The Man Who Hated God

I wrote this in January. I like it but it hasn't been published. Scott told me"Jeez-That's harsh, baby."
I said, "Good."

The Man Who Hated God

Jobe was sitting at a stoplight when he realized why he hated God. He hated God, because when his daughter’s body was racked with pain, as her immune system ate itself, this thing—this “God” huffed the experience like airplane glue in a paper bag. Lily’s suffering was nothing to it. He met a woman at a party who described God as reclining on a dais with a lotus blooming from its navel, dreaming the universe. As Jobe had chewed this over, God became less of a Lewis Carroll-style caterpillar, and more of a drug addict, lying in a pool of its own effluence—tying bits of itself off, to experience pain and emotion, eventually letting the bits return, but only after they had shriveled from separation.
He had driven home in a thoughtful mood. When he arrived home, he looted his bookshelves for books on religion, ancient dust-covered textbooks left over from classes long-forgotten. A picture fell out of his world religions book. It was a photo of him and Lily’s mother. She was never his wife, she was barely his girlfriend, and when she left he was sure she hadn’t spared a second thought for the family she left behind. She was selfish, but selfish in such a weak beautiful way that others gave her what she asked for. He tucked the picture into a random book and resumed his search for God. He woke on his couch with the sun warming his face. When he sat up, his journal fell to the floor. Rancid ramblings and whirling images scarred the pages. His fingers were speckled and stained with ink. There was something in this fog of madness that engulfed him, guiding him—a fire that lit his day, like a torch to follow. He arranged his religion books around him in a starburst pattern. He sat cross-legged on the floor, and flipped pages at random; finding patterns, tracing lines to a path he was sure was there. When his library was exhausted, he turned to the internet. It was early morning again when he looked up from the journal. His hands, his chest, and his face were covered in ink. He was shocked when he had gone to the bathroom, and saw his face in the mirror. He ran a bath. The sun was already up when he called his friend Wil. Wil was a long-time paramedic whose bearded face had been the first or last image for many people. He was three hundred pounds and moved like a ballerina. Jobe met Wil in the ambulance after Lily’s first seizure, and they were fast friends. The more Lily was sick, the more time Jobe had to sit in the hospital cafeteria, and shoot the shit with Wil. Wil promised him if he ever needed him no questions would be asked. They hadn’t spoken much since Lily’s death, but Jobe hadn’t spoken much to anyone since then.
Wil showed up with bags of ice, and duffle bags full of hospital equipment, and filled the bathtub with ice. He asked the question that had been eating at him since Jobe had called, “Why do you call God ‘It’?”
Jobe was taking the handful of pills that would induce his near-death experience with God. He finished swallowing before he answered, “’It’ is an ‘it’ because that is its nature, ambiguous, androgynous—it is everything and nothing. If there are no words that truly encompass the infinite then three sad little letters like g-o-d could never even come close. So god, in a worldview, can only be described with the most ambiguous of words—it. Everybody knows it exists almost instinctually, nobody can agree what it looks like, anybody can tell you about it, but in the end nothing can describe it.”
He sighed and rubbed his face, “I’m sorry if that didn’t make sense. I’ve taken a crash course in God the past few days and my head is still spinning.”
“You had a revelation?” asked Wil.
“No,” Jobe answered, “I have a reckoning.” Then he passed out.
Wil opened Jobe’s shirt, and attached the monitors that would tell him when to jerk Jobe back from the edge. He then picked Jobe up, and laid him in the freezing bath. Wil brushed the hair off Jobe’s forehead. “Good luck, old friend,” he whispered.
Jobe heard Wil through a fog. He was so cold; the darkness under his lids exploded into a kaleidoscope of colors, and pulled him away from his cold flesh. He sat up in a white desert. The sun glared off of everything. A voice whispered over the dunes, “Daddy?”
He threw handfuls of sand in the air. “LIES!!” he screamed into the wind.
“Jobe?” a voice from his memory called—Lily’s mother.
“No,” he whispered, knuckling the sand from his eyes. “You aren’t dead.”
“You know this?” She whispered. She knelt beside him, and stroked his shoulders. “When did you last think of me? You think the world is as kind as you to delicate women? Oh my poor Jobe.” She kissed the back of his neck with cold lips.
Back in the bathtub, Jobe wept. Wil stroked his face and neck with a washcloth, and cleaned away the tears. Wil felt sick for Jobe.
Jobe felt her stroke his tears, she drank his pain like she used to—impressed by his love only when it killed him. He stood in the white desert, and she was knocked aside.
“Jobe!” She cried from the ground, her hand outstretched, “Take me with you. I made a mistake. I cannot take this desert anymore. Hide me. Please my love, if you ever loved me—take me with you. I’ll be the wife you wanted me to be.”
Her desperation froze him. There wasn’t any love, only fear, and he hated it. He kissed her forehead, and said, “You were the wife I wanted—you weren’t there.”
Her enraged cry split her mouth, and she curled in on herself with a squeak. A black stone with a red swirl was left in the sand. He picked it up. The stone was cool, but the swirl was warm. He held it out, and turned in a slow circle. He stopped when the swirl grew warmer. He sighed, and walked in that direction. The day was hot; the sand burned him. The night was cold; it crippled him. His skin turned black and peeled away until his muscles were exposed to the sand. His breath came in gasps; he was fading. Wil sat by the bathtub watching, he injected adrenaline in the butterfly needle taped to Jobe’s hand. Jobe felt a jolt in the desert; the stone grew unbearably hot. He dropped it, and knelt in the sand to pick it up. He watched it melt, and cried. “NO!”
He scrabbled after it; it turned into a black mandala that faded as he stirred the sand. She left him again—when he needed her most. The bitch. He sobbed until he was sick.
The smell of a flower crept past his senses—it caressed his wounds, and made him whole. He looked up. A chaise lounge with a sleeping figure sprawled on it perched in the sand under an ornate tent. A flower that rotated and pulsed with many colors bloomed from its navel. Large patches of petals would blacken and wilt. Again the whisper echoed over the sands, “Daddy?”
“Leave me,” hissed Jobe.
Beneath the tent, God woke up. Its skin was a riot of multi-colored thread knots, a brocade of the universe. It sat up, and looked at Jobe. Its gaze blinded him, and blasted his blackened muscles from his bones.
Wil shot backwards when Jobe sat upright in the tub, and howled. Wil hauled him from the ice bath and said, “This ends now.”
In the desert, God placed its hand on Jobe’s shoulder, and pulled him upright. Jobe’s blackened wounds became ash, and fell away to reveal a new form, unscarred by life. Jobe shook the hand away. God cocked its head, and said, “Did you know the voice was your daughter? You could have been with her if you had but accepted her presence.”
Jobe said, “My daughter is dead—dead and gone.”
God toyed with an iridescent string on its finger. It tugged on it. Jobe felt his world tilt sideways. “This is you,” God purred. He tapped it, “if I pull too hard, you will come back to me. Everything that was you will be gone—you will not even know. All your anger—all your pain, gone in a second, wouldn’t that just be heaven?” it asked.
Jobe believed in the knife in his hand. He made it solid with his belief. His hate made it extra sharp. God giggled, and pulled the string. Jobe’s hand flashed out, and sliced the skin from the knot before it could be absorbed. He popped the piece of God into his mouth, and swallowed. The universe exploded in his head. God and Jobe both watched the blue thread slither to the sand. The wound on its finger welled with bright blood. God whispered, “Ouch.”
It rubbed its wound. Jobe said it before he could stop himself, “If you pick at it—it will never heal.”
God assumed a benevolent pose, hands outstretched, and laughed. “You are truly my son. Oh, how I love your audacity. Ask your boon; I cannot refuse such a hero,” it said.
Jobe slapped its hands away, and pulled God to him by the skin on its chest. It looked more affronted than frightened by being touched. Jobe said to God, “I want nothing from you. You offer me a pale shade of the one I loved most. Let me guess: my hubris will prove my undoing; I will look just before entering the light—losing because I didn’t trust you.” He spat on the ground. “I know your games.”
God said, “Of course you know my games, you’re one of the pieces. You are all bit players in a passion play—mine. You attack me, but what are you, but dirt under my fingernails? Should I mourn my hair when it drops from my head or the shit that drops from my behind? Do you? Why doesn’t all the endless little deaths weigh heavy on your soul? Is only the familiar death worthwhile?”
“All death is familiar to mortals—you’re the stranger in that land,” whispered Jobe.
“And so are you,” it replied. “You’re still alive.”
Jobe shouted, punctuating his words with blows to God’s head and shoulders, “I lived in the land of the dead for eight fucking months. What do you know of pain or death? You use us like drugs to give your endless existence meaning; and you posture as if you’re our meaning. Well fuck you. You are nothing without us. You’re a dead-beat dad who provides no guidance then blames his children for their ignorance. Your acolytes preach patience, but your reality preaches pain, useless pain, for the general amusement of the universe. We war over your affections, and after seeing you that really saddens me.”
He pushed away from God, and walked a few feet away staring off into the desert. He finally spoke, “I am no longer yours. I own myself. My boon is this: You will pay attention. You will shepherd your children like advertised, and if you don’t—I will find you, and there will be a reckoning.”
He knelt and grabbed a handful of sand. God was rigid with fury. It pointed a shaking finger at Jobe. “You are marked by me little man. One day you will beg to die, I will change my mind only when I feel your suffering equals my disdain of you. You will find it difficult to track me again, it’s never the same road,” it said.
Jobe opened his hand, showing it the black stone with the red swirl. “I will find you,” he said.
It snarled and raised its hand. The world tilted, and exploded with a clap. Its image was lost as Wil slapped him again. Jobe sat up on the bed, he started choking. He twisted sideways and spat on the floor. It was the black stone, Lily’s mother. Jobe grabbed it before Wil could. It burnt into his hand. When he opened his hand, it bulged under his skin.
“What is it?” Wil asked.
“My compass,” said Jobe.
They jumped when there was a knock at the door. “Daddy,” a voice whispered.
Wil breathed, “Lily?”
Jobe walked to the door. Wil shouted, “Don’t open it!”
Jobe flung the door open. The whisper faded on the wind. Lily’s favorite doll, a beat-up stuffed frog, slouched on the doorstep. Wil said in a sad voice, tiny with grief, “But…we saw her die. She died. It was her voice, Jobe. It was her.”
Jobe shook his head, “It wasn’t her—it was a memory,” he said.
“What is this then?” Wil asked, and pointed at the frog.
Jobe’s face twisted into a pained smile. He said, “It’s a gift from god—that bastard.”
And then he shut the door.