Jesus Christ, It’s Jesus Christ Owen Oxley Hamill
A Beginning. We had been conducting workshops all week; today was the last day. The first story, Panic! at the Disco, centered on a man who assumed people were yelling, “This dance club’s on fire!” because his moves were so hot. We read and critiqued the story of Jennifer and her boyfriend Hewitt, titled Jennifer Loves Hewitt. And a third student imagined a cookbook written by David Foster Wallace.1 We were crammed around two large lab tables pushed together, the twelve of us. I was seated at a corner, trying not to lean my torso into the sharp edge protruding out at me. Jane sat two seats to my right, and wanted to begin this workshop as she did all the others. She leaned forward, around the students between us, and asked me to read a section of my story aloud. She suggested the opening paragraph.
On the right panel, streaks of chalk were only partially erased. The right edge of this panel sat behind the open door, which had swung recklessly around its hinge until banging against the chalk ledge, then had vibrated back about six inches before coming to rest. Out the open doorway sat a vending machine, flanked on either side by the men’s and women’s restrooms. A girl was jabbing the heel of her palm into the front of the machine and firmly instructing the stuck bag of Bugles to accept its fate as her morning snack, dammit. A boy paused momentarily outside the men’s restroom to zip his fly before echoing down the hallway. Answering Jane’s question, Keith cleared his throat and said, “I don’t think there was enough development of Jesus. At the end of the story, I still didn’t know much about him.” He sat slouched in his seat, his left ankle resting on his right thigh, tapping his fingers lazily on the instep of his shoe. This posture and his glasses often conspired to grant him an aura of casual intelligence. Recently, trying to put Jane’s grammar lessons to use, he had proclaimed his favorite band to be The Whom. “What do other people think about that?” Jane asked. “Do people agree with Keith?” “Yeah, I do,” said Chloe. “There wasn’t a whole lot of depth to his character.” Leah leaned forward in her seat and reached her hand out towards the middle of the table to catch Jane’s attention. Leah’s last story, a series of diary entries written by a mother grieving the death of an infant daughter, had been written with an anguish that bled through the fiction unit and into something real. “I think the lack of character development actually helped make him more relatable.” She spoke softly, as she always did, and I leaned forward to catch every word, grimacing as I bumped my sternum against the corner of the table. “There’s no need to characterize him. Others have already done that. Matthew, for example, and Mark, Luke, and John. He could be two-dimensional in the story because he’s Jesus, and Jesus isn’t two-dimensional, so therefore he wasn’t two-dimensional.” All the air gone from her lungs, she deflated back into her seat. “Well,” Jane said, “that may be so, but we need to focus on what he’s like in this story.” She pressed her forefinger into the story as she spoke. “Emily, how about you, what did you think?” “Jesus was cool,” Emily said. “I have nothing actually constructive to say because this is an intro class and I’m the obligatory classmate who doesn’t give a shit.” Matt cleared his throat and said, “I didn’t think there was a whole lot of development, honestly. He’s sort of a one-note character, sort of flat.”
Jesus is a really shitty professor. Standing at the front of the lecture hall, he looked odd in a coat and tie, no beard and trimmed hair. But I suppose the dress code applies to everyone, even the Son of God. Staring forlornly out at our Religious Studies class on the first day of the semester, he looked as if he expected more from the Second Coming. I think we all did. The syllabus began with Buddhism, which I couldn’t imagine was Jesus’ forte. Alas, the curriculum was set in stone, although that shouldn’t have been a problem for him. A Middle. “So,” said Jane, “let’s start with this: Who is the main character of the story?” She looked around the table. “Caitlin?” she asked, looking at Courtney. “Courtney,” Courtney corrected her. Jane jutted her chin slightly left and squinted, puzzled. “No,” she said slowly. “There weren’t any characters named Courtney in the story.” She flipped through the piece, skimming each page. “I think it’s pretty clear the main character is Jesus.” She looked up and nodded at Courtney, nudging her glasses back up the bridge of her nose before continuing. “Okay, let’s discuss this Jesus Christ character. What do we know about him? Do we sympathize with him or not?” Jane gestured to the chalkboard stretching across the entire front wall, made up of two smaller chalkboards pushed together. Scribbled on the left panel, the white chalk nearly washed out by the morning sun barging in through the windows, was WAYS TO DEVELOP YOUR CHARACTERS. Jane had written that at the start of class as a reminder of our discussion on character development a few classes ago, prompted by a student’s contention that because his main character hated both warm soda and carpets, that character was neither flat nor static.
The title of the cookbook was Infinite Zest. Chapter One was titled “Looking to Add More Seafood to Your Diet? Consider the Lobster.” Chapter Two was just a picture of an Aquafina bottle, the caption reading: “fig. 1: This is Water.” And that was it, that was the whole story; i.e. a Food Network recipe for lobster rolls and a bottle of water. 1
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