A Lot Like Christmas: Stories

by Connie Willis

  “Down?”

  “Because of the storm. I tried to call my sister just now, and the clerk told me the phone’s been out all day. I don’t know what she’s going to think when she doesn’t hear from me. I promised faithfully that I’d call her every night and tell her where I was and that I’d gotten there safely.”

  He couldn’t call B.T. Or get to him. “Excuse me,” he said, and started back across the lobby to the registration desk.

  “Has the interstate going east opened up yet?” he asked the girl behind the counter.

  She shook her head. “It’s still closed between Malcolm and Iowa City. Ground blizzards,” she said. “Will you be checking in, sir? How many are there in your party?”

  “Two,” a voice said.

  Mel turned. And there, leaning against the end of the registration desk, was B.T.

  “And there appeared another wonder in heaven, and behold a great red dragon.”

  —Revelation 12:3

  For a moment he couldn’t speak for the joy, the relief he felt. He clutched the checkout counter, vaguely aware that the girl behind the counter was saying something.

  “What are you doing here?” he said finally.

  B.T. smiled his slow checkmate smile. “Aren’t I the one who should be asking that?”

  And now that he was here, he would have to tell him. Mel felt the relief turn into resentment. “I thought the roads were closed,” he said.

  “I didn’t come that way,” B.T. said.

  “And how would you like to pay for that, sir?” the clerk said, and Mel knew she had asked him before.

  “Credit card,” he said, fumbling for his wallet.

  “License number?” the clerk asked.

  “I flew to Omaha and rented a car,” B.T. said.

  Mel handed her his MasterCard. “TY 804.”

  “State?”

  “Pennsylvania.” He looked at B.T. “How did you find me?”

  “ ‘License number?’ ” B.T. said, mimicking the clerk. “ ‘Will you be putting this on your credit card, sir?’ If you’ve got a computer, it’s the easiest thing in the world to find someone these days, especially if they’re using that.” He gestured at the MasterCard the clerk was handing back to Mel.

  She handed him a folder. “Your room number is written inside, sir. It’s not on the key for security purposes,” the clerk said, as if his room number weren’t in the computer, too. B.T. probably already knew it.

  “You still haven’t answered my question,” B.T. said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I have to go get my suitcase,” Mel said, and walked past him and out to the parking lot and his car. He opened the trunk.

  B.T. reached past him and picked up Mel’s suitcase, as if taking it into custody.

  “How did you know I was missing?” Mel asked, but he already knew the answer to that. “Mrs. Bilderbeck sent you.”

  B.T. nodded. “She said she was worried about you, that you’d called and something was seriously wrong. She said she knew because you hadn’t tried to get out of the ecumenical meeting on Thursday. She said you always tried to get out of it.”

  They say it’s the little mistakes that trip criminals up, Mel thought.

  “She said she thought you were sick and were going to see a specialist,” B.T. said, his black face gray with worry. “Out of town, so nobody in the congregation would find out about it. A brain tumor, she said.” He shifted the suitcase to his other hand. “Do you have a brain tumor?”

  A brain tumor. That would be a nice, convenient explanation. When Ivor Sorenson had had a brain tumor, he had stood up during the offertory, convinced there was an ostrich sitting in the pew next to him.

  “Are you sick?” B.T. said.

  “No.”

  “But it is something serious.”

  “It’s freezing out here,” Mel said. “Let’s discuss this inside.”

  B.T. didn’t move. “Whatever it is, no matter how bad it is, you can tell me.”

  “All right. Fine. ‘For ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of Man cometh.’ Matthew 25:13,” Mel said. “I had a revelation. About the Second Coming. I think He’s here already, that the Second Coming’s already happened.”

  Whatever B.T. had imagined—terminal illness or embezzlement or some other, worse crime—it obviously wasn’t as bad as this. His face went even grayer. “The Second Coming,” he said. “Of Christ?”

  “Yes,” Mel said. He told him what had happened during the sermon Sunday. “I scared the choir half out of their wits,” he said.

  B.T. nodded. “Mrs. Bilderbeck told me. She said you stopped in the middle of a sentence and just stood there, staring into space with your hand up to your forehead. That’s why she thought you had a brain tumor. How long did this…vision last?”

  “It wasn’t a vision,” Mel said. “It was a revelation, a conviction…an epiphany.”

  “An epiphany,” B.T. said in a flat, expressionless voice. “And it told you He was here? In Zion Center?”

  “No,” Mel said. “I don’t know where He is.”

  “You don’t know where He is,” B.T. repeated. “You just got in your car and started driving?”

  “West,” Mel said. “I knew He was somewhere west.”

  “Somewhere west,” B.T. said softly. He rubbed his hand over his mouth.

  “Why don’t you say it?” Mel said. He slammed the trunk shut. “You think I’m crazy.”

  “I think we’re both crazy,” he said, “standing out here in the snow, fighting. Have you had supper?”

  “No,” Mel said.

  “Neither have I,” B.T. said. He took Mel’s arm. “Let’s go get some dinner.”

  “And a dose of antidepressants? A nice straitjacket?”

  “I was thinking steak,” B.T. said, and tried to smile. “Isn’t that what they eat here in Iowa?”

  “Corn,” Mel said.

  “And when I looked, behold…the appearance of the wheels was as the colour of a beryl stone and…as if a wheel had been in the midst of a wheel.”

  —Ezekiel 10:9–10

  Neither corn nor steak was on the menu, which had the Holiday Inn star on the front, and they were out of nearly everything else. “Because of the interstate being closed,” the waitress said. “We’ve got chicken teriyaki and beef chow mein.”

  They ordered the chow mein and coffee, and the waitress left. Mel braced himself for more questions, but B.T. only asked, “How were the roads today?” and told him about the problems he’d had getting a flight and a rental car. “Chicago O’Hare was shut down because of a winter storm,” he said, “and Denver and Kansas City. I had to fly into Albuquerque and then up to Omaha.”

  “I’m sorry you had to go to all that trouble,” Mel said.

  “I was worried about you.”

  The waitress arrived with their chow mein, which came with mashed potatoes and gravy and green beans.

  “Interesting,” B.T. said, poking at the gravy. He made a halfhearted attempt at the chow mein, and then pushed the plate away.

  “There’s something I don’t understand,” he said. “The Second Coming is when Christ returns, right? I thought He was supposed to appear in the clouds in a blaze of glory, complete with trumpets and angel choirs.”

  Mel nodded.

  “Then how can He already be here without anybody knowing?”

  “I don’t know,” Mel said. “I don’t understand any of this any more than you do. I just know He’s here.”

  “But you don’t know where.”

  “No. I thought when I got out here there would be a sign.”

  “A sign,” B.T. said.

  “Yes,” Mel said, getting angry all over again. “You know. A burning bush, a pillar of fire, a star. A sign.”

  He must have been shouting. The waitress came scurrying over with the check. “Are you through with this?” she said, looking at the plates of half-eaten food.

  “Yes,” Mel said. “We’re through.�
�

  “You can pay at the register,” the waitress said, and scurried away with their plates.

  “Look,” B.T. said, “the brain’s a very complicated thing. An alteration in brain chemistry—are you on any medications? Sometimes medications can cause people to hear voices or—”

  Mel picked up the check and stood, reaching for his wallet. “It wasn’t a voice.”

  He put down money for a tip and went over to the cash register.

  “You said it was a strong feeling,” B.T. said after Mel had paid. “Sometimes endorphins can—nothing like this has ever happened to you before, has it?”

  Mel walked out into the lobby. “Yes,” he said, and turned to face B.T. “It happened once before.”

  “When?” B.T. said, his face gray again.

  “When I was nineteen. I was in college, studying pre-law. I went to church with a girlfriend, and the minister gave a hellfire-and-brimstone sermon on the evils of dancing and associating with anyone who did. He said Jesus said it was wrong to associate with nonbelievers, that they would corrupt and contaminate you. Jesus, who spent all His time with lowlifes—tax collectors and prostitutes and lepers! And all of a sudden I had this overwhelming feeling…this—”

  “Epiphany,” B.T. said.

  “That I had to do something, that I had to fight him and all the other ministers like him. I stood up and walked out in the middle of the sermon,” Mel said, remembering, “and went home and applied to seminary.”

  B.T. rubbed his hand across his mouth. “And the epiphany you had yesterday was the same as that one?”

  “Yes.”

  “Reverend Abrams?” a woman’s voice said.

  Mel turned. The short, plump woman who’d been on the phone and at the motel the night before was hurrying toward them, lugging her bright green tote bag.

  “Who’s that?” B.T. said.

  Mel shook his head, wondering how she knew his name.

  She came up to them. “Oh, Reverend Abrams,” she said breathlessly, “I wanted to thank you—I’m Cassie Hunter, by the way.” She stuck out a plump, beringed hand.

  “How do you do?” Mel said, shaking it. “This is Dr. Bernard Thomas, and I’m Mel Abrams.”

  She nodded. “I heard the desk clerk say your name. I didn’t thank you the other night for saving my life.”

  “Saving your life?” B.T. said, looking at Mel.

  “There was this awful whiteout,” Cassie said. “You couldn’t see the road at all, and if it hadn’t been for the taillights on Reverend Abrams’s car, I’d have ended up in a ditch.”

  Mel shook his head. “You shouldn’t thank me. You should thank the driver of the carnival truck I was following. He saved both of us.”

  “I saw those carnival trucks,” Cassie said. “I wondered what a carnival was doing in Iowa in the middle of winter.” She laughed, a bright, chirpy laugh. “Of course, you’re probably wondering what a retired English teacher is doing in Iowa in the middle of winter. Of course, for that matter, what are you doing in Iowa in the middle of winter?”

  “We’re on our way to a religious meeting,” B.T. said before Mel could answer.

  “Really? I’ve been visiting famous writers’ birthplaces,” she said. “Everyone back home thinks I’m crazy, but except for the last few days, the weather’s been fine. Oh, and I wanted to tell you, I just talked to the clerk, and she thinks the phones will be working again by tomorrow morning, so you should be able to make your call.”

  She rummaged in her voluminous tote bag and came up with a room key folder. “Well, anyway, I just wanted to thank you. It was nice meeting you,” she said to B.T., and bustled off across the lobby toward the coffee shop.

  “Who were you trying to call?” B.T. asked.

  “You,” Mel said bitterly. “I realized I owed it to you to tell you, even if you did think I was crazy.”

  B.T. didn’t say anything.

  “That is what you think, isn’t it?” Mel said. “Why don’t you just say it? You think I’m crazy.”

  “All right. I think you’re crazy,” B.T. said, and then continued angrily, “Well, what do you expect me to say? You take off in the middle of a blizzard, you don’t tell anyone where you’re going, because you saw the Second Coming in a vision?”

  “It wasn’t—”

  “Oh, right. It wasn’t a vision. You had an epiphany. So did the woman in The Globe last week who saw the Virgin Mary on her refrigerator. So did the Heaven’s Gate people. Are you telling me they’re not crazy?”

  “No,” Mel said, and started down the hall to his room.

  “For fifteen years you’ve raved about faith healers and cults and preachers who claim they’ve got a direct line to God being frauds,” B.T. said, following him, “and now you suddenly believe in it?”

  He kept walking. “No.”

  “But you’re telling me I’m supposed to believe in your revelation because it’s different, because this is the real thing.”

  “I’m not telling you anything,” Mel said, turning to face him. “You’re the one who came out here and demanded to know what I was doing. I told you. You got what you came for. Now you can go back and tell Mrs. Bilderbeck I don’t have a brain tumor, it’s a chemical imbalance.”

  “And what do you intend to do? Drive west until you fall off the Santa Monica pier?”

  “I intend to find Him,” Mel said.

  B.T. opened his mouth as if to say something and then shut it and stormed off down the hall.

  Mel stood there, watching him till a door slammed, far down the hall.

  Bring your friends, Mel thought. Bring your friends.

  “For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face.”

  —I Corinthians 13:12

  “I intend to find Him,” Mel had said, and was glad B.T. hadn’t shouted back “How?” because he had no idea.

  He had not had a sign, which meant that the answer must be somewhere else. Mel sat down on the bed, opened the drawer of the bedside table, and got out the Gideon Bible.

  He propped the pillows up against the headboard and leaned back against them and opened the Bible to the Book of Revelation.

  The radio evangelists made it sound like the story of the Second Coming was a single narrative, but it was actually a hodgepodge of isolated scriptures—Matthew 24 and sections of Isaiah and Daniel, verses out of Second Thessalonians and John and Joel, stray ravings from Revelation and Jeremiah, all thrown together by the evangelists as if the authors were writing at the same time. As if they were even writing about the same thing.

  And the references were full of contradictions. A trumpet would sound, and Christ would come in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. Or on a white horse, leading an army of a hundred and forty-four thousand. Or like a thief in the night. There would be earthquakes and pestilences and a star falling out of heaven. Or a dragon would come up out of the sea, or four great beasts, with the heads of a lion and a bear and a leopard and eagles’ wings. Or darkness would cover the earth.

  But in all the assorted prophecies there were no locations mentioned. Joel talked about a desolate wilderness and Jeremiah about a wasteland, but not about where they were. Luke said the faithful would come “from the east, and from the west, and from the north” to the kingdom of God, but neglected to say where it was located.

  The only place mentioned by name in all the prophecies was Armageddon. But Armageddon (or Har-Magedon or Ar Himdah) was a word that appeared only once in the Scriptures and whose meaning was not known, a word that might be Hebrew or Greek or something else altogether, that might mean “level” or “valley plain” or “place of desire.”

  Mel remembered from seminary that some scholars thought it referred to the plain in front of Mount Megiddo, the site of a battle between Israel and Sisera the Canaanite. But there was no Mount Megiddo on ancient or modern maps. It could be anywhere.

  He put on his shoes and his coat and went out to the parking lot to get his road atlas out o
f the car.

  B.T. was leaning against the trunk.

  “How long have you been out here?” Mel asked, but the answer was obvious. B.T.’s dark face was pinched with cold, and his hands were jammed into his pockets like the carnival kid’s had been.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said, his voice shivering with the cold. “I don’t have to be back until Thursday, and I can fly out of Denver just as easily as out of Omaha. If we drive as far as Denver together, it’ll give us more time—”

  “For you to talk me out of this,” Mel said, and then was sorry when he saw the expression on B.T.’s face.

  “For us to talk,” B.T. said. “For me to figure this—epiphany—out.”

  “All right,” Mel said. “As far as Denver.” He opened the car door. “You can come inside now. I’m not going anywhere till morning.” He leaned inside the car and got the atlas. “It’s a good thing I came out for this. You didn’t actually intend to stand out here all night, did you?”

  B.T. nodded, his teeth chattering. “You’re not the only one who’s crazy.”

  “By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand, and seeing ye shall see and shall not perceive.”

  —Matthew 13:14

  There wasn’t a Hertz rental car agency in Zion Center. “The nearest one’s in Redfield,” B.T. said unhappily.

  “I’ll meet you there,” Mel said.

  “Will you?” B.T. said. “You won’t take off on your own?”

  “No,” Mel said.

  “What if you see a sign?”

  “If I see a burning bush, I’ll pull off on the side and let you know,” Mel said dryly. “We can caravan if you want.”

  “Fine,” B.T. said. “I’ll follow you.”

  “I don’t know where the rental place is.”

  “I’ll pull ahead of you once we get to Redfield,” B.T. said, and got into his rental car. “It’s the second exit. What are the roads supposed to be like?”

  “Icy. Snow-packed. But the weather report said clear.”

  Mel got into his car. The kid from the carnival had been right. The ding had started to spread, raying out in three long cracks and one short one.