have felt like. Twice I walked away from the window. I got into bed and put in my earplugs and put my pillow over my head. I closed my eyes real tight. I even balled up my fists. I just kept hearing it, though. A banging sound against the side of the dumpster.
Finally it stopped. It sure seemed like it took a long time. I went back to the window and peeked outside again. I saw a man lying in the dumpster. He was pale, and his clothes were really dirty and gross. He wasn’t moving at all. He looked like he was dead for sure. But he didn’t look scary dead, or mean or angry dead. He looked very peaceful. And normally I would have been very scared. I would have yelled or screamed. I might have hidden somewhere. I wasn’t scared at all, though. I actually felt sort of wonderful. I just stared at the man lying in the dumpster. I forgot about everything. I even forgot I was me, which was something that had never happened. After a few minutes, the man started moving his hands and legs a little bit. I opened the window and talked to him.
Hello?
He looked up at me.
Hello.
You okay in there?
Yes, thank you.
You were banging around a lot.
He sat up and turned towards me.
Yes.
What were you doing?
I was looking for food.
In a dumpster?
Yes.
That’s gross.
He laughed.
There’s lots of good food in dumpsters.
No lie?
He laughed again.
No lie.
What do you find?
What other people don’t want.
And you eat it?
Of course.
Is it good?
People throw away wonderful things.
Did you find anything wonderful tonight?
He smiled.
Maybe.
I smiled.
In there?
No, I got interrupted.
By me?
By God.
Excuse me?
I was speaking to God.
Like God, God?
Yes.
God from Heaven?
No, the real God.
Who’s the real God?
If a bird dropped a pebble in the same spot once every thousand years, the time it would take for that pile of pebbles to grow to be the size of the largest mountain on earth would be equal to one second of infinity.
Yeah, so?
He laughed again.
God is infinite. And like infinity, too vast and too complicated for us to understand.
Then why do people worship him?
They’ve been tricked into believing something that is wrong but that they can understand. Humans cling to what they can understand, even if it’s wrong.
If that’s true, then how does God talk to you?
The sound you heard was me having a seizure, and my arms and legs and head hitting the sides of this dumpster. In the second before I have the seizures, I see things, and I hear things, I know things, and I am told things.
How do you know it’s God?
Because of what I’m told, what I’m given.
Which is what?
I speak languages I’ve never studied, some of which are no longer spoken. I know the contents of the world’s holy books, word for word, even though I have never read them. I understand general relativity, quantum mechanics, string theory, astrophysics, quantum gravity, physical cosmology, and black hole thermodynamics, even though I dropped out of school when I was fourteen.
What’s all that got to do with God?
The first things allow me to understand God as God has been written, and portrayed, and worshipped. As people believe in God. The others allow me to understand how close we are to understanding the real God, the God that doesn’t need to be worshipped, that does not exist as we do, that does not judge us, that does not offer us anything more than what we have.
You sound crazy.
He smiled.
