God Act
God was in the bedroom sitting chair when Janet woke up. “Good morning,” he said. “Coffee’s ready. I’ll meet you in the kitchen. We need to talk.” He stood and left. She heard his feet padding down the stairs.
Janet was always groggy in the early morning and only found her full senses after a few moments of waking. She was not one of those magical souls who bolted upright with dawn’s arrival, bounding into full function with a stretch and yawn, back straight and mind at the ready. Habituated to a 6:30 rising with an alarm that made sure of it, her mornings tended to crawl to her in pieces beginning around 6:00.
The whole God-in-my-bedroom thing was not part of any kind of waking dream. She was sure of it. Various pieces of weirdness coalesced in her mind as she began to reckon with her breaking day. Why wasn’t she panicked that she woke up to a strange man in her bedroom? How did she know he was God?
The answer was as odd as the question: she just did. And it hadn’t been a bold claim on his part. He hadn’t said so and there was nothing divine in his appearance. Just an ordinary guy and an invitation for coffee. How would she have known he was God? Why would that be a first guess? He certainly wasn’t godly. He was unremarkable. Average build, average height, brown hair, middle age, average all the way down the line. Jesus must have taken after his mother.
As her shower proceeded, she developed a theory on what this was all about.
Toweling off, she became convinced of it and was not only unblinking, she was annoyed with God for having singled her out among all atheist insurance adjustors who were defending against flood claims in Westwood Hills. There had to have been a half dozen. She dressed as she normally would have for her work as an adjustor with SoCal Mutual, wearing nothing special for her upcoming conversation with God.
She’d used the phrase, “Act of God” more times since the Westwood Hills rain event than she ever had in her career. It was a perfect fit for the microburst that decided Westwood Hills was where it needed to wring itself out. It was, everyone said, of biblical proportions. There’d been four six-figure claims under her purview and she was determined to spare her employer all of them.
She’d get a bonus and a maroon jacket, unwearable except at the annual banquet. They didn’t just give those jackets away and Janet was a solid candidate for one. She was close—so close she could almost feel it chafing her neck and constricting her arms. A few more high-dollar claims deflections and the ill-fitting ghastly maroon blazer would be hers. Anyone who had a jacket or was close to getting one had ice water running through their veins.
Janet didn’t prepare to humble herself at the feet of the Lord.
There would be no tear-drenched mea culpa delivered from the knees on the wrongness of her atheism. No apology for using the term “Act of God” so disingenuously. Instead, a steely resolve took over as she descended the steps. With each footfall, her spine stiffened, fists clenched tighter. God wasn’t going up against any old sinner. He was going up against a claims adjustor.
God had already poured Janet’s coffee. “Good morning, Janet. If I’ve been doing my job, you like it cream, no sugar. Medium light, kind of a clay beige, Pantone 16-1439.” He stood and handed it to her. She took a grudging sip.
“Wow. That’s one spectacular cup of coffee. Your beans?”
“Yours.”
“I didn’t hear the grinder.”
“I didn’t want to wake you so I ground them with my eternal mind.”
“Must be nice.”
“It’s pretty sweet. I picked up some spring water from the Rockies on my way over. That’s really the difference-maker here. Water is so key. Which leads me to my point, Janet: Mary Overland.”
“What about her?”
"She’s in a real pickle with this flood claim.” God’s body language was that of a man about to leave. Janet’s was of a woman who wasn’t going to budge.
Acts of God were going to be her way out of more than a half-million dollars in claims this week and she wasn’t about to let God screw that up. “You have zero Old Testament vibe happening right now and I’m not intimidated. As soon as I finish this spectacular cup of coffee, I’m going to my car, getting an Egg McMuffin on the way to work and preparing a report guaranteed to quash Mary’s claim.”
“On what grounds?”
“Act of God! It’s right there in black and white and she signed it. Know what that means, bucko? It was yourfault!”
The caffeine was kicking in and she went at him hammer and tong with references to child illness, world hunger, religious strife and then on to accusing him of being derelict with regard to watering California, speculating he’d spaced out on that responsibility for years. “Yeah, and you finally noticed one day last week and totally overdid it—am I right or what? OVERCOMPENSATED. Typical male. Booya! You flooded Mary Overland’s house.”
“First, I have nothing to do with the Old Testament. Or the newer one. Or the Quran or any of the other human guesses at what I am. Second, drought followed by unprecedented rain overwhelmed Mary Overland’s responsibly maintained drainage systems, whose capacity was less than any reasonably expected rain event. You can use that exact language in your report.” God paced in an instructive, pedagogical way, gesticulating to accent his points as he talked to her about climate and weather, emphasizing his own lack of culpability.
“Don’t you dare Godsplain to me if you’re useless for stuff like climate and hunger.”
God sighed. He sat back down at her kitchen table.
“Janet, I kinda fucked this up.”
God, God explained, was one of a band of six promising young creators in the beforetimes who were learning the basics of universe building when he, the class clown—known to his five close friends as Slappy—was screwing around with the table of elements. He snapped off four of them, mixed them with a sugary carbonated beverage and some hard candies in a mortar and pestle. He hit it in a dab rig with a blow torch and kaboom—the big bang. The four elements he snapped off have still never been found in the universe known to humans. God was tripping balls for the first several days while the blast was at its peak.
He was frank in sharing that it was likely those four elements contained the key to pollution-free energy on Earth. After the fiasco (and after he came down from the novasium cocktail), he was rusticated to the universes he’d just created with his little caprice as punishment. “So you see how I feel partially responsible?” God said.
This was the only moment when the encounter felt unreal to her. Talking to God seemed a natural, almost expected event. Oh, God’s here. But right now, in this moment, God was back on his heels. Supplicant to her in argument. She hadn’t expected that. Janet had options here: she could let God off the hook with a “there there, now now,” maybe pat him on the back and make a kissy face or she could tighten the vise. Go in for the kill.
“Do you mean to tell me if you had sat on your hands another billion years or so and just graduated from God school like all the other Gods…”
“Mm-hmm… Bobo, Herf, Artuigo, Framble and Bfwat. Miss those folks.”
“…without trying to get high on the table of elements, Earth could have had pollution-free energy? I would say you’re totally responsible. You have the impulse control of a child.”
“Please note that everything was chugging along just fine for 13 billion years until life started to evolve all over the place.”
“Hang on. All over the place? What can you tell me about that?”
“We’re here to talk about insurance.”
“What galaxy? How advanced are they? Are they humanoid? Carbon-based or… what—platinum? Teflon?”
“That’s not an element. My point is, Janet, in order to blame me as it relates to Mary’s house flooding, you’d have to go back to the creation of the universe. Even so, I regret it and I’m making amends at a micro level. It was dumb, trying to bong up those elements. Still, a really interesting situation resulted, doncha think? Life on Earth? The universe as you know it?”
“I guess.”
God went on to say he had no idea evolution was even going to happen, let alone that after 65 million years, dead dinosaurs would burn so great or that emissions from burning dead dinosaurs would create this weird blanket that slows heat dissipation into the atmosphere. “Who was gonna foresee that?!”
The atmosphere itself was another of the many unintended consequences of his farting around with the table of elements all those years ago. Life wasn’t intended—it just happened. He thought he was going to see some cool colors, which he did. “Ever seen an emission nebula go full supernova when you’re high on novasium?”
From the kablooey moment forward, all of the rest of it just happened. God copped to creation of everything, but only accidentally. As to management? Intervention? Completely out of his control. “Ipso facto,” God said, “unless you’re holding me responsible for a 13.7 billion-year-old boyhood lark, I had nothing to do with Mary Overland’s house flooding.”
Janet remained unswayed. After she finished her coffee, she rinsed the cup and put it in the dishwasher. “If all you can do is make a decent cup of coffee, maybe you should get a job at Starbucks instead of harassing claims adjustors. I assume you can show yourself out?”
She didn’t even look back at him again as she walked through the door that opened onto her driveway.
All the way to McDonald’s, Janet wondered, why Mary Overland? What was so special about her claim that it merited a divine intervention? There were three similar claims in her active portfolio and there must have been hundreds in Southern California alone. She met Mary once. Her and her little knot-headed son. She didn’t meet her husband, but from the pictures on the walls, he seemed like a hippie. The kid at ten years old was a fake little hippie too. Mary seemed spacy. She didn’t like the Overlands. She didn’t like most people, which came in handy professionally.
Climate change had made it a real no-guts-no-glory world for the claims adjuster, and if you weren’t the kind of person to be a bulwark of cold, hard reality for the corporate entity footing the bill for your ease and comfort, maybe you weren’t adjuster material. Sometimes you had to to say “no” to hippies, kids, ladies named Mary, even God. She pulled into the drive-through and got to the squawk board after a two-car wait.
“Egg McMuffin meal please with a small coffee.”
“There is no charge for your meal this morning. Please pull up to the second window,” the squawk box said.
“Well thanks!”
Janet arrived at the second window smiling. If there is one kind of food most people are strongly hard-wired programmed to like, it’s free food. The sliding window opened.
God.
“Mary Overland is an unusual situation,” he said.
“Are you going to hold my breakfast hostage?”
God told Janet that Mary had what you might call a special-needs son. He was going to a great school, but if Mary were to get stuck with a $200K repair, she’d have to pull him out of the school. “I don’t mean to share more than I ought to, but he was arrived at through in-vitro therapies. Are you beginning to understand what I’m trying to tell you?”
Janet made some remark about Mary’s hippie husband maybe asking for a raise at work.
“Her husband, Joseph, you mean. He’s a carpenter,” God said.
“And?” Janet said.
“Joseph. The carpenter. And his wife, Mary. Need a place to stay. To raise their in vitro-fertilized child.”
“And?” said Janet.
“And?”
“Holy shit.”
“Holy shit is right.”
“So this is how you’re doing the second coming? And you mean her son is…hang on a second. I thought you said the Christ myth was just that. A myth.”
“It is. I already told you what actually happened. Toke-toke-boom. I just wanted to use a metaphor everyone would understand. So I plagiarized a little, I mean, it is the greatest story ever told, veracity notwithstanding. This kid, my son, is going to straighten a lot of things out if he gets a shot. Maybe he’ll invent something important. Maybe he’ll mobilize people. Kids, right? You have to let them be who they’re going to be. Keeping him in that school, I’m personally convinced, is an important part of the whole picture.”
He handed her the Egg McMuffin, hash brown and coffee and closed the window. There was also a fresh scone in the bag God had picked up in Edinborough. Soft and doughy, with raspberry jam, not like the hard, crusty ones you get in the US.