LI
Bean spent his first night in this other temporal dimension spying on who he believed to be God. He had watched her appear out of nowhere, as it was said that God often did. And he had watched her - more interestingly - console the very girl whose presence alone was, at this moment, set upon destroying Planet Heaven.
And when God left, after the girl was asleep, he followed her.
He followed her through the campsite as she went from tent to tent, and from ditch to ditch, blessing every drunken person in her troupe; drawing her finger over their foreheads in a five-pointed star, before kissing each one on the lips. He watched as she prayed for each one, listening to her whisper, which sounded like waves, lightly breaking on distant moonlit shores. It alone drew comfort in Bean’s thoughts and had him nearly fall asleep himself. And he would have too, were it not for what occurred next.
God kneeled down before an old, diseased tree and tore from one of its last branches, a sharp pointed stick. There she carved into the dirt, some kind of a sigil. Bean had seen it before, on Planet Heaven. He had seen it scrawled in places that few souls favoured going. Most of them were dusted away or scratched off the walls. But every now and then, he would catch a few that were poorly erased. Bean knew this sigil though he had never seen it as rich as he did now.
She was invoking The Demon.
He watched as God placed her hands up her dress and took a drop of blood from between her legs, and then ran her red fingers along the outline of the sigil until the dirt was glowing like fire.
“Irik Ahkh Tahr. Demon invoco te servus ad propositum. Loro Deo ortum. Irik, Ahkh Tahr.”
And she bowed with every word and syllable, spitting into the centre of the sigil as she did. As Bean watched, his back shivered with a cocktail of wonder, excitement, and sheer terror. This hardly felt like the kind of act one would want to be caught spying upon. Still, as much as his every sense begged him to run, he felt this strange and overwhelming desire to edge closer and closer, as if whatever hell might be unleashed, might not reach him, were he suckling at its breast.
“Show yourself demon.”
The tree, unto which God prayed, split in half, and from its centre came a horrid looking creature with a splintered, arborous body, and erasure for eyes. The emptiness that was its face had such a pulling gravity that it wiped the expression off of anything that dared look in its direction. Its breathing sounded like a landslide, and as it spoke, the sound of its voice, as it addressed God, was like the hallowing shrill of a mother, having just given birth to her stillborn son.
“Tis I, The Demon,” it said, curtseying for God. “Well, if it isn’t the king herself. And to what, pray tell, do I owe this prestigious honour?”
“I want to see for myself,” said God, “the very last child.”
“He may not be so easy for you to turn. He has evaded my spell until now.”
“I have something more acute than what you have at your disposal.”
The Demon hissed.
“Don’t be jealous. We each have our purpose. I was expecting, at the end of this, a challenge. And I am prepared.”
“You brought her. I can smell her.”
“She will lance the boy, this I can promise you.”
“And then what?”
“He is all yours. His suffering is my gift to you.”
“It is your deal and your payment. It is not a gift. And when this is over? What will become?”
God sighed.
“You know, I haven’t even thought that far.”
They stood silent for a while, holding each other’s hands and slow dancing. Bean, though, was looking through them, at the split in the tree where he could see, as plain as day, a doorway to another dimension. He could see, darkness as if the bark of the tree were woven with the fabric of space and time. And he could see too, a dull glow from a lonely red planet, and a glittering speck, way off in the distance, which, in how it shone, could only have been Heaven. He couldn’t calculate how far the Light had to travel, and whether it would distort through a temporal shift, but for the moment, to the untrained eye, it did seem as if Heaven hadn’t come asunder, not yet anyway. He still had time.
“It has been a long road,” said God, “but we are finally at its end.”
The Demon was unimpressed.
“How many people survived the illness?” asked God.
“Thousands. There were some who were incapable of love. And some with a thirst for passion, but incapable of being loved.”
“Gaia will need an exact number.”
“Three thousand, eight hundred and eighty-eight.”
“Prompt. Very good.”
“How will you kill them?” asked The Demon.
“Tomorrow night, we will put on a spectacle. It will be savage,” said God, as the two continued to hold hands, looking one another in the eye so to speak, and swaying like nervous courters, to the left and right. “We intend on poisoning everyone.”
“Including your own,”
“They cannot die of their own hand. They must die in a holy manner, without will. You should come. You never know, you might enjoy yourself.”
“I have my obligations.”
“Speaking of that. Do you have the stories?”
God smiled in a cunning and foxy kind of manner.
“I have them all,” said The Demon, heavy hearted.
“Oh don’t be so glum.”
“You’ll have the last of the paper by the morning. It’s being cut as we speak.”
God licked her greedy lips.
“And how does he look? The tree.”
“Enormous,” said The Demon. “And frightened.”
“I wish I could be there to see it fall. It’s tragic you know, to have witnessed the beginning of a life but to have to be absent for its end. As a father, nothing disturbs me more. But I too have my obligation. We all do. And tomorrow night, we will taste the fruit of our labour.”
“So this is it then, the last world? After this, when this system is as dark and lifeless as all the others, what then?”
“You and I will have all earned our rest.”
They had, by the middle of their discourse, let go of each other’s hands, and they weren’t so much dancing anymore as they were, passing time in an awkward and impatient fashion.
“Meet with Gaia in the evening,” said God. “She will have the last of the stories of this world. You are, as you know, to dispose of them.”
“I will take them to my home,” said The Demon.
God shivered.
“And I will bury them in my garden, where I shall plant the last human child.”
The Demon danced about. The more serious was its tone, the more demented was it demeanour. It eyed God like a salivating and bloodthirsty hyena. Yet, at the same time, it danced impeccably, and with so much zest. First it did The Pony, and it looked, for a second, as if it might round God up in its saddle, and ride her off to the abattoir. But just as it seemed as if it were losing control, The Demon changed its step and it broke into The Madison, clicking its fingers and tapping its toes, never looking like it was thoroughly enjoying itself, which was the manner of the utterly hip. And then, when The Demon had reached the utmost of its displeasure, it did The Mashed Potato.
God wore a cool expression, but beneath her steel nerve, she shook ferociously. “Nothing and no one will ever find them. Understood?”
“Of course. Now, can I ask you a question?” asked The Demon, immediately breaking into The Twist.
He danced with such vigour that, were his feet two pointed diamonds, he might have bored his way to the centre of the Earth by now.
“I need not be omniscient to know what it will be.”
“Why? Why take it away? And then why offer it in the first place?”
“Light?” said God, pensive.
“There are no happy endings,” said The Demon. “It is the course of love that one must suffer at its end. There is no way without suffering. There is no closure without
a miserable severance of the heart. And that alone, if you listen closely to any human, is a price worthy of their heart’s committal.”
“The fear is rife.”
“Yes, that is true. But it is not always this way. I have seen it myself. In the wake of each tragedy you will find, undoubtedly, the shadow of human compassion. Unless of course, there are other reasons.”
“You think I am jealous?”
“I think you are scared.”
“Of what, my creation?”
“Their transcendence,” said The Demon sagaciously, now doing The Monster Mash.
“They still need me. They still need their God.”
“Look at what they have done; at how much they have achieved. No species has yet to acquire that mastery of awareness, such as the extent in these beings. Not on any planet that I have visited. You should see, in how their thoughts collide, the power that surges from their collective consciousness.”
“So what?”
“They. Are. God.”
“Fuck you. God is just a word, an idea. I planted the first seed. Its fruit is mine to reap. This is my garden.”
“And there are many more like it. And there are many more like you, driven mad by their sense of powerless abandon; by their state of uselessness. My kind, we have played the gracious servant to many proud and mulish alien species for far longer than you could imagine. I, myself, can count the exact number of universes that exist, and in them, the exact number of worlds. I was there at the winding of the clock, an hour before time began. I saw, the first child born.”
“And you will see the last child die,” interrupted God.
“Yes, it is not my place to judge. It is your garden as you say. My kind, we merely attend to the pruning. But know that your intention is not new. And I have seen beings with lesser intention amass far greater wealth than what you have so far. I, like my kind, have served in a finite number of dimensions, but of a number far too great for you to comprehend. I say finite, though be sure, this, and you, will not be the last. Just as there were gods before you, so too shall there be gods in your wake.”
The Demon never stopped its dance, even though God was furious.
Especially because she was furious.
“What I do with the Light that I collect is my business,” said God, thinking of the disco ball in her study. “And there shall be no more after me. I am the last king. My reign is eternal.”
“There is always more.”
“And it will forever be mine, every last speck,” said God.
“Such power,” said The Demon.
“Tomorrow, at the end of the spectacular, we will have killed every single being in this omniverse, and here, on this plain, it will all be over. And you will be paid what is due.”
The Demon left, and as it did, it kicked its funny looking heels and fluttered up into the air with every step that it took as if it alone were the only thing on this Earth unaffected by gravity.
God, on the other hand, wobbled her way back into her carriage, looking like an absolute novice in heels. Bean followed her and preyed outside her room, spying through her window. As he watched, he was overcome with a desire to strangle her. He didn’t rationalize this feeling, he merely stared at her with raging scorn, and for some reason, if felt to him, as much as a glass of water might quench his thirst, that putting his hands around her neck would undoubtedly make this feeling go away - which was a cocktail of stupidity and rancorous ire.
Bean watched as God undressed. And first, when she took off her wig, he sighed, for her hair was not as august as he had once imagined. She was bald for the most part, with tufts of hair sprouting out like stubborn weeds here or there. Her head looked like an eroding sand dune. It was when she took off her dress though that he gasped and gagged.
God, at times, was also a man.
He sat beneath her window the entire night watching the man in her bed and in her skin, snoring loudly and nearly chewing off his own tongue as she or he slept. He thought about Heaven for most of the night, as he stared at The Ringmaster as if he were eyeing in sheer disgust, at a ring worm that had slithered out of his cereal. He couldn’t bear the thought of returning; but where else would he go after he died? What else was there, if Heaven was a lie?
Everything that was once right and true had been turned on its head. He didn’t know what to think or feel. Was he distorting reality? Was this merely a delusional encumbrance? Was this an effect of Light?
“Is this what God was protecting us from - this doubt, this horrible indecision?”
Right now, Heaven was in the midst of an upheaval.
And not even God herself seemed to care.