Bertumirtha
My name is Gordon Brick, and I am a writer.
A writer is just what we call those of us who go around pretending we don’t matter while secretly believing the opposite: that nobody matters aside from us. Take myself, for instance. What incredible ego must I have to take it upon myself to create people and places that don’t already exist? Presumably, were these people meant to exist, they would. I am not doing the universe any kind of service.
But let’s say the worlds and characters I create exist in some other dimension. Were we to accept that an infinite number of parallel realities coincide directly with ours, then - wouldn’t we have to assume that in one of these there is a living breathing animal with the name of Bertumirtha Robinson? I just made her up, you see. Upon having imagined Bertumirtha, who is a sixteen-year-old girl (as well as every other age she could possibly be) I have hypothesized a universe where she exists. And if an infinite number of universes exist, then so must she. What if that one universe in which she exists is this very one?
Therefore, if you’ve been following this logic, I am God.
Understand - I label myself not this word in an effort to change your personal beliefs. Perhaps your God and myself are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps we can both exist at the same time - if not in this world then surely in another. Also, do not mistake me. I did not make you. Some other version of me in another universe has most obviously hypothesized a character with your name, effectively creating the need for your existence. Simply by typing a few sentences about your facial structure, demeanor, and the type of clothes you wear, they’ve ensured that somewhere, sometime, you exist. Lucky for you that time is now. The God you pray to only exists in another version of this reality - he or she can’t hear you. But I can.
Isn’t that what’s important - A God that listens?
Listen: While I typed those words, a message box opened up, and thinking I must know the person who messaged me, (because who besides people I know would bother?) I responded. In responding I found out that the name of the person on the other end of the message was Bertumirtha Robinson, a sixteen-year-old girl. When I asked her what universe she came from, she seemed to be confused. She said “Atlanta.”
Why has she messaged me? Bertumirtha says she has found my name on a list with a plethora of contact information. She’s been compelled to contact me. She does not know anything about me. I find all of this rather suspicious.
At first I wonder if I am simply the victim of a very clever prank, meant to strike fear into my blaspheming heart. I can imagine a person doing such a thing - thinking these very words as he portrays himself as a sixteen-year-old girl with a horrendous name I am responsible for: “He wants to play God, does he? Then we’ll let him play God. See how he likes it.” The idea being that playing God is not a very fun game.
I find myself agreeing with this prankster. What fun is it to be the creator of anything if all that thing wanted to do was find and bother you with its tiny problems?
So I ignore Bertumirtha at first.
Time passes. Etcetera.
Bertumirtha tells me she loves me. We have been talking for several months, and I have not yet told her that it is possible that I am her Creator. That she appeared to me moments after I hypothesized her existence. I tell her I love her too, because she is very pretty, and if I am her Creator I don’t want to be apathetic about it. I wonder if it is because she only says things I would have made her say. I have friends who would be interested in this relationship, because it all seems rather masturbatory.
Tomorrow I am traveling to Atlanta to meet with my creation. She says she will be wearing a red dress.
I am not sure what to wear. Behind my eyes, in the front part of my brain, there is a dull throb of surety. I will arrive, and she will not. She cannot, because she cannot exist. If she does, then I will be pleasant with her, and put my lips to hers. She is only sixteen because I made her that way - she is no girl.
What was it like when God came down from a mountain as a burning tumbleweed?
Was he nervous?
We meet at a church. The reason doesn’t matter - by now I’m convinced it is because a church is the optimal setting for a meeting between a character and its creator. I might have joked it was my house, but it’s a Greek Orthodox church, which I’m not even sure is a real thing. Walking through the doors and looking around, I am more and more convinced the place is made out of papier mache.
She looks how I imagined her. Same almond skin, deep brown eyes, soft lips. If I’m not her creator, someone else thought my thought before I ever did. She’s sitting in a pew, and some other people are too. Pews are a sort of really long bench, and these ones are heavily-glazed cherry. Maybe when the carpenter was putting on all those coats of lacquer, the place really stunk, and the really long benches got named. I slide in next to her, and it’s easy because I’m wearing a white fleece jogging outfit (accented with orange vertical bands) and I think I could slip down the whole length of one if I had a step or two to get up to speed.
“Bertumirtha,” I say. She looks at me like she knows me, because I sent her a picture. In the picture I’m jogging.
“You’re wearing that same outfit.”
“I thought I should wear something recognizable. Also, whenever I drive more than two hours I wear the fleece.” I don’t tell her why, because it’s not in her character to be interested in boring details like it’s how I keep the odors in.
“We’re in a church.”
“Good setting, right?”
“I’d rather go somewhere we can talk.” She looks at me and I can see she doesn’t mean talk. All of a sudden I realize a church is a terrible setting, and my fleece starts to itch. I lick my lips, wondering if I shaved.
“Let’s take a walk.”
In front of the Chorus Members Only room (which I misread as Chosen Members Only the first and second times) there is a velvet rope and a carved out cylinder of stone wherein two people can be safely hidden until the noises they make are heard by wandering men of God.
Bertumirtha and I are in this cylinder. She smells how I wrote that she did, like pomegranate and salt. She moves to kiss me and I wonder if I imagined that part of her, the mouth part, too big. Our teeth clank. Outside of our cylinder, a man says, “But who would steal anything? Inside a church?” The word church, given such emphasis, tickles me. Bertumirtha gets better accustomed to the unusual shape of my mouth, and I hear this: “Hard to imagine anyone doing anything like that inside a church.” I am still kissing her but now I am laughing too. This is a mistake. It’s in Bertumirtha’s character to respond to any sort of laughter with a raucous brand of her own, often ending in fits of snorting. She does so.
Moments later a man’s giant head pokes into the cylinder. It is like some deep sea creature. A jellyfish, or an octopus. Some of it is glowing. Its eyes (does it have eyes?) are dark and bulging, and veins all over it are standing out. I think it might pop.
“What are you doing in here,” it seethes. The head tries to get more of itself into the opening, but it’s too big. It pulls a foot-long stick from the robes it flies around in and waves it at us.
“Are you having sex?” It is in Bertumirtha’s character to respond to accusations regarding her coital status by widening her eyes and opening her mouth. It’s a stock expression of fear, and I’m a lazy writer. The way my face works itself up at the giant head is as if to say, “No, we’re not having sex you jolly fat idiot,” but my mouth doesn’t say this at all. My mouth says this:
“Not yet.”
The eyes bulge, the veins tighten.
“You’re in a church!” the head hollers. I giggle. Bertumirtha sobs. “You’re having sex in a church?” That word again, like it’s supposed to mean something extra when it’s said all sideways like that. Is a church ever more or less a church?
“Get out of my church right now! I’m going to call the police, and they’re going to-” He stabs his little stick at us, his magic wand of religion. I have never seen the owner of a church so angry, but perhaps that’s a commonality among such men, as I’ve only encountered the one.
“IN A CHURCH?”
I once wrote a story about a man who devoted his life to coming up with phrases that people would attribute to him after he died. Every night he would come home from work and put down in his journal something he’d thought of during the day. “A fool and a genius should each be paid - the genius for his thoughts, and the fool to keep out of them.” “Constant scrubbing doesn’t stop the child from walking through mud.” Little gems of wisdom like that. He made sure to say one or more of his favorites every time he was at a social gathering or work function - so they might catch on. They never did. One day, he rushed to the toilet in his office and just managed to sit down before the worst of runs came out of him. The noise was awful - the smell stripped paint. He put his head between his knees. “Oh Christ,” he said, “Better to shit down than sit up.” Someone started laughing - a coworker had been in the stall next door, listening to it all. My writer of sayings died soon after, as characters are wont to do, and what do you think I made his friends and family put on his tombstone?
Outside, in the grass, I tell this to Bertumirtha, and then explain that the thing we’ve just encountered will have a similar tombstone. This man’s epitaph would read, “IN A CHURCH?” She is still crying, not audibly, but in kind of wheezing gasps, the kind I am proud of because any writer can make a character’s eyes get red and have water come out. Then I start laughing, because she’ll have to, and soon she is laughing and gasping and wheezing and it’s all my fault.
“I have to go,” I say, pulling her head toward my head so they touch, our forehead greases mixing.
“I have a secret,” she says. “I created you.”
“What now?” This is certainly not in her character. Stealing my secret and saying it’s hers, because I didn’t create her to be rude.
“I imagined a writer,” she says, “Named Gordon Brick, for a story assignment at school. I made up a character sheet. Even drew him. A week later I typed the name into Google. You were real.”
I hadn’t written any characters to think they’d created me, because that wouldn’t make any sense. Bertumirtha has taken on a mind of her own. I scrunch up my eyes and make them as narrow as they get. This is how you look at people you were just kissing inside of a church but for certain reasons no longer trust.
“I wrote a story about your character from your point of view, and had him think himself God, had him imagine a random name, which was mine, had him immediately confronted with the possibility of his creation.”
“Oh. But. You’re sixteen.” There is something I am trying to get at here, a kind of proof of denial. Sixteen wasn’t enough years to imagine all of mine, all of my books. I’ve written hundreds of them.
“You’re forty, and yet nothing about the idea of making out with a sixteen-year-old girl in a church bothers you. I made you that way. You only remember having written books, not writing them. The story about the man of quotations I made up for my assignment as an allegory for you.”
“How’s that?” My head feels muzzy. I really should have left when I said I was. All the extra listening is making me nauseous.
“You’re a man who thinks he’s God, thinks he’s been given proof of that fact, only to find out that he’s less real than anyone else, and that a sixteen year old girl-“
“Uh huh.” I didn’t remember making her character this long-winded, but if she could be trusted (and I’d really stopped trusting her right after she’d gone out of character - maybe this wasn’t Bertumirtha at all, but a decoy) then I was a fabrication, not her. I giggle at the absurdity.
“-actually is God. Irony. Only it would be, if it were in your character to believe unbelievable things people you think you’ve made up say to you in person once you’ve met them.”
I’m turning to leave. I’m walking across the parking lot. I’m in my car. Bertumirtha is standing in the grass, no longer crying, no longer laughing. She has her hands on her hips. I roll down my window as I go by, and say this:
“What happened at the end of your story assignment?”
She says some nonsense, and I drive home.
