“Finally, she makes a joke!” Zack was not entirely convinced by Lilly’s argument, but he had to admire her passion. “Anyway,” he said, “isn’t all of this irrelevant now? I mean, now that God ended the world.”
“I don’t know. Somehow it’s still important to me.”
“Ok. Well let’s not start World War III over this – I think we both made some valid points. How about this, for all of your beliefs, and everything you did in life, I’m going to give you…” He rubbed his hands together and produced a gold medal, which he then hung around her neck.
“What does it say?” She held it up. “Crusader for justice? That’s nice… nobody ever gave me a medal before,” she said, smiling.
“You just didn’t know the right people.”
Lilly did not reply, and Zack took this opportunity to take the conversation in a completely different direction. “So… what was it like when God first came to you? I mean after you realized that you weren’t dreaming.”
“Well, like I said, we were on the sidewalk in Brooklyn. He said ‘Happy Birthday,’ even though he knows I don’t like to make a big deal about it, and then I asked him why he was a man.”
“Interesting.”
“He said that he is neither male nor female, but is all things at once. He said that he appeared to me as a man because that’s what I was expecting. I tried to argue with him, but I had to admit that deep down, even though I didn’t like it, he was right. Then I asked him a whole bunch of other questions.”
“Sounds familiar.”
“He answered most of them, but then he said that I might want to visit the Library. Wow Zack, that place was a trip!”
“Tell me about it.”
“It turns out that I was baptized and I never knew it!”
“Really?”
“Yes. My grandma did it when I was a baby. My parents were atheists too and they absolutely refused to let her, but she took me behind their backs when she was babysitting me one day!”
“That’s hilarious.”
“I know. Anyway, after the Library, I had the sudden urge to eat Easter candy.”
“Easter candy?”
“Yes. It was soooooo good!”
“Why Easter candy? Why not Halloween candy?”
“Phhhh. Don’t you know anything about candy? Halloween candy is crap. It’s just regular candy. Easter candy is special. It has different colors and shapes… different tastes. They don’t make it all-year round, you know, like those Cadbury eggs, with the crème filling? I even asked God to make new kinds of Easter candy for me to try – holy shit, so fuckin’ good.”
“What! No way. What kind of an atheist are you?!! You were baptized, you love Easter candy?”
“What can I say?”
“And now I find out that you love Mondelez, Inc.!”
“Mondo – what?”
“Mondelez. It’s the company that owns the Cadbury brand.”
“Phhhh!”
“But how could an evil corporation bring you so much happiness? I think deep down you’re really a kid at heart.”
“I don’t know.” Lilly’s face got serious again.
“Tell me,” Zack said, “what were you like as a kid?”
“Oh boy. This could take a while. I know, let’s sit down over there and I’ll show you.” She pointed to an empty bench in the nearby square.
They started to walk over, and Zack noticed that Lucky had disappeared. “Hey Lilly, where’d Lucky go?” he asked, looking around. “Luuuuucky!” he called out. “Wheeere aaaaare yooouuuuu?”
“Maybe he got bored. You know, we did just circle the same block like five times.”
“Oh wow, you’re right. I was so wrapped up in the conversation that I didn’t even realize.” He looked around again. “Luuuuuuuucky!” he yelled as loud as he could. “Oh, never mind, there he is!”
Lucky came tearing around the corner, with what appeared to be Zack’s mother’s dishcloth in his mouth, only to stop five feet away and jump backwards in an attempt to entice Zack and Lilly into a chase.
“Lucky, come here!” Zack said, pretending to be mad.
Lucky settled down and slowly complied.
Zack took the dishcloth from Lucky’s mouth and examined it. It had blue and white checkers, with two large burn marks – just as Zack had thought. “It is my mom’s dishcloth. How the hell did Lucky find it here?” Zack looked at Lucky and could have sworn that for a second, his fur was white. “You don’t think… I mean, he’s only a dog?”
“You did tell me he’s a really smart dog.”
“I know, but still.”
They sat down on the bench and watched Lucky closely.
For a minute, nothing happened. Lucky just sat there looking at them. But when it became clear that Zack and Lilly were neither going to command him nor entertain him, Lucky’s attention drifted, and the next thing they knew, he was pawing at the air and rolling hotdogs onto the ground off of an invisible shelf a foot in front of his face.
“Wow!” Zack said, beaming with pride. “I knew he was smart, but this time even I’m amazed!”
“I suppose,” Lilly said. “But I’m not shocked. Remember, it’s his heaven too! It would be surprising if God left dogs still entirely at their masters’ mercy.
Anyway, wasn’t I going to show you what I was like as a kid? Or did you forget?”
“No, of course not, I want to see.”
“Ok, give me your hand.”
Zack did, and instantly felt a sudden rush of unexpected sensations. Lilly’s hand was soft and fiery, demure and electric, sweet and cunning – all at the same time. In that moment, Zack felt incredibly awake. In his whole life, he had never felt so much excitement just from the touch of a woman’s hand. He looked at Lilly, but she continued talking as if nothing had happened. Had she not felt the same thing?
Ok, Lilly thought into Zack’s brain, I am going to play you some memories. Close your eyes and open your mind.
This was Zack’s first time communicating with telepathy, but it turned out to be no more difficult than producing Lilly’s gold medal. He closed his eyes, relaxed, and the next thing he knew, he was a little girl in a pink jumper, sitting next to a little boy in a doctor’s office.
Remember, you’re me, Lilly said, answering his concerns.
Then a nurse walked into the office and smiled at the boy. ‘So, I heard you were afraid to get your shot. Well, I’m gonna give your big sister here her shot first, so you can see that it doesn’t hurt.’
The little boy nodded.
The nurse took Zack’s little-girl arm, and Zack smiled slyly. Something was going to happen.
The nurse stuck him with the needle. ‘Ahhhhhh!’ he screamed. ‘Ahhhhhh! It hurts so much!!!!’
The little boy ran out of the room crying, and the nurse shook her head.
Zack chuckled, and then Lilly gave him the next one. He/she was older now, sitting in an empty grade school classroom with a teacher.
‘Now Lillian,’ the teacher said firmly, ‘evolution is just one theory. Of course it is backed up by science, but the question asked you to talk about two theories for the origin of mankind. To get full credit, you had to discuss both. Look…’ She shuffled through her papers. ‘Ah, here we are. Debbie Parsons, A+. See, evolution and creationism.’
‘Creationism isn’t science, and you shouldn’t be teaching it in a science class!’ Zack burst out, almost shouting. ‘You shouldn’t even be teaching it in school at all!’
‘Lilly, I never said creationism was right. You are certainly entitled to believe whatever you want. But you need to recognize that there are other theories out there.’
Zack could feel Lilly’s anger in the young teeth that he now shared, as well as in the adult hand and mind projecting them.
Lilly quickly jumped into the next memory.
This time, Zack was a teenage girl wearing a leather jacket, in a park at night with two girlfriends smoking pot. He pulled a pocket mirror out of a l
ittle black purse and checked his hair and make-up – they must have been going somewhere else after this. Lilly, you were very pretty! Are you crazy?! Zack pushed the words into Lilly’s mind, but Lilly ignored them, leaving Zack to wonder if she had slipped this first part of the memory in by accident or design.
‘Yeah,’ Zack said in the memory, in a tough, cool voice, ‘you know that fucking cross she always wears? Well I told that bitch exactly where the fuck she could shove it!’
Lilly’s friends roared with laughter.
Then Lilly fast-forwarded the memory a little, and an adult man appeared. He looked like somebody’s father.
‘Give me a break,’ Zack said, ‘it’s no worse than alcohol. We’re not hurting anyone. Do you know how much money the government would save if it legalized pot?’
‘I know I’m going to be calling your father, Lilly,’ the man said.
“Ok, Zack,” Lilly said, “just one more. I’ll give you an adult memory.”
In this one, Zack found himself a grown woman dressed in a suit, standing before a judge in a courtroom.
‘Your honor,’ he said, ‘this document clearly falls into the business records exception to the hearsay rule. You have to admit it into evidence.’
‘I’ve already made my ruling, the email stays out.’
‘I’ll appeal, and I’ll win.’
‘I’ll hold you in contempt!’ the Judge shouted, banging his gavel.
The memory faded away, and Zack opened his eyes.
“Are you starting to have second thoughts about me?” Lilly asked.
“Not at all! I’m happy you shared all of that with me. I want to know everything about you.”
“We’ll see how long you keep thinking like that. So, what else do you want to know?”
“Well, one question I had, what was that trial about?”
“Health insurance. My client was a factory worker with a bad back. He suffered nearly debilitating pain, but somehow still managed to pull himself to work every single day and push through his shifts. His doctor recommended a spinal surgery, but the insurance company said it was an elective procedure. They said it wasn’t medically necessary! Unbelievable. The stuff that happens in this world… well, that used to happen. Anyway, my client couldn’t get a private plaintiff’s attorney to take the case for him because it wasn’t worth enough money, so he came to legal services, and I got it.”
“What happened? Did you win?”
“No. We lost at trial, but I appealed on several grounds. I probably would have won, but the insurance company’s lawyers dragged everything out so long that the world literally ended before the company had to pay out a dime!”
“Haha. Well, at least everything worked out. I’m sure God fixed your client’s back pain a lot quicker than you and the legal system ever could’ve. No offense.”
“None taken. Anyway, it’s your turn. What were you were like as a child?”
“Hmmm. You want to see? I suppose that could be arranged! But let’s get out of here. I won’t just give you a memory; I’ll let you experience it in the here and now.” He took Lilly’s hand again and grabbed Lucky’s collar, and in the blink of an eye, they were sitting on a tree-covered hilltop in the woods.
It was small – only a few hundred feet from base to summit – and it was pristine, without a single trace of man or God, not even a hiking trail. In every direction, one was met only with views of other hills, covered in the same crumbling brown leaves from last fall that covered Zack’s hill, in addition to the hundreds of light grey boulders that an ancient glacier had deposited in the entire area during the last ice age. Above them, the new spring leaves grew thick, letting in only slivers of sun. Zack was thankful that God had changed nothing.
“I used to come up here all the time growing up,” Zack said, inviting Lilly to sit on an unusually flat, waist-high boulder padded in bright green moss. “I’d mountain bike or hike up here with Lucky, and we’d sit for hours. Since it’s off the trail a little ways, no one ever bothered us.
“I grew up a few miles down that way, near a lake,” Zack continued, pointing. “I had a really happy childhood. In the summers, when I wasn’t up here, I’d be swimming in the lake with all of the neighborhood kids. Oh, and my favorite thing – they used to have this Fourth of July party at a field near the lake. The entire neighborhood would come out for it. But then, over time, people stopped going to the lake and to the party. They put in private pools, and the kids disappeared into their videogames and computers.”
“That’s too bad. I think it’s pretty common though; the same thing happened in my town. Although, it wasn’t quite as woodsy as this.”
“Yeah, I love the woods. I love animals too. In fact, I wanted to be a biologist when I grew up.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I couldn’t find a job in it after college, and I had debt. Then that first i-banking job just sort of happened. After that, business school was the next logical step. For a while, I was always trying to think of ways I could combine the two interests, like maybe starting a biotech firm or buying a zoo or something.”
“A zoo? Haha. Zack’s Zoo! Zookeeper Zack! I like the sound of that.”
“Yeah, I always thought I could come up with the next big business idea or strike it rich in the stock market and then retire and do something else. I was good at trading you know. It was fun for me, kind of like a game.”
“A game? Whoa! Because of people like you, my clients lost their houses in the Great Recession.”
“No that wasn’t me. I wasn’t into credit-default swaps. I did make a ton of money trading off of all the volatility though.”
“Double yuck.”
“Hey wait a minute. Didn’t you tell me last night that you started your career with a corporate firm?”
“No, not exactly. It was a small defense firm. The Partners told me that I would be doing small criminal trials and tons of pro bono. They said I would be defending poor city kids that never had a chance and otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford a defense and would get stuck with the public defender. But when I got there, they put me in the white-collar defense division, and I spent all of my time defending the Bernie Madoffs of the world. They worked me like crazy, and I didn’t have time for sleep or family or anything. My physical and mental health went to shit. Then, when I complained to the Partner that I did most of my work for, he told me to just do it and that if I ever applied to work at another firm he would badmouth me to every lawyer in the City and destroy my reputation.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Yeah tell me about it – capitalism at its worst. The owner exploiting the worker, chained to her desk.”
“Well what did you do?”
“I started recording all of our conversations on my phone, and I got him talking about how our clients were suckers and we could get them to pay us whatever we wanted.”
“Really? He said that? Was he stupid or just an asshole?”
“A little of column A… a little of column B. Oh man, he was the sucker – in more ways than one. A big fat fuck, this guy. A bloated deer tick, swollen with his clients’ and associates’ blood.
“But I got him! I played the tape for him and told him that if he didn’t give me the most glowing recommendation that my next employer had ever heard, I’d take the tape to his clients, the newspapers, the Bar, and anyone else who would listen.”
“Whoa, you really are a tiger! Was what you did even legal? I mean, aren’t office conversations like that private? You can’t just go around secretly recording everyone.”
“I didn’t care then and I don’t care now. It worked.”
“Well, shouldn’t you have at least told the Bar anyway? I mean, if he was ripping off clients, and you knew, wouldn’t turning him in be the ethical thing to do?”
“Haha, you wouldn’t last one day as a lawyer!”
“But I thought I was a big-bad Wall Street suit, which is so much worse.”
“That�
��s pretty bad too, but it still pales in comparison to some of the lawyers out there. And that’s coming from a lawyer!”
“At last we agree!”
They laughed.
“Let me tell you Zack, the people that I worked with at this firm were some of the most calculating, selfish people that you could ever imagine. Every word they spoke, every nod, every facial expression, was carefully designed to manipulate you or promote their interests in one way or another. If one of them smiled and held the door open for you in the morning, it was because they wanted something from you. If they didn’t, it was because they wanted to intimidate you.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“It wasn’t. And most of them didn’t make it here.”
“No surprise there.”
“Oh! And there was this one lawyer I knew, Truehea– well… hmmm. I guess I shouldn’t take pleasure in other people’s misfortunes, even if they deserve it. He was somebody’s kid too.”
“Or uncle.”
“Huh?”
“I have an uncle who didn’t make it. Uncle Casey – he died a couple of years ago. God said he’s not ready for Heaven yet.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“That’s ok. What can I do?”
“Yeah.”
“Anyway… I believe we were making fun of lawyers?”
“Yes. Yes we were.”
“Hey, did you ever think about becoming a judge? It seems like that would’ve been a pretty sweet legal job.”
“I’m sure. But you have to practice for a lot of years first. It wouldn’t have been an option for me for a long time.”
“If I was a lawyer, that’s what I would want to do.”
“Yeah, but it’s a lot of responsibility. Judges held people’s lives in their hands. Would you have been able to handle that? A judge has to be really decisive.”
“I was responsible for my investors’ money. Although, I guess that was different.”
“Probably. But hey, let’s not talk about that stuff anymore. This place is beautiful. Thank you for bringing me here.”
They both smiled, and for a minute, neither one spoke.
The Alpha and the Omega: An absurd philosophical tale about God, the end of the world, and what's on the other planets Page 6