But I soon came to my senses. The air was real. If it wasn’t real, how could I be breathing? And if the air was real, that meant the upholstery might be real. And if the upholstery might be real, then the entire car might be real. And if the car was real, the road and the beach and the Miocene shark teeth and the nuclear plant might be real.
If I’m god, I thought, then I should be able to shut this power plant down with just a thought—to keep everyone safe. If I’m god, I should be able to just think the right thoughts and put an end to war everywhere. If I’m god, I should be able to walk on water.
I waited in my car until after dark, so I could be alone. Then I found a quiet place on the beach. No one else was there. I walked through the sand and inhaled a whiff of bay water. Not quite freshwater. Not quite seawater. Just a hint of salt. I thought about what I was about to do and giggled.
I realized that if I made an attempt to walk on water, I might be taking my first step toward divinity. But I also knew my parents would have had me committed if they’d known I was contemplating this experiment. I knew it would have looked and sounded insane. But my parents were three hours away. And there was a certain mental texture to ideas many reckoned to be insane that I found…pleasing. What I mean is: insane ideas kind of felt good in my head. They felt better in my head than my parents’ ideas felt. If insanity was so bad, why did it feel so good?
(And, besides, my parents’ ideas were only counted as sane because billions of other people shared them. “Sanity,” as something in and of itself, didn’t really exist. The concept had been created and sustained by consensus. Why should it be considered not only sane, but downright orthodox to believe the old god walked on water, but crazy for me to even test out my own ability to do the same?)
I took a step in.
There was splashing as my feet dropped through the bay’s surface and hit the rock and sand underneath. This made the man from New Harmony, Indiana, seem like a charlatan. I decided I would confront him on this matter. I endeavored to write a letter in which I put all of my cards on the table. I would explain I wasn’t certain he actually existed, and I wasn’t certain the car existed. But I took it on a certain amount of faith that they existed, so I could test the hypothesis, and when I made the attempt to walk on water, I couldn’t, and this made me question everything.
This is what I intended to write. What I ended up writing was the following:
I’M NOT GOD (CAN’T WALK ON WATER)
* * *
I had a great deal more hope after getting the next letter from the future god. He appeared not only to be entertaining the real possibility of His godhood, but also challenging the reality around Him. To date, both of us had restricted ourselves to seven words in each piece of correspondence. This seemed to be the god-to-be’s way of expressing Himself. I felt awkward about the idea of communicating with Him using more than seven words, yet I also felt He was at the stage of needing more in-depth assistance. If I kept my communication to only seven words, I would fail Him by providing Him with insufficient guidance. But if I exceeded seven words with my communication, I risked unintentionally alienating Him by suggesting I was abandoning His lead and simply following my own whim.
This was just the first of many instances in which my responsibilities as hierophant were at odds with my responsibilities as a worshiper. Mine was a precarious position. I was a spiritual figure with a destiny of my own, of course, endowed with powers and perspectives unreachable by even the most imaginative layman. Strictly speaking, the soon-to-be-god could not emerge into full godhood without my assistance. Yet I was mortal. I was a creation, not a Creator. I was constantly walking a line, alternating between instructing Him and submitting to Him.
With regard to the matter of the seven words, I decided to enact a sort of compromise in which I would begin the letter with a seven-word salutation, in deference to the soon-to-be-god’s preference, and then continue on with a great deal more text below such a greeting.
I started the letter this way:
YOU WILL MAKE NEW WATER. BETTER WATER.
I then went into detail, explaining He couldn’t possibly tread on water that had been created by the old, inferior god. The water didn’t yield to Him, because He wasn’t its maker. Most likely, the water resented Him, because it sensed He would one day replace it with a newer, better version. Hence, it could not be counted on to follow commands.
The water was loyal to the dying god, and would maintain that loyalty until that god’s last breath (and possibly even afterward).
No, if He wanted to walk on water, He would first have to learn how to create new oceans. I told Him this was what hierophants were for. I let Him know the history of men such as myself—that we’ve existed throughout the universe, since time immemorial, to help gods learn to be gods. Each soon-to-be god has needed a hierophant to assist Him (and, ultimately, the world around Him) with the transition.
This was also the letter in which I informed Him there were seven tasks of initiation He would need to complete to achieve apotheosis. I did not tell Him what all seven tasks were. I only told Him the first task. Hierophants are forbidden from disclosing all seven tasks, at once, to gods-to-be.
Well, let me rephrase that. To be honest, I cannot swear that all hierophants, over the entire width of space and breadth of time, have been forbidden from disclosing such things. I can only relate my own experience of being forbidden to reveal all seven tasks at once. John the Baptist passed along the rules to me.
I’d been invited to a cornfield on the outskirts of New Harmony to investigate a report of a crop circle, but instead discovered the prophet. His shriveled head was on top of a scarecrow’s body. When he flapped his lips open, no words came out. Only coughing croaks. At least, that’s how it seemed, at first. Turns out he was talking, just very quietly (in whispers that rushed out of his mouth like escaped prisoners in between coughs). He spoke in Aramaic. I’d only understood him because I’d taken Aramaic in divinity school.
“Seven tasks,” he said. “One chosen man plus seven chosen tasks equals one god. He must be told about them only a little at a time. You must tell Him about them. If you disclose them to Him all at once, He may be tempted to rush ahead. He may be tempted to skip steps to reach power more quickly, and then you will have risen a demon instead of a god.”
There were no eyes in his sockets, but I felt like he was staring at me, nonetheless. What could I do but fall to my knees? In divinity school, we discussed the concept of mysterium tremendum—the sense of awe and horror experienced during an encounter with the nameless numinous. Prior to that day, all I knew of this was theory. For all my time engaged in prayer, meditation, fasting and the use of sacred drugs, I’d never before encountered the transcendent in such a way that gooseflesh seemed to erupt from both outside and inside my skin. That day in the cornfield, I did.
I wanted to shout my destiny from the rooftops, just as the Baptist had over two thousand years ago. “I will build a temple to your honor, John. Right here on this property. I’ll buy it from the present owner. You can’t tell by the way I dress, but I have money, you see. I wish to commemorate the time and place in which you passed on to me the mission of assisting a man become god!”
Flakes of dried flesh fell from the head as it scowled. The mouth slackened, giving birth first to a gasp, then to a wail, then to a warning. “You’d do well, hierophant, to beware of my example. I preached the coming of the Messiah. I baptized thousands before baptizing Him, and in doing so I may have made believers but I also made enemies. When you seek out the new god and when you instruct Him in His seven tasks for apotheosis, you should act with stealth and cunning. Let no one know you are the hierophant. Not even after the god you have trained has risen to a place of ascendancy over the old god. You’ll be tempted to boast of your triumph, but you must be aware that you are the weakest link in the chain of divinity. Those resentful about the old god’s fall will seek to take vengeance on you, because you will be far easi
er to find and kill than the new god will be.”
This puzzled me. “I don’t understand. If I’m to orient a new god to His role as ascendant master of this galaxy, then that means I’ll be complicit in the destruction of the old god—presumably, I would think, the god you helped bring to power. Why should I trust a word you say? How do I know you’re not wishing me ill?”
“Because,” the head howled, “this is the way the magick works! The nature of things requires me to play an active role in both a god’s creation and His destruction. Why else do you think I linger so? I must forgo resting in peace until the god I helped usher into power fades away. It will be the same for you, one day. Your loyalty isn’t to the god, it’s to the proper passing of gods, one after another. People like you and I exist to ensure the succession proceeds in as orderly a manner as possible.”
I felt a churning in my stomach and a chill on my soul. From early childhood, I knew I had been set apart for a holy mission. My work was to be that of the spirit. And yet, here I was, engaged in conversation with one of the most famous prophets of all time, and I felt not envy or collegiality but rather despair and disgust. I tried to shove thoughts out of my head but they wouldn’t budge. I became obsessed with the notion that, one day two thousand years from now, I would be in John’s place. I would be a tired, lingering spirit waiting for the death of a tired, lingering god. I felt blessed and damned all at once. I croaked something about understanding and obeying and accepting my lot in the scheme of things.
Then he elaborated on the Seven Tasks. Shivers ran repeatedly down my spine as the Baptist passed down to me his knowledge of the Sevenfold Path to Godhood. A burning sensation accompanied the Words as they passed from my ears to my brain. The sensation grew sharper, hotter, fiercer until in the end I could no longer look at John. My head grew heavy under the weight of the new knowledge that inhabited it, and I had no choice but to leave the place, trembling.
I went home, weeping every mile of the drive, and wrote my letter—the one in which I instructed the god-to-be of His first task, the creation of a man, out of nothing, using only the force of His mind.
* * *
I walked into my dorm room and smelled the odor of Arihiro’s afternoon delight wafting through the air: the tangy scent of sex mixed together with the sour stench of body odor, the piercing smell of perfume, and…something else. Something smelling like plastic melting in a microwave.
Arihiro was on the floor, in the corner, smoking something out of a glass pipe. There was a woman with him. She looked as frail as a Holocaust victim. She was missing teeth and had dry, bleached-blonde hair that reminded me of straw. Arihiro kept running his fingers through it. I was surprised it didn’t rustle when it moved. She had a tattoo of a rose on the tiny breast Arihiro was groping, and the ink’s colors had long ago begun to fade into her faked-tan skin. She looked older than us.
She didn’t belong on campus. She looked like a townie. The only way I imagined her even knowing how to get onto campus was if she held some sort of menial job with the cafeteria or in janitorial services. Maybe that’s how Arihiro had found her. Or maybe he went out to the local strip club. They say the women there are whores.
I felt my hands curl into fists and my pulse begin to pound in my temples. Arihiro giggled and inhaled from the pipe. “That sucks,” he said. “That sucks so bad.”
I turned around, walked out, and slammed the door. I jogged to the bathroom and vomited. I didn’t bother flushing it. That’s when I decided to walk down to the post office to see if the hierophant’s letter had arrived. Never had I felt more relieved to see the crazy, crinkled envelope awaiting me. I let my hand linger over the seal for a moment, trembled with excitement, and tore it open. I read it right there in the lobby.
The letter explained why I hadn’t been able to walk on water. The water, it seemed, was Christ’s water. Made by him, and therefore owned by him. Like a slave, it did his bidding. If the hierophant knew what he was talking about, then this answered several questions. For example, it suggested there was something to the idea of predestination. If all the currently existing matter and energy was owned by the reigning god, if everything was simply the reigning god’s chattel, then free will was an illusion. I’d suspected this was true for a very long time. When I was a junior in high school, I made the naïve mistake of trying to share this discovery with my parents. I tried telling them we were “like automatons.” But they took it literally. Mom told the doctor I thought “everyone was robots,” and I ended up getting shipped off to Restful Meadows for a week. (The name was an utter crock, by the way. They had real schizophrenics there who screamed and screamed until someone gave them a shot, rendering the place about as “restful” as an abattoir. And if there was ever a meadow within five miles of the place, it had long ago been developed into a strip mall.)
I wondered, for a moment, if the hierophant had ever spent time at a place like Restful Meadows. I wondered, for a moment, if Christ would have been put away in a place like Restful Meadows if they’d had them around when he was starting out as god. Then I stopped wondering about Restful Meadows, because the memories of the place began to make me glum.
The hierophant hadn’t written to make me glum. He’d written to put me on the path to godhood. He told me that if I wanted to walk on water, I needed to create some of my own. I needed to create whole new oceans. The prospect both daunted and enthused me.
But then the hierophant’s tone abruptly changed. He stopped talking about oceans and started talking about Seven Tasks I must complete to become a god. He said he could not tell me what all the tasks were, he could only tell me the first.
“Using only Your mind, make a man,” the hierophant had written. “When You have done this, send me a letter telling me how You made him and what he is like. Feel free to draw a sketch or take a photograph.”
I thought about where I should perform this first task. I didn’t care to return to my dorm room just now. Judging by Arihiro’s groping of the woman’s breast and the smile on his face, I guessed he was likely going to be rutting atop her again. So I drove out to Calvert Cliffs. This was a weekday in the middle of September, just around sunset. There might still have been visitors there, of course, but they would’ve been few and far between. I was able to find a stretch of sand to call my own, a place where I could attempt the first task without being disturbed. (“To call my own”—hilarious, now that I think about it. The sand was spoken for thousands of years ago. It belonged to Christ.)
How could I be sure it wasn’t watching me? How could I be certain that each grain of sand at my feet, each puffy cloud in the sky, each fish flopping around in the bay, wasn’t a spy for Christ? How could I stop them from noticing me? The hierophant’s notion of the chattel-like nature of reality changed everything. I wasn’t yet sure that I bought it hook, line, and sinker. But, without a doubt, this correspondence intrigued me (as, I think, it should ideally intrigue any liberal arts student who is truly committed to the principle of free inquiry; that is to say, those liberal arts students more interested in the pursuit of knowledge than the pursuit of redneck pussy).
Indeed, the ongoing correspondence with the hierophant wasn’t at odds with my education; to the contrary, it was a logical extension of it. It was like my correspondence with the hierophant was a graduate-level special research project on the nature of reality. Why should I bother focusing on tedious introductory survey courses when I had something far more fascinating demanding my attention?
I decided to err on the side of safety. If I had any words to say while engaged in the act of creation, I would mumble them softly rather than scream them. In the event there were any wild gestures I had to make, I would inhibit them to the degree possible. And, just for good measure, I decided to seek out the same quiet stretch of beach as I’d gone to before. (That place on the beach where the nuclear plant’s cooling towers loomed most inescapably on the horizon; likely the most deserted stretch of beach because people visiting Calvert
Cliffs couldn’t make sense of the ugly juxtaposition of nature and nuclear power). I was visiting this beach for the quiet, though, not the scenery. I had no problem with such scenery. After all, if the hierophant was right, the nuclear power plant wasn’t my nuclear power plant. It, like everything else, belonged to the old god. If the hierophant was right, I could change things when I came into power. Put a forest where the cooling towers were, for example.
I decided to sit on a fallen log on the shore and watch the tide wash over the sand. The sour-salt scent of the bay hit my nostrils and a breeze tousled my hair like a condescending father. I began to wonder if I would have any use at all for tides or for beaches once I took over. This initiated another line of thought: when I became god, would I remake everything using the present galaxy as raw materials, or would I simply obliterate the world and start over from scratch?
The tide surged onto the shore, dampening my jeans and underwear and making my perch even more precarious than it had been when I first sat down. As the foamy surf lurched back out to the bay, I grabbed a handful of wet sand and began to wonder if I could make a man out of it. In some ways, I liked the idea of taking Christ’s sand and Christ’s shore and commandeering them for my own purposes. It seemed a little mean-spirited, like adding insult to injury. I would not only depose the old god, I’d reshape his crude matter in all sorts of new ways just to show how unimaginative he’d been. I’d show him just how gloriously strange a world I could make, using the very same materials he had at his disposal.
I grasped the tide-soaked sand in my left hand and looked down at the hierophant’s letter I held in my right. I read the pertinent line:
USING ONLY YOUR MIND, MAKE A MAN.
I Am the New God Page 2