* I’d have to purify the air and the water, cap the hole in the ozone, remove millions of square miles of concrete construction, plant billions of trees, dispose of mountains of garbage and plastic junk, deactivate millions of landmines, bring up dozens of Soviet atomic submarines, resuscitate hundreds of thousands of animal and plant species that have gone extinct, completely restore the entire planet’s supply of natural resources: it would be a huge job even for an omnipotent god. But it won’t be me. I’ve done what I had to do and I don’t have the slightest intention of starting all over again just because a handful of lowlifes is having a ball destroying everything. It breaks, you pay, as the saying goes.
Ms. E.’s scientific optimism annoys me just as much, however. There seem to be no limits to human presumption; from the inception they’ve been trafficking in flints and other tools (primitive, yes, but still deadly efficient), then moving on to other diabolical contraptions and making them ever more dangerous, so that they could stage their massacres without fear of retribution. And if there’s a category of technophiles who with supreme arrogance would like to steal my job, it’s the geneticists. Those necromancers seem to forget that so-called biological life on that insignificant speck of dust of theirs is only possible because of a fleeting set of circumstances that very soon will no longer exist, even before the galaxy takes a hit from Andromeda (what an extravagant name).
But let us not be misled by appearances: what seems to be an argument between the two is more like an amorous display, like the dance elephants do before they mate. Rain or shine, the coitus they crave will soon take place and then the little one, defeated, will retreat. Humans are programmed to copulate, even before they begin to philosophize; the two youngsters certainly don’t seem to be an exception to the rule.
The doe-eyed iguana-hugger puts her glass down, and rather than argue with her philandering partner (as would be logical but perhaps counterproductive), tells the other she thinks that in reality every leak that technology plugs opens a larger breach somewhere else. The solution will be to give up all the unnecessary frills, beginning with automobiles (cars merely serve to let you work far from home, work that allows you to buy a more expensive car that allows you to work even farther from home) and television sets and microwave ovens, airplanes and electric blenders, air conditioners and satellite navigators, toilet paper, portable computers, carbonated beverages, high heels. The only thing consumer goods are useful for is to create the phony need for more consumer goods produced by slaves on the other side of the planet, not to mention the continual spikes in overproduction and the dreadful wars. Human beings must take care of the health of their own souls, as well as the souls of the animals and the plants. The rest is just dangerous hogwash.†
† For a long time I mistakenly believed that atheists and agnostics were my worst enemies, but recently I’ve been forced to accept that animism, which I thought was dead and buried, is once again proliferating, if in a new, metropolitan guise.
The super-materialist stares at her as if she’s just heard a Martian make a long speech in Martian. She’s astonished that someone of her age could unload schlock of that vintage, BS of the kind spouted by that nutcase friend of her mother’s. Without scientific research we could not so much as make a phone call, she says, tapping a finger on her next-generation cell phone. She sounds not only indignant, but shaken, upset. Telephones are not only completely useless, they’re carcinogenic and should be outlawed, the little one shoots back.
Tomcat is gloating: each of them is convinced she’s right. That way they’ll stop putting up that common front of theirs. He figures that he should be able to find an excuse this week to invite the microbe-hugger to have a drink some place with comfortable lounge seats where they can make out like on the night of the toads. Instead of running off this time she’ll lure him back to the sexy former fishmonger’s where she lives. He can already picture the scene, feel his member getting hard. I can confirm that last point, if you’ll forgive me for weighing in where a professional novelist would hesitate to tread.
Our spiritual guides will come to our aid, the doe-eyed one says following a long pause, short of better things to say and showing her gum-colored gums. Our spiritual guides? the other echoes, face twisted up as if she might have eaten a lemon. I didn’t say religion, I said our guides, said the first in a low voice, almost an apology for holding such a conviction. She believes that the souls of the dead and those of the living connect through an Internet-like network, and that some techies somewhere are pulling the strings under the supervision of an extremely powerful secret CEO, says Vittorio, nodding at his companion with a radiant mocking smile. A pity that just at that instant he is struck by a sudden stab in the gut of excruciating pain, and dropping his dialectical seducer pose he bends over double and begins to whimper like a baby. Men do suffer from the occasional unexpected pain in the gut; it can even be the symptom of a serious illness.
I Don’t Know What’s Happening
I don’t know what’s happening to me; Ms. Einstein now seems less odious than she once did. Yes, her devotion to science is a pain in the backside (as it were), but watching her play the rutting atheist no longer sets my teeth on edge the way it did; I no longer want to rub her out by sending her bike skidding on an oil stain as she rounds a curve. In some ways, I realize, I’d like to know her better. I mean approach her as a person, not just using my unlimited divine faculties. It would be a less objective kind of knowledge, less complete perhaps, but warmer, more personal.
Instead I listen in on what she’s thinking while she rides that big ugly bike of hers, check on what’s in her digestive system, how each of her hairs is coming along, whether the pores of her skin are dilating and contracting properly. I flip through her past the way you page through the photo album of a family member you are particularly fond of, going back a couple of generations—even a dozen while I’m at it. I study the workings of her genes (genes being not nearly as boring and conservative as geneticists think) and the cordial ententes that link them to the amino acid sequences of every protein in every cell. Not that I neglect my normal divine duties: I surveil, I resolve, I save, I punish, I overlook, I admonish, I judge, I unleash, I even avenge (that happens sometimes, my son, or presumed offspring, notwithstanding). However, it’s her above all whom I scan.
I myself am astonished at what’s happening to me. I look at myself in the mirror (metaphorical mirror, ça va sans dire) and I see that I’m the same, I’m what I’ve always been. I’m still absolutely perfect, absolutely no doubt about that: I remain infallible, omniscient, omnipotent, omniwhatever. And yet, and yet… I’m unable to transcend this damn Daphne (that’s her name), sympathetic or not; I follow the evolving situation attentively (I almost said greedily), not missing a single minute of it.
But the randy paleoclimatologist, despite those health problems of his,* is playing a tight defense. His latest thing is to send her text messages, and, one excuse after another, he’s constantly tapping away. His comments, meant to be witty and captivating, are in fact merely stupid, but she reads them all right through, sometimes even laughing to herself. You don’t have to be a god to see how that devious electronic tomfoolery might well be the final offensive in his campaign to take his coveted target. The cleft between her legs, that is.
* The stomachache that suddenly intervened during the meal with the iguana turned out to be rather serious; he vomited all night, thrashing around in pain. In the morning he was even worse and they hospitalized him for a couple of days to do tests. Alas, the health of a human being is always hanging by a thread, the tiniest factor can put everything out of whack.
His companion, meanwhile, seems to be forcing herself to do exactly the opposite of what common sense would dictate. Having sussed out the danger, anyone else in her situation would go out of her way to keep her rival as distant as possible, put her partner under lock and key and threaten him with all manner of retribution. Instead, she’s constantly calling the tall
biker to suggest they do this or that. She’s wild about those crazy rides on the priapic twin-cylinder. I won’t say I’d be pleased if she took an electric knife and removed her boyfriend’s filthy big tongue—excessive violence has never appealed to me, whatever’s been said about that—but still, she could at least give him an ultimatum or threaten to throw him out of the house. Instead, she’s as obliging as a little lamb.
Harbinger Rituals of Sex
On her birthday Ms. Einstein gets to her lab at 2 a.m. For several hours she focuses all her concentration on a new prototype of the bacteria-powered battery, a model that encompasses everything learned so far. Sucking on slivers of candied ginger, she adds nutrients and the agreed-upon inocula, sets the temperature and the pressure, and programs the survey of electrical conductivity and other factors at established intervals. She likes the rapt silence of nighttime, likes to feel the energy of dawn’s first glimmers on her, when the birds begin to stir on the blighted grounds around the Institute. She doesn’t yet know what will come out of this, but the back of her neck and the lining of her lungs tell her it will be very interesting. Those are points whose sensations she trusts.
When she’s finished taking samples of genetic material she returns all the equipment to its place and hides the battery, which unfortunately is quite a bit more voluminous than the earlier one. In the meantime the laboratory is filling up, and the young pretender with the phosphorescent pimples sits down in front of the atomic absorption spectrometer, aiming his pleading looks her way, something she can’t bear. At a certain point the lab director also shows up but she doesn’t notice him, so taken is she with the article she’s writing, not to mention the South African rap music blasting through her earbuds. The boss coughs politely, shifting a foot to one side as if to crush a harmful insect. That Catholic vibrato is familiar to her and she raises her eyes from his elegant shoes to his well-rested face, his phony indifference masking memories of their intimacy, so out of place. He smiles, showing all his teeth.
While she’s removing the earbuds he’s describing a job he wants her to do, his short stout hands (mole’s paws, she thinks) making wide circles in the air to accompany his words, which repeatedly contradict what he’s just said, even as his traffic-cop gestures struggle to make them come together in a single ordered flow. She doesn’t understand a thing, it being materially impossible to understand. She’d be amazed if she did. Patting his firm cheek (smooth as a baby’s butt, she thinks), he concludes by saying that in fact it isn’t urgent. He then smiles intently at her with his baby eyes, as if he’s very pleased with her reply (she hasn’t said a thing). The 15,000-rpm centrifuge where their two–zero took place is just a few yards away, but their eyes don’t stray toward the spot where that kinetic frenzy occurred.
The reason he’s so affable is that the hiring committee for the job she’d applied for had met the previous day. And he, president of the committee, wielding his usual flutter of jokey remarks had got everyone to agree they hire the one who looks like the TV showgirl. So it’s she, so clever at dispensing smiles and glimpses into her cleavage, who’ll be hired, while the beanpole will be out on the street. There’s not enough extra in next year’s budget to keep her on as an adjunct. The boss doesn’t regret what he’s done, no. There will be many fewer articles published, but his life will also be considerably less stressful. His rather severe German wife is now also working for the courts, where so many divorce cases come up. As a good Catholic, though, he feels ever so slightly uneasy, which is why he’s come by to interrupt her.*
* Despite their reputation as irreprehensible, Italian Catholics are capable of the most nefarious behavior, even toward friends and closest relatives. Afterward, though, they suffer strange abdominal upsets not unlike digestive problems, and try to make up for it with hypocritical smiles and witty remarks while they prepare to clear their criminal records by visiting the confessional booth.
At lunchtime Daphne heads off on the bike to inseminate a dozen Friesians. She’s slightly late and has to pass up the usual couple of bignè alla crema from the pasticceria right on the main road, the ones she particularly likes. The cowshed, in a town not very distant from the city, is quite large and bordered on three sides by abandoned industrial shells. They already know her here and they trust her, so she’s left alone. As she introduces an arm into the anus of the first Friesian she’s thinking that the wee zoologist isn’t entirely wrong: it would be better not to eat animals. But these are dairy cows, not beef cattle.† Still, her friend would be horrified if she saw the assembly line conditions here. For the first time she feels uncomfortable.
† With that incoherence so typical of human thought (an intrinsic cerebral opportunism?) she’s not counting the fact that dairy cows, when their milk days are up, are also sliced and ground. And never mind about the male veal calves.
On the way home she stops at her usual garage. Since the last time the bike was repaired it’s been running fine, but all the same she puts it up on the kickstand in the square and goes inside. The owner tells her that the mechanic who worked on it has gone to race an Enduro. So she sits down to wait on her doubly erect twin-cylinder and looks at the other bikes parked around hers, imagining how she would improve them. She’s never studied mechanical engineering but she knows enough to mentally scan a bike body or engine quickly, identifying structural defects and little flaws. When the mechanic with the boxer’s flat nose shows up she smiles at him and says she’s reconsidered, and would like to do that checkup he was proposing. They discuss the terms for a few minutes, then she’s off. She stops in a church she often visits—and here I must ask that we cast a veil over what she’s up to—and then to the supermarket.
Back home in the old fishmonger’s, she begins cleaning house. It’s that type of ruthless cleaning that precedes some very important occasion, some special party. She polishes the two big windows facing the inside court where the old entrance to the fishmonger’s was, she shines up the inclined surface where the fish were laid out, now her kitchen counter, removes the three-quarter mattress from the old trout basin, vacuums, disposes of the dust balls from the coils of computer cords, washes the sky-blue tiled floor. You can see it’s not a burden, that she’s actually happy to clean up. She folds the balled-up clothes lying around, dusts the knickknacks atop the “furniture,” changes the cat box, for which the cat, though blind, seems to be grateful. Now she’s working on the atmosphere: incense, candles, plates of biscotti and candied ginger like votive offerings.
You’d think she was arranging a sacred ceremony, while it’s nothing but a banal copulation. Sex for sex’s sake, without even the appearance of moral pretext (never mind the institution of the family and the ceremony that seals it). When I think of this I feel a hard-to-define discomfort, a pang I don’t think I’ve ever felt before, almost misery. This is depraved materialism at its worst, unfolding in a context where the individual and his/her corporal nature are fetishistically sacralized under the specious sombrero of sexual freedom. But am I not partly responsible, when I allow them to copulate in that wild way the randy one favors? Doesn’t that mean I’ve given her a sort of license?
It would be child’s play for me to blow young Randy’s plans to smithereens. I mean, what does it take to knock down a bicycle ridden by a guy with one arm in a sling and mysterious stomach pains, just as an old van whose brakes are shot comes along—or better, might as well do things properly—a tractor trailer? The cyclists are asking for it, in a way, trying to glide through the anarchy of Italian traffic. It often happens without me raising a finger. A hard blow to the temple, I’m thinking; no blood or other distressing fluids. Just a cranium smashed in at the parietal lobe. Fate can be so cruel, people would whisper. At least he didn’t suffer, poor guy. All those agnostic remarks that by now no longer even touch me.
I’m ready to intervene. I already have the bike in my crosshairs, and needless to say, it’s red. I’m merely waiting while the rider,‡ who’s now bent over the seat,
gets on and begins to pedal. I’m rubbing my hands with glee (forgive me if I turn up the hype, a story shouldn’t be boring) the way every killer does. I sense the slight tension in me that marks the approach of the fatal hour. I’m already feeling slightly better because this nightmare (so it seems to me at times) will soon be over. I’ll be back to my old self; I’ll cease to think about these matters once and for all. I’ll take up my old duties.
‡ Perhaps someone will think I’m the mastermind (so to speak) behind his fractured elbow on the night of the toads. That is utterly untrue. Here is what actually happened. When I saw that he was about to step on a very slippery spot (a toad flattened by a car tire) I slightly corrected the spin of his fall to prevent him from putting his hand down in the same slimy mess. Now it’s true that he smashed his elbow instead of dirtying his hand, but my intentions were nothing but the best, as befits a merciful god.
But then, as Daphne meticulously bathes her long asymmetrical body, I reflect that the situation that’s been created (by whom? I need a break here) is utterly ridiculous. Whatever it may say in the Bible, where there’s entirely too much emphasis on those rare occasions when I lost my head, I believe in being fair and impartial. And it’s obvious that I would completely disqualify (not to say something much saltier) myself if I were to behave like some grandee pursuing only his own interests. In time the word would spread, and with it, complaints and protests. In the long run no one would believe in me, and atheism would triumph.
I Am God Page 8
