God-Bald

He remembered the day God found him and the way God found him. 

Under a storm-bruised sky, he was standing in uniform, shuffling after the mourners. Their voices beat back the thunder as they rose in funerary song (O, Roc, Of The Blackest Cap). The Proclaimer of Grief, a boy not yet twelve, stood with the solemnity of his elders and clashed a pair of cymbals at the door. 

The God-found man did not sing. It was not very becoming of him, but he just moved his lips. He had always been self-conscious of his voice. Should he, at least, have hummed a note? Did he draw too much attention to himself?

In hindsight, he suspects he was made holy to be punished by Proto Deva, but at the time, he thought little of it. He simply looked at the long black hair caught in his fingers and thought, Huh. 

But once God found him, he was never left alone. His hair came out first in slithering tendrils, and then in great clumps. It fell out when he slept, when it was windy, and when he took a comb to it. His son said, “Just like when we brush the cat.”

It became harder and harder to hide, and eventually, he was entirely out of vogue. His neighbours began to look at him sideways, attempting to discern if he was mad or simply ugly.

Some people—almost all of them brutish and strange—saw their locks with the swords they use to kill and the knives they use for bread. These people, it is agreed, are terribly unfashionable with their jagged bangs and angled trims. Fortunately, they are also usually poor and can be tucked out of sight, where we cannot hear them say things like “I don’t want my hair to get stuck in gears or wheels and lead to my untimely death.”

“Wretched,” tut the wealthy, who would dare not step out without their hair styled in the fashion du jour. For men today, the thing is to wind the braid up and up in a conical formation, a narrow mountain. For women, braided buns are favoured—the more the merrier, as a symbol of both status and health. For those who identify their gender otherwise, either approach will do, as long as they pull it off.

When the sun caught the dome of the God-found man’s head, passersby flinched from the glare. He was a beacon of strangeness and drew the Church like a moth.

But Proto Deva, called on to summon the God-found man to his people, struggled to understand him.

“You’ve never,” he squinted, confounded, “Partaken in feta?” The God-found man’s diet omitted many Church favourites. “Nor goat?”

The God-found man confessed awkwardly that he was a vegan.

“What do you mean you’d rather not sing? You attend mass, and I just saw you at the service for—you mouthed the words? God, are you sure this is the one?”

But he was, and bit by bit, the last of his hair fell away. His wife, in either spiritual or aesthetic agony (the God-found man couldn’t tell; she was very timid now when she kissed the top of his head), said she would weave a scarf of what he’d lost and wear it every day.

Proto Deva, whose hair trailed behind him like a cape, and whose wispy beard ended at his groin, was no fonder of the God-found man, but now protective of him. He would rub the God-found man’s head in the Sacred Oil of Glory and force upon him holy literature. They listened to hymns. Even the God-found man agreed some of them were pretty good.

And it took time—perhaps more time than it takes most people to accept that they are the one chosen by God—but the God-found man came around. He began to look at his oiled scalp and see, as the scriptures suggested, the moon above in him. At night, when he looked up, he saw himself among the heavens. It was true that he no longer clogged shower drains or went to sleep with wet hair. His arms had not cramped up from braiding, and his mornings were no longer wasted agonizing over fashion. He reflected on his life thus and concluded he had lived it well! He was a dutiful, loving husband who regularly went down on his wife. He was an attentive father to his young son. He had painted some nice, harmless, morally inconsequential art. He had tipped appropriately.

Indeed, perhaps he had lived it so well he was God-found, God-blessed, God-bald.

“You know,” Proto Deva said to him earnestly one day, after they had gorged themselves on God’s word, “What a man like you means to our people. Now you are versed in the scriptures. You were chosen for a reason—and I’m glad you’re able to think of some, because I still don’t get it—and you must go where the devout can see.”

They prepared him for his debut, a process involving four Protos and a choir. One Proto polished his head until it gleamed, massaging his temples til he was both half-asleep and heavily perfumed with eucalyptus. A second Proto drew squiggly lines in oil down his back, where his hair once lay, before a third Proto robed him in the grim black gown of the Church. The Church recently condemned the straightrazer among Protos, and so the God-found man had kept the hair along his cheek and chin. Proto Deva twisted curls into the coarse hairs with his finger, adding a touch of wax to hold the shape.

Finally, a choir sang From Our Crown to Earth, and off the God-found man and Proto Deva went.

“We’ll start in the Barren.”

On the furthest edge of town live the lowest caste of craftsman. You will rarely see a fingerman, not unless you are very poor, very daring, or evidently some religious missionary.

From a bird’s-eye view, the Barren souk ripples like a sail; their stalls are tarped with thin fabric, and their alleys too. Within these curtained halls are fingermen wares for fingermen prices, fingermen families upon cushions taking coin.

In the factories, wealthy men feed fingermen scraps. In exchange, they are careful with the textiles they’re given. No one has mastered ripping as the fingermen have. With magnifying spectacles, they hunch over workbenches and make slow, precise tears in the cloth. There is no fabric they cannot master, no material too thick or unwieldy for them to conquer. They wear caps on their thumbs with glass for a nail so they may rupture the skin quicker. Some close their mouths on metal dentures, with a brutal smile to saw and slice at ribbon and twine. 

The fingermen’s cuts are famously exact, but the work is punishing; many leave their jobs with fingers curved like claws, with permanently rounded shoulders, and with fading eyesight, from staring so long at such dainty thread. 

Most beautiful things that fingermen have touched are not here. Here, there are corns and small pots and poems and ashtrays, sold by those who can’t labour in the factories: fat-fingered infants, people with bad backs, and the blind.

When the God-found man and Proto Deva entered the souk, people mostly ignored them. Proto Deva pushed the God-found man ahead of him in the aisle, urging, “Go, go,” like the God-found man knew where.

The God-found man walked up to a vendor. She sold pyramids of spices and little beaded lizards for children. “Hello.”

“Can you move that fucking thing? I have the sun in my eyes.”

He stepped sideways into deeper shade, ducking his head from the afternoon glare. 

“Do you want something?”

Awkwardly, he shuffled on the dusty path. “I wondered if you wanted anything from me?”

“Like what?”

“Like answers. To questions like ‘How can I too be lightened of my burdens,’ or something.”

“Nope.”

He scurried back, “Proto Deva, I don’t think they’re the religious type.”

“Maybe you’re not being holy enough.” Proto Deva raised his voice to the souk, “Do you see this man? He has ascended from his earthly burdens, and now his crown is lightened. He is a model specimen for humankind.”

A fingerman squinted at them down the aisle and heckled, “What are you buying?”

It took some convincing—and several more uneventful conversations with vendors—before Proto Deva agreed to quit the souk.

As they took their leave, they passed a boy bleeding into the dirt. Next to him, a mature woman was on her knees, threading the wound. She felt around the dust for a knife, but, finding none, leaned into the gash, which smelled of iron and rot, and tore the suture with her teeth.

“We’ll try the platz,” Proto Deva said officiously, shaking red-stained dust from his hair. “People may try to touch your head. Do not be alarmed. It is thought by some to bring fortune, and I insist that you allow it, should anyone try.”

In the platz, where there is water for the earth and money for the people, the paths are laboured by flora and gossip. No one immediately attempted to touch the God-found man’s head.

“You—” a woman with two large, braided buns above her ears gasped, but then had to pause to tug her dress free of thorns. There is often a quiet war against bushes, which grow into pathways and press against houses and have, at times, ripped gowns and stolen hats. “You have—”

“Yes,” said Proto Deva proudly, “He is a man of God.”

“No, not that,” the woman stumbled over a vines as she approached. At night, they say, a brigade takes machetes to the bark and hack at the green veins in the road. But it is never enough, and there is always a rich woman or a horse who trips, and then the bored, braided people riot.

“He’s got the strangest head I’ve ever seen.”

“Yes, it’s a sign from Above.”

The God-found man didn’t feel holy. His head felt cold.

“My, my,” the woman said, putting her hand over her mouth in glee. “It’s hideous.”

“Excuse me!” Proto Deva puffed up, “This outstanding man has been recognised for his goodness. By following his example, we will all be free!”

“Oh dear,” said the woman. “I hope not.”

Defeated, the men slumped outside of an atelier. There was a flood of traffic and a drought of interest. The dress shops are making a killing these days. They’ve discovered how much tidier a hem can be if you fold it inward before stitching. Now, even those who can’t afford fingermen-cut cloth can buy garments without ragged edges.

“Proto Deva,” ventured the God-found man. A rat ran past his shoe. Recently, an idiotic but undeniably handsome gentleman attempted to prove that rodents can be put to work too. For a fortnight, he smeared peanut butter along ribbons where he wanted a cut, then left them on the floor overnight. The result is that the rats are now better dressed than the fingermen.

“Do you think perhaps that perhaps we are misreading this situation? No one but you—and, let’s be real, you’ve been a hard sell—sees my holiness. Perhaps I was not chosen by God to be a leader of men. Perhaps I am only bald.”

Proto Deva looked over, affronted. “How can that possibly be? You are blessed with fortune—yes, for, again, inexplicable reasons. If we were not meant to master our hair, to bear our hair, to reconcile our hair … if we were not meant to be burdened thus, God would have given us something to cut it with.”