The Alpha and the Omega: An absurd philosophical tale about God, the end of the world, and what's on the other planets (6 page)

The man noticed and quickly caught himself. “Present company excluded of course. It’s more the heathens that get me, with religions that I’ve never even heard of from God knows what savage corner of the Earth. And the gays. And the trans… what the hell do you even call them? Why, in my day we’d of…”

“What?!” Zack turned to his father. “You invited this guy to dinner?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Really? Knowing about his racism and homophobia?”

“Ha!” the man shouted. “In my day, in the old country, we didn’t talk to our elders like that!”

“What?! Good God Dad, you’ve got to be kidding me! Is this some kind of a joke?”

“Why don’t you ask him if he’s joking?” Zack’s father replied. “He’s sitting right there.”

Zack suddenly remembered the Boston Tea Party argument. “Because I want to ask you first. I want to ask you at what point you knew about this and decided to invite us both to the same dinner anyway.”

“Zack, please don’t talk to me like that in front of our guest. He’s right here, and if you have an issue with him, you can talk about it civilly like adults.”

“No Dad,” Zack said, his hands starting to shake from the anger welling up inside him, “back in the day, I had to listen to a lot of crap from your redneck, hillbilly friends, but this is ridiculous.”

The man stood up and shook his fist at Zack. “Come here!”

Zack stood up too, but his father got between them. “Son, calm down. Don’t be so quick to judge us humble country folk.”

“
Be calm?
” Zack absolutely hated it when someone told him to be calm; it was the least calming thing that he possibly could imagine. “
Don’t judge?
This guy just judged the majority of the human race!”

“Now Zack,” his mother broke in, trying her best, “this man is family, and he’s just adjusting, that’s all. He’s from a different time and place. If you had been born there, maybe you’d be the same way.”

“But how did he get into Heaven when your brother didn’t?”

“That’s not your concern,” Zack’s father said. “A lot of people from his time didn’t make it here, specifically because of those beliefs he’s got. But he’s a good man.” He patted the man on the back. “He’s done enough good in his life to make-up for it, and you’d’ve realized that if you’d actually taken a few minutes to talk with him.”

“Zack,” his mother said, “I know what’s really bothering you, and you need to stop it right now. Try not to view all of this as proving that religion was right. It wasn’t. You were right about most of it. Humans evolved from monkeys, and none of those stupid religious rules meant anything. Gosh, depending on how you look at it, you were even right when you said that there couldn’t be an all-knowing and all powerful God. He’s growing and changing just like us. So give him a break. Give everyone a break. It’s time to come together now and be happy.”

“Excuse me,” Zack said, in a low voice. “I have to use the bathroom.” He got up and turned, but was immediately halted by the instantaneous, hysterical, and unexplained laughter behind him. Zack whirled back around, baffled.

“Zack, did you forget?” his father asked, trying his best to hold back the laughter. “You don’t have to go to the bathroom. No one does here. Unless of course…… you
want
to!! Hahaha.”

Zack’s mom playfully hit Zack’s father on the top of the head.

“Lucky!” Zack called, heading for the door. “Come on boy, we’re leaving.”

“Zack, come on,” his father said.

“Let him go,” his mother said. “He’ll be fine.”

Once they were outside, Lucky lifted up his right hind leg. Well, Zack thought, apparently
he
wants to.

Zack wasn’t really that mad, but at the same time, there was no way he could bring himself to stay there for dinner. Tomorrow he would see them again and it would be fine, but that was tomorrow. Tonight Zack was on his own, and he would try to have some fun.

In that spirit, Zack decided to try to fly back to Jersey rather than teleport, just to see what it was like. He thrust his arms up toward the stars like Superman, and slowly and gently, his body began to lift off of the ground. He cautiously pulled himself up about ten feet, then paused, then pulled himself up another ten. Zack was amazed at how safe he felt. He did not feel like he was floating in the middle of the air with nothing to support him, as he would have expected, but rather, as if there were huge invisible elastic nets above and below him, connected to his mind, which he could push or pull at will to propel him wherever he wanted to go.

Zack looked down at Lucky, whose head was cocked sideways in disbelief. “Come on boy! Try it!”

Lucky did not need much coaxing. First, as if to warm up, he sprinted back and forth across the front yard, making very short stops each time he changed direction. Then, he lowered his head and charged the entire length of the yard in one long sprint. When he reached top speed – in the neighbors’ yard – he looked back up at Zack, and his paws slowly separated from the ground until they were churning the open air, just like the reindeer hooves that carry Santa’s sleigh.

Lucky flew to Zack’s height, turned, and came to him. He continued pumping his four legs, even as he hovered with Zack, as if he were treading water. Then he opened his mouth wide, dangled his big red tongue, and panted loudly. Zack was not sure if dogs smiled, but if ever one did, it was doing it right then. Zack was very proud; Lucky had always been a really smart dog.

Having gotten the basics, Zack and Lucky ventured higher, and Zack watched his childhood neighborhood turn into a map. He could see his house, his street, the lake, and the other one hundred and fifty or so houses in the neighborhood, their tiny front porch lights pushing little circles of light into the surrounding darkness. He could see the playground where he had his first kiss and the field where everyone in the neighborhood would gather every Fourth of July to light fireworks, blast oldies music on a boom box, and drink beer around a large bonfire. Finally, he could see the wooded hills, an endless black sea on which the neighborhood floated, and the only connection to the mainland, a single road that led to the town center five miles away.

Zack missed this place. All throughout his life it had been slipping away from him. Childhood summers
swimming, fishing, hiking, and mountain-biking turned into teenage summers studying Honors Biology, Calculus, and History. Then they turned into long weekends looking at the lake from the window with his college girlfriend, then to quick glances at the woods out of the car window as he shuttled his parents back and forth from the hospital, and then finally, to fading memories. Zack was thankful that he could now come back any time he wanted.

After admiring this second printing of the pages on which God had written Zack’s storybook childhood, Zack led Lucky up and east. Curiously, as they continued, and more and more of God’s masterpiece unfolded beneath them, Zack began to spot little red flames in the wilderness between the cities. Soon, there were hundreds of them, dotting the valley floors and puffing long lines of thin grey smoke into the air. They must have been campfires.

Maybe, Zack thought, they belong to Native Americans, who choose to live now in the same manner as they always had before. However, before Zack could finish the thought, he found his attention pulled in another direction. Two other travelers approached, from the east.

Strangely enough, it was also a man and his dog, but from a very different time and place. The man was young, about Zack’s age, but wore long brown animal furs and carried a spear. He was tall and thick, with olive-colored skin covered in dirt; long, black, un-kept hair; coffee-colored teeth, and bright-blue eyes. His dog was really more of a wolf, with long white teeth, grey and white fur, visible musculature, and blue eyes that matched his owner’s.

For a moment, they were silent. Then the dogs cautiously floated toward each other, and Zack noticed that the
other man was studying Lucky and his golden-copper fur with great interest. As Lucky froze and allowed the wolf to sniff him up and down, the man’s eyes turned from Lucky to his own dog, and then back to Lucky. “Great,
great
, grandfather!” the man said, pointing at his dog and engaging in deep laughter.

“Hey yeah!” Zack said, laughing too. “Hey actually,” he pointed directly at the man, “great, great grandfather too!”

“Maybe,” the man said, “or maybe great, great grand-
cousin
… you of brown-eyes.”

“Good point.”

“Yes, well please,” the man said, “travel in peace, cousin brown-eyes.” He brought his left hand over to the spear that he held in his right, and with both hands, slowly turned the spear toward the ground in a grand, ritual fashion.

“Yes cousin, in peace,” Zack replied, waving goodbye as they parted.

This experience stirred Zack’s mind in a way that he had not known since his youth, but soon, after he and Lucky passed over the immense, sleeping earth-giants known as the Rockies, they saw something truly surreal.

At first, it looked just like all of the other cloud masses that they encountered on their flight, shining eerily in the light-blue moonlight. But as they got closer, a mesmerizing dreamscape unfolded. The clouds were shaped into a vast assortment of all earthly objects large and small. There were cloud hills, cloud trees, cloud houses, and cloud roads with cloud lampposts showering bright white light on the barely human pedestrians below, ambling by in their long white gowns and angel wings. Some strolled, while others drifted in little cloud sailing ships, cloud gondolas, and
cloud beds. A few children bounced along in large, clear bubbles.

These people must have used the powers that God gave them to create their own vision of Heaven, and Zack could not fault them one bit. Just before he and Lucky moved onward, he looked up and saw a large hovering cloud sign with little twinkling stars for letters that read: “New Los Angeles.”

When they arrived back at Zack’s apartment, Zack’s head poured over with possibility. What fantasy worlds would
he
create? What marvels would
he
discover? What miracles would
he
perform?

Let’s start small, he thought… with dinner. “Boneless Buffalo wings,” Zack said, and a plate appeared.

Zack dug in, and they were insanely good. He tossed some to Lucky, who agreed. “Another.” These were also transcendent, and Zack felt full.

“I want to not feel full,” he said, and he was instantly hungry again. “I want the juiciest, rarest, most expensive filet mignon imaginable.” It appeared, and it was. “A milkshake.…… Chicago deep-dish pizza.…… fettuccini Alfredo.”

And then came the cheese doodles. Bite after bite, bag after bag. More and more. He made them cheesier and cheesier still. He gave himself six arms to shovel them in, not wanting even a second to pass in between bites. He wanted the cheese taste to overpower him. He wanted his mouth to taste so cheesy that it hurt. And it did. And soon, he no longer even needed the extra arms, because he discovered that he could simply float the cheese doodles into his mouth.

He lined the cheese doodles up six feet in front of him in the air and made them march toward his mouth in twos, in synchrony with the rhythm of his bites. For nearly an hour
he did this. Then, when he started wondering whether it was possible to give himself more than one mouth, he decided that he had better stop. “I want to feel full now.”

Ok, Zack thought, now it’s time for some
real
fun. Maybe I can finally meet my top five! He concentrated hard, but nothing happened. Huh. Let me try something else. “I want to party with Guns N’ Roses, Metallica, and let’s say, I don’t know… Led Zeppelin.” Again, nothing. “I want to debate the meaning of justice with Socrates?” he asked. Silence.

“Hey God. What’s going on here?”

God appeared. “So, I hear that I’m an evil space-alien who’s going to cook you for dinner?”

“You heard that?”

“Yes Zack. I said that I would stay out of your
mind
. Not that I wouldn’t hear your conversations. Of course, I can respect your conversations as well, so if you want them to be private, say so, or communicate using telepathy… or at the very least, go somewhere out of the way. You and Stan were talking right on the sidewalk!

“Anyway, you didn’t answer me. I asked if you thought I was going to eat you. Or perhaps you think that this is all a dream that I am implanting in your head? Or that you are living in ‘the Matrix.’ ”

“What?”

“Don’t play dumb Zack. I know that you read Descartes in college, and I know that you watched The Matrix over and over again. And don’t be so surprised by me asking
you
the tough questions. It’s a two-way street.

“Anyway, I think the story that you should really think about is the parody that The Simpsons did of that old Twilight Zone episode. Do you remember it?”

“The one where the aliens were going to cook the people? I think so.”

“No, you know so. Continue.”

“Well, the aliens offered to take the Simpsons back to their home planet to experience the most amazing delights in the universe. But after they got on the spaceship, they started to suspect that the aliens were really going to eat them.”

“Yes. And do you remember how it ended?”

“Yeah. It turned out that the aliens weren’t going to eat them at all, and when the aliens found out how suspicious the family was, they were deeply hurt and decided that the Simpsons were too primitive to come to their home planet.”

“Yes. The family lost everything because of their mistrust.”

“Are you saying you’re gonna kick me out of Heaven?”

“Could a being that advanced be offended
so
easily? No. I am just trying to help you find the truth, kind of like Socrates did in the dialogues.” God smiled at his joke.

“Well then what’s the answer to
my
question? Why can’t I meet Socrates?”

“Zack, Socrates has millions of admirers. You can’t expect him to personally entertain every single one.”

“But this is Heaven, I get to do whatever I want.”

“Indeed. And there are several videogames that should suffice. You can party with your favorite bands and debate Socrates there, and it will be just like real life. You can also watch recordings of Socrates’s actual real-life dialogues from twenty-four centuries ago, or any other non-private historical event. I have recorded the entire history of this
planet. And, as if that weren’t enough, I believe that Socrates is planning to give a public speech later this week.”