Even as I bathed I kept expecting to slip in the tub and crack my head on the tile floor. I could almost see myself lying there with bright red arterial blood spurting from a gash in my skull, looking up into the light with my soul being drawn heavenward. It’s what I wanted to happen. Disappointingly, I finished my shower without incident.
My legs wobbled as I walked to my car. I looked at the neat rows of identical stucco homes with their identical red clay roof tiles and their identical drought-friendly rock desert landscapes, wondering if any of this would still be here after today. I watched the paperboy meander up the street, peddling his mountain bike in a slow leisurely motion, a comically large satchel of newspapers slung over his arm. I watched my neighbor, Mr. Green, walk out to meet him wearing only a housecoat, blue corduroy slippers, and red and white Fruit of the Looms, his graying chest hairs forming a trail down over his protruding stomach as it parted his housecoat, his ratty little Yorkshire Terrier “Skippy” yipping at his heels. I waved to them both. I watched lights go on in kitchens up and down the block as one by one my neighbors rose to greet the day, and I wondered if any of them would still be here.
The drive to work was uneventful as was the walk from the underground parking lot to the elevator and from the elevator to my lab. But there was still plenty of time to stop me.
I lined up the powerful electromagnets in a machine that looked like a gigantic centrifuge with a gun turret attached to it. Some of the magnets were almost as large as I was and I fully expected one to topple over and crush me, so I had my two young lab assistants help me lift them into place. They had questions of course, but they were used to me ignoring them and weren’t surprised when I sent them away. I transferred energy from the fission reactor I had used to find The Higgs boson to give power to the magnets. They would be the most powerful electromagnets ever. I sat back and looked at what I had built, daring myself to turn it on.
I searched my mind for one memory that would sway my decision and it was only then that I remembered the good times, before my parents’ deaths. I remembered birthday cakes, Thanksgiving dinners, Christmas trees and Easter baskets. I remembered throwing Frisbees in the park with Dad. Sitting in the kitchen licking spoons clean of cake batter as Mom laughed and wiped the excess off my cheeks. I remembered being tucked in at night with a bedtime story from Dr. Seuss and a kiss on the forehead. I remembered hugs. Then, inevitably, I remembered the gunshots and the screaming. I remembered the smell of sulfur and blood and the insane grinning face of the crack-head as he ran past my bedroom door and smiled at me with his hands full of blood-soaked money and jewelry. He had looked happy, almost proud.
I tried to shake the memory out of my head. I tried replacing it with other happier ones, recent ones, like giving the valedictory speech in high school and again in college. Then I recalled going home afterward to an empty apartment and crying myself to sleep. I thought about standing up on stage in Geneva receiving the Nobel Prize for Science and how proud I had been until I looked out at the audience and remembered that there were no loved ones out there to share my joy. Even my colleagues were not my friends, barely more than acquaintances, and some were almost strangers. I had never learned to form relationships.
I reached out to the keyboard and began to type in the formula that would initiate the ion engine’s electron accelerator and launch an endless explosion that could recreate the Big Bang and destroy all matter in the universe. I wondered if trillions of years from now the explosion would reverse itself, as Einstein predicted, and collapse inward again. I wondered if the universe would ever possess life again.
There was a bible in one of the desks. I went looking for it, knocking over chairs and spilling papers everywhere in my haste to find it. I couldn’t locate it, but I did find a copy of the Koran. I wondered whose it was. With today’s sociopolitical climate, having an Islamic text and a security clearance would have made many people very nervous. It was not surprising that whoever owned it had attempted to keep it hidden. I looked for the bible a while longer before contenting myself with the Koran. I held it tight to my chest and prayed.
“God, if you can hear me now, then You know what I am about to do and why. You know what will happen if I go through with this. Everything that You have created will vanish. If You value us at all, You will not let me do this thing.”
And with that, I threw the switch. Or rather, I pressed enter.
I had pointed the barrel of the accelerator upward as a final precaution, just in case the magnetic field failed and the electrons flew out of the vacuum tube. Immediately I heard the explosions going off in the tube. At first I could count each individual one. Then they came so fast that there seemed to be no break between one and the next, just one endless roar. Then the tube exploded. I braced myself, as if you could anchor yourself against the force of a supernova. I saw white hot light explode from the accelerator and I was certain that the end of the world had come. Then the hole appeared.
The six-inch thick glass that enclosed the chamber where the ion engine sat did not as much as crack. In fact, there was no damage to anything at all except for that gaping hole in the ceiling that seemed to have ripped open the sky but had done more than that. It had torn open reality the way you would tear a Polaroid. There above me was the sun and the clouds and the faint ghost of a moon, yet between it was a gaping portal the size of a shopping mall and within that portal I could see HIM and He was hurt, mortally wounded—by my machine.
His blood was the blackness of space dotted with starlight and his eyes were like suns growing dimmer as I watched. His flesh was night and day and ocean and sky and seemed to have no end to it. His face was human. Or at least that is how I perceived it. But it was that horrible rictus of pain that struck me most of all and that look of surprise. The same look I’d seen on the face of my mother and father when the bullets punched through their bodies as that crack-head emptied a stolen nine-millimeter Berretta into them. He was surprised that I had hurt Him. He was not omniscient after all.
His eyes became human then. The fire in them extinguished and they were the green of the earth with a halo of brown orbiting the pupil, like a volcano amid an island of verdant flora. Tears filled them and I knew they were not for his own physical pain. He wept for the loss of the creation that he would never see again. He wept for me.
I maintained eye contact as galaxies yet to be born spilled from his wounds in a premature birth that would no doubt doom them all. I could feel my soul diminishing, growing cold as I stared deep into those tremendous orbs that had witnessed everything I had spent my career trying to understand. He began to dissipate as his essence spilled out into the void and became new universes.
“Perhaps this is how it is done? How it has always been done? Maybe I was meant to kill him so that the next universe could come forth? Maybe the death of a God spawned our universe?”
The theory brought me no comfort. I couldn’t prove it and neither could I believe it.
Despite my guilt and shame, I could not look away from that mournful stare. He looked so lonely. So helpless. I felt like He needed me there, to watch Him die. Like, perhaps, He had made himself visible to me just so I could see His pain. I wanted to reach out for Him and hold Him, to comfort Him in His final moments. But it was impossible. He was so vast. I was not even sure how I was able to comprehend His size or even to see it all through that one portal that should not have been large enough to encompass His infinite image. So I just watched with tears streaming down my face as He died and the portal closed again.
I walked out of the lab with my legs even more wobbly than when I had entered. My eyes would not close or blink. The image of His death was branded onto them or rather through them onto my spirit. I reached for my car door and fell to my knees. My stomach churned. My sorrow roiled there indigestible until it came boiling back up and I regurgitated the few morsels I had managed to ingest in the last day or two.
I was expecting the earth to up heave, for fire to rain
down from heaven, the oceans to flood creation, perhaps the Angle of Death with his flaming sword of vengeance. But instead, Barney the chief of security just waved to me and told me to drive safe as I drove out of the parking lot.
I watched the news carefully in the days that followed. The same wars still raged. The same criminals still got acquitted and the same innocents persecuted. The same half-off sales and two-for-one sales and this-weekend-only sales still flashed their commercials every eight minutes in between. The same church scandals, political scandals, celebrity scandals, blockbuster concert and movie premiers, football, basketball, baseball, and hockey stats and figures still dominated the newspapers. I started going to churches, mosques, temples, and synagogues looking for some awareness, some indication that anyone had noticed. The sermons had not changed and neither had the responses or lack thereof. TV evangelists still claimed to hear his voice. God was dead and nothing had changed. God gave His only begotten son and it changed the world forever. He throws himself in front of an electron accelerator to prevent the destruction of all creation and the Super Bowl makes the headlines.
At least I had answered my question as well as so many others. Man was so far from the divine. Our illusions and our faith kept us from ever knowing the true God when eventually science would have allowed us to discover him. Instead we filled the gaps in our knowledge with belief, fantasy, faith, lies! So, I jumped the gun and forced the meeting. Now the creator’s death is on my conscious.
I looked at my hands expecting to see blood. Not the sticky red ichor that humans and animals bleed, but that cold black blood filled with sun and stars that leaks from the wounds of gods.
“If God is dead, then what happens when we die?”
The question burst into my head unbidden and I knew immediately that it would be my demise. It was the logical question, the only one I had yet to answer and it worried at me until finally I devised the perfect experiment. I bought the gun today for two hundred dollars at Super Pawn. Tomorrow, I go to join Him.
***
“. . . You have to come to him and beg forgiveness. God is all loving, all merciful, but if you do not ask for his forgiveness in the name of Jesus Christ our savior then you will die with those sins on your soul and you will burn in the inferno. You have to be baptized in His holy name and accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and savior.”
I laughed. I couldn’t control it. The unrelenting hypocrisy of those who had “received the calling” never ceased to amaze me. This should have been a funeral for the Lord of Creation, this entire sermon his eulogy, yet instead it was just one more opportunity to scare the God-fearing into filling the collection plates. I laughed until tears wept from my eyes.
The young preacher shielded his eyes from the lights and looked out across his congregation as the laughter grew louder, echoing from the back of the cathedral where I sat.
“Is something funny my son?” he asked with exaggerated annoyance thick in his pompous voice.
I looked around the immense cathedral marveling at the time and money that must have gone into constructing such a monolithic temple. All the craftsman and artisans who had carved the ornate statues, placed each stone one at a time to build the tremendous thirty-foot walls, painted the stained glass, fashioned all the gold and silver into crucifixes, all paid for by scores of the faithful on the hopes that it would bring them closer to heaven. Yet, none of it had anything to do with God. I knew more about God in that instant that I watched him suffer and die than any of the endless stream of charlatans that had stood on that pulpit. They didn’t even know he was dead.
“I’m not your fucking son, Padre.”
He blanched and then his face turned red with anger. The entire congregation gasped.
Several men stood up and shouted angrily at me. They began moving towards me snarling and waving their fists. I guess they were going to show me a little bit of Christian love. I smiled and showed them my Tech. nine millimeter as I rose from the pew. That silenced them. I turned back to the pastor who had lost the color in his face again when he saw the automatic pistol.
“Who the hell am I supposed to be asking forgiveness from, Padre?”
“You are supposed to ask for the Lord’s forgiveness. Now please, do not bring that weapon into God’s house.”
There was a quiver in the pastor’s voice now. His eyes darted nervously around the church looking for help as I walked towards him.
“Don’t you know shit, Padre? The Lord’s house is empty.”
“God’s house is always full. Full of the holy spirit.”
“God is dead, Padre. I killed him. Shot him down like a dog in the street. I’m probably the world’s greatest assassin, but no one even knows who I am because no one knows he’s dead. And no one knows God’s dead because no one ever knew God. All of this . . .” I waved my arms gesturing widely at the ornate stone statues of Moses, and Mary, the stained glass depictions of the birth of Christ, the Last Supper, Moses parting the Red Sea, The Crucifixtion. I still had the gun in my hand so half the room ducked as I gestured towards them, “…is bullshit! You are full of shit!”
I was halfway down the aisle and the young pastor who had probably fucked half the single women in his congregation and a quarter of the married ones, was looking more and more like a caged animal. Every one wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die. Not even a preacher. That alone should have been a sign to any reasonable man that the whole religion thing was a scam.
“I want you to tell me, Padre, how I am supposed to ask God for forgiveness when he’s dead? Who is going to forgive me for what I’ve done? I mean, God was already in heaven so it ain’t like he goes to heaven when he dies. So who’s doing the forgiving now?”
“I—I don’t know what you are talking about. Now, please, leave this church. You are scaring all these good people.” Sweat was bulleting down the pastor’s face and his heavily moussed, gelled, and sprayed, perfectly styled hair was beginning to frizz.
I looked around the room and no one had moved from their chairs. They all sat riveted to the front of the room like they were watching a soap opera on television. Their faces were both sad and horrified yet all of them looked curious, like rubber-neckers straining to spot casualties as they cruised by a car accident.
“You’re the only one that looks scared to me, Padre. Your flock just looks a little nervous, maybe even excited. This is probably the most memorable time any of them have ever had at church. Now, please, answer my question. Who forgives the man that murdered God?”
“You cannot murder God! This is blasphemous!”
I walked up to the pulpit and shoved the Tech.9. right into the pastor’s pretty young face. The man was rubbing me the wrong way.
“Who the fuck am I blaspheming against? God is dead! Haven’t you been listening? I killed him! And none of you so much as noticed! You still stand up hear preaching your lies, claiming to have a direct pipeline to God, and yet you don’t even notice that he’s gone? You say you talk to him? You say you know God? That you’ve got a personal relationship with God?”
“Yes, I have a personal relationship with God. I talk to God every day.”
“Well, what’s God’s favorite color? What’s his favorite type of music? What’s his favorite movie?”
“I—I don’t know? What does that have to do with anything?”
I was so angry now that I was snarling.
“Because I can answer those questions about all the people I know. I know these things about all the people I have a personal relationship with. Yet, you speak to God everyday and you don’t even know whether he likes James Brown or Green Day? When was the last time you spoke to him?”
“This morning! I spoke to him this morning at my bedside!”
I looked into his eyes and the belief was as clear as day. The man was not lying for whatever reason he thought he was telling the truth. I almost lowered my gun. I almost walked out of the church. But then I saw it. I saw him doubt.
“Ca
reful, Padre. I know you couldn’t have spoken to God this morning because I haven’t slept in over a week. Not since the day I punched a whole in the Supreme Being with an electron accelerator. I’m telling you that I killed him. I watched him die right there in my lab. So I know that you didn’t speak to him yesterday and so I’m pretty sure that you’ve never spoken to him. I’m pretty sure that you don’t know shit about God. But I do have one more question for you.”
“What’s that, madman?” the young pastor’s eyes blazed defiantly as he finally found his guts.
“Careful, now. I’m not in the mood to be challenged. All I want to know is what happens now?”
“The cops come and you go to jail and then to a hospital where you can get some help.”
“No! I mean what happens to all of us? I mean how does this work? Is it like a gang thing? I mean do I become God now that I’ve killed him?”
The sirens came exploding out of nowhere. Suddenly they were all around the church. Red, blue, and white lights flashed through the stained glass casting a kaleidoscope of colors around the cathedral. The front doors opened and what looked like half the police force spilled into the already crowded church.
“Drop your weapon! Drop it! Drop it, now!”
About two dozen guns were now pointed my way. I smiled at them.
“One more question, Padre. It’s been worrying at me all week and I just can’t seem to find the answer. I hate unanswered questions. That’s how all this shit got started in the first place. I keep trying to leave it alone, but it’s just not in me. I have to know.”
The Book of a Thousand Sins Page 25