Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (80 page)

“But it says in the Bible—”

“I’m God, so please don’t quote the Bible to me. That’s another of the great fallacies. I didn’t write that ridiculous book. You think I have nothing better to do with my time than sit around writing inane dietary laws, accounts of primitive battles, and long, boring lists of who begat whom? There’s a Gideon Bible in every hotel room only because MKULTRA put microchips under the gold leaf on the cover. The hippies who used to use the pages to roll joints with when they ran out of skins had the right idea. The damned Bible was cobbled together by a bunch of ancient, too-long-in-the-sun psychopaths sitting in caves in the stinking desert, finished up by a conspiracy of patriarchal prehistoric sheep herders who wanted to believe that, somewhere in the sky, there was some Great Shepherd who would take care of them the way they took care of their blasted sheep and goats. And don’t look at me like that, Mr. Thomas. I have nothing against goats; in fact, I number them among my more likable creations. It’s the shepherds I have the quarrel with. I mean, they only had to see a bloody bush catch fire and they were off and running. Do you know just how stupid the original Moses was? It took the fool forty years to get across the bloody Sinai. T. E. Lawrence did it on a camel in less than a week and he took time off to kill one of his boyfriends on the way by dropping him in quicksand.”

Aimee was floundering. She would have liked to believe that this
so-called God was some preposterous impostor, but she knew in her heart that she was talking to the real deal and her heart was plunging to the sub-basement. Just to make matters worse, each time she opened her mouth, it sounded like the blurt of an imbecile. “You mean Lawrence of Arabia?”

God nodded. “The very same. I thought O’Toole played him very nicely.”

“But what about Jesus? Didn’t you send him to save us all from original sin?”

“That’s what he told you, wasn’t it? Actually, I just wanted to get him to leave home. The kid was a pain to be around.”

“But the Jesus that was here—”

“That homicidal idiot. I don’t know if he was the genuine article or not. It’s been so long, I’ve actually lost track. Either way, that boy was a born troublemaker. I take it you crucified him yet again? It’s usually the best thing for him. It gets him out of the way for a while. The only trouble is, he comes back twice as nasty. He was actually quite well-meaning the first couple of times around. But then the power started to get to him. Loaves and fishes weren’t good enough. Oh dear me, no. First he got into starting wars and pogroms; now the latest fad seems to be old movies and serial killing.”

“But he might have really been your son?”

“Who can tell these days, with so many impostors coming out of the pods? Either way, he’s certainly better off crucified.”

The Persian cat continued to look at Jim. “You see what I mean about multiple conversations?”

Jim nodded. “I’m beginning to get the picture.”

“Aren’t you glad you’re well out of it?”

“I surely am.”

“Now, listen, Trixie . . . ”

“I’m not Trixie anymore. I’m Bernadette.”

God gestured impatiently. “Yes, yes, I know all about that. You fancy yourself as Bernadette, the Hammer of God. Well, I’m sorry,
lovey, I’m God and I have absolutely no need of a hammer. I have no desire to hammer in either the evening or the morning, and if I did, I’d go to the ironmongers and buy one.”

“But I—”

“Please don’t interrupt.”

“But I was—”

“I said, don’t interrupt. As it is, I’m not particularly pleased with you, and if you keep interrupting, I may have to do something judgmental. Don’t you think I’ve had to deal with your kind before? It’s really all about sex, isn’t it. Sex and more bloody sex. That’s all you overblown chimps seem to have on your minds. I know what those machine guns and phallic blasted missiles are all about. I’ve seen hundreds like you before, and you never fail to annoy me. I blame it all on that absurd prude Saint Paul. The repressed Syrian tentmaker fouled everything up. The man was completely obsessed with sex. He couldn’t stand the very thought of it. Hated women more than he probably hated himself. Started all those fish-smell jokes. I never encountered such a rancid mind in anyone who managed to get himself canonized. And, believe me, there were some foully rancid saints. And then there were all the bloody Popes that came after him, and those repulsive fools Ferdinand and Isabella, not only putting up the money to find America when it wasn’t lost in the first place, but also forking over the cash for the disgusting Inquisition so people could be branded with hot irons and have their eyeballs gouged out and be hanged and burned alive, and all in my name. I’m God, damn it! I absolutely don’t care what people do in the privacy of their bedrooms, or even out in the street, for that matter, as long as they don’t annoy the horses. I think Tennessee said it best when he had Blanche Dubois deliver the line, “I’m never disgusted by anything human as long as it isn’t unkind or violent,” or words to that effect, I don’t remember it all that well. My recent trouble with Marlon has quite put the exact text of
Streetcar
out of my mind. Unfortunately, most of what your kind do is very unkind and ultraviolent. Do you really think that, if I wanted human beings to be celibate, I would have given them genitals and the urge to use them in the first place?”

He halted in his holy tirade and looked hard at Bernadette. “You’re not taking any of this in, are you?”

“I’m trying to.”

God sniffed. “I’m not sure you’re trying hard enough.”

“I’m still a little confused.”

“Yes, and you’ll probably stay confused for all of eternity, so I suggest you go away, think about it, and stop bothering me.”

He clapped his hands once and Bernadette/Trixie vanished into thin air. God then turned and looked at Jim.

“And what about you, Morrison? You don’t have much to say for yourself?”

“I didn’t think there was much point in adding to the babble.”

“That’s right—you used to be a poet, didn’t you? I’m glad you still have the magical hearing, even if you refuse to do anything with it.”

“There’s also the small matter that I never really believed in you.”

God laughed. “And now you feel a little sheepish, with me standing here in all my glory?”

Jim spread his hands and half-smiled. “Something like that.”

“What was that line? ‘You cannot petition the Lord with prayer’?”

“That’s what I wrote.”

God smiled. “And never was a truer line written. Do you know how irksome it can be getting prayed at all the time? I was just telling Aimee McPherson all about it.”

“I had teenage fans when I was a rock star.”

“Then you do have a vague idea. Is something else bothering you?”

Jim hesitated. “There is one thing that’s puzzling me.”

“And what’s that?”

“I thought you claimed you were the only God. ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me,’ and all of that stuff.” Jim gestured to the screen in the middle of the lake. “And yet you seem to have no trouble getting along with those guys.”

God grinned slyly. “That’s because I lied.”

Jim was amazed. “You lied?”

“You think God doesn’t lie?”

“I kind of assumed you were perfect.”

God blinked. Now it was his turn to be surprised. “If deception was an imperfection, Shakespeare would have been a tax collector. You, if anyone, ought to know that.”

“So why the big deal about being the one and only? It kind of set things up for a whole mess of intolerance.”

God shrugged. “Maybe. But as I was just attempting to explain to the truly confused Trixie, humans hardly need an excuse to torture, slaughter, and generally victimize each other. It’s a thing with us gods. You either join a pantheon or you avoid complications by putting it around that you’re the one true deity. I couldn’t really handle a pantheon. I believe I’m what sociologists call unclubable.”

God turned his attention from Jim, looked around at everyone present, and raised an authoritarian hand.

“If you’ll be so kind as to simmer down for a moment, I have a few general remarks that I’d like to address to all of you.”

God waited and the babble slowly died away in Jim’s head. Then God took a deep breath. “Thank you.”

He paused to scan the faces that were now giving him their undivided, and, in some cases, very apprehensive attention. “As you’ve all probably gathered by now, I’m not overly enamored of the human race. When the Cro-Magnons started in slaughtering Neanderthals, I pretty much knew that, as a species, you were well off the rails already. I wanted to flood you all out, but I allowed that wretched Noah to talk me into letting him build his ark because he promised to save the giraffes and the rhinoceroses. A little later, I seriously believed that the aliens where going to nuke you all to extinction, but all they did was fry Sodom and Gomorrah, which I guess only tends to confirm how wrong I can be when it comes to humanity. I didn’t much like the Roman Empire; the Dark Ages were a mess; I suppose the Renaissance was okay, but then the Industrial Revolution started the whole fossil fuel greenhouse thing going and I knew it would only be a matter of time before you turned it all over to the roaches. What you might call the last straw, the thing that really pissed me off, was that
Time
cover story. There it was, white out of black—
GOD IS DEAD
—in damned great letters, and I decided to give up on the whole pack of you. If you chose to think I was dead, so be it. I was history. You had a gang of oily evangelists to address your needs to worship, and I was about to take a cab.”