"My client wishes to lodge a complaint about the Big Bang." I wanted some sort of an answer from him. "Maybe you can begin by giving me a few definitions-"

"No," he said. "Begin you. You define God."

"I can't."

"Come now." He used both his hands to brush back his hair. "Any God will do. Greek, Christian, Moslem, Hindu, Hebrew, African…"

"The only thing I've found," I began, stuffing my hands in my pockets and leaning back in the chair, "that is common to all the accounts I've read is that God is unknowable to varying degrees. That makes my search a bit difficult."

He peaked his fingers together like Basil Rathbone contemplating a crime. "Epistemological transcendence. Yes. Claiming to know that something cannot be known, ever. Claiming to possess the omniscience to know that something will never be known. Contradiction and conceit-the traits of a successful theologian. In my book, anyone stating that God is incomprehensible is merely confessing the specious nature of his own arguments."

Footsteps approached from the bedroom before I could respond, saving me from having to think of a snappy rejoinder.

A short, slender woman appeared, wrapped only in a large burgundy-hued bath towel. She gave Ann and me a quick glance with large, dark eyes. Her throat made pardon-me noises.

"Ted?" she said in a gentle voice.

"Raissa! Come in and meet Ann and Dell."

She entered the room with a fluid motion of her bare legs. From the silver-streaked raven hair that hung down to the nape of her neck, I guessed her to be somewhere in her early forties. That body told some fine lies, though. Her arms, legs, face, and hands displayed enough youth in them to say what needed to be said about the parts of her hidden beneath the towel.

Raissa smiled warmly at the two of us and maneuvered her way past to reach the study. A word processor whirred and clacked into life. Soft tapping of fingers against keys drifted into the living room.

Golding smiled.

"The greatest joy in my life and my highest value." From where he sat, he had a vantage on the study that we didn't. He watched her for a moment. "She gives great perceptual reaffirmation of my self-concept."

He shifted his attention back to me. "God is one of those words that has been bandied about into the realm of the meaningless. You can't define god any more than you can define love or freedom. Everyone has his own definition, right or wrong. With so many different interpretations of a term, the intellectual noise generated turn the words into nothing more than floating abstractions-words meant to conjure up an emotional image that's not concrete or identifiable." He stopped to smile at Ann and wink. "How'm I doing?"

"The gods that existed before the advent of Judeo-Christianity were far more concrete," she said.

"Yes," he agreed. "And they were denounced by later theologians for being too concrete, too easy to conceptualize. Who needed to pay a priest to communicate with such deities when an idol in the living room was sufficient to invoke the spirit?" He looked over into the study. "Raissa! Make us some coffee!"

"Fuck off, love-I'm on a hot streak." The word processor buzzed and clattered.

Golding smiled. I wondered whether the man ever frowned. I sniffed the air to check for the aroma of burning hemp.

"I guess I'll make the coffee." Golding went to the kitchen, sidestepping books and plaques all the way. He spoke over his shoulder.

"As with any type of fiction, Dell, suspension of disbelief is an absolute necessity in religion. Faith is the tool used to undermine reason and circumvent proof. Faith supposedly operates where reason is deficient. Shit!"

A coffee cup clattered to the floor. He stooped to pick it up. "Religion, like politics, cannot be defended as rational."

Ann smiled gently. "You put in a qualifier back there, Mr. Golding. About the older gods."

"Yes I did, Ann. And I'm about to get to that."

I stretched my feet out and sighed. I wasn't getting anything that I figured would be of use. I stood and walked into the kitchen, pulling a cigarette from the pack in my coat pocket. I had to ask him the question. Directly.

"Look, Golding." I lit up the coffin nail. "I just want to know one thing." I paused for dramatic effect and took a deep drag. "Whether He exists or not, a lot of people act as if He does. With that in mind, how can I kill God?"

The canister of coffee slipped from Golding's hands to thud against the parquet linoleum, spilling its grounds like jewels from a chest. I had finally succeeded in getting him to frown.

It was actually more of a scowl.

"How, precisely, do you plan to kill God? Poison? Drowning? High explosives? Magic?"

"That's what Ann thought you could help me with. I-"

Anger gathered in his gaze like a burning L.A. smog. "Kill something that doesn't exist? Kill a mere idea floating around in people's minds? I'm sorry if I seem insulted by your intrusion here. I don't have much time for cranks. You may have the coffee I promised you, then I'd like you to leave."

"Dell is serious," Ann said. "I thought that your experience-"

"That's rather the point," he snapped. "My experience. I've been fighting a battle against antihuman, antirational, anti-joy brutes for thirty years. The most I can show for it is a few thousand people who now aren't afraid to question their early conditioning. That's good, and I've made a living at it. Around the world, however, murder and plunder still thrive in the name of God. Look at what Ireland is doing to Ulster and vice versa. Look at what Israel and PanArabia are doing to one another. Look at the Church that gathers and hoards gold and art treasures while its adherents starve, that smugly states that `the poor are with us always' without admitting that there's such a thing as less poor and less-" He looked at Ann for a moment. The muscles in his face relaxed, though what remained was less anger than weariness.

"Do you think that, because I'm an atheist, I don't take God seriously? Do you think that a doctor doesn't take cancer seriously, simply because he thinks it has no place in human life?"

"Cancer exists," I said. "A doctor can find it. He can cut it away. He doesn't play word games to deny its existence."

Golding paused for a moment to consider my non sequitur. He smiled once more. Almost impishly.

"Many cancers are created by the mental attitudes of the victim. So it is with God." He tapped at the side of the coffee pot with fingernails immaculately maintained. "You want to know where the current God came from? The Judeo-Christian God evolved as a construct-as a political effort to accumulate church power and crush the followers of older, established religions by making the new God more powerful, more intrusive, more petulant, and more irrational than any previous god or goddess. The Levite priests of Israel brazenly copied religious concepts of the Aryans, the Sumerians, and dozens of other Indo-European races. The theft from the Romans and the Greeks was even more obvious-they just changed the names a bit. Jove became Je-ho-vah, Zeus became Ya-Zeus, the goddesses Ma and Rhea became Ma-ria."

That was too much. "Are you saying that the Jews adopted the religion of their enemies?"

"Can you think of a better way to co-opt your foes? Can you think of a better way to attract possible converts than to use their own symbols? How do you think the Christians co-opted the Jews and the pagans? Certainly not by offering a totally different religion to usurp its predecessors. They incorporated the old religions almost whole cloth while simultaneously stripping the symbols of their former meaning. The Babylonians still worship Ishtar? Substitute worship of the Virgin Mary. Egyptians believe that Osiris rose from the dead? Have Ya-Zeus do the same."