God Is Dead (9 page)

“Shut your mouth, you son of a bitch.” She rears back and kicks me squarely in the balls. I go down like a sack of bricks, utterly convinced.

The restaurant is silent.

“Betty,” Selia's mother says, tugging her hand. “Betty. They've got beef and broccoli. Can we have beef and broccoli?”

Prison isn't nearly as bad as we're led by prosecutors and newsmagazines to believe. At least not the prison they've sent me to, a minimum security compound in the midcoast region. No shanks or forced sex here. My fellow convicts are all nonviolent offenders, largely white-collar sane individuals who can be trusted with a knife, if not your wallet. I eat well. I can come and go more or less as I please within the compound. There's cable television, and movies in the rec room on Tuesday and Saturday nights. In the yard we play volleyball, basketball, horseshoes. Once a week five or six of us gather in the quad for poker. I've got gratifying work as a peer counselor, helping other inmates cope with depression, sexual privation, and the guilt associated with having disappointed and shamed their families.

I'd almost forgotten how it feels to be liked.

Still, until very recently something was bothering me, a gray malaise which kept me up nights staring at the springs on the underside of the top bunk, or else caused me to drift away when I should have been listening to a fellow inmate in my care. For a while I thought it was simply that I missed Selia, but when I projected my thoughts into the future and imagined the time, not too distant from now, when we'd be reunited, it did little to help me feel better. After months of sleepless nights I was able to identify this discomfort only as a desire. Far from lifting the cloud, however, this realization served only to darken it—now that I knew I longed for something, I wanted desperately to know what that something was.

And then, just yesterday, this letter from Selia:

Only a year left. It'll go by before we know it, and then we can leave this shitass town and get on with our lives. So I've got a proposal—and brace yourself, because it's a whopper—but since Mom died I've been really lonely for someone to care for. Ridiculous, sure, but there it is. So here's what I'm thinking: you, me, a bambino. We're different from the fawning retards around here. We'll be good, sensible parents. And we'd make a good-looking kid, too, as long as he didn't end up with your nose. I've thought about it for a while, and I know this is what I want. So I'm going to Dr. DerSimonian next week to have my IUD removed. And just think, you'll never have to wear a rubber again! Small consolation, I know, when you're still a year away from getting laid. But maybe the thought will keep you warm nights.

I read the letter three, four times. I put it down on the desk and read it again, lacing and unlacing my fingers. My palms went cold with sweat; I wiped them on the canvas of my prison-issue pantlegs as my breath came quicker and I longed for a cigarette though I've never smoked, and then, with trembling hands, I took out pen and paper and wrote my response, one word, three letters, in a bold, capital script which took up the whole page: YES.

 

I'm riding with my father in his truck when I see the kid, lying motionless in the grass, his head resting below a window of the house he's crawled up against. There's a backpack there, and a crappy old ten-speed that's been half-propped, half-crashed against a tree.

“There's a kid hurt over there,” I say to my father. We've been mowing lawns, so he doesn't have his hearing aids in, and I have to repeat myself. By the time he understands what I'm saying we're already past and down the hill. My father makes a wide turn, swinging the trailer around, and heads back.

We pull up in front of the house and get out. As we cross the lawn I see that the figure lying there is not a kid, but a grown man. He looks a little younger than my father, late forties maybe. He's lying on his side; the seat of his jeans is soiled with either dirt or shit, I can't tell. There's a Bud Ice bottle on the ground near his head, empty except for a bit of yellowish foam in the bottom, and a busted-up placard that reads
GOD LIVES.
The man's eyes are half-open and staring. He might be dead.

I'm always thinking the worst.

To be on the safe side I let my father take the lead. He just retired from thirty years as a paramedic, so he knows better than I do how to deal with this.

We stand over the man, and my father says, “Hey.” He takes the man's arm at the elbow. “Hey,” he says, shaking him. “Wake up, buddy.”

“His name's Lou,” someone says.

A woman's face appears behind the window screen. My father looks at me; he thinks I said something. I point to the woman.

“His name's Lou,” she says again, to my father.

“What's that?” my father asks.

“Lou,” she half-yells.

“Hey Lou,” my father says. He takes Lou's wrist between his fingers, counting the pulse against the second hand on his watch. “You know him?” he asks the woman.

She gives a bitter smile. “That's one way to put it,” she says. “I wouldn't let him in.”

“Does he have any medical problems? He diabetic?”

“He's drunk,” the woman says.

My father places Lou's hand back on the ground, then loosens the shirt around Lou's neck, to let him breathe. Lou starts to snore. He sounds like an angry rattlesnake.

I stand there, rubbing the grit on the back of my neck, staring down at Lou, thinking.

“You should call the police,” my father says to the woman.

“He's just drunk,” she says.

“What?”

She repeats herself, louder.

“Call the police,” my father says. “Tell them to send an ambulance. It's better that he go to the hospital. He can't be left out here in this heat.”

The woman stands at the window a moment longer, then disappears into the darkness of the house. After a while she comes back.

“They're on their way,” she says.

My father is looking down at Lou and doesn't hear her.

“Okay,” I tell the woman.

“I'm going to shut the window.”

“We'll stay out here until they come,” I say. She closes the window, glances once more at Lou, then disappears again.

My father and I stand with our hands on our hips, squinting in the sunlight. I kick at the grass, shifting my gaze around, trying not to look at Lou. My father bends over to check his pulse again.

Then my father says, “Kind of reminds you why you quit, huh?” He doesn't look at me when he says it.

For a minute I don't respond. Then I say, “I started drinking again a year ago.”

He looks up. “Hm?” he says.

“I said, ‘That's no way to live.'” I form the words carefully so he can understand.

Eventually the cop shows up. He's short and thick and has a crew cut. He knows Lou, but calls him Preacher.

“One of your regulars?” my father asks.

“Oh yeah,” the cop says. “We've been looking for him today.” He and my father laugh knowingly. I don't laugh. Instead, I set my lips in a straight line against the front of my teeth. The two of them crouch on either side of Lou, colleagues now.

“I don't like his breathing,” the cop says.

“Yeah, his breathing's good,” my father says. “His pulse is a little weak.”

The cop looks at my father for a minute, then reaches in and squeezes Lou's nipple through his shirt. “Come on, Preacher. Wake up, buddy.” But Lou doesn't move.

“You got an ambulance coming?” my father says.

“Yeah. I can take it from here.”

“Okay,” my father says. He straightens up, stretches a bit. “We've got more work to do anyway.”

We start back toward the truck, and the cop says, “Thanks for your help, guys.” I've got my back to him, and I jump when he says it. It sounds funny:
guys,
addressing both of us, though I haven't said a word, haven't been a help to anyone.

My father turns at the waist and raises his hand. I keep walking, and don't look back.

I haven't thought of you in what seems like a long time, but for some reason I do now. I see you knocking bottles off the coffee table with an angry sweep of your arm. I hear your voice from behind a locked door, screaming there's no God, why can't I just accept it like everyone else? I picture you crying so hard and so long your eyes swell shut. I wonder where you are, who you're with, if you flinch every time he moves his hands, like you did with me.

 

Author's Note:
Interview conducted in the Sudanese desert, near the town of Nertiti, in early June 2006. After five months of searching Southern Darfur for———————, who by then had already passed out of any verifiable contact with people, I'd set out for Nertiti from Nyala, but managed to travel only seventy kilometers before the jeep I'd purchased for the trip bogged down in a sand lake. I didn't last much longer than the truck. Lost and disoriented, to escape the heat I crawled into an abandoned animal den. With no idea where I was in relation to Nertiti, and no strength to get there even if I'd known the way, I assumed I would die. It was at dusk on the second day that———————entered the den, and the interview began.

It should be noted that this interview took place through extrasensory means; that is,———————and I communicated without either of us actually speaking. Also, owing to my burgeoning delirium, many of the questions I put forth to——————were more or less nonsensical (though he was able to intuit what I was asking and answer accordingly). For the sake of readability I represent those questions here with the simple device of an uppercase bold
Q
. The substance of the queries can, for the most part, be inferred from———————'s responses.

My absolute recall of the interview, as well as my eventual emergence from the den and arrival in Nertiti, less than half a kilometer away, can only be attributed to some intervention on———————'s part, the nature of which I won't pretend to understand.

—RFC

Q?

Locating you was fairly simple, really, and has less to do with whatever abilities I gained from eating the Creator than with the abilities I already possessed as a feral dog. Contrary to what people believe, I'm far from omniscient. There are huge gaps in my knowledge of things, as I presume was the case for our Creator. For example, I was aware that you sought me out, and I knew you were somewhere in Darfur, but beyond that I was more or less in the dark. Among dogs, though, those of us with the best noses can detect the smell of a dying animal at ridiculous distances. Despair, like its cousin fear, carries a bitter scent, and just a few molecules of it, driven across the plains on a gusty afternoon, are more than enough for me to trace its source. Finding you was not difficult at all.

Q?

No. I'd expend more calories in the effort of chewing you than I would gain. Too thickly muscled. The inevitable result of obsessive weight lifting. So please, don't worry; though you'd make an easy meal, easy meals are plentiful for us during the hot season. I'm sated. But that's not the only reason I won't eat you.

Q?

Oh, this whole application-of-morality-to-animal-behavior problem I've been grappling with since eating the Creator. Compassion is a coat of fur I find particularly ill-fitting. Just doesn't mesh well with the nature of a dog. To feel pity for the young, old, weak, injured, and infirm—and as a result to abstain from killing them—not only contradicts that which is feral dog directive number one, but also is poor strategy from the standpoint of self-preservation. I'm still in the early stages of sorting it all out, and honestly it often makes me unhappy.

Then there's a third reason I won't eat you—much as I desire now to avoid your kind, I do sometimes miss intelligent company. This is why I'm here.

Q?

Don't be silly—yes, even by my lofty standards you are intelligent. If I may be frank, this was one of the things that eventually repulsed me about people. The way they prostrated themselves before me, sometimes literally, with hands clasped and all manner of entreaty on their lips, but more often figuratively, as you do now—“My meager intellect can't possibly compare with yours,” et cetera, ad nauseam. One shouldn't confuse knowledge with intelligence. Is an encyclopedia smarter than you? Or a computer?

Q.

Of course not. So what makes you so certain that I am? The fact that I know without having been there what India's Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh, ate for dinner last night? I do. He had a bit of a sour stomach, and so ate a bland mixture of lentils and rice, of which he finished only a meager portion. There. Can you accept this, and still be my friend? Not my supplicant, not my apostle, but my friend?

Q?

It does. It does upset me. From the perspective of one steeped in the social customs of dogs, the eagerness with which people bow down, with little prompting and no real evidence that such humility and reverence are justified, is beyond distasteful. Especially when, as I'm now aware, that humility obscures a greed and sense of entitlement which is nearly ubiquitous in your kind. Boundless duplicity. It's small wonder great masses of you are so unhappy.

So, to sum up: You're smarter than the average wildebeest. Which will suffice.

Q?

Yes, perhaps it would be better to change the subject.

Q?

Certainly I'm willing to talk about it. You've nearly killed yourself for the dubious privilege of hearing my story, after all. Where should I begin?

Q.

Well, I think I should start a bit
before
the beginning, because it seems worth mentioning that I and another dog had an encounter with the Creator a few days before the five of us actually ate him. An odd coincidence, in retrospect. I can't offer much detail, because my recollection of life before my transformation is vague, and could probably be more accurately described as a general impression of experience, rather than memories in the sense that I've come to know them.

It was around this time of year. I know this for certain, because the days were searing hot. Dogs are not terribly intelligent, but they are very good at finding food, and we'd learned from our mothers, who had learned from their mothers, and so on, to follow the roving bands of Janjaweed militia, because food was always plentiful in their wake. They killed everything in a village, and when they moved on to find more to kill, we came in and cleaned up after them. A tidy relationship, except for the rare occasion when one or two of us neglected to keep a safe distance from the Janjaweed and found ourselves in their path. The first time I encountered the Creator, this was what happened. My brother and I caught the scent of despair and, unwisely, we followed it, ranging ahead of the Janjaweed until we found a young woman lying half-conscious and alone in the tall grass. I did not know at the time that this was the Creator, in the form of a Dinka woman. I had no capacity to understand the concept, of course. All I saw was an easy meal. We walked cautious circles around her, to test her awareness and ability to fight. She did not strike out, did not flail or cry or respond at all, and we were about to make the kill when we heard the Janjaweed drawing near. Without hesitation, we bolted. This was our only hope for survival. They can't be outrun, and believe me when I say that whatever they come into contact with dies.

Q?

Well, after that my brother and I returned to the pack and resolved, insofar as dogs are capable of resolving, that it was better to be hungry and alive than full and dead. We knew that with the Janjaweed on the move, our patience would be rewarded. Two days later we followed the smell of scorched flesh to the ruins of the refugee camp. This was when the five of us, those famous five, partook of the Creator.

Q?

That strikes me as a tactless question, not to mention beside the point.

Q.

I suppose you're right; it is rare information. I can see why you'd be curious, however morbid that curiosity may be.

Q?

Fine, I'll indulge you. It was tough, sour, gritty, the vilest meat I've ever tasted. Which was why none of us ate more than a mouthful.

Q.

It is surprising, when one stops to think about it. The flavor was anything but divine.

Q?

No. I don't recall my transformation. There is a gap in my memory between the last moments as the dog I'd always been—wild, cheerful, nothing more or less than the sum of my appetites—and this new, heightened sentience. But I can tell you it was not instantaneous. When we discussed the sequence of events later, the others confirmed that their experience of the change was identical. For several hours after eating the Creator, we continued to feed at the refugee camp with the rest of the pack. Eventually we came together and moved west out of the camp to find a suitable place to spend the night. These, now, were the last moments of my old life. I tramped down a bed in the tall grass and set about grooming myself. I lapped at my paws until the bloody paste was gone from between my toes, then used the pads to wipe away the crust of blood on my snout. I was surrounded by the nighttime noises of my brothers and sisters and cousins and uncles, rolling languidly onto their backs, sighing and growling in pleasant fatigue from the long day of eating. Soon the satisfaction of a full stomach, combined with a cool north wind blowing steadily over my fur, lulled me to sleep.

I did not dream.

The next morning I woke to the sun glaring down from a throne of distant hills. Immediately I was aware of the change I'd undergone. Whereas before I'd known only impulse, instinct, and habit, now suddenly my mind was full of thoughts; whereas before nothing existed for me outside of what I could detect with my senses, now I could apprehend the whole earth as a single entity, the minute and varied ways in which the parts of this whole interacted, passed into and out of being. All this became clear and accessible in a flash of consciousness, and with the same clarity I realized that my time as a member of the pack had come to an end.

The other four had reached this same conclusion. Our departure was as natural and inevitable as the sunrise. We rose together and prepared slowly to leave, hobbled by the unfamiliar complexity of sorrow. Hearing us, my brother stirred. He shook briskly to wake himself and trotted over, wanting to come along, thinking perhaps we meant to do some early scavenging before the day grew too hot. I tried to tell him that he couldn't accompany us, but already the old way of communicating seemed lost to me. I flattened my ears when I should have brushed shoulders with him; I raised my tail when I should have lowered my snout. Frustrated, I showed him my teeth, and he moved away one small backward step at a time, tail drooping, eyes meek and downcast.

I haven't seen him since that day, and of all the sorrows that I've learned, this last image of him is among those that pain me the most.

Q?

No. I'm aware, in my way, that he's doing well—happy, healthy, a father now. Loss, among our kind, is a daily fact of life, and he forgot about me almost as soon as I disappeared from sight. My sadness is for myself.

Q?

Much as I would like to, I can't seek him out, for the same reason I had to leave the pack that day—I don't belong anymore. I never will again. I don't expect you to understand this. You're not equipped to understand it.

Q?

We had no specific destination in mind when we left. We did know that people, in addition to being both our most plentiful food and our most dangerous enemy, possessed great intelligence. We hoped we might find a new home among them. So we headed toward the large cities of the north, but the going was hard. With the knowledge of time, our legs were heavy with regret and dread. None of us could muster the spirit to hunt. We passed hungry through great plains and dry riverbeds, up and over hills, across dark stretches of desert. At night we tried to comfort ourselves in the old ways, by grooming one another and curling together while we slept, but these things were empty now, useless as wings on a chicken.

Finally we came to an oasis farming village. With new hope we approached the first person we saw, a thin old man with a long, gently seamed face. I asked him, in the same way you and I are communicating now, if he could take us to the person in charge of the village.

Only four of us left that place alive, running as fast as our weakened legs would carry us. The one who did not survive lay in the dust of the village's single road, a rifle bullet in his head. The farmers, as Christians, believed we were evil spirits rather than dogs, and they pursued us into the desert with their guns. We escaped into a system of underground caves and spent three days and nights inside, mourning our friend and our fate. Snouts on paws, we whimpered in the gloom and dust; we still knew how to do this, at least, and it was the same waste of time it had always been.

Q?

It's a good question. I've tried many times to explain this to people, without much success. The analogy I use, when comparing a normal dog's emotional range to that of a person, is the difference between primary colors and the wide gamut of secondary colors. Normal dogs, for example, will experience a primal anger—let's call it basic red. People, on the other hand, have an entire spectrum of red shades—the scarlet of irritation, the vermilion of resentment, the deep crimson of fury, and so on. The four of us now possessed this emotional kaleidoscope—or it possessed us—and early on, the strain of enduring it nearly drove us insane.