I Am God

by Giacomo Sartori

  It shouldn’t be so difficult to understand that their lives are thrilling and tender because they come to an end. But no, to deny the facts, to stave off resignation, to fool themselves into thinking they’ll continue to live on even after death, they invent a load of cock and bull. They dream that once they’ve passed (their term) they’ll find themselves in a beautiful park supplied with chaise longues and tropical fruit trees and the luxury hotel treatment. Utter foolishness, as even a child could see. You imbeciles, other animals also kick the bucket, and you can see in their eyes (those that have eyes) that they’re not bursting with joy, that it’s quite a nuisance, and yet they take it well, they just lie down and wait to expire.*

  * We’re talking about millions of billions of ants every year, of billions of billions of billions of microbes every second, not some piddling number. What if every insect, every single earthworm, began to moan and groan when its time came, to issue solemn declarations and beg to be granted the big pardon?

  Humans haven’t learned how to die yet, and worse, the more time goes by, the more they think they’ve understood everything and the less prepared they are. It’s the rare specimen who faces the advent of decomposition with a modicum of dignity and gets it over with quickly. Most abandon what little restraint they have; they pray, they suddenly remember to pray, beseeching me to put them back together if only for a few days, or if there’s no hope at all, to make it easy on them. Even the ones who don’t seem to be in such a bad way can rarely resist the weeping and solemn declarations and crazy vows. They’re ludicrous. Sad sacks.

  ‌Lab Two–Zero

  The lofty biker ascends the stairs three at a time, whips through the fire door on the second floor, slips by the director’s office hermetically sealed in metagenomic thoughts. She arrives in her laboratory that smells, like every laboratory in the world, of chemicals and plastic, says hello to her fellow researchers, who respond with that bleak affability typical of the disciples of genetics. Her purple-pimpled colleague, as soon as he sees her, turns the color of red-hot lava and looks like he’s about to burst into tears. She raises her eyes heavenward and puts on a white coat over her post-punk uniform.

  The tall one’s at work on a project that aims to create (yes) bacterial strains that can produce alcohol from wood waste. They blast helpless microbes with scorpion and porcini mushroom genes hoping to activate an appetite for sawdust.* Her job title (adjunct technical staff) and pay rank might suggest she was hired as unskilled labor, but in fact she’s so good at inventing modifications and calculating results (she’s always been nuts about mathematics) that the director of the laboratory has published eminent scientific papers under his own name. Papers written by her, naturally.

  * The unfortunate bacteria have lived in peace for four billion years reproducing themselves millions of times a day, thus giving birth to billions of individuals. (If some bacterium wanted to organize a Christmas dinner with his closest relatives, even supposing he could track down the names and addresses, he would have to send out billions of billions of billions of invitations.) If there’s something that bugs me (just a figure of speech, obviously), it’s that instead of going to battle with crocodiles or piranhas, creatures that can defend themselves somewhat, that lily-livered species of humans go after bacteria. One more proof, should we need another, of their cowardice.

  Cellulose-digesting bacteria excite her only up to a point, however; she’s keener on microbes that produce electricity. She wrote her PhD thesis on bacteria-powered batteries, and even won one of those scientific prizelets awarded for original ideas considered completely impracticable. And she’s continuing the project on the sly, secretly putting together a network of researchers from various countries who think the idea is promising. She’s convinced it’s just a question of time.

  Mid-afternoon, the unfailingly well-dressed lab director strides in, and uttering a tangle of phrases that hover over the void like unfinished bridges, asks the giantessa where she is with the statistical calculations they spoke of the day before. He studies the floor, his brow just slightly less unlined than usual, his perennial self-satisfied smile bobbing up to the surface like a stubborn corpse. Extracting one earbud, she replies that the results are very interesting indeed and she’ll send them right over by email. She too speaks as if she has a mild stomachache, in their usual style of communication. Or rather, their usual style since one evening six months before when they found themselves alone together because they had to complete (she did; he, for the most part, obstructed) an important trial.

  He, stroking his wondrously relaxed jaw, had asked why didn’t they step out on the balcony and smoke one of her hand-rolled cigarettes. She had knitted her brows slightly because the desire in his tomcat eyes looked somewhat more sexual than nicotinic (not to mention that he doesn’t smoke). But hooking the distal phalange of his little finger in hers and looking him in the eye, she smiled faintly the way she does when going into sex mode. At that point his perfectly shaven and cologned face advanced on hers (although he is the shorter) and she somehow made their lips meet. She put a hand on his fly, squeezing his already erect member. After some tottering and fumbling with buttons and zippers he had tried to penetrate her by shoving her up against the big 15,000-rpm centrifuge, the way they do in the movies.

  Then she sat him on the floor under the plastic beaker collecting distilled water, and mounted him the way she does her bike when she’s in a rush. This for coitus number one. For number two, she knelt and he took her from behind, also on his knees (the height difference here being insignificant). This second time, too, she had no orgasm; it was 2–0, in short. Honestly, I don’t like to watch some things human beings do. But as you can imagine there’s no roof nor wall nor duck blind nor sheet nor wile that stands in the way of a god; unfortunately I must put up with all of it. And then they actually did go out on the balcony of the reagent room to smoke a cigarette. He lit one too, coughing a little.

  The dapper director, who’s a practicing Catholic† with a wife and two daughters at home, trusts that the matter’s been filed in the top-secret drawer; he’s fervently counting on it. For the most part it is only at scientific conferences (which seem to serve primarily that purpose and where the risks are minimal) that he will jump a female colleague, jump her like a rooster in the henhouse. He feels pretty sure that the purple-haired girl is not the sort of nitwit who’s going to preen about the thing in public or even confide in some bosom friend. In spite of the neo-metropolitan get up, her only real heartthrob is scientific research, he reckons, and from the way she fixes him with those far-apart eyes, he doesn’t think she’s upset with him. However, he’s not one hundred percent easy about it. That mummified gentility of his, in short, is fear.

  † It is no secret that those who pontificate and preach are the same who trespass most in the shadowy backwaters of practice; if I had to tote up all the merriment taking place in sacristies and convents over the past thousand years it would take me a decade.

  I watch the narcissist stride athletically back to his office, his behemoth of a desk perfectly clean of any clutter, and can’t help but reflect that men, in their grotesque presumption, consider themselves superior and unique when instead they are clumsy and shapeless, obtuse, sex-crazed‡ and monomaniacal, ready to fall for every sort of superstition and fanaticism, to mutually eradicate one another and commit bestial acts that make your hair stand on end. And if that were not enough, they’re infested with parasites inside and out and with terrible contagious diseases. They’re dangerous, in short. Not to mention quick to putrefy.

  ‡ Merely in order to copulate, those big hairless apes lie to each other and themselves, dissimulate, cheat, squander fortunes, destroy friendships and marriages, bleed themselves dry, murder each other, all the while employing creativity and invention far beyond that applied to their technical progress. If I could begin again I’d endow them with a libido (a term that always reminds me of the name of a rock group) one hundred times more moderate
than what they have, or limit its activity to a brief period each year, as I’ve done with many other species (and therefore, among other things, there would be a lot fewer of them).

  If I were capable of second thoughts (a priori out of the question), the one thing I’d regret would be having created them. Without men, evil would not exist, nor the whole shebang of infamy and atrocities that go with it, and the cosmos would be utterly perfect. No infanticides, no blood feuds, wars, massacres of the innocents, holocausts. If I could do it again (another meaningless expression) I’d recreate the giraffes, the fleas, the walruses, the dinosaurs (poor things, came to a bad end), the salamanders, and I might even throw in some novel items, as always happens when you remake something from scratch and new ideas come to you, but one thing I wouldn’t do is put man back in circulation. I’d leave Noah on the dock. Ban the Man, as the nuclear disarmament people would say.

  Having completed what she was meant to do and also what according to the protocol she wasn’t meant to do, the brainy biker now heads straight home to the former fishmonger’s shop she’s minimally converted into a dwelling, and once inside the door strides straight to the toilet and sits down to pee with her blind cat on her knees. She then empties a tin of rice and tuna into the cat’s dish. For herself, she snaps open (dull thwack) a can of sweet corn, adds some olive oil, half a finely sliced onion, some salted capers, some white raisins, and seated on the floor in front of the television, digs in with a spoon, from time to time biting off some cheese (fontina) from the piece she holds in the other hand. Before retiring to sleep in the large green-tiled fish tank, she watches a ghastly TV show about a beautiful young woman who was supposed to marry an airplane pilot but instead dallies with his ex, a female lifeguard. First she masturbates by kneading the cushion between her legs and then using her fingers (in short, a real eyeful).

  ‌I Am Perfect

  I am God and I am wrapped in silence. A silence consonant with my divine office. A silence that is also a deafening roar, a cacophony of clanging and hissing sometimes unfolding into a heavenly symphony, sometimes just one noise drowning out the other. A silence that is blinding light, a blaze of too many colors, but also perpetual darkness. I’m putting this badly, though, for as you can imagine it is not easy to describe my existence (let’s call it that) in clumsy human language. The language resists, it refuses to admit my transcendence. Languages were made for (wo)man.

  I am God, and I am perfect (and thus there is nothing more untrue than the expression nobody’s perfect). My perfection is uncontestable, it is axiomatic. You might think that in the long run my utter absence of defects, even tiny ones, would grow tedious, especially when there is no great stampede to admire it (and in fact there is no one at all in the vicinity), but that isn’t the case, because perfection entails having a perfect character (none of that rage and cruelty you find in the Bible) as well as an imperfectible—already free of impurity—patience. Perfection is also achieved by perfecting perfection.

  Although this is the first time I’ve expressed myself, I do not stammer on words I’ve never used before, I don’t stumble over complex constructions; the words well up (to employ a hydraulic metaphor) like water from a spring. I merely feel ever so slightly giddy from time to time, as when one is just beginning to fall ill. I am immense, and my immensity must pass through the lexicon’s narrow neck and the obligatory pathways of syntax (resembling the twists and turns of a digestive system). It’s a sensation (as much as that term can mean anything referring to a god) like that experienced by speleologists as they slither forward into the rocky grip of a cave.

  Sometimes I ask myself, why did I create them, human beings? Let me emphasize that it didn’t happen as the Bible asserts (one of the most unreliable and delusional storybooks ever written). I started creating (I no longer remember why), and all of a sudden I was peering at microbes so minute even a divine eye could scarcely make them out, huge, lumbering ruminants, tiny plants, fungi and algae, serpents, cacti, shellfish, gnats. It’s not true that fish appeared and the next day, animals (the next day?); I created and created, and before I knew it there was a huge potpourri of animal and vegetable species. It’s all very well being omniscient, but there are some things that just blow you away.*

  * During creation one is so intent that nothing surprises (it’s a sort of trance); nevertheless I invite you to imagine what it feels like to have a brontosaurus staring at you as if to work out whether he’s seen you somewhere before, and what the hell he must have been up to last night not to remember diddly squat.

  Certainly, as soon as I laid eyes on them I knew what each of these species was called, and how they were made, et cetera et cetera (obviously), but still, I would be lying if I said that in one precise instant I decided to create a creature called x that looked like such and such, and then another called y that looked like so and so, and so on. No, I was taking the inspiration as it came, winging it, as they say. Picasso, too, was amazed to see what came splashing forth from his brush, so you can just imagine just how volcanic my creation was, considering that I am omnipotent. This was the situation (I won’t say chaotic, but confusing, yes) in which, without me having decided anything specific, man came forth. Anyone who imagines a long and meticulous drafting as an architect might do, a craftsman’s patient perfecting and polishing, could not be more mistaken. What is more, that bunkum about in His own image is thoroughly exaggerated, although there is some slight family resemblance; I noticed it myself immediately.

  ‌The Supper of the Crucifician Immolation

  Humans abound, although in comparison with bacteria (for example) they can almost be considered a species on the way to extinction. They teem in all four corners of that little planet that designates itself Earth, so that many regions seen from on high look like colonies of Enterococcus, a condition exacerbated by the pestilential fumes and lights that pollute the night. You might suppose that I watch all the geographic regions equally (divisions in nation-states make little sense to me). But no, I mostly keep an eye on what’s happening in that tatty little Italian boot that (rightly and properly) gobbled up the Papal State in the nineteenth century. Focusing in particular on a large city in the north not very far from a mountain chain famous for its rupestrian beauties. And more in particular, on that strapping blond mademoiselle (blond when not tinted purple), half skinny (on top) and half hefty (below) and intolerably sure of herself. I myself struggle to understand why.

  That afternoon, the bespectacled beanpole, skipping her sacrilegious big game hunt, goes straight home. This time she cooks rice with okra, following a recipe she invents as she goes. She also makes an algae salad with capers and pickles that smell of oyster shells and the Atlantic. When she’s finished she goes to the storeroom with the bayonet window that looks out on the alley of Nigerian prostitutes, takes the door off its hinges and mounts it on two sawhorses ordinarily used to hold up complex stratigraphs of clothing. Over this she throws a colorfully striped tablecloth made from a parachute, the gift of a Swiss athlete with whom she’d had three or four two–zeros.

  These preparations of hers irritate me but I can’t stop watching, I observe her every move, weigh her every sigh. You could call it a maniacal interest if it made any sense in the case of a god to speak of interest, let alone maniacal. You could call it a fixation, which suits me even less. If not an obsession. What’s certain is that nothing like this has happened to me in many billions of years; that’s what floors me. I’ve never felt less divine.

  When her two guests arrive, the lanky microbiologist reaches into a woven plastic bag under the computer station with its tangle of screens and towers and pulls out a handful of crucifixes, stacking them head to foot in a neat pyre in the tiny fireplace. She sets them alight with the help of some pages from an old microelectronics review. Even before the little pyre catches fire she warms her hands over it as if it were winter, and after a moment of hesitation so do her guests, a wee female and her good-looking male companion. It’s June alre
ady, but it’s still raining and summer is a long way off. For a while all three watch the flames dancing among the crucifixes without saying anything.

  If she thinks she’s going to shock me, she’s quite mistaken. I’ve seen far worse: human beings burned at the stake and drawn and quartered, gruesome rapes, steaming torrents of blood, genocides. I find the fanatical geneticist a bit sad, actually—that beaky long face of hers like a highly alert bird. Her and her militant atheist accomplices. Let them rip all the crucifixes off the walls and burn them, these are certainly not the things that count. True, a father doesn’t enjoy seeing images of his son (especially an only son, and deceased young) set on fire, but there’s no point in making a tragedy out of it. There are hundreds of millions of crucifixes around; a dozen more, a dozen less, mean nothing. Anyway, I never much liked the pose in which the poor kid was immortalized: too bombastic, too melodramatic, too human.

  Even supposing that madman really is my son. Truth is, I knew nothing about it until he burst onto the scene and began proclaiming to the four winds of Palestine that he was the Son of God. There have always been droves of nutcases ranting on about such things, sometimes from the top of a date palm tree. Celebrity has a price, as some pontificator said. The difference was that this one could convert a corpse, and so rather than toss him in the dungeons, they got down on their knees, copied down everything he said and didn’t say, bombarded him with questions, followed him everywhere. Unbelievable. Because he really was my son, or because he was better at leading them down the garden path? I confess it’s not a dilemma that keeps me awake at night.*