The Last Testament: A Memoir (3 page)

⁴
That took about five hours.

⁵
It would have taken far less, had I been able to see what I was doing; but there being darkness over the surface of everything, I had to work mainly by feel.

⁶
Reflecting upon this later, I had an epiphany; so I said, “Let there be light!” and there was light; which was encouraging, that the utilities were already working.

⁷
And I saw the darkness, and called it “night”; and I saw the light, and called it “day”; and then I called it a day.

⁸
Day Two was the riskiest decision point of the entire week; for as thou mayest read, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.”

⁹
(I will note here that all Bible references in this book will quote the King James Version; it being not merely the most majestic translation, but the only one endorsed by basketball great LeBron James.)

¹⁰
Now, waters-division would have been a bold creative risk no matter how I attempted it; but what made what I did truly dicey—take that, Einstein!—was that I did it with a firmament.

¹¹
For if thou art at all familiar with firmaments, thou knowest they have a tendency to leak like unto a Cajun levee.

¹²
And this foreboded a disaster I could ill afford, as I planned to one day— the next one—transform the waters above the firmament into the sky; which I intended to make of a completely different substance from the waters; though I thought I’d keep the blue motif.

¹³
But if the firmament were not of the strictest structural integrity, the sky would have seeped into the sea, and the sea into the sky; and then I would have been looking at millennia of renovation.

¹⁴
Still, I made the firmament; and all these millennia later it still holds; for back then thought was still given to craftsmanship and detail; unlike now, when everything is done by machine, or, even worse, by exploited Asian children whose hearts are just not in it.

¹⁵
Day Three was fairly routine: dry land in the morning, plant life in the afternoon.

¹⁶
Forming the dry land gave me the most pleasure I had all week, for I took great delight in shaping the landmasses; in carving the Grand Canyon, and sculpting the Himalayas, and shaping Florida so as to resemble what I, even at that early date, was fairly certain was going to be a penis.

¹⁷
As for the plants, that was tedious going, for plants are dull; ecologically necessary, but dull; especially trees, which bore me to no end.

¹⁸
Hear me: I am the L
ORD
thy God, King of the Universe; and trees are stupid.

¹⁹
Day Four was “Astronomy Day”: I created the sun, the moon, and the stars; the planets, too, although that part is not mentioned in Genesis.

²⁰
(Yea, there are countless things I omitted from the Old Testament when I dictated it to Moses; it does not mean they did not occur, or that I forgot about them; it means I was merciful enough to want thee to leave church at a reasonable hour.)

²¹
The Day Four achievement of which I am proudest, was sizing the sun and moon so perfectly as to allow for eclipses upon the surface of the earth; creating thereby spectacular occasions for awe and panic;

²²
Which are without question, my two all-time favorite human emotions.

²³
Day Five was a stressful day, a near-disaster; for it was when I “let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.”

²⁴
Fill the sea with fish, fill the sky with birds; in hindsight this seems obvious; yet up until the last minute I had been planning on putting the fish in the sky and the birds in the sea.

²⁵
I kid thee not!

²⁶
For I had conceived feathers as a means of aquatic propulsion; whereas scales were designed to provide maximum aerodynamic lift;

²⁷
Yet when it came time to let the waters teem, for some reason I went the other way, and threw the fish in instead of the birds.

²⁸
And lo: The fish took to the waters so perfectly, that today to even imagine a fish out of water, is to envision a comical juxtaposition.

²⁹
As for the birds, having no other place to put them I threw them all into the sky; where their quill-flippers proved unexpectedly adept aviation aids; so it worked out for everyone, except the penguins and ostriches.

³⁰
And then came Day Six, a whirlwind of activity; for I spent it creating the land animals.

³¹
I created them in groups: mammals, amphibians, reptiles, insects; over 400,000 different species of beetles alone did I create.

³²
It is not that I am fond of beetles; to the contrary, I did not like any of them; over 400,000 times I strove to make the perfect one, and over 400,000 times I failed;

³³
Until finally I created the Colorado potato beetle,
Leptinotarsa decemlineata;
and I thought, “Now
there
is a beetle!” and I moved on.

³⁴
Late that afternoon, I paused to take in my work.

³⁵
In just under six days I had built an entire universe in literally the middle of nowhere; and I had done so under budget.

³⁶
Life thrived everywhere; the stars shone, the oceans roared, the flowers bloomed; all around me flourished the myriad signs of my glorious abundance . . .

³⁷
And then,
thou
walked in.

CHAPTER 3

¹
B
ut before I speak of humanity’s earliest ancestors, I must here address a subject of great importance to all seekers of truth; but particularly those seekers of truth, who are tenth-graders in Kansas.

²
Over the last several hundred years, scientists have uncovered an obscene amount of evidence in support of the theory of evolution expounded by Charles Darwin.

³
And each such piece of evidence has seemingly revealed a new and more profound inconsistency between reality, and the account of Creation offered in Genesis.

⁴
Now, I know many of my faithful servants have labored earnestly to reconcile the two; even going so far as to form a new discipline, “creation science”; a phrase carrying roughly the same intellectual heft, as “dragon anatomy.”

⁵
But by now, the absurdity of this endeavor has surely become apparent to even my most steadfast defenders.

⁶
And so I must tell thee here, in the spirit of candor, that the evidence for evolution is now indeed so overwhelming, so incontrovertible, so beyond the level of mere “theory,” that it can no longer possibly be denied,

⁷
How impressive it is, that I planted it all.

⁸
Because I did.

⁹
I planted it all.

¹⁰
Every . . . last . . . bit of it.

¹¹
Zing!

¹²
Canst thou grasp the scope of my hoax, humanity?

¹³
Can thy mortal minds absorb even a drop of the immense ocean constituting the thoroughness of thy punking?

¹⁴
If all of thee, working together since the dawn of time, were charged with devoting thy lives to the single task of fabricating all the evidence that exists to support evolution, thou wouldst fail utterly.

¹⁵
But I am God; in me all things are fakeable.

¹⁶
I molded the fossils; I deposited the dinosaurs; I modified the DNA; I mutated the vestigial tails; I arranged the migratory distributions; I specialized the finch beaks; I booked Darwin’s cruise.

¹⁷
And I did more than this: I meticulously layered geological strata; I altered the level of carbon 14 in every rock on earth; I even redshifted every particle of light in the universe so that it would appear to thy observers that the cosmos was created through some kind of large-scale explosion 13.7 billion years ago.

¹⁸
Yea; over the eons I have invested more time and energy into falsifying an empirically unassailable case for evolution than any other venture since Creation itself.

¹⁹
Wouldst thou like to know why?

²⁰
Because every time a scientist dies and ascends to heaven, and I spend an hour lavishing him with praise about his use of reason and facts to overcome the primitive superstition of his fellows;

²¹
Then does the entire colossal undertaking become worth it, at that glorious moment, when the thunder claps, and the skies darken, and I bellow, “So long, sucker!”, and the trapdoor opens, and I send him to hell.

CHAPTER 4

¹
T
o resume:

²
It is often said—and even more often screamed at anti–gay marriage rallies outside the statehouse in Lansing—that I created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.

³
Wrong.

⁴
Now will I tell the story of the first man, Adam; and of the companion I fashioned for him, Steve; and of the great closeting that befell their relationship.

⁵
For after I created the earth, and sea, and every plant and seed and beast of the field and fowl of the air, and had the place pretty much set up, I saw that it was good;

⁶
But I also saw, that by way of oversight it made administrative sense to establish a new middle-managerial position.

⁷
So as my final act of Day Six, I formed a man from the dust of the ground, and breathed life into his nostrils; and I called him Adam, to give him a leg up alphabetically.

⁸
And lo, I made him for my image; not
in
my image, but
for
my image; because with Creations thou never gettest a second chance to make a first impression;