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Christopher

Noxon

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Second Coming

Charlie studied cryptography, robotics, philosophy, economics, Mandarin—if it was difficult (or sounded impressive), Charlie was into it.

Still, he had no idea what he wanted to “do” after college. I worried he’d get recruited by the CIA or, worse, get into hedge funds. At one point he said he’d probably go to law school “to delay the inevitable.”

I hoped he’d use that big brain to save the world or invent something or cure a disease—we wouldn’t be Jews if we didn’t want a doctor in the family – but the “inevitable” he talked about was almost certainly writing. Our family is lousy with writers – his dad, mom, aunt, uncle, two granddads and grandmas were writers, not to mention a whole slew of novelists and poets and journalists among his extended family.

And from early on, Charlie was a sucker for a good story. He read like a fiend as a kid, ripping through fantasy series and dressing up as an actual BOOK for Halloween one year. As a teen he started reading DeLillo and Murakami and famously carted around the Kissinger biography to high school hangouts (was it any wonder he didn’t make many friends his own age until college?). Recently I asked his girlfriend Izzy what books he talked about while they dated, remembering how I’d attempted to seduce women with the swoony-romantic novels by EM Forster. “Kant and St. Augustine,” came the reply.

So it wasn’t exactly a surprise that in college, between lab science and economic classes, he started turning out stories on the sly, for fun. Then in his sophomore year he took a fiction workshop and started writing strange, speculative, ambitious, death-obsessed stories. No tortured autobiographical slices-of-life for Charlie. In one story he imagined a near-future in which the destitute pay off their debts by harvesting their organs. Another followed the soul of a recently deceased man as he ran through his life over and over.

Then there’s “Second Coming,” a comic story about the return of an all-powerful, all-forgiving savior. I was initially surprised Charlie had chosen Jesus as a subject—the Christian Lord & Savior didn’t get much play around the house and while I’m from Quaker stock, whatever spiritual yearnings I possessed as a kid were satisfied by “Star Wars.” The spooky guy on the cross held zero interest to me; I was good with Obi-Wan. So it was especially moving to read Charlie’s version of the Jesus story, with the Savior appearing in multiple bodies as friend and confidante to anyone who calls on him. His Jesus is compassionate, comforting and not a little bit annoying. After losing his job and girlfriend to a far more suitable replacement (how can you compete with Christ himself?) a sadsack nonbeliever named Theo confronts his lord and savior in a scene that’s equal parts George Saunders and George Romero.

He may not have identified as a fiction writer, but Charlie wasn’t shy about his work. After he died I learned that Charlie had submitted “Second Coming” to the New Yorker, receiving a form rejection that he proudly displayed in his dorm room (One measure of what different people we were: I waited until my 40s with a sure-fire piece before daring to approach that particular mountaintop).

It turns out he also submitted the story to the Columbia literary magazine Quarto. And this month the magazine published it with the following note:

Quarto received an online submission from our late peer Charlie Noxon in early November of 2019. As an editorial board, with the support of his family, we chose to honor his writing in our 2020 Spring Print Edition and are posting it to our website now. We offer our sincerest condolences to his family, friends, and loved ones.