Love in Infant Monkeys by Lydia Millet (best feel good books .txt) 📕

the bushes and flew up and blam!—fell to Earth, like Bowie in that seventies movie. (Sternly to self: “Film.”) He was like Jesus in that. If Jesus was an alien. Which, let’s face it, he probably was. There was no other explanation. Huh: What if Christians were basically the UFOlogists of ancient history? And the Jews were the people who were the debunkers? They were like, “No, the Messiah hasn’t come, and if he has, where’s the proof?” Whereas the Christians were the ones who said, “Seriously, the aliens came down, and we saw them. Man, you’ve got to believe us!” Except there was only one of these aliens, namely Jesus.

Christians were hopeful, which made them basically insane. They were hopeful about the past. I.e., Christ = son of God, etc. Hopeful about the future. I.e., paradise will be ours, etc. And then the clincher: They figured this particular hope made them legitimate. They hoped they personally would be saved and live happily ever after—and then they had the chutzpah to call that faith. So like, faith was thinking you were great and deserved to sit at the right hand of God. Selfish much?

Jews were more like, Come on. Be reasonable. Here we are on Earth, now just try to be nice for five minutes, would you? Can we have five lousy minutes without a genocide? Sheesh.

Course Kabbalah was something else again. It wasn’t that you deserved to be saved, it was that God was in you. The power of the names of God, the seventy-two names inscribed in figures of light . . . what if the bird had tiny eggs in a nest somewhere? She had her own eggs, Lola and Rocco. This thing could be a mother too. Poor little thing. Birds were graceful. She wouldn’t look that good if someone shot her. Bad thought! Knock on wood. She reached out for a thin tree. Did a tree count as wood? I mean yeah, she knew that, but for luck purposes?

Actually, if she was shot in the right place, then well lit, she could look excellent. Kind of a martyr concept. Consider. If not shot, crucified. Good one there.

Now the eggs would die in the abandoned nest, forgotten. But maybe not, if this bird was a man. Rooster, that is. When it came to pheasants, they called them hens and roosters. (Good work, self.) Too bad she couldn’t tell. You couldn’t check between a bird’s legs like with a dog or a horse, nosirree. A male bird had nothing out there bobbing and dangling. Really no way to know. Unless you were, like, a bird-penis specialist. (Kidding, self.) The poor birds had no dicks. Their sex was in the plumage. Any idiot knew that. Different colors, she guessed, but then there were the young ones that all looked the same. Piece in the Mirror had recently called her “an accomplished breeder of pheasant and partridge”—good. Good. In the sense of manager, she managed the breeding. She didn’t sex the things personally—so what? She hired very good gamekeepers. Delegation was key.

She was chosen by God. That was what so many people seemed to completely overlook. What else explained her meteoric rise to stardom? Her continued success? For twenty years now she had basically been a megastar. Try the most famous person in the world, basically. They said her name in the same breath with Elvis and Marilyn. What, because she was pretty? Just because she could dance and had mastered a Casio? (Kidding, self, just kidding!) She had talent, even brilliance, even exceptional brilliance (“brill”—use in moderation), and nothing’s wrong with a Casio anyway. The eighties were the eighties.

But that alone would get you to the corner gas station. (“Petrol.” Good thinking.) True to her name, which was not even a fake one, she had been chosen. Chosen to embody.

Now and then someone, usually a crazed psycho, asked: “Are you the Second Coming?” Because that was what it looked like, if you were literal-minded. Like maybe she was the Mother of God, Mark II. She wouldn’t go that far, of course. There was a reason they called them psychos. But the kind of luck she’d had couldn’t really be called luck anymore. Luck was catching a bus, maybe winning a raffle. Luck was a good parking spot.

You had to keep this kind of knowledge under wraps, though, as a celebrity. You had to keep it a secret between yourself and yourself or you would end up a Tom Cruise. Believing the sun shone out of your sphincter, beaming with the smugness of an All-Knowing Colon.

When all you were, at the end of the day, was a highly paid face.

But she got him, basically, the whole Scientology thing. Not her “cup of tea” (good work, self!) but what the media didn’t get, when they made fun of her and Guy for Kabbalah, or Gere for his Dalai Lama or Cruise for his pyramid scheme or whatever the Dianetics thing was, was that you needed to worship too. The fans worshipped you because they needed something—well, what were you supposed to do? Well, prostrate yourself before the Infinite. Clearly.

OK, granted, sometimes the mirror suggested it: Not your fault if your reflection reminded you of all that was sacred, all that was divine and holy. The world would do it to you. At that point you were the victim. Brainwashing, like with anorexics. Too many magazine covers. But she resisted. She was actually very humble. And of course, it was not wrong to see God in yourself. Anyone could do it. That was where the intellectual part came in. She read the holy books, she read old plays and that . . . it helped her, as an artist, to be extremely intelligent. Besides being a savvy businesswoman—she got that a lot, and rightly—and even a genius at the marketing level, she was a seeker. A seeker never gives up.

She was pretty sure