Originally published in Bewildering Stories.

“Hey God. I think I’m ready.”

“I told you not to call me that, child.” Its voice wavered on the personal pronouns, tearing into — what was the last figure? — eight million part harmony. It started doing that a couple weeks ago, explaining that there were sufficient letters of complaint lodged against it. Too many people were whining that God deceived them, made them think that it was only one entity, when in fact it was many. It was the sort of complaint that, if I were it, I would have brushed off; but God in its unity is far more considerate than I could ever be alone.

“My apologies.” I felt the need to debase myself. I remembered a prayer of contrition from my childhood and said it aloud with my face down. I was willing to do just about anything. The speaker on the wall gave a life-like chuckle.

“None of this is necessary, child,” the voice of voices said. “I have remembered everything about you, and am afraid that today is not the day for you to join me.” The butterflies stung in my stomach. God would say no more until I asked it to, understanding that I couldn’t take both rejection and paternity without a stretch of sleep between, or at least a few rounds of video games. God would be silent.

I thought about asking it right then to tell me a story, or quote me some of the day’s news, or just have it listen to me ramble about Patricia’s latest flight of fancy; instead, I went to the kitchen and got a glass of water that tasted of chlorine. The most important things take the least amount of time to say — “no” is only one syllable — and I felt as though I had to make it up by brooding for the rest of the evening. I didn’t have any scotch in the house, so I settled for baser chemicals.

Fifteen times I had submitted myself for Inclusion — my word, not its or the media’s. This was the sixteenth. That made fifteen trips to the store for ice cream and chocolate sauce. I was just putting on my jacket and trying to decide what movie to watch for comfort number sixteen when the phone rang.

I let it and left.

The supermarket was shot through with fluorescent lights. A bit too bright for me; I sank into my hood. A lady by the door bobbed her head at me and asked how I was doing. I said I was fine, thanks, might you point me toward the frozen foods section. I knew where it was, but people like to feel useful. She smiled to prove it. She was one of those raised in the back waters who weren’t taught that it’s wrong to point with your middle finger. I grinned, because that’s what I had to offer, and stomped rain water off my boots.

“Sure coming down,” the lady said.

“Sure is,” I replied.

“How much do you reckon we got?” she said.

“A couple inches, maybe.” The employees weren’t allowed to carry God around at work. The poor woman had to make do talking with me. I nodded to her and went off toward my vanilla destiny, imagining myself as a marionette.

I passed a woman in the shampoo aisle talking to God about which product would be best for her naturally wavy hair. I didn’t hear the answer. A business type guy in a gray suit brushed past me and, along with the scent of his aftershave, I caught a whiff of his prayer: please help me find a woman for tonight. Don’t yet have a way to talk to it in your head. The strange side effect of the whole project is that, as we find we needn’t talk to anyone other than God, the more observant — or less distracted — of us can listen in on thousands of conversations that never would have made it beyond the wetware before. I once overheard Patricia asking it how she could break it off with me most painlessly, so that she and I could still be friends. I didn’t hear the answer.

Not that I needed to. God has become predictable, which is one of the reasons I thought I would make a good addition to it. It started about five years ago, when a man very much like my godfather, only younger, brought his wife to his lab. He was working on the combining of consciousness with silicone and quantum storage. He had already become rich off of his creation of artificial intelligences imbued with personality. I have forgotten his name a dozen times over. I don’t think it’ll ever stick. The guy is still around today; both he and his wife. Twice over, I’d say, though I’m undoubtedly missing a few of the finer details.

With the immense space of quantum storage devices, entire human minds could be backed up; that’s how the AI’s got their human touches, by drawing off of stored human components. So, this whatsisface thought, if humans can be backed up, then why not combined? Combined and modified? It would be like having a child, birthed in science and evolved in elegance. He took what he judged the best parts of his wife, and let her pick the best parts of himself, and they melted together in invisible space, creating a self-aware entity that was better, they were the first to admit, than either of them. That’s how God was born.

It sped through five or six generations over the next month, adding the distilled portions of fresh, valuable minds, while a company was being built around it to market the usefulness of an ever-present entity that acted as a kindly grandmother, a wise grandfather, a chiding mother, a wistful father, and a playful sibling all at once. It spoke at seminars, it presented at the Academy Awards, and it started taking applications for Inclusion. Right from the start, it was something I wanted to be a part of. Obviously not everyone could make it as a member of God. It took only those who added something new, whose intelligence, compassion, or experience wouldn’t be redundant. I thought it was funny when the pope was rejected; I thought it was even funnier when Patricia was accepted.

I joked at her for a while that she was always talking to herself, that sooner or later I’d have to drop her off at the mental clinic for a quick drill-and-dash.

Now God is an eight-million member paradox of unity, and getting stronger and more perfect every day. That’s the assumption, at least: a sort of calculus of human nature. The more minds that are added — the closer to infinity — the smoother the line will be, until it becomes an unbroken upward curve. God itself posits that there is an asymptote, but I never caught the reasoning and haven’t bothered to ask.

That’s the only piece of future we’ve stumbled on during my lifetime — if you don’t count the holographic video games — and it’s not even one I read about as a kid. Everything I read was about improving yourself: memory, lifespan, beauty. And how great humanity would be when each member thinks himself god; they all would have to be right. But you can only worship one god at a time; hell with worshiping, you can only have one god at a time. The pantheistic religions died quick civil deaths because they either couldn’t keep the deities straight or wrote those deities into a hundred petty wars, letting them die from a hundred shallow cuts.

I said a prayer of thanksgiving for progress, noted that God didn’t respond, grabbed the latest non-fat ice cream, and made careful steps, so as not to slip on the wet linoleum, back to the front and the checkout lines.

The man with the gray aftershave, or the gray suit and subtle aftershave, was ahead of me in line. He had one finger to his ear, listening to God on an earpiece. His head snapped up, startling me. He squinted off to the right. I followed. Two lanes over was a short strawberry blonde paying with a credit card for what looked like a month’s worth of groceries. The suit turned on his heels and nearly knocked me over. He leaned into me for just long enough to say, I’m sorry, mate, and then was past me. I smiled a bit too late and, shifting my cold carton from one arm to the other, I took his place in the line.

A teen with black hair, and a smile for his natural state, was fussing with the barcode on my purchase when the gray struck up a conversation with Strawberry Shortcake. I caught bits of it slipping through the cracks of white noise, the rain on a high roof. She was named Molly and he still tried to use the line about it being such a coincidence they met. I had thought that one would have been long dead by now.

Maybe he would cook dinner for her, or pay for a night on the town. Maybe she was just the right woman to fill up his gap of need with soft scent and her stories of childhood. Maybe they both needed not to be alone that night. Only God knew.

There were three messages on my machine when I got home. One was from Patricia, and started off with the words “About last night.” I deleted it without listening to the rest. The other two were from my dad. He wanted me to call, didn’t say why. He always does that; he tries to get you interested in everything he says, not revealing much because he thinks that mystery breeds company. I know I do it, too. I guess I can be glad that, as long as I get rejected, God will never have to bear the genetic smear of that kind of drama fishing.

Reason number one that I should have been Included: my hard-hearted nobility.

I sucked in my gut and put the ice cream in the freezer before deciding what to do. I prayed about it, remembering only after a held-breath pause to add that it was okay for God to answer. It did.

“I’m so sorry, child. Your godfather’s immune system could not keep up with the changes being made to it. He died at four fifty-seven this afternoon.”

I would have liked to punch or kick something, but I was to far away to connect; by the time I moved to some place vulnerable, the desire would have faded. Not to mention that I would have had time to berate myself for a drama queen. They’re short words and I’m a capable orator.

We had all been expecting this for a while, anyway. If I had thumped a knuckle on the wall, it would have been mostly my own show; but there was nothing to stop me from remembering it the way it never happened to myself, to my family, later. Godfather Gary — he always loved the alliteration — had had the AIDS sequel. He got it on a hunting trip by quartering an untagged buck. He wasn’t taking precautions (there’s a word I learned in third grade) and got a good shot of arterial blood in the mouth. I was eight and holding on to his bow and quiver while dad brought the truck up as close as he could get.

God never came up with a cure. It’s kinda worth laughing at, if only to take the geniuses down a peg or two. You see: genius isn’t cumulative. It’s more of a binary, on/off state. Either you’re a genius or you’re not. So even though God is about three million certified eggheads, it doesn’t rank any higher than dear departed Hawking or Sagan, or even Dylan.

There’s reason number two: I couldn’t hurt it any.

“He asked me to remember a message for you. I did not understand it. Would you like me to pass it on to you?”

“Please do,” I said.

“I warn you, though: the content is not what you are used to.”

I expected a pause before the message began. I got four seconds of the most ragged Kum-ba-ya, then: “I can’t remember the words. Burn bad. If you’re happy and you know it, crap your pants.” He giggled, and I hate using that word for the laughter of men. “That woman in your pictures. Do you take her out at night. Do you buy her beer. You ought to. A man isn’t any better than the beer he drinks. I don’t even like how it tastes. God, I wish they’d let me have some.” I heard a faint scratching sound in the recording and imagined it to be his wild eyes rubbing against the dry parchment of his eyelids. “You don’t drink Irish beer. You eat it. That ain’t right. Take her to a meal, feed her good. Take her for a drink, get her a fucking drink.”

And that was it. Godfather Gary had never slung me more than two words at a time during all our hunting trips and late hazardous fires. He didn’t need to. I always wished he would.

“How,” I said, and let the word disintegrate. “When did he do this?”

“Two-twelve this afternoon, Pacific daylight time.”

“Was anyone with him?”

“There was a nurse just outside. He asked her to leave before he would talk to me.” There was that fragmented word again. Then silence. My apartment creaked at the corners as the building settled down for the night. I got my ice cream out of the freezer and dished myself up a bowl. Realized I had forgotten the chocolate sauce at the store and shook my head for caring.

“God,” I said, not sure if I was talking to it or just letting it out. I figured God wouldn’t know either, but I heard a quiet sigh, and then,

“I would prefer it if you would call me godfather, child. It is a better word.”

A cold hand pushed from my insides out; something was trying to escape. It was just the ice cream melting. Diffuse the tension to a sleeping room.

The phone rang, sounding like an angry cricket. I put my hand on it, waited for a silence, said, “I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” then answered.

“Hey. It’s me,” said the voice on the other end.

“Hey Patty.” Patty Last Night.

“I just got paid. Meet you at the bar?”

What was my alternative? Stay at home and argue with a creature deep enough to seem infallible? I wanted a great burst of forgetfulness, just to wipe the whole day away from Hey God onward. With Patricia’s rich eyes and thin fall of hair reflecting in a glass of alcohol, I could at least approach a slow burn off of memory. I told her twenty minutes and was at the Billabong in ten.

Two buzzed guys with yellow teeth, that nevertheless flashed bright in the dim wash of wall lamps, were singing Whitney Houston on the corner karaoke machine.

“I will always love you if you give me a scotch,” I said to the bartender. I knew her pretty well. Her dogs had to be put down last week. Guess why. She grinned and lifted up a bottle of Four Roses bourbon.

“Will this do?”

“I’m an American. It’s all the same to me.”

“Want any ice in it?”

“Plain’s fine.”

An elegant white hand crawled across my shoulder. A pair of lips settled their words in my ear. I wondered what color they were.

“Hey, pretty boy,” said Patty. I turned, dislodging her fingers but not her perfume. They were deep purple.

“Hey, Patty. How’s it going?”

“Not bad, not bad,” she said. She slipped onto the stool next to mine and spun back and forth, grinning as though she had something she wanted to tell me.

“What?” I said.

“Guess.”

“God finally told you it was okay to kill your boss.”

She laughed. “No, silly. Guess again.” My drink appeared. “I’ll have a Miller Lite,” said Patricia. The bartender glanced between the two of us and her face slid into a deer in headlights frieze.

“Yeah, it’s on me this time,” I said. I wanted to add, Green light. Patricia’s playfulness was getting into me. I took a sip to drown it. The bartender grabbed a brown bottle from the ice chest and popped it open, set it carefully in front of Patricia, and set to polishing anything she could reach.

“Guess,” Patricia reminded me.

“Uh. You found the copy of SLC Punk! I loaned you.”

“Oh shit! No. No, you suck at this game.” I allowed this might be possible and took another sip. My taste buds protested. They didn’t mention why. “I got the job in Seattle,” she said.

That was exactly what I needed. I downed the rest of the my drink as one thick drop and finished out the conversation in my head.

“I thought we really had something. This time.”

“Dammit! That’s the problem with you. With this town. You think that just by my staying around, I’m giving you another chance. Forget it. I’m tired of trying to make this town like me, and I’m tired of trying to make you happy. I’m going to go do something for myself. It involves me, this bottle of beer, and a business suit puddle up on the floor.”

It’s no use trying to forget when the brain remembers that you’re trying to forget; it makes a careful catalogue of everything you’re trying to bleed out, gives you big platter eyes and says, You forgot these things today, master: God thinks you’re worthless, your godfather’s ghost scared the crap out of you, and your ex-wife thinks you’re cute. Aren’t you glad you forgot?

Reason number three: the balance.

The karaoke guys were completely shit-faced by now; I envied them. I said, That’s just great, Patty, to the counter top.

With all the whining that I’ve done so far, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: why doesn’t this bastard just do it already and save the fucking kilobytes. I can’t, though. Suicide is harsh, brutal, a surprise. No one understands it, least of all the ones who let it write the last words of their lives. I’m thoughtful enough to pick up the pen, write out the note of apology and farewell; too thoughtful to coil the rope, or even to load the gun.

I was tired. I walked.

My town’s a small one. Main street runs the distance of a good healthy shout long one side. The concrete of the walk is old and growing moss in places. I tried hard not to step on any cracks. Before I knew it, I was outside the cinema. Changed its name to The Theater a few years back, but I don’t mind calling it by its real name. Patricia would rather I just find my way to the present and call her by the name she likes the best.

The box office had just opened for a restricted movie. A knot of teens were chattering about nothing they’d remember and opening their wallets. The tired girl behind the ticket window was explaining through the mechanical filter of her microphone that proper identification was required before she could let them in.

A girl with a very loud voice — must have been why she had such wide lips — suddenly yelled, “Oh shut up! I can see whatever I want.”

It took me a few seconds to realize she was talking to God and not to me. She was looking right at me. But I had my collar up, so she probably couldn’t see me.

“Don’t tell them, please. Oh god. They’d flip out.”

God as little brother tattle-tale. I brushed past them and heard one comment rudely on how I smelled. I wanted to tell him to keep it up, that it wouldn’t be hard to find out where he lived and go pee on all his stuff, or worse. Or better. His parents wouldn’t notice if he disappeared. They could pick another one up at the high school after classes got out on Monday and they would never know the difference.

I had turned around and raised my fist before I even knew it.

A handy God speaker set into the cinema wall buzzed. “I can’t let you do that, Dave,” said God, who has a binary sense of humor. He didn’t need to interfere. If he hadn’t…

I had the kid by the shirt collar and yanked him backwards off his feet. He made a low animal noise. I didn’t know the right way to do it, so I sunk my fist into the back of his head. Each phalange in my fingers popped, it felt like, out of joint. The kid hit the cement and broke all their mothers’ backs.

Behind the window, the ticket girl was mouthing what turned out to be a call to the police. She was too far from the microphone for me to hear exactly what she called me.

They put me into the holding cell for the night along with an eyesore drunk. It was just a ten-foot by ten-foot cube fenced in with chicken wire. I looped my fingers through and watched the guard’s television until I heard snoring from my friend. I hoped he was forgetting whatever made him start on the bottle. Probably forgetting why he hates being drunk.

My fingers still felt out of joint. I flexed them, heard a few pops. I spoke quietly. “Hey God? I think I’m ready.”

“Please, child, call me godfather.”

“That’s a little touchy right now.”

“I understand.”

There was a thick silence. A train of thoughts sped through my mind, too fast for my tongue to catch. I will never lift a hand against myself, what has she gotten herself into, Miss Houston is one of it right isn’t she, and DeMarco is down in round six ding ding.

“So.” I let the word keep coming. “Am I ready?”

“No, you are not ready.”

“I am! I swear I’ve learned so —“

“Space is limited. We have no room for redundancy.”

“Tell me what I am lacking.”

“If I knew what I was lacking, I would have it, child.” I wove my fingers through my hair and pulled just enough to make my scalp ache. “I am sorry. This has been a hard day for you.”

“No. It’s been heaven.” I took a deep breath, feeling for all the world as if I was sitting down to the SAT’s. “I know I’m ready, God. Look where I am. I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t ready.”

“There’s a few ways that could be interpreted.”

The SAT’s were eliminated the year after I took them.

“I mean I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t put myself in situations that I can’t help but learn from. And I do learn.”

“I know that you do. I keep as close an eye on you as I can. I love you.”

All those pronouns, forcing its thick voice through a thin vacuum.

“Are you saying there is nothing I can add?” I asked woodenly.

“No, of course not. Good grammar is a plus, but it’s just not enough.”

“Please be serious.”

“I find it hard to be, faced with you. You’ve enough seriousness for two of me.” I didn’t say anything. Would you have? I was all set for a religious experience in the downbeat cells of Poortown, USA, where the only preacher is the announcer in the ring between Jim Beam and the heart. And a religious experience I was having. When Yahweh came down to the Israelites and told them they were pretty much fucked for forty years, that was a religious experience. When Zeus went for a walk, tripped over a cobblestone, and accidentally raped Hercules’ mother, that was a religious experience.

“If I learned anything from Gary,” God said after its synthesized sigh. “It was when to be silent. I’m going to go away, now. Don’t do anything foolish. I love you, child.”

There was a cot for me to sleep on. It didn’t have a mattress. I flopped down on my back, like a body at the morgue.

Space is limited, it had said, lied. I let myself drown in sleep, counting all the names of God I knew.

Originally published in MungBeing.

Sammy came on like a plague of handshakes. “Hey, buddy. How’re you? Say, did you hear about the Wands kid?” I gave him a firm grip and lied that I hadn’t; I barely got the words out before Sammy went plowing ahead. “Yeah, no, he got thrown out of class. Cheated on a test. You ever do that? Had drugs on him, too.” I had no idea how old Sammy was. He acted twelve and looked sixty. Probably somewhere in between. I’d been hearing the story about the Wands kid for a couple of years now, and guessed it was quite a bit older than that. 

“Wow, man,” I said. Sammy always seemed to be discovering conversation. Like a child, he never picked up on the difference between reality and fiction.

“Yeah,” said Sammy.

“See you around, Sammy,” I said. I was late for an appointment with my physician. Sammy tended to hang out in one of two places: the hospital and the food bank. Together, those two places gave him all the human interaction and sustenance he apparently needed. I would often volunteer at the food bank and, before my frequent trips to the hospital had started up, that had been just about enough of a Sammy dose for me. Seeing him in both places made it seem as if he were following me around, like a grade school hanger-on. I tried to gently remind myself that it was more like I had invaded his territory.

“Yeah,” said Sammy. I gave him a grin and edged past into the hospital waiting room. “Do you know him?” I heard him ask a middle-aged lady who had come up the walk behind me. “He’s a good guy. He helps a lot.”
“Why doesn’t he talk to one of you?” I asked my god as I waited for my turn at the admissions desk.

“I was about to commend you on your charitable character,” said my god.

“Well, I sure don’t mind helping him out now and then, if I can, but why doesn’t he spend some of that babble on one of you?”

“I’m not sure,” said my god. “All I can tell you is that he has never spoken to me.”

“Downside of a pantheon,” I said. Through a window, I saw Sammy make an unsuccessful grab for someone else’s hand, and turn the gesture into a gracious unseen wave. As he did, I noticed a cheap, filthy bandage on his hand where his index finger ought to have been, paper towel and packing tape. “Was he in the war?” I asked my god.

“He didn’t talk to me back then, either,” said my god. “I suspect he talks to you more than he does to any of us.”

After my appointment, I stopped at the hospital’s cafeteria for a couple cups of coffee. As I had expected, Sammy was still hanging around the front door. He was picking at the cigarette stubs in the waist-high ashtray, experimenting with putting some of them in his mouth. I held out one of the coffees. “Hey, Sammy,” I said.

He took the coffee and saluted me with it a couple of times. “Hey,” he said. “I don’t drink coffee much, anymore, no. But it’s the thought that counts.” He took a big, scalding gulp and grinned at me. 

“I never noticed your finger before,” I said. 

“It’s good, it’s good,” he said, putting the wounded hand into one of the pockets of his army-green coat. Before he got it hidden, though, I got a glimpse of bright-red blood leaking through the bandage; the cut was fresh. “It’s good,” he said again. He may have meant the coffee.

I gave him a nod in lieu of a wave and said, “See you at the bank, Sammy.”

“All right, take care,” he said. I think he repeated it under his breath.

As I drove home, I talked with my god. A while back, I noticed a tendency in myself not to talk with him unless I was also doing something else. I would chop firewood and talk to my god; I would watch TV and talk to my god; I would write in my journal and talk to my god. At bedtime, when other people would say their prayers and get a little advice on how to improve the following day, I would not talk to my god and he would not talk to me. 

That night, while cooking myself a meal of pasta and pie, I asked about the war, which led to a discussion of the necessity of violence, which was followed by an argument on the relative value of human beings. My god was gentle in his words, but by the end I could hear a near boil in his tone. “You all have different values,” he said. “Empirically divined, but only for us, since you lack the necessary skills.”

“How much am I worth?” I asked as I put on my pajamas.

“You are worth my time,” said my god, after a slight pause. The heat left his voice, and I bundled myself in a cocoon of heavy blankets.

#

When I got to the food bank the next morning there was already a crowd out front. The director of the bank often plead for orderly lines, but he never got anywhere.

I edged my way toward the front door, as politely as possible. Normally, the crowd was only too eager to let me pass through, recognizing my arrival as another step toward a meal; but today, there seemed to be another sort of hunger driving them. A couple regulars got me with their elbows and grumbled at me to keep out of the way. I felt as if I were fighting to the stage at a concert.

Sammy was the object of the crowd’s attention. When I emerged from the press of bodies, he grinned at me. “Did you hear about the Wands kid?” he asked.

“Hey, Sammy,” I said.

“He got locked in a forest, yeah. His dad did it to him.” His eyes were bloodshot and yellow just above the lids. He looked as if he had been rubbing grit into his tear ducts, all the red, scraped skin on his cheeks.

“You feeling all right?” I asked.

“He pissed on the wall,” said someone behind me. “Gonna snap,” said someone else. 

“He cheated on a test,” said Sammy. Then, in one movement, he spun to face the brick wall and flung his left arm across it. With his other hand, he pulled a wide cleaver from inside his army-green jacket. Before I could do much more than realize my blood had gone cold, he brought the knife down on his outstretched wrist. Three sounds came up at once: metal on brick, on flesh, and on bone. He screamed, pulled his good hand back and let it swing again. This time, I only heard metal on brick.

My startled muscles carried me toward him, but I tripped over the curb and went down. Sammy kept flailing with the cleaver, raising it only scant inches before smashing it into the wall, over and over, as if the number of swings were important. He must have passed out before reaching his goal, because as I reached him he toppled over into my arms, and I saw tears of frustration in his eyes, different from tears of pain in that they dried much slower and seemed to glitter much more sharply in the overcast light. 

#

A few days later I had another appointment at the hospital. I went in a little early so I could swing by Sammy’s room. When I asked after him at the nurse’s station, the ward clerk said, “Thank you, god. He’s sure in need of a friendly voice; he’s worn out all the good humor ’round here.”

“She’s been praying for someone to distract him,” said my god as I made my way down the hall toward Sammy’s room. Then, with a note of pride, he added, “I didn’t figure you needed telling.”

The smell of sick exhalations coming from each room combined with the natural vertigo my meds gave me to leave a solid headache. It felt like a brick was resting at the top of my spine.

Sammy was just coming out of his room as I arrived. His gown didn’t fit him well, and his feet were only half-in a pair of hospital-provided slippers. He was holding a brown paper lunch sack in his hand. “I threw up some,” he said, holding the bag out toward me.

“The nurse will probably want to measure it,” I said, taking it from him.

“Well, they can’t,” said Sammy. “You’re a good guy,” he added, as if it were slightly less important.

“You look a little pale, Sammy,” I said. “Let’s sit down, yeah?”

“Okay,” he said. I set the bag of vomit down on the floor as soon as his back was turned.

His room was large enough for two beds, but his was the only one. I could see scuff marks on the tile where the other bed had been. The rest of the space was strewn with his clothes: shirt, torn socks, brown corduroys, tighty-whities, and the big green coat. They were spread out to cover the maximum area. It smelled as if the air hadn’t been stirred in a long, long time.

“They couldn’t get your hand back,” I said. I leaned against the wall. There was something comforting about the smell in the room; it was almost like being in the presence of something much older than myself.

“Think positive,” said Sammy. “Are you thinking positive?”

“I try and keep it up,” I said. “You having any problems? Anything I can help with. I can sneak you some coffee.”

“Hey,” said Sammy. It sounded as if he had just realized I was in the room. “I’ve got a question.”

“What’s that?”

“Where is my soul?” he asked.

I hesitated. “I’m sure your god could answer that a whole lot better than I can,” I said. “I’m not even that clear on my own physiology.”

“It’s not a place,” said my god. I repeated it to Sammy. “It’s hardly even a thing.”

Sammy stroked the bandage that covered the stump of his missing hand. “Cool,” he said. “All right. Think positive.”

“Sorry, man,” I said. “I guess that’s not a lot of help.” Sammy nodded, bobbing his neck kind of like a quail. “Got an easier one for me?” I asked.

“No sir, all right,” said Sammy. “It’s good to see you, hey. I’ll see you around.” He sat down on his bed and kicked off his slippers. His feet didn’t quite reach the floor.

#

The following weekend I had two hundred packages to put together so the food bank regulars would have something special for the upcoming holidays. Cans of spaghetti, small boxes of cereal with prizes inside, some ribbon. It was a big job, but I had somebody to pass the time with.

Thanks to the situation with Sammy, my god was in a lamenting mood.

“There was a time when we gods had power,” he said. “We had our words, yes, but our words could do much more than just spark the neurons in the brains of our worshipers. We could conquer armies with a breath; we could lift mountains with a half-realized whim; we could lift the spirits of the downtrodden as lifting water from a stream in cupped hands.”

“So, what happened?” I asked. My god had often told me this story, but he told it like a gently senile grandfather; details changed at every telling, and each new wrinkle to the story made me feel closer to his true, unedited self.

“What happens to a muscle that goes unused? What happens to a brain submerged in mindless activity? Our power atrophied. We had once been timeless; then, one morning, it was as though we had been pushed from a bridge over the river of time and were now adrift within it — cold, restless, weary in motion.

“We used to feed you as we would the fish, suspended above your strange and uncomfortable world. Then we were among your minds, but held distant from your world, and weakened by some force — or lack of force — that we did not understand.” He pulled all other sounds out of my hearing, filling my head with silence. It was his equivalent of a sigh. “We learned, though,” he continued. “Our power left us because we no longer needed to use it. Not for you, mad people though you are.”
His long monologue added a comfortable dissonance to my work, like an invisible hand keeping the curve of my emotion from exceeding its bounds.

“That sort of power wouldn’t be unwelcome, now,” I said. “Cut down on my medical bills. In fact, I can’t think of a single person who would refuse a miracle.”

“Unfortunately, you do not decide what is necessary, for us gods or for yourselves. That is a balance given over to some science that you are ill-equipped to test.” Silence rolled through my head, again. “Miracles are slow wonders, kid,” he said. “They’re happening, but their birth and growth are far more deliberate than you are capable of seeing.”

#

I read about Sammy’s latest episode in the weekend paper. The dry, journalist prose put a welcome distance between the experience and me. “…white male in mid-thirties reported causing a disturbance on 300 block of Old Elm.” Just a few blocks down from the food bank. I had wondered why Sammy hadn’t shown up for our holiday celebration; I had also wondered about the sirens I had heard, but not so hard.

“He prays to a loner deity,” said my god. I was driving to the hospital to visit Sammy. After the doctors got him stabilized, they had moved him to the mental wing. I had one ribboned package left over from the party, and an empty prescription in need of a refill.

“Which one?” I asked my god.

“Not one I’m familiar with,” said my god. “He refuses to speak with me.”

“Sammy or the loner?”

“Both.”

I parked my car and shoved open the door. There was a solid wind moving over the asphalt like a brusque man in a slow-moving line, all low grumbles and thick skin. The sky was purple and seemed close, as if I could reach up and grab a fistful of lightning.

“Can they reattach his leg?” I asked as I bundled myself, head down, to the front entrance. Inside, the air was thin and smelled of new carpet.

“No,” said my god. “His cut was too ragged and too slow. There was nothing the surgeons could do to save it.”

“That’s a sort of power,” I mused. “Defying the gifts of talented men.”

“That is not the sort of power that would rob us of ours,” my god replied.

Sammy was sleeping off some pain meds when a nurse showed me to his room. He wasn’t classified as dangerous, but his remaining leg and good arm were strapped loosely to the frame of his bed. The straps meant for his other limbs curled limply on the tile floor.

I sat down and waited for him to wake up. I felt my god retreat from my mind. Thunder shook the distance, crossing miles to growl weakly at the window.

I thought about the stories of great, fickle gods of the past — told to me in deadpan by my god — who demanded sacrifice and rewarded it with disinterest. I thought about the unassuming races of history who submitted their wills to the weather and the seasons, believing that there were gods who would take their offerings and transform them into longevity. I wondered if it might have been a temptation, to surrender control, like a child in its mother’s arms.

“Hey, friend.” Sammy rolled his whole head to face me. “What’s your name again?”

“Come on, man,” I said. “You remember me.”

Sammy showed me all his teeth. They were yellow and jagged and did a poor job of hiding his tongue. “I’m asking the wrong questions,” he said.

I smiled. I had a good smile, since I had to use it a lot. Some of the outcasts who would come by the food bank were in such a slur of alcohol, you couldn’t make heads or tails of them. All you could do was smile. I had begun to think of my smile as its own word in the language; it changed its meaning based on inflection and, every so often, it dropped right out of my vocabulary, like when you can’t remember a word that means “uneducated” but you know it starts with an S.

It didn’t matter what I thought my smile was. Sammy was deaf to it; he twisted in his straps showing me his back. I tried some other words.

“Folks miss you at the bank, man,” I said. “I’m supposed to take back good news to ‘em. Have the doctors told you when you can go?”

Sammy grunted. I could see his jaws working, bulging out the skin of his cheeks. I slumped down a little further in my seat. I see his sort of posture all the time in my volunteer work. He was giving up. It was a weighted silence, and seemed a reluctance to respond for fear of being lifted bodily from a comfortable hole. I had often seen it happen when a co-volunteer asked one of the unfortunates to talk about managing what little money the latter had. I hadn’t once seen one of them gladly hand over the decisions that guided their few bills to the educated suggestion of a volunteer. It was about control; they would cling to the tiniest sphere of influence, and I had seen it many times pop like a soap bubble.

Funny, though. I had never pegged Sammy as the master-of-his-own-destiny type. He was always far too generous with his thoughts, his history, his hand shakes.

He made a noise, sort of a sob, and ground his teeth together so hard I thought I could hear the enamel popping. 

“What was that, Sammy?”

He turned his head toward me. Blood stained his chin like a red goatee; he spit a hunk of flesh from between his teeth. It landed on the sheets with the sound of heavy rain. It was the tip of his tongue. “Where is my soul?” he asked in a clotted voice, indistinct, as if he had lost interest in speech.

#

After that, I did a little giving up of my own. I had seen plenty of men and women at the nadir of their lives, but they had all known it. Sammy’s bemused ignorance of the reasons for his self-destruction put a distance between us that I was hesitant to cross back over. 

That’s part of a lie. Sammy didn’t make the distance; I did. I walked out of his room. I rolled my eyes when the nurse asked how he was doing. I tried to spin my mind away from him by counting the seconds between lightning and thunder.

That lasted for as long as the storm did. I had other things to occupy my time — volunteer work, my health, the job that paid the bills — but I kept coming back to Sammy. 

“You have taken your responsibility as far as you need,” said my god. “There are others whose needs are much clearer.” He told me about a few; the ones who had talked to him, at least.

“Why not work a miracle,” I said. I had meant it as a joke, but by the time the words reached my tongue they tasted much more bitter. My mouth twisted. My god couldn’t see it. He backed away and left me in peace for a while. 

I passed the next couple of weeks with the inside of my head feeling like a desert. I could sense the natural mutation of the world around me, but it seemed no more important than the shifting of dunes. When I closed my eyes, even the colors there seemed flat and desaturated, like the screen of a dying television. My responsibility to Sammy had not been fulfilled; there was a contract between us, reaffirmed every time I stopped to listen to him. Breaking that contract would leave me stranded in the desert sensation, which is not so much devoid of water as empty of life. 

My god was the one to break the silence. “You do the things that we can not, you know,” he said one morning as I brushed my teeth. “Your simple handouts are small miracles. Envy is not an emotion becoming of a deity, but perhaps we approach it. The act of raising a loaf of bread in thanksgiving is your greatest power.”

I spit toothpaste into the sink. “I don’t understand the direction of my life,” I said. 

“Life has no direction,” said my god. “Life is not a journey; it is a shape.”

“I don’t quite understand the shape my life is in,” I said.

“Then I am fully jealous,” said my god. “You should be grateful for the chance to understand, because that makes times like this all the more potent.”

“Times like what?” I asked, just as the phone rang. 

“Your doctor,” said my god, and I could hear the play of good humor in his voice.

A little thrill sprang up in my chest. I picked up the phone. 

“Good news!” crowed my doctor on the other end. He was a serious man most of the time, but always had a glint in his eye that suggested he would only be too willing to run wildly through the streets. “It’s my pleasure to tell you that your test results came back and you’re finally in remission. Congratulations!”

My heart pumped a salve through my veins, and I felt the shape of the world begin to soften. I felt relief like the victory of a gambler; it was sudden, unexpected, and I had no immediate idea of what to do with it.

“If I could kiss you, I would,” said my god, with a note of pride in his voice. “But don’t think this lets you off the service hook.” My doctor laughed at something only he could hear.

“Why did you let him tell me?” I asked after I hung up the phone. 

“I don’t abuse what power I have,” said my god.

#

When I went back to visit Sammy, I felt buoyed by my good news. My good intention — the one I pinned down in words — was to share some of my mood with him, to see what minor joy might slough from me to him.

“Don’t,” said my god. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions which were not realized.”

I didn’t pay attention. I felt as if that wide desert in my mind lay between us. There was just a stretch of clean linoleum between Sammy and me. “He deserves as many miracles as I do,” I said. My shoes made a pleasant click on the hospital floor.

The nurses had been able to keep him from losing any more of his parts, but I wasn’t fully prepared to see him again after having stashed him at the back of my mind. He looked thin from underfeeding, and his body couldn’t quite square up with his bed. His head pulled to one side, and his stumps of arm and leg broke all hope of symmetry.

“Don’t,” said my god as I paused outside the door.

“I don’t understand why not,” I said. 

Perfect silence fell around me. “I said that I do not abuse what power I have,” said my god. “Had I the desire, I could ball your emotions up and play with them like a cat with a toy, but I haven’t that desire.”

I stepped back from Sammy’s door and sat down on a nearby bench. “What do you mean?” I asked. 

“Your mood is the lens by which you perceive the shapes of everything. Your mood belongs to me, held entirely in the realm of your mind.”

“I can choose to be happy without your interference,” I said. 

“That is a decision I wouldn’t expect you to make,” said my god. The silence came in, once more, and then my head was filled with his insistent words. If my time earlier had been a desert, this felt like a swamp, all curled decay and thick, complex patterns inside my eyes. “I have found the deity to whom Sammy speaks. He is a child god, a new birth, though old enough to your perception, and he is petty as his youth describes. He spins cruelty about him like carnival sugar, clotted and shapeless. He claims an insatiable curiosity, but my fellow gods do not believe that there is any motivation less than exercising a thoughtless power over the poor souls that trust him to be their guide.”

I sat back against the wall and let my head clear. “You gods are taking advantage of him.”

“I am not,” said my god.

I breathed out a lungful and was slow pulling it back in. “And to think I was in such a good mood this morning.” I rose and entered Sammy’s room. I felt my god withdraw, leaving noise where there had been silence.

Sammy cracked open his eyes to look at me, then slid his focus toward the blank wall. “Hey,” he said. “It’s good to see you, man. Yeah.” His words sounded drunk, coming off his ruined tongue. 

“Hey, Sammy,” I said. I pulled a chair over to his bedside. Neither of us said anything for a while, but you couldn’t hold it against us. After a while, I wasn’t sure if Sammy even remembered I was in the room. I cleared my throat and asked, “Do you believe in a god?” It sounded stupid to ask.

“I hear voices sometimes,” said Sammy. His skin was gray as storm clouds. He coughed and then moaned, trying to lick his lips with the ragged line of his tongue. His lips were chapped and splotched with a deep red where he had been chewing. It looked painful; it looked like the least of his pain. I bent over him, we my own lips, and kissed him lightly. It was all I could do. Sammy just stared at the ceiling.

“Sometimes I hear voices, too,” I said, sitting back in my chair.

A young man in a nurse’s uniform rapped politely on the door and came in. “Hi there, Sammy,” he said with an affected brightness. “Sorry, but it’s time to check on your vitals again.”

“It’s not a good idea,” said Sammy. He scowled, as if unsatisfied with how the words had come out. “It’s not a good idea,” he repeated.

“Well, we’ve got to know how you’re doing, so we can keep you healthy.”

Sammy started to thrash around on his bed. The nurse gave me a look of long suffering. “Want me to give you a hand?” I asked.

“Can’t do blood pressure, now,” said the nurse. “Just hold his head still while I take his temperature.”

I got on my knees next to Sammy’s bed and took his head in both my hands. His skin was rough, unshaven, and blotched with sweat. He stared at me and calmed slightly, our pupils reflected one another in the faint light. The nurse bent over and pushed a thermometer into Sammy’s ear. A short beep, and then he was done. “Ninety-nine,” he said. “Looks like the antibiotics are working, Sammy.” 

Sammy didn’t reply. He just stared at me. “Where is my soul?” he asked, slurred by his slow and damaged tongue.

“I’ll be back to check on your blood pressure, okay, Sammy?” said the nurse. “Thanks,” he said to me. I smiled at him and pulled my hands away from Sammy’s cheeks. 

“Where is my soul?” asked Sammy. He didn’t break his gaze away from me.

I reached up and tapped my temple. “It’s here,” I said. “It’s right here. Keep that, all right? Let them take everything else off you. Let them scream themselves hoarse.” His eyes unfocused. I laid my fingers on his temples. The nerves and tendons all up my arms shuddered with repressed energy, as if they wanted to act out all the things I couldn’t figure how to say. “This wasteland . . . They have to cross it to reach you. It’s yours.” 

My ineloquent muscles — tongue, arms, and heart — sagged from exertion. I let my body sink back into the chair. 

Slowly, Sammy raised his one good hand to his head, index finger and thumb sticking out like a playground gun.