Mercury Rests

by Robert Kroese

  “Are there other people around?” asked Mercury. “Or are we it?”

  “I think we’re pretty much it,” said Job. “Us and the guys downstairs. Ernie and his gang.”

  “Yeah, what’s up with them?” asked Mercury. “Is there something special about that fire they’re huddled around? This is going to sound nuts, but it seemed like they were somehow observing human history through the fire. And not just observing it, meddling with it.”

  “It’s possible,” said Job. “Cause and effect are breaking down too. Can a group of hobos huddling around a fire retroactively change history? Sure, why not? It’s always seemed a little arbitrary to me that causality can flow in only one direction.”

  Mercury held his head in his hands. This whole situation was completely absurd.

  “Think of it this way,” said Cain. “For most practical purposes, we live in a deterministic universe. By this I mean that if you could somehow know the exact state of a system at its starting point, then you could predict the exact state of the system at its ending point.”

  Mercury stared at Cain uncomprehendingly, his hands still on his head.

  “Take this Ping-Pong ball. If I drop the ball, it’s going to fall to the concrete and bounce in some seemingly unpredictable way until it finally comes to rest somewhere, probably a few feet away from where I dropped it. I say seemingly unpredictable because if you actually knew the exact position of the ball when I let go of it, the structure and composition of the ball, the texture and slant of the concrete, et cetera, you could predict exactly, within a thousandth of a millimeter, where the ball would end up. Got it?”

  Mercury nodded.

  “Now reverse the whole process. Let’s say you know the exact position of the ball after it comes to a rest. Can you predict where the ball started out? That is, where it was when I let go of it?”

  Mercury frowned. “It doesn’t seem like it.”

  “Right!” said Cain. “Because you’d be missing some data. When the ball hit the ground, it displaced a minute amount of concrete, and it also converted a minute amount of kinetic energy to heat. Now let’s say that you have access to that information as well: you know exactly how much concrete was displaced and where it went, and you know exactly how much heat was radiated and where it ended up. Now could you tell me where the ball started out?”

  “I suppose so,” said Mercury. “Theoretically.”

  “Right again!” exclaimed Cain. “So you see?”

  Mercury shook his head.

  “You can predict the future using information from the past, and you can predict the past using information from the future!” said Cain. “In other words, we think of the initial state of the system determining the end state of the system, but you could just as well say that the end state of the system determines the initial state. Which is just another way of saying that the future causes the past. And now that all of reality has been condensed into this one small area, everything that we do will theoretically have massive repercussions on the past. Hell, my scoring of that last point against Job may have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs for all we know. So could Ernie and his friends be meddling with human history by poking at a fire with a stick? Absolutely! And all of this, of course, underscores the absolute absurdity of the human condition. You could sneeze and kill half the population of Europe.”

  Mercury wasn’t sure he followed all of this, but one thing was certain: he was not going to sneeze.

  The fog continued to creep closer. Wispy gray tendrils were caressing a corroded street sign just down the road.

  “But...I don’t understand,” Mercury said. “Was Manhattan built on top of a haunted leper colony or something? Where did this fog, or whatever it is, come from?”

  Job shook his head. “I think that’s the wrong question. The question is, where did everything else come from? Why does anything exist at all?”

  “Look,” said Mercury. “All I’m saying is that where I’m from, there’s no Creeping Fog of Nonexistence threatening to wipe out reality. So my question is, where did it come from? What changed?”

  “The fog has always been there,” answered Cain. “It’s been trying to annihilate us since our Universe came into being in a freak accident six billion years ago. It’s picked up steam in the past few thousand years, so to speak.”

  “But why?” Mercury asked. “Why is it advancing so quickly now? What changed?”

  Job and Cain exchanged glances.

  “It isn’t exactly clear,” said Job. “Something seems to have happened in the early part of the twenty-first century. We’ve heard plenty of rumors—more like myths—about what happened. They all seem to center on something called Wormwood.”

  “Wormwood?” asked Mercury. “What’s that?”

  “Like I said,” Job replied, “it isn’t clear. In most accounts, it’s some sort of artifact, a crucible of great evil. The evil is awoken by an angel, who doesn’t seem to have a name. He’s simply referred to as a ‘lost angel’ who somehow gains control over the Wormwood. Usually Lucifer is said to be involved.”

  “Lucifer,” snorted Cain quietly.

  “What about him?” asked Job. “Is there something you haven’t told me about Lucifer’s involvement with Wormwood?”

  “I’ve been waiting for the right time,” said Cain. “I guess now is as good as any. It’s true that Lucifer was involved, but he was only a tool of destiny. As was your mysterious ‘lost angel.’ The fact is, though,” Cain answered, savoring each syllable, “Wormwood was my doing. It couldn’t have happened without me.”

  “What couldn’t have happened?” asked Mercury.

  Cain grinned wickedly. “The destruction of Heaven itself.”

  FOURTEEN

  Christine awoke hours later, feeling groggy but somewhat rested. Sunlight streamed through the bus windows. The bus had stopped at a fast-food place somewhere in Virginia. Jacob was still sleeping soundly, so Christine bought a couple of breakfast sandwiches and two cups of coffee with the little money she had. One of the Covenant Holders, a roundish woman named Debbie, struck up a conversation with her.

  “So neat to see the nation’s capital,” she said, beaming at Christine. “So much history.”

  Christine nodded politely.

  “This is my first time here,” she added. “Washington, DC, I mean.”

  Christine smiled.

  “My husband, Phil, was a huge history buff. He would have loved to see Washington.”

  Christine nodded and smiled. Debbie smiled back. An awkward silence crept up on them. Christine realized that she had missed her cue.

  “Your husband!” she said, a little too loudly. “Is he...?”

  “Phil went to be with his Lord. He was one of the elect.”

  “The elect?”

  Debbie nodded, smiling beatifically. “He was in the stadium. He was one of the one hundred and forty-four thousand who were called home ahead of the Rapture.”

  Christine’s mouth went dry. This woman’s husband had been killed just six weeks earlier, along with tens of thousands of other people, and here she was, standing in a Burger Giant in Virginia, chatting with Christine about how “neat” it was to see the capital.

  “Do they...” she started. “Is that an exact number? A hundred and forty-four thousand? I haven’t been watching the news lately.”

  Debbie nodded. “That’s the number in Revelation,” she said. “ ‘Then I looked, and there before me was the Lamb, standing on Mount Zion, and with him a hundred and forty-four thousand who had his name and his Father’s name written on their foreheads.’ I’m so happy that Phil was one of the chosen. I hope he remembers me when I get to Heaven.”

  Christine was baffled by this turn of the conversation. The last she had heard, the total dead and missing from the Anaheim Event had been estimated at around a hundred and fifty thousand. About a third of these had been attendees of the Covenant Holders conference; the rest were people who happened to be in the vicinity of the
stadium at the time—including a hundred or so assorted atheists, feminists, and pro-homosexual activists who had been loitering around the entrance, harassing the attendees as they entered. Had God called them all home? She supposed the atheists and fundamentalists meeting each other in Heaven would both have a fair amount of explaining to do.

  “So the Rapture...is that happening soon?” Christine asked.

  “No one knows the day or the hour,” said Debbie. “But the signs are all around us. The hundred and forty-four thousand being called home, a third of the moon falling out of the sky, war in the Middle East...The End will be here soon, praise God.”

  Christine forced a smile. “Praise God,” she echoed faintly.

  When she returned to the bus, Jacob was awake, staring out the bus window. As she approached, his head jerked back and he made that strange noise in his throat again. He was wearing a T-shirt that one of their fellow pilgrims had given him. It read “Darwin is dead. Jesus is ALIVE!” Jacob had scowled when he saw it but suspended his principles so that he could remove the stained and reeking polo shirt he had been wearing for two days. Christine had changed in the restaurant bathroom, peeling off her dirty blouse and sticky bra to put on a sweatshirt that had Matthew 12:30 printed on the front of it, inadvertently causing her breasts to threaten, “Whoever is not with me is against me.” Jacob blushed and looked away as she approached.

  “Got you some breakfast,” she said, sitting down next to him.

  “Oh,” said Jacob. “Thanks. I don’t drink coffee, though. The caffeine...”

  “Sorry,” said Christine, who was secretly thrilled to have doubled her coffee supply for the morning. She handed him the sandwich.

  “These people kind of creep me out,” he whispered to her.

  Christine laughed. “You and me both.”

  They ate in silence. “So,” Christine said when they had finished, “what was that back there? With that jerk in DC? What did you do to him?”

  Jacob smiled meekly. He tapped the center of his chest. “A well-aimed blow to the solar plexus will incapacitate the receiver for a good sixty seconds or so. I’ve had some basic hand-to-hand combat training.”

  Christine frowned. “That looked like more than basic combat training,” she said. “You moved so fast I didn’t even know what happened.”

  Jacob appeared to blush again, although it was difficult to tell with his dark complexion. His head jerked back and he made the noise in his throat again. It was something between a grunt and a cough.

  “Shit,” Jacob muttered to himself.

  “What is it?” Christine asked. “Something wrong?”

  “I don’t have my medication,” Jacob replied. “My tics are getting worse.”

  “Ticks? You have ticks?”

  “Tics,” said Jacob. “No k at the end. Involuntary muscle movements. It’s part of my condition.”

  “Your condition?”

  Jacob sighed. Clearly this was not something he wanted to talk about, but given their situation, he seemed resigned to having to explain it to Christine.

  “Condition,” said Jacob, with a touch of bitterness. “Syndrome. Syndromes. Call it what you want. They have names, but the names aren’t very helpful. People substitute names for understanding something. Give it a name, put it in a box, don’t have to think about it anymore. Unless you’re the one in the box.”

  “OK,” said Christine hesitantly. “So help me understand.”

  “One name they use is Tourette’s Syndrome,” Jacob said. “I also have Asperger’s. And clinical depression. I take medication for all of it.”

  “You have Tourette’s?” asked Christine. “Isn’t that where you can’t stop swearing?” She felt a little queasy as she imagined Jacob letting loose a torrent of profanity while trapped on a bus with two dozen religious zealots.

  “That’s coprolalia,” Jacob said. “It affects fewer than ten percent of people with Tourette’s. Tourette’s is characterized by tics—sudden, repetitive movements. They can be either motor tics or phonic tics. I have both.” As he said this, his head jerked backward, and he made the throat noise again. “I take medication for it, but I’ve been off it for a few days, so the tics are getting worse.”

  “Does it hurt?” Christine asked.

  Jacob shrugged. “It’s like a cough. Something that you have to do. Sometimes you can hold it in for a while, but eventually it comes out. Of course, when you cough, people don’t give you weird looks and hold their children closer. It does have one positive side effect, though.”

  “Really?” asked Christine. “What’s that?”

  “Do you have a coin?” asked Jacob. “Anything, a penny, quarter, whatever.”

  She nodded, pulling a dime from her pocket. “That’s a sizeable percentage of my savings, so don’t waste it,” she warned him.

  Jacob laughed. “Hold it on your palm.”

  Christine held out her right hand, with the dime resting in the center of her palm. “Now what?”

  “Close your hand.”

  Christine closed her hand.

  “Now open it.”

  She did. The coin was gone.

  Jacob smiled, holding the coin between his thumb and forefinger.

  “Holy...” Christine gasped. “How the hell did you do that?”

  Jacob laughed again. “Why’d you close your hand so slowly?”

  “I didn’t...OK, let’s do it again.”

  He gave Christine the dime and she once again placed it on her palm. “Tell me when to close,” she said.

  “Close,” he said. She snapped her hand shut. This time, she noticed Jacob moving, almost imperceptibly. He held the dime in his fingers.

  “No one can move that fast,” said Christine, as if she suspected Jacob of being possessed by demons.

  “When I’m off my meds, I perceive time differently,” explained Jacob. “Everything moves very slowly around me.”

  “You’re like The Flash,” said Christine in awe.

  Jacob smiled weakly. “Kind of,” he agreed. “If The Flash had uncontrollable muscle spasms and crippling social anxiety.”

  The bus got back on the road. Evidently they were going to travel straight through to LA, with several people taking turns driving. They drove all day, stopping every few hours for a meal or a restroom break. At the first stop, Christine and Jacob’s new-found born-again friends took up a collection for them, which came to an embarrassing $316.41. Whatever faults these people had, they were certainly generous.

  Sometime after dinner, Christine began to see signs for Oklahoma City. Christine had been to Oklahoma City only once before, when she was very young. Her family had been on vacation in Texas when the Murrah Federal Building was destroyed in a terrorist attack, and her father had thought that seeing the site of the bombing would be a good lesson in current events. There hadn’t been much to see: just a pile of rubble surrounded by police barriers. Her father had tried to explain to her that the pile of rocks was all that was left of a government building after a very troubled man had exploded a truck bomb. Christine didn’t get it. She wanted to know what the building had looked like. Had it looked like the Alamo? No, she was told, it had just been a regular old square building. She felt like they were putting her on. Why would they drive six hours out of their way to see a building that hadn’t been anything special even before it had been blown up?

  A few years later, when she realized the point of their detour, it still struck her as a bit odd. What had been the point of dragging a child to see the site of a horrific catastrophe that she couldn’t possibly comprehend? She hadn’t really understood it until very recently, when she had made her own pilgrimage to the site of the Anaheim Event. It was a way of coming to terms with the gaping nothingness that constantly loomed at the edges of human civilization. It took only one lunatic with a rented truck and a few thousand pounds of fertilizer and fuel oil to reduce to rubble a building that had taken hundreds of people years to build. And it took only one little glass a
pple to suck Anaheim Stadium right out of existence. She shuddered at the thought and looked up at the pathetic moon. Things could very easily have gone much worse—would have gone much worse if it weren’t for Mercury’s quick thinking and nerve.

  Mercury.

  Where the hell is he? she thought. The archangel Michelle had said that Mercury might be stranded on some remote plane with no way back to the known Universe. But something in the back of Christine’s mind told her that wasn’t right. No, she thought. This isn’t over yet. The world is in too much danger, and I can’t do this by myself. Somehow, he’s got to come back.

  Christine turned to look at Jacob, who was sleeping soundly, curled up in a fetal pose in the seat across the aisle. Occasionally his left hand would jerk wildly, as if he were shooing away an invisible insect. Ticks, thought Christine, smiling at the pun. The hand-jerking was almost cute, making Jacob resemble a dog that was dreaming of running. Certainly less annoying than the weird vocalizations and head-jerking he did when he was awake.

  Her smile faded when she realized the pettiness of these thoughts. If she found the tics annoying, how much worse must it be for Jacob? The tics weren’t something he did; they were something that happened to him. What would it be like to be unable to control your own body? To feel a near-constant compulsion to act in ways that appeared to observers as bizarre affectations, probably hinting at some severe underlying mental illness? Ironically, Jacob was probably the sanest person she had met since all of this stuff with the Apocalypse had begun. The extent of his neurosis was a debilitating social awkwardness—a condition that she could only assume was not helped by his uncontrollable muscle spasms. As amazing as Jacob’s inhuman reaction speed was, she couldn’t imagine Jacob wanting to be the way he was. In fact, he had specifically chosen otherwise, taking medication to suppress his symptoms. Presumably, the medication also suppressed what Christine had come to think of as Jacob’s “ninja powers.”