This is no gratuitous act of sadism, though. The big girl, poking around in the rectum, is guiding the pointed instrument forward toward the cervix. Her fingers correcting the trajectory, she directs it past the fornix and the endocervix to the uterus, where her forefinger has located a follicle nearing dehiscence (having watched this at length, I too have become an expert). Only at this point does she engage the instrument’s plunger. When you are a god, you see what’s taking place both inside and out, that’s your fundamental prerogative.
Let me repeat, and certainly not to boast (that would be absurd for a god): the cosmos is absolutely the most unbelievable work of art imaginable, and also the most tragic, most comic, most fabled. All flaming tropical sunsets, steely seas, glittering glaciers, and mighty waterfalls are by comparison mere tawdry sketches by some amateur dauber, poor, dull landscapes. The beauties of the cosmos literally take your breath away (a purely rhetorical figure of speech for the undersigned). Not even the divine eye (let’s call it that) can ever have its fill of the infinite variety of shapes and unending metamorphoses, the ever-changing choreographies that give life to its farraginous complexity. I have spent millions of years, billions, looking at the universe, and I’ve never had enough. And now I’m staring blankly at the Earth, its devastations and its dumps, staring at the sodomatrix biker.
The die-hard unbeliever takes another dose of semen from the portable refrigerator and snaps it into that contraption that resembles a pistol, a ruthless assassin. She pokes a hand into the behind of another cow and removes its contents. Then back in she goes, aiding and guiding the progress of the pistolette (so it’s known) toward the cervix. It’s obvious she has done this many times, for her gestures, though measured and precise, are somewhat mechanical. Every so often she’ll peel off her surgical gloves and go roll herself a cigarette outside the barn. With each puff, she tips her purple head back slightly as she exhales the smoke, almost as if she’s blowing it in my face.
Cows are made to copulate with bulls, it’s all been foreseen right down to the minutest details, and instead today humans masturbate the bulls, and once they’ve obtained the seminal fluid, they dilute it and dilute it again to reduce the unit cost of each fertilization. Then they freeze it, like you freeze peas, or fish. Everything is rationalized and optimized (their terms) so as to get the best results and highest profits; they don’t give a hoot about how yours truly has organized things. Now I am not one who has to decide everything (contrary to what you may have heard) and in fact I’m open to any and all proposals for change. Yet it irks me to think they want to systematically alter everything I’ve done. How would they like it if I came to their house and moved all the living-room furniture around or used the toilet brush to stir a truffle-scented béchamel? I mean, a little respect.
Even so, the heifers are fortunate. Most of the junior bulls end up in the frying pan (with that system of theirs one bull is enough to impregnate thousands of females). I’d like to see their reaction if someone organized the same method for them, if the normal sexual act were replaced by a plastic syringe to the uterus guided via anal penetration, and there was just one male to every thousand females (the remaining nine hundred ninety-nine destined for steakhood). Not to mention that out on the street you’d see mobs of children all looking familiar: thousands of half-sibs, or at best cousins. And the widows, if we may call them that, all sleeping solo.
When she’s finished plunging her arm up cows’ backsides, the beanpole straps the case containing her instruments onto the bag rack of her priapic twin-cylinder motorcycle, and removes the blue overalls, beneath which she’s wearing her normal neo-punk biker’s gear. She puts on her helmet, mounts the bike, and takes off like a hypervelocity star (the typical frenzy of the atheist, if I may offer a personal—call it that—opinion). Pausing at a pastry shop, she wolfs down two cream-filled cornetti and a sfogliatella without removing the helmet. Back in town, she heads for the Institute of Molecular Genetics, where she works.
Statistically speaking (I’ve always wanted to employ that agnostic expression, it makes me smile) the probability that my eye should come to rest on that particular girl is far less than the chances that a particular grain of sand should twice end up in the hair of the same camel-driver.[1] My eye could surely find many more interesting human specimens out there, with less repellent occupations. And instead my gaze falls on her, precisely as a laser beam. You’d almost think it was seeking her out. As you might imagine, my gaze is not the exclusive and monomaniacal stare of a human being, who when (s)he fixates on something (all the more when sexual hormones are involved), it’s all that exists. The fulcrum of my attention is however always her. It’s something in many ways incongruous that’s been happening to me for some time (I use those words even though technically speaking it is I who make all things happen). I tell myself I must stop staring at her, and yet I stare at her. Of course it’s absurd that absurd things should happen to a god; but these are the facts. I myself imagined I was immune to any sort of aporia, and was convinced that certain crackpot medieval theologians[2] were just making mountains out of molehills.
THE SELF-SERVING SIDE OF RELIGIOUS AFFLATUS
For tens of thousands of years men worshiped river spirits, fish spirits, tree spirits, stag spirits, the spirits of hares, mountains, clouds, and rain: every type of spirit apart from that of yours truly. Some raving tramps had the gift (they thought) of communicating with this mob of spirits, and so were held in the highest esteem (like rock stars and athletes today). They would leap and spin around, waving their matted hair until they lost their senses, then, eyes rolled back in their heads and foaming at the mouth, intercede for their clients (or so they thought) hoping to obtain heaps of game, cures for diseases, assistance with various everyday problems. A pathetic spectacle. And meanwhile there I was, just waiting for them to notice I existed.
And then they finally did notice. Better late than never, I said to myself. For a few more millennia they still had a very limited notion of my capacities: they believed I had hung the sun in the sky to light up their days and the stars to make their nights more splendid. An eternity went by before they realized that their blessed Earth is a mere speck in the Solar System, in turn a piddly little mite in the Milky Way, one negligible molecule in the vastness of the universe. Only my great patience kept me from taking serious umbrage. And to top it off, rather than finally recognizing my merits, rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s (that boy of mine, the one reputed to be my boy at any rate, had a knack for catchy sayings), now they’re spreading the rumor that the universe created itself. That it sprang forth from nothing, like a mushroom: Big Bang, and there’s your rabbit, folks.
And let us not forget the days of the votive barbecues. The intentions were excellent, don’t get me wrong, but it was as if they truly believed their next-door neighbors would be pleased to get a blast of exhaust from their sacred pyres. The more smoke they made the happier they were, the more purified they felt. Sometimes they even grilled up girls and boys; it was gruesome. All these offerings of their primitive culinary arts were in my honor, or anyway in honor of my supposed colleagues (they thought of us as a flight squadron). And they were convinced we would be tickled pink (what a turn of phrase). Not to mention that they almost always left me just the offal. Filet for the gentlemen; for me, acrid exhaust fumes and bloody innards.
1
The comparison might have been more apt two thousand years ago, given that freight, including illicit freight, travels by truck and air nowadays. But that’s how it came to me and that’s how it stays.
2
Pardon my frankness, but if there is one discipline I’ve always considered nit-picking it is theology. Theologians reek of superiority, as if the gods (in their surreal deductions) were