Days of Atonement

by Walter Jon Williams

In silence, it followed him home to Atocha.

  *

  As he drove, Loren could look in his rearview mirror and see the glow of a fire in the national forest to the north, deep orange outlining the black column of smoke rising above it. Helicopters, searchlights stabbing down through the murk, circled the smoke cloud like moths hypnotized by a lamp.

  The ATL Blazer was right behind him, not bothering to try to hide. Uncertainty crawled through Loren’s heart. For some reason he didn’t want to lead Patience’s goons to his home, to have their intruding presence within the peacefulness of his querencia, and so he passed his turn and drove down Central heading toward the Line. The town was quiet on Monday night, with only a little vehicle traffic and a few pedestrians, mainly young people, walking in small, cheerful groups down the streets.

  Before he got to the Line he turned around in the high school parking lot and headed back, forcing the Blazer to make a U-turn behind him. He grinned into the rearview mirror as his followers swayed back into his trail. You couldn’t do a proper tail job with a single car.

  A figure appeared out of the darkness, a tall man wrapped in a blanket: Roberts the Prophet, trundling home from the Line with a bottle in a brown paper bag. His daily dose of inspiration.

  Miracles happen every day. Roberts’s slogan.

  The big thermos-bottle-shaped towers of the Apostle church reared up on the right, silhouetted by the glow of the town plaza. Behind the church, the porch light of the parsonage was on.

  An impulse swung Loren and his car into the right lane, then brought him to a stop. Loren waited behind the wheel for the Blazer to pass him— it kept on going down Central— and then Loren stepped out.

  Loren hadn’t done his spiritual duty for months now.

  A car drove past on jacked-up rear wheels, Arab quarter-tones booming from interior speakers. Loren tried to ignore it.

  The Ordinances of the Apostles commanded each member of the community to regularly visit the pastor and “make his report” on the state of his spiritual health. Exactly how often was “regularly” was up to the pastor, the church elders and deacons, the parishioner, and the latter’s conscience. In his wild days Loren had let years go by between visits. Now he reported every two or three months, at least for the amount of time it took to announce that his spiritual state seemed, on the whole, pretty good.

  Now he didn’t know precisely what his soul was telling him. Questions bubbled up in his heart, questions he did not dare ask lest they betray him as a lunatic. He swung open the white picket gate, walked up the short flagstone path, and knocked. Only then did he wonder exactly what it was he had come here to say.

  Pastor Rickey’s expression, on answering, seemed only mildly curious. In the few times Loren had seen him in this capacity, his questions had been as pro forma as Loren’s answers. Maybe he only tried to match his parishioner’s mood.

  “Hi,” Loren said. “Is it too late? Can we talk?”

  Rickey’s expression didn’t change. “Come on in.” Rickey swung open the door and Loren followed him into his study.

  “Are you here for your regular visit?” Rickey said as he walked. Yower. “Or is this some special particular occasion?” Pahrticular.

  “I’m not sure,” Loren said.

  “Sit down. Would you like some tea?”

  The study had a strange little tented tin ceiling with winglike deco motifs, and a plastered dado that featured deco symbols of a more or less religious character: zias, crosses, swastikas, Egyptian sun symbols with streamlined Raymond Leowy wings. The pastor’s desk, bookshelves, and chairs were of light wood, the uprights carved with branching zigzag lightning bolts clutched in the hand of God or Zeus. More 1920s modernism.

  “No tea, thanks.” Loren hitched his gun around under his jacket and sat down in one of the lightning chairs.

  Rickey tugged at the knees of his pair of brown cords and sat. He was wearing a light blue shirt open at the collar. Part of the next day’s sermon lay flickering on a video screen just above his keyboard.

  “We’re alike in a way,” Loren said. “You and me.”

  Rickey looked at him with polite regard.

  “We both keep other people’s secrets,” Loren said. “We both know more about our neighbors than anyone else.”

  Surprise glittered behind Rickey’s spectacles. His balding head inclined to one side.

  “I hadn’t considered that.”

  “Sometimes more than we want to know.”

  “I suppose so.” He leaned forward encouragingly. “Is that what you wanted to talk to me about? How to deal with other people’s secrets?”

  “Not exactly.” Loren cleared his throat, shifted his weight to the other hip. “What I’m worried about isn’t a secret, exactly. Well”— changing his ground a bit—“it might be a secret. It’s something I can’t talk about directly.”

  Rickey absorbed this. His brow furrowed as he considered. “Can you perhaps give me an indication of its general nature?” he asked.

  “What—” He paused for a moment, licked his lips, went on. “What is the church’s position on miracles?”

  Genuine surprise danced in Rickey’s eyes. He smiled and nodded. “Miracles are an established part of doctrine. Twelve people witnessed the ascension of the Master in Gray. The first president of the church recorded his miracles in his diary.”

  “Miracles happen every day.”

  Rickey grinned. “Have you been speaking to poor Mr. Roberts? That’s his slogan, I believe.”

  “Al Roberts is going over the edge.”

  “He’s gone. Long gone.” Shaking his head again. “Perhaps a miracle would have saved him.”

  “Maybe.” Loren looked at the pastor suspiciously. He couldn’t quite tell whether Rickey was being flippant or not.

  Miracles. How could he get there from here?

  “I was down at the labs today,” he said. “Looking at some of their equipment.”

  “Ah.” Rickey settled into his seat, fingers steepled in front of him. Loren peered at him again. How significant was the “ah”?

  “They say,” starting again, “that they can come close to remaking the Creation. One of the techs even told me it was possible to create a whole universe.” He gave a little dismissive shrug. “Though maybe that was all bull. I think it was. I couldn’t really tell.”

  “Whatever they can do,” Rickey said, “it’s not the Creation. It’s just a material reconstruction. The Creation—and any genuine miracle, by the way— requires the divine spirit.”

  “Yeah.” Loren cleared his throat again. “That’s not the miracle I was talking about, anyway.”

  “Oh.” Rickey frowned. “I thought perhaps that science had shaken your faith.”

  “No. I don’t think so.” He shook his head. “Definitely not.”

  “Science, read properly, should build faith.” Rickey was laughing. The words of the next day’s sermon glowed over his shoulder. “The evidence is good. I’ve looked into it, and science reaffirms the most essential tenets of our religion.”

  Loren looked at him, despair tugging at his heart as he tried to figure out how he was going to get through this without seeming a lunatic.

  “The evolution business gets in the way, always. People get upset over whether we’re descended from apes, or whether the Creation actually took place on October 22 of 4004 B.C., like Bishop Ussher said. What twaddle!” Rickey waved a hand dismissively. “That’s picayune literalism! It’s just modern-day Pharisees picking over the minutiae of a religion that they and people like them tried their best to kill in spirit ages ago— and thank God they didn’t succeed. Why be literal about the thing?” Literahl. “What matters is that the Creation actually took place, however it did! What matters is that we’re here!”

  Loren tried to smile at him. A smile at least seemed required, the pastor seemed so cheerful. Even if he was totally missing Loren’s point.

  “The scientists look at nature and find randomness, and that’s t
he same kind of literal-mindedness that the latter-day Pharisees engage in— they won’t believe in anything unless it’s spelled out for them. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle— it demonstrates free will! I’ve looked into it!”

  Aggravation griped along Loren’s bones. “Hey,” he said, “does everybody know about this Heisenberg guy but me?”

  Rickey laughed again. “I studied physics for a while, till I decided to go into philosophy instead. And with ATL being built down the road, I reacquainted myself with modern physics on the principle of know-your-neighbor. I suppose I thought I might have the chance to convert a scientist.” Loren nodded. Rickey went on. “Heisenberg was a physicist, and he demonstrated that you cannot determine both the position and velocity of a particle.” Pahrticle. “One or the other has always to remain uncertain. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.”

  Loren thought about it. “Okay,” he said. “I understand the bumper sticker now.”

  Rickey looked puzzled for a moment, then shrugged, his enthusiasm returning. “A man named Schrodinger illustrated the principle with this lovely parable about a cat and a bottle of poison— but my point is this: in classical physics, all is ultimately knowable. If you can understand the present, know it really well, unto the tiniest particle and its velocity, then the future is predictable. As foreordained as the most depressed Calvinist would have it. If the present is unknowable — if you can’t demonstrate certainty even about the present— then it follows that the future is unknowable. And that means, my dear sir, that free will exists! We are not predestined robots! We exist, and our actions have consequences. Church doctrine is proved. Samuel Catton was right. QED.”

  Loren looked at him. The man was looking at him expectantly. Maybe he was anticipating applause.

  “That’s good, Pastor,” he nodded.

  It had been a mistake to come here, he knew. He searched his mind for a graceful way to make an exit.

  “And as for miracles— they do happen!” Rickey’s openmouthed smile revealed his tongue probing at the back of his teeth, as if searching for answers. “They happen not every day, but every second! Look at what happens when an electron absorbs a photon and moves to a higher energy state— the electron doesn’t just migrate to the higher state, it sort of fades out in its old location and fades into a new one.” Rickey dropped a fist on his knee, banging the point home. “That’s a miracle, son! And that’s a miracle that happens every teensiest fraction of a second to billions upon billions of electrons in the whole goldarn universe. Be joyful!”

  “I’ll do my best,” Loren said. His head was swimming. A thoroughgoing nostalgia rose in him for the former parson, who would have quoted some stern Old Testament injunction or other, told him it was not his place to question the ways of God, and then sent him on his way. And who would certainly not have given him a physics lesson, of which he’d had a clear overabundance in recent hours.

  “Miracles,” Rickey said, “are a demonstration of God’s grace. In our fallen world, a world filled with evil and uncertainty, with impure motives and questionable deeds, miracles are like a voice in the wilderness that crieth out God is here!” His voice was earnest now, not bubbling over with enthusiasm as before. He leaned forward, gazing intently into Loren’s eyes. “Large miracles— macroatomic miracles, if you like— appear when all else is hopeless. When things are so tangled and confused that God himself must intervene! When there is no other way to God’s grace, miracles point the way!”

  Loren thought about it, wondered what it meant for him. “Have you ever seen a miracle?” he asked.

  Rickey grinned. “No. It was the absence of miracles that convinced me of their existence.” He leaned back, cleared his throat. “I was brought up an Apostle, of course, back in Susquehanna, but I didn’t take much stock in matters of faith.” Apahstle, Seskehanna. “The idea that God sent an angel to some half-literate farmer in upstate Pennsylvania in order to deliver a worldwide revelation— pretty silly, don’t you think?” He grinned self-consciously. “And the good things that were associated with the church, the welfare and community work and so on, were being undertaken by the federal government.”

  He shook his head. “So I joined the Peace Corps. I got sent to Africa— Uganda. And that was a disaster— well, you’ve seen the television.”

  Loren nodded.

  “After that,” Rickey continued, “I moved to Los Angeles and went to work in a shelter for the homeless. I thought that the relief effort had just been mismanaged, that if I couldn’t be a part of the effort abroad I could at least help people here at home. And you know what?“ There was a hot desperation in his glance. Loren saw a gleam of moisture on his upper lip. “I couldn’t help. You can’t imagine how hopeless it was. A city the size of L.A. has tens of thousands of indigent— we’d fill our facility every night and close the doors in the faces of hundreds. And we didn’t just serve old rummies— we’d give priority to families with children, and even so there’d be little kids sleeping in the streets of our neighborhood, because we didn’t have places for them.

  “And the diseases.” There was remembered horror in Rickey’s eyes, and Loren knew the pastor wasn’t seeing his comfortable little study, but the sick bay in his Los Angeles shelter, children lying on ancient iron beds, old donated mattresses, mended white sheets. “Stuff we should have got rid of years ago. Diphtheria. Scarlet fever. Polio, for heaven’s sake! If we’d had leprosy and schistosomiasis, it would have been as bad as Africa. But the social services were all overwhelmed, and even basic vaccinations for children weren’t being done.”

  He cleared his throat, then coughed into his fist. “We were in a gentrifying neighborhood, and the people living there weren’t pleased by our presence. They wrote to their representatives, complained to the media; some of them even picketed. They didn’t want to live next to poor people! Thought it brought down their property values!” Prahperty. Rickey gave a little mad grin; his eyes gleamed. One hand was scrubbing his thigh, a robotlike gesture without awareness. “And one night somebody burned our place down! Arson!”

  Ahrson. “Jesus,“ Loren said— and then was acutely mindful he’d broken a Commandment. Rickey continued, seemingly unaware of Loren’s transgression.

  “There was a proper fire alarm and a sprinkler system— our place was up to code!” Rickey mopped his brow. “No one should have been hurt. No one should have been hurt!” He seemed to want to insist on that. “But some of the alarm components had been stolen by our clients, to sell for liquor or food or bootleg antibiotics, and the alarms and the sprinklers didn’t go off. Twelve people burned to death. Most of them children from the sick ward.” He gave his crazy little smile again. “No one caught the arsonist. They said he was a transient, and maybe he was. Nobody looked very hard. Developers built a strip mall on our location. And I went back to Pennsylvania, to Catton College.”

  “I never knew any of this,” said Loren.

  Rickey slapped a hand on his knee. He was smiling. “Do I believe in miracles? You bet I do!”

  Loren looked at him. “Because the rest weren’t burned, you mean? Other than the twelve who were killed?”

  Rickey gave a twitchy shake of his head. “Because there’s no other answer,” he said. “Nothing else works. All that planning, all that relief effort, it failed. Federal intervention is a joke. Mankind is fallen and so are all our schemes. All, as Ecclesiastes says, is vanity and vexation of spirit.” His ropy arms lifted, brandishing fists. “God’s grace has to be the answer. Because otherwise it’s all a desert. Extinction. If God isn’t the answer, nothing is. God is the only hope.”

  Loren felt heat flashing through his body. Rickey was right. Loren was a public servant, he knew how rotten it all was, how much the world needed belief. But he had other things to believe in— faith wasn’t his last resort. Images of his children shimmered before him. He wasn’t like Rickey, with all his work gone for nothing.

  “If you had children,” he said, “you might feel different.
”

  Rickey looked at him from shrunken eye sockets, a skeletal smile on his face. “I had lots of children, Chief. Some starved, some were crippled by polio, some burned to death. They are much better off with God.” The skull’s smile widened. “Auden, I believe, said that not to be born was the best. Failing that, I recommend faith. As, I believe, did Auden.”

  Loren started to answer, realized he had nothing more to offer. Nothing except that he believed in his family as much as he believed in God, and Rickey wouldn’t accept that.

  “I almost forgot to ask you.” Ahlmost forgaht. Rickey gave a self-conscious chuckle. “You’ve performed a miracle? Is that what this is about?”

  “I haven’t done one,” Loren said. Knowledge of his own sins plucked at his heart. “I’m not a prophet or a saint,” he said. “But I think I may have witnessed a miracle.”

  He called my name.

  “I’m somewhat relieved,” Rickey said. He produced a handkerchief and mopped his brow. He was breathing hard. Loren thought of children burning in a sick ward, Randal Dudenhof pierced through with the steering column, all the unexpected horror that could shatter life’s peace.

  “I’m not sure how I would deal with someone who said he worked miracles,” Rickey said. “A witness, though, that’s another thing. You’re a trained observer, and that helps, too. A man of the world, not a mystic. I’ve met mystics, and you can fool them with parlor tricks. Prestidigitation. They want to believe so much.” He gave a shaky smile. “So who performed this miracle?”

  “No one that I saw.”

  “Hm.” Rickey looked at him quizzically. “But you can’t tell me what it was?”

  “I would prefer not to. And I don’t know for certain that it was a miracle. There are other possibilities I have to eliminate. But—” He spread his hands.

  Still, he called my name.

  “But it still troubles you.” Rickey took off his spectacles, wiped them on his handkerchief.

  “Yes.”

  Myopic eyes flicked to Loren. “Why does it bother you?”

  Loren opened his mouth, closed it. Because I’m afraid. He didn’t want to confront this matter of miracles. He wanted a straightforward police investigation, with John Doe killed by Timothy Jernigan because he’d caught him in bed with his wife or some other answer equally simple and satisfactory.