God Is Dead (11 page)

Q?

We grieved, for everything we'd lost and were about to lose. For dogs, to grieve means to howl, and so we did, through that first night and into the next day. The others' voices weakened, then dropped out of the chorus altogether, and soon I was alone, crying out against the walls of that room, throwing myself headlong into the bars of the cage until my snout was bloodied, feeling my insides shrivel and fail.

Q?

What happened to Mubarak is well documented; you probably know as much as I do. In London he met with Ibrahim Hussein Al-Jamil, a friend and colleague who lectured at King's College. Together they oversaw the autopsy and study of the Creator's corpse, which revealed, among other things, a massless composition that defied long-held principles of physics. A select group of scientists descended on London, all of whom agreed, on reaching the inevitable conclusion, that it must be kept from the public. Mubarak, being more interested in recognition and personal gain than in the preservation of human society, did not honor this agreement.

Q?

By all accounts, his bizarre behavior resembled the symptoms of certain neurological disorders—tics and spasms, bouts of catatonia, babbling—except that the progression of these symptoms was far too dramatic. He danced spasmodic jigs in lunch-hour traffic and once spent an entire day on the Piccadilly line of the London underground, ropes of drool hanging from his lips, traveling the loop around Heathrow over and over until early in the morning, when the conductor had him removed by police. Shortly after urinating on Ed Bradley during an interview for
60 Minutes,
Mubarak went missing, and a few days later his body was fished from a gate on the Thames barrier, east of the city.

Q?

It's true that accident or suicide is the widely held view.

Q?

I am aware of the actual circumstances of his death, but I'll decline to divulge them, except to say that Ed Bradley had nothing to do with it.

Q?

By now I was near death myself. The others had been gone for a week when Mubarak's housekeeper, a girl named Lily Gabriel Holland, eased open the door to the spare room and peered in. Seeing us, she pushed the door open wide and entered the room, tall and bold, a Christian girl cursing her Muslim employer in his own home.

Q?

Initially she thought we were all dead. Tears spilled onto her cheeks, but her voice was strong and steady. “What has that bastard done?” she said, moving slowly from cage to cage.

I was too weak to rise. “Help me,” I said.

Lily grasped the bars of my cage and shook them with sturdy hands. “You're alive,” she said.

“I'm alive,” I said. “Barely.”

“How are you speaking to me?”

“Your God is dead,” I told her.

“Yes,” she said. She gave the cage another shake, and examined the padlock on the door. “There are rumors circulating in Mandela, though the government has tried to keep it quiet. People are more frightened of no-God than of the soldiers. So they are talking. They say Mubarak has something to do with this.”

“I can explain,” I said. “But for now—”

“Yes, no, of course!” she said, rising quickly to her feet. “I'll find something to open this cage.” She left the room, returning a moment later with a hammer and pry bar. She wedged the sharp end of the bar against the latch, raised the hammer high above her head, and snapped the lock with one powerful stroke.

Q?

Lily was slender but very strong, and she carried my wasted body several miles through the streets to the slum of Mandela, where she shared a room with her father in a long dormitory-type building.

Q?

Like Lily, her father was kind, helping to care for me, fetching water from the neighborhood well, and grinding pigeon hearts into a paste I could digest. But unlike her, he was feeble, with spindly shriveled arms and a weakness for homemade liquor distilled from dates.

Q?

When I'd recovered my strength, I confirmed for them the reports they'd been hearing: The Creator was dead, and the first tremors of this revelation were being felt around the world. I told them, too, how I'd unwittingly eaten part of the Creator and been transformed.

“Then you are him,” Lily's father said.

“What?” Lily said. “No, Papa.”

“Isn't it clear?” her father said. “He ate God's body. Here he sits, a dog who talks like a person. He tells us things of a world we've never heard of. America! What does anyone here know of America, except its name? Yet he knows. He knows everything.”

“I'm not your God,” I said.

“He's not God, Papa,” Lily told him.

“I know what I know,” her father said, drinking from a jar of date liquor.

Q?

Lily guarded me closely, even from her father. Tension was gathering in the slum. People disappeared almost daily, taken by soldiers to Omdurman prison for blasphemy and incitement. Army trucks ground slowly over dirt streets, broad casting orders for residents to attend churches and mosques on the appointed days of worship. Lily found this bitterly humorous.

“They must be desperate,” she said. “Before, they bulldozed our churches and built apartment complexes on the rubble. Now they want us to show up every Sunday, without fail.”

One night I pretended to sleep while Lily and her father argued about me.

“He could help people,” her father said.

“It's too dangerous,” Lily said, “if the government found out about him. And they would.”

“He could give people hope. My friends—they want to know the future will be better.”

“And what if it won't be, Papa?” Lily asked pointedly.

“Other things,” he said, sidestepping her question. “What has happened to their families, for instance. Years of wondering, of suffering, could come to an end.”

“Ah,” Lily said, “now the truth comes out. We're not talking about your friends, are we, Papa? We're talking about you. What
you
want to know.”

“Yes! Of course! And I hope you would be interested to know what became of your mother and sisters, too.”

“I already know, Papa. They're dead.”

After a few seconds of silence, he responded. “You think you know so much,” he said, but his voice was quiet now, almost a whisper.

Q?

Lily was right; her mother and two older sisters were dead, killed by the goat farmer they'd been sold to after being kidnapped by the Janjaweed fifteen years earlier. But when her father came to me one afternoon while Lily was out bartering for wheat flour and lentils, I didn't have the heart to tell him their fate. He'd been kind to me, and I wanted to return that kindness.

Q?

I said they'd escaped the farmer and were living together in Darfur, near Nyala. I told him they were hoping still, after all the years, that he and Lily would return to them.

Now, in retrospect, I think of this as the moment when I truly joined the human pack.

Q?

Lily was angry, with her father for asking, and with me for giving an answer. She asked if it was true, if her mother and sisters were still alive. Not knowing what else to do, I told her that it was.

She cried all that night, while her father swore off date liquor and went about Mandela, relating my story and making plans to bring in people from the neighborhood to commune with me.

Q?

The next morning people began to arrive, bearing clothing, jewelry, sandalwood, crumpled wads of dinars, baskets of food. Lily's father collected the offerings and led people in one by one. Most, especially the women, immediately fell to their knees before me; others were more skeptical and did not genuflect until they heard my voice in their heads. Some were Christian, some were Muslim. They wanted to learn about the future, and the past. They asked after fathers who had disappeared, grandmothers long since dead, sons who had turned to thievery. When the honest answer was bad, which was most of the time, I lied to them. I told them that their dead fathers would return, that their grandmothers were happy in an afterlife I knew did not exist, that their psychotic sons would someday repay their love tenfold. I pretended to heal children who had only weeks to live, and called down great fortunes on the poorest of the poor. Every person I saw departed happy, their faces streaked with tears of shock and gratitude. Some even searched their pockets for anything else they could offer me, scattering coins and bits of lint on the dirt floor. By the time night fell, a growing crowd had clogged the street outside the room, and Lily's father told them to go home and return in the morning.

Q?

That night he cooked a feast of sorghum, corn, and lamb chops. Lily refused to eat; she sat silently on her cot, staring through the room's single window at the people still waiting in the street, their hopeful faces lit by flickering kerosene flames. After dinner her father counted up the offerings, and though his hands trembled for want of a drink, he smiled and waved the money in the air.

“Soon we'll have enough to travel to Nyala,” he said to Lily. But she gave no sign that she heard him.

Q?

She watched in silence as word spread and people came to Mandela from as far away as Uganda and the Congo. They brought fear, despair, and money, and left that room relieved of all three. Many of these pilgrims brought their families and erected makeshift shelters. In two weeks the population of Mandela swelled by thirty thousand. At night they lit fires and sang songs of praise, united in their new devotion.

Q?

It did bother me, taking their meager belongings in exchange for lies, however well-intentioned those lies were. What bothered me more was Lily's disapproving stare. But I craved inclusion so desperately, and now I had it, or at least I thought I did. It didn't occur to me then that being an object of worship is possibly the greatest exclusion of all.

Q?

It ended as Lily had predicted—the government learned that people were making pilgrimages to Mandela, worshipping a dog as if he were God, and they sent troops in. The night they stormed the slum, rain fell hard, beating a violent rhythm on tin roofs, and while the people around me assumed the distant rumblings were thunder, I knew better.

“They're coming, Lily,” I said. “Men in half-tracks, with rifles. They're coming for me.”

“The people will fight them,” she said. “They'll fight and die for you.” It sounded like an accusation.

“I don't understand this,” I said.

“You need to go,” she said. “But before you do, I want to ask: Why did you lie to me about my mother and sisters?”

I didn't respond.

“Why?” she said again.

And for the first time in weeks, I spoke the truth. “I don't know,” I told her.

Q?

Lily lifted me through the window, and I fled. I ran south through endless crowds of worshippers surging in the other direction, toward the fighting. In the darkness not one person noticed me, and I ran until the desert swallowed me again. I didn't stop until the sand became dry beneath my paws, until I had outrun the rains.

Q?

Hundreds of people died that night, including Lily. She was the only one among that crowd who fought for the right reasons. She stood tall in the rain and threw rocks. She used her strong hands to wrest a rifle from a soldier's grasp, and before she turned the gun on him she told him her mother's name, and made sure he heard it clearly.

Q?

Her father was taken prisoner and died a few months later at Omdurman, poisoned by a bad batch of cell-brewed liquor.

Q?

How do I feel about it? Let me answer you this way: I've never returned to Khartoum, or any other place where people gather. I live as a normal dog, though hunting by myself is difficult and I'm often lonely. I haven't spoken to a person since that night, until now. That's how I feel about it.

Q.

No, that isn't the end. There's one other question you've neglected to ask. The question you came halfway around the world to have answered.

Q?

Don't be coy. I know things, remember. I know, for instance, that you are no different from any of the thousands of supplicants I've met with, except in this regard: I've told you the truth. And so you shouldn't need to ask your question, because you already have the answer.