I don’t know what’s happening to me; Ms. Einstein now seems less odious than she once did. Yes, her devotion to science is a pain in the backside (as it were), but watching her play the rutting atheist no longer sets my teeth on edge the way it did; I no longer want to rub her out by sending her bike skidding on an oil stain as she rounds a curve. In some ways, I realize, I’d like to know her better. I mean approach her as a person, not just using my unlimited divine faculties. It would be a less objective kind of knowledge, less complete perhaps, but warmer, more personal.
Instead I listen in on what she’s thinking while she rides that big ugly bike of hers, check on what’s in her digestive system, how each of her hairs is coming along, whether the pores of her skin are dilating and contracting properly. I flip through her past the way you page through the photo album of a family member you are particularly fond of, going back a couple of generations—even a dozen while I’m at it. I study the workings of her genes (genes being not nearly as boring and conservative as geneticists think) and the cordial ententes that link them to the amino acid sequences of every protein in every cell. Not that I neglect my normal divine duties: I surveil, I resolve, I save, I punish, I overlook, I admonish, I judge, I unleash, I even avenge (that happens sometimes, my son, or presumed offspring, notwithstanding). However, it’s her above all whom I scan.
I myself am astonished at what’s happening to me. I look at myself in the mirror (metaphorical mirror, ça va sans dire) and I see that I’m the same, I’m what I’ve always been. I’m still absolutely perfect, absolutely no doubt about that: I remain infallible, omniscient, omnipotent, omniwhatever. And yet, and yet… I’m unable to transcend this damn Daphne (that’s her name), sympathetic or not; I follow the evolving situation attentively (I almost said greedily), not missing a single minute of it.
But the randy paleoclimatologist, despite those health problems of his,* is playing a tight defense. His latest thing is to send her text messages, and, one excuse after another, he’s constantly tapping away. His comments, meant to be witty and captivating, are in fact merely stupid, but she reads them all right through, sometimes even laughing to herself. You don’t have to be a god to see how that devious electronic tomfoolery might well be the final offensive in his campaign to take his coveted target. The cleft between her legs, that is.
* The stomachache that suddenly intervened during the meal with the iguana turned out to be rather serious; he vomited all night, thrashing around in pain. In the morning he was even worse and they hospitalized him for a couple of days to do tests. Alas, the health of a human being is always hanging by a thread, the tiniest factor can put everything out of whack.
His companion, meanwhile, seems to be forcing herself to do exactly the opposite of what common sense would dictate. Having sussed out the danger, anyone else in her situation would go out of her way to keep her rival as distant as possible, put her partner under lock and key and threaten him with all manner of retribution. Instead, she’s constantly calling the tall biker to suggest they do this or that. She’s wild about those crazy rides on the priapic twin-cylinder. I won’t say I’d be pleased if she took an electric knife and removed her boyfriend’s filthy big tongue—excessive violence has never appealed to me, whatever’s been said about that—but still, she could at least give him an ultimatum or threaten to throw him out of the house. Instead, she’s as obliging as a little lamb.