Confessions of a Discontented Deity

By Michael Z Lewin

If God created man in his own image, then to find out what God is like it makes sense to look at men and work backwards. Right? So God probably grew up wanting a simple life, wanting not to be hassled - especially when he was working with his machines - and wanting to get laid. But as men get older, they can mature. Right. And they can begin to look at life a bit differently. So chances are that's happened to God. Or is happening now. Right? Confessions is God's recounting of how he discovered he had problems he'd never anticipated when he created man (and woman...) And how he tried to resolve them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Z Lewin
• Release date: Mar 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310586422

Michael Z Lewin

Michael Z. Lewin has been writing mysteries, stories, and other fiction for more than forty years. Raised in Indianapolis, many of his books have been set there. More recent fiction, including the "Family" novels and stories, have been set in England where he currently lives. His writing has received many awards and generous reviews. Details of many of these, and a lot of other information, is available on his website.

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ASK THE RIGHT QUESTION

THE WAY WE DIE NOW

THE ENEMIES WITHIN

THE SILENT SALESMAN

MISSING WOMAN

OUT OF SEASON (OUT OF TIME, UK)

CALLED BY A PANTHER

EYE OPENER

Leroy Powder series

NIGHT COVER

HARD LINE

LATE PAYMENTS

Lunghi Family novels

FAMILY BUSINESS

FAMILY PLANNING

FAMILY WAY

Other novels

OUTSIDE IN

AND BABY WILL FALL (CHILDPROOF, UK)

UNDERDOG

CUTTING LOOSE

OH JOE

Short stories

ROVER’S TALES

THE RELUCTANT DETECTIVE and Other Stories

FAMILY TRIO (electronic only)

Non-fiction

HOW TO BEAT COLLEGE TESTS

If you took it in hand,

would it blush, bruise or slap you –

peach pincher of Bath?

From the blog of Elsie of Bath

CONFESSIONS

OF A

DISCONTENTED

DEITY

IN THE BEGINNING

For a long time I didn’t face up to the fact that I wasn’t happy. I ignored what I was feeling which, now that I look back on it, was downright discontentment. I made do and buried Myself in work. I distracted Myself by creating things – which is what I enjoy most. It’s what defines Me.

In fact, when the events I am reconstructing finally came to a head, I was working on My biggest project since I created the Universe. I was creating another Universe – cool or what?

When I did My first Universe I was a complete beginner. The tools and techniques I developed to fill and expand it came along all higgledy-piggledy. I managed to work up lots of stuff that entertains Me, but it’s also very untidy. So I got the idea to use My experience and make a new Universe. A nice tidy little one where, no matter what planet you looked into the sky from, it was clear that I had a whole design concept in mind from the Beginning.

When I started I made it vacuum clear throughout Heaven that I was not to be disturbed. And I was making good progress.

But then there was a knock on the Creation Chamber door. I was surprised. And not pleased.

Another knock.

I pressed Pause and turned. What? I thundered. There was a colossal electrical storm over the Amazon.

St Peter shuffled in, his head bowed. I am stricken to interrupt You, Lord. But You have been away for so long. I know it’s only a blink of Your eye, but a situation has arisen on Earth and we in the Host simply don’t know how to resolve it.

Earth is about to blow up?

No, Lord.

A meteor the size of 8sjjjx’^r42 is about to crash into it?

Nothing like that, Lord.

Well, what is it like? I was not happy. I tossed My hair. There was a sandstorm in the Sahara.

Well, Lord, Peter said, there is this place… He consulted his clipboard. They call it Texas.

*

I hadn’t really been incommunicado for as long as all that. Maybe a hundred years as they measure it on Earth. And, it’s true, I’d lost track of time – that happens when You’re engrossed in Your work. But it seemed that one of the Angels assigned to Prayer Delivery was in jail in a city called Houston.

Aisha from the Angel Bureau led Me to where Angel Olaf was waiting, his head in his hands. When he saw Me he fell to his knees. I’m so sorry, Lord. For I have screwed up.

Olaf, I said, you were sent unto… Aisha whispered in My ear. …unto Bobbi-Lou to answer her prayer.

And I did try, Lord. Olaf hung his head. My very utmost. But… But…

In the early days of Heavenly admin when Angels went to Earth on missions they would find themselves among the kind of people they had lived with when they were alive. They’d understand how those people felt and thought and behaved and they could help accordingly.

But nowadays we don’t get many Angels from modern humanity. Olaf had lived and died in Norway in the 14th Century.

I whispered to Aisha, Is this the same Olaf who was at the center of that debacle in Salem?

Yes, Lord.

I thought he was supposed to be retired.

We had no one to replace him, Lord. Souls are not the only thing there’s a shortage of.

The soul-supply shortage… One of the areas of hassle I’d buried Myself in work to avoid being nagged about. I was suddenly weary. There were doldrums in the South China Sea.

However this day Eternal Life had brought Me to a Houston jail cell because of a problem about a prayer. And poor old Olaf: how could he be expected to understand the likes of a Twenty-First Century Bobbi-Lou, who lived on Pink Flamingo Boulevard in the fifth Airstream on the left? Whatever an Airstream was.

Olaf still might have been all right if Bobbi-Lou’s prayer had been something specific like, Let my cat Cuddles find her way home today, or, Let my boyfriend be run over by a bus. But Bobbi-Lou had prayed for her life to be made better. Well, how’s an Olaf supposed to get to grips with that when better in his lifetime amounted to an extra reindeer?

Prayers are answered on a lottery basis. Back when the Heaven thing was in its infancy I did try out a few merit systems, but they were hopeless as soon as a typical prayer stopped being, Lord, please strike down this saber-toothed tiger so I can get back to my cave-rats. Ranking the comparative value of vaguely expressed human yearnings and wantings was just too hard.

So now all heartfelt prayers go into a metaphorical Heavenly hat. The – few – lucky winners are assigned an Angel of Mercy from the pool. It ought to be straight-forward. It ought to keep Me out of it.

But sometimes it’s an Olaf who goes to a Bobbi-Lou. With the best will in the world he says, Come unto me, child. For I am here to answer your prayer.

But his intentions are misunderstood – maybe it’s the accent – because Bobbi-Lou says, You can come unto me any way that answers your prayer, pal, for forty bucks, but you gotta use a condom.

One misunderstanding leads to another and Olaf isn’t carrying any money – Bobbi-Lou checks. So before he knows it he’s in a jail cell, accused of attempted rape. Maybe they’re even going to execute him. It is Texas, after all.

And that’s the big issue for Peter and the Host. For an Angel to be executed in front of a bloodthirsty audience could disrupt the whole balance of belief and reality on Earth. As in, Where did the body go?

Hence Peter at My door. Hence My materializing in a Houston jail.

I’m so sorry, Lord, Olaf said unto Me, for I know not what I did.

*

When I arrived at Bobbi-Lou’s, she was in the shower. But I didn’t appear before her immediately. I was distracted by her Airstream, and what I found in it.

I saw at a glance that mankind had made technological strides since I’d last dropped in on Earth. The Airstream itself was a huge advance on a Conestoga wagon, though Bobbi-Lou’s seemed to have lost its wheels somewhere along the way. And they’d made imaginative use of metals and, especially, electricity. Everywhere I turned there were machines I hadn’t seen on Earth before. Not only forms of light, toaster ovens and little computers, they now had television.

The screen was the size of a window and displayed some people sitting on a stage with the caption, He had sex with his sister after she became a man.

But there were other channels too and I flicked through them. Most of the women were unlike any I’d seen in Heaven or on previous visits to Earth – pale-haired and top-heavy. And the men were shades of copper, and top-heavy. Everyone was ivory-toothed.

Who the hell are you? Bobbi-Lou screamed from a doorway. And what the hell do you think you’re doing? I was watching that. She held a small machine between her face and Mine as if it were a weapon.

I raised My hand to stop her where she was. I examined the device. It was a multi-functional transceiver – telephone, camera, computer, news gatherer, epistle writer and epistle receiver all in one container lighter than a wren and as small as a shrew. Earth people had a long way to go, technologically speaking, but they’d certainly been busy since I was last among them.

But I’d catch up with all that another time. I was on a mission.

To keep us from being interrupted I lifted Bobbi-Lou from her wagon and from her preparations to give a formal statement to the policeman who’d come in response to her 911 call about Olaf. I took her to Another Place.

Wha? Wha? Wha? she said.

But I silenced her again.

Because I was astounded. Apart from what was growing on her head, she was hairless. That’s not the way I’d made women. Was it a side-effect of electrification? Or a bizarre evolutionary step?

I didn’t like it. It made Me think of children and that’s never been how I’ve wanted to think of women.

Oooh… my… God, she said when I let her speak again.

Yep.

Don’t tell me! This is one of them alien abductions, right? I just knew they was true. You want to breed with me, right? It’s pointless for me to resist, right?

I’d been on My own in the Creation Chamber for quite a while. But although Bobbi-Lou was plump, glistening and eager, I just didn’t want to.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want it. I didn’t want her.

At first I thought it was just because of her freakish hairlessness.

*

I spun Bobbi-Lou around a few times to dizzy her up. Then I explained that if she played her cards right, the policeman who was about to interview her would be the man of her dreams.

Of mah dreams? The light in her eye was almost Heavenly.

I told her to tell him that she was dropping the charges against Olaf. To say she’d only filed them because she was shocked from having led such a pure life heretofore.

I don’t tell lies Myself, but Bobbis-Lou are not bound by such constraints.

I told her to say that from the moment she saw him she knew he was the policeman for her.

If she did all this, he would marry her, and together they would move to Alaska where, even if the marriage didn’t work out, there were so few women that she’d be considered pretty and smart and her life would be better forever. For I have come to Earth to answer your prayer, Bobbi-Lou. Have you got all that? Or shall I go through it again, more slowly?

PROBLEMS

When I got back to Heaven I was still annoyed about having been interrupted. Big projects have a momentum and You can’t just pick them up again once You’ve put them down. So I wrote off the rest of the day and dealt with a few of the smaller Heavenly admin tasks that had accumulated on Peter’s clipboard.

I didn’t reflect on My experience with Bobbi-Lou until I was back in My Celestial Bed.

It was there that I realized that I wouldn’t have wanted her even if she had been as I’d thought I’d made her.

This was a breakthrough in My Self-awareness, though at the time I certainly didn’t recognize how big its ramifications would become.

I’d known for ages that something wasn’t right. I just hadn’t faced it. And My encounter with Bobbi-Lou helped Me to identify what it was: I’d become bored with the way I was getting laid.

*

They say God is immutable. That He is unchanging. A constant. Well, that’s just not true.

I change and that ought to be obvious, if you think about it. I made man in My own image – and why not, for I am truly awesome. But that means if you want to know about Me, you should look at man. Men, actually. And men change. Well, some of them.

It may take awhile, even an inexplicably long time. But if men can change then so can I. And this change caught Me by surprise.

Ever since I created women I’d just taken My pick from the tottie On High and on Earth. Every one of them would do anything for Me, anytime – because it was Me. Until the period I’m reconstructing I was perfectly content with things.

But now I faced that women had been doing it with a concept, not with Me. And – along with her juvenilizing lack of fur – that was what had put Me off doing it with Bobbi-Lou. Even if she’d thought I was an alien rather than the Almighty, she behaved as if she had no choice.

As I reflected on what had happened, I realized that what I wanted now was more than it.

I wanted women – wherever – to be doing it because of who I was, not what I was.

That was new for Me. And confusing. Because for a very long time what I’d wanted had been clear and simple. The only complications were ones I put in for My own entertainment, like snagging some of Earth’s special beauties by coming to them as a bull, the holy spirit, or Lord Byron.

It wasn’t that I no longer wanted women. I fancied and fantasized about them as powerfully as ever. But as I visualized them, the women were wanting me. Not Me.

But… how could that work?

I couldn’t be anonymous in Heaven.

So I would have to go to Earth and take some inconspicuous form.

Changing My appearance would be no problem. But what then? How did one speak to a human woman other than to command her? I knew no more about the social skills used for mating in 21st Century societies than I knew about Bobbi-Lou’s multi-purpose transceiver. In all My existence I’d never needed social skills. What was a social skill?

A tremor beneath a polar ice cap broke off a hundred icebergs.

But the dissatisfaction I’d identified about being with women was a real one. I was clear about that, even if I didn’t yet know how to solve the problem.

However solving problems was something I did regularly. It was an intrinsic part of Creating. So I would solve this one.

I’d spent eons on My own before I thought up man and woman. I had no intention of going back to flying solo.

*

The next morning was misty, like so many Up Here. I awoke resolved to address My newly identified problem.

My plan was to begin by running through the logbook that Peter keeps at his gate. That would allow Me to catch up on what had been happening on Earth, technologically and otherwise. Movers and shakers might not make it into Heaven very often, but they all came to the gate.

Then I’d go Down There to check the lay of the land. And depending on what I found… Well, who knew? I didn’t expect it to take all that long. How hard could it be, compared to making a Universe?

I breakfasted on milk and honey. Ever notice how pure honeys never grow mold? A nice touch, I’ve always thought.

Lord?

I did not plan to have My breakfast interrupted. But it wasn’t Peter. It was Jesus.

Whenever the Boy shows up at My door Peter lets Him in. No doubt that’s because they were buddies back on Earth.

I turned toward Him but I held up My hand to prevent His talking or coming forward. I hadn’t