O Father

Jacobus Josephus stepped over the bottom of the picture frame and down to the museum floor. He felt the pleasant pull of his first steps in every muscle of his body, a physical joy at leaving what had been his frame of reference for what must have been a hundred years, since they'd moved the painting to this building.

He walked to the center of the floor. Somehow his steps weren't wobbly. Walking was natural to him even though his last half-memory of walking was four centuries old, when he'd found himself formed out of slaps and strokes of paint as the image of a self-important nobleman who'd posed for his full-length portrait, who had probably longed for the physicality of movement almost as much as Jacobus had in the hours before he'd actually stepped outside the picture frame.

He looked back at the frame. There was a long expanse of bare canvas down the middle of the picture, surrounded by details of the room in which the nobleman had stood for his portrait. Much more cluttered than the room he'd seen the last few decades, with the framed landscapes, still lifes, and depictions of people he'd seen lined against the three walls he'd been able to see, and the mysterious glass cases, two of them, standing on square wooden legs before him. On the wall beside the painting he'd inhabited hung two other large portraits, one of a woman who may have been Spanish, the other of a Dutch clergyman. Beyond them, on either side, were doors that seemed to lead to other rooms.

He circulated the walls, looking into the eyes of the people in the paintings. None of them responded, none looked back, none flinched or turned or brushed themselves from the touch of his breath. He was alone. Even the echoes of shoes on the parquet floors were absent. He heard only the constant breath of what he'd always thought of as some kind of air machine that kept the atmosphere here so constantly comfortable.

He stepped to the middle of the floor, looked into the nearer of the two glass cases. There, in miniature, were models of three rooms of a mansion he did not know, with stiff little dolls wearing the clothing of people he might have known, but didn't recognize. A short, dark-haired noblewoman was talking to a taller blond military officer in one room. In another room, one of the household servants watched two small children play on the floor. In a third room, an older man who may have been master of the house examined a painting on the wall that resembled the one of the Spanish lady that had been next to him a few minutes ago.

He turned and looked into the other glass case. And was met with surprise. There were figures here, too, in a set of rooms, but the rooms were those of the museum, and the people were people he'd seen there, looking at the art. And, unlike the figures in the other case, they moved. The tall African man with the wild hair and the paint-splattered blue pants was waving a notebook and passionately addressing the young red-haired woman who was usually there with a small red-haired child, waving his arms and looking as intense as he usually did when he stared at the paintings and sketched ten minutes at a time. The small, fat, bald-headed man in the grey suit looked into one of the glass cases, in much the posture that Jacobus had taken, and very occasionally rocked side to side. The white-haired couple in checked sweaters sat on one of the benches, quietly talking as the small red-haired child as another child played on the floor.

He looked up, shook himself, and walked through one of the doors into another room.



The museum took up a very large building. Jacobus followed the doorways from room to room. One series of rooms featured works from the Middle Ages, another from ancient Rome. Some of the rooms had art and glass case displays from periods and places he did not know. Some of them he could guess - China, the New World, the Muslim lands - but others were strange, though some seemed somehow related, in custom or technology, to his own world. The signs seemed to be in English, of which he spoke and read little, and were of almost no help to him in understanding what he saw.

It wasn't until he reached the rooms that seemed to have to do with far ancient days that he found another glass case with people that moved.He saw in the signs the word neolithic , which he understood to have something to do with newness and stones, maybe an age, a relatively recent one, of a technology in which people still relied on stone tools.

The case was a large one, with a large number of small people working and talking in a relatively large landscape. A fishing boat was being unloaded. A tree was being harvested. A field was being planted. Three quarters of the sides of the display were defined in relief with the shapes of trees. There was a small cluster of buildings, on top of one of which a man was sleeping. Several men and women in front of the building were chatting. Nobody moved much from where they were, but they were definitely alive. Jacobus leaned on the top of the glass and watched them for what must have been quite a long time.

Slowly the man on top of the roof awoke, rolled over, and looked up at Jacobus. The face Jacobus saw was very nearly his own.



I was standing in front of the house of Jarah, talking with Jarah, her husband, and her two daughters. Suddenly Dlent, who had been sleeping on the roof after a night guarding the crops from wild beasts, started shouting. I looked up at him. His eyes were wild and he was pointing at the sky.

"Forgive me, o Grmil!" he shouted. "O Father of us all, o god of barriers and forests, I am too humble to look at you! Please forgive my unimportant soul!"

I looked up, which I hadn't all morning. It had been a clouded, nasty day and I hadn't wanted to remind myself of that fact.

The image of a man, in white tunic and beard trimmed in the style of our people, took over a good portion of the sky. He was looking directly at Dlent in what I would have interpreted as surprise and amazement in a mortal, and seemed to disappear in the clouds. I could see his face and his huge arms, hands, and chest, but that was all.

Why was the god of barriers and forests looking at us?

The entire village looked up after Dlent's scream. No one ran. Where was there to run to? Grmil, as I've said, was huge enough to take up much of the sky, and everyone could see him. Suddenly Grmil receded, first his face, then his arms and hands, and the sky was again a cool grey mystery.



The day of the vision of Grmil was the first day of the Great Change. Despite everybody's fears, nothing really went wrong. The crops grew and the wild beasts stayed away. Natak gave birth to her child, a perfectly normal daughter who, she said, looked a lot like her husband Tunt. Tunt, the one in our village most familiar with Grmil, examined the perimeters of the village and the edge of the deep, dense forest that surrounded us, and found nothing to be alarmed about. But the Great Change had begun, and it had begun with Dlent's dreams.

Dlent had never shown any great affinity with the spirits, save for his hide-paintings, in which most of the gods had shown a certain resemblance to Dlent himself. Most of his goddesses had at least some resemblance to Natak, although, as I said earlier, Natak's baby had no resemblance to Dlent. Most of us just figured that this was due to a certain limitation to Dlent's talent as an artist, but his depictions were otherwise fine so we were happy. Now, however, the entire village had seen Grmil, and we realized that Grmil looked just like Dlent.

Dlent started dreaming that there were holes in the forest, that we could walk through them to other lands, lands as different from ours as the further reaches of the sea. He dreamed of other tribes on the other side of the forest, tribes that we hadn't seen since before the Great Sickness that had made our village so much smaller so many years ago that none of us had been alive at the time, tribes that were as invisible to us as the gods had been until now. Tales of lands beyond the forest had always appealed to us, because we knew that there would eventually be more of us and that we would need the land, just as we had before.

The great god Grmil, Dlent told us, had taken him to the other side of the forest in his dreams. There had been vast meadows there, bodies of water even larger than our sea, and a huge mountain which, when he and Grmil ascended it, afforded a land of gods and goddesses, including Grmil himself flanked by a woman in a ground-length garment and a man in a strange tunic that was all black except for an oddly shaped white patch over his chest. With every dream, the land became clearer and more expansive. Dlent became quieter and calmer. It seemed that this land had somehow taken his anger away from him and given him a certain dreaminess.

Dlent continued making his paintings. They, too, had changed. The gods no longer all looked like Dlent. The goddesses no longer all looked like Natak. Most of them looked like people we had never seen, people with strange eyes, strange physiques, strange colorings of skin and hair. Dlent insisted that this was what our deities really looked like, that he had seen them, really seen them, in his dreams.

Dlent also insited that he could guide us to the new land, that he knew exactly where to cut through the forest, and that this new land was more real than the one in which we lived now. Did any of us actually remember going out into the vast sea to catch fish? Did any of us actually remember planting the trees and crops that we saw around us? This was because they were all illusion, and the place he would take us to was real.

Tunt didn't like any of this. He knew more about our deities than Dlent ever would, even though he never spoke as much as Dlent. He also thought that Dlent was doing this because he, Tunt, had won over Natak and now lived with her in her house, and that Dlent was still angry and jealous. But Tunt was quiet about this, as Tunt was quiet about most things.



Dlent's stories became more and more vivid. Soon he talked about nothing else. He began work on a great cutting tool, one that would cut through the widest and thickest tree in the forest, and started talking about tying it to the trunk of our finest fruit tree as one would the point of a spear, to cut through.

I was skeptical about his stories at first, indeed was one of the last allies of Tunt, who at first told Dlent that he should get more sleep and finally accused him of blasphemy, especially after hearing his new description of the gods and goddesses, and even more after hearing him say that he wanted to chop down the Tree of Fruit to use it as a handle for the giant cutting tool. The Tree that had been given to us by Marwa, the goddess of growing things, whom Dlent had blasphemously described as a woman with long black hair who wore a tunic that went down to her feet.

But Dlent's descriptions were so vivid, his belief in his visions so total, that eventually everybody in the village, even Tunt, was convinced that they were true. It took a full day to cut down the Tree of Fruit, and several more days to smooth and shape it into a handle, but at last it was done, and the great cutting stone attached to its tip.

With Dlent's guidance, we carried it to the proper place to begin our work.



Jacobus Josephus wandered the floors of the building nightly. He grew familiar with all the rooms, and figured out a raw chronological sequence to them. He could see far into the future, ever evolving fashions in clothing and art, a stream of inventions that were both mind-boggling and totally logical, cities that may have been cities or may have been mere models.

And every once in awhile he would see the figures in the glass cases come alive. Sometimes, but only sometimes, they would have changed their positions. He grew familiar with them, gave them names, histories, a few genealogies from the inhabitants of other cases.

He got to know the people in the paintings, and the sculpted people, too, but they never moved and were thus less interesting. As he observed these people more and more, he realized that God, too, must be lonely sometimes.



I was far from the blade of the tool as we battered it against the widest tree of the forest. The bark chipped off fairly easily, but none of us was ready for what lay beneath it. At first I thought it was stone, but it wasn't. It was a strange, clear material, much like obsidian but even more fragile, and it looked like the entire tree was made of it. A shard of it lay on the ground near the tree. I reached down and touched it, and cut my hand. Whatever we had done, we had clearly offended Grmil. Grmil had certainly not told Dlent to do this in his dream. Had Dlent been fooled by a demon? Had he lied?

And we had certainly offended Marwa, too. There would be no fruit from the Tree of Fruit again, and there would be no guarantee that Marwa would bless us with other crops anytime soon. Not after what we had done.

And it was Dlent's fault. As soon as Tunt recovered from the shock of what the tree really was, I knew that he would take the lead in doing something about our transgression.



Jacobus Josephus circulated among the exhibits by night. By day he slept in a cabinet in what seemed to be a warehouse room. And lay in anticipation of what he would see in the night ahead.



Tunt had decided that Dlent's punishment should be one of fire, and enough of the village had agreed with him that, after sedating Dlent with the pulverized roots of one of the ground plants that grew near the village, we lead him to the Tree of Fruit, which we had planted in the ground as a stake, and piled dried tree limbs around his feet. Tunt himself, the closest in the village to the two offended gods, began setting the fire.



Jacobus Josephus returned to the room of the neolithic people and their tools and sad battered gods. The scene in the glass case had changed drastically. The tree was gone. The largest of the trees at the edge of the tableau had been hacked crudely, all the paint gone now from a long strip of it and the glass behind it exposed and chipped. The entire village was gathered around a huge stake, to which was bound the man who looked like Jacobus. He appeared to be drugged. One of the villagers kneeled by a large pile of wood at the man's feet, and seemed to be trying to set it on fire.



The fire caught. Tunt slowly rose and stepped back.



Jacobus saw smoke rising from the pile of wood. Without thinking, he unlatched the top of the glass case, reached in, and grabbed the pole on which the man who looked like him was bound, then unbound the man and threw the stake back into the case. He looked gently into the face of the little man in his hand. The man, despite being groggy, looked terrified.



Suddenly the sky seemed to open and a huge hand reached down and pulled the Tree of Fruit from the ground. The fire burned impotently where the stake had been. The most horrifying aspect of all was the face that dominated the sky for a few seconds. It was that of Dlent, only much much larger.



Jacobus looked closely at the little man, who squirmed in his hand and then lay back. What was he to do with him? He didn't know why he did what he did next, but it seemed the only thing to do.

Jacobus ran through the halls of the museum until he came to the painting that he had once stepped out of, and held the little man up to the vacant space in which he remembered standing for four hundred years.

"This, little man," he said, "is where we both come from."

He came closer to the painting and touched the little man to the canvas gently, so that the little man's arm barely met the canvas. The little man faded, that's the only word Jacobus could think of, and he felt coolness in his hand where he had held him. And the space in the painting began to grow color.

The little man appeared on the canvas and began to expand until he was no longer little, until he fully filled the space Jacobus had taken in the painting. His coarse white tunic changed shape, too, flowing down his arms and down his legs to his knees, and his sandals grew into boots. A ruff appeared at his neck. Stockings covered his legs. The material of his tunic refined itself from dyed animal hair to silk.

Jacobus stepped back, looking in awe at this image of himself.



The Tree of Fruit fell from the heavens and landed just outside the houses of the village, pointing itself toward the tree we had managed to wound before. There was no sign of Dlent.

Tunt was apologetic. I was the one who suggested that we re-tip the Tree of Fruit and continue cutting into the large tree. To do otherwise would offend the gods, that was sure. Tunt agreed. He seemed subdued but still very much the one closest to the gods.



It wasn't until the next day that Jacobus returned to the room where he'd once inhabited a picture frame. The man who had taken his place in the painting now looked every bit the conceited duke who once had stood for his portrait. He said hello to the paintings on the wall, to the statues, to the little people in the glass cases. He took a deep breath and sighed before he went over to the neolithic room.

All the little people in the neolithic case were gone, as was their boat. On one side of the case, in the large tree in the center, was a hole almost large enough to put one's whole hand into. Jacobus lifted the top off the case and set it carefully on the floor. He reached into the hole and felt around. Little trees. Water. Something slick that felt like wet grass.

He took his hand out and put his fingers to his nose. Grass. Definitely grass.

He wondered if they were chanting hymns to him and what those hymns would sound like. Sometimes a god is very lonely.