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| The Worker Gives up on his Dreams [in progress] |
This is all probably a dream, but if I never wake up it won’t matter. In fact it would be better that way.
God was saying to me, “You’ve seen the movie Bruce Almighty, right?” Which I thought was a stupid question. He’s God, he should know a fact so simple. I said something to this effect. “Yes, of course you have. Well, I wanted to try something similar.” God looked like Nathaniel Lees, the Samoan guy who played Captain Mifune in the Matrix movies: light brown skin, greying, but once black hair and playful eyes that told me he was amused no matter what his expression said.
“I’ve considered this for years, what would happen, and even being omniscient it becomes hard to tell. Interacting with another divine being so similar to myself is without precedent and thus the enigma we are at.” He stood amongst the infinite crossroad of some desolate nowhere, I don’t know how we got there, but I supposed we had to exist somewhere to have this conversation. “What do you say? Play God for a while?” What was I talking about? We didn’t have to exist anywhere, here was a being claiming to be God - I could feel that he was God – and I was trying to come to logical conclusions. It was pointless.
“Go for it, I’ve got some ideas.” Which was true. I’d considered this before, what I would do if I was God. It seemed like a cushy gig: all-knowing, all-powerful and capable of manipulating time and space. I could dig it.
I can only say now that God made a terrible choice by selecting me for this particular position.
Aman was seeing red, his wife was being such a stubborn bitch and she tried again to kick him out of the house. But not tonight. The garage was a living inspiration, swallowing him with ideas of how to get inside and show that back-stabbing whore how he felt. Her car – her car bought with his money – looked like a crouching dragon waiting on the concrete floor staring at him with its glossy red and yellow eyes, threatening to open its mouth and devour him in metal and engine parts. Aman’s truck was outside, lurking around the corner so she wouldn’t know he was fucking around in the garage.
He didn’t turn the light on, letting the moonlight bounce off all the metal to show him what tools he had. The surface of the blades and wedges were like diamonds and he wanted to grab them all and just throw them through windows, but the house didn’t need to suffer just because his wife did.
Screwdrivers. No.
Hammers. No.
Drills, wrenches, shovels and saws. No.
And then he saw it, resting on its head and hiding in the corner, a wooden handle worn and flawed with time and use. The dull silver head flirted with the ground and tried to hide amongst its embrace, but Aman saw it. He saw the axe. It still fit perfectly in his hands as it had for fifteen years; a tool – no, a weapon – that could show him love like he loved it. Its head wanted to pull away, its weight reluctant to leave the garage floor, but he would show it that they belonged together. The axe and Aman.
Out of the garage. To the side door. He took the handle off the door with the flat side of the axe and kicked it open. Two screams. Aman’s daughter was home, she didn’t need to be here for this, but he was too far along. He was too far gone. He hefted the axe above his head and found his wife gripping the counter top with bone-white hands and struggling to find her feet. Her eyes were locked on him, she forgot her legs and how to run. He swung downward with a strength he had long forgotten, a vigor of his youth. It felt so good to see the metal bite into her shoulder, then again into her neck; her back; her legs.
His daughter came at him and shoved him to the door, pushing and fighting to try and save her mother. She almost got the axe, his fury was unchecked and what would happen if his daughter got the axe didn’t matter, but he wanted it. He was in love with the metal and wood. Gripping it in a stranglehold, he fell backwards out into the garage. His daughter got the phone, 9-1-1 probably.
Fucking whore! Just like her mother.
Aman got to his feet again, the axe now his best friend, lifting him and lifting his spirits, ready to follow him in to battle. To die with him. The axe came down on his daughter, but she was smarter than her mother. She raised an arm to deflect it, but it split her hand in two. Blood flecked Aman’s face and the white and green linoleum; it looked like the freckled skin of a giant Irishmen. Her screams matched the wail of her mom’s, another trait shared between them. Aman hated it, the link between them was too strong; she had nothing of him. That was why it was easy to bring the axe down again.
He tried, but someone else was there, someone had heard the commotion. The pool of red around his wife was eight feet across and growing, she garbled some plea and flailed like a caught bass on the line. Aman was in a choke-hold, the axe clattered to the ground to be photographed later.
“Do you feel anything?” God was like a curious child in that moment. We stood across a black hole, staring into the darkness but still seeing each other and the billions of stars that surrounded our bodies. I could feel the dark matter of the universe between my fingers and the pulse of life itself on the edge of my hairs, like each follicle was responsible for a galaxy of lives. I told him I felt nothing, lying. “Really?” He seemed legitimately perplexed, which is what I wanted. It was all a test to see if the one true God could read my thoughts and see my future.
We stood on the surface of a star, a white dwarf somewhere in the depths of space. I knew – somehow – that this star was farther out than humans on Earth could see. Men in the twenty-first century estimated the universe to be sixteen billion light-years wide and we were farther. In the infinite depths of space I tested the gifts God gave me.
As homage: Light. We stood on the surface of a planet revolving around the star and the light grew brighter, the surface became tepid and comfortable.
Life. The ground swelled and up came water. A geyser like Old Faithful erupted and my feet; in its flows I could see the smallest bacteria, the single-celled organisms that thrived and crawled over the scalding hot water.
Darkness. The entire thing plunged. The black hole appeared in the distance and consumed the new planet and then receded into my memory, lost until I called upon it again.
Stealth. I didn’t want God to hear my thoughts. I wanted to be able to plan and scheme, to alter the world without his censorship.
Power. God would have no sway over me, now we were two. In the singular universe we were two Gods now. His was the first, mine was the second. He was the beginning, I was the end. Alpha. Omega.
The power to end God. A dagger appeared in my hand. I looked upon myself from outside and saw I had changed. I was a scrawny white man, short cropped brown hair and blue eyes that were cold as the depths of space. Now I was light, I was the burning energy of a life-powered dynamo. The dagger was darker than the black hole, it spat out lightning and the screams of the damned, I heard Satan laughing in its blade.
Time stopped and I stared at the first God: unmoving and frozen in time.
In 1996 a man left his father. Bob started the car and Pam sighed, “We’ll go back next week.”
“Yeah.”
His father, John, had been diagnosed with colon cancer long before and he lay on his bed. His death bed. Bob and Pam – his wife – had been at the house for a few hours, talking with family and trying to penetrate the blazing wall of sickness that surrounded John. They wanted him to know they loved him and they wanted him to get better, but by then he had been on Hospice and had outlived their services. He was still dying, though. He forgot his children, he forgot his wife and all he could talk about was his friends from 1945, during the war but while he was still too young to serve. John served in Vietnam. Navy.
“It’s fucking stupid.” Bob gave the same rant on each journey home. “I don’t get it.”
John had been a devout Catholic for sixty six years since his birth in 1930. He raised ten children, made payments on three different mortgages and worked until his diagnosis in 1994 for General Electric. When he did emerge from the fog that his mind had become, he only ever wanted to ask God for forgiveness, to forgive him his trespasses and deliver him unto salvation.
John’s grandchildren never got to see him, even though they were present. “When can we see grandma and grandpa again?” They asked from the back seats.
“Soon.”
They rode the rest of the way in silence. Bob, Pam and sons lived ten minutes away. They’re automatic garage door opener welcomed them with its normal vibrating hello and signaling their dog that they were home. The routine was comforting, familiar: opening the door, petting the dog, checking the answering machine.
A small red 1 blinked on its black screen, “Somebody loves us!” Pam trying to be funny.
The voicemail: “Bob. Pam. I’m sorry, can you come back to Arlene’s? John’s… Dad…He’s gone.”
Like lead-footed zombies they piled back in the car.
