The Last Testament: A Memoir (14 page)

²⁸
He was not Charlton Heston; he was Charles Manson.

CHAPTER 3

¹
A
nd that is why he took so quickly to heart my violent plan to incite social upheaval; a plan he nicknamed “Isis Crisis,” after a popular hieroglyph of the time.

²
Moses was the perfect vehicle to implement my plan, save in one respect: as he says in Exodus, he was “slow of speech” and “not eloquent.”

³
Yet even in this he misspoke, for it was not true that he was slow of speech; if anything, he spoke at a rapid pace; it was more, that he was slow—
extremely
slow—of getting to the point, and also that he cursed like a sailor.

⁴
That is why I decided to involve his younger brother, Aaron; for he worshipped Moses, and did whatever he asked; but he spoke succinctly, in a dulcet tone.

⁵
Moreover, Aaron groomed his hair, and washed his cloak, and bathed twice a week, and did not generally come across like a filthy drifter living off scarabs.

⁶
Indeed, some have wondered why I did not recruit Aaron to lead the project himself, and leave his wild-tongued, half-crazed brother out of it.

⁷
The answer is simple; Moses had something that Aaron did not:

⁸
“It.”

⁹
And “it” is indefinable.

¹⁰
“It” is indescribable.

¹¹
“It” is a force so mysterious, and so powerful, that if I am not extremely mindful of who I am, a person with “it” can leave even
me
feeling captivated and helpless.

¹²
I have little control over “it,” but I know “it” when I see “it”; and Moses had “it,” and Aaron did not have “it”;

¹³
And there thou hast “it.”

¹⁴
So, having removed the stems and seeds from the burning bush and stored the remainder in tiny satchels, Moses and Aaron went to Egypt and demanded a meeting with Pharaoh at his earliest possible convenience; to facilitate which I smote all his Thursday appointments.

¹⁵
And Moses stood before Pharaoh, terrifying yet mesmerizing to behold; unkempt and savage-eyed, an ankh carved onto his forehead; and he said unto Aaron,

¹⁶
“Man, tell this pig there’s like, millions of people out there who are
slaves,
man, and not just like chains and whips and shit but like
mental
slaves, slaves to the whole corporo-pyramid-pharaohcracy that’s propped up by this, this
fucking
fascist courtesy of the little, fuckin’, the little fuckin’ obelisks he’s implanted in all of our brains; and the only solution is to burn it down, man!
Burn the whole motherfucker down!!!”

¹⁷
And Aaron said, “Let my people go.”

¹⁸
But Pharaoh refused, for I had hardened his heart; not that he was Mr. Softie to begin with, but I was planning a full-on godding tour de force, and had no intention of having my agenda ruined by any last-minute acts of human decency.

¹⁹
So I decided to give Pharaoh a foretaste of things to come; and here I must quote Exodus 7:10–12:

²⁰
“Aaron cast down his rod before Pharaoh, and it became a serpent; then Pharaoh also called his wise men and sorcerers; and they cast down every man his rod, and they became serpents: but Aaron’s rod swallowed up their rods.”

²¹
I watched this scene take place; indeed, I caused it; and I swear to thee, Reader, that neither Aaron, nor Moses, nor Pharaoh, nor any of the sorcerers there, had any idea how gay it was.

²²
For verily: had they all just gotten naked and made a sodomy train, that
still
would have been less gay than watching a bunch of serpent-rods eating other serpent-rods.

²³
Yet had I pulled any of the men aside and said unto them, “Seest thou any symbolism in this competition amongst thy varying serpent-rods?”, I guarantee thee they would have said, “Not at all; it is no more than a straightforward serpent-rod-swallowing contest; it betokeneth no subtext.”

²⁴
(Sorry; I mean not to wander forty years in the desert of this digression; but as thy Creator it is something that has long been on my mind.

²⁵
Truly, it almost surpasseth my understanding how it took thee 5,000 years to notice the similarity between the cylindrical and the phallic;

²⁶
And that even Freud, the man who first “discovered” this self-evidency, felt obliged to apologize for his finding by noting, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

²⁷
No. No. A cigar is
always
a penis.)

CHAPTER 4

¹
T
he Ten Plagues were an exciting time.

²
I remember the initial wingstorming session I held with my top four angels.

³
“Boys,” I said unto them, “let us create a drumroll-worthy list of the ten most superior methods of afflicting the Egyptians; one that not only unleashes a catalog of despair upon them, but does so in a mirthful way that keeps the pace up.

⁴
And let us earnestly endeavor to nail this: for if it goes well, I may have another list-of-ten writing gig lined up for thee in the near future.”

⁵
The ideas percolated; the energy overflowed; Gabriel would put forward a possible plague, which would trigger a pestilential suggestion from Raphael, which in turn would spark the basis of a new unutterable horror from Uriel; thou couldst
feel
the creativity.

⁶
All five of us had the same initial instinct: animals.

⁷
Herds of elephants; packs of wolves; unkindnesses of ravens; killer puppies; millions of land-lobsters scuttling across the desert like unto a giant terror-bisque—believeth me, if it was a living organism characterized by voluntary movement,
someone
suggested killing Egyptians with it.

⁸
Verily, we could have made all ten plagues animal-related, and it would have made for a grievously amusing spectacle; but in the end we limited ourselves to four: frogs (icky), gnats (bitey), wild beasts (really bitey), and locusts (faminey).

⁹
Then Raphael had the notion of killing their
preexisting
livestock with disease; a cute twist on the animal concept, I thought; we went with it.

¹⁰
Then Gabriel said, “This would I bounce off thee: after killing the livestock, what if we sicken their
owners
with visible signs of their own corruption?”

¹¹
And that moment right there, ladies and gentlemen, was the inspiration . . . for boils.

¹²
We placed it right after cattle disease; in the center slots, five and six; the cows got dead, then the people got scaly; a great one-two punch.

¹³
Needless to say, many potential atmospheric and meteorological cataclysms came to our minds, but in the end we chose only two, hail and darkness;

¹⁴
For we felt the Egyptians would regard a blizzard as more of a treat than a curse; and as for a deluge of rain, well, I was certainly not going down
that
road again.

¹⁵
And no Decalogue of Despair would be complete without a little of the red stuff; it was Uriel who had the idea of turning all the water into blood, including the Nile; which we ended up using as our opener.

¹⁶
It was somewhat engaging, but to be truthful it did not kill; for it did not kill.

¹⁷
This made nine plagues, each and every one a worthy addition to the pantheon of woe; yet none seemed to us a worthy “ender.”

¹⁸
Then, late one evening, when we were all exhausted; after we had each thrown a myriad of ideas against the wall, to find them sticking not; suddenly Michael, who had heretofore contributed little to the plaguewriting process, arose and said:

¹⁹
“Calleth me crazy; but what if we killed every firstborn son in Egypt, from the firstborn son of Pharaoh, to the firstborn son of the female slave who is at her hand mill; and all the firstborn of the cattle as well?”

²⁰
At which point, the rest of us all thought, “Well, verily, that’s it.

²¹
That’s number ten, right there.”

CHAPTER 5

¹
B
ut I did not want the Chosen People to feel left out; for I knew that if they played only a passive part in all the death and destruction, they would feel no sense of ownership.

²
So we conceived a plan whereby the night before the slaying of the Egyptians’ firstborn, the head of each Jewish household would slaughter a baby lamb, and daub its blood on the lintels of their houses, as a sign for me to “pass over” them.

³
This ritual of course became the basis of the sacred eight-day Jewish festival celebrated unto this day, “Lamb-Blood Doorframe Rub-a-palooza.”

⁴
(We later changed the name to “Passover,” on the advice of Marketing.)

⁵
So the planning was finished; the preparations were put in place; and before we knew it, it was P-Day.

⁶
For the most part our strategy was to hew to a basic pattern: Moses would threaten Pharaoh, incoherently; then Aaron would threaten him, coherently; Pharaoh would scoff; Aaron or Moses would stretch forth his hand over Egypt; horror would ensue; thousands would suffer; Pharaoh would relent; Moses would call it off; I would harden Pharaoh’s heart; and on to the next horror.

⁷
It proved a winning formula; for Pharaoh and his advisers were so dazzled by the array of scourges, they never caught on to the underlying predictability of the threat/scoff/horror/heart-hardening template;

⁸
And so we were not obliged to vary the rhythm by switching to Plan B, three plagues at once; or Plan C, a nuclear bomb.

⁹
I was glad we never got to Plan C; it might have felt contrived.

¹⁰
I remember the afternoon of the night of the slaying of the firstborn, when both Aaron and Moses addressed the children of Israel.