It's the End of the World, My Love by Alla Gorbunova

Author:Alla Gorbunova
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing

TREASURES IN HEAVEN: A TALE OF GOD AND THE BILLIONAIRE

All the world’s billionaires know: sometimes God drops by and asks for a loan. God is poor, man is rich; God is reckless, man is reasonable; God spends, man sighs but gives. Who says that God isn’t just a guy in the sky? There’s that guy in the sky and everything else is the devil’s work. Once upon a time there was, and so on and so forth, over land over sea, God came to ask for money from our billionaire. He needed money because he’d lost everything to the devil again, though there’s no sin in that—worldly money is fine to lose, though not to win, there’s something not quite decent about that. It went the usual way: God came by, asked for money, saying, you know, I’ll pay you back later.

The billionaire replied, “You don’t have to pay me back, I know you’re broke, but I heard a rumor that money isn’t worth anything in heaven. So repay the loan with whatever they treasure in heaven.” This billionaire is basically swimming in money, but it doesn’t spark joy.

God said to him, “Maybe you’d like something that you lack? Palaces, yachts, lovers?”

The billionaire said, “No, I have everything, I’m sick of it all. Just repay the loan with whatever they treasure in heaven.”

“All right,” God said, “I have a couple of things for you, they don’t cost much, but you’ll like them. You’ll see them soon and think of me. In the meantime, pass along the cash.”

The billionaire gave God the money, and then his wife berated him at length for helping that penniless rascal God; if it were up to her she wouldn’t let God on her doorstep. For three days she bawled him out, but he didn’t mind, he was used to it, and they went on living.

A tale is told but a deed is done, and the billionaire met a bum. The bum was wearing the same torn jacket that the billionaire had worn when he was still poor. He got the jacket when he was twelve years old, a gift from an American, Bob, who bought it from a Native American. It was a cowboy jacket with a fringe. The jacket went through thick and thin with the billionaire when he was poor, it was with him through fire, flood, and fortune. The jacket saved him and preserved him. He wore it all through his youth, slept with it under his head in attics and in cellars when he had nowhere else to sleep, hitchhiked in that jacket when he was a young hippie, rode a motorcycle in that jacket, hid in that jacket from the cops. The jacket got older, frayed, but the billionaire refused to trade it in for a new one. The jacket was a symbol of his youth and his freedom, and a memento of those things. The billionaire’s elderly mother, when she was still alive, patched the jacket up. Then the billionaire became a billionaire, he got married, and the jacket displeased his wife.

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