The Last Testament: A Memoir (11 page)

¹³
Yea, this is one section of the Old Testament that I refuse to enhance with any additional anecdote or commentary; and the reason is simple:

¹⁴
No anecdote or commentary I provide, could ever improve upon
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
by Messrs. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.

¹⁵
Heed me, for on this point I would have absolute clarity:

¹⁶
I do not usually like musical theater.

¹⁷
My son does; but not I.

¹⁸
Yet I forget this fact when I watch
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,
so thoroughly doth it transcend the genre.

¹⁹
I love
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat;
I love it far more than I loved either Joseph or his amazing Technicolor dreamcoat.

²⁰
In fact, one of the principal uses to which I have brought my power of omnipresence to bear over the last few years, is the viewing of no less than 35 international productions of
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

²¹
I notice something new every time.

²²
I will move on; I will say only that, if thou ever gettest a chance, I urge thee to take in a production of
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

²³
Let me rephrase that: I am the L
ORD
thy God, King of the Universe; and thou shalt run, not walk, to
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

SMITUS

(“On Natural Disasters”)

CHAPTER 1

¹
W
e have reached the first of the many small “interludes” that will be sprinkled throughout the present narrative, to lend it a breezy, reader-friendly, David Sedaris–esque feel.

²
And having just finished recounting the Book of Genesis, it seems fitting here to essay my views on natural disasters; which are in truth about as “natural” as Cheez Whiz.

³
Yea: to the retro-soothsayers who proclaim every cataclysm the result of divine justice, and who then themselves must suffer through the infuriating rationalism of the liberal, touchy-feely, everything-that-happens-on-earth-can-be-explained-by-natural-phenomena crowd,

⁴
Consider thyselves vindicated.

⁵
For natural disasters are indeed “acts of God”; usually one-acts, but once in a while I will join two of them together and give thee a full night at the theater.

⁶
Volcanoes? Mine.

⁷
Tsunamis? Tsuna-
Me
s.

⁸
Mudslides? Lo, that’s how I roll.

⁹
Now verily, after the Great Flood I made a covenant with Noah never again to kill all of mankind; and I have kept my word.

¹⁰
I have never again killed all of you at the same time; but I have killed lots of you, often.

¹¹
I have always had wrath-management issues; I am prone to lose my temper at the drop of a yarmulke, and in the heat of the moment tend to unleash my full fury upon an entire region, nation, or even continent;

¹²
When the healthier course of action—at least from the point of view of, say, Africa—would be to spend an hour in the absolute zero of the interstellar vacuum, cooling off.

¹³
But though my rage may be spontaneous, the means I use to express it are quite deliberate; for I was very careful when constructing the earth to incorporate in its architecture large-scale geological and meteorological mechanisms that, while helpful to life, could also, when necessary, double as killing machines.

¹⁴
Consider the tectonic plates; how, as with many marriages, a pair of them will grind up against each other decade after decade, neither side budging, the tension building beneath the surface, until suddenly a breaking point is reached and they move violently apart, leaving behind them a trail of chaos, destruction, and sad children.

¹⁵
Yet there is no inherent reason why this could not have been otherwise; why I could not have fashioned the plates such that they would be perpetually gliding in very slow motion, their friction never accumulating.

¹⁶
And indeed, I strongly considered this possibility during Creation; going so far as to prepare a special high-viscosity liquid that would have oozed upward from the planet’s mantle, providing its crust with a never-ending source of lubricant.

¹⁷
“Land butter,” I called it.

¹⁸
Or consider the sky, whose winds and rains and snows will betimes turn on thee; it, too, could have been designed so as to avoid such occurrences; yea, it could have been designed in any way I saw fit.

¹⁹
Those five or six days a year when thou steppest outside and think, “Oh, this weather is just perfect!”?

²⁰
I could have made it like that
every day.

²¹
But I did not; for a) I like the seasons, and b) I wanted to retain the option of burying and blowing and deluging and tossing thee about like a matchstick on a moment’s notice.

²²
Still: how great are those five or six days a year!

CHAPTER 2

¹
I
n the good olden days I, as a matter of policy, personally took the lead in the planning, implementation, and in a few cases even choreography of every disaster designed to cause over 500 deaths and/or destroy an area of over 100,000 square cubits;

²
Following the precept, that if thou wantest something horribly wrong done right, do it thyself.

³
Take as an instance Pompeii, which I destroyed in 79 A.D., just as Christianity was gaining a sandaled toehold in the Roman Empire.

⁴
I wanted to assist the rise of my son’s benevolent new religion by revealing the apocalyptic hellscape awaiting anyone who spurned it.

⁵
So I called my team together, everyone but Jesus; I did not think his presence there would benefit the discussion; for he and I have very different management styles when it comes to killing people.

⁶
I said, “Boys, the issue is not
whether
we have the capacity to make an example of a wicked Roman city; of course we have; no pep talk is needed on that score.

⁷
But I want to do it in such a way that its wickedness is somehow preserved for posterity; that even the sinners themselves remain frozen in time, permanent monuments to their own vice.

⁸
And I also want it done so that survivors could reasonably view it as a purely natural phenomenon; so that only the bright, perceptive Romans will convert, while the morons stay heathen.

⁹
So nothing supernatural; nothing deus ex machina–ish; nothing so clearly the work of divine reckoning that we lose all leeway for plausible deniability.

¹⁰
From the earth’s perspective, this needs to look like an inside job.”

¹¹
As soon as I uttered these last words, Uriel’s entire face began to light up with inspiration, as if he had stars in his eyes.

¹²
It turned out he
did
have stars in his eyes; they’d somehow gotten in there on his way back from Cassiopeia; we got them out with holy water and tweezers.

¹³
But afterward he told us of the town of Pompeii: how it was not only a cesspit of immorality even by Roman standards, but was conveniently located next to a roiling volcano that could spew lava . . . and ash.

¹⁴
Quick-suffocating, slow-entombing, moment-of-death-freezing ash.

¹⁵
It was a brilliant plan, but for form’s sake I had everyone else work up a couple of pitches; the only other semi-interesting proposal was pickling Rome in a brinestorm; creative, but forced.

¹⁶
And everything went beautifully; Vesuvius exploded; Pompeii was utterly destroyed
and
preserved; and hundreds of wiser Romans discerned the true cause, and converted to Christianity, providing it with a much-needed injection of brainpower, not to mention lion food.

¹⁷
Pompeii was sudden, spectacular, terrifying, unique, and well-targeted.

¹⁸
At the risk of sounding immodest, it was a perfect disaster.

CHAPTER 3

¹
B
ut it was not the
most
perfect disaster; that would be the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the only major calamity in history with a 100 percent justice rate.

²
For there were 3,425 people in the greater San Francisco area whom I wanted dead; and those were
exactly
the 3,425 people who died.

³
So that worked out well.

⁴
Yet it was right around that time that, for reasons that will become clear later in this testament, I stopped playing any part in the organization or scheduling of major catastrophes, or even minor tragedies; and as a result, the connection between moral cause and geophysical effect has grown increasingly tenuous in recent decades.

⁵
AIDS, for example; in no way was that virus intended as a punishment for homosexuals, whose overall fabulousness I have already celebrated in these pages.

⁶
No; AIDS began as a virus in chimpanzees, which then jumped to the humans who hunted and butchered them; and people who hunt and butcher chimps deserve to get AIDS, and I have no problem saying that.

⁷
Or Hurricane Katrina; many thought it was sent to chastise the people of New Orleans for the shameful immorality of their city.

⁸
No; it was sent to chastise the people of Biloxi for the shameful overdevelopment of their beachfront.

⁹
Or the recent series of catastrophes in Japan, which within three days were ascribed by the mayor of Tokyo himself to “divine retribution” for the Japanese people’s greed.