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God Is Dead
Written by Jia Zhang
He looked across this barren wasteland. The Earth was hidden under a cover of sand and rocks and dust. The buildings, the skyscrapers, the leftovers of a great empire—it was all enveloped beneath a blanket of gold and white. She was weeping, this green mother. She was crying, was bleeding, was hurting for a people that was left in ruins. In the Aftermath, there were few survivors. He was one of them—and he was quite sure that he was the only one that could hear the sullen lament of the Mother, calling out to Her Children, asking Her Beloved why He had done this, why He had forsaken them all. Why He was gone. Unlike the green mother, he was not in a state of emotional distress, and understood everything much too clearly—till it burned his eyes.
He was a non-essential factor in this Aftermath. He was unimportant, he understood. There were those much deserving than him, yet the Fates granted him a new life in this New World—after Armageddon. He wasn’t quite sure if he was grateful or not for this oblique opportunity. Sometimes, it felt good to be alive, to stare up at the sky and the blinking Christmas lights and breath the sweet salty air, but he thought that to be the instinct of every living thing that had some sort of conscious. At other times, he cursed the Fates, cursed this existence, and wished he were dead, like all those He took at the Wake.
He can still remember how it all began, like the many pieces of stained-colour glass. They all knew it would be the last War. The people hid in their homes with their white-picket fences, expecting it to all end it a matter of an instant. It did, with a horrible cruelty that only He can provide, it did.
Mushrooms of smoke grew all across the green, and the skin of the Earth was burned and charred to a thousand degree burns. There were only impressions of shadows left on the sidewalks—of the playing children, the dogs, and the jellow-pudding a mother was bringing to her mother. There was nothing left—the Earth ate itself up, and vomited out the entrails. The great monuments Man made to himself were all scattered chess pieces, and the sands swallowed up Time and the rivers and the streams till nothing was left but the skin and bones of houses and cars and buildings, and the carcass of a ruined civilization.
The vultures ate up the flesh and bones, and the people did nothing but wander, adamant in their confusion of the memoirs of a great species.
He sighed and looked up at the fiery sky. There was blood on the Moon. Was it too, dead as well? Perhaps, but he did not really know, nor did he really care. It was hard to find out what was alive and what was dead these days. But life and death was always intertwined so intricately together with each other that it was sometimes hard to separate either from the neither, to differentiate the values from the hues, to separate the truth from fiction. He shook his head furiously. He didn’t wish to contemplate this right now—he had an eternity to be quixotic.
He thought it was time he continued on his odyssey. He wanted to find the sea, and watch the Sun descend past the flaming horizon, that stood between the sky and the water. No matter how much the Earth changed and metapmorphed, whether it died or was reborn, the Sun would always shine of its glorious fire. Was this a kind of lost metaphor? He wasn’t too sure. Was the Sun the Light? Was it Hope? He wasn’t sure about Hope, since what was left was eroded away in the Tide. Hope he had none now, and he was quite sure it was locked away in Pandora’s Box as its Brothers and Sisters roamed the Earth to their pleasure. Yet, for some unexplainable reason, he was sure that, one day, Hope would be strong enough to break out of the Box.
He stopped and sat down on the loam Earth—tired—his feet hurting from walking against the coppered edged bloody stones. The sky rained red; droplets of crimson splashed like a Pollock painting on his hand. He ran, and sprinted, and fell, and picked himself up, to hide, under the protection of a broken house, shattered and split like bone, as the sky continued to bleed. He thought it was all oddly beautiful.
How queer, he thought suddenly, that he was not able to remember his mother—not her eyes, nor her hair, nor the spring perfume she wore at parties. He did not remember of her potluck dinners, or the taste of her famous Friday night lasagnas, and he did not remember the sound of her singing. He remembered her for trivial things—the way she used to tie her hair, the colour of her favourite necklace—made of blue and white rhinestones, the poem she memorized in her head, and the mirage of all her lessons.
Mother, he did not remember, and the others even less. He had a father, he was sure—what of sisters and brothers? He did not know. He faintly remembers a family dog, but that too was misplaced in his memory chest. He had an obscured apathy for all of this; there were snippets of such remains from that nearly ancient era, but it was now irrelevant—time swallowed it all, killed it all, and turned it all into dust and mold.
White bandages covered the bleeding of the sky. Finally, feeling it was all right to go out, he left his hiding place and continued on his way to the sea. He loved the water. It was always so pure and clean—the nostalgic drug of daydreamers. He didn’t feel like one, though. There was too much realism in his art—he was no abstractionist.
Finally, after his long journey, he was finally here. His eyes gazed out at the ocean—forever clear and shining. It reflected the sky and sun, and the light flickered across the water, like fireflies in the darkness of the night. It was so beautiful, he thought. Simply magnificent.
As he gazed out at the waters, he was rushed into a frenzy of memories—what of their people now? What of their world? He could still hear the weeping of the green mother, her sobs a demonstration of our failure as Father’s experiment. She wept not for the past we had, but the future we could have had, and the Test in which we should have overcome with a great virility.
But things are never so simple. Things are never just as black and white; the yellow brick road is never straight and narrow. He remembers the beginning, when those harlequins professed that the End was only an illusion of the mind. Oh, how clearly he remembers the warnings of a sparing few—those lost saints—who saw and thought and understood the Question—they warned us, he thought, but we did not listen. This is why everything has come to this.
The world irrupted into a hazy flame, and burnt itself right up into cinders, till there were only a few shards of bone and glass.
And he wonders, so quietly to himself, what had those lost saints saw before the End of the World? They destroyed themselves to try and deliver the Message, only to realize something crucial before the End. What had they seen? What had they understood for them to lie so peacefully as the world burnt itself up? Why did they choose to fall beyond the Veil?
He wondered if they knew?
He breathed in the salty sulfur air, drinking in the smell of the sea and the falling horizon. As he recalled his memories, and marveled in the beauty of the setting sun, he came to a discovery.
God was dead, and Heaven and Hell were crumbling into pieces. The souls of the dead and damned no longer had a place to go, and all those demons and angels had found refuge on Earth alongside the rest of humanity. The green mother must have loved us very much, he thought. Because she loved us, she could not bear to see humanity be ripped apart by a cruel Father’s failed experiment. We were the quintessence of what this Earth was, for there would be no Earth without humanity. And for that reason, She forced the Fates to weave another blanket for our world.
God is dead. That picture of Eden was shattered. The Earth wept because She had lost Her Beloved, and she wept for this Test that we should have passed with great potency. Yet, it is because of the love of this green mother that we find ourselves here, still alive, still breathing, still drifting.
He gazed across the apocalyptic wasteland.
Heaven no longer existed. Hell no longer existed.
This was Utopia.
fin
