I remember the night I met God. She was living in a rent-stabilized apartment on 76^th Street just east of Amsterdam. I was delivering a DVD for the last store in Manhattan that still rented the damn things. It wasn’t much of a job, with crappy pay to be honest, and no benefits, but I was back in school and you did get to meet all sorts of interesting people in the city. You don’t know what melting pot really means until you deliver a box set of Tarantino to some downtown dive at three in the morning. I suppose I could have delivered pizzas just as easily, and at a more normal time of day, but then I never would have gotten to meet God. As it turns out, she’s lactose intolerant.

“Thank you,” she said, taking the delivery bag and ushering me inside the dimly lit apartment. “Give me a minute to get my purse.”           

She disappeared into a bedroom while I waited in the foyer. She did have a really nice place that would have cost someone like me who hadn’t been living on the Upper West Side forever a couple of million. Large living room, two full bedrooms, dining room she could have used as a third if she hadn’t always lived alone. An antique bureau in the dining room with a bunch of pictures of family scattered atop, someone’s family, certainly not Adam, Eve, Noah, Moses or anyone like that. A Steinway baby grand by the window of the living room with a nice view north to 77^th Street and beyond.

She came out with a ten-dollar bill in hand. In the yellow light from a dining room candle, she looked a lot like my Aunt Evelyn, my father’s sister who lives in Austin and I get to see once a year at some holiday gathering. Her hair was long and thick and graying blonde, sprawling across the purple shawl that covered her shoulders. Her eyes were light green and warm. She looked tired. I looked past her to the piano.

“You play jazz keyboard for a group that tours northern New Jersey,” she declared.

“Did Carl tell you that?”

Carl was the clown prince of Mega DVD World and no information was safe around him.

“No, just a guess.”

Whatever, I thought. It was past midnight and I had four more hours on my shift. I wasn’t going to dwell one more second on this mystery, at least until I saw Carl in ten minutes, any more than I would linger on any other question one might think of pedaling Manhattan streets in the wee hours. Why anyone needed Tarantino delivered, why our store had survived cable and downloads, why my student loans had been cut, why my parents weren’t rich.

I began counting out change. “Do you play?” I asked.

“No, I keep it for Liberace to bang on when he’s up here visiting,” she said.

I was too young to have really understood how Liberace and piano had been synonymous for many people at one time. I’d heard the name though and seen the outfits.

I went there two or three times with assorted movies before she started performing a few minor miracles.

“I don’t want to freak you out, Jonathan,” she said in the doorway on one visit. “But every once in awhile, I do come clean with someone. Different people react differently.”

She made the apartment reverse itself so we were out in the snowy evening looking in on her empty apartment. Another time she turned her apartment into Mega DVD World and had the two of us floating in the air while Carl passed out in front of us. It freaked me out of course. I suppose I could have traded routes with Slow Joe but I never did. I was there once a week, always on a Thursday night, and gave myself a lot of credit for keeping up with my schoolwork and not losing my mind. I guess you could call it faith. I was left wondering if I had really only tried acid twice and how I might go about either handsomely profiting from my discovery, saving the world, or, in the most hopeful of miracles, doing both.

It was around my tenth visit or so, with everything Scorcese had ever directed in my knapsack, that I really came to believe that I hadn’t encountered David Blaine in drag. I told her so.

“That’s sweet, Jonathan. It’s nice to be credible.”

“It makes me feel bad about all the things my father used to say about the Reverend Falwell, may he rest in peace,” I said.

“A little trade secret,” she said, leaning forward. “Everyone does.”

“Everyone does what?”

“Rests in peace.”

“Yeah, sure, I know,” I said. “But when that guy came out on the tube and said he spoke with God, my father got so angry and called him a hallucinatory hater.”

“Falwell, Falwell, Falwell,” she repeated, staring blankly at the window. “Oh yes!” she exclaimed with sudden recognition. “That wasn’t me,” she continued softly with a smile. “It was only his toothbrush. But who am I to judge?”

One night, a particularly brutal January winter evening when the other millions of New Yorkers were smart enough to stay inside, I fought the blinding snow as I cruised up Broadway. Carl had insisted on staying open even though Mariella’s Pizza next door had closed and they had stayed open through 9/11, the 2003 blackout and Hurricane Sandy. I didn’t even bother locking my shitty bike at the usual No Parking sign on 76^th and wished good luck to any idiot out thieving that night. I could barely feel my face beneath my scarf or my hands inside my gray woolen mittens as the night doorman José opened the door wide and helped me inside.

“Praise God,” José said, brushing the snow from the back of my jacket.

Poor José clearly had absolutely no clue who lived up in 11A. He told me he would watch my bike and hit the elevator button for me. I stared at my reflection in the brass mirrors on each of the elevator walls and then down at Woody Allen’s Bananas. I realized that meeting God hadn’t changed a thing for me.

She had the door at the end of the hall open for me as I stepped off the elevator and a cup of steaming hot cocoa.

“This is no night to be out delivering movies,” she said.

“You called the store!”

“I did, didn’t I?” She removed my snow-covered jacket and hung it up on a hat rack. “Well, I certainly wouldn’t let anything bad happen.”

“So you say.”

“Another doubter. Take a number.”

She seemed to amuse herself but I was happy just for the cocoa. It was rich with chocolate, the best I’d ever tasted, even if I did not seem any wiser or surge with sudden awesome strength. This was the most time I’d ever spent with God.

“I’ve been thinking of moving,” she said, breaking an awkward pause. Every pause with God in the room had been awkward for me.

“I figure you could live anywhere you want.”

“True.”           

“And be everywhere at once.”

She walked over to the window and put her hand right through the glass, retrieving a handful of snow that she pressed against her lips. “I’ve really liked this apartment. I love the neighborhood. I don’t get out as much as I used to. That’s how I met you, after all.”

The idea of God aging was against everything I’d ever thought about. Most of my years since middle school I had been somewhat of a non-believer to say the least. I never would have thought that there was a God and that she was tired or bored or both.

“I’ve long admired the creativity of religion,” she said. “I know I could always have done something really awesome, something so spectacular that even fanatics would be impressed. But I didn’t want to believe I had to.”

Clearly, God had a sense of humor. Just like my parents had said.

“I just thought eventually they would get it together,” she said sadly.

I reflected on many thousands of years of war and death and the undeniable truth that only the numbers and diversity of both had changed. It was clear that God was depressed, clinical.

“Where would you go?” I asked, trying my best to cheer her up. “You love it here. José, the video store, Central Park, Zabar’s.”          

“I know, I know,” she acknowledged. “It’s not like I don’t love the Midwest either, those folks and their love for me and the country even if they get a little confused on which is which sometimes. And those Europeans, and the wonderful Asians, everybody is just so…..special.”

I thought about leaving. Carl would be mad at me anyway even if no one but God was renting a movie in this horrendous storm.

“I’m not about to tell God where to go,” I told her.

“The truth is that I’ve enjoyed our time together,” she said. “Better than most. And I’m not leaving yet, don’t worry. I have a very good deal here, believe me. But at this point, you and I are going to need a confidentiality agreement.”

Wow, where did that come from? My mother had always told me that I had a face anyone could trust. But apparently Mom was wrong. I preferred to think of the bright side, that maybe after all the pretty stupendous magic tricks and candid conversations we were going to get down to some important things. Save a few lives kind of stuff. I was excited.

“Do we have to sign something? Like, do I need to get a lawyer?”  

“No, I don’t think that will be necessary. A simple handshake agreement has always seemed to work.”

She extended her hand and I shook the hand of God.

“Wait, I don’t understand. All those other people. The ones who’ve talked to you routinely. Did you shake hands with them on this agreement?”

“Of course not. Anyone I’ve come to terms with hasn’t gone public. I’ve never even met those other folks.”

“Makes sense.”

“It’s not like I’m going to sue you or anything,” she said.

She handed me my jacket and walked me to the elevator. My bike was still there and the snow had built up on the street, making even a diehard bicyclist like me choose to walk his bike. I turned to look back at the apartment eleven floors up over 76^th Street but all I could see was the sun blazing away inside the apartment.

Nice trick, lady.

– Peter Brav