Failis

Starting in the summer of 2012, I worked on the crew that built a satellite to house God the Creator. I took a coffee shit every morning around 9:45 and prayed the pipes didn’t back up. They told us we were doing important work, but they cut corners to save a dime. By they, I mean the TV evangelists, government suits, and tech bro bosses. There was always some temporary plumbing fix that worked for a week until piss and shit bubbled up through the drain in the factory floor. It wasn’t just the plumbing. The hardware on the satellite was janky too. I wondered what type of threading would work best to contain the Creator. I suggested toothed washers and locking nuts, but none of that was taken into consideration.

They told us we’d feel different when God was sent away in the satellite, because there is a little God inside everything and that was going to leave. When I asked them why we were putting God in a satellite, they said we were doing it to know what would happen if we put God in a satellite. That seemed overly simple. And it was. In reality, they wanted to replace God with bitcoin–to infuse all living things with cryptocurrency, so it would have real, calculable, but still ineffable, value rather than the inherent value of the little bit of God that’s inside everything. The TV evangelists spent decades laying the groundwork for the large-scale monetization of divinity, and people seemed to be more or less OK with it.

When I walked into the job interview, the place was gunmetal gray and sterile. Two fellas were wearing suits like some Men in Black shit. A guy in a lab coat stood in the corner with his brow wrinkled holding a clipboard. Occasionally, he let out this grating, childish chuckle after I answered a question. It was fucking weird, and I couldn’t tell if it was a good sign or a bad sign. The hospital light bulbs flickered as I was subjected to a line of questions that felt beyond the scope of any job.

They asked, “Do you believe in God?”

“I’m agnostic,” I said. I hesitated to admit something, then it just slipped out, “but I thought I felt God once during wildflower season in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness.”

“That makes sense,” they said.

The guy in the lab coat chuckled and jotted something down.

I didn’t understand it then, but I get it now. It was doomed already. All of it. We were being watched and there was an air of collapse to the whole thing. Didn’t matter what kind of nuts or washers we used.

I grow dahlias. Every color of dahlia. I save the bulbs and overwinter them. When they bloom it’s like a thousand holes dug to enlightenment, tiny tunnels to nirvana. I wondered what my flowers would look like with bitcoin inside instead of God. I spritz my dahlias at 6:00 am. Their colors brighten so the holes drip wet, salivating at the sight of sunshine. Or, maybe that’s in my head.

Over a thousand satellites go up every year, but this was going to be the only one to house God. Elon Musk tried to argue in court that he puts a little bit of himself, his soul, inside each of his satellites. There’s about ⅓ of Musk’s soul in orbit inside Starlink. Therefore, he argued, he had already put God in a satellite. He sued us for the rights to the “Godellite” claiming it was intellectual property theft, but he lost the case and had to pay out 65 billion dollars. In a public statement, our lawyers said, “It was an open and shut case. Mr. Musk cannot be God, because he is so bad at everything. His failures are observable and well-documented. He’s the opposite of omnipotent.” The morning the decision was announced the computers overheated and crashed, and all the algorithms we were using in Matlab to build the Godellite were lost. We brought in a group of computer engineers to clean up the mess. They were pressured to rush through it. I don’t know where the 65 billion dollars went.

The rest of the satellites in space were for internet connection, telecommunications, and gathering atmospheric information. The significance of our satellite’s purpose made the project feel special for a time despite the moldy smell that came from the sink when we ran the water, the rotting food in the community kitchen, and the shit bubbling through the floor drains. One time the power went out and for a moment I believed it was a sign from God that we shouldn’t be doing what we were doing. They turned on generators that made my teeth chatter. I might be agnostic, but I really thought God, whatever that means, deserved better. If they weren’t gonna run this project right by God, they certainly weren’t gonna run it right by the factory workers.

There were other signs we chose to ignore. Lightning struck the facility. The primary contractor was found entirely drained of blood. A flock of snow geese died in the parking lot. A Cessna crashed through the sky into a bunkhouse on factory property. Looking just right at the smoke as it descended, I could have sworn it read, Stop! God don’t like. Killed fifteen people, too.

I’m a nuts and bolts and engine grease guy, so I don’t understand the science. Something about the God particle, something about the metaphysical energy generated by vibrating matter, ekpyrotic something. I dunno, man. You’d have to talk to someone else if you want that information. I went in with drills and sockets, and I built an interstellar house for God. They wanted the inside to align most closely with God’s interests. We had the Bachelor and Real Housewives playing on a big screen, so He could continue to watch the dissolution of His creation while also escaping the magnitude of His existence. I thought that must be boring because he already knew how the show was going to end, but, as it turns out, God is always bored. God is prone to depression too, so they put SSRI inhalants in the ventilation system. We truly are made in His image.

I remember the day it happened, when we took everything from everything. There was another machine called the God Sapper. As you may have guessed, it was built to sap God from things, so we could put Him in the satellite. When they flipped the sapper on, there was a nuclear explosion. Some invisible source was being pulled into the mushroom cloud, and it appeared as millions of different faces, beings, stars, and galaxies pushing on the black, rubbery surface of the mushroom seething with sapped God. Above it, all the memory of the universe was made tangible in the form of a 50 mg extended release Vyvanse floating in the sky, the sounds of animal roars and hurricane winds and laughing and sobbing poured from it until it was unified into a singular scream that hovered over the lips of the mushroom cloud and then it was swallowed and there was only the sound of the Abyss.

When we took God out of the equation it made it easier to do bad things. Economic value is a different kinda motivator than divine power. It was harder to see the divinity in things. Movies became repetitive, as they tried to fill God’s absence with God-like characters built on computers, paid for with bitcoin, but it soon felt redundant and fake. People consumed it anyway just to feel something, even if it was a cheap imitation. Deep down we all knew creativity was lost, because, perhaps, creativity is an expression of the God that was gone from us.

Due to faulty mechanics, the satellite broke somewhere around Proxima Centauri. Go figure! Suddenly, God blasted back into everything. When you haven’t had God in you for a while, it hits different. Everyone had a singular, personal experience, because with the return of God, karma came back. Some people were so terrible, absent of God, that their retribution was instant and brutal. The TV evangelists and government suits and tech bro bosses exploded on impact, coating the walls in shit, guts, and God. God was reincorporated into the souls of the less sinful.

I was in the grocery store when God returned. The produce section to be exact. After we drove God from the plants, we treated the Godlessness with chemicals. The color of the fruits became muted, so we added dye to make them appear full of life again. Animals began to disappear because, as it turns out, a number of species are driven by a primal divinity. Without that divinity they had no reason to exist. The monarch butterflies, who had migrated for millions of years for no apparent reason, just dried up inside shriveled milkweed plants. The bison of the plains collectively ran off plateaus in a mass suicide, because the majority of their identity was to exist as old shamans free from the burden of thought, just being with the Godhead–samadhi or satori or kaivalya or whatever. Standing between the rhubarb and the kiwis, I felt an energy permeating from my solar plexus, and everyone in the grocery store let out a collective groan of transcendence. People started pleasuring themselves where they were standing, using fruit and sweets and ice cubes. The feeling worked its way up toward my head until there was an explosion from between my eyes and an overwhelming pink string, glowing bright, appeared between me and everything in the Winco, even the floor tiles and ceiling lights. The web shook with orgasmic energy, as people throughout the supermarket were brought to their knees, naked and cumming.

I ran home from the grocery store to see my dahlias, pulling those strings with me as they merged into a single thread at the thinnest point of the membrane between me and everything else. I watered the dahlias and their holes were like the moist, dripping orifices of God again, lubricated so they could send their threads to coalesce with mine where it joined with the string of everything at the center of my mind’s eye. I collapsed in front of them and convulsed in pleasure. My dahlias! My dahlias!

With God’s return, there was no more room for the bitcoin inside everything, so it was shoved into the ether after being touched by the divine. The bitcoin floated upward, tangible after its collision with God, in the form of glimmering ones and zeros. It floated in the atmosphere and created a sheen around Earth that the sons of the dead tech bro bosses are trying to mine. No one has been successful yet.

After God came back everything roared with the presence of their piece of divinity. It became undeniable. No one was willing to hurt anyone anymore, because God’s absence made His presence palpable to the point of bliss-driven paralysis. The years thereafter were known as the Days of Divinity and they were filled with hedonism–drugs and orgies and ceremonial magic and food and laughter and music and metaphysical bliss, because that’s what God wanted from us, an indulgence in the senses and extrasensory pleasures we were gifted by way of our humanity. God had missed us, and we’d missed God.

When did it begin to fade? I’m not sure. It’s hard to say. It’s like losing love when you’ve been with a person for so long. It’s impossible to point to the first crack in the foundation. How did we just grow bored of our own divinity? I guess we were made in the image of a bored God and imbued with that holy ennui.

This morning, I woke up and watered my dahlias. I kneeled on the ground and peered inside the pedals. I was stunned by what I saw there.

“Why, God?”

A soft voice from inside the dahlias said, “This is the cycle. All of it must end and begin again.”

I climbed my stairs and made coffee. I smelled the lilacs blooming through the open window. They will be dead next Tuesday.