Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

the crust off of a goat cheese pizza in between spitting vitriol at the screen.
“No,” said Raziel, “but that other fellow looks like Pharaoh.”
“Really?”
“Yep,” said Raziel. He slurped the last of a Coke through a straw making a rude noise, then tossed the paper cup across the room into the wastebasket.
“So you were there, during the Exodus?”
“Right before. I was in charge of locusts.”
“How was that?”
“Didn’t care for it. I wanted the plague of frogs. I like frogs.”
“I like frogs too.”
“You wouldn’t have liked the plague of frogs. Stephan was in charge. A seraphim.” He shook his head as if I should know some sad inside fact about seraphim. “We lost a lot of frogs.
“I suppose it’s for the best, though,” Raziel said with a sigh. “You can’t have a someone who likes frogs bring a plague of frogs. If I’d done it, it would have been more of a friendly gathering of frogs.”
“That wouldn’t have worked,” I said.
“Well, it didn’t work anyway, did it? I mean, Moses, a Jew, thought it up. Frogs were unclean to the Jews. To the Jews it was a plague. To the Egyptians it was like having a big feast of frog legs drop from the sky. Moses missed it on that one. I’m just glad we didn’t listen to him on the plague of pork.”
“Really, he wanted to bring down a plague of pork? Pigs falling from the sky?”
“Pig pieces. Ribs, hams, feet. He wanted everything bloody. You know, unclean pork and unclean blood. The Egyptians would have eaten the pork. We talked him into just the blood.”
“Are you saying that Moses was a dimwit?” I wasn’t being ironic when I asked this, I was aware that I was asking the eternal dimwit of them all. Still…
“No, he just wasn’t concerned with results,” said the angel. “The Lord had hardened Pharaoh’s heart against letting the Jews go. We could have dropped oxen from the sky and he wouldn’t have changed his mind.”
“That would have been something to see,” I said.
“I suggested that it rain fire,” the angel said.
“How’d that go?”
“It was pretty. We only had it rain on the stone palaces and monuments. Burning up all of the Jews would sort of defeated the purpose.”
“Good thinking,” I said.
“Well, I’m good with weather,” said the angel.
“Yeah, I know,” I said. Then I thought about it a second, about how Raziel nearly wore out our poor room service waiter Jesus delivering orders of ribs the day they were the special.
“You didn’t suggest fire, initially, did you? You just suggested that it rain barbecued pork, didn’t you?”
“That guy doesn’t look anything like Moses,” the angel said.
    That day, thrashing in the sea, trying to swim to catch the merchant ship that plowed through the water under full sail, I first saw that Raziel was, as he claimed, “good with weather.” Joshua was leaning over the aftrail of the ship, shouting alternately to me, then to Titus. It was pretty obvious that even under the light wind that day, I would never catch the ship, and when I looked in the direction of shore I could see nothing but water. Strange, the things you think of at times like that. What I thought first was “What an incredibly stupid way to die.” Next I thought, “Joshua will never make it without me.” And with that, I began to pray, not for my own salvation but for Joshua. I prayed for the Lord to keep him safe, then I prayed for Maggie’s safety and happiness. Then, as I shrugged off my shirt and fell into a slow crawl in the direction of the shoreline, which I knew I would never see, the wind stopped. Just stopped. The sea flattened and the only sound I could hear was the frightened cries of the crew of Titus’s ship, which had stopped in the water as if it had dropped anchor.
    “Biff, this way!” Joshua called.
    I turned in the water to see my friend waving to me from the stern of the becalmed ship. Beside him, Titus cowered like a frightened child. On the mast above them sat a winged figure, who after I swam to the ship and was hoisted out by a very frightened bunch of sailors, I recognized as the angel Raziel. Unlike the times when we had seen him before, he wore robes as black as pitch, and the feathers in his wings shone the blue-black of the sea under moonlight. As I joined Joshua on the raised poop deck at the stern of the ship, the angel took wing and gently landed on the deck beside us. Titus was shielding his head with his arms, as if to ward off an attacker, and