I Am God

by Giacomo Sartori

  * And mind you, (wo)men adore injustices. If I were to counter all the existing cruelties, they’d wrack their brains to come up with even more horrendous ones, even more ferocious. You can’t expect a hippopotamus to walk a tightrope, or a giraffe to fly.

  Finally, Daphne can’t fight anymore. Fatigue descends upon her, she feels it in her stocky calves, her skinny ribs, her too-long neck, her larger-than-normal brain. She thinks she’s never been so exhausted. Her colleagues try to convince her that maybe the money will turn up to renew her contract, but their words sound limp, motivated by the pity they feel for her. Even the chemist with acne seems resigned. He’s crying. At this point she decides to go home.

  But her bike, rather than heading back to the old fishmonger’s, turns south toward the edge of town, then climbs the hills toward the flashy new villas of the nouveaux riches, and finally cuts down the scruffy valley inhabited by the leftover belligerents of 1968 and their followers. She gets to the parking lot (as it were) of her stepfather’s house (as it were), removes her helmet, and realizes she has no idea what to do next. It feels like she’s taken her head off. The neo-Buddhist drops the wheelbarrow he’s pushing toward the hayloft—or marijuana shed—and hastens to her side. He grabs an arm to hold her up, or rather he means to, but being clumsy he trips, making things worse. She is staring straight ahead, two eyes fixed like dead orbs in a wax figure. He pushes her inside the way you push a stubborn donkey.

  Now she’s slumped on the broken-down sofa that the big, long-haired dog uses as a bed. The big dog is staring at his fellow canine with the short hair (who’s more with it than he is) as if to ask what the hell’s going on. Why doesn’t she move a muscle? Why isn’t she crying? It’s like when she was three and her mother suddenly died (for her, suddenly). Recalling, perhaps, that catastrophic time, our Don Quixote look-alike observes her closely, scratching the bald part of his head. He’d like to ask her something, but they’ve never, ever, spoken of serious matters, so it isn’t easy. But, giving his jaw a massage, he wonders aloud, what’s up? They gave it to the goose, she replies, her voice impersonal, on automatic. Then she falls silent again, and he also says nothing.

  I’m God, however, and therefore I know what his synapses are up to. He’s thinking that the dapper lab director has a very fine automobile, and that these late-model vehicles make a gratifying blaze if you set fire to them, a lot of smoke and a terrible stink. Or else he could kidnap the man and stick pins in his scrotum; elite neoliberals are the worst specimens of the human race and the time has come to fight back. But then he looks at the altar with the fat fellow nude to the waist, and recalls his guru in India. It all goes toward building your karma, he thinks. Pins in the scrotum would be counterproductive.

  He scratches his neck and ruminates. Some of these neoliberal sharks do deserve punishment, however, without necessarily going to extremes. A slightly less devastating version of the automotive hypothesis? He could rake the car’s metallic paint job up and down with a size fifteen nail. At times the mystic spark in him does battle with an insurrectionary anarchist tendency. Before he drifted East he’d been a member of a tiny sect that urged perpetual revolution. But in a subsequent spiritual wave, he’s decided that what happens in material life matters very little.

  He brings her a beer and opens it. She drinks a sip or two, gazing at something invisible. He clears his throat loudly, the way you do when you think you have something important to say. He tells her that her mother (he calls her Gaia, that was her name) knew a priest who helped her when she was homeless, and with whom she used to have big discussions. He thinks Daphne ought to look him up. An imperceptible jolt runs through her, maybe just a mechanical reaction. She doesn’t seem to have understood. A guy connected with politicians and people who count, but he was also close to your mother, and he’ll certainly help you out too, he says in that unnatural voice, studying his slippers.

  Daphne stares at the enigmatic layers of dirt on the floor, not seeing them. Just you wait, you’ll be able to stick with your microbes, you’re so good, says the beatnik. Finally she begins to cry, the way she cries, silently and without moving a muscle. She cries for a long time, and drinks the beer directly from the bottle, and cries. When she’s done she drinks another. He hands it off to her as you do to a bike racer, and she takes it without thanks. Now another beer, still weeping in silence. Then, without being aware of it, she stretches out and falls asleep. Her “father,” as he styles himself, covers her with the throw he uses for his transcendental meditation and switches off the light.

  ‌Alone for a Night

  Last night (as they say) while I was struggling to get to sleep (same) I thought to myself: if I were ever to try incarnation, I certainly wouldn’t imitate my self-proclaimed offspring. I wouldn’t go around proselytizing barefoot, or pronouncing shamanic catchphrases, as often as not false, or perform miracles. No, the appeal—I started to say the thrill—would lie in a radical transformation. No more bottomless profundity, no definitive word on things, I’d immerse myself in the partial and the finite. Do normal things: squeeze onto the bus at rush hour, shop in shopping centers mobbed with people, watch a TV series sprawled on a sofa. I’d sample the whole palette of human sensations: walk on an empty beach in flip-flops, hurtle down a steep slope on skis, smoke a cigarette, try a fabled Siberian sauna, board an airplane. It would be an incarnation if not quite incognito, then private; no trumpets, no outrageous scenes, just the dignity and composure that befit me.

  The incarnation might be set in a palm grove adrift on a magnificent, transparent sea (so it looks from above, at any rate), or in a tidy Alpine village, or a bustling eastern metropolis. I’d have an embarras du choix, like the well-heeled tourist paging through the glossy brochures in a travel agency. And no one would prevent me from whisking myself off, free of any jet lag, should I change my mind. But I bet I’d end up settling in that ugly urban periphery that fades into the gloomy, foggy plain with its industrial fumes, its miasma of effluvia from pig- and bovine-rearing. Where Daphne lives. Those broad avenues measured out in humdrum tram stops, the resigned immigrants, the wastepaper whipped into the air by the wind: a desolate, depressing wilderness lying fallow until the real estate speculators—should the recession lift—begin building again.

  And if I do decide to go for incarnation, I suppose I might as well go for fit and good-looking, rather than old. I don’t mean “pretty boy”—God save us from bodybuilders—but not a monster either. A young fellow with all his hair, a pleasing and trustworthy face, a well-turned body, and the toned and well-proportioned reproductive apparatus of a Greek statue.* I wouldn’t mind eyeglasses; I’ve always found them alluring. Of course there’s no reason I couldn’t be a girl, although maybe I’d feel a bit (I worry here about being accused of sexist bigotry) like a transvestite.

  * Physical appearance has always had an exaggerated importance for the humans, according to them for reasons linked to so-called “evolution.” By choosing attractive mates the women hope to produce strapping young offspring. The men are likewise convinced that a pleasing appearance will guarantee against disease and frailty. It’s difficult to see why, now that they’ve cleverly found ways around mere evolution, good looks should count even more.

  If I wished, I could be incarnated as a billionaire rolling in luxury and privilege; the effort (effort?) involved would be the same. But the truth is, I would rather be incarnated as a very normal person. I’ve never liked rich people; ninety-nine times out of a hundred they consider themselves superior to the rest simply because they possess a few more things, and they expect the world to worship at their feet. On this point I’m in agreement with my son, although some of his extreme positions leave me puzzled, to say the least.†

  † I sometimes think that if he were to come back in these times when money has become sacred, he would be a terrorist. No more turning the other cheek to receive a fresh kick in the backside.

  Once I appeared in man form, I wonder what my very firs
t action, my baptism, if you will, would be. Would I down an espresso standing at the bar, studying the other customers over the rim of the cup? Take an elevator? How would I behave with Daphne, supposing I were to run across her? Would I dare to speak of my feelings, if they are feelings? And if she gave me the brush-off, what would I do—I who am accustomed to always getting whatever I want? Who can guarantee (I’m now trying to look at this from the human angle) that she wouldn’t mistreat me like she does the silent chemist, as women so often do? How would I deal with being reduced to hopeless yearning, losing my appetite, becoming a wreck? Wouldn’t I take it pretty badly?

  The most disturbing (put it that way) thing is to recognize that in some ways I might like it, being in despair. Looking down from the top of a skyscraper, one can feel drawn to the abyss below. I mean just for a moment, just enough to understand what it means to feel a hard lump in your throat, a weight on your chest, eyes smarting. To have no future ahead, only a desert of unhappiness.

  ‌Hidden Security Cams

  As she takes the stairs of the Stock Breeders’ Association three at a time, Daphne decides she’ll profit from this unexpected convocation to ask the president for the go-ahead to do more inseminations, not that she’s in favor of the procedure any more now than she was before—if anything, the more she thinks about it, she’s opposed—but it’s better than nothing when you need work. Striding up to the desk of the secretary who reminds her of Cleopatra, she sees the woman staring at her outfit as if the punk look annoys her even more than usual. There’s a gleam of triumph in her eye, too, a joy greedy for warm blood, then her glance is rerouted to the tumid cactus next to the photograph of her family.

  Daphne shrugs this off with a horsey shake of her long neck and enters the presidential office. The man, stout with tiny round eyes, usually beams her one of those crude testosteronic smiles he aims at all young women whether pretty or not, lust pretending to be amiable good humor. Today, though, he welcomes her chin up, his bull’s head tilted to one side, arms crossed, barricaded behind his desk. Before addressing a word to her, he searches for something on the computer. But he can’t find it. He snorts; he’s like a bull waiting for the bullfight to begin, she thinks. Bulls have trouble distinguishing real cows from imitations; imagine how they do with computers. And his fingers are too fat; he needs a large keyboard like on those children’s games.

  Finally the president nods, that head of his grafted to a bull’s neck bobs up and down. He’s found what he was looking for. A few seconds of private jubilation and then he turns the flat screen toward her, making a ladies and gentlemen, may I present semicircle with his arm that could be mistaken for humor but ends in a violent jerk. On the screen, a blue and white video from a security camera, showing an empty, darkish corridor, no one present. For quite a while absolutely nothing happens apart from the quivering of the poor-quality image. There’s only the corridor, and that queasy, empty feeling of nothing happening (redundant phrase meant to make the account more gripping). Then a door opens, slowly, and she steps out. It would be difficult to mistake her; she’s wearing the leather jacket she has on right now under her worker’s overalls, and her motorcycle boots are identical, not to mention the unmistakable sideways braidlets. She strides out confidently and enters another door at the opposite corner of the image. A few moments later she reappears with a crucifix in hand, holding it tightly in her fist like a hatchet. Now standing before the door she first came out of, she places the object in her rucksack, the same that’s now sitting at her feet. Like a fisherman carefully depositing the fish he’s just fished. Then she disappears, and the door closes behind her.

  Without any interruption, another video begins playing. We see a hall with many rows of chairs and a pulpit supplied with a microphone at the far end. An oblique light enters through picture windows on one side, as if it were a summer evening. Or an August afternoon. Daphne remembers everything. It was the Catholic summer camp next to the huge, newly renovated stable that belongs to the Curia, not far from the lakeshore with those monumental musty old villas. She had just finished work and had thought, while I’m here, how about a spot of hunting? And just then she appears, looking behind her as if she’s heard something. At the back of the pulpit, she reaches up for the crucifix on the wall above. But it’s too high up; even on tiptoe and stretching to the max, she can’t reach it. Now she goes to get a chair and stands on it, detaching my so-called son from the wall and, without getting down from the chair, she studies the figure up close. Suddenly she dashes it to the floor, furious.

  For some time now manufacturers in certain parts of Asia have been able to imitate wood perfectly, and at rock-bottom prices. But plastic crosses cannot be burned in wood stoves. There’s your problem. The president can’t know that, however, he simply thinks she’s deranged. He watches her over the top of the screen, on his feet now, as if she were a ruthless Islamic terrorist. Absurd, she’s never murdered anyone: in the video she leans over and carefully collects the splintered pieces of Christ and his cross. You can’t see all the details in the flickering images; she’s hunkered down on the floor. Seen from the back, she looks as if she might be peeing. She remembers the moment; she swept up all the Christian fragments and put them in her pocket.

  Now the president turns the screen back around so it faces the herd of bovines and the sunset out the window, exhaling from his nose, himself a bull collecting his thoughts. He stares at her without saying a word. At long last he’s free to express all the male chauvinist disapproval he harbors, which, mixed as it is with sexual desire, is formidable and highly impulsive. There are at least a couple of actionable offenses here, he declares. Breaking and entering and burglary, he says, counting on his enormous fingers. She thinks she may faint. Nothing like this has happened to her for what feels like a lifetime. This sensation of being at the mercy of the enemy, at risk of being annihilated, she first encountered when she went to the nuns’ boarding school/prison in elementary and middle school. By high school she had learned how to use her scholastic achievements as a defense weapon.

  Not even a mentally deranged person would consider stealing crucifixes, says the Minotaur. The more he thinks about it, the more enraged he seems. In fact he’s not a practicing Catholic and even less a believer, and never mind about the details of his so-called private life. Still, the more indignant he acts, the more indignant he becomes. He scuttles across the office and back, his pacing indignant, his nostrils bristling with outrage, and all his pores too. What shall we do then? Shall I call the police or the carabinieri? he says, staring fiercely at the telephone on his desk. He seems to think he’s on a stage.

  The beanpole is unable to say a word, she’s drenched in cold sweat. She would like to signal no with her head, but she’s paralyzed. It isn’t just shame, but the sensation she’s being totally crushed, physically and morally. Her ever-efficient brain tells her that soon the carabinieri—only a fool would think this is a matter for the police—will arrive and drag her down to the station. They’ll search the old fishmonger’s and find the big woven plastic sacks full to the brim with stolen goods. All those dozens of friars and parish priests who have filed suit to get their lost St. Josephs or Three Kings back will rub their hands with glee and demands for compensation will rain on her head like confetti. And then they’ll find her computer and discover the secret data she’s hacked into. The news will make the papers: Crucifix- and Virgin-burglar arrested; search of her home computer turns up top secret Vatican documents. When she gets out of prison she’ll be sleeping on the street, wheeling around town with a supermarket cart full of rags. And right now there is nothing she can do to get herself off the hook.*

  * One of the great problems non-believers face, when push comes to shove, is that there’s no one to turn to. Reason and Science never came to anyone’s aid in a pinch. And why should they?

  ‌A Titanic Struggle with Myself

  I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve come to a decision. This has to stop. With
out of course all the drama and tear-jerking that a human being would indulge in if (s)he were in my place. This is a titanic struggle; in some ways I’m like a volcano ready to erupt—but there must be no thunder and lightning, no earthquakes and whirlwinds to blow off steam, no massacres of innocents. A god shows his mettle even in the most difficult circumstances, indeed above all in the most difficult circumstances. I am God, as I say.

  To cancel the lanky one from my thoughts and be just God, period, seems to me the most merciless sentence imaginable, the cruelest. A fate worse than that recent asteroid in free fall, worse than a helpless guppy about to be devoured by a bigger fish, gobbled up in turn by a bigger. But I have a plan. I’m smitten, I couldn’t be more smitten, but I’ve decided, and when a god decides, we’re done.

  I’ve decided I’ll help her, then return to being Me. It’s not my place to play the algorithm for an online dating site, but I’m going to find her a boyfriend. Indeed, I’ll show my divine magnanimity by finding her a guy who’s close to perfect: attentive, accommodating, easygoing, simpatico. A guy who’s not obsessed with sex, who doesn’t think of that and only that, unlike the climatologist. A lad who feels the desire to couple from time to time, like a normal human being, and is even capable of respecting that commandment about thy neighbor’s wife.