I found God at the 7-Eleven on Magazine Street the night of the storm. Why was I the one to find Him? Call it an infection, lots of them going around at that time, new cancers, new blossoms on the faces of the citizenry as they stumbled through the nights, the air thick with toxins. Call it a theological conundrum for all I care. Lots of that was going around, too. You might even say theology was the infection, and above it all a howling, like someone had turned up the background radiation of the universe and it had entered every cell, microbe, quantum of air. I stumbled against the trunk of an oak. Across the street was Sam's Convenience Store, but I couldn't see it. So I let go of the tree, and the wind drove me to the 7-Eleven. Maybe, I thought, if I could get to the pay phone, but I had no change, the phones must be down, my brain was a shambles. And that's when I saw Him hanging up the phone and turn toward me a visage anything but holy, though at the same time holy was all He evoked. Holiness sprang off Him like water off a dog drying itself. Glad you could join Me, he said, all teeth now, white as whalebone, and the next moment He had turned into one of those rat-faced goofs out of a Bosch painting. Or maybe I'm thinking of Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece. Never mind. Every detail is still dream-sharp within me; it's just that I can't always place the dream the detail belongs to. Did He kiss me before or after He took me? Didn't I lose my soul as sure as water drains from a bathtub? Didn't I see His head balloon into the sky, a Montgolfier big enough to blot out a harvest moon? I huddled in the wind, I shivered. My bones bled. Go away, I screamed, but the wind upturned me, rolled me down the street like a doll in a freshet. Round and round I spun, my breath nowhere to be found, my heart in my throat, choking it. Root-stench, petrochemical rot scorched my eyes, my lungs. God's mouth sucked at my ears, His fingers pressed my bladder which emptied piss that smelled like pine trees into my jeans. And then the next moment we were sitting on a sofa in the middle of the 7-Eleven, the walls peeled back like a banana skin but the items on the shelves–Babo, Hazeltone, Mr. Clean–still sparkling. He licked His palm, and upon it I saw a thousand angels dancing as if on . . . on a pin a hundred times bigger than I, a dot in His palm, less than a tear, than a drift . . ., but He caught me before I fainted into my insignificance. We talked about lots of stuff, there on the lime-green sofa, while the storm raged around us, more than I can enumerate. We sat there on the sofa in the 7-Eleven, He on my left, and He said, I mean, honestly–and then laughed and laughed. Then He grabbed off the carrousel an Archie and Veronica comic and spread it across His lap. Veronica! Her bangs sang to me as if they had been blessed by God's beauty, while Archie's freckles, on the other hand, looked like they'd been lifted off Howdy Doody, and yet still Archie was everything that made our species worth fighting for. I mumbled something or other, burbled, babbled. A child, surely no more than four, appeared before us and said she often contemplated suicide. And for all the right reasons! She beamed up at us, and then swallowed a can of Drano. I said, You think that's funny? No, God said. Theological? Factual. I asked Him if this were the end, and He said, No, that was yesterday. Then an alligator slithered from the aisles and swallowed the kid in a gulp and vanished into a sky filling with hoops, saws, a motorcade, store dummies. Again I said, You think that's funny? No, He said. Then, just to make sure what I hoped would be for the last time, I asked Him if I were crazy, and He said, What do you think? I looked out again, though in no true sense was I looking out, just outward, beyond the peeled walls, washed away now in the flood, as were the oak trees, bicycles, limbs floral and faunal, teeth, toes, leaves, chemicals of various sorts, a man's German shepherd, the man himself and his three daughters, a dealer, a dreamer, a dromedary that came, I assume, from the zoo. He pared His nails for a moment, while the storm took a deep breath. In the morning I figured I would awake, drink coffee that tasted like sludge, repair my brain as best I could, then pray I'd never see or hear of Him again. No such luck, He said. Then He crossed His legs (I heard the ripple of silk stockings, though He wore none) and said, It's like this (and I knew then that whatever He said I'd never forget and that though I might not understand it, it would be more important than Life itself), take it from me, piles and piles of lives will be lost tonight, but death is no holiday. Pray all you want, belief don't got nothing to do with it. You think this storm is something? Just wait. I ought to know. I could have done better, I admit, but absentee landlord, as some of you think, I'm not. Do what you will, this life's a fiction, as Blake more or less said. Then suddenly the wind stopped, and–poof!–God vanished. And there sprang from my mouth frogs and devils, idolaters and prophets, angels and sorceresses, and a fountain of darkness, out of which I saw a beast rise up, and from his seven heads I heard him speak great things.

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