God Is Dead

by Ron Currie Jr.

  Q?

  It’s true that accident or suicide is the widely held view.

  Q?

  I am aware of the actual circumstances of his death, but I’ll decline to divulge them, except to say that Ed Bradley had nothing to do with it.

  Q?

  By now I was near death myself. The others had been gone for a week when Mubarak’s housekeeper, a girl named Lily Gabriel Holland, eased open the door to the spare room and peered in. Seeing us, she pushed the door open wide and entered the room, tall and bold, a Christian girl cursing her Muslim employer in his own home.

  Q?

  Initially she thought we were all dead. Tears spilled onto her cheeks, but her voice was strong and steady. “What has that bastard done?” she said, moving slowly from cage to cage.

  I was too weak to rise. “Help me,” I said.

  Lily grasped the bars of my cage and shook them with sturdy hands. “You’re alive,” she said.

  “I’m alive,” I said. “Barely.”

  “How are you speaking to me?”

  “Your God is dead,” I told her.

  “Yes,” she said. She gave the cage another shake, and examined the padlock on the door. “There are rumors circulating in Mandela, though the government has tried to keep it quiet. People are more frightened of no-God than of the soldiers. So they are talking. They say Mubarak has something to do with this.”

  “I can explain,” I said. “But for now—”

  “Yes, no, of course!” she said, rising quickly to her feet. “I’ll find something to open this cage.” She left the room, returning a moment later with a hammer and pry bar. She wedged the sharp end of the bar against the latch, raised the hammer high above her head, and snapped the lock with one powerful stroke.

  Q?

  Lily was slender but very strong, and she carried my wasted body several miles through the streets to the slum of Mandela, where she shared a room with her father in a long dormitory-type building.

  Q?

  Like Lily, her father was kind, helping to care for me, fetching water from the neighborhood well, and grinding pigeon hearts into a paste I could digest. But unlike her, he was feeble, with spindly shriveled arms and a weakness for homemade liquor distilled from dates.

  Q?

  When I’d recovered my strength, I confirmed for them the reports they’d been hearing: The Creator was dead, and the first tremors of this revelation were being felt around the world. I told them, too, how I’d unwittingly eaten part of the Creator and been transformed.

  “Then you are him,” Lily’s father said.

  “What?” Lily said. “No, Papa.”

  “Isn’t it clear?” her father said. “He ate God’s body. Here he sits, a dog who talks like a person. He tells us things of a world we’ve never heard of. America! What does anyone here know of America, except its name? Yet he knows. He knows everything.”

  “I’m not your God,” I said.

  “He’s not God, Papa,” Lily told him.

  “I know what I know,” her father said, drinking from a jar of date liquor.

  Q?

  Lily guarded me closely, even from her father. Tension was gathering in the slum. People disappeared almost daily, taken by soldiers to Omdurman prison for blasphemy and incitement. Army trucks ground slowly over dirt streets, broad casting orders for residents to attend churches and mosques on the appointed days of worship. Lily found this bitterly humorous.

  “They must be desperate,” she said. “Before, they bulldozed our churches and built apartment complexes on the rubble. Now they want us to show up every Sunday, without fail.”

  One night I pretended to sleep while Lily and her father argued about me.

  “He could help people,” her father said.

  “It’s too dangerous,” Lily said, “if the government found out about him. And they would.”

  “He could give people hope. My friends—they want to know the future will be better.”

  “And what if it won’t be, Papa?” Lily asked pointedly.

  “Other things,” he said, sidestepping her question. “What has happened to their families, for instance. Years of wondering, of suffering, could come to an end.”

  “Ah,” Lily said, “now the truth comes out. We’re not talking about your friends, are we, Papa? We’re talking about you. What you want to know.”

  “Yes! Of course! And I hope you would be interested to know what became of your mother and sisters, too.”

  “I already know, Papa. They’re dead.”

  After a few seconds of silence, he responded. “You think you know so much,” he said, but his voice was quiet now, almost a whisper.

  Q?

  Lily was right; her mother and two older sisters were dead, killed by the goat farmer they’d been sold to after being kidnapped by the Janjaweed fifteen years earlier. But when her father came to me one afternoon while Lily was out bartering for wheat flour and lentils, I didn’t have the heart to tell him their fate. He’d been kind to me, and I wanted to return that kindness.

  Q?

  I said they’d escaped the farmer and were living together in Darfur, near Nyala. I told him they were hoping still, after all the years, that he and Lily would return to them.

  Now, in retrospect, I think of this as the moment when I truly joined the human pack.

  Q?

  Lily was angry, with her father for asking, and with me for giving an answer. She asked if it was true, if her mother and sisters were still alive. Not knowing what else to do, I told her that it was.

  She cried all that night, while her father swore off date liquor and went about Mandela, relating my story and making plans to bring in people from the neighborhood to commune with me.

  Q?

  The next morning people began to arrive, bearing clothing, jewelry, sandalwood, crumpled wads of dinars, baskets of food. Lily’s father collected the offerings and led people in one by one. Most, especially the women, immediately fell to their knees before me; others were more skeptical and did not genuflect until they heard my voice in their heads. Some were Christian, some were Muslim. They wanted to learn about the future, and the past. They asked after fathers who had disappeared, grandmothers long since dead, sons who had turned to thievery. When the honest answer was bad, which was most of the time, I lied to them. I told them that their dead fathers would return, that their grandmothers were happy in an afterlife I knew did not exist, that their psychotic sons would someday repay their love tenfold. I pretended to heal children who had only weeks to live, and called down great fortunes on the poorest of the poor. Every person I saw departed happy, their faces streaked with tears of shock and gratitude. Some even searched their pockets for anything else they could offer me, scattering coins and bits of lint on the dirt floor. By the time night fell, a growing crowd had clogged the street outside the room, and Lily’s father told them to go home and return in the morning.

  Q?

  That night he cooked a feast of sorghum, corn, and lamb chops. Lily refused to eat; she sat silently on her cot, staring through the room’s single window at the people still waiting in the street, their hopeful faces lit by flickering kerosene flames. After dinner her father counted up the offerings, and though his hands trembled for want of a drink, he smiled and waved the money in the air.

  “Soon we’ll have enough to travel to Nyala,” he said to Lily. But she gave no sign that she heard him.

  Q?

  She watched in silence as word spread and people came to Mandela from as far away as Uganda and the Congo. They brought fear, despair, and money, and left that room relieved of all three. Many of these pilgrims brought their families and erected makeshift shelters. In two weeks the population of Mandela swelled by thirty thousand. At night they lit fires and sang songs of praise, united in their new devotion.

  Q?

  It did bother me, taking their meager belongings in exchange for lies, however well-intentioned those lies were. What bothered me more was Lily’s
disapproving stare. But I craved inclusion so desperately, and now I had it, or at least I thought I did. It didn’t occur to me then that being an object of worship is possibly the greatest exclusion of all.

  Q?

  It ended as Lily had predicted—the government learned that people were making pilgrimages to Mandela, worshipping a dog as if he were God, and they sent troops in. The night they stormed the slum, rain fell hard, beating a violent rhythm on tin roofs, and while the people around me assumed the distant rumblings were thunder, I knew better.

  “They’re coming, Lily,” I said. “Men in half-tracks, with rifles. They’re coming for me.”

  “The people will fight them,” she said. “They’ll fight and die for you.” It sounded like an accusation.

  “I don’t understand this,” I said.

  “You need to go,” she said. “But before you do, I want to ask: Why did you lie to me about my mother and sisters?”

  I didn’t respond.

  “Why?” she said again.

  And for the first time in weeks, I spoke the truth. “I don’t know,” I told her.

  Q?

  Lily lifted me through the window, and I fled. I ran south through endless crowds of worshippers surging in the other direction, toward the fighting. In the darkness not one person noticed me, and I ran until the desert swallowed me again. I didn’t stop until the sand became dry beneath my paws, until I had outrun the rains.

  Q?

  Hundreds of people died that night, including Lily. She was the only one among that crowd who fought for the right reasons. She stood tall in the rain and threw rocks. She used her strong hands to wrest a rifle from a soldier’s grasp, and before she turned the gun on him she told him her mother’s name, and made sure he heard it clearly.

  Q?

  Her father was taken prisoner and died a few months later at Omdurman, poisoned by a bad batch of cell-brewed liquor.

  Q?

  How do I feel about it? Let me answer you this way: I’ve never returned to Khartoum, or any other place where people gather. I live as a normal dog, though hunting by myself is difficult and I’m often lonely. I haven’t spoken to a person since that night, until now. That’s how I feel about it.

  Q.

  No, that isn’t the end. There’s one other question you’ve neglected to ask. The question you came halfway around the world to have answered.

  Q?

  Don’t be coy. I know things, remember. I know, for instance, that you are no different from any of the thousands of supplicants I’ve met with, except in this regard: I’ve told you the truth. And so you shouldn’t need to ask your question, because you already have the answer.

  Q.

  Correct. The answer is, I don’t have an answer. I can offer no comfort and little insight. I am not your God. Or if I am, I’m no God you can seek out for deliverance or explanation. I’m the kind of God who would eat you without compunction if I were hungry. You’re as naked and alone in this world as you were before finding me. And so now the question becomes: Can you abide by this knowledge? Or will it destroy you, empty you out, make you a husk among husks?

  The Helmet of Salvation and the Sword of the Spirit

  Cursed be he that doeth the work of the Lord deceitfully, and cursed be he that keepeth back his sword from blood.

  —Jeremiah 48:10

  EVO-PSYCHS TAKE NEW GUINEA

  PoMo Forces Abandon “Untenable” Positions in Australia; Withdraw to Hawaiian Islands

  With the Postmodern Anthropologist 8th Fleet, the Pacific Ocean (AP)—Evolutionary Psychologist forces, spearheaded by the human wave tactics of the Chinese, seized the capital of Port Moresby on Wednesday, effectively eliminating the last organized Postmodern Anthropologist resistance on the island of New Guinea. Three thousand PoMo Marines, refusing to abandon the capital along with the bulk of the defenders, were taken prisoner and subsequently put to death.

  “It is in our nature to destroy the weak,” Evo-Psych Premier Nguyen Dung said in a statement. “Thus, we had no choice but to execute your soldiers. But we do apologize. In fact, we apologize for this entire war. Sadly, it is in our nature to fight. And we are helpless against our nature. As are you.”

  Parents just didn’t understand.

  Arnold found himself thinking this more and more often in the latter half of his sixteenth year. He was thinking it now, as he sat on his rock on his beach and watched the ferry recede into the horizon where blue met blue, pursued by seagulls which never seemed to figure out that it wasn’t a fishing boat and there were no free meals to be had. He’d dropped the grim weight of his book bag on the ground, where the sand was still wet from high tide, and when he slung the bag over his shoulders for the walk home it would be damp against his back and stink of dead clams. But he didn’t care. He lit a cigarette, trying and failing to appear practiced and nonchalant about it, like the leathery fishermen on the mainland who seemed to have half-smoked Pall Malls surgically implanted on their lips. He took shallow drags and inhaled carefully. He watched the ferry and felt contemplative and full of important thoughts. He was putting on a show for an imagined audience of one. And though he knew at any moment he could have a real and unwelcome audience, in the form of his mother Selia, he didn’t care about this, either.

  He was in love. And that, among other things (such as Arnold’s growing faith in Postmodern Anthropology), was what his father and Selia didn’t understand.

  Arnold was smart enough to realize, though, that as different as life was now, some things had always been more or less the same. When his father and Selia were teenagers, they surely had had clashes with their folks over this sort of stuff. Well, maybe not his father. But Selia, definitely. Arnold could imagine her staying out past curfew, driving fast and loose, outdrinking rough boys she was forbidden to be with, then taking them to bed. Maybe falling in love with one of those rough boys. Having a big blowup over it with her father, and running away for a while. The only difference now was that she and his dad didn’t disapprove of who Arnold loved—in fact, they had never met Amanda, and neither had Arnold, for that matter. Their issue was with how he loved her. And this was where they just didn’t understand, because the world had changed but they hadn’t changed with it.

  This is how love was, now: Arnold sat and imagined he was being observed tenderly from an unapproachable distance by Amanda. She was everywhere and nowhere at once, watching him, as he sat here smoking on his beach, or whistling a tune in the shower, or listening to a lecture in class on the evils of Evolutionary Psychology. No matter where he went or what he did, Amanda was with him, and this sense of being observed, even as he slept, produced in Arnold a constant, consuming exhilaration from which there was no relief.

  Not that he sought relief. In fact, he reveled in the excitement of love as only a teenager can, scrawling page after page of poetry in Amanda’s honor, sending hundreds of messages to her phone every day (which she never replied to, thankfully, because to have real contact with her, to start an actual dialogue, would ruin everything, and this was understood intuitively by Arnold and all the kids he knew). He did not so much as brush his teeth without considering how he appeared to Amanda, whether or not she would approve of his posture, his choice of circular strokes as opposed to vertical, the way he scrunched his face up to reach the molars in the back.

  He was preparing to flick away the spent butt of his cigarette in a casual move Amanda would find pleasing when Selia appeared at the top of the bluff, her pantlegs rolled up in wide cuffs, clam-digging gear in hand.

  “Shit,” Arnold said under his breath. He hurried to dispose of the cigarette and the flick became more of a drop; the butt followed a weak trajectory down and landed in the sand a few inches from his boot. Amanda would not be impressed.

  “You’ve taken up smoking now?” Selia said as she approached him, her bare feet leaving behind prints that filled with seeping seawater. “Fuel to the fire, eh, kiddo?”

  Arnold said nothing. When his
mother was upset, it was best to just take his licks and wait for it to be over. She could talk circles around him, and any attempt to explain or argue would only increase the severity of the tongue-lashing.

  Selia handed him the pail, with the rake and shovel inside. Still talking, she rolled her pantlegs up further until they were above her knees. “Don’t sweat it. I don’t care. After all, I’m just some old bat who happens to be your ma. Smoke if you want to. Smoke a pipe. Smoke some weed. Smoke ground banana peels.” Finished with her pants, Selia held her hands out, and Arnold turned over the gear without a word. “Run off and join the army, while you’re at it,” Selia continued. “Go to the war. Get shot full of holes for the glory of PoMo Anthropology. Kill a whole platoon of Evo-Psychs with nothing but a soupspoon. See if I care.”

  Arnold ventured only a sullen stare in response. He knew Amanda would want him to speak up, defend himself, assert his independence. But when it came to Selia, he was prepared to defy her only indirectly—sneaking cigarettes, for example. Besides, even when she was just guessing, his mother always seemed to be right. He’d been reading the war news, how the Evolutionary Psychologist armies had taken New Guinea and most of Australia. And he’d been thinking, with a curious admixture of dread and eagerness, that as a member (even a junior one) of the PoMo Party, he was duty-bound to defend his faith, especially at so crucial a time.

  Plus, the thought of cutting a heroic swath through the Evo-Psych lines in Amanda’s sight made his groin tingle.

  But how did his mother always know these things, even when they never left his head?

  After a few moments when neither of them spoke, Selia’s eyes softened a bit, and she held the shovel out to him. “Hey,” she said. “Help me find the clam shows.”

  Arnold hesitated. Just because he was afraid to fight openly with Selia didn’t mean he had to accept a truce. He hadn’t dug clams with her for a long time, though when he was younger, before he started attending school on the mainland, they’d gone digging together nearly every day. It was something he’d enjoyed, being united in purpose with his mother, being useful as something more than an object of adoration, carrying the great bucket of clams home by himself, with both hands. His father would already have a kettle on the gas stove, steam shooting from under the lid. And the eating of food he’d earned by his own work—fingers wet with butter and sea salt, the laughter around the table—had been a deep satisfaction to Arnold, even as a child.