dream and told me about it, she replied calmly.

Who the hell is that? the same guy said.

She took a deep breath and said, Mary Shelley, shit-for-brains, wrote Frankenstein, the greatest book of all time. If any of you idiots knew how to fucking read, you’d know that.

Then she made her way back over to me—me standing in a puddle of fear, airless, weightless, dizzy, already having surrendered, already having left my body to take my beating and accept it. Then, standing near me, she told the story of the Eleventh Commandment.

There was this leper, she said, who was friends with Jesus. Everybody was grossed out by him on account of his nastiness—his skin was all gray and full of pus, and he had these horrible open wounds and shit. He was actually a pretty nice guy, but no one wanted to go near him, and since most humans are ignorant, they translated their disgust of his skin to him, deciding he was dangerous, deviant, and evil. But Jesus, being smart, really liked him. He even thought the skin thing was interesting—after all, the man’s suffering made him closer to God. Besides, Jesus had played chess and drunk and had great philosophical conversations with him, so he knew he was dope. It was just the town losers, who didn’t know shit, who hated him.

So one day this kid passed by the leper’s house and peeked inside the window and saw the leper and Jesus fucking. (At this point the crowd of boys began to hurl obscenities at her in disbelief.) I know, she went on, the town reacted exactly like you morons. But the fact was, Jesus and the leper were fucking. So the town, like you assholes, decided that Jesus was possessed by the leper-devil, that he was under some kind of leper-devil hex, and they set out to save him.

They were stupid, so their plan was stupid. They decided to wait for the leper to go to sleep and then burn him and his house to ash. But of course Jesus ended up in bed with the leper that night, and those idiots burned ’em both to ash.

Well, God was pretty pissed, as you can imagine. The next morning he cracked the sky open with lightning and put out the eye of the sun and threw down a rock slab bearing a new commandment. Thou shalt for the rest of time be stricken with disease, it said, when thou settest eyes upon the uncanny.

The minute they read that thing, all their dicks turned black and the pain of acid on flesh shriveled them up, and after a week or so their peckers dropped off altogether. And that’s what happens to anyone who rejects the uncanny without wondering what it means, without recognizing that they’re looking at a fucking miracle.

It was the strangest story we’d ever heard—strange because we didn’t know what “uncanny” meant, but also because she did, and because our little dicks were getting hard from this tall girl telling it to us. Strange because we hated anything about homos, because that’s what people called us when they wanted to beat us up, and strange because half of us were, or were on our way to becoming, what those beat-us-up boys hated—bodies that felt like home.

It’s not like they couldn’t have beaten the crap out of my sorry ass anyhow, or pushed her around, or played out their sadism in any number of other ways. But somehow by the end of her story, a little path leading off the field had cleared for us, and she walked it, and I followed her, and I got the impression that the waves would hold like that until the Romans turned to chase us, at which point they would be consumed by the sea, or perhaps just by all of their ignorance drowning them and washing them away.