Giacomo Sartori - I Am God

The Earth will be a toaster in no time , he says, not to be outdone and putting his all into it. Glaciers will melt like ice cream in the sun, the coastal plains that abut the great metropolises will sink under water, typhoons and other cataclysmic weather conditions will be daily occurrences. Nation states will implode in chaos: epidemics, radiation poisoning from obsolete nuclear power stations, bloody energy wars to capture the few oil wells that have not yet dried up. The bonsai zoologist shakes her head from time, the way one does when one thinks someone is exaggerating, even though the arguments are serious enough.

Ms. Einstein, though, isn’t the least bit hesitant. Armored with fundamentalist certainty, she treats him like one more heathen reprobate. Humanity will exploit the sun and the wind, but more important, we will learn to put bacteria and algae to work, she tells him. Bacteria can easily produce the alcohol to fill the gas tanks of our cars, she says, and in the not too distant future they will also produce electricity. The photogenic specialist in climate-change-before-and-after-the-French-Revolution, grimacing like a man with painful hemorrhoids, has decided to go in for the kill. The time is up for all your clever solutions, he says, the great ocean currents are about to reverse direction and half of the earth will soon lie fallow for lack of water while the other half rots at the roots. His girlfriend stares at him, holding her glass in two hands like a child, lips resting on the lip, a tennis player who’s been eliminated from the match.

It’s hard to say which one of them irritates me most. As far as the future of that little planet named Earth goes, the cocky young wise guy is perfectly right: I myself can scarcely imagine how I would repair such a degraded state of affairs, even supposing that particular bee entered my bonnet. [25] I’d have to purify the air and the water, cap the hole in the ozone, remove millions of square miles of concrete construction, plant billions of trees, dispose of mountains of garbage and plastic junk, deactivate millions of landmines, bring up dozens of Soviet atomic submarines, resuscitate hundreds of thousands of animal and plant species that have gone extinct, completely restore the entire planet’s supply of natural resources: it would be a huge job even for an omnipotent god. But it won’t be me. I’ve done what I had to do and I don’t have the slightest intention of starting all over again just because a handful of lowlifes is having a ball destroying everything. It breaks, you pay, as the saying goes. But he only talks to flatter himself; like many other young fellows he likes to warn us of all the horrendous catastrophes looming, preferably with a glass of wine in hand and some pleasant background music, while privately he thinks the fateful moment is still a long way off, and for some reason won’t involve him. Everyone else will die, but he, quite by accident, will survive.

Ms. E.’s scientific optimism annoys me just as much, however. There seem to be no limits to human presumption; from the inception they’ve been trafficking in flints and other tools (primitive, yes, but still deadly efficient), then moving on to other diabolical contraptions and making them ever more dangerous, so that they could stage their massacres without fear of retribution. And if there’s a category of technophiles who with supreme arrogance would like to steal my job, it’s the geneticists. Those necromancers seem to forget that so-called biological life on that insignificant speck of dust of theirs is only possible because of a fleeting set of circumstances that very soon will no longer exist, even before the galaxy takes a hit from Andromeda (what an extravagant name).

But let us not be misled by appearances: what seems to be an argument between the two is more like an amorous display, like the dance elephants do before they mate. Rain or shine, the coitus they crave will soon take place and then the little one, defeated, will retreat. Humans are programmed to copulate, even before they begin to philosophize; the two youngsters certainly don’t seem to be an exception to the rule.

The doe-eyed iguana-hugger puts her glass down, and rather than argue with her philandering partner (as would be logical but perhaps counterproductive), tells the other she thinks that in reality every leak that technology plugs opens a larger breach somewhere else. The solution will be to give up all the unnecessary frills, beginning with automobiles (cars merely serve to let you work far from home, work that allows you to buy a more expensive car that allows you to work even farther from home) and television sets and microwave ovens, airplanes and electric blenders, air conditioners and satellite navigators, toilet paper, portable computers, carbonated beverages, high heels. The only thing consumer goods are useful for is to create the phony need for more consumer goods produced by slaves on the other side of the planet, not to mention the continual spikes in overproduction and the dreadful wars. Human beings must take care of the health of their own souls, as well as the souls of the animals and the plants. The rest is just dangerous hogwash. [26] For a long time I mistakenly believed that atheists and agnostics were my worst enemies, but recently I’ve been forced to accept that animism, which I thought was dead and buried, is once again proliferating, if in a new, metropolitan guise.

The super-materialist stares at her as if she’s just heard a Martian make a long speech in Martian. She’s astonished that someone of her age could unload schlock of that vintage, BS of the kind spouted by that nutcase friend of her mother’s. Without scientific research we could not so much as make a phone call , she says, tapping a finger on her next-generation cell phone. She sounds not only indignant, but shaken, upset. Telephones are not only completely useless, they’re carcinogenic and should be outlawed , the little one shoots back.

Tomcat is gloating: each of them is convinced she’s right. That way they’ll stop putting up that common front of theirs. He figures that he should be able to find an excuse this week to invite the microbe-hugger to have a drink some place with comfortable lounge seats where they can make out like on the night of the toads. Instead of running off this time she’ll lure him back to the sexy former fishmonger’s where she lives. He can already picture the scene, feel his member getting hard. I can confirm that last point, if you’ll forgive me for weighing in where a professional novelist would hesitate to tread.

Our spiritual guides will come to our aid , the doe-eyed one says following a long pause, short of better things to say and showing her gum-colored gums. Our spiritual guides ? the other echoes, face twisted up as if she might have eaten a lemon. I didn’t say religion, I said our guides , said the first in a low voice, almost an apology for holding such a conviction. She believes that the souls of the dead and those of the living connect through an Internet-like network, and that some techies somewhere are pulling the strings under the supervision of an extremely powerful secret CEO, says Vittorio, nodding at his companion with a radiant mocking smile . A pity that just at that instant he is struck by a sudden stab in the gut of excruciating pain, and dropping his dialectical seducer pose he bends over double and begins to whimper like a baby. Men do suffer from the occasional unexpected pain in the gut; it can even be the symptom of a serious illness.

I don’t know what’s happening to me; Ms. Einstein now seems less odious than she once did. Yes, her devotion to science is a pain in the backside (as it were), but watching her play the rutting atheist no longer sets my teeth on edge the way it did; I no longer want to rub her out by sending her bike skidding on an oil stain as she rounds a curve. In some ways, I realize, I’d like to know her better. I mean approach her as a person, not just using my unlimited divine faculties. It would be a less objective kind of knowledge, less complete perhaps, but warmer, more personal.