The End of Times: A Cosmic Comedy of Apocalyptic Proportions

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Just as God was putting the final touches on yet another universe with its own peculiar space, time and rules, or the distinct lack thereof, he felt a presence. God turned quickly.

“Oh, for Christ’s sakes, Hermes. How many times have I told you not to sneak up on my like that and breath with your mouth open?”

“Sorry, my Liege, the Prime Mover, The All in the all, The Alpha and Omega, The…”

“Stop! I’m kind of intent on getting this little project done. What do you want?” The Almighty beseeched Hermes.

“Well,” said Hermes a/k/a Mercury a/k/a Jesus Christ, drawing nothing in particular with his winged sandal in the ephemeral ground.

“Out with it,” demanded the most Holy of holies. “What have you done this time?”

“You remember that little outpost you created a few moments ago? Actually it was fourteen billion units ago–nothing to us, right? But a damn long eternity to the inhabitants there. It’s Time-Space Condensed Physical Matter Virtual Reality Simulator, Locale Number 42. Something odd is going on there.”

God scratched his celestial chin, which was smooth as a cherub’s bottom from having shaved a mere million years ago. “Time-Space Condensed Physical Matter Virtual Reality Simulator, Locale Number 42,” he repeated. “Nope, never heard of it.”

“Earth?” asked Hermes impatiently, rolling his eyes, hoping that would illicit a memory from the big guy.

“Earth? Earth–nope–doesn’t ring a bell,” The Almighty confessed.

“Fine,” said Hermes. “Does this ring a bell?” Hermes face contorted like he was having a mighty bowel movement. From his head he extracted a translucent ball that was alive with swirls of images. He tossed the ball from one hand to the other and then hurled it, smacking The Almighty right between his flinching eyes.

In an instant God experienced earth’s history. He saw a molten ball, watched as it cooled and the water’s formed. Enzymes and proteins glommed together. Single celled organisms swam, grew fins and walked out of the water. Plant life teamed, dinosaurs stomped and roared, rodents scavenged, a meteor struck, primates emerged, and evolved to humanoids. Bloody battles were fought and alliances were forged, and battles were fought again, first between bands, then tribes, then city-states, then whole nations.

He felt every last ounce of pain, joy, elation, disappointment, longing, loss, fulfillment, pleasure and orgasm that had every been felt by every human since humans emerged as a presence on earth.

God reeled, staggered, laughed uncontrollably, bawled his eyes out, wretched and laughed some more. “My God!” exclaimed God, catching his breath.

“Yes,” he said deep in thought. “Now I remember the place. Time-Space Condensed Physical Matter Virtual Reality Simulator, Locale Number 42. Our cosmic engineers and I designed and programmed it for bored souls that were tired of everything being blissfully perfect all the time; a place designed to stretch the limits of one’s sanity, and thereby force evolution on a particular soul’s psyche through successive lifetimes until a soul gets it right and graduates and breaks the gravitational pull of Locale 42. But, the problem is…”

“But, the problem is, the souls that are building up there are stuck,” Hermes chimed with a flustered look. “No one is graduating. I tried to help by incarnating as a scraggly looking Hebrew fellow named Jesus Christ to get the beings there out of the rut of tribalism, teaching a more cosmopolitan world view to embrace otherness by teaching a more loving attitude. It worked for a very short while, but I’m afraid I might have started something that has grown perverse with time. My teachings only made people nuttier as the centuries passed. Thousands have been maimed, tortured and and their physical incarnations prematurely terminated in my name. Now, at this moment at Locale 42 some are bracing for the end of times–my second coming–the rapture!”

“What?” said The All rubbing his temples. “You’re giving me a head ache.”

“A few of the faithful actually believe that I am returning as Christ at this moment to take them away and leave all the others who have not accepted me in the peculiar capacity as the their personal savior, and the rest will be tortured by the great Satan (what ever that is) and be given uninspired tattoos of nothing but numbers on their foreheads, or some such crap. Others believe it is the other way around. The faithless will be unceremoniously ushered off to hell, whereas the true believers, maybe 140,000 in total, will be left to pet lions, and maintain Grand Hoover Dam, electric plants and the freeway system on their own.”

“That’s nuts!”

“I tried to fix the mess,” explained Hermes, “by incarnating as a psychologist–Timothy Leary. I may have only succeeded in making everyone a little goofier.”

“Let’s go check it out,” commanded the really big guy.

In a blink Hermes and The All where in a park in the heartland of the U.S.A. where mostly over-weight white people were gathered awaiting the end of the world as they knew it. The artificial Locale 42 time meter registered May 21, 2011.

“The end is near!” hollered an old guy in a cheap suit holding a black book.

“Amen! Praise be to the Lord!” responded those in attendance.

God looked down to see that he was fat as a walrus. He felt his head and noticed he was bald. His eye twitched. “Be careful,” said Hermes. “Don’t get too excited, or you’ll get stuck here, doomed to live many lives until you learn how not to be nuts.”

God fixated on the man in the cheap suit who rattled on apocalyptic. The preacher bellowed, “And the faithless–those that would dare not to heed the good book–shall be cast asunder to burn and rot in hell along with their children!”

“Amen!” the crowd responded.

“It shall be their just dessert. For he who dares to forsake the Lord as his savior shall be vanquished by God and left with tears for their drink, and everlasting despair for their meat!”

“Amen!”

“The bastard,” muttered God and picked up a half empty soft drink in a 42 ounce plastic cup, and hurled it at the preacher, hitting him right in the forehead. The preacher flipped backwards, heels over ass, as diet Pepsi exploded all around him. A police officer keeping watch over the assembled mass quickly moved in to quash the disturbance. Hermes, dressed like a dirt hippy tried to move in to mediate God out of certain incarceration and possibly a thousand years worth of incarnations.

“Please officer,” begged Hermes. “He’s my old dad. Dementia,” he explained.

“Dementia!?” said The All. “Watch your mouth, Jesus. I’m GOD!” Hermes shrugged his shoulders to the police officer as if to say, ‘See, I told you.’

“Come on old fellow,” said the cop with a wink to Hermes. The cop pulled out his handcuffs from his belt and moved towards The Almighty. “Let’s get him settled down and away from here,” said the officer to Hermes.

“Fuck you!” said God and dashed into the crowd. Hermes and the cop lost him.

“This is bad,” said Hermes to the cop–but the cop was gone too, as if he vanished into thin air. “What the hell,” said Hermes, and flashed out of physical matter existence to get a better view from one vibratory octave removed at the cusp of non-physical matter reality surrounding Locale 42. A hand full of believers in the park witnessed both the cop and Hermes flash gone right before their eyes. They frothed into a frenzy. As the day passed, and March 21st became the 22nd they realized they had been left behind with everyone else and went about the rest of their lives feeling damned.

Hermes watched from high and witnessed the Great Benefactor run through the streets, waving his hands, yelling and alerting everyone that they were crazy beyond comprehension. Exercised to insanity himself, God ran out into a busy intersection and was hit by a bus and instantly killed. “Ah, geese,” said Hermes.

God popped out of physical matter and into the great hall of souls to be processed back into Locale 42 to experience another life. Hermes tried to stop him. “Unhand me, you knave. I’m going back in,” said God. There was nothing Hermes could do, but wait it all out.

In quick succession, God incarnated as a street person, a palm reader,a farmer, a serf, an apothecary, a whore, a pimp, a gun runner, a drug dealer, a preacher, a dentist, a professor, a starving artist, an internet porn impresario, an over-sexed statesman, a homeopathic healer, an IRS agent, an insurance defense lawyer, a housewife, an actuary, a pot smoking dead head, a Subway franchise owner, a professional football player, a few hundred other things, and then a forest ranger and beat officer. From there Hermes lost track of him.

There was stirring though, of a high frequency that caught his eye and commanded his attention. It was the same park on March 21, 2011 all over again. He saw himself, and God as the senile old man, and the cop.

Hermes appeared at the scene by the cop, but disguised as one of the fundamentalist and holding a sign that said, ‘The End Isn’t Near, It’s Here, Biatch.’ The cop turned to look at him and said, “Oh, hey Hermes. How you doing?”

“Uh, just fine, thank you. How is it that you know my name?”

“I’m God, old friend,” he said. “I have one last thing I have to do, and we are out of here.”

Just then a 42 ounce plastic cup took flight and smacked the old preacher right in the head, sending the harbinger of doom skyward and to the ground. “Come with me,” said Officer Yahweh.

They approached the fat old man and the hippy. “Fuck you!” yelled the old man and took flight. The cop flashed out of physical matter. Hermes with the end-of-times-sign followed him. They materialized at a busy intersection where the crazed, old fat God was bellowing at the top of his lungs.

“You people are whack-a-doodle nuts! All of you! What are you looking at?” he said startling a woman walking on the sidewalk. “I’m God, you selfish, stupid, mean fuck heads! This place has made everyone of you stupid, selfish and mean and I won’t have this going on in any virtual reality simulator I have programmed.” He staggered into the street, crazed with angst and pathology. He held his hand in the air and pressed his middle finger and thumb together. “I snap my fingers and this program is deleted. Good bye, assholes!”

Just in a knick of time the cop yelled, “Look out and pointed behind God.” God turned and was hit by a bus and reduced to a splatter of blood, skin and phlegm streaked for ten yards across the pavement.

“That was close,” said the cop to Hermes. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Hermes and Officer Yahweh intercepted fat God at the Hall of Souls. Office Yahweh gave chase after him. Officer Yahweh pull out a pistol shaped apparatus from his belt, pulled the trigger and tazed the fat God. Fat God sprawled out flat and skidded across the floor, pumped full of enough volts to stop a rhino in its tracks. Yahweh jumped on top of fat God, and they melded forms. Where there had been two gods, now again there was only one, flat on his almighty back.

He blinked, took a deep breath. His back arched, and he bolted to his feet in one fluid movement. The big guy combed his hair out of his eyes, licked his fingers and slicked back his eyebrows.

“No,” he said to Hermes. “We cannot delete, under any circumstance, Program Time-Space Condensed Physical Matter Virtual Reality Simulator, Locale Number 42.”

“Good,” said Hermes. “I am relieved that you feel that way. Why the change of heart?”

The All searched himself for the answer. “It’s like I said once in one of my lifetimes down there in that hell hole. It was the only worthy incarnation I had. I famously said, ‘Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.’”

“Indeed,” concurred Hermes.