God’s Away

More about God’s Away

The morning God left, the railway clock continued striking six until the stationmaster climbed a ladder and removed an hour with his bare hands.

“Did you know where to look?” my grandmother asked.

We had searched the churches, the hospitals, the rooms where men slept with their shoes on because they no longer expected tomorrow. Nobody had thought to search the yard sales.

God had developed a fondness for things nobody wanted: chipped saucers, widowed shoes, a brass bird incapable of singing. He went from house to house carrying a shopping bag, paying the marked price without bargaining, which was how the women recognized him.

Only God would pay three dollars for a toaster that had killed a husband.

“God isn’t a blank screen for whatever you imagine,” my grandmother said. “He has tastes. Unfortunately, they’re expensive to ship.”

At the last sale he bought a suitcase belonging to a woman who had postponed her honeymoon for sixty-three years. Inside were a bathing suit, a railway timetable, and the smell of an orange her husband had peeled before the war.

That afternoon he boarded a train whose destination board read GOD’S AWAY.

People assumed it was a warning about the service.

The train carried him to a harbor where a world cruise was preparing to depart. God took an inside cabin. He had seen enough horizons.

At every port the passengers went ashore to photograph the world, while its maker remained aboard examining the little objects he had bought. He repaired the brass bird. It sang once, and somewhere a retired music teacher woke remembering the name of her first love.

By the third voyage the captain stopped asking whether he intended to disembark.

Years passed. The vessel acquired new carpets, new cooks, a new name. God remained in the same cabin, although the cabin number changed whenever someone tried to find him.

At home we painted his face on walls until the walls could no longer bear the weight of our revisions. A woman waited inside the yellow railway carriage with a ticket that had outlived three governments. The stationmaster grew old collecting fares to a destination he could not explain.

My grandmother alone stopped waiting.

“There is no second coming,” she said, setting an extra plate out for whoever might actually arrive.

Her hands were swollen. I dried the dishes while she washed them.

For the first time in years, we finished before dark.