Chapter 1: Breakfast

First impression: God has a fantastically cool living room.

It is, more properly, a morning room, meaning that it was designed to make the very best use of morning light. The sun poured through windows set perfectly to allow the room to be well-lit without being so bright that it made you want to return to the comforting shadows of your bedroom. Large yet unostentatious, the space had a perfect balance of furniture versus overcrowding. Sofa, love seat, chair, all a matched set done in a soft dark-golden color that was easy on the eyes. The centerpiece of this layout was a sizable coffee table that held a lot more than just coffee. Defying all rules of spatial relations, plates of donuts, sweet rolls, and pastries lay next to small platters filled with bagels, cream cheese (three varieties), miniature quiches in what looked like pastry cups for tarts (except that the crust was lighter), and a truly splendid selection of breakfast meats. Two dishes, on opposite sides of the table, lay ready with linen napkins and utensils.

“Dig in,” said God.

(Once last time: I’m writing about my experiences: what I saw, heard, touched, etc. Perhaps you’ll have your own experience, one day, and I look forward to what you’ll have to say about it. As the acronym has it, YMMV.)

I looked up to find myself in the company of a large, well-formed brown bear of upper-middle years, fur in perfect condition, his muzzle a creamy beige, his eyes a lovely dark brown. I guessed, as he was seated on the sofa across from me, that he’d have stood a little taller than myself when on his hindpaws. He was clad in what could have been chinos and a polo-style shirt, both of a sandy shade that complimented his fur color beautifully. He looked like the kind of fur you could strike up a conversation with, someone you could talk to easily, even if you’d just met him.

Naturally, I was utterly tongue-tied.

“Hey, this looks really good!” God placed the napkin casually in his lap and began surveying the goodies on the table as if he’d not seen them before. “You have terrific taste in breakfast items.”

“Me?” I finally managed to croak. “Didn’t you make all this?”

“Sure,” he said, “but not alone. We’re co-creating this reality. That’s the whole point of this book — creation, in all its aspects. To make the joke, ‘it’s not just for breakfast anymore’.” He looked around the table, grinning. “So many choices, and they all look amazing. Oh, and a special dispensation, while we’re together today: There’s no need for any of your meds, including insulin. After all, this isn’t exactly an ordinary day for you. I hope I’m able to treat you well.”

I still couldn’t move. I had the peculiar feeling that I was both living this and remembering it at the same time. I remembered my conversation with Josh about accepting the assignment of walking through a day with God, and then…

“Are you confused?”

“Do I look confused?”

“You look confused.”

“That’s because I’m confused.”

God nodded. “No problem, I’ll help walk you through it.” He spread some garlic-and-chive cream cheese on a freshly-toasted asiago cheese bagel half and hummed appreciatively. “Oh, that’s good. This could rapidly become my favorite. Please consider yourself invited to yet more breakfasts!”

“Josh told me…”

“Yes, he did, and I’m being silly this morning.” God wiped his mouth delicately and smiled. “I’m silly most mornings. It’s a great way to start the day.” He clasped his hands together and leaned toward me. “Okay, let’s see what we can do to help you feel less confused. Where shall we start?”

I looked around, at the room, at the food, at God, and I didn’t have the faintest idea what to say.

“Okay,” he said, “let’s start there. You don’t know what to say.”

So help me, I almost asked how he knew that. I caught myself at the last second.

“Tristan, I’m honestly not trying to be a prat. I know that I seem that way, sometimes. Let me try to explain it this way. Just a moment; this is so good…” He took another bite from his bagel, making very happy sounds while he chewed. After finishing his chewing, he set the rest of the bagel down and sighed gently. He looked genuinely concerned as he asked, “Are you feeling too confused to eat?”

I thought about it. I’m rarely so worried or preoccupied that I can’t eat. This time, however, I couldn’t get a handle on what was happening, and I make it a rule not to eat when I’m falling down a well.

God looked at me apologetically, one rounded ear flicking with something like embarrassment. “I’ll try to be quick. After I asked you to write this book, you said you had to think about it. You remember that part, right?”

I nodded.

“You called up to ask Josh for a coffee, and he met with you to talk about it. Remember that he said that you wouldn’t be able to take notes, but that you’d have a completely clear memory of every moment that we spent together? That’s what you’re experiencing right now.” He offered a shrug with the casual confidence of a mathematics professor who had just scrawled QED on the blackboard beneath a particularly simple geometric proof.

“You lost me at the bakery.”

“Rowan and Martin will never die,” God grinned.

“I’m glad that you caught the reference,” I said, “but I’m still lost.”

He sat back, his expression not one of disappointment but of sympathy, his smile genuinely compassionate. “When you talk to your characters, to create a story, you remember the conversations, circumstances, all of that. You recreate it as you sit at your computer, typing it up, going back over it to edit it, smooth it, polish it with your skills as a wordsmythe.” His smile became a grin. “I always did enjoy the way that you brought back the old spelling. Lends a flair.

“Now,” he said, leaning forward again, “the situation is changed only a little bit. I’m being a character for you, at least for the purpose of your writing this book. This is the part of the story where we’re sharing breakfast, talking, working out how to get the book started. The difference is that you’re experiencing this as it happens, and you’re also writing the story at the same time. Does that make sense?”

“I was asleep during that particular class of temperospatial physics and relative transdimensional perception.”

“Which Doctor shall I be?”

“Dealer’s choice.”

He considered briefly, then shook his head. “Too many good companions to choose from. Try it this way. When you agreed to accept the job of writing the book, you instantly remembered every single word that you are now typing — except that you don’t really remember it until you write it.”

“So I’m living it, remembering it, and writing it all at once.”

“There you go. Got it.”

“What, exactly, have I got?”

“Your forepaw reaching for an egg-bacon-cheese mini-quiche, from what I can see.”

Another unresolvable riddle: Which came first — my action or his suggestion? Either way, I’m writing it down (or transcribing it), and I’m enjoying a spectacular example of why Real Wolves Do Eat Quiche. It was small enough that I might have enjoyed it in a single, large bite, but I let myself savor it in two bites, just for the flavor. Absolutely worth it.

“Okay,” I said being polite enough to chew my food properly, just to prove that I could. After all, I wasn’t raised by… oh, wait… never mind. “Let me work on this part. I’m experiencing this for the first time while I’m remembering that it happened.”

“Close enough.”

“And that’s supposed to make sense.”

“Not necessarily. However, if you use it as the basic premise, everything else will make sense. Remember those Monty Python routines?”

“I should have known you’d be a Python fan.”

“Don’t let that get around; John Cleese is insufferable enough, and certifying my existence, much less my appreciation, might tip him over the edge.” God munched a Krispy Kreme donut which, as impossible as it might seem otherwise, was still warm from the oven. He seemed to enjoy every bit of it, including the still-moist glaze getting into his muzzle fur. Catching my brainwave (how difficult could it be?), he said, “When you indulge in something, enjoy it fully. Where there is love, joy, genuine appreciation, there is great fulfillment of the soul.”

He raised a forepaw before I could pounce on the idea. “Finish the thought, Tristan.” When I looked slightly blank, he said, “Read back a few paragraphs.”

“Oh… yeah, we were talking about Python.”

Smiling, he continued, “The principle is the same. Once you accept that a man has paid to have an argument, the rest of the sketch proceeds from there.”

“So if I accept that I’m experiencing and remembering at the same time, everything else will make sense.”

“Got it in one.”

My tail wagged a little in acceptance of the praise, even as my brain tried to wrap itself around the concept. Parts of my body can react independently of my mind; it’s why I don’t play poker. I thought about this as I helped myself to a particularly juicy raspberry cream pastry; it gooshed quite satisfactorily when I bit into it, and I was particularly gratified that I didn’t have to panic over the carbs, just this once.

“Okay,” I said, slowly. “Where do we go from here?”

“Where did we go the first time you went through this?”

I knew he was going to say that. I mean, I literally knew he was going to say that, and you have no idea how irritating it is to know now, and yet to know then as well, that he was going to say that. I finished off the pastry with as much grace as I could muster, dabbed at my mouth with the napkin, and looked God squarely in the face. “Since I’ve already done all this before, there’s no way I can make a mistake; everything I say and do has already happened, so no matter where this conversation goes, it’s in its final shape.”

“Almost.” God smiled in a genuinely understanding way. “You can always edit, you know.”

“I can?”

“Remember the term ‘co-create’ that I used a little while ago? Of course you do, you’re typing it now.” He waved a forepaw apologetically. “Sorry, sorry; I’m abusing my power a bit. Let’s get back to the idea of co-creation. You and I are in a partnership here. We are both contributing bits and pieces of this reality together. For instance, you picked what we’re having for breakfast.”

“And you made it.”

“Well, we made it. The act of creation is mutual. Everything is created mutually, when you get down to it.”

“Everything?”

“Everything.”

I shook my head. “Bakery.”

God leaned back, shifted so that he could put his long legs up on the couch. He was barepawed. “I seem to be making this more complicated than it needs to be. Or perhaps we are, together. Let’s start with some fundamentals.” He raised a cautious finger. “I’d advise against a joke about Fundamentalists here. But you already knew that.” He leaned on one elbow so that he could still reach for goodies from our co-created smorgasbord. Resuming his kindly smile, he looked at me and asked, “What is God?”

“Meaning?”

“Give me a definition of God. There are many to choose from.”

“Way too many; that’s part of the problem.” I thought about it for a moment. Fundamental, basic, core. “Something like ‘God is love’?”

“That’s good,” he said. “I always did like that one. What else?”

“All-knowing, all-seeing, that kind of thing?”

“Much closer.” He grinned. “How about omnipresent?”

“Yes,” I agreed, “that’s a pretty basic notion.”

God helped himself to a slice of bacon. Noting my raised eyebrow, he said, “You can’t be sure this isn’t turkey bacon. Besides — the whole kosher thing? Interesting and, in some ways, practical, especially in times before reliable refrigeration. Kosher food laws, vegetarians, vegans, the no-carbs diet, the no-fats diet, the no-processed-sugar diet, the macrobiotic diet, the no-dairy diet, the intermittent fasting diet, the grapefruit diet… Do you see the parallel between diets and religions?”

“Diets are science-based rather than faith-based.”

“For the most part, yes; the power of the mind to convince itself that some new regimen or other is working can actually help make it work, too. What I meant, however, is that there is no Absolutely One And Only Diet for everyone who is living, has ever lived, or will ever live. Each body is different.” He again raised a forepaw, to set aside the train of thought. “We’ll talk about the nature of food, bodies, health, all that jazz, later. Right now, let’s get back to the idea of omnipresence.”

He adopted his best teaching face (on him, it worked). “If God is truly everywhere, truly omnipresent, then there is no place where he can’t be, right?”

I nibbled an apple-smoked British banger, realizing that it would be nearly zero-carb even after this day was done. “Right,” I acknowledged. (Note to self: Remember to look for bangers…) (Other note to self: Not that kind…)

“Then everything is God. Because if you had a piece of paper that wasn’t God, then God couldn’t be omnipresent. You can tell one piece of paper from another, because there’s a point where one piece of paper stops and another one starts — or where one piece of paper stops and right next to it is air, or a table, or your fingers or whatever. Makes me think of that movie, the one about quantum physics…” The God/bear snapped his fingers a few times. “Um… Marlee Matlin…?”

“What the Bleep Do We Know?” I supplied.

“You mean you don’t know either?”

As the smile curled at his lips, I countered, “No, that would be, How the Bleep Would I Know?”

We laughed together, enjoying the moment. I remembered what Josh said about laughter, and I could tell quite easily that he was telling the truth (as usual[[1]](#_ftn1)): Laughter is a great way to connect with God. He provided quite the belly laugh, both from his setting me up and from my swatting it right back at him. In moments of laughter, we reconnect to what is good, safe, and best about the world. Another possible definition of God, perhaps?

He managed to regain himself after a few seconds, saying, “Great films aside… for that matter, quantum physics aside, no matter how close it matches up with our conversation… If God is indeed omnipresent, God has to be the paper, the air, your fingers, everything, everywhere.”

I swallowed the bit of God I’d been chewing on, breathed God deeply and, as God, said, “So I’m God?”

“You, and the table, and Three Mile Island, and the snows on Kilimanjaro, and the decomposed remains of Ernest Hemmingway.”

“Hemmingway is gross enough without the remains bit.”

God frowned at me. “How did you get a PhD in Liberal Arts when you have that attitude toward Hemmingway?”

“By hook, crook, reasoned argument, diabolical dissertation, and other means of heresy. That, and I’m still trying to develop a taste for him.” Sighing, trying not to curse (yet again) the literature professor at my first university who soured me on Papa’s work, I looked around. “So why is everything separate? Why is Hemmingway separate from Chandler? Why did Auster even exist? No, wait; enough of the literary litany.” I drew another breath. “Why are you talking to me as if you’re God and I’m not?”

“Because that’s the way that most fursons think about God,” the bear said, smiling at me. “They want God to be something bigger than themselves — which, in a physically literal sense, God is — and also something outside of themselves, so that they can address that something, talk to it, blame it, worship it, ignore it, or whatever else they want to do. It’s just easier for them that way. Do you remember Descartes’ argument in favor of there being a God?”

“Mostly.” I thought back to my philosophy professor from years past and tried to recreate the memory of his instruction. “Descartes systematically doubted or mistrusted the existence of everything that he experienced until he reduced everything down to nothing but his own existence: ‘I think, therefore I am.’ From that point, he had to figure out how to be able to trust that the rest of the universe actually existed.

“Descartes had a concept of God — a concept which, as he put it, was so incredibly vast, so huge an idea, that he couldn’t possibly have thought it up himself. Since he didn’t think it up, then obviously God existed, too. Once he had that part of the puzzle, he decided that God was benevolent and wouldn’t want to trick him, therefore the rest of reality — which God created — really did exist.”

“Bravo,” God said smiling. “Dr. Cording would be proud of you. You know, you were the only person in that particular classroom who tried to challenge him as he walked everyone through that sequence.”

“I was the only one who was awake enough. He was a wonderful teacher, but it was an early morning class, and most of the students just needed a humanities credit. I was actually trying to learn something.”

God nodded. “You did well. For example, you know what solipsism is.”

I was going to look it up again, just to be sure that I remembered it properly, but God kindly popped the idea into my head, or my word processor, or whatever. “It’s the philosophic view that the self is the only thing that exists, or at least it’s the only thing that we can prove exists. That’s basically where Descartes was, at first.”

“That’s quite a place to be in, isn’t it? Imagine having to take responsibility for either being absolutely alone in the universe — not even having a universe! — or of having to manufacture everything in the universe. Quite daunting tasks. I wouldn’t have wanted to attempt it alone.”

I blinked again. “Big bakery.”

Sighing, a delicate frown crossing his face, God thought about how to phrase the explanation. “I know that popular legends all tell about how I created everything. The thing is that, if you mean the ‘me’ that you’re talking to, I didn’t create everything; we co-created everything.” He frowned a little. “That gets into omniscience, and that would take a while to get into… Okay, let me back up. This ‘me’ isn’t all of me. Remember, God is quite literally everything, so the ‘me’ that’s sitting here having breakfast with you is sort of like a representation of…”

God broke off, realizing that things weren’t going exactly as planned.

Okay, I hear you out there — or imagine that I do. How could this not go as planned? It had already happened, even as I am typing it! It gets back to that convention that I talked about earlier: In order to tell you the story of what happened, I’m going to have to take a few liberties with whatever flavor of reality you happen to be enjoying this week. At that moment of our conversation, God stopped, smiled at the once-again confused look on my face, and said, “Tell you what. We can talk about all of this as we go along. It might make more sense as we start looking at a few things that are happening in the universe — you know, places to go, fursons to see, or even non-sapients. We won’t leave the planet today, just to keep the territory familiar for you. We’ll share some experiences that will help illustrate the sort of things that I’m talking about.”

“You mean, some sort of great cosmic lesson about the meaning of the universe?”

“Sort of. Those are easy; you can find dozens of them every day — almost every hour.”

He held up his forepaw before I could make mention of the bakery yet again.

“Trust me on this one. Everything you ever wanted to know about God, but were afraid to ask, can be found in the simplest activities — working, playing, eating, breathing, making love, dreaming, singing, anything that you do with a focus on the truth.”

“The truth?” I sank back into the chair somehow feeling more confused than ever. “Do you have any idea how many varieties of the truth there are in the world? Everyone seems to have his own, and they so rarely match up. That’s why we have jealousy, envy, vengeance, murder, war, and a thousand other excuses for making ourselves think that We’re Right and They’re Wrong.”

God nodded. “That’s the popular conception. Let’s try that direction for a moment; maybe it’ll give us some leverage. I’ll play Socrates to see if I can get you there by asking you questions. Why, for example, do you say that there are so many varieties of truth?”

“Because everyone has his own truth.”

“And why is that?”

“Perception.” I indulged myself in a French toast bagel half, freshly toasted (don’t ask how; it was there, I’m telling you), applied a thick schmear of honey-walnut cream cheese, and took a moment to savor the indulgence. It occurred to me that the treat was something that I had taken for granted in my remote pre-diabetic youth, and I made myself really appreciate it in this unusual here-and-now. When I came up for air, I found God waiting patiently, his grin telling me that we were both enjoying the experience. We echoed one another’s appreciation for a bagel and cream cheese and, like laughter, it brought us closer together.

“I think you were saying something about perception?” he teased.

“Just so.” I was starting to enjoy this. “Everyone has his own perception of the universe, and each person thinks that his perception is the only one that’s true. It’s what remains of solipsism, whether we like it or not. The idea is reinforced by finding others who agree with you, and it becomes absolute or perhaps received truth. At the risk of being mean, that’s an idea you’re familiar with.”

“Ouch, and yes, tragically, you’re right.” He raised a sigh, shook his head a little. “There’s room for a whole chapter on that, too. Set it aside.” He sat up again, adjusting his clothing. “Your thesis is that truth depends upon perception?”

“Largely, yes — it’s the basis for James Burke’s series called The Day the Universe Changed. As Burke pointed out, what we know is based upon what we’ve learned, and then anything new that we learn becomes filtered through what we already know. We can’t learn something new without attaching it to something we already know, and because what we know makes expectations in us — the gestalt, the way we expect the universe to look — what we learn gets tainted or perhaps even altered by what we already know. When something utterly new gets discovered, usually by accident, it changes reality, meaning what it is that we consider to be reality.”

“Example?”

“The Earth is the center of the universe, with everything revolving around it.” I grinned. “We can be an extremely egotistical bunch, can’t we?”

The bear chuckled. “It looks that way, though, doesn’t it? The sun rises and sets, and the moon, and all of that. Easy to understand why the idea persisted as being the truth, in the sense of ‘the way things are’.”

“Although,” I waffled, “not everything is about perception alone. There is a sort of external truth. If it’s pouring down rain outside, then we can say without fear of being contradicted that it’s pouring down rain. We see the rain, we can feel it if we venture into it, the ground gets wet, dirt turns to mud, and so on and so on. That might be considered a kind of universal constant — the sort of truth that we all agree upon. It’s raining.”

“What if someone says it isn’t raining?”

“We prove to him that it is.”

“How?”

I shrugged. “We could toss him outside and let him get soaked. It’s not nice, but it’s certainly effective.”

“What if you toss him out into the rain, and he doesn’t get wet?”

My eyebrows attempted to ascend into my hairline. “Talk about trying to believe six impossible things before breakfast — or during it, at least.”

“Why is it impossible?” God asked. “Suppose someone could be absolutely convinced that it’s not raining — so much so that he can walk around in what you view to be a huge thunderstorm, yet he doesn’t get the slightest bit wet.”

“I find myself wanting to make some joke about letting a smile be your umbrella.”

“Same general concept.”

“Nope.” I shook my head. “Sorry, Socrates old boy, it’s just not on. There is an external reality that…” I broke off because God was grinning as if he was about to turn into a Cheshire cat. (He didn’t — not then, anyway. That was later.) “Okay,” I said, feeling as if Dr. Cording was grinning as well, the same way that he would when he could see someone struggling with a logical conundrum. My shifting fur and twitching ears were my worst “tell” in such situations. “I know that I’m onto something, but I couldn’t begin to tell you exactly what it is.”

“Point nobly conceded.” The grin eased off very slightly. “Start with what you were saying about an external reality.”

“Okay.” I felt poised to jump off a cliff into a comfy bed of sharp spikes. “In some philosophical spheres, the idea of ‘reality’ could be considered malleable. In order to allow the rest of the universe to exist, so to speak, the term ‘consensus reality’ is sometimes used, meaning the reality that most fursons agree upon.”

God clapped his forepaws together, which made a bigger noise than I was expecting. “Great start! Let’s examine that just a bit further. Tell me about some other things that are part of consensus reality.”

I considered for a moment. “Science is a rigorous examination of observed facts and replicable results. No one has ever been able to make a stone fall upward, for example. On Earth, objects fall at a rate of about 9.8 meters per second squared; barring variables like wind resistance, such as when you drop a feather, it’s pretty much the same everywhere on the planet.”

“So what you’re saying then is that fursons who see things the same way, time after time, are seeing reality.”

There’s the trap. “Touché,” I grinned. “That goes back to James Burke. It’s also a ‘win’ in the Science column, because data is gathered continuously, results are analyzed, hypotheses tested, and new information helps everyone better understand the world.”

“So reality is a consensus of enough fursons saying something is true?”

“Definitely not.” I tried not to grind my teeth, thinking of propaganda’s manipulation of the mind known as Big Lies. I put up a forefinger to emphasize the point. “Substantiation of verifiable facts makes something true.”

“Gotcha.”

I blinked. “You did?”

The bear laughed. “No, I mean that I follow your argument. What you’re telling me is that there is an external reality — like, the world is round — that is true even though fursons believed at one time that it was flat.”

“Right.”

“Very well, then.” God considered for a moment, then indulged himself in a small onion-laced meatball with apple-wood smoked cheddar cheese, wrapped in bacon. I decided this was a divine choice — yeah, okay, there are some jokes I won’t resist — and had one myself. “So the more that you discover about this reality that you’re talking about, and the more fursons who can replicate the discoveries about this reality, the more real it is. In other words, it doesn’t matter who believes it, it’s just plain real and that’s all there is to it.”

“That’s one word for it. You might also call it scientific truth, in that it has been proved through a methodical process of experimentation, replicated more or less without exception — meaning that the exceptions can be equally scientifically explained, and probably replicated — until we have what we refer to as reality or truth.”

“Gotcha.”

“I’m glad that you understand.”

“No, I mean ‘gotcha.’ The flaw in your argument.”

“Which is?”

“You equated reality with truth.”

---

[[1]](#ftnref1) (Note to self: Remember to mention that Josh never lied, although his biographers may have changed a few things. Future chapter.) _[Don’t worry; I won’t let you forget. —God]