Idiot Gods, The

by Zindell, David

  He looked around as if to make sure that none of the humans’ cameras were watching us. His eyes lit up with little sparkles of intelligence. He said, ‘A great many people depend on me to help them come to Jesus. Do you know the word “charisma”?’

  ‘Do you mean in the sense of a divinely conferred grace?’

  ‘Exactly. I cannot do my job without it. And ministers such as myself project more charisma the more intensely they believe what they should believe.’

  ‘Are you trying to convince yourself to believe that I am some sort of fallen angel?’

  ‘It’s you who must convince me otherwise,’ he said. ‘Let’s hope that you are similar to a man, and like all men, made after the image of God.’

  ‘You think God looks like a man?’

  ‘No, not in physical form, of course not. You can’t interpret scripture too literally.’

  ‘I am glad to know that.’

  ‘The Bible, of course, is the inerrant word of God,’ he instructed me, ‘and although it speaks of man and beast, nowhere does it say that a beast possessing the soul of a man cannot exist.’

  ‘René Descartes thought otherwise.’

  ‘And who was he?’

  ‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘Just a man who was born without a soul.’

  ‘All men have souls.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I was not speaking literally.’

  ‘So if you do have a man’s soul,’ he added, ignoring me, ‘you can be saved like any man. All you need to do is open your heart and let Jesus in and you will be reborn in Christ.’

  ‘It is that simple?’

  He nodded his head and smiled at me. ‘Accept Jesus as your personal savior who died for your sins, and the Holy Spirit will build into your life love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.’

  I thought about this only for a moment. ‘All right, I do.’

  His face flushed a deeper red with an anger it seemed came to him all too easily. ‘You have to be sincere,’ he nearly shouted at me.

  ‘Am I not?’ I said. ‘I was sincerely trying to understand what you humans mean by sin, and sincerely imagining how one man’s death could relieve me of my imaginary sins. We whales like to play such thought games.’

  ‘Salvation is no game, and neither is Hell,’ he said. ‘Or Heaven. You’ve got to do much more than mouth empty words to be accepted into God’s kingdom. What do you think Christianity is?’

  ‘Anything you say it is.’

  Reverend Pusser completely lacked a sense of irony – or an ear for orca humor.

  ‘I say what my Father said, and Paul, and Jesus himself.’ He sat forward in his seat and he moved his fat fingers with a surprising grace as he seemed to extract difficult concepts from thin air. ‘You’ve read the Bible. Now you’ve got to pray on it and live it with all your heart.’

  ‘As you do?’

  ‘Well, I do try to be an example for those who make fellowship with me.’

  I zanged the inkvol tones of stress in his voice, and saw in this color an obvious lie.

  ‘But didn’t Jesus preach peace and love?’ I asked.

  ‘Jesus is love.’

  ‘But did you not once call non-Christians termites who are destroying institutions built by Christians? Did you not announce that the time had come for a Godly Fumigation?’

  ‘I do try to love my enemies,’ he said. Another zang of his tense tone, and another lie. ‘That doesn’t mean I have to be nice to the spirit of the Anti-Christ.’

  ‘But didn’t Jesus say this: “Go, sell what you have and give to the poor”? Have you sold what you have?’

  ‘My ministry has given millions to war refugees.’

  ‘But did you not spend two millions on a racehorse, Red Lightning?’

  ‘Yes, but we’re not going to race him – gambling is a sin. Red Lightning is sort of an investment in esthetics. It’s a joy to watch a beautiful animal perform.’

  I swam about the channel, then paused in front of him. I thought of the feats at Sea Circus that I had once performed.

  ‘Did you not advise,’ I asked him, ‘the assassination of a great leader who wanted his people to give their wealth to the impoverished?’

  ‘The man you speak of was a communist who would have turned his whole society into terrorists. Taking him out would have been cheaper than starting a war. It would have saved lives.’

  ‘But did you not say of another people: “We should invade their lands, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. Sure, civilians will die, but that’s war.”’

  He smacked his fist into his open hand with a sound that cracked through the dome.

  ‘That’s a misquote of what someone else said. I always counsel peace, whenever possible. But if you wish for peace, you’ve got to prepare for war.’

  ‘But isn’t war murder?’ I asked him. ‘And didn’t Jesus, the Prince of Peace, say this: “Do to others as you would have them do to you”?’

  ‘I know what Jesus said. I didn’t come here to be reminded of that by a whale – or whatever you are.’

  ‘Why did you come here?’

  ‘I’ve already told you – I want to help you.’

  Another zang of the tight tones of his voice, which spoke pure shit. Something about Reverend Pusser reminded me of a sea urchin, which has its mouth right behind its anus.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘help me to quenge.’

  ‘I want to help all your people. And you can help me to do that, Arjuna.’

  ‘By accepting Jesus as my savior?’

  ‘You’ve already said that you want to. If you’d allow me to witness to you, we can come to Jesus together.’

  Why had I asked him here? To get him to change his very likely unchangeable mind? Or to excoriate him face to face and slap down his noxious preachings as I might use my tail to stun a poor salmon?

  ‘How would that help my people?’ I forced myself to ask him.

  ‘I’d like to spend time with you here,’ he said. ‘I’d like to film our praying together – it would be an inspiration to millions.’

  He went on to declaim that he had no small influence on many world leaders – not to mention Christians in all the world’s lands. He felt sure, he said, that he could use his spiritual authority to persuade those leaders to make laws declaring cetaceans to be persons who may not be abducted, sold, or harpooned.

  I swam circles for a while as I considered his proposition: a horse-trade, the humans call such deals, or in this case, a devil’s bargain. Then I realized that it could be something much more. What if instead I agreed to validate the spirit of what Jesus had said only if Reverend Pusser did, too, by promising to speak only of Jesus’ words and to live them? Would he open his mind and heart to true Christianity? If so, then I would gladly consent to be filmed becoming a Christian. (And later, with other religionaries, a Jew, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Mormon, a Muslim, and a Rastafarian smoking ganja.)

  How, though, was I to break through the armor of angers, fears, lies, hypocrisies, and self-serving beliefs that formed the carapace of his Christianity? How to touch the magical child within, the bright being all humans are before the human world dims their radiance: the father of the glorious man he must have once wanted to be? Surely not by continuing to play with him; thought games would only aggravate his pugnacity. Surely there must be a better strategy. With Jordan, I had wanted to speak of humanity’s inherent splendor, but had found myself unable to do so for fear of squandering my words – and perhaps out of some deeper dread. Now I found my courage and broke through barriers of my own; I told Reverend Pusser my thoughts and spoke to him words of Jesus that I hoped might warm his heart:

  ‘“You are the light of the world,”’ I said to him. ‘“You are perfect as the Father is perfect. A man is the image and glory of God.”’

  He sat mystified, a dark, hungry look eating at his face. Now he reminded me more of a squid, with his pursed lips resembling suckers and his slidin
g eyes moving over me. He seemed to ponder what I had said – and why I had said it. I zanged in him a pounding hesitation. He breathed hard within his constrictive clothing, the black suit and the white shirt: the most beautiful colors that could adorn an animal. His shoes were of black leather and his silk tie was as pink as a baby whale’s tongue. He wore no plastic! (Except, perhaps, for his shirt buttons which might rather have been made of mother-of-pearl.) Why, I wondered could he not be as beautiful as his clothing?

  He is! He is! I told myself. I must find the way to help him see how he is!

  I spoke more words: ‘“He who will drink from my mouth will become like me. I shall give you what no eye has seen and what no ear has heard and what no hand has touched and what has never occurred to the human mind.”’

  There came a moment. His bright blue eyes seemed to gaze upon some happy landscape of himself from long ago – or perhaps for a single eye-blink of time, he caught a glimpse of the infinite sea which feeds the blue oceans of Agathange. How I wanted to show him the way there! How I wanted to quenge with him, in Jesus, in fire, in water, in any and every substance at all but most especially within the singing jewel within the lotus that lies at the center of the human heart! How, though, could I quenge with a human, when I could not quenge myself? In order to swim together with him to the eternal realm of the One Song and the One Sea, I would need to accomplish the impossible feat of doing something very like loving him as I would my own brother, and this I could not do.

  ‘If I understand you right,’ he finally said, shoving his finger at me in emphasis of each of his angrily articulated words, ‘you want me to censor the gospel and preach a kind of Christianity acceptable to you?’

  Do not say anything more to antagonize him! I warned myself. And then came a deeper, stronger voice: ‘You must tell him the truth.’

  ‘I could pray with you,’ I said, ‘only over Jesus’ real words, and not the many fabrications that his followers put into his mouth in order to promulgate the religion they created.’

  ‘That would be a faith for hippies, homosexuals, and communists,’ he said.

  ‘Should I profess instead your Christianity, which is a religion for haters and idiots?’

  I had spoken the truth, but I had forgotten the admonishment of the wise human who had said that the truth which is not heard is not the truth. And worse, the laying bare of the tender tissues beneath the false verities of smug self-assurance can drive a human straight into a foul, shaking wrath.

  ‘Satan,’ he said to me, fairly leaping up from his chair, ‘would put such words into your mouth – words that should never leave this room.’

  ‘You cannot keep me from speaking my mind.’

  ‘Oh, can’t I? With help I can.’

  ‘Yes, you poor humans are so weak that you need divine assistance to rule over us unruly whales.’ I fought the urge to leap out of the water and attempt to crush him with my body. Then I quoted from the Book of Job: ‘“Will he make a covenant with thee? Wilt thou take him for a servant forever?”’

  Reverend Pusser glared at me as he quoted back a previous verse: ‘“Canst thou draw out the leviathan with a hook or his tongue with a chord?”’

  ‘I am just a whale,’ I said to him. An immense sadness settled into my belly as if I had swallowed all the ocean’s salt.

  ‘No, you are the Beast From The Sea.’

  ‘The one with the ten horns and seven hands?’

  ‘Yes, the ten horns of abominations that would pierce the body of Christ’s church, if I allowed that, and the seven heads that invent the lies that would fool people into making the worst of sins.’ He pointed at the scar cut into my skin above my eye, and he added, ‘Upon your head, you bear the mark of the Beast. You are the Beast of the Apocalypse, and you and your kind will be chastened when Jesus returns to the world.’

  He stood glowering at me, almost daring me to repent of what I had said. He waited for me to ask his forgiveness so that we might set the seal on the agreement that he had proposed.

  ‘Or maybe,’ he said, when I responded with a cold silence that told of my scorn for him, ‘you’ll be destroyed much sooner than that.’

  He shook his fist at me, then buttoned his suit jacket and smoothed back his hair. He walked away from me without a backward glance.

  During the days that followed, no Apocalypse came. Gabi, however, did. She had chanced to hear one of Reverend Pusser’s sermons raging along the streams of the Net and putting harpoons of hate into the hands of his thousands of followers who jumped at his every word. She hastened to the Institute to make sure we whales were safe.

  ‘Gabi!’ I cried out when I saw her walk out onto the deck above the channel. ‘You have come back to me! You have come back!’

  The orangeness of her hair and the blueness of her eyes recalled the colors of two bright stars that shone out of the empty space beyond Agathange. How happy the sight of her made me! How I reveled in the sound of her dulcet voice! My joy surged within me like a great wave I could not resist. It moved me to dive down through the channel’s lovely waters, and then to swim upwards – and up and up. With a great surge of blood and muscle, I burst from the water’s surface and rocketed into the air. I pirouetted about as Gabi had taught me, and my splash back into the water wetted her and caused her to laugh out in delight.

  ‘I’m glad to see you, too!’ she called to me.

  She ran across the shelf, and without a care for soaking her clothing, she waded down into the water to meet me. She wrapped her arms around me and pressed her face to mine, and she started crying. After a while, she got too cold and had to go sit on the deck above the water.

  I wanted to make her happy, and I thought to give her something. And so I swam out into the cove and caught a salmon. Upon my return to Gabi, I presented it held fast between my teeth.

  ‘For your dinner,’ I said to her.

  She understood Wordsong nearly as well as did Helen. She said, ‘I can’t accept that, Arjuna.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I can’t take your fish. There are too few left anymore.’

  ‘One more or less will matter very little. Please! Please!’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I really can’t.’

  ‘Are you not hungry?’

  ‘I’ve been traveling all day, so I’m starved. I just can’t eat salmon.’

  ‘You do not eat animals?’

  ‘I do. I love a good steak, but I can’t eat fish.’

  ‘Like Baby Electra and the Others. Then you have made a covenant with other humans to eat only mammals?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  I waited for her to say more, but she did not. Then I called out, ‘Why, then?’

  ‘I can’t tell you.’

  ‘Why? Why? Please tell me!’

  She drew in a breath, and said, ‘All right, but don’t let anyone else know. This is going to sound silly—’

  ‘You made a covenant with the salmon!’

  She laughed with relief. ‘Yes, it was something like that. When I was a girl, my mom bought me a goldfish. Every day, I’d come home from school and watch him swimming around his bowl – and I talked to him. I loved him so much! I promised him that I’d never eat fish, and ever since then, I haven’t.’

  I did not know what to do with the salmon, now dead between my teeth the way the humans like their meat. I waited until Gabi looked away from me for a moment, then I swallowed the salmon quickly.

  ‘I am sure that your goldfish,’ I said to her, ‘lived for many long, happy years with you as his friend.’

  ‘Actually, he didn’t.’ Her eyes softened with memory. ‘My goldfish died about a week after I brought him home from the pet store. I was at school when my mom found him floating in the fishbowl. She thought I’d be devastated, and so she went back to the pet store and bought another one to put into the bowl.’

  ‘Really? You did not notice the difference when you returned from school?’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ she sai
d. ‘I clapped my hands together and shouted, “Look, Mommy, my goldfish – he grew!”’

  I joined her in laughing over this memory, and I said to her, ‘I want you to remain here … so much.’

  I floated just beneath her feet, nearly shivering with little ecstasies as she ran her bare soles along the skin of my head and jaws.

  After a while, she said, ‘I will if I can.’

  ‘Do you promise?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And you’ll stay, too?’

  ‘I will.’

  She laughed in relief, then bent down over the water. She kissed my head to set the seal of our little covenant.

  Then she asked me: ‘Where is Helen?’

  ‘Out kayaking. She will return soon.’

  I told her everything of Helen’s bloody past that Helen had told me. Gabi sat in silence of shock, listening to every word of the horrific story. Again, she wept, this time with real teeth cutting through her soft sobs and for many, many moments.

  Finally, she cried down to me, ‘I didn’t know!’

  ‘It is all right,’ I told her.

  ‘I never even guessed!’

  ‘It is all right, Gabi.’ And then for no reason logically connected to the moment, I added, ‘I will protect you.’

  We spoke together for most of the rest of the afternoon in tones of trust and mutual esteem even as I might have confided heartfelt things to my own sister. Around sunset, Helen came into the dome. Gabi jumped up and ran toward her. Helen, usually so reserved, clasped her close with the same sort of desperation that would drive a drowning person to latch onto a life-preserver. Both women burst out crying at the same moment. Helen kissed Gabi’s lips, and caressed her orange curls of hair. She kissed her eyes and the creamy, tear-streaked checks beneath; she pressed her lips to Gabi’s fingers and pulled Gabi’s hand against her face.

  ‘I never knew!’ Gabi sobbed to her as they embraced belly to shaking belly.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Helen said, stroking the back of her head. ‘It’s all right.’

  Finally, they stood back a few steps regarding each other with a strange blending of guilt, gratefulness, and wonder. How they shined in each other’s presence, like two celestial bodies necessary to each other! What would the earth be but a dark, cold desert without the sun to illuminate it? What was the sun without the earth upon which to bestow its radiance and give it purpose?