Carlyle looked to the altarpiece, the choirs of Heaven shimmering in their concentric circles of cracking paint and gold. “People made that, human beings searching for their own understanding.”
“If God made Man and Man made this, it is still a Self-portrait. And if, as some say, God made Man in His Image, and His Image then made this, it is a portrait’s portrait. And if Nature is the face of God, another Portrait, and Man is the spawn of Nature, it becomes a portrait’s portrait’s portrait. The Nature we see on Earth too is a microcosm, one might say a portrait of the Cosmos, and the Cosmos a portrait of the Laws of Nature, portraits spawning portraits like the spiral chambers of a nautilus repeating the face of God. Such a Creator seems desperate to show Himself to someone. And yet He hides Himself.” As sometimes in city parks clever sculptors create false merrymakers, a bronze person sitting on a bench or strolling by a lake, life-sized and eerie, just so Jehovah’s flesh sat frozen on the pew, the abstracted shape of a person without motion to make the person live. “Did you show proof of God’s existence to My Dominic, or did he show it to you?” He asked.
Carlyle’s breath caught. “Dominic told you about Bridger?”
“Bridger.” Jehovah repeated the name meticulously, sound by sound, not two syllables but a series of phonemes, segregated like steps in an equation. “I have not heard that as a name before. When you and I met four days ago you were a Deist. Nothing but your Clockmaker showing His Face could change you so fast, and Dominic would not stray from My side unless he has found That Which I most want in this universe, and seeks to hide from Me that he has found It.”
“Dominic, Mycroft, and Helo?se, they speak of you as if you were a god.” The words just came out, Carlyle tells me, unplanned, as when you rub your eyes and only afterwards discover you were crying.
“I Am.”
They are words Carlyle thought she was prepared for. She had heard them before, not just in textbooks, but in the wild like this, from another parishioner. Her training should have sorted the statement like any other, identified its proper label: Calvinist, Hindu, megalomaniac, and selected appropriate next questions to help a parishioner explore himself. But this was different, Jehovah’s ‘I Am,’ subtly yet absolutely different, for such was the conviction with which He said it that Carlyle believed Him. Yet at the same time, Carlyle says, she could not believe that she believed, as if she were split somehow, watching from some dream bubble another version of herself who had gone mad. “I don’t understand,” was all she could answer.
“Neither do I.” Jehovah moved at last, lowering His black eyes to look upon His hand, which He raised before Him with uneasy wonder. “I remember infancy,” He began. “My nurse often put My hand against hers, and I realized Mine was growing larger, deducing thus that these large beings that fed and lifted Me must be what I was going to become. I had known I was becoming more powerful, mastering how to grasp a thing, to turn it in My hand, to make it near and far. With no experience of the finite I had assumed My growth would be infinite. In her I saw its limit. Was that all? To see? To grasp what is within reach? To plunge forward in time, freefall, knowing only what lies behind, while what lies ahead remains invisible? Tu … Ya…” He stumbled now, one word then another falling stillborn as He realized it would not serve with monoglot Carlyle. “All things being right,” He tried at last, “I should have but to Will a thing for it to be, yet here I was reduced to these weak tools: hands, eyes, memory. Beyond these limits I would be forever powerless.”
Carlyle felt pain imagining such thoughts. “They say no one can remember infancy.”
“I make the most of what few tools I have.” Jehovah lowered His hand, and let His eyes lock on the sensayer trembling in the aisle beside Him. “Your flesh will drain your strength less if you sit.”
“Thanks.” Carlyle sank onto the pew opposite.
“As I grew I met words,” Jehovah continued. “These made sense. These one Willed into being, as is proper, and of them one could create anything, near or far or infinite or past or perfect. I thought I had discovered the real matter of this universe, but even words were too limited. Each person, I learned, could only perceive words made in their presence, and no new words could be made, only the same repeated that I heard from them, like atoms, diverse only when they recombine. Even these might have been building blocks enough, but, as I added more variety to my words, they affected the so-called adults less. Tutors told me each adult could only understand certain groups of words called ‘languages,’ that what had power over my nurse did not over Pater, or Papá, or Chichi-ue, or Monseigneur le Duc. Even now for you, Cousin, I must use only words in the set named ‘English,’ for the rest would pass intangible through the coarse net of your understanding, as they do through Aunt Kosala’s. The tutors promised that, with time, it would come naturally to Me, speaking only one language at a time, but how can it be natural to paint only with shades of red, or to build with atoms from only one column of His Periodic Table?”
Carlyle’s breath caught. “You mean God’s?”
“This Universe’s God,” Jehovah clarified. “I am not one small god among many, as you imagined Zeus, Anubis, and Apollo. I am the only God, the infinite, omnipotent creative Will, the source of all My universe, which is not this one.”
“A different universe?” Carlyle supplied, understanding breaking in her eyes like dawn. “A different universe, with a different monotheistic God?”
Jehovah does not nod. “In My own universe I Am all, complete, sufficient, the First and Final Cause, perfect in Myself. Yet, for some reason, I find Myself born here. In this universe I can perceive what is within the limit of My human body’s senses, remember what I have experienced, and wield the prostheses of human technology, but that is all. I have learned, I think, to eke out more from what this flesh can do than any human, but no finite thing can substitute for lost infinity.”
The dream bubble burst here. Sensayer training awoke in Carlyle, ingrained doubt piercing the thin film of belief, so she fell back on routine questions. “How long have you known you were a God?”
“My universe does not have time,” the foreign God replied. “I find it cruel, like death and distance and misunderstanding, barriers separating that which would rather be whole. I do not yet understand why This Universe’s God would make such things. Space. Time. I met Time at the moment of My birth, but since meeting it, and in My native infinity outside it, I have always known What I Am.”
“What happened to your universe when you left and came to this one?”
“I have not left,” He answered. “I cannot leave My universe any more than Being can leave this wood”—he looked to the pew, solid beneath them both—“or Space this place. I Am My universe, always, Creator, touching, making, enabling, and understanding every part of it, though I also sit here in this flesh.”
“So you can still sense your universe even though you’re here?”
Jehovah closed His eyes, the only sense we have the power, at our will, to shut off. “If Unity, which grants absolute understanding of all things, falls under the label ‘sense,’ then yes. It is all right that you struggle to believe.”
“What?” Carlyle’s voice cracked, startled.
“That I am What I say.”
Carlyle looked at her hands. “I believe that you believe it.”
“Most of My fathers tell themselves it does not matter whether I Am a God or not, so long as I do My duty by their Hives. But you know better.”
The sensayer nodded. “If it were true, the existence of another God and another universe, it would be the most important fact in the history of science, as well as the history of religion and everything else.” She buried her fingers in her blond-tinged hair. “I’m trying to understand what you’re describing, but it’s a lot, and, for me personally, at least, belief can’t come before understanding.”