William Bernhardt - Strip search

That was the path, the key, the missing element that these bigoted fundamentalists would never tumble across. We could know God, we could communicate with God.

We could challenge God.

Esther was a good teacher and a gifted mathematician. Her dissertation on Isaac Newton broke new ground, exploring the alchemical and biblical work that consumed more of his time than science or mathematics. Her first published paper won a major prize, guaranteeing her a tenured position with an excellent university. Rumor had it she was working on Reimann's hypothesis, the Holy Grail of mathematical proofs. A long shot-but if anyone could do it, she could. In her leisure moments, she studied the Kabbalah, became almost as knowledgeable about it as she was about math, linking the two, following Newton in his blending of math and theology, his progress from casual study to obsession. And once her professional life was stable, she began trying to become pregnant.

Given her background, sex did not come easy. She found it impossible to establish any kind of long-term relationship; every time she looked at a man, she saw her father's face, his or one of the abusive surrogate fathers she had endured throughout her childhood. She found it much easier to get through one-night stands, no commitment, no long-term involvement-and she never had to look them in the face. She became adept at picking men up, determining what would attract them, what they wanted, then using that to get what she wanted.

Or tried. In fact, she never got what she wanted. For years and years she tried without success to become pregnant. She sought out fertility specialists, unapproved drug therapies, even so-called specialists who she knew in her scientific heart were little better than witch doctors. It was so unfair! There were so many bad parents around-but she would be a good mother! She would be the best mother who ever lived. But never any luck. Nothing ever changed. Until that fateful day in October of last year. When everything changed.

She knew something was wrong the moment she saw the expression on Dr. Lorenz's face. "What's wrong with me? You said it was possible. You said I was capable of conceiving a child. Why isn't it happening?"

"Esther…please sit down."

"I'm not going to sit down. I'm not a child anymore. Tell me what you have to say."

He sighed wearily. "It would be better if you weren't standing."

"Stop treating me this way! Just tell me why I'm not pregnant!"

Slowly, he closed her clipboard. "You are pregnant."

"I-I am. I am! Then-what's wrong? Why are you looking at me like that?" She clutched the doctor's arms. "Oh my God. Is there something wrong with the baby? Is there something wrong with my baby?"

"No, no. The baby appears to be fine."

"Then what?"

Dr. Lorenz looked at her with the saddest eyes she had ever seen. "Esther…you've got cancer. Cancer of the throat."

Her lips parted, but only a choking sound came out where there should have been words. "How-How long do I have?"

"It's impossible to say. Some people live for years with your condition…"

"But I won't."

The doctor lowered his head. "I don't think so, no."

"Will it affect the baby?"

"No."

"Will I live long enough to deliver the baby?"

"I can't say. But even if you do…"

The doctor didn't have to complete the sentence. Esther knew what he was trying to say. Even if she did deliver the baby-she wouldn't live long enough to raise her child. She would never have a chance to be her baby's mother.

Esther sped home and collapsed on her bed, consumed with rage and tears. What kind of a God would allow this? She would have been a good mother, the best mother who ever lived. But now she would never have a chance. And with no father, her child would end up in one of those dreadful foster homes, full of rape and incest and perversion and sick minds inflicting their warped damaged psyches on the next generation. It wasn't fair. It just wasn't fair! How could God permit this? Why would He give all those wretched people children but deny them to her? He obviously didn't love children-look what He let happen to his own so-called son, what He let happen to his chosen people for centuries, how He allows those supposedly created in his image to lead hellish lonely lives. What was He thinking?

She had no answers. She could not fathom the inscrutable mind of God. But somewhere, just as something in one part of her brain was snapping, another part was stitching something together, something new and…workable. A way to ask her questions, to force God to answer. To let Him know what she thought of Him and His strange and mysterious ways. Math and magic, that was the answer. Calculus and the Kabbalah.

She would need a plan, a way to get His divine attention, to turn His own Holy Word against Him. And she would need a pawn, but by now, turning the minds of little men was child's play to her. Esther would take His bloody image apart piece by piece, destroy the Sefirot limb by limb, find her way from darkness to light by exposing the darkness in the light, the pathetic fallibility of God Himself. She would begin her work at once-calculate her plans and set them in motion.

And then, when she did, may God have mercy on His own goddamn soul.

July 31

"If you're going to get inside her head," I explained to the more than twenty federal officers crammed into the briefing room, "and you have to, if you're going to have any chance of catching her, then you have to understand what motivates her."

"Rage?" suggested one of the younger men in the front row, an agent Gilpin.

"Rage, certainly, but rage fueled by what?" The background checks on Esther Goldstein had come in, and they confirmed most of what I had already hypothesized and woven into my revised psychological profile.

"Frustration. Loss of the child she worked so hard to conceive."

"Certainly the child is a factor. But she doesn't know she's going to lose the child. There's only one thing she knows for certain."

"She won't be around to raise her child," agent Gilpin said quietly.

"Exactly so. All her life she's been surrounded by bad parents, at least in her mind. She was determined to be better, to be better than any of them. And now she's being cheated out of the chance. By God."

"Is that why she's using all the religious motifs?" one of the senior officers, agent Ringold, asked. "Is this her way of…filing an appeal? With God?"

"I can't say for certain," I acknowledged. "But I don't think so. I don't think she's interested in an appeal. I think she knows it's hopeless. But all this imagery and philosophy and mathematics she has absorbed from the Kabbalah, all of it relates to the relationship between God and man. That we are made in His image. That we are all potentially in the process of becoming God."

"So she wants to be God. A deity of equal status. So she could overrule His decision."

"That too seems impossible, even in her delusional narcissistic state. I think she knows she's doomed, that she'll never have a chance to raise her child, at least not on this earthly plane."

"Then what? What does she want from Him? A miracle?"

I shook my head slowly. "Not a miracle. An accounting. She's not buying into all that C.S. Lewis misery-helps-us-appreciate-God's-mercy crap. Don't mean to offend anyone, but in Esther's mind, God is not only a son of a bitch-He's a mean son of a bitch. He's the Old Testament God, raining down death and destruction on those who don't deserve it, torturing the innocent, justifying it all in terms of some incomprehensible plan. And that's not good enough for Esther. She wants to deconstruct God's image while simultaneously taking down as many bad parents as possible, and in so doing, to make God answer for what He has done."