Hope: A Tragedy

He imagined the scene at the gates of heaven to be not unlike that at the finish line of a long and grueling marathon: everyone high-fiving, hugging, collapsing, elated that it’s over, yes, it’s finally over, pouring cups of water over one another’s heads and saying, Holy shit, dude, that was fucking brutal. I am never doing that again.

Has a gun owner ever, in the history of the weapon, been satisfied with a small gun? If a small gun can save me, he figures, what can a big gun save? What can the biggest gun save? What can a bomb save?

He was emaciated, pale shrunken skin pulled tight over weary twisted bones, holding a cloth of some kind over himself in some final instinct of modesty and self-respect.

Protecting a child from the outside world is easy, said Anne Frank as Kugel struggled to descend; his leg ached and he could only hold on, awkwardly, with his one good hand. Protecting him from his inner world, Anne Frank continued, is quite a bit more complicated.

THAT NIGHT, lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling, Kugel thought he heard a gentle tapping on the vent, but decided that he hadn’t. Maybe he had. He hadn’t.

It seemed such an inadequate device, the heart—so finicky, so easily stopped, so Japanese when it should be so German. One moment it’s pumping, the next it’s not. And they lived. The end.

Here’s what I believe: we dream of utopia, but could never bear one. The impossibility of heaven is less a function of theology, in my opinion, than it is a problem of nature—our nature.

You never see a lion crucifying another lion. You never see a bear just randomly murdering salmon for anything besides food; bears don’t form armies, invade rivers, tear the heads off male salmon, rape the female salmon, and enslave their salmon children.

THE SUN WAS IN THE SKY like a something.