'Right. You said the man in that dream was me. Remember?'
She brushed a dark strand of hair out of her eyes. 'You still don't think he was?'
'No.'
'Who was he, then?'
'God.'
The muscles tensed beneath the oval plane of her face. 'I should have guessed.'
'Don't panic. I'm using that word as a kind of short¬hand, because we don't have a word to communicate what I experienced. God is nothing like we imagine him to be. He's not male or female. He's not even a spirit. I say 'he' only as a conversational convenience.'
'That's good to know.' A wry laugh. 'You're telling me God is a paralyzed man with no memory sitting in a pitch-black room?'
'In the beginning, yes.'
'Is he powerless?'
'Not completely. But he thinks he is.'
'I don't understand.'
'To understand the beginning, you have to under¬stand the end. When we get to the end, you'll see it all.'
She looked far from convinced.
'Remember the dream? The man in the room becomes obsessed with his questions, so obsessed that he becomes the questions. 'Who am I? Where did I come from? Was I always here?' Then he sees a black ball floating in space ahead of him. Darker than the other darkness.'
Rachel nodded. 'Do you know what the ball is now?'
'Yes. A singularity. A point of infinite density and temperature and pressure.'
'A black hole? Like what existed before the Big Bang?'
'Exactly. Do you know what existed before that?'
She shrugged. 'No one does.'
'I do.'
'What?'
'The desire of God to know.'
Curiosity filled her eyes. 'To know what?'
'His identity.'
Rachel took my hand in hers and began messaging my palm with her thumb. 'The black ball exploded in your dream, right? Like a hydrogen bomb, you said.'
'Yes. It devoured the darkness at a fantastic rate. Yet the man in the dream always remained outside the explosion.'
'How do you interpret that image? God watching the birth of the universe?'
'Yes, but I don't interpret it. I've seen it. I've seen what God saw.'
Her thumb stopped moving. She could not hide the sadness in her eyes.
'I know what you're thinking,' I said.
'David, you can't read my mind.'
'I can read your eyes. Look, to understand what I'm telling you, you're going to have to stop being a psychia¬trist for twenty minutes.'
She sighed deeply. 'I'm trying. I really am. Describe what you saw for me.'
'I described it for you weeks ago. I just didn't under¬stand it then. That explosion was the Big Bang. The birth of matter and energy from a singularity. The birth of time and our universe.'
'And the rest of your dreams?'
'You remember what I saw. After the bang, the expanding universe began displacing God. This didn't happen in three dimensions, but that's the only way we can think about it. Think of God as a limitless ocean. Genesis describes something like that. No waves, no ten¬sion, not even bubbles. Perfect harmony, total resolution, absolute inertia.'
'Go on.'
'Think of the birth of the universe as a bubble form¬ing at the center of that ocean. Forming and expanding like an explosion, displacing the water at the speed of light.'
'All right.'
'What happens inside that bubble is what I saw in my later dreams. The births of galaxies and stars, the formation of planets, all the rest. I saw the history of our universe unfold. You called it 'Hubble telescope stuff.''
'I remember.'
'Eventually my dreams focused on the Earth. Meteors crashed into the primitive atmosphere, amino acids formed. Evolution went from inorganic to organic. Microbes became multicellular, and the race was on, right up the chain to fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, primates…'
'Man,' Rachel finished.
'Yes. It took ten billion years just to get to biological evolution. Then hundreds of millions of years of muta¬tion to get to man. And all that added up to nothing in the eyes of God.'
Rachel knit her brows. 'Why? Didn't God intend all those creatures to exist? To evolve?'
'No. It's not like that. God was surprised by all of this.'
'Surprised?'
'Well… I think the feeling was more like deja vu. He'd seen something like it before. Not exactly like it, but what he saw made him remember things.'
She turned in her seat and stared at me. 'And the cre¬ation of life meant nothing to him?'
'Not in the beginning. But then-out of that teeming mass of life-a spark as bright as the Big Bang flashed in his eye.'
'What spark?'
'Consciousness. Human intelligence. Somewhere in Africa, a tool-making hominid with a relatively large brain perceived the fact of its own death. It perceived a future in which it would no longer exist. That hominid became not only self-conscious, but conscious of time. That moment was an epiphany for God.'
'Why?'
'Because consciousness was the first thing in that ter¬rifying explosion of matter and energy that God recog¬nized as being like himself.'
'That's what God is? Awareness?'
'I think so. Awareness without matter or energy. Pure information.'
Rachel was silent for a while, and I couldn't read her eyes. 'Where is all this going?' she asked finally.
'To a very provocative place. But let's stay with the dreams for now. Man evolved quickly. He tilled the ground, built cities, recorded his history. And God felt something like hope.'
'Hope for what?'
'That he might finally learn the nature of his own being.'
'Did God answer his questions by watching man¬kind?'
'No. Because after a certain point, evolution stopped. Not biological evolution, but psychological evolution. Almost as quickly as man created societies, he destroyed them. He sacked cities, salted fields, slaughtered his brothers, raped his sisters, abused his children. Man had unlimited potential, yet he was trapped in a cycle of self-destructive behavior, unable to evolve beyond an essen¬tially brutal existence.'
'And God had nothing to do with this?'
'No. God can't control what happens inside the bubble. He doesn't exist in the world of matter and energy. Not as God, anyway. He could only watch and try to under¬stand. As the centuries passed, he became obsessed with man, as he'd once been obsessed with himself. Why couldn't man break the cycle of violence and futility? God focused all his being on the bubble, searching for a weak point, for a way into the matrix of matter and energy that was displacing him.'
'And?'
'It happened. God found himself looking at the bub¬ble from the inside. Through the eyes of a human being.
