Ernesto Pecado woke up one Sunday afternoon claiming that God had visited him in his sleep.
“You’re hungover again,” said his wife Elena, who had already been to church and back.
“¡De veras!” he insisted, “the Lord spoke to me.”
“And what did he say?”
“He ordered me to create a spreadsheet.”
“You’re not hungover,” she corrected. “You’re still drunk.”
“Just help me with the computer, vieja!”
The Pecados didn’t have a laptop to quickly snap open for convenience. They were still using an unsupported PC from the early aughts with a computer tower the size of an old suitcase. Ernesto waited five minutes for the computer to boot, then added another five minutes of his own locating the correct application, which was outdated. As the program struggled to open, Ernesto could still hear God’s booming voice echoing in his tiny head. Set the font type to Arial and the font size to eleven. Make sure it is password protected, then add a filter for these three column headers in bold: Number One, Number Two, and Number Three. It took Ernesto two hours, but he did as God commanded, then saved the file as God.xls, which was an incompatible file extension.
“Now what?” asked Elena.
“Now we wait.”
“You’re not drunk,” she said. “You’re crazy.”
That night, God showed up in Ernesto’s dreams again.
“Ernesto, I want you to track your bathroom activity in the divine data table. Record the date and time of every visit and whether it’s number one, number two, or number three.”
“Number three?” asked Ernesto.
“Chorro.”
Ernesto was surprised. “You speak Spanish?”
“I’m God, puto. And don’t forget to set a filter for the column headers.”
“I don’t know how.”
“GOOGLE IT!” commanded God. “This is the word of the Lord.”
The next day Ernesto told Elena and she said “You’re not crazy. You’re an idiot.” But Ernesto did exactly as God commanded and for a month he kept track of his daily evacuations in the holy spreadsheet. One afternoon, Elena looked over his shoulder and commented on the data: “That’s a lot of threes.”
Ernesto fumbled with the mouse before collapsing the window. “It’s your cooking, vieja!”
“It’s your drinking, borracho!” Elena flounced out of the room and God’s voice floated in. “Ernesto, why are you using two different fonts?”
“I don’t know. It just switched to Calibri.”
“It doesn’t just switch!” snapped God. “You changed it. Now make it all Ariel.”
Ernesto started highlighting the data cell-by-cell and God’s voice thundered down on him: “USE CONTROL A!”
A month went by and Ernesto continued following God’s orders, but he started falsifying data, counting the number threes as regular number twos. One starry night Ernesto was drinking alone on the back patio and God confronted him. “Why are you fudging the numbers? Or should I say un-fudging the numbers, if you know what I mean.”
“Sabes que, God?” Ernesto was full of more liquid courage than usual that night. “I don’t think you’re God.”
“Come again?”
“You said puto one time and now you’re making diarrhea jokes. God wouldn’t do that.”
“Why are you avoiding my question?”
“I think you’re really the Devil pretending to be God.”
“I can’t believe this. I once asked a guy to build a colossal ark with his bare hands and fill it with like a billion living creatures and enough snacks for forty days and forty nights and we had zero problems. You can’t even build a simple spreadsheet.”
“Maybe I’m not smart enough.”
“Noah was no smarter than you, Ernesto. Kind of a tonto, really. He actually asked me if he should include ocean life on the ark. Can you believe that tontería?”
“Noah was saving the planet! I’m tracking kaka!”
Elena heard Ernesto yelling and joined him on the patio.
“I was wrong,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re not crazy. You’re from another planet.”
“I was talking to God.”
“Ernesto, you gotta stop this crazy talk. You gotta start going to church again.”
“Church? I got God right here!”
“Where? In that bottle? ¡Es el diablo!” She stormed back inside and slammed the door behind her.
Ernesto took another drink and grumbled to himself, “Church is for mentacatos.” He looked up at the stars and waited to hear God’s voice again but it didn’t return until later that night in a strange dream: Ernesto was walking on a beach with God and watching scenes from his life on God’s Netflix account. For most of the scenes, God and Ernesto left two sets of footprints in the sand, but some of the scenes only had one set, and they were during the shittiest times of his life.
“Yo, G-man,” said Ernesto in a strange voice, “I thought you had my back.”
“Why are you talking like your pocho nephew David?”
“‘Cause it’s my dream.”
“Fair enough.”
“So what’s up, foo’? Shit gets real and you bail on my ass?”
“I didn’t bail. That’s when I carried you.”
“Bullshit. I don’t remember being carried. I woulda remembered something like that.”
“You’re right,” said God stroking his white ZZ Top beard. “That musta been when I was gliding. The Lord doesn’t always walk. Sometimes he glides.”
“Just admit it, G. You punked out on me.”
“Okay, guilty as charged.”
“I knew it!”
“‘But I only left you hanging because I was testing you.”
“Yeah right.”
“No really. You know I work in mysterious ways. Life’s a beach and sometimes you get sand kicked in your face, so I wanted you to stand firm. As it says in Romans: there is glory in your sufferings, for it produces perseverance and character, and a hope which does not put you to shame because my love has been poured out into your heart through the Holy Spirit.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I dunno, man. My book is so old and outdated.”
“Why don’t you write another one?”
“Because print is dead.”
“Amen. I wrote a blog called Hispanicdotes and nobody read it.”
“I know. That was one of the times I abandoned you.”
“So how did you get people to read your book after you wrote it?”
“First of all, I didn’t write it. I had a bunch of ghostwriters. And secondly, it was a different industry back then. We didn’t have book tours or the internet to push it. We relied on good old fashioned word of mouth.”
“So maybe I’ll get some delayed word of mouth on my blog?”
“I wouldn’t count on it.”
Ernesto sighed with defeat and The Lord continued: “I better get back upstairs before somebody yells at me for tearing up this beach with my enormous footprints.”
“I was gonna say. What’s your shoe size?”
“Like 8,000… 8,000 ½, depending on the make of the sandal.”
“Crazy. Hey, before you go, I got one question.”
“The answer is yes, ‘Neto. You have to keep updating the spreadsheet.”
“Aw, come on! What’s the point?”
“There is no point, goddamn it. That’s the point.”
“Wow. You just used your own name in vain.”
“I’m God. It’s like using the n-word.”
“Okay, so how do I get out of this?”
“Easy: start going to church again. Your wife deserves more than a drunk for a husband.” Ernesto watched as God ascended to the Heavens.
The following Sunday morning Ernesto woke up hungover and told Elena he would go to church with her. After using the restroom, he opened the sacred document, added his final number three, and clicked Save.