Click. Ambient hiss. 

World Science Journal: There. That’s better. So, the question on the table— 

Gregori Egorov: No, I’m not worried— 

WSJ: Hang on a sec, Mister Egorov. I’ll repeat the question for the recording. With all the litigation being brought against proponents of free information, are you concerned about the legality of your project? 

GE: I’m not worried. When I first set [the project] up, in my fourth year of university, I was using a random number generator. My earliest published successes, the first near- or exact-copies, were attacked by owners of the originals, the templates, as violations of copyright. And, in a sense, the copyright holders were right. I had created the numbers artificially, which, in the courts, looked very much like an analogue to me just sitting down and tracing a cartoon, say, or copying, word for word, a short story. 

Then, during my post-graduate studies, a mentor suggested to me that I use pi as the basis for the project, rather than a random number generator. I would yield similar results and be legally unassailable. 

WSJ: Why is that? Why use pi? 

GE: Because it is theoretically an infinite, non-repeating series of digits. All possible combinations of numbers are contained with it. And I can’t be accused of creating the content I publish, since pi itself cannot be owned under the world copyright code. 

WSJ: All the information is there? 

GE: It’s all there. In the public domain. You just have to find it. 

#

Gregori Egorov, in a black bathrobe worn to threadbare transparency, tripped down the last four steps, righted himself on the landing, and blinked in the sunlight. It was very much like coming down a flight of clammy concrete stairs and into the belly of a mad scientist’s underground lab, if you discounted the wide open curtains, children playing in a sprinkler outside, and the smell of bread in the oven. Not to mention that the only madness evident was a tendency toward anal-retentive cleanliness. 

Watta was in the kitchen, cross-legged on the counter, fiddling with one of the dials on the oven. She turned and spread her arms for Gregori. 

He signed, Burn, and raised his eyebrows to show it was a question. 

She heaved a sigh, signed, I’m not child, and opened wide her arms again, demanding to be held. 

Gregori lifted her by her armpits, blowing out a thick lungful of air. “You need to lose a few, honey,” he said. She wrapped her furry arms around his neck and craned her own to plant a wet kiss on his cheek. 

“Aww, thanks, stinky,” he said. Her palms dangled down to his butt. She squeezed. “I’m sorry. You need to learn to be more gentle, my love. I haven’t recovered from last week, much less last night.” The warm saliva from her sound of distaste spattered against his ear. “Let’s get to work, huh?”

She nodded and signed, Okay, as punctuation.

Two desks ran along each side of the living room, which jutted out from the side of the house like an arm or a neck. Floor-to-ceiling windows ran the whole length of the room, interrupted by wooden struts. Taped, tacked, and gum-stuck to these struts were hundreds of printouts, from legal-sized pages to slips the size of cookie fortunes. One desk faced the walkway out front, the other the back yard. Each desk had a series of flatscreen monitors, desk lamps, and small linked-paper printers at the end. It looked like the office of a team of private investigators who both struggled with seasonal affective disorder. 

“What did you say you lost, ma’am?” 

“My bestselling novel. The one I haven’t written yet.” 

“Hang on. Let me open the blinds.” 

A sheet of banner paper had been glued to the window, just above eye level, of the latter. Watta’s Desk, it read, and underneath: cat frown and a rough drawing of an eighth note. That had been relatively easy to find in the mess of pi. Watta had gone nuts over the random words that had followed the legend, and had refused to sign anything but, Cat Frown, for a week. 

She scrambled up into a thick black leather chair at her station and steepled her toes. She stared at Gregori, drumming her hands on her feet; he had stuck his hands in his pockets and was now breathing deeply the warm greenhouse air. He stared out at the street, at Doctor Jema from next door walking his dog, at the two teenage girls sunbathing in the front lawn of the next house over. 

Watta pushed away from the desk with her arms and rolled her chair into the back of Gregori’s knees. He stumbled, turned, and laughed. “Sorry. Nature hypnosis.” She peered around his arm and pointed at one of his terminals. 

In large print, so it would be easy to read from a coffee break in the kitchen, characters were spilling in black across a white field. 

@8|nmymotherisafis 

Mother, signed Watta, her eyes wide enough that Gregori could see his own grin in them. 

Something hit the window. Gregori leapt, banging his knee into the desk. The safety glass spidered and dented at the point of impact. Watta crawled under the desk to peer out the bottom of the window. 

“Bird?” asked Gregori. Watta scooted out, behind first. Brick, she signed. 

#

WSJ: Do you work alone? 

GE: You know I don’t. Didn’t. That’s an intentionally leading question. I’ll answer it anyway. 

WSJ: Mister Egorov, I wasn’t—

GE: Yes you were. Yes you were. It’s not like it’s a new question. I worked and I lived with Watta, my life partner. All right? She was a pygmy chimpanzee, one of the two dozen or so that were given citizenship thanks in part to the Animal riots in the twenties.

WSJ: Did you participate in those riots?

GE: I did not. I was too busy researching my dissertation. 

WSJ: Which you never delivered, correct? 

GE: Yeah. Didn’t seem to be much point. [Watta] and I got a modest subsidy because she’s a pre-human citizen. [laugh] She doesn’t like it when I call her that.

#

Gregori read the note again. 

“This isn’t even literate,” he said, letting the crumpled paper slip to the floor. “You’re sure you didn’t see who threw it?”

Watta nodded.

“Right in front of my desktop, too,” Gregori continued, squinting through the tangled mess of white lines. “Going to have to replace the whole window.”

Behind him, Watta was listening to scraps of nonsense. Most of it sounded like static to Gregori’s ears, but occasionally there were tones, the crash of a chandelier falling, or wind shoving past the house. It was like listening to a badly scratched sound effects record.

Letting his eyes blur, he noticed that the dense center of the impact looked a bit like a mouth wide open, if he inverted his perception and let white equal black. A thin band of cracks surrounding could have been lips. A bundle of wild hair, white being white again, shot straight up from where a forehead would be before circling around to frame the cheeks, two spots of unbroken glass. A round-faced wizard, it looked like, staring straight out of the pane, conjuring Gregori’s world ex nihilo.

From Watta’s workstation came the distinctive metallic twang of Tin Pan Alley guitar. He whirled in his chair. Watta was standing on her desk, dancing in front of the radio she kept at the end.

“Watta!” He scowled at her. She flipped him the bird and grinned widely. Tired, she signed.

Sighing, Gregori turned back to the window. He couldn’t pick out the wizard’s face again.

#

Glitch. Pop. 

WSJ: —were after the recipe for Guinness?

GE: I had already placed it in the public domain. It didn’t make much sense to steal it. No, I think they had a different agenda.

WSJ: What, then? Revenge?

GE: No, not revenge, though it’s not something I’d put past the Irish. No. I haven’t told this to anyone else, Jerry. But the bullet wound in Watta’s head was located directly between her eyes. It wasn’t a random shot, a shot in the literal dark.

WSJ: Why would anyone want to assassinate Watta?

GE: My partner was political. Not as a hobby, but just by virtue of her existence. She didn’t enjoy the polarization that surrounded our lives. She mostly wanted to sit around in the study with me, watching and listening; she lived for the adrenaline of discovery. Physiologically, chimpanzees are much easier to addict to the chemical. She knew she was, but she didn’t want to give it up. We went on a vacation, once, to the back yard. But the neighbor kids didn’t know how to sign to her, so I ended up turning her text displays around so she could read them from her lounge chair.

But political factions suffer from [a long pause] creative differences. There are some, it is plain to me, who, if given a One if by land, two if by sea sort of code, would promptly forget what it meant, as well as their battle cry and where the guns were buried. Countrymen to count on, they are. Now with night vision goggles.

WSJ: And what was the end result; to where did that tragedy bring you?

GE: Well, they made off with my computers, and a bunch of the archives. But big deal. I had backups, and the server is buried in a cooling system under the badminton court in the yard.

She killed at badminton. Always hit it over the fence. Don’t know why those neighbor kids never learned how to sign.

#

It was a bad day for concentration. Gregori was imagining things in the pages of text scrolling past him, now. He could see faces, hands, people in the gaps between blocks of characters, in the configuration of punctuation marks. These two periods close together made eyes, and from them poured a waterfall, pounded by slashes and capital Ls.

He gladly took a break when the workmen arrived to replace his window. They said, We won’t disturb you. We can do it all from outside. 

“I’m gonna get some coffee. You want any?” he asked Watta. She shook her head to one side, not meeting his eyes. She was sulking about having to turn the radio off.

It was getting on toward evening. Gregori stood by the kitchen window as the kettle rose to a boil. The sunset was beginning, but it wasn’t worth staying around for. Not a cloud was in the sky; the boring gradient shaded from navy in the East to dust in the West, and that was it. 

The kettle whistled. Gregori poured a mugful and stirred in a teaspoon of freeze-dried crystals, even though the caffeine would keep him up tonight.

Back in the living room, the workers had finished unrolling the new window and were tamping its corners into place. Gregori watched them as he tried to compose a short poem in his head. The warm coffee, his bare feet in the carpet, the workmen standing still and fading into the deepening night, it all fit somehow together. He couldn’t find how, not with his own words.

Watta screeched. Found something, she signed with flailing arms. Gregori coughed, spit coffee onto his bathrobe. 

#

WSJ: How many works have you forced into the public domain in this way? 

GE: Uh, only four have actually been ceded to the public. There was this novel published a few years back — Starve a Fever, by the Canadian author Bess Kashuba.  That was the most recent. Last year, I think, the publishing house’s lawyers relinquished it. The print version had a typo on page eighty-eight. Mine didn’t. That was pretty funny. 

WSJ: Only four? 

GE: Well, yeah. It’s slow going, the process of discovery. But that’s all there is now. There’s no such thing as creativity anymore; just discovery. 

#

Gregori stopped reading aloud. His tongue tasted funny to him. He made a sound through his nose that might have been a laugh if, halfway through, it hadn’t turned into a sneeze. 

“That’s the end,” he said. “It trails off into gibberish after that.”  From her perch in his lap, Watta gave a grunt of dismay.  She fumbled around so she was facing him. 

Not accurate, she signed. 

“Should I publish it?” he asked. 

She shook her head. Might happen, she signed small, between her folded feet. She turned to stare at the flickering images on another display. Gregori watched her fidget with the thin fur behind her ears. She heaved out a great sigh and turned again, resting her long arms on his thighs. 

You didn’t cry, she signed.

“No, I didn’t. It wasn’t me,” he said.

You somewhere, she signed.

Tired, she signed from her elbows down. 

Play, Gregori signed, smiling straight across his face, too tired to hold the corners up. “You pre-human citizen you.”

She leapt up onto the desk and waddled to the radio, her arms up for balance. Click. Ambient hiss. Cat Scratch Fever.

“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.