Steve Toltz - Quicksand

As you wish.

Your Honour, I now submit my final piece of evidence — exhibit E — the transcript of the conversation I had with the voice, a transcript I made the following morning while the details were still freshly and indelibly imprinted in my mind:

VOICE: Aldo.

ME: Piss off.

VOICE: Aldo.

ME: I said piss off!

VOICE: It’s time to stop feeling sorry for yourself.

ME: Why?

VOICE: You often say, I didn’t ask to be born. Have you considered the possibility that the Lord has irrefutable evidence — a recording of the whole conversation?

ME: Gary, that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.

VOICE: This isn’t Gary. Look. He’s sleeping.

ME: Oh. Oh!

VOICE: Yeah. So sit up and look smart. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and feeling sorry for yourself about feeling sorry for yourself.

ME: What does that even mean?

VOICE: Isn’t it true that the more self-pity you feel, the more regular pity you feel for others?

ME: I guess.

VOICE: No, you don’t guess. I’m telling you something. Self-pity gets no respect around here, let alone pity, but when you think back to your whole life, can’t you credit self-pity for opening your heart out to the world? Didn’t self-pity propel you to pity others, and then to feeling that pity? Where else were you going to get empathy from— Leila ?

ME: I suppose you’re right.

VOICE: But what’s the point of being empathetic if you don’t get in the mix?

ME: So you’re saying, the empathy I have felt in my life for the sufferers in my immediate surrounds —

VOICE: Counts for nothing. Actually, less than nothing. Less than a self-absorbed solipsist. Less than a sadist. When one understands. Convulsions of empathy are actually immoral if you won’t get your hands dirty.

ME: Is that why I’ve suffered so much?

VOICE: No.

ME: Just as I thought. Meaningless.

VOICE: You’re so wrong. Suffering has meaning, just not for the sufferer.

ME: Oh.

VOICE: Suffering’s all about other people. What others do about your suffering defines their ethical stand in life and what you do about their suffering defines yours.

ME: I guess I can buy that. So because I’ve done exactly nothing to ease anyone’s suffering, that’s why God’s fucking with me?

VOICE: No. Listen. The creation of the universe was a motiveless crime — though not a victimless one, obviously.

ME: Obviously.

VOICE: But would you not agree that a god who cannot turn his omniscience off — nor shorten eternity — is limited?

ME: I would.

VOICE: You sure you haven’t made a mistake assigning agency to God?

ME: Have I?

VOICE: You’re awfully critical. Let me let you in on something. God loves a heckler but loathes backseat creationists.

ME: I just have this fear that one day God will forget to back up and lose everything.

VOICE: You have an unusually high number of fears.

ME: Is fear dangerous?

VOICE: People with castration anxiety do lose their testicles, but so do people without it.

ME: Is bad luck self-harm by another name?

VOICE: What do you think?

ME: I think an entire planetary suicide would be worth it just for the look on God’s face.

(the voice laughs)

ME: I got dicks flying at me from all angles! This shit’s funny to you?

VOICE: My turn to ask a question. What do you actually know about the ineffable?

ME: Only this: if you had a peek at its profile you would not hook up with your own soul on match.com.

VOICE: Let me ask you, why is an agnostic praying? Why now? You’re like those people whose relationships with God begin and end on airplanes during severe turbulence. This is a divine booty call, isn’t it?

ME: Yeah, all right. I’ll cop to that. I’m not actually a believer.

VOICE: The thing is, I don’t blame you. Why should you be? Imagine, if you will, a person with no nerves at all — he cannot see, hear, smell, taste or feel— now who wants to meet the Holy Spirit?

ME: No one.

VOICE: Right. What do we know about the risen Jesus other than his headshot? Isn’t the resurrection just three days he never got back? And I never understood why people are expected to cry for Christ’s suffering in particular when one hundred others were crucified the exact same day , a thousand the same week. His suffering was pretty standard fare for that time and place.

ME: Or how we are expected to believe in God at all when there’s so much evil in the world.

VOICE: Haven’t you ever heard of the bystander phenomenon?

ME: You mean, during the atrocities God’s up there, expecting some other deity to intervene?

VOICE: Maybe.

ME: I know history is littered with stories of people pissing on corpses. I’ve always found it curious that nobody ever shits on a corpse, not even in wartime, not even in Auschwitz .

VOICE: That’s true. But what’s your point?

ME: I don’t know. I’m just trying to find a way to say, Where the fuck has God been all this time?

VOICE: Perhaps the sad answer for God’s absence from human affairs is that He’s been denied visitation rights.

ME: What are you saying? That God lost us in a custody battle with the devil?

VOICE: Aldo, for those who love God, that love is enough.

ME: Yet any god who commands love doesn’t understand the first thing about love.

VOICE: Touché.

ME: In any case, love for God is just Stockholm syndrome.

VOICE: God’s silence is an injured silence.

ME: Injured by what?

VOICE: Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, dementia are God’s ways of acting out against mankind tripling the median mortality age and so rudely delaying their reunion with Him. He’s starting to think you’re avoiding Him!

ME: Look at Gary sleeping there. Why is it that whenever God or His angels talk to someone they are incapable of being overheard by a third party or corroborating ear-witness?

VOICE: Is that really what you want to know? What else?

ME: Off the top of my head? Does God allow mass murder because it’s like carpooling to heaven? In the afterlife do eunuchs get their balls back? Why didn’t He send down a daughter? Or twins? Admittedly the creation of the universe was terrific, but why no encore? Is God’s mobile ringtone the braying of an ass? And if He felt it necessary to point out right there in Leviticus You shall not place a stumbling block before the blind , what kind of cunts were running around Jerusalem back then? Are souls like fingerprints to identify the dead for processing? When it comes time for the dead to rise from their graves after Armageddon, what happens to all the cremated ash? Will it wriggle in jars and stir in flowerbeds and fish stomachs? It’s understandable that those Axial Age miracles drained Him of power, but that was over two thousand years ago; how long does it take the Lord to charge back up? If His son does come back, is He just going to raise the dead like last time? Does God so fundamentally misperceive human desire that He won’t turn back the clock instead? Doesn’t He know that’s the miracle we’ve all been waiting for? To make Lazarus young again? And why the fuck didn’t He simply make the inflictor of pain the equal recipient of its sensation? It’s such an obvious idea, I’m almost embarrassed for having to suggest it!

VOICE: You still want to talk about an absent father. A deadbeat dad.

ME: Yeah! Aren’t we just seven billion children in a single-parent household? He’s left Mother Earth holding the bag.

VOICE: Let me ask you another question.

ME: Shoot.

VOICE: What if I was to tell you that upon death God lets you ride Him bareback, judges you Best in Show, waits on you hand and foot as reparation for the scandal of consciousness; He swaddles you in His endless beard, pulls out the complete set of recordings of all your interior monologues, that you have to listen to, but if you’ve given a lot to charity, He’ll make you a compilation.