I began to parse this commandment for additional clarity. What, exactly, did the hierophant mean by “man?” Did he mean my creature needed to be male, complete with some sort of phallus? Did he mean it would need to have two arms, two legs, a head, eyes, nose, and mouth? If so, this seemed to be an unfair constraint on my freedom. If I were to become a god, then shouldn’t I have the right to use my imagination to depart from the design of my predecessor?
But these were merely aesthetic considerations. Instead of fretting about whether my creature must have a head, I shifted my focus to what sort of brain should inhabit that head. Or, to be more precise, what sorts of thoughts should inhabit that brain.
I closed my eyes and turned to the notion of consciousness. By almost any layman’s definition, mankind was an animal set apart from the rest of nature by its particular form of consciousness. Humanity had an awareness of past, present, and future. Each human had an awareness of its own demise.
But there were exceptions. Daniel, for example. I don’t want to sound like I’m insulting my own brother, but it always seemed to me as though he was—mentally—more akin to a squirrel or a deer than a man. I could tell he had thoughts—or at least, mental processes. But I doubt he had any real notion of the future, aside from a concern about when his next meal was coming.
In a lot of ways, having Daniel as a brother was a burden. But as I sat there on the beach, I realized his existence gave me a clue in how to approach the hierophant’s challenge. I realized, at that point, that I could create a man wholly lacking in consciousness. (There were, after all, other people like Daniel. And there were also people afflicted with various brain maladies who lingered in persistent vegetative states. They were human, and yet they lacked consciousness. Thus humanity could exist without consciousness.) I could accomplish the hierophant’s first task in quite a simple way by going this route, as the creation of consciousness was likely the most complex aspect of creation. By omitting consciousness from my creation, I would be saving myself a step. It would be quicker. Easier.
At the same time, I would be improving upon mankind, as created by the old god. After all, consciousness seemed more of a curse than a gift. Arihiro Takahashi possessed consciousness in abundance—consciousness capable of contemplating physics—and yet he seemed hell-bent on immolating that consciousness in one pipe or another. My parents had consciousness, but abdicated its higher properties to the old god and his minions. My classmates had consciousness, but focused it on the task of obtaining access to copulation. The old god had been careless in granting his creations a piece of himself. Consciousness was rightly only the province of gods and hierophants.
I would fix the mistake.
I crept farther inland to avoid being fully immersed in the rising tide. I moved to the very edge of where the bay had snuck in. The sand was moist and workable. There were oyster shells and tiny, smooth pebbles bearing fossil impressions of ancient plants and the animals that had slithered about this place in eons past.
Fancying the rock and shell to be something akin to bone and the mud to be something akin to flesh, I sculpted my first man. I gave him a mouth, but no tongue. I gave him eyes (black pebbles), a nose, and ears (tiny half-shells). I gave him short, squat arms and legs (if I tried to make him as tall as me, he would have toppled over; no, this man stood only one foot tall). I made his head flat on top so that he resembled Frankenstein’s monster. I made him this way to render it impossible for him to ever evolve a brain sufficient to achieve consciousness.
And when I was done, I looked down at the being, down into his eyes. He didn’t look back. I suspect he didn’t much care for being brought into existence. I couldn’t blame him. But everything I knew about becoming a god I’d learned from the hierophant. I had no recourse but to create. That was the hideous gauntlet that had been thrown down. If I wanted to explore the possibility of my godhood, I had no choice but to accept the challenge.
The tide began to surge farther inland, bringing with it foam and plastic debris from some boater’s recent excursion: Solo cups somehow still reeking of rum. The tide nibbled at the toes of my creature with one wave, and then—with a sudden lurch inland—swept up and over it, knocking loose its ears and disfiguring it to such an extent it no longer looked bipedal. It now looked like a damp, froglike thing (albeit, adorned with a human face) hunching down on its appendages rather than standing on them.
I took this incident with the tide as confirmation that the old god lived on borrowed time, and knew it. He knew it, and envied me my youth. Used his petty resources to deform my creation. I then vowed I would not allow him to prevail. I took what was left of my creature into my hands, and walked back to the car (that plastic, unreal-feeling car with its stuffy coffinlike air). I placed my creature on the passenger seat and noticed it had lost an eye during the walk from the shore to the parking lot. It had also become less defined while in my hands...began to look less like a being at all and more like a clump of wet sand.
I felt uneasy and realized two girls about my age were in a car on the other side of the parking lot, staring at me. St. Edwards was a small campus (fewer than 1,500 students) and I thought I recognized them as girlfriends of two of the lacrosse players. They wore snug cut-off shorts that gave boast to the availability of their baby-making factories and T-shirts that gave boast to their baby-suckling apparatuses. To an average guy my age, they were desirable. But I knew they were nothing more than carbon-based automatons (for all I knew, dispatched here by the old god to stir my own reproductive urges and distract me from the task at hand).
I gritted my teeth, trying to not lose my cool. I wasn’t yet ready to announce my imminent godhood. I was keeping everything secret. I vowed I would ignore them.
But then I heard the laugh. That high-pitched kind of laugh you expect to come out of carbon-based sperm receptacles when they’re trying to be alluring.
I grabbed the knob, cranked it to lower my window and told them, in my loudest possible voice, just what they were. “Automatons,” I screamed. “Automatons!” This seemed only to make them laugh louder. I raised my window, squealed my wheels, and drove off.
I decided this would be the new tact I would take in life. I’d known back in high school that humanity was nothing but automatons, but I’d been cowered into submission by my stay at Restful Meadows. The hierophant’s letters freed me; enabled me to act boldly. Allowed me to call a spade a spade.
The old god had a firm grip on the control panel of reality, I would readily admit that much. He was the one who made the tide surge forward to deform my creation. But, more importantly, the old god also had a firm grip on the perception of reality. Well...then again, maybe his grip wasn’t all that firm. Maybe, in fact, he had less control over the perception of reality than he did over reality itself.
After all, drugs had enabled alternate perception of reality for well over a thousand years, probably more.
So it occurred to me that I would focus my initial attack on challenging the old god’s mastery over the perception of reality. Then I would proceed to challenge his mastery over reality itself. It wasn’t long after I armed myself with this plan that I began to implement it. I made a conscious effort to stop looking at the world as the old god planned for me to look at it. That’s the first time I was able to look at the creature in the passenger seat and see him as he really was—not as an amalgamation of mud, shell, and rock but as flesh and fat and bone. Not as a tiny, half-man-like, half-toad-like effigy but as a tiny, half-man-like, half-toad-like creature with breath and the capacity to move—if it felt so motivated.
I stroked my creature’s rubbery brown skin and it made a cooing, purring sound. “Welcome to existence, my little Hop-frog.” And that became its name.
I intentionally drove slowly on the way back to my dorm. After my act of creation, I had lots of questions to consider. I knew Hop-frog lived and breathed, but Arihiro might see him as just a pile of sand and shells. He was still under the thrall of the old go
d’s definition of reality. As I began to come into my own as the new god, I would need to help him see things the way I saw them. I would not only have to do this with Arihiro, but also with billions of others of his kind. (Of course, one way around all this would be to simply eradicate all of humanity like so many ants crashing my picnic; another way would be to keep the humans themselves, but eradicate all human consciousness when I came into my full godhood. If there was no consciousness, then there would be no way for that consciousness to be tricked into still believing in the old god and his version of reality even after I’d replaced him.)
All of this was complicated business.
I considered the ethics of the situation. I wondered if it might not be better to try to convince Arihiro to accept the reality of Hop-frog’s existence by persuasion, rather than by force. Part of me didn’t think this would even be possible, due to the language barrier. But with a god, all things are possible.
As I drove through the dusk, I felt the spying eyes of the Man in the Moon glowering down at me. He had to know what was going on with me (of course he knew, the old god would have had to manipulate the moon as a way to manipulate the tides earlier when he had disfigured Hop-frog.) I looked up at the first evening stars. I began to see them for what they were—not masses of hot gas out in distant space. Not masses of anything, in reality. I came, at that time, to realize the stars were nothing more than tiny little pinprick holes that had been poked in the tarp of night. Holes from which the bright light of heaven shown forth. Holes out of which a certain old-you-know-who gawked to spy on me.
I cranked down the window and thrust my left hand out. I gave the old god the middle finger. “Gaunt god, haunt god!” I screamed. I kept the window down so the old god could hear me. He already knew I was coming for him. Was there really any need for subtlety at this point? Was subtlety even my style? Was subtlety even befitting a god?
I turned on the car radio. Cranked up the volume as high as it could go. I typically didn’t care for any noise from the outside world to corrupt my thoughts. I’d always felt apart from the world, and felt its noise to be little more than pollution. But that night, I felt like indulging in a celebration. The song was a sad little ditty. I laughed when I heard it. I considered it a funeral dirge for the old god’s reign. “Close my, close my, close my eyes,” the singers sighed. Then later, with a bit more force, they crooned, “Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies...oh, no, no you can’t disguise.”
I giggled so hard my eyes teared up. I screamed out the window for the old god and all of his creation to hear me. “No, you dying fucker, you can’t disguise! Your creatures won’t be seeing the world as you’ve disguised it anymore. Not any longer! My reality is ascending! Not yours! Mine!” I regretted there weren’t any other cars on the road. The old god must have arranged it so that there would be no additional traffic in my vicinity, so that his minions wouldn’t hear my shout of triumph. Fucking weakling.
When I arrived back at the dorm, one of the lacrosse players had his stereo cranked up, playing some nonsense song with the refrain “You’ve got to fight / for your right / to party” sung by some white kids who thought they were rappers. It didn’t have a bunch of heavy bass, but with it turned up as loud as it was, it got on my nerves. I could tell it got on Hop-frog’s nerves, too. It made poor Hop-frog cringe. I was glad to get inside my room. At least the thick metal door dulled the sound.
Arihiro was passed out amidst a tangle of cum-stained sheets. The smell of sex and drugs still polluted the air. He looked so vulnerable there. Hop-frog, on the other hand, looked like it was perking up. It moved its head back and forth and started to wobble in my grasp. It wanted down. I think it wanted to say hi to Arihiro.
I put my creature on his bed and it started to half hop, half scurry toward my passed-out roomie. Its long neck craned first to one side and then to the other as it examined him. It breathed in shallow little puffs that lifted his sweaty black hair off his forehead. Then it climbed on top of him.
Arihiro stirred. His eyelids fluttered. I just sort of stood over him and Hop-frog, actually. I began to feel my pulse along my neck and in my ears. I realized my palms were sweating. This would be my first chance to see how a creature from the old god’s reality would interact with a creation from my reality.
A look of disgust crept onto Arihiro’s face, crinkling his nose and making his thin lips snarl. I felt a smile begin to trace a path across my face.
“Fuck you,” he said. (Confirming, for the first time, that he was in possession of a vaster vocabulary than I’d been led to believe). “Fucking sand, Greg. Fucking sand!” That’s when he reached toward Hop-frog. I winced. Arihiro grabbed Hop-frog by the throat, and the creature let out a choking sound. Then he ripped the human neck away from the froglike body, and there was a high-pitched warble that rose rage in my blood. Arihiro tore into my creation like a savage lion tearing into a gazelle.
I lunged forward and tried grabbing Hop-frog away from him, but Arihiro tossed the remaining parts all over the room like so much confetti. He was still bleary-eyed. It seemed to me that he was coming down off his high. I smacked him. He pushed me. I was an inch or two taller than him and must’ve outweighed him by fifty pounds, so I didn’t budge. I smacked him again, harder. Then I tackled him. Then I punched him.
“My reality,” I said. I kept walloping him in the face, over and over. I knew I had to get him in the head. Disorient him. “My reality, not the old god’s, mine.”
I looked down and sensed Arihiro actually feared me. His eyes had gotten wide, his brow raised, his mouth hung slack-jawed.
This is how I learned that a god sometimes needs to use physical punishment to get attention. Arihiro was, in many ways, no different than much of the rest of the human race. All disrespect and backtalk until a god brought down the iron fist. After I’d gotten a few licks in, Arihiro’s gut started to spasm and he dry-heaved. It was a whiny, insistent little sound. I laughed, then brought my knee down on his belly. Gray vomit oozed out of his mouth. A fitting metaphor, I thought; for Arihiro reminded me of nothing so much as a kind of bipedal, sentient vomit that had issued forth from the old god’s diseased gullet.
He saw the world the wrong way and, because of that, killed my Hop-frog. This wouldn’t do. It was at this point in the evening that I remembered a key passage out of the old god’s scriptures. And if your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell.
That’s when I grabbed Arihiro’s corkscrew. While he was on his knees, leaning forward, spilling the last pool of bile on the cheap area rug, I ran over to him, grabbed his chin, yanked it upward, and brought the twisting protrusion of the corkscrew down into his dark pupil.
The music outside the door came to a rest, and for a moment the only sound I could hear in the entire hall was Arihiro shrieking. Then the white rappers started to croon a ditty about a brass monkey, and the lacrosse players started to sing along, and my roommate’s cries were once again drowned out. That’s when I plunged the corkscrew into the second eye.
The old god had constructed the human eye in such a way that it was difficult to dislodge. There were many thin strands of flesh that held each orb in place. I had to sever them before the job could be done completely—no easy task. A lesser god would have been satisfied with simply mutilating Arihiro’s eyes, grounding the eyes up with sufficient force to ensure they would never enable sight of the old god’s reality ever again. That would have been justice.
But it would not have been mercy.
Mercy demanded I not merely corrupt the old eyes, but that I also replace them with better eyes (in the same way I would eventually have to replace the old oceans with new ones). And so I severed every nerve and ligament connecting the orb to the muscles of the face. The corkscrew was an imperfect tool for this, but I wasn’t able to use a better tool until after Arihiro passed out. Then I fetched his scissors and
went to work on him, like the divine surgeon I was.
There was blood, but it was the blood of sacrifice. Arihiro’s old eyes had to go to make room for new ones. There was blood, but it was the blood of divine vengeance. He had eviscerated my innocent creation. A god could not let such a blasphemy go unpunished.
I looked at the pieces of my Hop-frog, littering Arihiro’s bed and the surrounding floor. Parts of him had even ended up on the wall. I had two tasks before me: I had to heal Hop-frog from his injuries—remake him. Then I had to give Arihiro new eyes.
I started with Hop-frog. He had been shredded into many tiny pieces. Therefore, I was unable to reassemble all of him. The logistics of the moment forced me to render his new incarnation in the shape of a sphere. I found Hop-frog’s own, single, dislodged eye and placed it in the center of his ball-shaped body. I smiled. In his new shape, Hop-frog reminded me of one of the monsters (“The Beholder”) from Dungeons and Dragons. I made sure to give him a mouth.
After healing (or, if you will, resurrecting) my creation, I spotted the two small shells I’d used to make Hop-frog’s ears. I thought about how best to use them. I inserted one under each of Arihiro’s eyelids, as though they were super-hard, opaque contact lenses. “New eyes,” I declared, “to see beyond the disguise.”
Arihiro grunted. His arms started to spasm. He seemed to be coming to. I held Hop-frog up in front of him. “Now, tell me what you see.”
He whispered a response in Japanese.
I slapped him.
“That’s not the language of your god! In English! Or do I need to give you a new tongue, too?”
He passed out again. I took a deep breath and considered my options. Perhaps he needed to be punished. But how? I thought about killing him. I had a number of pills prescribed for me by the doctor back home. I considered pouring them all down Arihiro’s throat and watching what happened. Surely, death by overdose would have been more merciful than simply stabbing him with the screwdriver we’d used to assemble his bookshelf. And, as the hierophant had told me, I was to become a vengeful god, but not a god without mercy.
I Am the New God Page 3