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When Christ Reached Nirvana

Alexander P.S.

    I was standing there thinking whether or not I would go to hell, just as the priest was holding the bread above the cup of wine and water. I thought about all of the good and bad things that I had done, and I wondered if they evened each other out. Then I wondered if it worked like that: one good deed cancels out one bad. I figured it didn’t because I remember reading a philosopher who wrote that when you get to heaven you’ll see people you never expected to, and some of the people you expected to see won’t be there. It was all plain and confusing to me because I saw religion as a group of people who know, but don’t really know. I related it to waiting to hear back from a college that, with your grades and impressive extracurriculars, you’d be sure to get into. And you could be as sure as you wanted that you would get into that college, but the truth is that there would be no way to actually know except for when the letter arrives in your mailbox.

    All my life I had been raised in the Catholic faith and I started to drift away from it when I was about sixteen years old. I was attending a Catholic high school in northern Illinois and that place really put me off to religion in general. I started to see it as nothing but groups of people who claimed that their group held more truth than the others. I remember a conversation I had in a comparative religions class that I took the last semester of my senior year. The teacher was a real nice guy by the name of Mr. Vince. He played in a christian rock band and was always trying to get me to strengthen my faith. One day during class we delved into the topic of Buddhism and the birth of its founder, Siddhartha Gautama. There was a real asshole sitting to my left named Joseph David. Joseph was the worst type of asshole, the coward type that would act all sorts of friendly to your face because he didn’t have the balls to be real. He always had something stupid to say, too. And no matter what he said, his paparazzi would laugh and give him a hi-five; he was a jock.
    Anyways, we were sitting in class and Mr. Vince brought up the story of how Siddhartha was believed to be conceived. The sacred texts read that Siddhartha’s mother had a dream, and in that dream a white elephant touched her side with its trunk and at that moment, she was pregnant with Siddhartha.
    Joseph immediately broke out into laughter saying, “These people can’t be serious! They would have to be absolutely insane, out of their minds or just plain stupid to believe that a white-” he couldn’t even get the words out without laughing, “A white elephant touched her side?” He burst into laughter again, and in his idiotic laughter and sheer ignorance, my mind conjured a thought that I felt held value. I turned to him and said, “That is funny, Joseph.”
    And he looked over at me with his face shinning bright red and said, “How stupid can they be? An elephant? An elephant? Really?” His eyes were watering and he just kept laughing. I waited for him to settle down for a minute before I said, “I wasn’t talking about the birth of the Buddha being funny.”
    His face straightened and he looked at me with a confused look, not knowing whether to keep laughing or to become offended. It was my goal to clear that up as soon as possible, “What’s funny is that you’re laughing at the thought of an elephant touching a woman’s side and becoming pregnant, but you firmly believe that an angel came down from a cloud and said, ‘You are pregnant with the Lord’s Child.’”
    Mr. Vincent said, “Moving on...” and continued with a lecture about karma and reincarnation. I remember that day so vividly because it was the same day that I beat the living hell out of Joseph for bullying a real nice kid by the name of Nick Bimere. I had known Nick for all of eleven years. We had gone to the same grade school, middle school and high school. He was a real genuine spirit with a hard head and his own ideas, needless to say, he was misunderstood. I have to admit that I was not always the nicest to him, often he would try too hard to talk about things that most people had no interest in talking about, and he was always right. Like I said, the kid had a very hard head. I mean, you couldn’t tell him anything without him giving you some crazy explanation pulled straight from his ass. But, the kid was genuine and in no way did he deserve to be treated the way he was treated by his peers. I never knew much about Nick, and to be honest, I never did bother to find out more like I should have. I just knew his name and I knew that he enjoyed medieval video games and his father was some sort of teacher. I also knew that he took the public bus to and from school and his glasses were so strong that without him he couldn’t make out a face from two feet away. He was always talking about politics and North Korea, “We should drop bread on North Korea!” And everyone would give him this weird look and he’d say, “Think of it, just think of it for one moment, listen: in World War II we dropped propaganda from fighter jets to inform the people of countries fighting against us that our motives were good and hopefully they would start a protest. North Korea is so poor, but they don’t know any better. The only intelligence that they have is the intelligence that their dictator-emperor will allow them to have. They don’t even know how bad they have it because they’re brainwashed to think that they have it the best, and they hate America. We need to drop bread from planes and have little notes attached to the loaves that say ‘From: America.’”
    When he got around to telling me that, I said, “Yeah, Nick. Good idea, let’s drop bread on the North Koreans so they can take it the wrong way and think, ‘Oh those asshole Americans, they know we’re dirt poor and they’re trying to to kill us by dropping bread on us! Oh the cruel irony of the Americans!’”
    He laughed.
    But I wasn’t laughing the day when Joseph David walked up to Nick and called him a “Dumb-ass-nerd-loser,” then spat on his glasses. No, I wasn’t laughing one bit. And when Joseph and his friends were giving each other hi-fives and chest bumps, I was sorting through some sort of merciless-psychotic-killer instinct to reach for the fire extinguisher and bash his hollow head in until he was thirty minutes past dead.
    Nick was a small kid, only an inch or two taller than me. He had a bowl-cut of soft yellow hair and big blue eyes that he could barely see out of. His glasses were two large eggs with a thin wire frame. He slouched a little when he walked and he was constantly pushing his glasses back behind his ears, they were old and warn out, but his family didn’t have the money to buy him a new pair. He didn’t drink or smoke tea, he never had. One day I was sitting next to him in the library with a water bottle containing half water and half vodka, and I asked him if he wanted a sip. He shook his head, “I don’t drink or do anything like that. I like my brain, and I like to take care of it.”
    I took a hard hit from the bottle and I said, “I care about my brain too, both of them, actually,” and I winked to a skinny girl with blue eyes and wild hair.
    I was actually very respectful to women and I didn’t care much for drinking or partying. In fact, the only reason that I had the water bottle full of alcohol that day was because I would have to sit through the awards assembly. The awards assembly was literally three hours of sitting on the most uncomfortable bleachers in the most uncomfortable gymnasium. The place had no fans or air conditioning, and there were one thousand kids jammed into that sardine can of a gym, all breathing heavier than the person sitting next to them. You’d have to be absolutely insane to sit through that without alcohol or tea or something! Especially when the entertainment would begin, and by entertainment I mean the dozens and dozens of kids that would pass out during the assembly. I’m not joking when I say dozens and dozens. During almost every assembly at that place there would be a minimum of ten kids passing out, some of them were real good too. I mean these kids were ten, twenty rows up passing out and tumbling down the bleachers until a limb got stuck or they got snagged on a fat kid. To see that happen while you were drunk or high was just about the funniest thing that you’d ever witness in your life.
    “I had a friend that drank and smoked,” he said, “we were best friends until he got hooked on being high or drunk all the time. He started dealing drugs and the next thing I knew he was just some sort of zombie, a shell of what he used to be.”
    I was tipsy and had no desire to hear anything about that, plus I knew all about it. “Just because it happened to your friend doesn’t mean it’s going to happen to you or me or anyone.” I took another swig, “Addiction is for the weak.” Nick moved his head back and forth and hunched his shoulders up.
    It was a good assembly, one girl fainted and fell so hard that she gave herself a concussion. I don’t know how that school didn’t get sued for neglecting the safety of its students, but they got away with it. And it was really that thought that made me abandon my backpack and lunge on top of Joseph David with a frenzy of fists: they got away with it.
    The way I saw the world of my generation was nothing but bad people getting away with doing bad things, while the good people had to suffer. I didn’t understand any of it, especially in a Catholic school. A school where the teachings of Christ were supposed to be upheld and the community was supposed to consist of loving individuals. What a joke, what a funny joke.
    I didn’t believe in karma, but I believed that the concept of it was good. I mean what is a better incentive to do something good if something good is going to happen to you in return? I saw no problem with that. It could be argued that people would only be doing good deeds for self gain but is it a problem to want good things to happen to you if you spend your time doing good things? And I never saw Nick doing any bad things. I never saw him lie, cheat or steal. I never saw him kill anybody. I never saw him say an unkind word or even lift a finger to anyone in a negative way. I only saw Nick being a genuine spirit. I only saw him wanting to learn and to talk and to have somebody to truly call his friend. And I know that even the worst thing he had ever done in his life was not worthy of having Joseph David say such cruelties to him and then spit on his face, and I learned from my junior religion teacher, Fr. Bernie, that God is more of a spectator on earth. Which meant that God gave everyone free will and people can do whatever they want on this earth with no consequences; their consequences would come when they were either rewarded with heaven or punished with hell. I didn’t like looking at God as some type of observer who would let good people go through bad things, like my friend George. His mother passed away the first month of senior year and he was the most generous, kind and friendly person I had ever met, and of course it would be his mother that would pass.
    I knew damn well that Christ and all the the saints in heaven sitting naked in the clouds above would do absolutely nothing for this kind spirit who had his face spit on and publicly humiliated as Joseph David and his minions laughed and laughed. I knew that nothing bad would happen to them and they would grow up to be even bigger picks who have lots of money and beautifully stupid wives, creating little versions of themselves that would grow up to be the same shit-bags they were.
    And I did what any good person would do. I, standing five foot six inches, weighing in at one hundred and forty five pounds, lunged on top of Joseph David and hit him time after time again. I broke all of my knuckles on my left hand on the right cheekbone of his face. His friends gathered around in sheer awe as they watched their football God be nailed over and over by my hammer of a fist. And when I was done, I spat on his face and looked at Nick, whose eyes were wide with fear that was magnified by his powerful glasses. I looked at him and said, “Would you like a ride home?”

    And as I stood in the back of the church as the priest was holding the bread above the chalice, I wondered if I would go to hell. I wondered if my ideals were all wrong and someday I would meet the creature that is making Hitler dance for eternity. I wondered if good deeds outweighed the bad, and above all, I wondered what exactly good was.

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