Although this revelation was more than enough to convince Semple that she was in the presence of an entity of great importance and power, she was still without a clue as to who this might be. Jim was looking around curiously; even Aimee herself was totally mystified. The only one who appeared to suspect was Doc, who had an amused smile on his face. It took Mr. Thomas, emerging from where he’d been hiding behind a marble copy of Michelangelo’s David, to effect a less-than-conventional introduction.
“Don’t you gaggle of fucking idiots know who this is? It’s Him, isn’t it? Yahweh, the Lord God Jehovah, and all of the other Thousand Names. It’s bloody God himself, look you.”
***
The voice of a nun came from somewhere at the back of the crowd. “I told you it was God.”
God made a self-depreciating gesture. “I used to be Allah as well, but we had to subdivide around the twelfth century. The crusades were making us schizophrenic.”
A number of nuns were already on their knees, and angels and cherubs were starting to gaze with all the adoration that was expected of them. Aimee, on the other hand, wasn’t buying so soon. “You’re really God? Not just another of Semple’s malicious pranks?”
God sighed. “What did you expect? George Burns?”
“There’s been a lot of unfortunate confusion here lately.”
“Surely you don’t want me to prove it to you? I don’t have to walk on the lake or anything, do I?” He noticed Doc Holliday at a distance and nodded with genteel courtesy. “How are you, Dr. Holliday?”
“I’m feeling pretty well, my Lord. How about your good self?”
“I fear I may be looking at a few problems here.”
Aimee stared at Doc. All the color had drained from her face. “He is God.”
Doc gestured in the affirmative. “The Lord of Hosts and none other.”
God looked amusedly resentful. “So, Aimee McPherson, you need Doc Holliday to confirm my identity?”
Not only did Aimee’s color return, but she was rapidly developing the expression of a near-psychotic. “Damn right, I need Doc Holliday to confirm your identity. The last one had a halo and called himself Jesus, but then he turned out to be Ted Bundy. How I am I supposed to tell? When did you ever make thyself beknown to me? When was I granted the revelation? When did I ever see even one of your faces? I’ve devoted my entire life and hereafter to lauding and magnifying your name, and what have you given me in return? Nothing. Zip. Nada. Zilch. Not a sign, not a rainbow that I didn’t have to make myself. Not so much as a phone call. You couldn’t even pick up a gold phone and tell me, ‘Keep up the good work, Sister Aimee’? Oh no. That would have been too much effort. And now you’re surprised I don’t immediately recognize you and fall on my face when you show up in your fancy handmade ice-cream suit and your four-hundred-dollar blow-dry haircut. Well, I’m sorry, my Lord, but adoration is supposed to be a two-way street.”
God gestured to Doc. “You see what I mean? They all expect something from me.”
Doc demurred. “Fortunately, I have such a bad reputation, few are disappointed at the way I treat them.”
***
The Persian cat smiled at Jim. “He’s very good at talking to everyone at once.”
“I don’t know how He does it.”
“Well, He’s God, isn’t He?”
“It all sounds like babble to me.”
“That’s because you have a poet’s sensibility. Mr. Thomas hears much the same thing. The others all think they’re having a one-on-one with their Creator.”
“What are they all talking about?”
“Most of the nuns are just behaving like fans, gushing compliments and making themselves ridiculous. A few want favors, dispensations, or forgiveness for their sins. The Aimee half of the McPherson sisters has totally lost it, and she’s berating him as though he were an unfaithful lover. The hooker called Trixie, who turned herself into Bernadette, is boasting about all the sinners she’s sent to the pods on his behalf, and he and Doc are discussing the finer points of single-malt scotch.”
“That’s a pretty neat trick.”
“I think he’d rather dispense with the rest and just be talking to Doc.”
“And what’s Semple doing?”
“She’s keeping quiet. She seems a little bemused.”
***
“I’m sorry, Aimee, but you have fallen for the same self-delusion as hundreds of thousands before you. You humans constantly operate under the assumption that I, God, give a rat’s ass about the petty comings and going of a species of big-brained, overdeveloped, and rather violent monkeys. It’s just plain absurd. Some of you start praying to me when you lose your bloody car keys. Okay, a prayer is a prayer, and I don’t mind fending off the odd holocaust or arranging a cancer remission if it’s in a good cause, but car keys? Football games? Lotto? The two-thirty at Aqueduct? Give me a break. It’s nothing more than theological junk mail. All it makes me do is want to put as much distance between myself and humanity as I can. Yes, bad things do happen to good people. And no, Aimee, there is no Santa Claus. It’s a cruel and random universe, full of black holes and entropy, where all manner of terrible things happen, deserved or not. And contrary to popular opinion, I didn’t make it, either in a week or two billion years, so you can’t blame me when shit comes to pass. Poor little crippled children are a DNA freakout, not a result of any malice on my part. Ebola was a result of you morons cutting down the rainforest, not my divine bloody judgment. I only added a few of the finishing touches-orchids, woodpeckers, and, to my eternal shame, you nasty humans. Believe me, as far as the rest goes, the math is far too complicated. The universe was originally put together by a consortium of forces that I can only just understand and you couldn’t even begin to take my word for. Have you any idea what the numbers for the Theory of Everything look like? They make quantum mechanics look like two plus two.”
“But it says in the Bible-”
“I’m God, so please don’t quote the Bible to me. That’s another of the great fallacies. I didn’t write that ridiculous book. You think I have nothing better to do with my time than sit around writing inane dietary laws, accounts of primitive battles, and long, boring lists of who begat whom? There’s a Gideon Bible in every hotel room only because MKULTRA put microchips under the gold leaf on the cover. The hippies who used to use the pages to roll joints with when they ran out of skins had the right idea. The damned Bible was cobbled together by a bunch of ancient, too-long-in-the-sun psychopaths sitting in caves in the stinking desert, finished up by a conspiracy of patriarchal prehistoric sheep herders who wanted to believe that, somewhere in the sky, there was some Great Shepherd who would take care of them the way they took care of their blasted sheep and goats. And don’t look at me like that, Mr. Thomas. I have nothing against goats; in fact, I number them among my more likable creations. It’s the shepherds I have the quarrel with. I mean, they only had to see a bloody bush catch fire and they were off and running. Do you know just how stupid the original Moses was? It took the fool forty years to get across the bloody Sinai. T. E. Lawrence did it on a camel in less than a week and he took time off to kill one of his boyfriends on the way by dropping him in quicksand.”
Aimee was floundering. She would have liked to believe that this so-called God was some preposterous impostor, but she knew in her heart that she was talking to the real deal and her heart was plunging to the sub-basement. Just to make matters worse, each time she opened her mouth, it sounded like the blurt of an imbecile. “You mean Lawrence of Arabia?”