The phone rang and a bird hit my window at full speed. It struck the plate-glass with a sharp thud; it could have been a rock. I went to answer the phone. “Dude, Road Trip” Scott said. How do people always know it’s me on the phone? “What?” “Dude, Road Trip” he repeated persistently. “Hang on man, this bird, like, crushed itself on my window” I opened the sliding glass door. I’m not much of a bird person. “Shit, I think its dead.” I’m not much of a death person either. It was your average bird, not like a crow or anything, just a bird, but very small. As I listened to the voice on the phone tell me about a brother in So-Cal who has a room we could use, the bird began to twitch. “Shit,” I repeated.

Do birds have weird diseases? I’m not about to actually touch this thing. As I scooped it up with the sheet of paper out of the printer, the bird regained consciousness. With its little black eyes and it looked at me like “Am I Dead? Are You God?” I tried to adopt an omniscient quality about me as I held the paper in one hand and the phone in the other. I’ve never been really good at the whole hold-the-phone-with-your-shoulder move; I must have a long neck or something, like a giraffe. So this bird is standing there and it jerks its head and then freaks out. It jumps off the paper and flies away in a frenzy, winging out towards the rising sun. “Hey man,” I yell after it, “ I’m God, remember?” “What?” Scott wants to know. “Nothing, stupid bird’s an atheist.”

My Girlfriend is a thief. She is really neither a thief nor my girlfriend, thought I guess she technically qualifies as both. I still have a hard time believing that stuff that you are supposed to pay for is so easy to just take. She explained patiently, “you go in all innocent, then when no one’s watching you just put anything you want in your purse. I mean I want the stuff most of the time; I just don’t want to pay for it. Other times, I just get carried away. “ Our relationship was surprisingly similar. She didn’t want a boyfriend but I’m too busy watching her rub her nose, something about how it just wasn’t real enough in high school. It was fine with me, I don’t know how many guys are really into the idea either at that point. Then things started disappearing, abstract ideas of innocence first then lastly and most noticeably my very prudence, taken bit-by-bit and smuggled out in a Louis Vuitton.

Then she stopped calling. I guess she just got carried away. I hate her.

I don’t know why this was going through my mind on that Saturday morning in early spring. I guess I was still burned about being not really dumped by my not really girlfriend. At the beginning of spring break I intended to take the both words very literally. Derek, our host, was a senior at Redlands University. He bore a striking resemblance to what I had always considered Jesus to look like. “Dude, count me in” I said.

The next day we packed up my carmine convertible and drove off down California 1. Hendrix howled out of the open top as the champagne rays of the morning sun broke across our bow.

Trying to find anything smaller than large mountain ranges using a 1973 map of the western United States is a challenge, forget about midsized cities. We finally got into Redlands around 7:00 p.m. and as I pulled up in front of the dorm, someone threw a TV out of a third story window. It hit the ground with a delicious metallic crunch. There was guy standing on the sidewalk in front of the dorm who was apparently supposed to catch the TV - this was Derek’s roommate. We greeted him with “Hey” and gazed skyward to the window the TV had originated from. A huge shaggy head with shoulder length brown hair and a full beard emerged. “Holy Shit!” Derek yelled, “Come on up!”

His dorm room was larger than others I’d seen before. In the middle of the floor was a fish tank that contained three fish. They weren’t special fish like clownfish, just fish but kind of small. We walked maybe a block around the corner and went into this cafeteria thing. Derek told us to order whatever we want because he had like lots of money on his card. So we got a table and he comes out with like five smoothies under his shirt. Everyone’s a thief, even Jesus.

It’s strange how some things happen and the camera in your head gets turned way down so it’s like watching an old movie where the frames are all distorted. All the sound is real but the images are like they’ve been left out in the sun all day. It’s the next evening, around dinnertime. One second this haggard waitress at an Italian place is joking with Derek about trimming his beard for him and then snap. She gets this look like all of her hair was pulled up in the back, real surprised looking with the eyebrows up. Then her head snaps back and she drops the little order book. Just kind of sprawled out sideways and nothing, emptiness. I knew she was dead. The way she hit the concrete floor, just out, gone. Ambulances came; people said it was a stroke. Just like snapping your fingers, gone.

We left the next morning. No one said much, just got in the car and drove north. At a rest stop around Stanislaus I caved in and called my thief. Why are people sorry for me? I’m not the one who died. I’m God, remember?