All the Names They Used for God

by Anjali Sachdeva

Once the guests arrived, Gina kept herself busy refilling platters of cheese and crackers and tried not to watch the door. Finally, the DJ tapped his microphone and announced the newlyweds. The bride and groom entered through an archway decorated with tissue-paper roses, heralded by a song that Michael had always turned off when it came on the radio.

  The first thing Gina noticed was how clean Michael looked. In all the time she had known him, he had been smudged with either coal dust or road dust, but now his hair lay flat and his skin looked polished. He smiled and waved at the guests, one arm circled around the waist of his bride.

  She was beautiful in an easily forgettable way, soft and smiling and mild as milk. Behind her, being shepherded by an older woman in a pastel suit whose face Gina vaguely recalled from that last day with Michael, was a child of such uncommon loveliness that Gina smiled in spite of herself. He had Michael’s curls and his mother’s pale skin, and he skipped among his relatives, grasping the hands of the adults as he moved from person to person. Gina clapped with everyone else as the bride and groom took their seats at the head table, watched as Michael leaned over and kissed his wife before settling his napkin on his lap.

  * * *

  —

  Gina bided her time until after dinner. She didn’t want to make a scene, exactly; it would be enough to get the bride alone. She waited until Michael had gone off to get a drink and the bride was standing and talking with a small group of people, and then picked up a tray and walked up to her.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” Gina said, “but I wondered if you need a drink? Some champagne or lemonade or something? It’s your big day, after all, and we want to make sure you have anything you might want.”

  “Oh,” said the bride. “Some water would be great, actually.”

  “Of course. I’ll be right back.”

  The water was in sweating silver pitchers on a side table, and as Gina filled a goblet, she watched the bride. Michael’s wife was beautiful, but she was nervous. She laughed too much at everyone’s jokes, her eyes darting from face to face, and now and then she glanced around the room as if she were lost. Gina placed the goblet on her tray. Moving through the throngs of people who had all gathered to celebrate Michael’s marriage, she felt a sense of exhilaration, of power, as though she were a cyclone descending, unsuspected, on all those glad faces. By the time she reached the bride, she could see Michael approaching from the other side of the room.

  The bride smiled and reached for the glass, and as her fingers brushed against it, Gina tipped the tray just enough so that the goblet fell forward, sluicing water down onto the bride’s dress and soaking it.

  A chorus of concerned coos went up from the women surrounding the bride, and people at the nearby tables turned to look.

  “Oh, I am so sorry, I’m just the clumsiest thing,” Gina said. The bride whimpered and began to brush at her skirt, and a woman in a black-beaded cocktail dress said, “Aww,” and emptied her drink. Michael was walking quickly toward them now, looking faintly worried, and Gina watched him and waited, and waited, until that moment when he was finally close enough to recognize her. His face turned gray and he stopped in midstride. A man from a nearby table got up and began clapping Michael on the shoulder and congratulating him, and Gina took the bride by the hand.

  “Let’s go to the ladies’ room. I’ll fix you right up,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  When they reached the powder room, Gina pointed to a chair in the corner and grabbed a stack of paper towels. The woman in the black dress had trailed behind them, and now she leaned against the counter as the bride sank into the chair and Gina knelt down and began to dab at the damp skirt.

  “Oh, wow,” the woman said, “the dress. Well, I mean. I mean, it doesn’t really matter, it’s not like you’ll have to wear it again. We hope!”

  The bride nodded but didn’t reply, and Gina turned to the woman and said, “Why don’t you go see if you can find a hair dryer to help out here? Try housekeeping.”

  “OK,” said the woman, and staggered out.

  As soon as she was gone, the bride made a choking noise and began to cry. Gina dropped the towels and sat back on her heels, bewildered. The bride covered her face with her hands and tried to catch her breath, her shoulders making little shrugging motions that shook the curls pinned to the top of her head.

  “I know what everyone’s saying,” she said. “I know no one thinks it’s going to last. But I just wanted him to come home for so long and he did. That must mean something, right?”

  Gina looked around, but there was no one else in the room. Michael’s a liar, she wanted to say. Michael’s a child. His name itched against her tongue. Every time the bride sobbed, Gina felt her pulse race and her blood sizzle. For the first time in her life, she understood the smile she had seen so often on her father’s face, the smile he flashed when he told her about buying out a competitor or twisting the city council around his finger, the one he had surely worn the night he took all of Michael’s money. It was a smile that said, Make the world you want, and take without mercy. Gina had all the right words; she could make Michael’s pretty new life come undone with a wave of her hand.

  But she didn’t want to. She didn’t want any of it—Michael, or the yellow house, or the sweet little boy with his curls. Not the way this woman did. Who knew how many nights she had lain awake, wishing with all her strength that he would come back to her. Maybe she had her own kind of magic that had drawn him to the lake that night in Montana, to Gina’s dress and the bag of money that had unlocked Michael’s chains, all the way across the country and right back to her door. A magic that had gotten Gina free of Montana, which was all she had really wanted to begin with.

  A moment later the door swung open and the bride’s son ran in, followed by Michael, who glanced around uneasily. He looked at his crying wife, and then at Gina, and as she looked back at him it felt like the last two years had never happened. Like they were still back in Montana standing at that lakeside, staring in the darkness, and she’d just discovered the whole world was a top she could spin with a snap of her fingers.

  The bride’s tears were turning gray as they dissolved her makeup, leaving sooty trails on her cheeks. She sniffed and swiped at her face with her fingers even as she continued to cry. Gina took one of the towels and blotted the bride’s face until it was clean. Then she reached up from where she was kneeling on the floor and grasped Michael’s hand, and when he tried to yank it loose, Gina held on tighter. “Help a lady up,” she said, and pulled herself to her feet.

  Zoology, Anatomy: The terminal or distal portion of the forelimb of an animal, especially a vertebrate, homologous with or analogous to the hand.

  Roman Law: A form of power or authority…

  —Oxford English Dictionary

  Yvette and I were in bed, watching through a gap in the curtains as my neighbor Lou Spellman stood at his mailbox and cried. The corner of the box was pressing into his gut, and he took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his nose.

  “What do you think happened?” I said to Yvette.

  “Draft card. Obviously. What’re you, stupid?”

  A woman came out of one of the houses across the street and went to stand with Lou. I’d seen her before, always thought she was pretty, but had never gotten around to talking to her. Now she was rubbing Lou’s shoulder while he kept right on crying. I turned away from the window.

  “If I was stupid, would you be here right now?” I slid my palm across the sheets, over Yvette’s stomach and her breasts. She’d recently gotten her own draft card giving her two weeks’ notice, and decided to make the most of things while she could. Most people got only a day’s notice, but neither of us was complaining about the extra time—we’d spent the past week holding our own personal Olympics of Sex. Before that, I hadn’t seen her in a good ten years.

 
“I’d still be here if you were stupid and ugly,” she said. “Don’t think you’re the first person I called.”

  I stopped touching her and got out of bed. Yvette was meaner than I remembered. She’d been an art student back when we dated, the only black girlfriend I’d ever had. In her second year of grad school, she’d developed a raging social conscience that meant her apartment was always filled with anti-sweatshop protestors and militant vegans, but before that Yvette and I had spent most of a year holed up in her studio, surrounded by canvases covered in angry swirls of color, getting high and eating junk food and laughing ourselves dizzy. In those days, her body was always flecked with paint, conté crayon caked under her fingernails. At the time I’d told myself it was just meaningless fun, but it looked like a kind of paradise now.

  “Hey,” she said, coming up behind me and wrapping her arms around my waist. “Don’t be so sensitive.”

  “I have to get ready for work,” I said.

  * * *

  —

  The architecture firm I worked for had gotten the contract to design the supplementary housing for the Masters’ new American headquarters in Washington, which meant extra hours at the office. A lot of plans were getting scrapped and having to be redrawn, because after seven years we were still learning about the Masters. They despised physical contact, even with one another, so all the hallways had to be three times as wide as we would have made them for people. They hated rough surfaces, so where we would have liked to put carpeting there had to be acrylic tile instead. They didn’t need bathrooms. As soon as you thought you’d sorted things out, they would pass down a new mandate: no wood, no windows, as few corners as possible. I was glad we didn’t have to figure out the headquarters building itself—another, bigger firm in New York was designing that, although the construction couldn’t be started until a third company finished hauling away the remains of the Pentagon.

  My co-worker Beatrice called the Masters “the Snots,” because that was pretty much what they looked like—giant globs of snot. Every time she said it, I got the same thrill I’d get in elementary school when one of the older kids did something illicit at the back of the bus. Back then I knew I would never be the one to light up a stolen Newport or put my hand up Patricia Riker’s skirt, but that didn’t cut the vicarious thrill I got from watching other people do it. Beatrice’s desk faced the hallway, so I guess there wasn’t much chance that any Masters could get in hearing range without her noticing, but I still felt a buzz of adrenaline every time she said, “Oh, goody, another visit from the Snots,” or “Guess we’d better add some more troughs to this building so the Snots will have somewhere to eat.” She was an older woman, plump, always wearing frilled blouses—she looked like she ought to be at home watching Family Feud, which just made her defiance more entertaining. Sometimes when the Masters were standing right by her chair, she’d pluck a tissue from the box on her desk and blow her nose for no reason at all, winking at me from behind her Kleenex.

  * * *

  —

  Bea and I spent most of the morning playing online Scrabble at our desks and sending each other links to hilarious or disgusting Internet videos, but around eleven a Master slithered into the doorway and said, “Hey, anyone who don’t have upgrades needs ta go to the conference room.” The Masters all had the exact same voice when they spoke English, a high-pitched, androgynous blend of Long Island nasal tones and fat Midwestern vowels. It was indescribably irritating, and no one could figure out why or how they had chosen it as the one über-voice that all of them would use to communicate with Americans. Word was that their versions of Danish and Swahili and every other language were equally grating. I waited until the Master left and rolled my eyes at Bea.

  “Have fun, sucker,” she said.

  “You can’t be thinking of words the whole time I’m gone.”

  “Says who?”

  I went into the hall and followed a stream of people down to the conference room. It was a much smaller group than it had been the last time we went through this ridiculous exercise, several months earlier. Once we were all seated, Peggie from HR clicked on the TV, and someone turned out the lights.

  The blue screen gave way to the words “Official Re-Handing Procedures,” and I probably would have dozed off right then if the video hadn’t immediately switched from the title to a close-up of Daniella Cortège. Which I guess was the point. I had seen this same footage at least a hundred times, like everyone else in the world, but I still did a double take when she came on the screen: the flawless face of the Re-Handing Procedures Initiative.

  The familiar images continued. Daniella—French, nineteen years old, hot as a cast-iron skillet in a white angora sweater and a tight gray skirt—walks down the hallway of an Exchange Center. She is followed by two Masters, their gelatinous yellow bodies gliding along the floor tiles. Smiling, Daniella walks into the Exchange Room and approaches the blank, buffed zinc face of the “Exchange Apparatus,” known to everyone with legs as the Forker. Here was where I always started to think that the Masters were just playing dumb when they said they didn’t understand why people complained so much about the re-handing, that, in fact, they had a very good grasp of human aesthetics, because when Daniella holds her hands out to insert them into the Forker, they are ugly: mannish, calloused, the fingernails chewed down to warped little buttons. A blemish on an otherwise breathtaking girl. Without hesitation, she puts her hands into the two dark slots in the face of the Forker, and the pneumatic cuffs hiss shut around her wrists.

  Daniella stands for a moment with her hands inside the machine, where they are invisible to the viewer, and to her. She looks relaxed and contemplative, as though she’s reflecting on the progress of her life to date, or maybe just on what she should eat for dinner that night. Then the cuffs hiss open again, and she withdraws from the Forker and holds up her arms. Where her hands used to be are five metal fingers, each one fully articulated and as thin as a pencil, connected to a spherical metal base where her palm should be. “Titanium Alloy Hand Upgrades” in Masters’ parlance, “forks” to everyone else, because that’s what they most resemble. She flexes the tines twice, bends a couple of them at strange angles you could never get with real fingers. Then she opens the little leather purse that’s hanging at her side, extracts a compact and a tube of lipstick, and deftly applies her makeup. She nods cordially at the two Masters and walks back down the hall.

  Next, a Master comes on the screen and starts describing the draft process, “randomly selected” blah blah blah “everyone will get a card” blah blah. They would go on to say that about ten times before the end of the video, “Everyone will get a card soonah or latah,” but by then I was zoned out, wondering what Yvette was up to and whether I was going to get laid this consistently ever again. When everyone around me stood up, I did, too, and went back to my desk.

  “Pugnacious,” Bea said, looking smug as all hell and cocking her thumb and pointer tines at the Scrabble board like a gun. “One hundred thirty-one points. I guess your little ‘pug’ was worth something after all.”

  * * *

  —

  When I got home Yvette was already there, chopping vegetables in the kitchen, which was full of delicious steam. I wondered whether she’d ever left that morning, but didn’t ask. She handed me a broccoli floret. “Feel that,” she said.

  I pinched the crown of the floret. “Feels like broccoli,” I said, and popped it into my mouth.

  “No, seriously.” She handed me another one. “It’s soft, but you can feel all the little buds, too, right? Like taste buds, or goosebumps or something.”

  “Goosebumps made of broccoli,” I said. I ate that one, too.

  “You’re hopeless.” She picked up the cutting board and dumped the vegetables into a frying pan, but when I leaned in to kiss her she set the board down and put her hands on my face, running her fingers through my hair and down the bac
k of my neck. “I always did like your hair,” she said. “I knew there was some reason I kept you around.”

  * * *

  —

  That night I woke up to a tapping sound echoing through my bedroom. A moment later, I realized it was coming from the window. I wrapped the sheet around my waist, crossed the room, and pulled the curtains back. Lou was pressing his face against the window, rapping the glass with his fingernails.

  “What?” I said. Yvette had gone home earlier, saying she needed a night in her own place, and I was having trouble pulling myself out of the depths of sleep.

  “I can’t hear you,” Lou said, loud as anything, and I pulled the curtains shut, put a robe on, and went around to the back door to let him in.

  “What the hell, Lou,” I said.

  “Listen, I want to talk to you about something.”

  I sat down in my TV chair and waved him toward the couch.

  “Got any beer?” he said.

  “In the fridge.”

  He brought two bottles from the kitchen, handed me one, and sat down again. After he twisted the cap off his beer he just sat there, looking at the dents the cap had made in the meat of his palm.

  “So, what’s up?” I said.

  “I got my draft card today.”

  “Really? I’m sorry to hear that.”

  He shook his head. “Me too. I mean, I’m sorry I didn’t think about it more before it happened. I guess I wanted to believe I might get lucky. And now it’s too late to do anything about it.”

  “What could you have done anyway?”

  “I coulda gone to one of those places. Those surgeries.”

  “That’s an urban legend. Those places don’t even exist.”

  “They exist,” he said. “I don’t know where yet, but I could find out. I been thinking about it all night.”