The Last Testament: A Memoir (6 page)

⁷
He did not return; and Noah presumed he had found dry land; and Noah loved Sparky; and I loved Noah; so I left it at that.

⁸
Then at last the waters receded, and the ordeal was over; and humanity emerged ready to move past its long global nightmare, known at the time as “Floodgate.”

⁹
The ark landed upon Mt. Ararat, which I chose because it had jutting from its summit a perpendicular ridge of sufficient width to double as a pier.

¹⁰
I remember as the ark approached, mirthing cunningly unto Noah and his family, “Behold, I see a pier appear up here!”

¹¹
Long I waited for a response; but they kept silent, lost in grief for their tens of thousands of drowned kinsmen.

¹²
A righteous family, Noah’s; but a tough crowd.

¹³
Then I blessed him and his descendants, and bid them be fruitful and multiply; and as a sign of this blessing, I displayed unto them a glorious rainbow;

¹⁴
Which is why it is most ironic, that of the millions of people who today take the rainbow as their banner, not
one
of them can multiply without outside assistance.

¹⁵
And I made a covenant with Noah never again to destroy every living thing with a Flood, as it is written: “And I will establish my covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth.”

¹⁶
That is Genesis 9:11; and lo, everything changed after Genesis 9:11.

¹⁷
For the survivors of this new, post–9:11 world had learned through bitter experience, that behind daily life’s peaceful façade there lurked always the potential for unimaginable horror, at the hands of a religious extremist with little regard for human life.

CHAPTER 10

¹
A
nd so for a second time the earth was repopulated from a single family; and for a second time I will refrain from delving into thy prurient curiosity over whether or not this entailed the practice of “siblings with benefits.”

²
The only event of note over the next 400 years was the Tower of Babel, which caused me to confound all the languages of the earth.

³
That was a zoning dispute.

⁴
Thou seest, the Tower’s blueprints called for it to be 57 cubits high; yet municipal ordinances of the time allowed for the erection of no commercial structure over 50 cubits high, as per §[C26-801.1] of the Greater Babel Building Code.

⁵
(The reason was that a building higher than 50 cubits would significantly obstruct my view of earth, thus lowering the resale value of heaven.)

⁶
But the building’s owners countered that as the Tower would comprise partly single- and double-family dwellings, it should be granted a residential and/or special-use exemption under a little-used (and, to be candid, poorly-worded) secondary codicil of the Code of Hammurabi.

⁷
This prompted a hearing on the matter, featuring rambling testimony from idle senior citizens, and much bluster from the architect about “aesthetic integrity,” when verily from a purely visual standpoint the design lacked even the charm of a second-tier ziggurat;

⁸
And when the Babel Development Board ruled in my favor by a vote of 6 to 3 (with one abstention), an immediate motion to cease construction was filed with King Gungunum; which was clearly a tactical ploy on the part of the Chamber of Commerce to bide time until the reinstatement of the planning committee . . .

⁹
Anyway, long story short, I wound up confounding all the languages of the earth.

¹⁰
And from that day forward the peoples of the world no longer all spoke good old-fashioned English, but instead blathered incoherently in thousands of tongues; each more un-American than the next.

¹¹
But other than Babel, I spent most of those four centuries doing something I should have done much sooner: assembling my staff.

¹²
I mean this in two senses: first, in the sense of finding a large piece of cedar wood, whittling it, varnishing it, and affixing unto it an ornate golden handle.

¹³
It came out nice.

¹⁴
It was shiny.

¹⁵
But secondly, I mean it in the sense of gathering unto me a team of agents, representatives, subordinates, messengers, interns, and temps to help me run all facets of my ever-expanding enterprise.

¹⁶
Perhaps thou art asking thyself why a supreme and self-sufficient God would need a celestial support system of any kind.

¹⁷
That is a fair question; one I myself mused upon often in the antediluvian period, always arriving at the conclusion that no such system was needed; for I am the L
ORD
thy God, King of the Universe; I never give myself anything I cannot handle.

¹⁸
Yet in looking back on the Flood, I realized there were several occasions when the deployment of an associate on my behalf would have been useful.

¹⁹
For example, informing Noah that all his friends and extended family were going to be destroyed forever due to my wrath . . . there was no reason
I
had to be the one to tell him that.

²⁰
The piteous cries of the wicked and their children as they fought in vain against the relentless surging of the waters . . . there was no reason
I
had to take that call.

²¹
The unremitting continuance of the torrential rains for 40 days and 40 nights . . . there was no reason that repetitive task could not have been delegated to an aide; a younger aide, perhaps, eager to work his way up in the
machina.

²²
Moreover, my failure in the days before the Flood to appreciate the full scope of the growing wickedness had been partly a result of my over-reliance on my own omniscience; a fact that, in retrospect, I should have known.

²³
But now I saw that, in the post–9:11 world, the vital job of gathering intelligence would be best served by an aggressive team of “wings on the ground,” charged with monitoring the goings-on in the region of my principal concern, the Middle East;

²⁴
Thus making that area safe and stable in perpetuity.

CHAPTER 11

¹
S
o I began assembling an elite group of subordinates—Genesistants, if thee will—to do my bidding, deliver my pronouncements, oversee the earth’s natural processes, and manage the inevitable papyruswork produced thereby.

²
I quickly decided it would not do to use transplanted humans; for few were worthy, and those few were needed on earth; where good men were, and remain, hard to find.

³
(Verily, ladies, am I right?)

⁴
No; the only thing for it was to create an entirely new class of creature; and this time not of the dust of the earth, or aught else terrestrial, but of immaterial chunks of pure spirit I would rend from the mystical heart of my own essence, and then futz around with for a while.

⁵
It went very smoothly; within a few days I had over 3,000 employees; I gave them halos to help them see better, and wings to make air travel less burdensome;

⁶
I called them “angels”; and collectively I called them The A-Team; or at least I did until 1983, when I dropped it for reasons thou mayest well imagine.

⁷
I wish not to speak in great depth of my angels; partly because much of their work is classified, and partly because I value their privacy.

⁸
Also, I assume thou already hast a basic understanding of the ninefold angelic hierarchy, and the Three Spheres, and the Three Orders within each Sphere, from having read Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite’s 5th century treatise
De Coelesti Hierarchia
in fifth grade;

⁹
Or, in more poorly-funded school districts, sixth grade.

¹⁰
Yet I would be remiss if I did not here acknowledge five angels, without whose dedication, hard work, and loyalty everything would still have happened, but not with the same
bonhomie.

¹¹
The first of these is Uriel; he is the wisest of my angels; the patron of poets, the guardian of thunder, a repentance whiz, and a great wordsmith; his collaboration with the prophet Ezra on
The Second Book of Esdras
is the reason that work was such an improvement over
The First Book of Esdras,
which was a piece of shit.

¹²
It was also Uriel who devised the idea for Kabbalah; so Madonna, next time thou addest up the numerical values of letters in the Torah, and useth the sums thereof to schedule thy body waxing, forgetteth not to thank Uriel.

¹³
Offer him a prayer, Madonna; yea, or something like it.

¹⁴
The second angel is Raphael; a healer of mind, body, and spirit; he is considered the patron of travelers, and sojourners to this day call upon him to protect them during their journeys, although that is not an excuse to lie out without sunscreen.

¹⁵
Raphael is also endowed with a dry wit that has proven of great comfort in those moments when my disposition waxes saturnine.

¹⁶
As an instance, I remember the council to determine whether to send the Black Death to the world; it was a long and sober discussion, until I turned to him, in his capacity as chief medical consultant, and asked how long the disease would take to kill its victims.

¹⁷
He looked at me with a face void of levity, and said, “My L
ORD
, they will go from coughin’ to coffin in three days.”

¹⁸
And there was great tittering, for a weight of gloom had been lifted from the deliberations; and our spirits were much lightened, as we set about killing one in every three Europeans.

¹⁹
The third angel is Michael, chief of the archangels, the angel of mercy and sanctification, and the commander of the Army of God; he is present on every battlefield, granting victory to the side of the righteous; “victory” in this case betokening a wide range of outcomes, from triumph to triumph-by-martyrdom.

²⁰
Michael is often portrayed in art as androgynous, but he has asked me to tell thee that he is in fact “all man”; and that if thou couldst see clear to painting his jawbone a little squarer, he would greatly appreciate it; because some of the other angels tease him about it sometimes, and even in heaven, words
do
hurt.