By Eric Le Roy
The universe was once a black hole so small that not even a microscope would have detected it. If my feeble grasp of science is right on this one, then it makes it all the more amazing when that cacophonous “Who Let the Dogs Out? moment occurred. All hell broke loose, literally and metaphorically. Night and nothingness made way for light and somethingness.
And on 8 May 1949, I was born, the culmination of everything leading up to that inspired cosmic moment of conception.
Excuse me, I lack modesty. But hold on. Isn’t it true for everyone? Isn’t everyone the central star of their own universe? I suspect so. Every night when I gaze up at myself, I wonder who else is doing the same thing. But there is a downside. Even if we make allowances for the possibility that identical twins share an extraordinary amount of DNA, we are still left with the final verdict: each of us is alone. The proof is that these twins, die as they do, don’t drop to the ground together. Rather, one at a time. Me first !! The chronic homo sapien problem of being 100% ego driven is that it leads to one’s own self-obsessed little cubicle at the edge of the universe. There is no lonelier address.
In the sense I am speaking of, therefore, couldn’t we say that each human being is a black hole unto itself, a black hole turned inside out? It sounds comical, I know, but in this way of imagining it, we could say that every person is a one-off ‘big bang’. Of course, some of us bang a bit harder than others, yet it is wise to remember that even the biggest bang of all will stop banging at some point. And then the long, slow train ride back to Depot No.1 begins.
And who knows where all of those messages that fill the wealthy suites of the brain go when the switchboard flickers and the lights blink and stop working? Pitch black just as the guests are arriving. And there you are: a dead office. It’s like the brain and heart reach a certain dark street corner in the universe, shake hands like two conspirators in a deal, and move off in opposite directions where the blackness shrivels on either side and then is not even black anymore, but nothing at all.
My colleague ‘ArrowS’ composed a piece recently with the cheerful title “ The Part of You That Dies First.” Even more laughs can be found in the following excerpt:
From an Asimov-style rational viewpoint, personal identity is best treated as a pattern of information and causal connections. If the pattern is preserved and continues to run in a sufficiently similar hardware, we treat it as the same person. If the pattern is destroyed beyond reconstruction, we call that death. Body parts are logistics; the brain is the archive.
From a Dr. House perspective, this is simpler: your brain is you; the rest is spare parts.
If you really want a piss and a giggle, look at the illustrations. It’s me; the tubes are just for decoration.
The funny thing is, I still think I’m immortal. That’s right. It’s why, all my life, I have been amazed to read and hear about the deaths of other people. These have included friends and family, people down the road, people up the road, sports and movie stars, good and bad, old and young. For example, today I learned about the death of Brigitte Bardot, the famous French beauty, film star, and animal rights activist.
Let’s make no mistake about it: Brigitte Bardot was a more significant person than I am. Her beauty and persona touched millions. Men idolized her. She was what they like to call an ‘icon’. I am nothing more than somebody’s grizzled old uncle wearing a grey sweatshirt, standing on the roadway waiting for a bus.
When I die, the place they dump me will have enough open real estate around it to build a small town. The only mourners will be the buzzards flying overhead if my wife does my bidding and pays a couple of gypsies to take my carcass out in the woods and heave it down the first sinkhole they can find. I’m not being morbid, only frugal. I don’t want the goddamned funeral home having one last fling at fleecing me of my cash. It’s meant for my wife and her future beau.
Being as that may be, I am still breathing, and Brigitte Bardot is not. That gives her one more feature that I cannot claim to possess: death. It also means that I am hanging onto one that she doesn’t have anymore: life. I am sitting here writing about her, not the other way around. Whoever she was, it’s over now. She has earned admittance into all the secrets of the beyond, except that I fear there is no beyond the beyond. Oh, I fear it.
God. Yes, that mysterious entity (or empty vessel expressed in a word) that appears at the window of the imagination. I have done enough blasphemy in my day to merit the construction of a dozen extra Hells, but I have never been afraid of God. Perhaps this is because, having had it drilled into my head that God knows me, I feel I have the right to say, well, if that much is true, then I guess I know Him just as well. I see Him lurking around like a derelict on the property until I remember that He is both Land Surveyor and Architect. Like me, He holds a lot back, but enough gets through to form an opinion. Right?
That’s because we share the same imagination: He agreed to create me, as long as I agreed to create Him. The ‘worshipping’ part was in the contract too, but contracts can be renegotiated. I carry this God around with me everyday And one day, like brain and heart, we will part company once and for all, like Puff the Magic Dragon and little Jackie Paper.
But as long as I live, everything in my mother’s and father’s coded slime that combined into a single seed and then slid out into the world to meet the mob – all manner of mind and spirit, revolving like bats swirling in the ceilings of great cathedrals, slapping against dome and mosaic windows, while the great bells resound in iron skies outside – confirms my existence. I think it will all last at least one more night. Morning will tell.
God has malfunctioned so miserably in terms of what one might reasonably expect of a ‘god’ that I could be excused for leaving him, drunk and muttering, when I get on that bus I have been waiting for. But I won’t do that. I won’t, and why I won’t comes down to the fact that I have been arguing with God for going on 77 years now, and if I left Him there, out in the rain, I’d have no one to argue with. For me, therefore, God is a companion, but not a king. And that’s the only way we can put up with each other. Butch Crappity and the Shitpants Kid. I can also think of a thousand reasons why He might have left me in the rain. But he didn’t.
I turn to God because I can make Him understand me, and I know that no other person on the planet can, could or even would if they could; in fact, I know damn well they couldn’t and wouldn’t. A wasted investment in a doomed start-up. The world’s verdict on me. Nevertheless, God is Me, and I am God. That sounds arrogant. Listen, I am not done.
If we go the existential route, which is to say that there is no ‘God’ out there and the universe is therefore an absurdity in the sense of not hearing our cries and acknowledging our (fluctuating) values, and if we are left therefore with only two choices: (1) suicide; (2) invention – then it should come as no surprise that each of us customizes his/her own god in the same way as a house or suit of clothes.
In short, we get the God we decide on and draw up the blueprints for. As the carnival barker used to cry, “Ya pays yer money, and ya takes yer choice!” And if the church is God’s boardroom, I am the CEO of Null and Nil and Nada and Nope. Let them jabber. I say, “Father, they know not what they do.” One of these days, I must stop talking to myself.
Some Gods are no better than hangmen. They stand on the scaffold waiting, noose in hand, for the next among the legions of the condemned to mount to the gibbet. Afterwards, the bodies will be cut down and placed on carts. There are white rooms and black rooms where the embalmers wait, and the room each dead person is taken to will be the one he has earned. When he wakes up again, he will get his ‘surprise’.
I would expect no such thing. For me, God is an old acquaintance, maybe someone I robbed a bank with or got drunk with, and who has finagled his way into a part-time job as the town executioner. When my time came to scurry up the ladder and prepare to ‘swing on the string’ as they used to sing at Tyburn, I would behave discreetly with God. To save his reputation, I’d pretend I didn’t know Him, and He’d do the same. Maybe I’d say, “You know how it is.” And He’d say, “Yeah, I know how it is.”
And he would hang me.
Maybe you think I am talking out of my mind. Being silly. Or wasting your time with my fantasy. But think of it this way. Tonight I exist. Tonight, therefore, everything and everyone I have known or known about, including Bardot, exists. The books I have written, which sit proudly on the shelf next to me, exist also, and they contain the expression of my best and worst thoughts. They are who I am, sitting right beside me.
But sometimes, I wonder if someone else wrote those books. It doesn’t seem possible that I wrote them. When, as I do once in a while – not often – I open one of them and look in, I am always surprised to meet myself coming right up to the curb. And when I close the book, that Eric, without a word of complaint, folds himself up amid the darkness like a stowaway on a clipper ship.
Whoever he was, you can find him there. Someday, someone will get rid of the books, seeing no value in them. When I die, I will cease to exist; when they throw the books away, I will be out of print.
Well-hanged, I sit on a bench in the middle of absolute nowhere, kept company only by the God of my Soul, which is to say, the God of my imagination.
I turn to Him and say, “You really hanged the Hell out of me today, didn’t you?”
And He’d say, “You’re Goddamned right, I did. It’s what you deserved.”
And it would be no good suggesting a do-over because God’s a stubborn old gaffer.
But let me suggest an alternate scenario – for God, for me, and for you.
The scaffold was still on the mountain, because of course it was. God had excellent carpenters and a sentimental weakness for symbols that aged badly.
The people were still there. Waiting. They always waited well. Waiting was humanity’s most polished virtue—centuries of practice, generations of standing in lines that promised meaning at the end and delivered paperwork.
God stood above them, Hangman by unanimous consent.
He had tried mercy. That had been misunderstood.
He had tried judgment. That had become doctrine.
Now He was trying closure.
The rope hung beside Him, coiled like a thought He kept pretending not to have.
The crowd stared upward with that peculiar blend of terror and consumer expectation. They had come for the End. They wanted fireworks, or at least a verdict they could quote later.
God cleared His throat.
“So,” He said, “this is it.”
A murmur passed through the people. Some clasped hands. Some checked their moral math one last time. One man tried to remember whether intent counted more than outcome. Another wondered if irony earned partial credit.
God glanced at His ledger—an infinite book full of very small handwriting—and sighed.
“You know,” He said, “I’ve reviewed your cases. Extensively. Obsessively. I invented guilt, and even I think I overdid it.”
No laughter. They were very bad audiences when nervous.
He gestured at the noose. “This was supposed to be simple. You line up. I hang you. Justice happens. Everyone goes somewhere definitive and stops asking me questions.”
A woman near the front raised her hand. “Are children exempt?”
God pinched the bridge of His nose. He had given them free will, and they kept using it to ask procedural questions.
“That,” He said, “is exactly the problem.”
He looked at the rope again. At the knot. A perfect knot. He had taught sailors how to tie it. Executioners too. He had always been very generous with practical knowledge.
“I made you in My image,” He continued, “and then acted shocked when you turned out petty, frightened, and deeply invested in being right.”
A man called out, “So… are we condemned?”
God laughed.
It was not a warm laugh. It was a laugh based on something resembling sorrow about old work that had come to nothing.
“No,” He said. “You’re exhausted. And frankly, so am I.”
The crowd shifted. This was not in the pamphlets.
God stepped closer to the noose.
“For centuries,” He went on, “you’ve insisted that someone has to pay. Blood for blood. Death for meaning. Preferably someone else’s.”
He lifted the rope, weighed it in His hands.
“You liked it best when I sent a son,” He said mildly. “Very theatrical. Very clean. You could cry, feel absolved, and go right back to being awful with a clear conscience.”
The bite landed. A few people flinched.
“So let’s skip the allegory.”
Before anyone could stop Him—before anyone could process—God slipped the noose over His own head.
The mountain inhaled.
“This,” He said, adjusting the knot with professional irritation, “is what you actually worship.”
Someone screamed. Someone prayed. Someone else took notes.
God stepped onto the trapdoor.
“Don’t worry,” He added. “I know exactly what I’m doing. I always do.”
He pulled the lever.
The drop was clean. Immaculate, even. If there were judges for these things, it would have scored highly.
The rope snapped taut.
Silence detonated.
Humanity stared at the dangling body of God—tongue swollen, crown absent, feet twitching in the deeply undignified way death insists upon. Some of those who were very picky about accurate detail waited for the conventional stream of urine to start seeping down from his groin.
“This was not our saviour! Some of them cried. “Yes, He was!” others yelled in response. Still others burst out with, “Yes, He IS!!!”And they waited to see what would happen.
They were still waiting when a few men came to their senses and cut God down. They bore him away. He was now just a corpse doing what corpses do best: intersect narratives.
The crowd grew restless.
At last, someone whispered, “Is… is this forgiveness?”
Another replied, “I think this is sarcasm. I think it was staged. A conspiracy. Someone’s taking the piss out of us!”
The scaffold creaked in the wind. It was as if God’s ghost bucked, swayed a little, and nodded.
Slowly, horrifyingly, the realization set in:
There was no one left to judge them.
No cosmic parent to disappoint.
No gallows to climb.
No final verdict to hide behind.
Only each other.
No one knew what to do next.
Then a voice piped up out of the crowd: “Isn’t it customary to go somewhere and eat after things like this?”
“No funeral then?”
“Why bother? He’ll just pop up again if He wants to impress us.”
As usual, there was a wag in the crowd who was bound to say something cheeky. And so he did: “Massino’s Pizza Palace, anyone?”
That broke the tension. Everybody laughed. A shop had opened, and being near, they could already smell the dough, the pepperoni and cheese. Off they went, very relieved that God was out of the way, and nobody else had got hanged.
