In The Beginning, There Was God
I wrote this story a few months ago. It’s a mess. The beginning to an amateur Tim Robbins novel. But this morning, I promised myself that I would work on it. To avoid the pressure of having to write something on the blog, I’ve posted the first part of it. Now there’s nothing but myself in the way of getting started, and myself is a very large obstacle to climb over.
It really did happen like they tell it in the Bible, only they got the order all wrong. God, in his infinite loneliness, created Eve first. When she proved to be too surly, he created a brother, Adam. Tempted by “the snake,” Eve bit the forbidden fruit of her own blood, and was forever expelled from Eden.
Because in actuality, God, at the beginning of time, was nothing more than a petulant child, a boy who didn’t yet understand the breadth or scope of his powers—and in comparison to his makers, they were not many. Out of all of the matter in all of the universe—and beyond—God was given a very small parcel. And with that parcel, he played around, blowing things apart, testing out different balances. He created first the sun, a roaring mess of noxious fumes, around which he flew merrily for a few days, an omnipotent pyromaniac.
Then, with his hands, he shaped the planets, beaming things with rough textures. He experimented on them with the weather. He thought up color spectrums, and wrought them in the skies, the bands of light, the chips of mica and the moon rocks that he scattered like beads across the surfaces. Later, when he tried his hand at an autobiography, he claimed to do it all in one day. The separation of light and matter. The making of the universe.
“Bullshit,” Eve snickered when she read it. “What a work of fiction.”
“Give that to me,” God whined. Then he crossed his arms, and sulked for a while under his “tree of life,” which is what he called their pretty lair in the garden of Eden—cheekily, he thought—his lip stuck out two inches from his handsome face. From boredom, but not pity, Eve forgave him, and crawled over in his arms to watch as she moved his hands over the sky, shifting stars, making colors. Later, in different lives, she would see fireworks, and some primal part of her would be imbued with a sense of suffocation.
Eve had been around for most of it. But not all. First, God had created the framework where he would exist. Then, he had become exhausted. His exhaustion left him with time to ruminate. In his ruminations, he realized that he was completely alone. But something told him it hadn’t always been that way.
In his memory, which was infinite in comparison to ours, but akin to a human one in comparison to the powers that rule the metaphysical world, God remembered some kind of warm, reddish chamber. He remembered a throbbing, and an expulsion. He remembered his own birth.
He remembered stretching his arms, and the space around him crackling. For a while, he slept. Then, without warning, he was pushed out into a cold, cold, COLD void. Words cannot describe what it looked like, because it was colorless, odorless, completely unformed. “This will be amusing,” he seemed to remember someone saying. And then, a thunderous voice shouted, “YOURS.”
In the cold, his body trembled and shook. He shook out his arm, and saw that it produced light. He shook it harder, and some of the formless nothing shifted. He thrust out his arms and legs, clenched his muscles, and wailed. The void flew in the opposite direction.
“Awesome,” he thought. And that’s basically all he did on the first day of life in his new universe.
After a few days, he learned that he could control his own powers. He could create large masses. He could program temperatures, and hues. He could, if he tried gently, create beautiful, tiny objects that he had to squint his eyes to see. These he called moons.
First, he created a lot of large planets, which he strung horizontally, and slept underneath, like they were a line of paper lanterns. Mars. Venus. Jupiter. Saturn. Uranus.
The most delicate of them, Urth, was rich with variety of form. Every morning, he got up to work on it. Creating nuances on its surface engrossed him for time immeasurable. But like most creative people on a down swing, he became desolate and discouraged and bored.
“Am I really to be alone forever?” he said, looking around him. And then “ugh,” at the tiny planet, his “Urth.”
From the depths of his bowels, his discontent left a tingling, which moved swiftly through his long, powerful body, until it reached the area where he had recently begun to sprout some hair. Rushing through him like a bolt of lightening, his blood filled the flaccid thing between his legs, and it began to rise, bumping the stupid little moon he had just released from the atmosphere into another universe. “What the fuck?” he said, not necessarily with anger.
“Tell me what this means!” he shouted at the rocks, and then didn’t answer him. “Give me some blessed release!” he said to the sun, but recoiled his hand when he tried to grab it, boiling as it was with his freshman efforts.
At this point, this weird thing in front of him came dangerously close to knocking out his precious little Urth project, bobbing about as it was. He grabbed it to keep it from it’s upward trajectory, and suddenly, felt his hand and it become one.
Afterwards, he was sore for days.
But as the hair on his body continued to grow, and as his mind because more troubled, the urge continued to return. Adrift in the great nothing that he was sculpting into something he thought was beautiful, he indulged in that feeling of one-ness. The build up, the release.
All the while, he was refining his hand skills. He built oceans full of precious objects, in myriad blues and greens. He laid out planes of grass, each stem melded meticulously by his own fingers, hand embroidered. He gave them the power to refurbish themselves, to re-grow, because to be completely honest, it was a waste of time, with the rushing blood and the other shit he had to take care of—the fucking black void, the beyond, which was always threatening to gulp at his life—for him to shape every fucking tiny little leaf, every lavender rock, every icicle on the crystalline glaciers every time one died or was destroyed.
One day, he looked down at what he had created, and he realized it was good.
But God, with his infinite narcissism, was not content. He looked for something to balance the exhausting act of building a world, and all he could find was himself. “Look at you, wasting this!” he scolded himself every time he took that throbbing God stick hanging from his body, and watched as it expelled his inner life fluid into the ether, like diaphanous sheets of silk. Every night, he vowed never to do it again. But then, most mornings, he was back at it.
Because God, with his absent parents and lack of sex education, didn’t realize that his own body could rejuvenate itself. That all of the energy from the universe flowed in him, and through him, and out of him, and that he could not control it all.
“I must stop wasting this,” he moaned one morning after a particularly enthusiastic session. He thought of what he could do. He thought of the beautiful, sleek hills he had just molded on one of his grass plains. He thought of the soft holes he had melded with the grass into the earth. He thought of the deep, sweet dirt below—which, if he was being honest, had served as a resting spot for his manhood on more than one occasion. He thought of the most beautiful receptacle he could imagine, and he imagined himself as he was in his youth. Hairless. Fey. Slender. So beautiful.
But if the creature God created from his own likeness were to fit his needs, it would need a hole, tight as his fist. It would need to be exactly the size where he could manipulate it a bit. Roll it around. Push it over. Make it whimper. The thought of it alone made him so hard that he knocked a chunk of matter into the ether, and created Neptune.
He looked at himself in the waters he had created. He took matter of out of the air, and like a sculptor, began to mold the features of a creature just like himself, only slightly prettier. Or so he would later hear. His main concern was really just the dark little hole, that sweet, secret space where he could do his business. So he built her with a Godly-sized canal, and at the end of it, he put a balloon sized receptacle, her womb. Then, for finishing touches, he added a few handholds. An ass to grab on to. Some breasts to burrow his red-faced shame. Long hair to pull.
When she was finished, she looked nothing like he had expected. She was like him, but also, so very different. He put his lips to hers, and breathed his life into her mouth. Her nerve endings sparkled, and her brain came alive. She opened her eyelids, and began to speak.
“Where am I?” she said, looking up at him with her large, innocent lashes, her perfectly symmetrical features. Those succulent lips. Her voice was sooth and melodious. “And who are you?”
“I am God,” he said curiously, his voice sounding different because for the first time, it was being heard by someone else.
“God?” she said.
“Your creator.”
And then she opened her mouth and screamed, with those God-ly lungs, and her boundless energy, for the next 3 hours.
God, bewildered, watched her. Despite the noise, inexplicably, he found himself to be completely aroused.
But lust, as we all know, has many boundaries.
When God had had enough, he grabbed his creation by the hair, and smushed her down until she was infinitely smaller than his fingernail, infinitely smaller than the cells that made up his own body. “Enough!” he roared.
Then he placed her, gently, for safe-keeping, on a grassy knoll on Urth, where he could hear her scream no longer. There, she stayed, with no choice but to wait for him to return.
