The Alpha and the Omega: An absurd philosophical tale about God, the end of the world, and what's on the other planets (9 page)

“Hmmm. You want to see? I suppose that could be arranged! But let’s get out of here. I won’t just give you a memory; I’ll let you experience it in the here and now.” He took Lilly’s hand again and grabbed Lucky’s collar, and in the blink of an eye, they were sitting on a tree-covered hilltop in the woods.

It was small – only a few hundred feet from base to summit – and it was pristine, without a single trace of man or God, not even a hiking trail. In every direction, one was met only with views of other hills, covered in the same crumbling brown leaves from last fall that covered Zack’s hill, in addition to the hundreds of light grey boulders that an ancient glacier had deposited in the entire area during the last ice age. Above them, the new spring leaves grew thick, letting in only slivers of sun. Zack was thankful that God had changed nothing.

“I used to come up here all the time growing up,” Zack said, inviting Lilly to sit on an unusually flat, waist-high
boulder padded in bright green moss. “I’d mountain bike or hike up here with Lucky, and we’d sit for hours. Since it’s off the trail a little ways, no one ever bothered us.

“I grew up a few miles down that way, near a lake,” Zack continued, pointing. “I had a really happy childhood. In the summers, when I wasn’t up here, I’d be swimming in the lake with all of the neighborhood kids. Oh, and my favorite thing – they used to have this Fourth of July party at a field near the lake. The entire neighborhood would come out for it. But then, over time, people stopped going to the lake and to the party. They put in private pools, and the kids disappeared into their videogames and computers.”

“That’s too bad. I think it’s pretty common though; the same thing happened in my town. Although, it wasn’t quite as woodsy as this.”

“Yeah, I love the woods. I love animals too. In fact, I wanted to be a biologist when I grew up.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I couldn’t find a job in it after college, and I had debt. Then that first i-banking job just sort of happened. After that, business school was the next logical step. For a while, I was always trying to think of ways I could combine the two interests, like maybe starting a biotech firm or buying a zoo or something.”

“A
zoo
? Haha. Zack’s Zoo! Zookeeper Zack! I like the sound of that.”

“Yeah, I always thought I could come up with the next big business idea or strike it rich in the stock market and then retire and do something else. I was good at trading you know. It was fun for me, kind of like a game.”

“A game?
Whoa!
Because of people like you, my clients lost their houses in the Great Recession.”

“No that wasn’t me. I wasn’t into credit-default swaps. I did make a ton of money trading off of all the volatility though.”

“Double yuck.”

“Hey wait a minute. Didn’t you tell me last night that you started your career with a corporate firm?”

“No, not exactly. It was a small defense firm. The Partners told me that I would be doing small criminal trials and tons of
pro bono
. They said I would be defending poor city kids that never had a chance and otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford a defense and would get stuck with the public defender. But when I got there, they put me in the white-collar defense division, and I spent all of my time defending the Bernie Madoffs of the world. They worked me like crazy, and I didn’t have time for sleep or family or anything. My physical and mental health went to shit. Then, when I complained to the Partner that I did most of my work for, he told me to just do it and that if I ever applied to work at another firm he would badmouth me to every lawyer in the City and destroy my reputation.”

“That’s terrible.”

“Yeah tell me about it – capitalism at its worst. The owner exploiting the worker, chained to her desk.”

“Well what did you do?”

“I started recording all of our conversations on my phone, and I got him talking about how our clients were suckers and we could get them to pay us whatever we wanted.”

“Really? He said that? Was he stupid or just an asshole?”

“A little of column A… a little of column B. Oh man,
he
was the sucker – in more ways than one. A big fat fuck, this guy. A bloated deer tick, swollen with his clients’ and associates’ blood.

“But I got him! I played the tape for him and told him that if he didn’t give me the most glowing recommendation that my next employer had ever heard, I’d take the tape to his clients, the newspapers, the Bar, and anyone else who would listen.”

“Whoa, you really are a tiger! Was what you did even legal? I mean, aren’t office conversations like that private? You can’t just go around secretly recording everyone.”

“I didn’t care then and I don’t care now. It worked.”

“Well, shouldn’t you have at least told the Bar anyway? I mean, if he was ripping off clients, and you knew, wouldn’t turning him in be the ethical thing to do?”

“Haha, you wouldn’t last one day as a lawyer!”

“But I thought I was a big-bad Wall Street suit, which is so much worse.”

“That’s pretty bad too, but it still pales in comparison to some of the lawyers out there. And that’s coming from a lawyer!”

“At last we agree!”

They laughed.

“Let me tell you Zack, the people that I worked with at this firm were some of the most calculating, selfish people that you could ever imagine. Every word they spoke, every nod, every facial expression, was carefully designed to manipulate you or promote their interests in one way or another. If one of
them smiled and held the door open for you in the morning, it was because they wanted something from you. If they didn’t, it was because they wanted to intimidate you.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“It wasn’t. And most of them didn’t make it here.”

“No surprise there.”

“Oh! And there was this one lawyer I knew, Truehea– well… hmmm. I guess I shouldn’t take pleasure in other people’s misfortunes, even if they deserve it. He was somebody’s kid too.”

“Or uncle.”

“Huh?”

“I have an uncle who didn’t make it. Uncle Casey – he died a couple of years ago. God said he’s not ready for Heaven yet.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“That’s ok. What can I do?”

“Yeah.”

“Anyway… I believe we were making fun of lawyers?”

“
Yes
. Yes we were.”

“Hey, did you ever think about becoming a judge? It seems like that would’ve been a pretty sweet legal job.”

“I’m sure. But you have to practice for a lot of years first. It wouldn’t have been an option for me for a long time.”

“If I was a lawyer, that’s what I would want to do.”

“Yeah, but it’s a lot of responsibility. Judges held people’s lives in their hands. Would you have been able to handle that? A judge has to be really decisive.”

“I was responsible for my investors’ money. Although, I guess that was different.”

“Probably. But hey, let’s not talk about that stuff anymore. This place is beautiful. Thank you for bringing me here.”

They both smiled, and for a minute, neither one spoke.

Then Zack slowly leaned in for a kiss.

Lilly looked receptive at first, but at the last second she pulled away. “I’m not that easy,” she said.

“Come on,” he said jokingly, “you’re crazy about me.”

“Oh?” She did not take the joke well. “I’m not a machine – enter one beautiful spot with a nice view, get one hook-up.”

Not wanting to apologize for his last comment, for fear that Lilly would then think that he had been serious when he made it, Zack doubled down. “Don’t pretend you’re not into me just for the sake of it. We’re both smarter than that.” Zack tried to say this with a light tone, but his overconfidence had carried him too far, and this was foreign territory for him.

“Don’t you tell me what to do!”

Zack could have sworn that Lilly’s irises turned red.

She pushed him hard, and he fell backwards off the other side of the rock. In Heaven, women were equal in physical strength to men.

Lucky, who had been rolling himself around in the leaves unashamedly, stopped, looked over, and tilted his head sideways inquisitively.

Zack wasn’t hurt, but the fall disoriented him. He got up slowly, caught his bearings, and looked around. Lilly was gone. It seemed like an overreaction to him, but it didn’t make sense to go after her now. If he knew women, and he thought he did, he just needed to let her cool off for a while. Then he would find her and apologize.

In the meantime, there was nothing else to do but sit down and enjoy the peacefulness of his favorite place. How could any videogame ever compete with this?

Zack sat back down on the boulder and looked down at his feet: ants! He had always liked watching them; they always seemed to take his mind off whatever was bothering him.

On that day, a strange wind moved these particular ants, and they frantically scurried in and out of their anthill with unusual concern. Odd, Zack thought, what are they doing? Maybe they’re out of food. I know, I’ll give them some bread crumbs. Ants love bread, he thought, dropping the manna from his fingers.

They went right for it. But it probably wasn’t the healthiest food for them, was it? Bread isn’t natural. Hmmm, Zack thought. How about some fruit? Even better, how about a tree to produce the fruit for them? “Let there be a tree,” Zack said, and a small tree appeared.

“Let the tree bear the most delicious fruit possible, in many different varieties,” Zack said, and the tree did. There were apples, peaches, plums, pears, berries, coconuts, papayas, and some fruits that Zack had never seen before. “One for me,” Zack said, picking an apple and biting into it, “and one for you,” he said, picking a second and dropping it to the ground.

“And finally,” Zack said dramatically, “let the tree drop food for the ants continuously throughout the day so that they are never without.” He clapped his hands together, as if to conclude his work, and then turned off to the distance, deep in thought.

“Hey God, can ants feel pain?”

“Yes Zack, they can. But it’s not the same as with humans. They have very tiny brains and are barely conscious of anything.”

“But they have a little bit of consciousness, right? It just strikes me as odd, that’s all. All of the billions of ants out there in the world, getting stepped on or eaten by bigger animals. It seems like a lot of suffering. Why are you letting it go on? Why not make it their heaven too?”

“Because humans still appreciate the beauty of the natural world. That’s why you’re up here. And like I said, the ants are barely conscious.”

“But some animals are smart. When I was at the shore a couple of summers ago, a seagull snatched two French fries right out of my hand.”

“I remember.”

“Yeah, well then you remember how it waited until the exact moment that I turned my head the other way. That’s pretty smart!”

“It was no more than a learned reaction to external stimuli, like Pavlov’s dogs.”

“Hmmm. What about the squirrel in the roof that my dad killed?”

“What about it?”

“It cried out in pain. It wailed like a city-cat in the night – we
thought
. But the thing was, after my dad removed the dead squirrel from the trap, the wailing continued, and we realized that it wasn’t the injured squirrel that was crying at all, it was its mate! Are you telling me that the mate didn’t feel conscious emotion?”

“Infants cry for their mothers, but that does not mean that they know why.”

“Well… maybe,” Zack said with disappointment. “But there’s something else that’s been bothering me even more.”

“Shoot.”

“When I was young, there was a kid at school. The other kids bullied him relentlessly. They called him names, they tripped him in the hallway, they beat him up.”

“I remember that too.”

“And one day, he went home from school and got a rope and hanged himself.” Zack paused and gathered his thoughts, and what he spoke next, he infused with as much consternation and sarcasm as he possibly could without sounding ridiculous. “
Now what kind of a God would allow that?
”

“Zack, I thought we already went through the problem of evil.”

“Well I guess we didn’t go through it enough, because I still can’t wrap my head around this one. I want to know – where are those other kids now?” Excitement crept into his voice. “Have they, who made their fun
soooooo
profitably from that kid’s pain, now finally learned how to take only as much happiness
as is consistent with everyone else’s?
”

“Zack, they were only children. They had not yet learned how to be moral. That is what life is all about. Suffering is the very thing that teaches them.”

“So then why not just create them good to begin with? Then there would be no need for suffering.”

“Challenge and free will Zack, you know that. I could not just create mindless automatons. Humans had to learn morality for themselves. They needed to be free, corruptible creatures that could choose to overcome their nature.”

Zack pondered this as he looked back down to the ants at his feet. “And what do animals learn?”

“Zack, we’re going in circles.”

“So what?”

“Some would say that repeating the same behavior again and again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity.”

“And would
you
say that?” Zack asked.

God smiled.

“Because
some
would say that that’s just one of those stupid things that sounds good until you think about it for twenty seconds.”

“And why would they say that?” God asked, fully aware of the answer.

“Because it’s a bad definition. Repeating the same behavior and expecting a different result doesn’t make you insane, and not doing it doesn’t make you all right. Someone who applies to hundreds of jobs only to have the door slammed in his face each time, but who keeps going and still believes against all odds that he’ll succeed isn’t crazy. And someone who hears his dog telling him to kill his neighbors even once
is
, even though he’s not repeating the same behavior and expecting a different result.”

“Very good, but I said that
some
would say it, not that I would.”