“Never mind the sulfur,” Rosette said, leaning hard on the horn. “Aye! Puta! I’ll fry your ass in a rusty pan!” She slammed on the brakes and flung her arm across Karen’s chest as though this alone would prevent her large body from hurtling through the windshield. It was the most maternal of gestures. The seat belt could barely contain the wild beating of Karen’s heart.
“People in this city are crazy. They think we can read minds. Turn left whenever you want but don’t signal to the other drivers. Lord have mercy…”
“I’m hungry, Rose.” Karen had said this three times already. They had been her first words when Rosette had arrived in Mr. Cox’s big silver Lincoln Town Car at Dennis’s address. Mr. Cox was asleep in the back seat. “We could stop at McDonald’s but I’ll have to pay you back,” Karen suggested.
“You can eat at Last Kingdom,” Rosette said. “I made my mother’s octopus stew. The best in the world.”
They arrived at the shopping center around nine o’clock at night. All the stores were closed for the holiday, their windows papered with purple and gold banners advertising their grim sales. BUY NOW—BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE! Rosette unlocked a glass door that led to a staircase filled with a plasticky, chemical scent. The walls were a pale gray bearing perfect squares of a clean, lighter shade of paint where pictures had once hung, the ghostly reminders of vacated businesses. Even those that had remained in these sad office suites were halfhearted operations—a party rental company that was in actuality a front for Mafia interests; the headquarters of a nearly bankrupt, poorly attended French Canadian film festival; and the Last Kingdom on Earth Parish.
The music of Last Kingdom could be heard all the way down the hall. It was an office space like all the others, furnished only with what the previous occupants had left behind, half a dozen high-backed, rolling office chairs and a conference table pushed against the far wall, lined with aluminum foil trays of food. Only the elderly were seated. They rocked back and forth in the wobbly chairs as the music washed over their subdued faces. Everyone else was standing barefoot. Rosette removed Mr. Cox’s and her shoes at the entrance and Karen did the same.
“We stand a long time. Hours and hours,” Rosette explained. “It’s hard on the feet. No shoes is better. Let the body balance the way it is designed to.” She plopped Mr. Cox down in a chair but he immediately stood up, his chest full and proud.
“I’ll be fine sitting on the floor,” Karen said.
“No. We are greeting our Maker standing.”
Karen angled toward the food table, but it was blocked by three guitarists blasting a long, improvisational song. The faithful numbered close to thirty people, exiles from the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the stragglers they’d collected along the way. The music was loud and electric and seemed to have no beginning and no end.
Everyone was talking at the same time.
“…I am so grate-ful! I am so grate-ful! I am so…”
“…and you knew. You knew exactly what you were doing. You left me alone with wolves. I was a child—a friggin’ child…”
“…pleine de grâce. Le Seigneur est avec vous…”
“…hold me, hold me, never let me go until you’ve told me, told me…”
“…and a dishwasher and a mudroom and a fireplace and central air…”
“…two three four five six seven eight nine ten one two three four five…”
“…Doug can burn in a fire. Amber can explode. Shep—actually Shep’s whole family—they should be eaten alive by lions. No, by maggots…”
“…that’s an insult to wolves. Wolves are ten thousand times kinder than the monsters you…”
Whatever came to their minds, whatever moved their spirits. Theirs was a faith uncluttered by mytho-historical characters and poorly translated verse. It left a lot to the imagination. It got very personal. The true language of God was spontaneous and perishable, they believed; recitations by rote were another faulty life-preserver in the floods of deception. Or so they assumed. Alfred had never actually told them any of this, but he’d implied it.
“Can anyone hear each other?” Karen asked Rosette.
For no reason she could discern, a man at the center of the rabble lifted his arms up in supplication. His long fingers reached all the way to the drop ceiling.
“Yes or no, oui ou non, sí o no, sim ou não…”
The lead guitarist ripped a lawless, boiling lick, nodding his head as if in response.
“Pastor Alfred,” Rosette said, nudging Karen. The supplicating man was almost as broad as he was tall. For years he’d tried to make himself fit into the small enclave of Haitian immigrants in Boston, a place that felt no more his rightful home than Haiti had, and so, he’d decided, home must be a notion that simply did not exist in this world. What he’d found instead was a people so battered by weather and addiction, fear and pride, that the sheer pragmatism of Armageddon made perfect sense. Exhaustion was the best motivator, and so they all decided to stand until they dropped.
It was a tenet of this new church that the drama of the coming apocalypse not overshadow its message of surrender. Alfred tried, in his passive, lazy way, to discourage discussions of fire and nuclear winter, horsemen and demons. They were beside the point. Passion needed to be conserved for the awe and splendor of whatever was coming, and though Alfred did not purport to know anything for sure, he mused aloud that histrionics would probably irritate the Supreme Being burdened with such a brutally complete task of search and destroy.
“Chill,” he urged his parishioners when they lapsed again and again into talk of blood-black rivers and fire in the skies.
They came every Monday and Wednesday night for lectures, stream-of-consciousness rants from Alfred that expounded on the finer points of his utilitarian hopelessness. He had few concrete ideas himself, which allowed his congregants to come up with the details, approved by a simple majority vote. Thursday nights were for meditation, a practice in which members stood in two rows facing each other and stared, eyes wide open, into the eyes opposite them for a full ten minutes, then they switched, square-dance style, to a new partner, until everyone in the fold had been “seen” by everyone else. Friday nights were for cooking and resting in preparation for Saturday, when, at sundown, their weekly vigil for the end began. It was a twenty-four-hour ritual, with members coming and going, though most stayed for the entire saga, joint pain be damned.
Karen watched the whole circus in amazement. While not in their Sunday best, most folks looked as if they’d put thought into their clothing. They stood and swayed, hollering their prayers to and at each other and whatever God they hoped was listening. There were no Bibles at the Last Kingdom. No hymnals or pamphlets. The word of God could not be trusted coming from man, Alfred had warned them repeatedly. That this included him was a fact he fully acknowledged.
“This happens to be where I am waiting for deliverance,” he said, as though he had heard Karen’s thoughts and was responding in kind. “Don’t mean you have to wait here, too.”
A pretty young Korean woman in a floral, grandmotherly dress started jumping up and down. “I am so grate-ful! I am so grate-ful. I am so gra-a-a-a-te-FUL!” she sang in an almost petulant, schoolyard tune. “How can I say thanks for all that you have done for me? All this life we don’t deserve! Lord, take it away from me!”
“It was never ours to begin with,” the pastor said in a natural tone of voice. Sweat pooled in the thick folds of skin at the back of his neck. Despite the heat, Alfred wore a brown wool suit. A white man with hairy knuckles removed a handkerchief from his suit pocket and dabbed the pastor’s neck with it.
“Thanks, brother,” Alfred said.
“Don’t mention it, Al,” the hairy man brayed.
It was an unusually diverse crowd for Boston. There were a decent number of nations represented, considering the size of the sample. The lead and rhythm gui
tarists were brothers, Adiel and Anildo, Cape Verdean high school students wearing thin neckties and crisp, collared shirts tucked into their sagging jeans. They would have joined Last Kingdom even if their parents hadn’t belonged, such was their sweet fatalistic fervor. They liked the idea that nothing mattered but God, as the majority of stuff in their life—their grades, their skin, their sex prospects—was so unruly and frustrating, the source of all their pain. The message they gleaned from this new religion—forget it all!—met the paradoxical needs of their adolescence: to feel both totally powerful and completely taken care of at the same time.
The pastor rewarded their commitment by giving them free musical rein on Saturdays. Their bassist, Nate, was a white boy with shoulder-length hair and a nose that looked broken too long ago to be fixed. After nineteen years, his life felt long enough. The maintenance manager of this office complex, he lived in a squalid apartment with two disrespectful roommates he’d met online, and he worked long hours to pay for this tiny scrap of undignified freedom. Until he’d befriended Adiel and Anildo and joined the fold, he had been on the verge of suicide.
The three of them stood together at the edge of the crowd, playing shifting melodies that swelled with feeling, then drew back.
“I really friggin’ hope God sees us, sees our love and devotion,” shouted Moira, a deliriously smiling white lady. In her early fifties, she was decked out in black jeans and a black sweatshirt that had been cropped at the waist and the neck, exposing the tanned, very wrinkled skin of her shoulder, where a wobbly, amateurish shamrock had been tattooed a long time ago. Moira held her hands over the eyes of a small girl, Shayla, standing by her side. Shayla had dressed herself in boyish hand-me-down gym shorts and white athletic socks that were scrunched up at her slim ankles. New breasts pushed disconcertingly into the billowing, man-sized T-shirt she’d chosen to hide them in. Moira guarded her fiercely.
“Can God see us?” Moira was crying now. “We are giving Him friggin’ everything.”
Alfred folded his hands over his stomach. At heart he was an antinomian. Good works, he believed, were just another currency in the bankrupt economies of human faith, a way for man to barter his way into salvation. The greatest sin, the only sin, Alfred believed, was trying to make a mystery make sense. But he didn’t want to be dogmatic about any of this. If his followers got the finer points, great. If those parts were lost on them, well, that’s just how things go. They liked to take his words letter by letter. It was what they were used to doing and he had no delusion about breaking their habits in this lifetime, not with the deadline of a looming apocalypse ahead. That’s why he tried to say as little as he could get away with. It was easier to let them make their own meaning. And anyway, half the time he couldn’t remember what he preached from one day to the next. There were wild inconsistencies in his sermons, he was sure, which worked toward the ultimate good. It gave everyone less to hold on to.
But they wanted an answer and they wanted it now. He’d already forgotten the question.
It hurts to love you so much, he wanted to tell them.
“It’s a shot in the dark,” he said.
Rosette grabbed Karen’s hand, kissed it, and held it enjoined with hers in the air.
They went on like this for hours, straight through the midnight hour, when the Great Hush of Last Day unfurled across the Eastern Standard Time zone. House lights switched off, restaurants got dark. Voices everywhere reduced to a whisper, uttering only the sibilant command, “Shhhhh, shut that off, shut up, shhhhhh.” Light withdrew in stutters and voices darkened to shadows. People mouthed their last words, voiceless confessions offered up for the sky to swallow. They muted their kisses, softened their breaths, paused the music and the dancing, ceased their chewing, drinking, urinating, lovemaking.
“Lacrimosa dies illa
Qua resurget ex favi—”
At Symphony Hall, the conductor dropped his arms and all the musicians and singers stopped. They sat and waited.
Up and down the eastern seaboard, radio frequencies did not so much mute as morph into an otherworldly buzz, the hiss of cosmic inhalation, a slow, deliberate breath measured one time zone at a time. TVs still blared their regularly scheduled commercials, though a few stations offered a quiet, though not entirely silent, thirty-second spot of holiday greeting at the midnight hour. In New York’s Grand Central Station, only the four clocks, hidden behind its garish holiday flags, could be heard ticking. Even the vagrants, the ones who were awake, knew to hold their tongue.
The sound of cars on highways swam in their ceaseless current. In just a moment, the lights would stutter back on. Voices would return to their normal levels. Some would scream their way out of the silence, howling and whistling like a victory had been won. In São Paulo, Atlanta, Brooklyn, and Belize, men on rooftops would shoot guns into the air. Throngs in Times Square would cheer and throw their hats, their cups, their lighters, whatever they had in their hands, into the blind, invisible sky.
But not yet. For this moment, all was quiet, dark, and still.
Time twitched and the bottomless stars grew brighter.
Outside the window of the Last Kingdom office parish, the lights of the parking lot went on a timed hiatus. The wind pushed trash across the pavement. For sixty seconds all was dim. Inside, however, the band played on. Last Kingdom did not recognize holidays, Christian or secular, and so at the stroke of midnight on the Last Day the congregants continued to hold forth and wail at and with each other. Then it was over. The lights of the parking lot came back on.
Karen had many times tried to witness the Great Hush of Last Day but was foiled year after year by her meds, which knocked her out into an almost vegetative state not long after dinner. Now her eyes strained to see what, if anything, was happening around her that was different or special. In the ceiling just above the window a stain like spilled coffee flowered outward from the corner of the room. Karen’s eyes, tired from straining, lost focus, until she saw in the perforated drop ceiling a face emerge. Smiling and blotchy, it pushed itself out of the ceiling stain, taking shape in three dimensions, until Karen saw—she swore she was seeing, swore on her heart, on Nora’s heart, on the hearts of all the kittens in the world—the tiny, hovering face of an angel.
“Do you see her?” Karen asked Rosette, who was still holding Karen’s upraised hand in hers. “She looks like Glinda the Good Witch. Do you remember her?” Karen pointed at the ceiling.
“Oh, my sweet girl. Sweet, sweet, crazy, crazy girl.”
“No. Look, Rose. There she is. Tell me you don’t see her.”
Rosette shook her head. “It’s time to eat,” she called out, and Pastor Alfred threw his arms in the air and shouted, “Amen!”
The musicians unplugged their instruments and sat on the carpet along with everyone else. An assembly line of women formed to plate and deliver food to each parishioner. A bowl of stew was put in Karen’s hands. She ate it so fast she cracked a tooth on a chunk of bone floating in the thick broth.
“Mmmm,” she said, pretending to wipe her mouth with a napkin so she could spit out fragments of her tooth. “What kind of meat is this?”
“Goat,” an old woman answered.
“I’ve never had goat before. It’s delicious. Did anyone else see that angel?”
The angel had disappeared. Squinting at the ceiling stain, Karen could almost make out a two-dimensional likeness of the face, but she wasn’t pushing it. You couldn’t force astral communion, or else everyone would be doing it all the time, and then who would there be to drive the buses and check the chemicals in the pool and perform vital surgeries?
“No such thing as angels here, hon,” Moira said, picking her teeth with a plastic fork. “The real God don’t need all those accessories.”
“Rose? You saw her, didn’t you?”
Rosette held her hand up to Karen’s face. She was listening to the messag
es on her phone. When she was finished, she fixed Karen in a flinty stare. “Babygirl, is there something you are not telling me?”
Karen could only blink at her. Where to begin?
“Your home called me. Asking if I had seen you. You are a missing woman tonight….”
“I’ve finally found a faith that works, Rosie. I’m ready to join your church. You can’t make me go back. Not yet, anyway.”
Everyone was looking at them now. What a moment! This was the drama Karen had longed for. She sensed serious potential for applause. If only Rosette were not the antagonist in the scene. She considered Rosette a kindred spirit, a big sister. No matter who Karen got to foster her, and there were plenty of new options here at this church, Rosette would always be family. Karen had always imagined that in a past life, once upon a time, she and Rosette had been crushed under the same heavy stones for the same crimes of witchcraft/generally disruptive female power, that their spirits were forever entwined as they followed each other into successive lifetimes.
“I can make a major contribution.”
“I don’t believe anything you say.”
“No, really. Look.”
Karen produced one of the three bottles she had taken from Dennis. She shook it like a little maraca. “Like last time, Rose. Except this time you can give my half of the money to the church. As my initiation fee, or whatever.”
“Crazy girl!” Rosette said under her breath. She snatched the bottle from Karen and hid it in her pocket. “You are crazy in the head. Half intelligent, half stupid. How can you be so stupid?”
“You always say the meanest things in whispers,” Karen replied. “Just because it’s quiet doesn’t make it hurt less.”
“What’s the problem, Karen?” Moira asked. She had never liked Rosette. Didn’t trust her.
“I want to join!” Karen cried. “I want to be in your church.”
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