The Last Testament: A Memoir (44 page)

⁵
(Jesus disagrees with me on this; he favors a more communal governance based on sharing resources, and caring for the sick, and faith, and hope, and some other third abstract noun I never let him get around to telling me.

⁶
For whenever he begins to spout his utopian vision, I angrily cut him off: “That’s socialism!”

⁷
And he saith, “No, Father. It is not socialism.”

⁸
And then he afflicts me with more of his worldview, and I interrupt again: “Yea, socialism! Thou art a socialist!”

⁹
And he saith, “Father, that is but a bogey-word used to demonize others.”

¹⁰
And I say, “Thou art demonized?!? Out! Flee my son, evil socialist demon!”

¹¹
And he saith, “Father, I am Jesus Christ. Dost thou really think me possessed?”

¹²
And I say, “Truly, no; for a socialist demon would not possess thee; he would share thee with all his lazy demon friends on welfare.

¹³
Verily, Jesus, thy traitorous words almost make me question the authenticity of the strange circumstances surrounding thy birth.

¹⁴
Keep this up, and I will demand thou furnishest me a copy of thy long-form birth certificate.”

¹⁵
Cue the Look.)

¹⁶
All manner of dualistic hierarchies flourished during the Middle Ages: king-subject; pope-church; priest-flock; lord-serf; happiness-misery.

¹⁷
But the maintenance of these hierarchies would have been impossible were it not for the fact that this was also an era when literacy knew its place: as the exclusive property of religious fanatics.

¹⁸
For the medieval monks saw books as treasured commodities; regarded reading as a kind of sacrament; and labored so hard on their writing that they created ornate illuminated manuscripts that to this day remain unsurpassed in glittering illegibility.

¹⁹
True, Islam was simultaneously suffering through its Golden Age, marked by a flourishing culture and great advances in arts and sciences; but I was patient.

²⁰
I knew deep inside its urbane exterior lurked a puritanical center just ululating to get out.

CHAPTER 3

¹
I
maintained a thorough oversight over human affairs during this time; but as for divine intervention, the Middle Ages marked the start of the third and final phase of my dramatic career.

²
Like Garbo, I had begun in silence, made the transition to talking, and now, increasingly, just wanted to be left alone.

³
So I made fewer and fewer cameos; and many well-known figures of this era who are widely assumed to have been my associates, had no connection with me whatsoever.

⁴
Attila the Hun, for example; even in his own time he was nicknamed the Scourge of God; to be sure he was a scourge, but not mine; he was but a tribal scourge, scourging whatever he deemed Hunnably scourgable.

⁵
The same is true of the Vikings; I played no role in any of their raids, or ransacks, or pillages, or plunderings; though I did admire their work.

⁶
(As an aside, I must briefly state my displeasure that through some quirk of historical circumstance, four of the seven days of the week are named for pagan Germanic gods.

⁷
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday; 80 percent of thy office hours are spent in nomenclatural Valhalla.

⁸
The worst is Friday, for that is the day I am forced to hear myself endlessly and mistakenly thanked.

⁹
Thank not me; thank Frigg, the Norse goddess of love, ye unwitting pagans.)

¹⁰
At one point during Genghis Khan’s brutal conquest of half of Eurasia, he said, “I am the flail of God.”

¹¹
I sent no such flail.

¹²
Nor were the great heroes of the age in league with me; men like Charlemagne, who was deified by many of his subjects after he named his kingdom the “Holy Roman Empire”; they took it as a sign of my providence; it was not; it was just good branding.

¹³
And the knights who roamed the countryside as ostensible paradigms of the Christian warrior; some rescued fair maidens, others ravaged fair maidens, and over half
dressed
as fair maidens under their armor, but nary a one was doing “the L
ORD
’s work.”

¹⁴
Even Dante, author of
The Divine Comedy
—the greatest sci-fi trilogy of all time—worked alone; though his work was infused with such genius I wound up borrowing a few of his ideas, as did the devil.

¹⁵
(Which ones? Thou shalt have to wait and see!)

¹⁶
But there were a few significant events during this godliest of ages that I actually did a little godding on.

¹⁷
One was the Black Death, to which I referred earlier as the butt of one of Raphael’s great mirths; I imposed it on Europe as harsh but fair punishment for . . . something.

¹⁸
At the moment I remember not what, exactly; but knowing me my guess would be something in the general ballpark of wickedness;

¹⁹
Though it may have just been “that time of the century.”

²⁰
I also played an active role in the Christianization of Ireland, guiding St. Patrick on his journeys through the Emerald Isle.

²¹
Yea; how I loved watching St. Patrick parading gaily along his route, marching and prancing in his gaudy finery, inviting the many like-minded men he encountered to join his festive procession; which they did, often fueled by mead; in this way converting the entire nation of Ireland to Christ, and/or sodomy.

²²
And I personally guided Marco Polo on his epic journey to China.

²³
For he had prayed most devoutly to me to satisfy his wanderlust by guiding him to the Orient; so I agreed to help him, but only if he promised to show perfect faith in my navigation.

²⁴
Thus, throughout his entire journey he kept his eyes closed; ascertaining the direction of travel by repeatedly shouting out his first name, then listening for the sound of my voice ahead shouting back his last name.

²⁵
In this slow yet oddly amusing way did he travel from Venice to Cathay, whereupon he celebrated with a dip in the pool.

CHAPTER 4

¹
A
nd then there was Joan of Arc; that sweet, innocent young farmer’s daughter who flat out gave it up for me.

2 No, I mirth; truly, Joan of Arc was beloved of me; for she was none other than the earthly incarnation of my daughter Kathy, sent down to earth like her brother, to be born, inspire, and die young.

³
Jesus and H. G. had long since become active partners in all aspects of my business; but Kathy had spent the previous 14 centuries assisting Ruth in her duties as a heavenwife.

⁴
(Note that I did not say “
just
a heavenwife”; for I know how difficult it is to maintain a proper heaven.

⁵
Yea: in some ways heavenwifery is the toughest job of all!)

⁶
Kathy had been in awe of Jesus ever since his triumphant return, yet also a little jealous; for though never one to gripe, every century or so I would overhear her in the throes of an all-out martyrdom complex, complaining, “It’s not fair! Why won’t Daddy let me die for him!? Is it ‘cause I’m a girl?”

⁷
For over 1,000 years I ignored her pleas, because I harbored concerns about her pursuit of a career whose inevitable end was excruciating death at an early age.

⁸
As I have said, I can be overprotective.

⁹
But she was the apple of my eye; so when in 1412 I overheard her grumbling yet again, I lovingly set out to get her killed.

¹⁰
She did not require a mission as global as Jesus’s, only one that would make a difference in some epic earthly enterprise; and the obvious choice at the time was the Hundred Years’ War;

¹¹
Which was already so-called even though it had only been waged for 75 years; for those were the days when men dreamed big.

¹²
Until that point the war had been a purely secular conflict between England and France, and I had no stake in the outcome; but it was suitably vast for Kathy’s modest messianic purposes, so I decided to plunk her down smack dab in the middle of it.

¹³
I flipped a coin; it was tails; she was French.

¹⁴
I will spare thee the tedious details of our planning, along with those of Kathy/Joan’s short life, which thou mayest read elsewhere; though I will point out that unlike Joseph and Jesus, the definitive musical version of
her
story hath yet to be written.

¹⁵
(I am looking at thee, Jeanine Tesori; for I admired thy score to
Caroline, or Change
, and I hear Joan’s story told with the same kind of stylistically eclectic musical vocabulary.)

¹⁶
Yet also unlike Jesus, “Joan” never learned the true nature of her identity; so up until the moment of her death, she considered herself no more than a French peasant woman;

¹⁷
Or, as that was known at the time, a “triple non-threat.”

¹⁸
But her brothers and I keenly monitored her progress; indeed, the saints who visited her and commanded her to fight for France were not in fact Michael, Catherine, and Margaret, but the three of us in disguise.

¹⁹
I was Michael. Just so thou knowest.

²⁰
And lo, Kathy rose to the occasion; she was fearless and incorruptible; she forever proved the point that a woman
could
achieve success in a man’s world, so long as she was tough, and hid her femininity, and cut her hair like a lesbian, and was personally protected by the king and God, and there was only one of her.