Ms. Einstein, for example, is she beautiful? According to human criteria her hands and feet are too big, her shoulders too broad, face too long, eyes too far apart, mouth too wide, and above all her rear end and thighs are too ample for her to qualify as a nice piece. The heavy egghead glasses and the punk Lolita pigtails don’t do much for her either. But in my view she has magnificent eyes, splendid hair, great ankles. For me she’s infinitely more beautiful than most actresses and models considered super.
But can I be sure that this gimpy language hasn’t already contaminated me with some human germ, some deadly infection still in its latent phase? No, I can’t be sure. Even without wishing to be a prude there’s no way I can compare this girl to the alleged mother of my son: virgins don’t have so many casual and unplanned sexual relations, they don’t steal crucifixes and burn them, don’t stay up all night trying to hack the Vatican website. To be perfectly frank—one thing I infallibly am—it’s not clear my appreciation of her is one hundred percent divine. And that’s making me a little crazy.
The Iguana’s Prehistoric Eyes
Just as she steps over the threshold of the one-bedroom/animal shelter Vittorio hands her a present: the box of a famous brand of gym shoes (no product placement in my story!) full to the brim with crucifixes. “Awesome!” says Ms. Einstein, running a hand through the contents and flexing her fingers like a fisherman who knows in a flash which are the no-account fish and which the inestimable. “You’re fabulous,” she adds, continuing to rummage through the Christs, from time to time taking one out to examine it. Euphorically appreciative, she stretches out her long neck and gives him a peck on the cheek.
Of all the things that make me laugh, militant atheists are the funniest. They think the universe gave birth to itself, along with the Earth, the animals living on it, the plants, and of course the humans. Without any help from beyond, any higher purpose, just a magic wand—whoosh—and there it all was, working perfectly. They’re not alone in this; children, for example, believe their presents come from Santa Claus.
When these same ladies and gentlemen get into their cars they’re perfectly aware that the big gizmo that sends them racing down the road didn’t build itself, it was designed and put together by someone with skills. They know that the steering wheel and the gearbox, not to mention the engine and the clever anti-skid mechanism, aren’t trinkets you can improvise, there’s a lot of work behind them. They’re not so naive as to think perfection, or something close to it, popped up one night from a cabbage patch. But when they look on a regal sequoia, a slender giraffe grazing, a magnificent heron poised in flight, a breathtaking mountain chain or any other natural wonder (as if nature had anything to do with it) no matter how crafted and fine-tuned, they become as silly as penguins and start to mutter about spontaneous generation. Instead of worshiping me, they worship Evolution. For that matter even automobiles can be made to seem the product of natural selection. When cars grow bigger, more efficient and more beautiful every day, isn’t that thanks to Evolution?
The little zoologist appears delighted that their new friend has dropped by. She seems oblivious to the fact that her partner is a philanderer, just as she’s oblivious to the large white cockatoo on her shoulder. The house smells of a truce, like when a couple tires of quarreling. He’s proud of his Maoist street cleaner’s jacket; his arm is still in a sling. For some strange reason, as the traumatologist had said candidly, the fracture was slow to heal. Once the cockatoo has been settled on its perch and the visitor has met the numerous other birds crowded into a large cage next to the refrigerator, they sit down for the meal.
They’re eating an appetizer of basil sorbet when Ms. Einstein shrieks and jumps to her feet: she’s caught a glimpse of a black and gray snake slithering unctuously across the opposite wall, where the refrigerator stands. It’s moving without hurry but decisively, as snakes do. The wee one, instead of screaming, seems happy to see it, like she would a friend who’s just showed up after a nap. He’s cute, isn’t he? she says tenderly.
Ms. E. hunkers down in the chair, her feet perched on the cross post. Snakes have always bothered her, she says. Convalescent Casanova shoots her an understanding look. And that’s absolutely normal, says his expression. Is it very poisonous? the tall one wants to know. Somewhat hesitantly, the tiny animal-rights activist acknowledges that yes, it is. Smiling one of her doe-eyed smiles at the cockatoo to reassure him, she explains that it’s very rare that snakes bite and even when they do, they usually don’t inject their venom. They’re very pacific animals, as it happens. Ms. E. asks the seducer if snakes often hang out at their house, and he sighs and says Yep, twenty-four seven.
Now if there’s an animal I personally have never liked it’s the snake.* Sometimes I even think I was mistaken to create them, although once there were moles and mice you needed some type of hungry creature to complete the trophic cycle, and of course snakes being things that slither on the ground, they can be spotted by large birds from above and snatched up in turn. If I’d given them legs, at the first sign of danger they’d have legged it out of there and goodbye carbon cycle closure. If I’d stuck fins on them they’d have jumped in the water, and the birds of prey would have gone home empty-stomached. This is the way it had to be, long flexible salamis with no appendages to facilitate escape and no ears to prick up in response to danger.
* The problem for me isn’t that they make me nervous, nor that they represent the bad guys in a certain religion we’re all familiar with. I’ve no intention, with these reflections that nobody’s ever going to read, of grinding my own axe here; I was doubtful about these reptiles for many millions of years before those Bible stories came along.
The little zoologist asks the big girl if she’d like to touch the viper (he’s a Vipera ammodytes, aka a horned viper) and without waiting for an answer, she grabs the animal by the neck and picks him up firmly. The beast hangs from her hand like a length of rope and allows himself to be petted like a cat. From time to time, his mouth springs open, but he doesn’t seem angry. You know you’re not allowed in the bathroom, ’cause of the mice, the little one warns the viper as if she were talking to a naughty kid.
The male hottie (I fished this tasteless term from Ms. E.’s left cerebral cortex) is telling her that their bathroom is actually an intensive care unit for animals in difficulty. When people in town find a bat with a broken wing or a lame duck, what do they do? They call the city cops, who in turn tell them to consult the Science Museum. Nine times out of ten, the strays that go to the museum end up at their house to be spoon-fed, bandaged and splinted, given their medicines. Badgers hit by cars, baby eagles stunned by high-tension power lines, owls hit with hunters’ BBs, foxes vomiting up pesticides, cats fallen from balconies, ducks with bronchitis, insomniac marmots, depressed hedgehogs, et cetera—all have passed through their bathroom. Once the patients are well they’re conducted back to their habitat. The iguana, however, is different; he’s not going anywhere.
Still holding the viper as if he were a necktie and stroking him, the diminutive zoologist replies that sooner or later the iguana will find a home with someone who loves her. The zoophobic seducer raises two fingers, which seems to mean two years. Each new potential adopter that comes along is ruthlessly rejected—too little iguanaesque fellow feeling. The big lizard continues to scarf down pounds of organic carrots and will probably grow up to be a brontosaurus. Don Giovanni’s aiming to sound jovial, but his voice betrays how exasperated he is, or would like to sound.
Would you like to have a look? asks the wee herpetophile. Rather than engage in polemics with her boyfriend, she smiles, her gum-colored gums showing broadly, and addresses Ms. E., who flushes red, the unexpected invitation catching her off-balance. The doe-eyed one now puts the viper on the floor, tapping him on the neck the way you might give your dog a pat. She reassures the cockatoo, who’s thrashing his head from side to side like a mad rock star.
The iguana occupies the apartment’s lone bedroom, n
ow converted to an iguana pad complete with an infrared lamp to warm the beast. Poised on the highest branch of the leafless tree wedged between floor and ceiling, the thing seems to be asleep; she doesn’t move a millimeter, although she stares at them with her prehistoric iguana eyes. Can I touch her? the tall one wants to know. The short one says just avoid any brusque movements, you don’t know each other yet. She strokes the reptile’s back the way she does with her cows, feeling their warmth. The iguana, however, is barely room temperature. The way the beast gazes at her protector, the way the latter in turn plays with the spiky mane behind the reptile’s head, it’s pretty clear they’re involved. It’s the cockatoo who’s not over the moon; he’s plastered himself to his servant’s head (that’s how he sees her), the feathers on his neck standing straight up.
Human Language Overwhelms Me
At times I don’t feel like myself. I was, and continue to be God, I possess all the prerogatives and faculties of a monotheistic deity—and you can take that to the bank. Although how you take a statement of fact to the bank, as if it were an endorsed check or a jar of pennies, I couldn’t say. There are moments now when I fear that things are no longer right with me. I’m annoyed at the snakes (poor things, never did anybody any harm except to get mixed up in the notorious expulsion from Paradise—assuming the story wasn’t made up by some bard with a galloping imagination—I myself don’t remember anything of the kind). Instead of some more worthy occupation,* I’m here staring, like a fool scientist bewitched by the microbes at the other end of the microscope, at those three in an ugly kitchen on the multiethnic urban fringe of a tiny planet whirling around a starlet in a little galaxy fancifully named the Milky Way.
* There’s a range of possibilities, from 1) watching from the presidential box while a star that has run out of gas gets badly crushed by gravity, 2) standing under a shower of X-rays from a white dwarf; to 3) surfing space-time on the back of a gigantic gravitational wave.
In theory it shouldn’t matter one blessed iota to me whether this merry-go-round of sexual partners (for that’s what this is all about) spins faster or slower, or whether all three of them throw themselves off a cliff or perish in a horrendous car crash. Instead I have a feeling I’ve waded into something new, something connected with those tawdry mood swings, or rather endocrine swings underlying the bipeds’† melodramatic yearnings, and the messes they make, their stubborn and incurable and tedious unhappiness, preparatory to the great collective suicide they’re approaching. I find this hard to believe, naturally.
† It should be said that in the beginning, they weren’t bipeds: most everyone’s seen the vignette with the ape on all fours, then crouching, then gradually standing upright until finally he’s wearing a necktie. Oh well, I doubt that many theologians would feel comfortable with Adam in the ape phase.
I should stop writing. Stop writing, stop thinking. Things would improve instantly; I’d stop staring at the so-called Milky Way and return to contemplating the cosmos, which after all I’m so fond of. Millions of years would go by without me even noticing, as it used to be. I’d be in heaven once again, as they say.
It’s a titanic struggle wrestling with a language that wasn’t made for a god. Everything I say distorts my thoughts (that word!), leads me to utter further nonsense that I don’t mean to say and find repellent. My supreme visions and sublime notions emerge as profoundly petty, self-interested and vulgar, not to say dishonest—pronouncements in which I don’t recognize myself at all. I try to dodge every trap, every ruse, to pay more attention, and the result is even more alarming. Some god I am, if human language can overpower me. It’s a shattering experience in many ways. As if a god could be shattered!
If I find myself in this regrettable situation it’s because I’m a monotheistic deity. If I had some colleagues (or whatever), we would certainly have devised our own irreproachable language, billions and billions of words that zoom around in all directions like sparks rather than follow one another in slavish single file like dumb ants. A three-dimensional language with a syntax that even a hundred thousand years of superhuman effort by the most brilliant linguists wouldn’t be able to decrypt. An ethereal parlance, crystalline, utterly free of the sordidness, the ugliness, the pestilence that trails after every human action in a fateful train of electrons. A language that expresses peace and order and harmony. Not one that makes me feel like a deposed king in rags, rooting around in the garbage bins in search of some usable remains.
The Sinking of the Titanic
Back at the table the three youngsters are eating millet pudding with organic cactus pear garnish that short stuff has prepared, washing it down with the non-organic Turkish wine provided by the neo-punk researcher. It’s just delicious, this timbale with boar ragù, quips the tomcat. He seems to want to play the comedian to please their guest. This lamebrain is carnivorous, sighs the little one, as if she’s speaking of something truly gruesome. You’re the only one here who’s herbivorous, the rest of us are omnivores, Vittorio snaps back, looking for complicity in their new friend. She smiles at both, face frozen in a mask of discomfort, as one does when couples pick at each other in public.
The soon to be two-timed zoologist explains that she stopped eating animals when she was still a girl; she couldn’t bear to swallow, whether raw or cooked, bits of the corpses of beings that are humans reincarnated, or one day will be. Dead fish have the same effect on her. I come from a tribe of cannibals, alas; my father was crazy about baby fingers, her cocky companion butts in. I know what you mean; I’m not wild about eating meat either, although sometimes I do, says the lanky one in shorty’s direction. The jokester, meanwhile, has turned to stone, his fork frozen in midair.
The wee warrior is radiant. Three-quarters of all the grain cultivated, she points out, is transformed by livestock into manure, obviously inedible, and the animals that produce it also belch out methane, a foul greenhouse gas. Fish are caught and ground into meal, then fed to farmed fish, chickens, and pigs to become millions of tons of more feces, drenched in antibiotics and other highly polluting muck. And the number of the world’s carnivores continues to rise, as spirituality declines in poor countries and they convert to globalized cannibalism. And now they’re even cloning farm animals, although it’s kept hush-hush. The young man, brushing a suffering nineteenth-century artist’s lock off his brow, says that cannibalism or no cannibalism, whatever last-ditch solutions people put forward are like trying to resuscitate a dead body. All the climate indicators suggest that the sinking of the Titanic is imminent, even if the dancers in the ballroom are enjoying themselves too much to be aware.
Ms. Einstein gazes at her wineglass as if it were a fortune-teller’s crystal ball. Science will come up with answers for all these problems, there’s no need to be overly pessimistic, she says. Scientific research subservient to the interests of the transnational oligarchies will merely accelerate the speed of the driverless race car, soon to smash into the Great Wall of reinforced concrete, says the tomcat, his brow traced with existential lines. His reaction is unexpected, but he’s no shrinking violet, and the hormonal storm underway only boosts his combative spirit. You do nothing but preach; I’ve never seen you move your ass one inch, short stuff snaps back.
The Earth will be a toaster in no time, he says, not to be outdone and putting his all into it. Glaciers will melt like ice cream in the sun, the coastal plains that abut the great metropolises will sink under water, typhoons and other cataclysmic weather conditions will be daily occurrences. Nation states will implode in chaos: epidemics, radiation poisoning from obsolete nuclear power stations, bloody energy wars to capture the few oil wells that have not yet dried up. The bonsai zoologist shakes her head from time, the way one does when one thinks someone is exaggerating, even though the arguments are serious enough.
Ms. Einstein, though, isn’t the least bit hesitant. Armored with fundamentalist certainty, she treats him like one more heathen reprobate. Humanity will exploit the sun and the win
d, but more important, we will learn to put bacteria and algae to work, she tells him. Bacteria can easily produce the alcohol to fill the gas tanks of our cars, she says, and in the not too distant future they will also produce electricity. The photogenic specialist in climate-change-before-and-after-the-French-Revolution, grimacing like a man with painful hemorrhoids, has decided to go in for the kill. The time is up for all your clever solutions, he says, the great ocean currents are about to reverse direction and half of the earth will soon lie fallow for lack of water while the other half rots at the roots. His girlfriend stares at him, holding her glass in two hands like a child, lips resting on the lip, a tennis player who’s been eliminated from the match.
It’s hard to say which one of them irritates me most. As far as the future of that little planet named Earth goes, the cocky young wise guy is perfectly right: I myself can scarcely imagine how I would repair such a degraded state of affairs, even supposing that particular bee entered my bonnet.* But he only talks to flatter himself; like many other young fellows he likes to warn us of all the horrendous catastrophes looming, preferably with a glass of wine in hand and some pleasant background music, while privately he thinks the fateful moment is still a long way off, and for some reason won’t involve him. Everyone else will die, but he, quite by accident, will survive.
I Am God Page 7