Pathogenesis

“Well, the truth is I don’t know what to do with you.”

That’s what God said when I met It for the first time in the middle of a very dark ether, a bit of light emanating from His or Her or Its great gold cape, bright enough to illuminate the captives.

“I’ve never known what to do with you people,” It said, scratching its humanoid head with the orbic end of a long black scepter. “That’s why they’re held here.”

The lot of them, holed up in a rusty jail cell, hundreds of thousands, crammed. Some of them wailed, some of them laughed, some of them screamed, and a few I could recognize. Van Gogh and Hemmingway. Robin Williams and Kurt Cobain, the latter looking grungier than ever, his blonde and stringy hair hanging two feet below his feet. Everyone floated in ostensible zero-g. A stench in there, of rotting souls. Plath and Woolf and Sexton smashed themselves into the edge of the cell, arms stretched out through the iron bars, all of them pleading, “Help me."

I stared God in the face.

“So you punish us?” I asked. “For our pain?”

“It’s no punishment. Not compared to what I might do,” It said, floating toward and then above me. “You chose this. You violated the first rule of life—to survive,” and God sank down to my level, looking me in the eye. “And yet, I take pity on you.”

Now I tried my best to survive. I even called the National Suicide Hotline. But Gabe was too painful.

“No. You decided our fate,” I said. “You wired our defected brains. We didn’t ask for this. For crisscrossed synapses. And now, you hold them against us.”

“How dare you talk to God that way,” It said, floating closer, now closer, now one inch from my face.

I waited.

I waited for it to banish me into the prison, a prison perhaps less painful than the agony that sent me to the other side in the first place: the man of my dreams.

Not long after shoving a two-carat emerald on my ring finger, a perfect one, one void of flaws, one that I could see straight through, he told me that there was just one condition to my happiness.

“I want you,” Gabe said. “I want you more than anything. But only if we can sleep with other people. I have to have that. That freedom.” He kissed me on the lips and squeezed me too hard. “Marry me.”

I could not live with him or without him. Pathetic, I know, to off myself over a dude, but what was done was done, and I blame faulty synapses. Or faulty circumstances. Either way, I couldn’t weather him.

I was happy to see Plath.

God paced as best It could without gravity and without ground.

“I don’t tinker with your brains,” It said. “And I don’t tinker with your circumstances. I leave them all to Chance. There are too many of you to keep track of.”

Cobain, I saw him, shoving his way to the edge of the cell, pushing his body between Plath and Sexton so he could get a good look at God.

“Fuck Chance,” Cobain yelled, wagging his finger at God. “Get us out of here.”

“And where would I send you?” God asked Cobain. “To Heaven? You don’t deserve it.”

God had no beard and no nose, so It couldn’t smell the stench of souls. Eyes? Yes, silver ones. Pupils? No. It had none, but Its silver eyes were almost see-through, like Gabe’s emerald promise ring. With no beard, God had to soothe Its nerves and fight Its indecision by dragging Its fingers up and down and up and down the scepter.

“Send us back again,” Kurt said. “A do-over.”

“Back down around again?” God asked, pointing the scepter’s crystalline orb at Cobain’s nose. “So you can do the same thing all over again? Devastate your family and friends with your selfishness?”

“Not selfish when we truly believe they’d be better off without us,” Williams said in a quiet yet unwavering voice.

Now God banged Its head with the scepter.

“You’re all an existential riddle, and you torment me.”

It stopped pacing.

“And yet, you’re better off than you could be,” God said. “You could be down there, in the Eternal Furnace. Instead, I keep you here in the in-between.”

It circled the jail, dragging Its scepter along the rusty bars, the orb knocking into the noses of the lucky ones who could breathe easily from the cell’s edge.

“Set us free,” I said. “Give us new lives. Better lives with better heads, heads that can tolerate what life throws at us.”

“That violates Karma,” It said. “It will repeat and it will repeat, your fixation with death, your hatred of life.”

“So it’s predetermined,” I said. “We then have no defense against the darkness. How is that fair? You gave us bad brains and bad circumstances. We had no other choice but to terminate ourselves.”

God hung Its head.

God shoved the scepter and its orb up into the ether sky.

God roared.

I waited for flashes of lightning, but none flashed.

“You are an existential riddle,” It said.

“Please,” Plath said. “We tried our hardest.”

I floated to her and said, “I Am. I Am. I Am.”

“You read me?”

“I understand you.”

“Then it wasn’t for not.”

God watched us talk through Its silver eyes, Its lids half-open and half-closed in indecision. It sighed, then dropped Its scepter.

“Fine.”

The rusty bars dematerialized. God floated up, too high to be seen as the captives scrambled out of their prison. Freed, we went our separate ways. I found a spot to rematerialize, somewhere in Andromeda.

Thankfully, I found a way to be male.