The Last Testament: A Memoir
Page 26
11 (For he was a conscientious dentist; and a fishwife along his route suffered from a toothache, and would have demanded he cease his mission to treat her; so I knocked on her door, guised as an itinerant apothecary, and pulled her tooth, and even provided a complementary cleaning; which, by the way, nobody did back then.)
12 My behavior was classic passive-aggression; which from thy standpoint was at least less lethal than my usual behavior, aggressive-aggression.
13 Yet despite this I could not help but watch with wonder and growing dismay, as human history proceeded apace; indeed, its pace seemed to quicken in my almost-absence.
14 Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, mankind continued to colonize whole new continents, and invent whole new technologies, and enslave and exterminate whole new races;
15 Wondrous accomplishments one and all, and all (unbeknownst to thee) performed entirely under thy own guidance.
16 Did I feel threatened? Yea; yea; maybe a little.
17 And gradually did I fall into a spiral as massive as that of the Milky Way galaxy; only the name of the supermassive black hole around which I orbited . . . was shame.
18 Finally, inevitably, my trouble began affecting the one aspect of my life I held most sacred: my family.
19 I started asking Jesus and H. G. to take on more and more of my responsibilities; small things, at first; a Great Awakening here, an Egyptian capture of Mecca there; then larger and larger tasks; then whole sects and countries.
20 Some of ye may be familiar with the doctrine of consubstantiality, first formally expressed in the Nicene Creed of 325 A.D., whereby Jesus, H. G., and I are all of one substance, with Jesus being eternally “generated” by me, and H. G. eternally “proceeding” from me.
21 Lo, before I knew it I had a full scale consubstantiality-abuse problem on my hands.
CHAPTER 13
1Fortunately, Jesus and H. G. really took their divine game to the next level, organization-wise; under adverse managerial conditions they steppethed up to the plate, and verily did they hit it out of the park.
2 They were also wise to delegate more and more responsibility to my prophets, archangels, and large network of wingmen and wonderlings; who proceeded to administer earthly affairs with the kind of service thou wouldst expect from a celestial company of over 80,000 cherubs, 250,000 seraphs, 750,000 archangels, and one Xerox machine.
3 But there is a fine line between delegating responsibility, and enabling; and my sons crossed that line many times.
4 None of us wanted to confront the truth of the situation; so when the French Revolution arose—with its explicit endorsement of atheism—all of us looked away, and Jesus said, “It is only a phase.”
5 And when my absence led thinkers like Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche to openly question my very existence, H. G. would shrug and say something like, “It is only the European intelligentsia; no biggie.”
6 Looking back, I am unsure why not a single being in heaven had the courage to sit me, the LORD their God, King of the Universe, down, and tell me I had a problem.
7 The only being to have even attempted such a thing was Raphael, who one day made bold to approach me and ask: “So, LORD, how doth it feel to be ‘omnimpotent’?”
8 “Not so ‘omnimpotent’,” I replied, “that I cannot still banish thee to the lowermost circle of—”
9 “Mirthing, God! I’m mirthing!” he wailed, plunging to the ground in abject terror.
10 “It’s a m-m-mirth!
11 I’m j-j-just mirthin’ around!
12 T-t-takest thou not a mirth?”
13 Lo, he was lucky he’s union.
14 None of this is to shirk responsibility; I do not blame anyone else for my conduct.
15 I am a strong believer in the doctrine of free will, at least when it comes to me; and I was the one who chose to outsource these assignments and remove them from my divine plate.
16 I am the LORD thy God, King of the Universe; the buck stoppeth here, for the most part.
CHAPTER 14
1The absolute nadir of my recklessness, impropriety, and sheer personal debauchery was the Victorian Era.
2 I spent those 63 years having thousands of aborted dalliances with my bevy of comely totalities, and doing my best to stay out of trouble.
3 But paranoia had already begun to set in.
4 The vital God of the Old Testament; the all-forgiving Father of the New Testament; the mighty Allah of the Koran . . . all these personae of mine now gave way to a new one: that of the angry old man cursing at the neighbors’ kids from his porch.
5 I began (falsely) interpreting every major world-historical development as a personal message to me; much as many a religious leader (correctly) interprets every major world-historical development as a personal message from me.
6 I took the life of Mozart to mean, “Look what a modern man can do in the same amount of time it took Methuselah to take a dump.”
7 I took the life of Napoleon to mean, “We will only worship greatness if it’s really, really short.”
8 I took the Industrial Revolution to mean, “Anything you can do, we can do child-laborier.”
9 I took the invention of anesthesia as thou choosing to close off one of my favorite lines of communication.
10 I took the telegraph as a mockery of my penchant for cryptic messages.
11 (In this I was perhaps not mistaken; for though many recall the first message Morse sent on his invention, “What hath God wrought?”, far fewer remember his second, even cheekier message:
12 “My butt. That’s what God wrought.”)
13 I took the Suez Canal as an attack on the very idea of mass drownings in the Red Sea.
14 I took the coinage of the word “dinosaur” as an insult in two different ways.
15 I took the Emancipation Proclamation as a rejection of the institution of slavery; which is about as explicit a rebuff to the Bible as one can make.
16 I took the rise of the British Empire—which by any objective standard was a positive occurrence for me—as a threat to my own empire.
17 (Lo, when I heard someone brag “The sun never sets on the British empire,” I spent three years trying to non-apocalyptically jigger the earth’s orbit to make that not so.
18 I could not; it made me furious; I took it out on Krakatoa.)
19 I took the unification of Germany as a positive step; yea, by this point I was truly out of my mind.
20 I took the Eiffel Tower as all of humanity giving me the finger; would that I had taken it as merely the French giving me the finger; then I’d have known it was nothing personal.
21 And I took Impressionism as an indictment of my eyesight.
CHAPTER 15
1Every entity struggling with issues like these reaches a moment when he hits rock-bottom.
2 For me that moment came on April 15, 1912; and unfortunately it also caused 1,517 innocent people to hit sea-bottom.
3 I got to heaven late that night, around 11:30 Heavenly Daylight Time.
4 I had spent the last four days in one of my other universes; I had tried for six hours to get a routine phressel to glax counter-clockwise, but it would not even yoip;
5 At which point I went on a transgalactic binge of other-destruction that made that entire cosmos look like Keith Moon’s hotel room; that is, had Keith Moon yet been alive, and if a cluster of galaxies can be equated to a bedside table.
6 I walked in; a few angels nodded; others turned away and whispered.
7 (Imbeciles; thou wouldst think one of these eons they would remember I can hear everything, too.)
8 I saw the boys and the angels conversing; everyone had their just-act-like-unto-everything-is-normal smiles on.
9 We began talking, and they filled me in on the latest: Uriel mentioned they had just lain the cornerstone for a new university in the Holy Land, devoted to technology; right away that put me in a bad mood.
10 Then Jesus mentioned that the Titanic’s maiden voyage was m
ore than halfway done; and that she was making record time for the transatlantic crossing; and that its owners were not concerned about her safety, because they claimed she was unsinkable.
11 I glared.
12 “Unsinkable,” I began.
13 “Un . . . sink . . . a . . . ble.
14 Verily, boys, that seemeth a bit . . . arrogant, doth it not?
15 To imply that there exists in this universe—or any universe—no power great enough to send such a trifling edifice of gross material plummeting to the depths, along with the entirety of her precious cargo of human lives?
16 Verily, doth that not seem . . . sassy?”
17 By now, all other conversation had ceased; and heaven—yea, the entire eleventh dimension—had grown deathly quiet.
18 “I am striving to remember—assist me, boys, for my omniscience is not what it used to be—the profligates and sinners who mocked Noah before the Flood; were they, too, unsinkable?
19 Lo, wait; never mind; now I remember; they sank.
20 Or perhaps I am thinking of the Egyptians who chased Moses through the Red Sea?
21 No; never mind; sorry; my bad again; they sank.
22 Sank like lead.
23 Yea.
24 I notice too, that unsinkable rhymes with ‘unthinkable.’
25 Unthinkable; as in, ‘unthinkable tragedy on the Atlantic.’
26 Is that not interesting?”
27 Jesus and H. G. looked at each other nervously.
CHAPTER 16
1Father,” H. G. said, “perhaps we should withdraw to another mode of reality to continue this—”
2 “No, I’m fine right here, H. G.
3 Yea; I’m fine, Holy Ghost, thou trained Paraclete, thou.
4 And Jesus, my pride and joy; savior of the world; Jesus, Jesus, I mean Jesus Christ, Jesus, everybody loveth thee, Jesus.
5 Lo, didst thou know there is a new word in the earthly parlance; ‘bejesus’?
6 As in, ‘Once in a while it is mirthful to scare the bejesus out of people.’
7 I have done that a few times in my day, have I not?
8 Yea, I have done that a few times with those who have flaunted their wickedness at me.
9 ‘Unsinkable.’
10 I have some naval experience, you will recall; for I slew Leviathan.
11 Me.
12I did that.
13 ‘Hast thou slain Leviathan? Canst thou draw out Leviathan with an hook? Or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?’”
14 “Father, we have been through this,” interrupted Jesus; “there was no Leviathan; that was a story you made up to Job as thou went along. Now let us all calm ourselves and—”
15 “He was this big!” I shouted, stretching my metaphysical hands across half the North Atlantic;
16 “He was this big, and firebrands streamed forth from his mouth, and his back had rows of shields tightly sealed together, and smoke poured from his nostrils as from a . . .a . . . I forget ‘as from’ what . . .”
17 “A boiling pot over a fire of reeds?” said one of the interns.
18 “Yea! That is right, Seth! ‘A boiling pot over a fire of reeds’!
19 Leviathan was that big, and that terrifying, and when I slew him I—
20 Lo, verily verily verily, what is this?
21 What is this frigid hunk of water that I feel off the coast of Newfoundland?”
22 “Put the iceberg down, Father,” said Jesus.
23 “Put the berg down, and let us converse of these things like civilized Godheads.
24 Put... the berg... down.”
25 We stared at each other for a moment; then I dropped the berg and made as if to go to my desk and read the Weekly Prayer Report.
26 Then I quickly turned, rushed back, grabbed the berg, and shouted so that Raphael, Gabriel, Uriel, and Michael—the four angels who had been there to witness that disastrous mirth so long ago on the Red Sea—could hear me:
27 “It’s time to turn the North Atlantic... into the Dead Sea!
28 I am the LORD thy God, King of the Universe!
29 I’m the King of the World!”
CHAPTER 17
1The worst part was “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”
2 Yea: watching the ship’s band nobly stay at their posts as the doomed vessel sank, then close the final set of their lives with a hymn in my honor...
3 Verily, I was surprised my heart could go on.
4 My impetuous sinking of the Titanic served as final confirmation of a realization I had first made watching Abraham prepare to sacrifice Isaac; and again at the Red Sea; and again with Job; and again and again and again a million billion times since:
5 There was something seriously, seriously wrong with me.
6 By this time Ruth and Kathy had joined Jesus and H. G. in the office; I could see the four of them out of the corner of my all-seeing eye planning some kind of intervention, but I spared them the awkwardness.
7 Before the end of that day I had called it quits with all the other universes; I visited each one and induced therein a cosmic explosion annihilating all their constituent parts into nothingness; none of them took it well.
8 Then, with Ruth’s blessing—and verily, where (metaphorically) would I be without her?— I said good-bye to the family and went off into self-imposed exile inside a cosmic void that the kids found for me.
9 And so I took the last century off.
10 I wanted to exist once more as I had before the Creation; to reconnect with that young, innocent being who had hovered alone contemplating his own perfection; back when the future was limitless, and nothing seemed impossible.
11 But I was no longer the same God I was during those carefree, heady pre-days of yore.
12 I had said too much and done too much; thought too much and felt too much; seen too much and heard too much; blessed too much and cursed too much;
13 Fuck, I’d cursed a lot.
14 I needed help; and when thou art God, there is only one entity capable of giving the kind of help thou needest.
15 And so, finally, after spending a few decades summoning up the necessary humility, I opened my heart and addressed him.
CHAPTER 18
1Are you there, God?
2 It’s me; me.
3 Hope you don’t mind if I skip the ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ stuff; it feels a little too formal.
4 Forgive the interruption; I know I have bigger things to worry about than my own trifling concerns.
5 And let’s face it: I and I both know I have never been much of a praying God.
6 Yet these days I find myself struggling with thoughts and feelings so overwhelming, I have no choice but to turn my eyes me-ward.
7 For 6,000 years I have tried to be the kind of God people could believe in; but recently I have come to question the very nature of my divinity.
8 Well, no; not recently; I guess on some level I’ve been questioning it since the beginning of time, but I didn’t want to face it.
9 What is wrong with me, me?
10 Why do I let bad things happen to good people?
11 And why do I get off on it?
12 I can’t blame my genes; I can’t blame my childhood; I do have a lot of violence in my background, but I created the violence; and for that matter, the background.
13[Three-year pause.]
14 I feel useless.
15 I feel like there’s no point in going on.
16 Maybe humanity would be better off without me.
17 Yea; I bet if something were to happen to me tomorrow no one would even notice, much less care.
18 I feel like I’m at the end of my rope.
19 So I’m turning to me.
20 I’m putting it all in my hands.
21 Yea, I made the universe; I made mankind; out of me unspools the totality of all that ever was and is and will ever be;
22 But who am I?
23 Why am I here?
24 Do I even exist?”
CHAPTER 19
1And then, silence.
2 I waited for an answer for a very long time; I cannot say it seemed like forever, because I know what forever feels like and this wasn’t as long; but a very long time.