god, or something like it

God, or Something Like it


My name is Victor Camilleri, and if you’re reading this, then I don’t exist.
If you know that right now I’m sitting in a government prison camp somewhere in Southern Africa, then I’m just a fictional character and none of this is real. But the whole concept of reality is a bit subjective.
This seems real to me. The pain of the bruises from yesterday’s beating don’t feel fictional. I think this is the warm salty taste of blood in my mouth where two of my teeth used to be. The searing burning sensation of the cut on my right cheek doesn’t feel like a literary device. But if you do exist, and you are reading this, then I guess this is all moot.
I hear shooting coming from the road outside. Someone’s yelling. None of the other prisoners seem to pay it any notice. There’s always shooting and yelling coming from outside; they have more important things to worry about.
The room is big, like a miniature warehouse. The walls are warped and contorted from the water and mold streaking down them. There are about twenty men here. Some of them teachers, writers, or simple farmers; anyone the government wants to make disappear. As if they could make people disappear in the sense that I made people disappear.
None of them look scared or worried anymore. Once you’ve been beaten enough you get too tired to worry about anything, even your own mortality. They all just stare at the ground with looks of melancholy complacency. All of them, except me. I’m smiling.
How odd a sight it must seem to all these people: here in a prison camp in Southern Africa they see a rich white boy in his mid-twenties grinning like a mad-man. His sweat drenched Ralph Lauren original suit is torn and dirty. His teeth are stained pink from blood and two of his bottom teeth are missing.
(Not to brag or anything, but I also have a pinstriped Christian Dior ascot from his spring 88’ collection, which I’m wearing as a tourniquet to slow the profuse bleeding from a nicked artery on my forearm.)  
Two guards walk in. They’re tall and menacing, and when they walk in every single man looks up in terror, like a ghost just walked through the door. Except me. I start to laugh.
They’ve been sent in here to collect a prisoner, but also simply to intimidate us. They want us to think that they could crush us all with their mighty goons, because in reality, all the other guards in the camp are skinny and malnourished; I could probably take any of them in a fight. None of the other prisoners know this. Only I know this.   
I know this because I’m God.
The two guards grab a prisoner, seemingly at random, and begin to drag him out the door. The man is wearing a very plan combination of a torn blue t-shirt and khaki shorts. He’s in his mid-thirties and is disturbingly skinny. The man starts to kick and scream as he fails about in every direction. I get the image of a fish flopping around in the hands of a fisherman, and I can’t help but to be amused.
“And he saith unto his disciples, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”
-Matthew   Chapter: IV   Verse: who gives a shit?
I stare at the flailing man whimsically as they take him into the yard outside. How nice that I’m soon going to die. Being God has just been one huge disappointment. I suppose it was better than not existing, but I’m just glad my story’s finally ending soon. I didn’t really know what else to do with my life from this point, so dieing just seems like a nice way to wrap things up.  
But I don’t want you to think I'm insane. You’re the only real person that will ever know I existed, and I’d hate for you to have a bad impression of me. So I’ll tell you what happened that brought me to this state.

  

Sloth is the desire for ease, even at the expense of doing the known will of God. A perpetrator of sloth will be punished in hell by being thrown into a snake pit and will catch fire every time they’re bitten.
Once you’ve read Dante’s Inferno enough times, you start to use it as a motivational tool. Everyday-sins you take advantage of now will be a real pain in the ass when you die. When used correctly, this tool can scare a person into being kind, honest, and hardworking.
This might’ve work better if I were religious.
As it is, I’m just a fat oaf who sits around his crappy little apartment all day, lying to cute girls on the Internet and watching copious amounts of television. In the time it took you to read that paragraph, I've probably committed about five mortal sins.

I work at a Simon & Schuster Publishing House. My dad’s a senior executive editor, so he managed to get me a cozy little job that could’ve been given to someone much more qualified and deserving. I can’t help but laugh at the thought of some business school graduate in a fancy suit coming in to apply for a job, all eager and optimistic, just to find out the position was given to some fat asshole just because his daddy’s been here a long time. What a beautiful image to have in your head.
The job that could’ve gone to our friend, the business school alumni, is that of an acquisition editor (AE). It’s a fairly easy job, and especially easy for me because I don’t actually do it.
You see, what happens is that when you start out at the company, they put you down in the basement where you sift through a mound of unsolicited manuscripts. And when I say a mound, I mean a literal mound; it’s a good six feet tall from the floor to the peak. We call this the slush pile. If a junior editor (JE) finds something in the slush pile that may actually be worth publishing he sends it to me, or one of the other AE’s. If we like it, it’s sent to a senior publisher. If it’s approved and published and actually turns a profit the junior editor gets promoted out of slush pile duty.
The problem is that I never approve a manuscript. I hardly ever even read them. I’ll just pass them on and say they’re crap. That’ll teach those damn JE’s for being younger and more ambitious than me.
I’ve even worked out a system where I have one of the lower-paid interns bring all my manuscripts directly to my apartment, and I’ll just phone in my responses to them. I never even have to leave my shitty apartment to do nothing at my do-nothing job.
The intern who brings the manuscripts is named Kevin, or Craig, or something kinda’ faggy like that. The first time he came by I wasn’t sure what to make of him because even though he’s an intern (and one of our lowest paid interns at that) he’s a relatively snappy dresser, and drives a nicer car than I do. I figure he’s probably one of those trust-fund babies out to make it on his own steam, like he’s got something to prove.
I sometimes invite him in for a beer and he sometimes accepts, but once inside he never sits down and neither of us says a word. He just stands there and drinks his beer quietly, and he never stays long. This might be because, despite my relatively ample allowance, my home is a one-room apartment that smells like something old and slightly wet. Also, the only furniture I have is a sleeping bag on the floor and my computer desk, which is completely covered with Tony's microwavable pizza wrappers, some of which still contain half-eaten pizzas covered with some form of mold or fungi. This may not be the most inviting social environment.
Sometimes, when there’s nothing good on discovery channel, I’ll actually read some of the manuscripts. It gives me a great feeling of power to be able to control the outcome of these authors’ entire careers. Will they be published or not? I feel like the emperor in the coliseum, giving the thumbs up or thumbs down to determine if some helpless gladiator lives or dies.  
It doesn't make me God, but it's the next best thing.
Even when I do read the manuscripts, I'm not actually qualified to judge them. I never went to any expensive college for some overpaid professor to tell me what hot shit Kafka is. All I ever read are books involving some form of violence, medical encyclopedias (due to my occasional hypochondria), and a complete idiot's guide to whatever interest catches my fancy that week. Even those books I don't read much. I spend most of my day on the Internet.
I have separate accounts on myspace, livejournal, xanga, true.com, and mate1. Even I have trouble keeping track of who I am. I'm pretty sure my name is Victor Camilleri. It could be Garet Sanderson, Steve Shill, Dayton Boothe, or any of the other names I've given women I've met online. Online, I can make myself a doctor, a Hollywood director, or a rich business mogul.
It’s not even about seducing the girls, who I know I’ll never have the balls to actually meet anyway. I really just do it for the sake of doing it. I like the idea of me having complete control over an aspect of they’re perception of reality; and in the end, that’s all reality is: perception.
In terms of their reality, my being rich and famous is just as real as anything. So I like to think that these websites make me God over myself. My life can be whatever I want it to be. Whatever I want. My will be done! More power, more control.
It's not omnipotence, but it’s close.


That last section was not written by me.
That was an “experimental character outline” that was thrown in with a collection of short stories, essays, and poems; all compiled into a manuscript with the title “YHWH.” The only reason I even opened the thing was out of curiosity as to what the name stood for, assuming that it would correlate to one of the poems or stories. But I never found out what it meant, because I didn’t read past the first four pages, which consisted of the text you just read.
Though that section wasn’t written by me, I am Victor Camilleri, I am a fat asshole who works at S&S Publishing Works, and I do enjoy the feeling of omnipotence I get from lying to girls on the internet.
Every aspect of that outline was exactly dead on; and it mentioned things that nobody could possibly know.
Could I have written this somehow? It didn’t seem to make sense that a person could write a book and not remember.
I checked the back for the manuscript’s contact information. It was written by some guy named Ian Hashem. Sounds like a Jew.
First Theory: This guy is stalking me because he’s got some kind of creepy obsession. But then how could he have known exactly what I thought and felt about everything? He even sounded like me.
Second Theory: I’m some kind of schitzo-nutjob, and my other personality wrote this (like in Fight Club). The more I thought about it, the more this seemed the most logical explanation. But as I read through some other sections of the manuscript, I noticed the author used an awful lot of words I didn’t understand, and I also still didn’t know what YHWH stood for.
Still, I didn’t count the idea entirely out of the realm of possibility. In Fight Club, the guys other personality knows all sorts of stuff about bombs and shit that the guy never even realized he knew (and yes, I realize how pathetic it is that my entire knowledge of mental illness stems from Fight Club).
So I went down to the apartment below to get my landlord, Mitch. I pounded on the door a little louder than may have been necessary. But almost immediately it was answered by a chubby little bald man with a mean scowl on his face. He’s wearing a wife-beater and OP shorts that are way too short.
“What the fuck do you want?” he asks.
“There’s somethin’ wrong with my phone line; I can’t hear shit on any of the phones in my apartment.”
He sighs like the reluctant lazy ass that he is and starts to follow me up the stairs to my apartment. As soon as I get inside I grab for the phone and start to dial the number on the back of the manuscript.
It takes me a second to figure out how to put it on speaker phone, and by the time I do it’s already been answered by a man’s voice.
“Hello?”
“Is this Ian Hashem; the guy who wrote YHWH?”
“Yeah, why?”
I hang-up the phone and look to Mitch.
“What the fuck was that?” He asks this sounding more angry than confused, as though this had somehow offended him.
“You heard that alright?” I ask.   
“Of course I did; what are you, fucking deaf?”
“Yes, I’m fucking deaf; now get out of here.”
I don’t even bother gauging his reaction as I shove him out the door and lock it behind him.
This seems like pretty substantial evidence that I’m not crazy.
Third Theory: This Ian guy is an alien conducting some kind of study on me. But then why would he have put such a study in an unpublished manuscript full of shitty poetry? That didn’t seem like an alien’s style.
Fourth Theory: this guy is some kind of god, and he created me and dictates my life.
This theory made me think a little bit (a pass time I normally abhor).
Do I even really exist in the conventional sense of the word? Maybe I only exist in the same sense as Dayton Boothe, Garet Sanderson, and all my other fake internet identities.
Or maybe this god-like entity doesn’t dictate my life at all; maybe he just records my decisions.
I figured I’d check the date on the manuscript and see if he wrote it before, after, or during the period of time in which the story takes place.  
The date on the cover says 1995.
That’s when I was ten years old.
This was all preordained.
Shit.
At this point I did what anyone would do when they’ve reached such a monumentally cosmic and philosophical understanding of themselves: I bought some pot and cheap bourbon and got hammered.

As I was in this advanced state of consciousness, I began wonder if Garet Sanderson really existed somewhere. Maybe I was his god just as Ian was mine. Maybe someday soon I’ll get a phone call from some perplexed billionaire who thinks he’s crazy, and he’ll ask me if I invented him to score chicks on the internet.
However, in my less-then-entirely-lucid state, I just couldn’t comprehend how I could’ve thought up the life of someone so completely different from myself. Garet Sanderson was rich, talented, kind-hearted, and charming. As we’ve established, this isn’t exactly the perfect description of Victor Camilleri. I just couldn’t understand how my mind could’ve created something so distant from my life.
Thoughts are like legos; you can rearrange them in different orders and combinations, but that’s all you’re doing: rearranging. You’ve never really created anything. The legos were always there.
So maybe Garet was always there inside my mind. All I did was manifest him through my virtual exploitations of young susceptible women. So if Garet was a part of my subconscious, maybe subconsciously he was really in control of everything all along. Ian never had control of me, he just thought he did.
But why stop there; if I really am just a manifestation of Ian’s subconscious then my limitations only lye in the limitations of his mind. Just like I could make Garet Sanderson whatever I wanted, I could make myself whatever I wanted.
And as soon as I had finished this thought my old life drew back like a curtain, and suddenly I was no longer a fat asshole in a shitty apartment, but a handsome billionaire in a penthouse filled with booze and naked chicks.    


"And Victor said, Let there be hot chicks; and there was hot chicks. And Victor saw that the penthouse was good and He approved it; and God separated the light from the darkness, and did some other stuff, blah blah blah"
- Genesis: Chapter: whatever



I'm sitting in the VIP lounge of 40/40, Jay-Z's new club. Some bad hip-hop is playing so loud that the building shakes with each pulse of the beat. Next to me are Trisha Lowell and Jim Donald. Jim is a Starbucks CEO and Trish is some form of model. They're talking to me about something, but I'm not sure what; I've been drifting in and out.
"But, like, how can water have an expiration date? I mean… it's water. Water doesn't go bad, does it?" Trish's word are slow, and it's painfully obvious that she's trying to choose her words carefully, which makes it that much more pathetic. "Even if the water itself is perfectly pure, the container, especially if plastic, may leach chemicals into the bottled water. But you can reduce the reaction by storing your bottles somewhere dark and cool. But if the original water isn’t pure, especially if it contained biological contaminants, then the water quality will continue to degrade regardless of the storage container or conditions. That's why I only drink water bottled in glass." You can tell how much Jim loves the sound of his own voice and just can't get enough of the fact that he's smarter than everyone else. Except me.
I'm God.
He waves his bottle of Pellegrino around like it's something to be proud of. Then Trish asks "But that’s mineral water. Doesn't it got that stuff in it that makes the water go bad? The… uhmm… contaminants?" Jim smiles, he almost laughs even. "The substances dissolved in mineral water are all naturally purifying substances like salt, sulfur compounds, and gases. Besides, Pellegrino isn’t mineral water, it’s sparkling water." "Does sparkling water have the contaminants?" The only thing worse than Jim's pretentious answers to the questions is that Trish keeps asking them.
Before Jim can answer I blurt out "The effervescence in sparkling water is caused by the release of carbon dioxide molecules, not formulated chemicals." Don't try to one up God Jimmy.
Jim looks defeated, but only for a moment before he elaborates, saying "That's right. And did you know sparkling water contains the same amount of carbon dioxide that it had at emergence from the source. But the carbon dioxide may be removed and replenished after treatment, so you may not even know that it's sparkling water."
The smug look on Jim's face makes me physically nauseous, but then I’m only more repulsed by the fact that I’m getting so pissed off due to a conversation about water, and all the combined factors just make me want to kill the son-of-a-bitch; so I do. I make a gun appear in my hand and get him right between the eyes. Nobody seems to notice and I don't feel much better so I just make the gun and the body disappear and go back to drinking my Absolut on the rocks.
"Then the LORD said, 'I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, I am sorry that I have made them.'"
- Deuteronomy… or maybe it was Leviticus?
That's okay God, I forgive you, just don't do it again.
So far, being God has not been everything one might expect it to be. The first Month or so I spent getting drunk at my penthouse with about a hundred supermodels and enough alcohol to flood my old apartment. But after a while, even supermodels and booze gets old.
I made myself attractive. I'm now tall, lean, and quite muscular, but not in a creepy body-builder way. I have perfectly white wall-to-wall teeth, defined jaw, high cheekbones, and a long flowing head of blonde hair.
Last night I had dinner at Aureole with Tom Ford, Uma Thurman, and some guy from some shitty show on HBO. The night before I went to a party at this new club downtown called Neo or Neon, or some cheesy 80's retro name. I drank a little bit and flirted with some other big celebrities, but I don’t remember who, and I don’t really care anymore. Celebrities aren’t so great once you’ve met them in person.
The night before that I had a drink with some rich snobs at Ginger Man and the night before that I had a drink with different rich snobs at High Bar. I think I went to a party with some models the night before that, but I don't remember where.
You may think I'm ungrateful for my blessings, but you don't understand. It's not just that my life and scenery and friends haven't changed; I haven't changed. People weren't meant to have a perfect life, they were meant to suffer, and through suffering they would adapt and evolve into something better than they were. I’ve had no need to adapt because if anything’s wrong, I’ll change it instead of me. In the end, I don’t think a person can change himself. The only thing that can change a man is the world around him.
Living life doesn't mean enjoying life, it means growing. All I'm doing now is sitting around waiting for death, and all these models and parties and celebrities are just party-favors to keep me amused until I die, like the magazines in a waiting room.
This is why famous rich people get obsessed with drugs and alcohol; not because they're lives suck, but because they're too perfect. This is why rich white kids do a lot of blow and make-up all these melodramatic issues with their girlfriends; they can't accept that their life is perfect. This is why Americans love horror movies and sob stories; they wish they're lives were so bad.
It's time I start to hurt. It's time I start to feel some real pain, witness true suffering. Maybe I'll even die. Who knows?
Well… I do… I'm God.



The minute I got off my private plane, government officials walk me into the back of a military truck and place a burlap bag over my head. I don't mind; it smells rather nice, sort of like cinnamon. I'm not even sure exactly where I am. I know it's a war-ridden country in Southern African, but that doesn't narrow it down much. There are a bout twelve war ridden countries in Africa, hundreds of human rights violations, a couple pandemics, and a few holocaustic cases of genocide. All of this gets swept under the rug. This is the continent that the rest of the world likes to pretend doesn't exist. All I can think is "thank God a place like this still exists."
We drive for about six hours, but I’m not exactly sure; it’s hard to keep track of time with a sack on your head. During the entire drive, the furious African heat consumes me like an unseen oppressive force weighing down on my body. But by the time we get to the camp, it’s raining, and raining hard.
I’m taken out of the truck and dragged into a room. When they take off the sack I’m in a small simple room. The walls are white but incredibly dirty. All that’s in there is a single fluorescent light hanging from the ceiling that sways and flickers, and a old wooden chair that just sits in the middle of the room.
I’m on the floor, and on the other end of the room is a tall muscular man in uniform holding just a long bamboo poll. He doesn’t ask any questions, he doesn’t even say anything at all, he just starts swinging away. I don’t want you to think I’m some sort of creepy masochist, but I’ve never felt better than I did while I was getting the living shit beaten out of me. This is my drug of choice; this is my horror movie.
The second son he named Ephraim [the Hebrew word for twice fruitful.] and said, "It is because God has made me fruitful in the land of my suffering."
Job: Chapter: something Verse: something else
Boy have I made myself fruitful in the land of my suffering. And I saw that it was good.
It was about a third of the way into my beating that I started to think about the life I’m soon to leave behind. And at the same time, for a reason I couldn’t explain, I started to think about all the other prisoners in the big room, waiting for death. I guess I could free them all; for the first time, do something with my power that had nothing to do with me.
That made me start to think about the things I could have done with my life. I could’ve created peace on earth, fallen in love with a wonderful woman, had lots of kids, lived in a little house with a white picket fence, and done all that other Miss America/Hallmark card bullshit. But I don’t think that’s necessarily what happiness really is. I think true happiness is just finding something that gives you the ability to endure the grandeur of the world. These men in the prison, their idea of happiness is just not to die, and be able to see their families again. As long as I am God, I will never be satisfied, and I will never change.
I figure the least I can do with this failed experiment of a life is to help the other prisoners, so I decide to make the guard disappear and transport myself back to New York to start all over again…
…but the guard is still here, still kicking my ass with that same fucking piece of bamboo…
…shit.


So here I am, back in the big room, waiting to die. My hand is shaking uncontrollably. This might be because I’m nervous, but it’s probably just traumatic Parkinson’s. Traumatic encephalopathy will do that to you, where partial necrosis of brain tissue takes place. Neurons replaced by brain-dead scar tissue. A person’s body’s not meant to withstand the type of beating mine did.
Did I ever really have control? Was this all just a part of Ian’s plan? To be honest, I don’t think either of us had as much control as we think we did. He may have formulated my creation, and I may have started myself off, but after a certain point, I think the collaborative aspects of a story can only lead it to one place. I’d like to think the only real God is the inertia of the story itself, the built up momentum of a person’s past events.
But to what effect was all this? What difference does it make that I’ve grown as a person if I’m just about to die in a few seconds anyway? Was this growth reflective of my author? Will this all make a difference if I’m reincarnated in the form of a new character in a different story? Or will he have to undergo his own trials to change like I have? And if he does, then what was the point?
I don’t know, who do you think I am, God?