I Am God

by Giacomo Sartori

  † The original camper (back in the days of Ms. Einstein’s mother, there had only been that) had been absorbed into an eclectic heap of discarded materials, like a small fish trapped in the stomach of a bigger one.

  Under the porthole that gives onto the chicken coop (home to one lame and mangy duck) there’s an altar decorated with a string of colored lights like the ones you hang on a Christmas tree. Below the statue of a fat man bared to the waist sits an offering of overripe bananas and a pear in the final stages of putrefaction surrounded by a halo of happy, buzzing fruit flies. Thank heavens that slimy mess isn’t addressed to me, I say to myself. After years of ingesting psychedelics, her mother’s friend is now the follower of an orientalist-leaning cult. Brain fried by long sessions of transcendental meditation, he’s convinced that his lady friend has been reborn in India. Or rather, in his delirium she was first a red and yellow butterfly, and now (soul transposed with the ease with which you might move into a more comfortable apartment) she’s a woman with a red dot in the middle of her forehead. He has no doubts whatsoever, and even claims he sees her from time to time. It’s precisely to avoid listening to this lunacy that Ms. Einstein would rather not talk (and who could disagree with her?) but just sip her beer in silence.

  As twilight fades to night he smokes another joint and she drinks a second beer and devotes her attention to the addled canine sex maniac, to whom she’s very partial. The animals each have their own seat on some chair or cushion, for this place belongs to them above all. They’re a bit puzzled, though, that food-wise nothing is happening, and seized by that restlessness that precedes a meal. Why aren’t these two amiable bipeds preparing something for us to chow down? they wonder (I can also read animal thoughts). Why aren’t they talking to each other the way humans do? When it’s pitch dark, she shakes her purple braids and bids goodbye to that derelict creature she calls father. A man who pays the rent by watering the garden and cleaning the pool for the ex-Communist wholesaler of organic bananas.

  Mounting her bike now, she heads back into town.

  ‌The Night of the Horny Toads

  The following Saturday around noon Casanova telephones the beanpole and, sounding distracted, proposes they meet for a drink that evening. She says she’d like that very much but she already has plans to meet up with his companion to save the besotted toads. The wind whistles right out of his sails; it seems that his wee friend has already contacted this girl (who’s been monopolizing his brain for three days) and co-opted her in that horny toad soap opera. He hadn’t expected a move of this kind. To gain time, he clears his throat and stammers out something unintelligible. Had his girlfriend divined something and deliberately tried to cross him? It doesn’t seem very likely, but he can’t dismiss that hypothesis. He’s struggling to regain his cocksure good cheer, and ends up telling her he’ll come along too; he’s crazy about anurous amphibians.

  The beanpole shows up on her motorbike at the dirt lot where they’ve arranged to meet. It’s pitch dark and many toad-saviors are already milling around, each with a light beam projecting from their heads. The iguana-lover, she too wearing a miner’s helmet, explains why they’ve assembled: every year at this time the toads descend from the woods toward the lake on their ancestral path to reproduction, and come smack up against a road cutting across their way. It’s not even a heavily trafficked road, yet every time a ruthless toad-slaughter takes place. Until the corrupt politicians get their act together and build some tunnels under the asphalt, the only solution is to flag down the cars and give the toads a hand.

  The lofty geneticist really likes the tiny zoologist’s joyous energy, her calm dedication (playful, weightless, and unpredictable as a leaf in the wind). It’s clear that she’s absolutely at ease here—with that delicious woodsy smell, the darkness swarming with animals and nocturnal insects—it’s her natural habitat, you might say. And from what she can see, all these people here look quite pleasant, people accustomed to doing good deeds. It occurs to her that maybe her lab isn’t the greatest place in the world, with those emaciated, semi-depressed colleagues. She’s used to electronic interactions, not encounters with bodies that exude all sorts of scents, and gentle exhalations that lightly brush a person’s cheek.

  At some point Don Giovanni himself materializes out of the darkness and gives her a hug, eyes down in a pretense of shyness. In truth, he’s worried that in this pitch-black atmosphere his nonchalant charms may not be as effective as in a well-lit café with comfortable seating. And maybe a little concerned that this peculiar young lady may blab to his girlfriend about his phone call: a worry that makes her vaguely shadowy air seem even more mysterious and fascinating. Meanwhile, she’s so taken by this throng of affable militants that she completely forgot he was coming. To make up for it, she returns his embrace a little too energetically.

  They take up their positions along the paved road and, her genetic acumen at work, our brainy scientist immediately notes that the wave of toads is in no way trying to dodge the cars. Programmed hundreds of millions of years before the first automobile, they’re instead mesmerized by the headlights, probably thinking they see pairs of giant fireflies preparing to mate.*

  * As usual I’m presenting what I know for a fact as merely hypothetical, the way writers do to avoid looking too sure of themselves. Not a very brilliant solution, but it’s what they teach in “creative writing.”

  Decked out with a lamp on her brow and a vest with reflector strips, she lends the others a hand, collecting the toads and stacking them neatly in the bucket she’s been handed. When it’s nearly full she gently empties it on the valley side of the road. Frequently, though, the dimwit drivers don’t understand, or pretend not to understand, and refuse to be guided zigzag down the road to avoid hitting those nasty little varmints (everyone’s free to have an opinion, God above all). Due to a pileup of the pulped brutes, stretches of the asphalt are spread with a layer of slippery mucilage, and the cars are skidding and sliding as if on ice.

  But the tiny iguana-hugger has taken stock of the problem, and now seizes control of the situation. They will need to organize an alternating one-way traffic plan, she persuades the others. The two volunteers at either end of the descent must keep in phone contact, and those in between will quickly remove the toads from the road surface. Along the stretch bordered by a high wall, where most of the beasts are being mauled (their saviors screaming bloody murder), she makes the drivers slow to a crawl. She knows how to deliver an order and can be brusque when necessary, but they all obey her happily because her voice is clear as a bell and utterly free of authoritarian animus. Although—but perhaps this is just my impression—she’s ever so slightly whiny, à la Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

  The lanky one’s up at the top of the critical stretch of road and she’s happy, certain to be doing something genuinely useful. She likes taking the toads in hand and placing them on the valley side, likes running to rescue the suicidal ones, likes clapping her hands triumphantly to speed the laggards along. Her long and not unfleshy legs sprint from one side of the road to the other, she bellows at the weary amphibians, terrorizes the drivers going too fast, stands in the middle of the road to make them slow down. Don Giovanni is posted near her, his face all crumpled up; he handles the toads as if they were dog droppings. Privately (I can tell you with no fear I’m mistaken) he thinks these creatures have survived long enough and it would be no tragedy if they became extinct. But he means to stay by her side and he’s carrying out the mission, not without a stream of witticisms: he imitates toad calls, makes toad speeches, sings arias in toad voices. She laughs. Great mathematical skills do not a sagacious person make.

  As always I can’t stop staring at the damn girl: I watch her as she takes the toads into her long hands as if they were fluffy kittens, I watch her warm to the hunk, not giving him much rope but feeding as necessary his testosteronic amour propre. I imagine—although the verb imagine doesn’t begin to convey in what detail I see the scene—the coitus that�
�s coming. A three-three, I’m sure of it (I know, that’s not an appropriate expression for a divinity, but it fits). I try to think of something else, to remove myself from the situation. But I can’t take my eyes off her. I see her, and above all, I see what happens next.

  Were I a little less tolerant and magnanimous, more like what those hoary old scriveners depict in the Old Testament, I’d have her struck by a passing automobile, fall backward to hit her head hard against the pavement, whack! a tiny trickle of blood, and the problem would be resolved. Race to Hospital to Save Animal-Rights Volunteer in Vain, the local papers would report. The young woman was deceased before reaching the emergency room. Finally, I’d detach my gaze from the Earth (there’s only a thin film of real earth down there) and for a while I’d direct my attention to stars and galaxies. You can thank your lucky stars I’m nothing like the cruel God of the Book of Job, or she’d be done for.

  ‌Salving Ecologist Consciences

  Theory of evolution or no theory of evolution, human beings take it for granted that I hold them above other animals, that I consider them superior. When in fact for me, whether they are humans, walruses, or sardines makes not a whit of difference. When a man takes a dive I certainly don’t grieve more than when, shall we say, a microbe or a turnip bites the dust. To tell the truth, in many ways I prefer turnips; at least they remain silent and like many other cruciferous greens have a genuine vegetable dignity. Not to mention the large marine mammals, to which I’m deeply attached. How could anyone imagine I would prefer the lowest of humans to a nice walrus? That’s just crazy.

  Every day (wo)men pursue the relentless genocide of animal and vegetable species they’ve been carrying out for some time now, every day they trample a bit more of what they call their environment (as if it had been made for them!), every day they use their cunning, I wouldn’t call it intelligence, to scrape the bottom of the barrel of resources, with the idea that anything that comes in handy has been reserved for their exclusive use. By now their frenzy has become fury; they are literally destroying the wee planet to which they’re attached by gravity. Unlike bacterial colonies that proceed in silent dignity toward death, drowning in their own excrement, humans do everything they can to make sure the end will come in the most chaotic, horrific way possible.

  What’s especially chilling about them is their dogged and fanatical materialism. They direct all their mental and physical energies (not insignificant despite their mediocre longevity) to squandering and dissipating everything under the sun, unable to rest until they’ve consummated their part of the damage. The only thing they can agree on is the need to provoke as many catastrophes as possible. Unlike, for example, ants and bees and other social species, they’ve never shown much solidarity, and every year less. I’m no hard-line conservative, mind you, but I see no reason to wreck and demolish everything.

  Most of the so-called environmentalists—and this is something I want to emphasize—are even worse: they not only think they are superior to the animals, but better than their species-mates who mistreat so-called nature. They’re convinced that their speeches and spiels help save the globe from catastrophe, that they themselves are doers of good. They too profit from the coming dilapidation of all things, they too live like nabobs while passing their time lecturing everyone else. They seem to think humanity can keep up a five-star hotel lifestyle without causing any damage. All they need to do is use biodegradable detergents, separate the household waste and put a solar panel on the roof to solve the problem. They want to have their cake and eat it too. As they say.

  It did occur to me right from Day One that a single species out of the many might take the upper hand and subjugate the others. To tell the truth, I thought it would be the lions, or the scorpions, or one of the fighting ants. I wouldn’t have bet a nickel on them, those apes playing the smart-asses. Honestly, I thought extinction was their fate: delicate as they are, them and their squidgy, amorphous pups that look like they’re made of mozzarella. Instead, they used that Jesuitical guile of theirs to compensate for being vulnerable, and then just hung in there until they had taken down all their enemies including some who were a lot more powerful, leaving nothing but scorched earth behind them. It took them a while, but now they’ve established their dictatorship and they think it’s just how things are. Only, they still need to salve their consciences, and so they’re always signing petitions to save whales, Asian tigers, tropical forests, etc., etc.

  ‌Big Hands All Over the Place

  God is not the sleepy old fart that many believers imagine—let’s get that straight. He likes to keep up with what’s going on in the cosmos, he intervenes when he needs to, although intervention doesn’t necessarily mean throwing a giant tantrum or staging a Biblical-scale massacre. There are also moments (and these can go on for several million years) during which he just loafs around in his (as it were) slippers. Mostly when nothing much is happening, when the stars are living out their adamantine life cycles, the galaxies evolving as galaxies will, and even on the subatomic level all is going according to plan. When trying hard as I might to come up with something to do, I can think of nothing that can’t be done tomorrow. I won’t say I sleep, a god never sleeps, but my condition isn’t much different from that of a bear in hibernation, or a brumating snake. Let’s just say I take things easy.

  But then, bang! everything shifts and suddenly I have a thousand pestiferous problems to resolve, millions of things to look after. Rush over here, race over there, put out that, dam up this, patch up the other: I can barely keep on top of it all. And things have gotten distinctly worse since that appalling bungler homo sapiens started making all kinds of trouble: war, epidemics, slaughter, genocide, annihilation. Not only collective disasters but a myriad of individual emergencies. Women starving to death, children mistreated, children put in terrible danger and subjected to agonizing torture. Seven billion individuals, no matter how irresponsible they are, are still seven billion in need of a hand. Sometimes I feel more like a social worker than God. Hardly that high-handed hothead the Bible talks about.

  This time, however, there’s no holocaust, no fatal siege where the victims have run out of water and their throats burn dry with thirst and fear. There’s just a girl whose sexual mores leave something to be desired, a girl who can’t stop making herself available. I’m lost here; I can’t tear my eyes away from her and I can’t understand why. I never dreamed I’d find myself in a mess like this. If it weren’t a state as far as possible from divine, in fact quite incompatible with it, I’d say I’m confused.

  Around midnight there aren’t as many cars coming, and the toads in heat seem to have learned to keep to the right. Don G. has now begun spinning an astronomy lesson for Ms. Einstein’s benefit, meanwhile supplying her with ginger-flavored chocolate squares, well-known aphrodisiacs.

  Two casual clicks and he switches off their headlamps and begins pointing out the constellations and individual stars, commenting on their colors (indicating temperature), their ages, velocities, varieties of nuclear fission. Speaking in very cogent phrases (it must be said), he discourses at length on the recent discovery of Sagittarius A*. Small as it is, that black hole is a million times heavier than the sun, he informs her, talking the way you would about a sprinter who never loses a race. Raising an arm to point it out to her he nearly grazes her breast—he adores women with girlish breasts—and gives her a blast of the male hormones saturating his breath. She doesn’t back away because she’s captivated: she, too, a toad frozen in the headlights. All she would have to do to save herself would be to step back—and instead she continues to listen to his singsong spell about the supermassive hole around which the Milky Way’s hundreds of thousands of stars revolve.

  Bingo, I say to myself as the strapping seducer lunges toward her and kisses her on the mouth. Some things that happen are so predictable that even a drunken tree sloth could see them coming, no need to posit divine intuition. Which doesn’t make the matter any less annoying. She doesn’t t
hrow herself into it but nor does she push him away, and he, deciding that he now has free rein, pushes her up against the stone wall and lets his hands roam up and down and all over the place. This too is part of the script, of course, but still, she could have given him a shove and run away. Nope, she kisses him passionately in turn, her too-far-apart eyes half-closed, the palm of her hand moving over his chest as if washing a window.

  It’s pitch dark but I can see the scene as if it were lit up by stage lights, smell the smells: her lips slightly metallic, copper, I’d say, with notes of clove and newborn galaxy.

  It’s only when the car is almost upon them that they unclutch. So taken are they by their grappling that they don’t even hear it; they could have been run over. And the weird thing is, I didn’t see it coming either. It’s extremely rare that something takes me by surprise, and it feels very peculiar. Their brains are pumped with dopamine and the other sex hormones, the worst drugs out there, and I myself am not feeling perfectly normal either. It’s mortifying.

  At this point the denouement can only be penetration, over there on the far side of the stone parapet, where there’s a grassy patch that seems to have been made for such exertions. The elusive three–three is drawing near. The horny Apollo has seen it now, the grassy little terrace over the lake, and his probabilistic savvy has already weighed the pros and cons. He’s calculated the Euclidean distance from the two nearest toad-grabbers and concluded that the sound waves will sink below the threshold of audibility before reaching them. He’s checked that the condom in the back pocket of his jeans for every contingency is still there. I’m watching, enchanted, about to witness one of those scenes essential to every NC-17 movie.