• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

"Don’t talk, Andy. You couldn’t possibly form a coherent sentence. The pain was coming back, so I gave you another injection. Shall we go deeper this time? How about I talk and you listen?"

"Muuh. Ah. Muuh."

"Don’t try to speak anymore, Andy. I just want you to absorb my voice. I know you’re still a little disoriented. Not sure where you are. Maybe you’re afraid. Well, you’re going to let go of all of that. Fear has its place, but not here, not now.

"You ever been driving somewhere and you suddenly became alert and realized you didn’t remember the last twenty miles? I’m going to bring you to that state, Andy. I want you to lose all context and focus solely on the sound of my voice.

"You’re behind the wheel of a luxury sedan on a long, boring stretch of road. The dotted line moves beneath the wheels. Engine hums hypnotically. Sun shines in. You’re nice and warm, the seat soft and comfortable beneath you. And your eyes begin to lower and lower…and lower. And now your eyes are closed and the sound of my voice is all you hear. And we go deeper and deeper, and the sleepiness feels so good, so warm, that you want to go deeper and deeper…and deeper.

"My voice is now the only thing that exists. Squeeze my hand, Andy."

I squeeze the voice’s hand.

"We’re going to talk about values, Andy. Right and wrong. Good and evil. I want you to picture a row of great stone tablets. The rules of man have been chiseled into these tablets, and all your life you’ve abided by them and been put upon by them.

"These tablets stand on the edge of a cliff. And now there’s a man lurking behind them. Do you see him? Squeeze my hand if you can see him."

I see the man behind the tablets. I squeeze the voice’s hand.

"Now that man is pushing the tablets over the cliff. One by one. And they’re shattering, Andy. They’re shattering into millions of pieces on the ground. Squeeze my hand if you see them shattering."

I see them shattering. Hear the rock breaking. I squeeze the voice’s hand.

"That man standing on the cliff is you, Andy. You have just broken those terrible tablets that have been imposed upon you. You’re free now, Andy. Free to make your own right and wrong. Free to create your own values. Good and evil, as you’ve known it your entire life, does not exist. Evil is an illusion. Good is an illusion. You’ve broken those awful tablets.

"So now, when you see something, violence for instance, you will laugh and laugh and laugh, because it’s hysterically funny. Do you know why it’s funny? Because it’s meaningless. It’s so utterly meaningless, and people have attached to it such grave meaning. When you see an act of violence, Andy, you will laugh and say ‘How meaningless.’ Values no longer concern you, Andy. You are above them. They are falling away beneath you. You have just taken the first step toward becoming something better."

# # #

god comes to Vi after she pushes her third meal in a row through the slot beneath the door. god always waits until they try to starve themselves to death. It is a sign of their malleability.

When she hears the voice from the darkness overhead, she thinks she’s crossed into delirium. Weak, starving, she has hardly the strength to sit up, so she rolls over onto her back and stares into the blackness above.

"What’s up, God?" she says.

"Are you mad at me, Violet?"

"You do this to me?"

"’Fraid so."

"Then I’m mad at you."

Vi laughs in god’s invisible face. god laughs, too. The sound of god’s laughter is the most disturbing thing she’s ever heard. Her subconscious image of God is one of those oil paintings of a hippie, blatantly Caucasian Jesus in a clean, white robe, staring out of the canvas with sad, penetrating eyes. God isn’t supposed to laugh. Her God is holy and solemn, and if Vi were honest with herself, perfectly boring.

Under most circumstances, Vi would disregard any voice that intimated it was God. But after thirty days in soundless, pitch black isolation, when a voice suddenly speaks to you and tells you he’s God, you have no perspective