God shouldered open the swollen back door and amidst the plosive shower of rust and dust sneaked a quick squint upward.
There wasn’t a star or planet in sight. They were all masked by an opalescent gray blanket. An invisible gray thread snaking down to His nostrils informed Him of the blanket’s advanced industrial origin—not honest coal smoke so much as the sulphuric stench that was a by-product of the manufacture of plastics, high-grade fuels, and steel.
While the music of the spheres drowned by a restless, incessant throbbing like the grumbling of a thousand distant dragons and the hissing of ten thousand serpents.
God squared His chin surlily. That was the trouble with meditating on His creation, Zen or no Zen. It gave the Adversary a chance to undo it. He’d dozed off dreaming of a glittering city with silver spires climbing toward a bespangled Heaven and swarms of His happy creatures, rainbow-clad, dancing on the greensward between the skyscrapers. And while He’d slept, the Adversary had devised smog and freeways.
It was a wonder that when He’d originally rested on the seventh day, He hadn’t waked on the eighth to find everything redesigned. The Adversary had been sluggish then, but now he was carrying the contest to His very door.
God backed away without closing it. There was an old cloak hanging beside it, and a slouch hat that had seen better days, and a black eyepatch dangling by its worn elastic. God’s shaggy white head brushed a large, empty birdcage and set it swinging.
He’d have to re-think this Adversary business very carefully. He told Himself as He turned. Maybe He’d been too quick in letting his cozening creatures woo Him away from gnosticism and convince Him that the Adversary was only a paper devil, who’d crumple and flare to nothing like flash paper on Judgment Day, or the Japanese fleet before Pearl Harbor. Ahriman might be a better name for the Adversary, an evil strong as His own good. In which case He’d damn well better do the Persian again and be Ormazd fast.
A pair of sleazy stretch pants and an old bra hanging on the back of a kitchen chair made Him remember Venus. There was a lot to be said for polytheism, He had to admit, especially when He woke lonely as this. The trouble was He couldn’t trust the pantheon, which He had fathered during his Zeus phase, to stick by Him. He had a vivid vision of Venus, last to leave Him, turning in the kitchen door, glorious in her sandals, denims, sweater, long golden hair, and inimitable vase-curves.
“It’s been the most, Dad,” she’d said simply, “but now I gotta drift. The beach, Dad. I always had an affinity for surf.”
Nor could he trust or find security in any of His mortal creatures. He’d guided them to atomic energy and spaceflight and computers, and then thought He could turn Himself off awhile, at least for this sector of the cosmos—and He’d come back to find them almost unrecognizable: talking a jumble of new scientific and artistic and social jargon (though many of them no longer thought, they dug), haring off after extrasensory perception, creating brief rainbow microcosms in the inner space of their brains with new alphabet drugs, peering up at quasars rather than stars, tweezering out the molecules of heredity, insanity, sanity—that list was almost endless—inventing languages for machines, reducing ultimate particles to flickering clouds of sub-particles—or wavicles!—devising new human relations by the hundred (they were fantastic social inventors) and new human arts by the thousand.
Of course He could keep an eye on them all the time. He could watch each sparrow fall, each overworked ant collapse from heart failure, each microbe dissolve in the grip of a posse of leucocytes, each unstable atom give up its pale radioactive ghost, each restless particle put on its quick-change act, each idea flicker and die, not missing the one idea in a billion billion billion that lived. But would that grandiose busy-work bring Him any closer to His Creatures or really keep Him in touch with them? They’d still all go on changing and developing through the cycles of seemingly sterile repetition. And He’d be dead inside.
A scrawny black kitten came, mewing at God’s shapeless, soft-soled slipper. Well, at least one of His creatures still depended on him. God levered open two triangular holes in a small can, poured the condensed milk into a dirty saucer, set it on the warped floor, and went off to inspect His four rooms.
In the small studio where He roughed out creation, the paints were dry on canvas and palette, the watercolors cracked, the copper plates eaten through by acid.
In the second room, where He recorded His directives—His Word—there was dust on the tapes and from the machine came a faint stale stench of burnt insulation.
In the third room there were cobwebs on His typewriter.
Clearly the Adversary hadn’t stopped at the back door. He had invaded and disordered the whole.
He had even invaded His body, God belatedly realized. He was full of aches and pains, His tongue was thick, He had to lean down close to the typewriter to make out what He had been typing on the last sheet.
There was a web just above the paper and a tiny black spider was walking across it. God jerked back. Why the Hell had He ever created spiders? What had got into Him then? For the moment He couldn’t recall. It seemed like the end of everything.
But then He reminded Himself that this wasn’t the first time He’d been slammed back on His heels. This wasn’t the only occasion on which He’d been made to feel small. He became aware of a warm knot of identity deep in His gullet, under His breastbone. The Adversary hadn’t invaded that and right now that was all that mattered. He still had a mustard-seed of faith in Himself.
His lifting gaze touched a tiny Buddha of once polished, now dust-coated, reddish wood. Maybe… no!—look at the trouble the contemplative mode had got Him into. The trouble about Nirvana was He always had to come back from it. No, another time, maybe, but not now.
A chain of association flashed on in His mind, like a zigzag lightning flash. Buddha—those priests drenching themselves with gasoline and setting themselves afire—universal flames—atomic holocaust—the ultimate battle of Ragnarok—the Norse gods—Odin! Yes, that was it! It was time that He went out on another anonymous swing, to inspect His creatures and perhaps spot one of the lesser gods here and there. Somewhere along the line, He’d remember the beach.
He returned to the kitchen and put on the eyepatch—His left eye felt as if it really needed the sleazy thing. He whipped on the slouch hat, pulling it low on his forehead, and swirled the old cloak around his shoulders.
He looked up unhappily at the empty birdcage. He really ought to have His two ravens on His shoulders when He went on His Odin-tour of inspection, but they must have flown away long ago. Someone had probably released them out of mercy—maybe Venus, just before she left. Or maybe He had.
The kitten came purring to his slipper. On a sudden inspiration, God picked it up and gently stuffed it inside his vest. Then He hurried back to the typewriter, delicately caught up the cobweb with the spider on it and laid it on His shoulder. They would have to do for his Hugin and Munin. At least they were both black.
Then God squared His shoulders, tucked His chin against His chest, pushed the back door open wide, and stepped out. He was feeling remarkably cheerful. He’d really make His rounds this time. If he happened on a rocket bound for the Moon, or Mars, or even Midgard, He’d hop aboard.
The back gate was stuck like the back door and had to be forced open. That depressed Him again, but after He’d taken a few dozen steps down the dark alley, He began to feel better.
THE GLOVE
My most literally tangible brush with the supernatural (something I can get incredibly infatuated with yet forever distrust profoundly, like a very beautiful and adroit call girl) occurred in connection with the rape by a masked intruder of the woman who lived in the next apartment to mine during my San Francisco years. I knew Evelyn Mayne only as a neighbor and I slept through the whole incident, including the arrival and departure of the police, though there came a point in the case when the police doubted both these assertions of mine.