Kingdom come

It was about this time, anyway, that New Jerusalem, God’s spanking-new capital on Earth, fell out of the sky. For the most part it conformed to Old Jerusalem, which worked out, because it landed perfectly flush. If you had your eyes closed at the wrong moment you would have missed it. You would only know what had happened in that one unbelievable noise of demolition because the Temple Mount was restored, all white, its turrets bright as trumpets, mosaics bleating out rainbows. And the city streets had been paved gold, smoldering as though super-hot.

If you had been standing in Old Jerusalem, of course, you would have been squashed very flat by a building or thoroughfare or some other piece of city engineering. Just like everyone, good, bad and indifferent, you’d been sent up for sorting.
The reemergence of the Atlantic Fleet of the U.S. Navy was reminiscent of a number of historical moments in which military units are marshaled for an onslaught after the war is over with. This was on a somewhat larger and more incongruous scale than normal.

Dauntless, the nautical compliment of the Baleful Horde had steamed up the Chesapeake, and then on up the Potomac, and now canister fire was crashing into every skyscraper, landmark, and government office within immediate view of the fleet. This was long ago envisioned as the spectacle to sensationalize and theatricalize the Satanic overthrow. The overthrow itself had gone awry, of course, upon Satan’s murder, and then the death of his murderer Tot Tot Maddock’s murderer, Jim Johns the Antichrist.

So clueless, minimally organized Horde members were having the last bit of satisfaction available to them in eternity, firing for an hour on every hint of civilization they spotted, loosing round after round upon the Coast Guard; desperately attempting to shoot down a few F-18s that scrambled to protect the capitol.

“Hey,” ensign Ariman Papst was saying, running his paws over elaborate configuration of switches, buttons, and displays on the bridge of the flagship cruiser. “Don’t they keep nukes on these things?”

Admiral Kok Ba’el frowned for a moment. “Do they?”

It was around this time, while Ensign Papst was not paying attention, and seconds before the all-consuming fire arrived, that the U.S. fleet began plowing through the Great Falls—the Potomac fall-line north of D.C.—shearing upon the rapids, beaching awkwardly and for a moment clogging the Potomac completely, tipping and roaring as they pulled apart. The river promptly began to rushing its banks, churning and bubbling in among the mess.

Then at some point the Potomac evaporated, along with the Horde.
*
The Messiah farted though, we have to agree on that. Jesus passed wind—with as much frequency, you’d say, as any tradesman.
There’s nothing particularly impressive about God showing up AS GOD. God coming down as moody, hairy, fragile and odiferous is the trick—the occasional agonizing bowel movement emphasized—
Lucas d’Estime

Finding God: A Life

*
The President stood before an informal convocation of Big GOD missionaries and converts within the former service area of the former Jiffy Lube. He had never done well on occasions of forced candor. At this moment, in fact, he longed for the End. And he longed to be back on the court.

“My name is President Amis,” he said, blushing. He coughed.

The assembly laughed quietly. There was uncomplicated acceptance in the sound. It made the President hate his discomfort.

“Mr. Amis,” he said. “I’m sorry. Julian Amis.”

Two or three people clapped here, spurring him. One whistled through forefingers and front teeth.

“I just want to say I’m glad...” the President said. The smiling faces went on smiling, waiting without impatience. “I just want to say that I’m glad.”

The President gulped. He prayed. His wife touched his arm, and he looked over. She was standing closer now, bolstering him. She smiled. The appealingly plain face made the President think of Murray, that soft-bodied oaf—that blessing—now a petrified mausoleum in coastal Maryland.

He remembered their last significant conversation, the day before the President left for Las Vegas two weeks ago. Murray was consuming Marshmallow Alpha-bits at the time from a speckled blue mixing bowl. Before him lay a 1200 page book about a foot and a half square. Murray’s eyes combed the page as he munched without expression. Then he was drinking the cereal-milk, his eyes still glued to the page, straining wide-open over the rim. The President examined sideways and without comprehension the byzantine graphs and figures, and the lines of impenetrably thick text like old Greek.

“Here’s what I don’t get about Physics,” said the President, clearing his throat. “Is that they change the rules every now and again.”

Murray looked up, nodding, wiping milk from his lips with a big blond paw.

“Like: this is what the universe is,” said the President. “Here it is, we can show it to you—Oh wait, that’s not the universe anymore, sorry about that. The principles the universe was running on are no longer current.”

Murray patted the page. “That’s actually what this is about.”

“Physics?”

“Theoretical physics,” Murray said. “This says the universe isn’t really governed by math.”

The President nodded, frowning, his trademark thoughtful pose for moments where he had ventured into a subject he had no comprehension in.

“Then what is it ruled by?” he said.

“Something...” Murray said, screwing up slightly the husky adolescent face he’d retained since he was eleven. “Simpler.”

The President nodded, still frowning.

“See,” he said. “That sounds like horseshit to me.”

Murray laughed, a loud sudden noise. He clapped, pleased.

The President plowed on, encouraged. “Every few decades they change the universe. Like the Science Vatican has a new gospel every generation, and now its like the old thing was never reality.”

“No,” Murray said. “No. That really is exactly what it’s like.”

It was the President’s lot in life to be perpetually excluded from things that actually mattered. And he sat for a long time with the large forty-year old brooding over an empty cereal bowl in his white underwear, stroking his moustache dry. For that tiny remembered moment at least, short and without any further consequence, the President meant something.

Now the idea of a presidential library was gone with the ridiculous presidency, Murray was gone. The President looked on Murray’s double, the large boy called Donell in the front row, smiling, a little uncomfortable in a group—all-believing. And all at once the President began to grieve. And the feeling made him smile. The President swallowed. He was going to turn to his wife, her hard haircut, age-ruined eyes, statuesque nose and forehead. He was going to say to her:

“Kat, I’m lucky. I’m lucky to have lived, and you are the entire reason. If there is a God who exists, you are Him telling me so.”

She was smiling. She kissed him, lips tear-soft.

The President was going to square off with the crowd. He was going to tell them, “I’m glad...”

But his wife’s hand on his arm turned to carbon. The air over the crowd turned to quark jelly. The Universe went very bright and very dense.

So that when the President smiled, his teeth were suns.

His eyes were galaxies.
For several minutes Cerberus, affable hell-dog gorgeous and terrible, was screaming down the continental divide at the rate of a fighter jet. He blew through towns and he blew over wheat fields and he blew past weigh-stations and trucks stops with shingles out announcing walnut bowls and locally-created fudges. He smoldered like a meteor, the clothes of the dapper young man burning off and fluttering away in black ashes, the fur of wolfhound charring, leaving a streak of stench, hide tanning till black. He took the same path the mage-laden asses had blazed a few hours before. The opposite direction.

Cerberus got to Kansas. He blew down the shoulder of the interstate and arrived at Stull in a blink. He stopped at the half-fallen chapel. There the roofless old edifice stood, like a mangled hand clawing skyward. Crackling and pouring smoke, Cerberus before knelt before the guard tower of old A.G. Devonwald, whose Satanic Eucharist still lay over it colorfully. Cerberus stood and approached the Stairway of the Unfortunate.

“Well,” he said, sighing. “Had a good run.”

And the dog-beast stood a moment. He laughed. He decided the he did not have time to make himself believe the words. So he dove inside, shutting the door over him with an earth-muffled boom. The Hell Hound wouldn’t see it, of course, but when the inferno-wind blew over seconds later, yanking every leaf of grass from its lucent pink root, every hair from its buttery follicle with absolute fire, there were several individuals standing in and around the unfortunate graveyard—hapless. For Cerberus unwittingly shut them out.

**
Hell, whatever it turns out to be, is apparently voluntary to a significant degree. That may not seem right, but you have to remember how resistant most people are to any form of existential forgiveness, forgiveness for existing.

Take Catholicism generally.

Take Cultural Studies.

In the end God arbitrates righteousness sort of the way a —12 fl. oz.— line arbitrates a measuring cup—the way a landmass arbitrates the fork in a waterway. Thus, strictly speaking, God is not in the damnation business; the human creature is more than willing to damn itself in most cases God is only the Almighty Turnstile. It is for this very reason human freedom had so often been considered a design flaw.

Back home in the Pit, the Man of Sin Jim Johns sat watching reruns. He was bolted to a wooden chair in the style of electro-execution. The remote control was riveted to the floor between himself and the screen, and a family comedy from the late twentieth century was playing. Satan, not just angry, but inconsolably wounded, had the Antichrist’s eyelids removed. The current show was something about two thirtysomething veterinarians who were married and also first cousins.

Jesus came by and they sat together for a bit. They watched the remainder of an episode in which one of the vets’ patients, a Weimaraner, had consumed the wife veterenarian’s IUD, requiring a frantic, antic search, which coincided with visiting in-laws and an impromptu visit from a AVMA commissioner—

“Staying?” said Jim Johns.

“Nah. Saw your man earlier. Gotta get back.”

Jim Johns nodded, his head-clamp squeaking. He attempted to be gregarious.

“Well,” he said, laughing. “It was all a dream.”

Jesus thought. He shook his head. “Not exactly.”

Jim experienced nausea, visibly.

“Wanna come up for awhile?” Jesus said.

Jim torqued his head back and forth inside the clamp.

“Nah,” he said. “I’m gonna watch this.”

The opening credits of the next episode were running.

Jesus smiled.

“Good deal.”

A white column of heat blew up from below, at this time, and vaporized Jim Johns and his chair and the married cousins and shut up their creepy wordplay. The Passover Lamb had disappeared a moment before, however, and the crypt was vacant.
Hitch and Rita MacAbee were in the long, winding, false-daylit shopping mall beneath Caesar’s Palace. Hitch wore the creamy white groom’s-toga, and Rita word a long green bridal gown. They wore gold belts—Knots of Hercules. They browsed Tiffany’s. They compared Rita’s ring and admired it. The ceiling/sky fell in. The air went molten. When Caesar’s hunched down on them they were before the sprawling fountains sharing white tuxedo cheesecake. Heat and light and atomic shear crammed their atoms together. There cells went crystalline. They resembled diamonds.
And as the Lake of Fire fanned out, things that looked like human beings in the half-light were lined up for miles awaiting admittance. The theory of the Rapture turns out to be true in some ambiguous regard, for all souls were loose, utterly free, and one after another they plopped in with a hiss—the same philosophical expression on each face. In particular you saw Pethuel Melchizedek jumping forward in the queue a little at a time, cutting in line again and again. He fidgeted, impatient, finally he bolted out of line, drew up into the air extended, head down, slipping down to the chasm like a diving bird—wingless.

Far above his head the Earth was closing, as occurs when God is satisfied.

A line a person has always been following that they will never reach the end of is practically infinite, so far as that person is concerned. A set of possibilities that are theoretically limited, all triable, but all of which humanity will never have the time to try, is practically infinite so far as the human species is concerned. Time, it turns out, is practically infinite to everyone but God who, as a constellation of ideal states, does not deal in practical considerations. Time is practically infinite for humans, though, because it turns out to exist a few moments longer than we do.

When humans stop existing, Time stops being a name for the organizing principle of human experience and quickly has to figure out a way to go on making any sense. This is why it only lasts a very short while—not to say that the word “short” or “very” or “while” or “word” have any meaning as objectified units of cogno-subjective human experience when there is no longer anyone left to utter them and thus pretend they are objects.

And so Time becomes erratic, and very very fast, and in moments has flown past eons and eons until the Universe is impossibly hot and impossibly close together. It is at this point that Time goes out the window, along with gravity, electromagnetism, the nuclear forces and all the inches, quadrilaterals and polyhedra with which humanity was once so capable, before all had been accomplished.