The Last Testament: A Memoir (25 page)

¹⁶
Which reminds me: from now on I’d like you to keep thy deeply held Christian beliefs to thyself; in fact, I’d appreciate it if thou couldst make numerous statements on the record that seem to prove beyond historical argument that thou art a Deist.

¹⁷
I’m telling Jefferson and Franklin the same thing.”

¹⁸
“But God,” he said, “I love thee and thy son Jesus Christ so much, and I want all the world to know!”

¹⁹
“Jim,” I said, “trust me.

²⁰
The document thou art creating will not only live forever, but one day be recognized as the explicit endorsement of a Christian theocracy that thou and I secretly know it to be.”

²¹
This made him feel better; and as by then we had reached the steps of the Museum of Art, he joyfully ran up the stairs, lifted his arms in triumph, and shadow-boxed a group of street waifs.

CHAPTER 3

¹
A
merica, allow me to address thee directly for a moment.

2 When thou sentest a man to the moon and back, it was the most amazing achievement in human history, and Neil Armstrong correctly hailed it as “one giant leap for mankind,” meaning the entire human race.

³
And then he went and put an
American flag
on it.

⁴
On the
moon.

⁵
That is so
thee
!

⁶
Thou drivest me crazy, America, yet still I bless thee; despite all thy shortcomings I can quit you not; and I continue to not only bless thee but to love thee, and to do so unhealthily; unhelpfully; in a manner that keeps thee from doing the soul-searching needed to become a better nation.

⁷
Verily, America: I cut thee 50 arkloads of moral slack a week.

⁸
Why?

⁹
I shall tell thee.

¹⁰
As thou hast seen, I am a divine being who needs recognition.

¹¹
I like it when those whom I grace with my bounty acknowledge it; and do so in a formal, ritualized way that gives it the stamp of authority.

¹²
And when I removed myself some years ago from earthly affairs, there was one outstanding issue on this front, as it pertained to America, that deeply troubled me.

¹³
I never forgot about it; so upon my return, when the staff began to brief me on all that had taken place in my absence, and the subject turned to thy nation, I quickly interrupted them.

¹⁴
“Boys,” I said, “spare me this talk of atomic bombs and civil rights and pollution and Vietnam and Iraq; for when it comes to America there is only one question that matters, only one issue that will determine my attitude toward that frustrating, lovable himbo of a superpower:

¹⁵
Have they, at long last, inserted ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance?”

¹⁶
And the angels nodded, and smiled; and I nodded, and smiled; and all of us nodded, and smiled;

¹⁷
For in this bellwether of all signs regarding thy fitness to lead the world, thou hadst done right.

¹⁸
Yea; call me sentimental, but I am a sucker for nations that give me a shout-out in their voluntary oaths to magical pole-cloths.

FACTS

(“On Unsolved Mysteries”)

CHAPTER 1

¹
M
ystery is the lot of man.

²
Mystery enfoldeth thy coming into the world; mystery enshroudeth thy departure from it;

³
And in between, mystery is the preferred literary genre of millions of you, particularly those seeking a light beach read.

⁴
Now, thou mayest believe that to God nothing is a mystery; that for me all is foreseen, and even the most mundane occurrence known beforetime.

⁵
And verily, as I said before, the simultaneous containment of all information in the universe
is
well within my powers.

⁶
I am the Supreme Database; my processing speed is ∞ GHz; the range of my knowledge mocks thy most powerful search engines;

⁷
Although once in a while I break down and Google myself; last time I checked I had over 600 million results; not too shabby.

⁸
But I have learned over time, that
true
omniscience is knowing enough to know what things are better off not knowing.

⁹
For example: clearly do I recall the long summer of 1980, when millions were nigh unto madness desirous of discovering, “Who shot J. R.?”

¹⁰
Now, I am the L
ORD
thy God, King of the Universe.

¹¹
I could
easily
have found out who shot J. R.

¹²
I could have attended the producers’ meetings; I could have read the script; I could have sat in on one of the table reads; thou gettest the idea.

¹³
But I did none of these; I stayed deliberately uninformed of the culprit’s identity until the night of the airing, when it turned out to be Kristin, J. R.’s mistress/sister-in-law.

¹⁴
A decent resolution, I thought, but a bit of a letdown.

¹⁵
(On the other hand, the ending of
The Sixth Sense
blew me away.

¹⁶
I had no idea it was coming; which is amazing, for remember, I actually
do
see dead people.)

¹⁷
Yet despite my efforts at self-nondisclosure, I am in the end the repository of all knowledge hidden and arcane; the possessor of the answers to all the great mysteries that have haunted the generations of men.

¹⁸
In me the unfathomable is made fathomable, and the anonymous nonymous; all whodunits become he-dunits, and all what’s-his-names become right!-
that’s
-his-names.

¹⁹
My publisher has asked if I would be willing to divulge some of these secrets to my readers, and I am happy to oblige; but I would not have the solutions to these timeless riddles fall into the hands of those too impious to fork over the cover price.

²⁰
So, bookbuyer, I ask that thou sharest none of the information I am about to reveal with anyone who hath not purchased this book;

²¹
Especially those craven, fiendish souls who borrowed it from a library.

CHAPTER 2

SPOILER ALERT! ******** SPOILER ALERT! *************

¹
I
will start with a big one: the identity of the most notorious serial killer of all time, Jack the Ripper.

²
It was Neville Hopkins.

³
He was an itinerant pickpocket squatting in Whitechapel; a quiet man; kept to himself; bit of a loner; few close friends.

⁴
Flew completely under the radar.

⁵
Right after the final murder he boarded a boat bound for New York and was never heard from again.

⁶
Anyway, Neville Hopkins: Jack the Ripper.

⁷
Now thou knowest.

⁸
Sticking with unsolved murders, the Zodiac Killer was famous astrologer Jeane Dixon.

⁹
Yea: embarrassed after an epic public misreading of the moon in Scorpio, she worked through her anger with a horrific murder spree through Northern California.

¹⁰
She got away with it, too; for on her next birthday she cast her own horoscope and found that it read, “You born today are passionate, strong-willed, and capable of getting away with a horrific murder spree through Northern California...
if you stop the killing right now.
”

¹¹
Los Angeles’s infamous Black Dahlia murder of 1947 was committed by folk singer Woody Guthrie.

¹²
In fact, he confessed to the crime in the sixth verse of his most famous song:

¹³
“As I was strolling South Norton Avenue, I met a woman, the Black Dahlia. I killed her slowly and bashed her face in. This land was made for you and me.”

¹⁴
But he was never caught; for
no one
ever makes it to the sixth verse of “This Land Is Your Land.”

¹⁵
As for Lizzie Borden, she, with an axe, neither gave her mother 40 whacks, nor, having seen what she had done, gave her father 41.

¹⁶
No; that August morning, the Bordens fell victim to a serial killer who broke into their house at random, chopped them both to bits, and fled the scene, never to be heard from again.

¹⁷
His name?

¹⁸
Neville Hopkins.

CHAPTER 3

¹
T
he Shroud of Turin was a forgery produced in 1287 by the Turin Shroudmakers’ Guild to promote the local shroud-making industry; it succeeded spectacularly.

²
Grand Duchess Anastasia died at the hands of the thugs who killed the rest of her family; the woman who later claimed to be her was in reality her chief assassin; the whole thing was a
Single White Female
situation that got way out of hand.

³
The works of William Shakespeare were written by none other than legendary British playwright William Shakespeare.

⁴
The Lindbergh baby was indeed kidnapped and killed by the man executed for the crime, German immigrant Bruno Hauptmann, in 1932.

⁵
(Fortunately, Lindbergh was big enough not to let one bad apple cloud his overall view of either German leadership, or the many exciting things it was doing in the 1930s.)