Simon’s Gospel

To Cassie Finch

CAUTION; Language, possible religious triggers, discussion of women’s reproductive rights.

The table felt funny.

That generally went without saying. Simon knew by rote the number of steps from his apartment house to Warshinski’s on Division, how many lights he must chance on the morning pilgrimage (two), and how many coat hooks he must count from the entry step-down to rear booth (Warshinski’s was OG Chicago). He could smell 30 feet before Mrs. Warshinski slid his standing order onto the formica with a mute pat on the shoulder. Simon suspected Mrs. Warshinski’s fragrance of choice, which overpowered the kraut that accompanied his Polish/two eggs, had been a gift from when actual Fieldses ran Marshall Field’s.

Simon suspected the Washinskis had either a running war or a wink/nod relationship with the Cook County Health Department. One of the blessings of his “condition”: Simon usually could rely on senses 2 through 5 for a 4-star breakfast experience.

But this morning, the table felt funny. Simon felt about for his fork, and noticed it. Tacky AND wet — these were the tactile norm. But never before had the table spoken to Simon.

SIMON, he “read.”

**

It could well have been a joke — the Washinskis protected “the boy’s booth” like their cabbage roll recipe. This was not accommodation for Simon’s disability but reverence for the theology student whose presumedly sacred mission they fueled with sausage and fried potatoes.

However, even had stolid old Washinski or his bride been struck by whimsy this chill Chitown day, he doubted they’d picked up braille in the Old or New Worlds.

SIMON GOOD. 

So now, we were in Charlotte’s Web territory. “SOME PIG. TERRIFIC. RADIANT. HUMBLE” — Wilbur got better reviews. A saintly swine, at least in certain faiths…

Simon tried to be a good neighbor here in the Windy — being unable to read facial cues probably helped him maintain a congenial attitude, though the occasional verbal cue tested his mettle. SIMON GOOD until time not to be good — Roadhouse rules.

SIMON CHOSEN. Simon’s Yelp score was rising.

“Mrs. Washinski?” Simon called. Heavy footfalls, a slight rattling of the presumably grubby coffee mug with the weight of a calloused, meaty paw against the wall-mounted table. 

“Yeah?” Old Washinski himself. “Eggs good? You good?”

Apparently. “Both great, thanks. Lemme ask you — what do you see on the table?”

Simon sensed confusion in the momentary silence, and the wall brackets creaked as Washinski leaned in and down. Onions and tobacco to the missus’ floral napalm. 

“Goodness!” Washinski grunted. “So sorry.”

The footfalls retreated. “No, it’s…”

The old man was back within seconds, and Simon pulled back with the slap of a damp towel. Washinski finished before Simon could think to protest, and the onions and nicotine gave way to overripe roses and lavender and a compensatory sausage plopping onto Simon’s plate.

The message was gone now, and Simon dove into Pim Valkenberg’s World Religions in Dialogue, braille edition. After finishing his apology sausage sturdy coffee, Simon tossed an extra bill on the table and collected text and cane. 

Simon detected a scuttling whisper as he shoved the thick volume into his backpack. Simon ventured back out into the bracing Lake “breeze.”

**

A cousin had recommended the Chicago Theological Seminary or University of Chicago Divinity School, but Simon would have felt a fraud. Most back home would consider studying religion for religion’s sake a noble undertaking, but few grasped that Simon sought not a calling but a few overdue answers.

Not so much for the obvious. Simon’s sightlessness was the early childhood result of retinopathy of prematurity, so he’d seldom if ever railed against the Heavens. Getting pissed at a supposedly omniscient, omnipotent deity for glibly blinding premies was simply piling irrationalism on top of some fairly fanciful assumptions. Kinda narcissistic, too.

Radiant, humble. Good piggy. 

The guy who’d “surreptitiously” grabbed the last seat as Simon entered the El car exploded in an unprotected super-sneeze.

“Bless you,” offered Simon the Good, hugging the pole.

“Fuck off,” Sneezy said.

**

“I think someone’s watching.”

“That goes without saying.” 

The eyeroll was an alien concept to Simon. But Terence’ pious spin on the most innocuous observation could be a real test of Christian tolerance.

“In a more secular sense. Jeez, at least I assume.” Terence’ thin lips pursed at the misdemeanor blasphemy, but Simon’s study buddy listened attentively to his greasy spoon parable.

“I mean, you’re a good enough person, if a bit weak on liturgy,” Terence murmured. He was on a clerical track, and viewed Simon as a spiritual tourist. But it was Terence who’d stepped up early in the semester. In Simon’s world, it was easy enough to step quickly on past, and he accepted the backhanded commendation. “Perhaps one of the regular diners was taken by the shabbily dressed blind boy cloistered in a back booth with his religious teachings. It’s very monastic.”

“It was in braille, so I doubt pity or the Myth of the Magical Blind Man had anything to do with it,” Simon noted. “Maybe empathy — somebody with a blind father or son or sister. But it wasn’t carved into the table, and Mr. Washinski was able to wipe it away with a wet rag. In fact, he seemed embarrassed, though now I think about it, why, when he couldn’t even read the message?”

Terence considered. “Well, you could simply accept the kindness without question.” He laid out legal pads and pens. “Or watch your back. Sorry; listen for trouble. You may have a psycho stalker. So, you want to start with Bonhoeffer or Niehbuhr?”

**

SIMON CHOSEN. SIMON GOOD. TELL YOURS. 

The Washinskis had been engaged in trilingual battle with a misguided, famished, misguided German kid probably from the hostel down the block. Simon had moved stealthily past the skirmish (which seemed to involve the establishment’s lack of vegan bialys) and unloaded the device with his Valkenberg. 

Simon moved quickly before he heard the clomp of Mr. Washinki’s boots on the brittle linoleum. The scent of bleach and citrus and onion and tobacco, the slight squeak of applied elbow grease. 

Great, Simon groaned — I’m that guy.

**

“Jesus. JESUS.”

Simon perked to the abrupt anguish of the woman seated at his right elbow.

“What. WHAT?” Her seatmate. Simon detected a pair of mingling fragrances no doubt far pricier than Mrs. W’s by-the-gallon essence. A series of nail-clicks on screen, then silence. “Oh, FUCK. Hey, hey, Erin…”

“Is everything OK?” Simon asked.

“You know what? We got this — we don’t need your fucking help!” 

Simon retreated to the other side of the pole. 

“Fucking cisgender asshole!”

The car filled with hushed curses, tears, a silence heavy with grief and consolation. Two stops later, Simon debarked quickly.

**

“Maybe you got yourself a secret admirer down to the diner, bro,” Manny suggested. “Braille like one of those love languages?”

“I’m thinking no.” Simon rummaged his Minivision2+ from the pack, delivered a couple of voice commands, and placed the phone before his buddy. Manny slurped a tapioca pearl from his boba and grunted. 

“Why am I looking at roach shit?” Simon’s friend asked.

“At what?”

“Dude, you forget my dad’s helped rehab a lot of these lofts over near McCormick. How I spent my summers in high school — breathing in roach dirt. Your secret admirer did this, I’d find a new breakfast joint. Or buy a .38.”

From the criminal sciences major. “Hey, I was so preoccupied I forgot to check. Something big happen today?”

“Got to be specific, Bro. My guess is Roe v. Wade. Supreme Court Handmaid’s Tale: The Prequel.”

“Jesus.”

“Know, you say that a whole lot for a religious dude. Hey, got class in five. See you. Unless you see me first.”

**

It hit Simon in the face before the door chime’s echo faded, before the sausage and eggs and onion and kraut reached his olfactory sensors. He strode swiftly toward the back booth, nearly colliding with the rear wall.

The scent most of the Washinskis’ patrons might welcome settled in Simon’s gut like a lead-filled pierogi. Simon placed his palms on the tabletop. Damp. Blank.

“We have complaints.” Mrs. Washinski murmured, sliding his polish and eggs into place. She must have spotted Simon’s fallen face. “The, ah, the yuppies, they see, they call the city. Health inspector comes tomorrow. Not you. Enjoy, mój dobry chłopak. Study hard. Niech cię Bóg błogosławi.”

Bishop Kazimierz Tomczak had come up in a “Faith in the Face of Fascism” seminar last fall, and Simon smiled appreciatively, swallowing his chagrin with the first forkful of kielbasa.

**

“One more thing,” Terence sighed.

Simon’s chair scraped, and it reverberated through the small library. “One more thing? I mean, I kinda get why that woman on the El was so pissed yesterday.” Terence’s eyes darted. “These clowns just told her and her buddy and her sister and, er, heck, every woman in this country, they no longer have final say over their body. Is this what we do, man? Tell some 12-year-old rape victim or pregnant woman going into sepsis that she’s, what, just the incubator for a sacred soul? This is what we do?”

“Look,” Terence interrupted, crossly sympathetic. “As long as Roe v. Wade was in force, the job was easy. Preach the company line, follow the script, and they’re free to do whatever they want. Well, what their individual conscience permits. Now, we’re going to be the enforcers, the deniers, the religious patriarchy with the force of law behind us. Not an easy time to be the clergy, and yeah, I heard how that sounds.”

“You got another option, you know,” Simon suggested. “Two, really, I guess.”

Terence looked to the ceiling with a Job-like grimace. “God help me. I know, I know — God help us, every one.”

**

Simon finally landed some prime CTA real estate, and he propped his cane beside the bench like a scepter.

Manny had “texted”, and he plugged in his buds. “Dude,” his boba bud breathed. “I got the rest of your dungmail translated, I think. Used a braille scanning app. This some crazy-ass shit. 

“SIMON CHOSEN. SIMON GOOD. TELL YOURS. GENESIS. DO GOOD. That clears things the fuck up, right?”

Simon nearly dropped his Minivision as a pole-hanger belly-walloped him. The passenger urped once as fingers squeaked and slid for purchase, and Simon popped up.

“Here, take mine. Please.”

A second of silence. “Thought about asking, but I felt like it was kind of a toss-up,” the pregnant woman mused. “And I could tell this one wasn’t giving it up.”

“Fuck both of you,” a young male voice muttered from the “handicapped” bench across the aisle. Simon and the prospective mom erupted into laughter. He wished he could see the asshole’s face.

“Thanks, seriously,” she said, as man and woman and belly and cane negotiated the unyielding El crowd. “It’s been a week, you know?”

“Yeah,” Simon said. “I underst —. Yeah.”

**

The other major event of the week went unnoticed for nearly a week more.

The first was Mr. Washinski’s demeanor. He had one.

“Bialys,” he fairly sang, pushing a fragrant second plate toward Simon. “That niedogodność, that foreign kid make good point. What is Polish diner with bialy? You are first to try — Zofia makes, onions, poppy seed, only thing I ever like about her mother.”

The aroma — yeast, caramelized onions, a trace of pepper — reached Simon’s nose before the pastry fulfilled its savory potential. 

“Health inspector, he finds nothing. Clean as whistle — well, enough to get passing grade. Inspector say everybody in neighborhood do better – no cockroaches anywhere. Only spray a little Raid in the corners. Oh, well, maybe the global warming – maybe they go north for winter. Okay, then. Zofia makes you up bialy dog bag. We watch – you study hard, you need the nutrition, yes?”

“Niech cię Bóg błogosławi,” Simon smiled.

There was a silent moment. “Yes, well.” 

And Simon wondered if Washinski or some parent or sibling might have had something in common with Bishop Tomczac. Then again, Tomczac had sat out the Nazis in a monastery, had never seen the inside of a cattle car.

**

“Thish is the shit,” Manny proclaimed though a mouthful of bialy.

“Yeah, right? Except don’t eat all the evidence.”

“Evidensh?”

Simon tapped the now-empty bag onto the stone bench between them. It was toward late afternoon, and somewhere above, the Dearborn Street Bridge was alive with pilgrims seeking steak or carnitas or crab or blues or hipster bargains or an affordable Loop-adjacent couch after a day hustling plates or blouses. Simon liked this green patch on the banks of the Chicago, removed from the order and chaos battling above, a sensory buffer on occasion.

“Dude, these are poppy seeds,” Manny said, flatly. “You don’t think I know shit about shit? Your guardian angel or demonic stalker or sinister Mom and Pop diner owners work exclusively in roach dung. Though they may have to find a new medium.”

And Manny explained. It was a global phenomenon, apparently – a curiosity piece fueled by entomologists and exterminators, rapidly becoming good news/apocalyptic news top of the news. Already, the eulogy had begun, like a toast to a despised uncle who’d been secretly building Habitat homes and counseling troubled youth.

“They turn almost anything into nutrients for the soil and shit,” Manny related. “They have these crazy super-antibiotics, and in China, the docs use roach syrup for gut problems and powdered roaches for burn treatments. There are dudes raising roaches to sell to the Phama people. I kinda feel like shit now, like a mass murderer. Wonder how we’re gonna manage, without them cleaning up our shit. You know, I had us in the big Sixth Extinction Lotto, but I guess 300 million years is a pretty good run. 

“Little less creepy, though, they’d found some trace. I mean, like one day, they just fucking disappear. No corpses, no suicide note. You ever hear of anything like that?”

Simon had little context for dusk, but a chill was setting in.

“Theoretically,” Simon said.

**

Volume 1 was beside the bed, like something some diehard Gideon left at the Motel Six. The rest of the set was still in a U-Haul box on the closet floor. The braille edition had cost upward of $700, a gift from a grandmother happy Sightless Simon had found a purpose she could get behind. New King James on audio would have cost a fraction and weighed a shit-ton less – shit, there were apps for this -- but Simon likely would haul them around for the rest of his life like a Dickensian chain forged in the guilt of misleading most of the folks back home. They had no idea Simon was seeing other religions, and that it was all pretty much a metaphysical fling.

The answers sought had nothing to do with the eternal darkness of being Simon. Truth be told, Simon’s folks had been saints in the non-canonical sense; his classmates and teachers had been pretty cool about everything.

No, Simon sought the Big Answers – the top-of-the-news stuff. Blind was fine in small town Illinois, but questioning, critical, challenging didn’t get you a date to the prom. Simon lingered for a second on the pebbled cover, wondering what his Watchers would have done had Grandma popped for the Audible edition read by Jon Hamm. He quickly located the “prologue,” and his fingers went to work.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

“Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night…”

It went on like that for seven days. But Simon was more interested in what lay between the lines, and his heat leapt as his suspicion was confirmed. The second set of “braille” was more pronounced, a bit more haphazard. It was a simple code: A small “dot” positioned above selected words. Simon now realized he’d had a huge community of watchers, and that he would probably have to haul out the U-Haul box.

**

And on the fourth day, Simon completed Volume 31, fingers aching, head throbbing. On the fifth day, Simon rested. On the sixth day, Simon emerged from his two-room cave, and went forth.

“We wonder what has happened to you,” Mrs. Washinski murmured as she deposited the Simon Slam.

“I was feeling a little off, stayed in and read.”

“But now, you are good?”

“Actually, awesomely good,” Simon smiled. 

“You don’t bring books. You don’t quit school?”

Simon’d considered it. The manifesto, gospel, whatever he’d been entrusted with, now made it all seem irrelevant. Surprisingly, that had been something of a relief.

Roach Rapture — say that one 10 times fast. Not that he’d ever tell anyone that the curtain had closed on the whole damned show a week ago, that it wasn’t ever as “promised” all about us.

“TERRIFIC, RADIANT, HUMBLE.” That radiance could penetrate the darkness, that the humble indeed had inherited, was comforting well beyond his watchers’ devastating revelations. The truth would destroy much of humanity, but Simon could now “see” how he might DO GOOD without all that other shit.

“Heavens no,” Simon told the old woman.

**

And there was only darkness, rich with the fragrance of decay. An eternity of scavenging without fear, without the savagery of those who made only waste, who murdered their own and everything beyond, who eventually would perish under the weight of the billions they forced into the world, into misery and hunger. 

And it was good.