“Huh?”
“What does it feel like to be a white mouse? I’ve tried to guess, but empathizing with humans is hard enough. I love my white mice, but I don’t know how they actually feel. So you can tell me. This is almost better than starting to believe in God.”
Bertis calls to Rick, “Buddy, what planet is she from?”
“Answer her question.”
“You two are crazy.”
“We’re not crazy,” Rachel says. “I breed white mice for a living.”
“You’re a teenager dressed like Nancy Reagan.”
“I’m dressed like a fertile woman of child-bearing age. And judging by your raised voice, you are either angry or telling a joke.” Rachel heads back to the bar and washes her hands with Purell and a bar towel.
Bertis says, “This isn’t happening.”
“Bertis, can we please discuss white mice?” Rachel says, taking a sip of her Coke.
Rick snickers. “Now you know how we feel when you get all Goddy on us.”
Bertis changes the subject. “Rick, would you please untape my hands?”
“What? You can’t be serious.”
“I am. I have no circulation in them. They don’t even feel like hands anymore. Look at them. They’re white. I’m not asking you something major. Handcuff me to the table, if you like. There are cuffs in the inside pocket of my bag. But I need more blood circulation. And may I remind you that your buddy shot off my toe?”
“There are cuffs in your bag? How did I miss those? Wait — why do you have cuffs in your bag?”
“When I set out today on my holy mission, I wasn’t sure what the day might . . . entail.”
Rachel says, “I think it’s safe, Rick. You hold the gun to his head while I cut the duct tape on his wrists, then cuff him to the table.”
“Fine. Let’s do it.”
Rachel opens the bag and locates the cuffs, then kneels on the floor beside Bertis. Rick watches closely, holding his shotgun to Bertis’s head as the duct tape binding his hands is sliced off. Then Rachel slides the table closer and cuffs Bertis’s right arm to one of the legs. The transition occurs without incident.
“There. I can move my hands. Thank you.”
“Jesus, all of this craziness, just because oil implodes,” says Rick.
“Oil is black and thick like sludge, Rick — like the unsaved blood that pumps through your heart.”
“Okay, Bertis,” says Rick. “I guess we’re overdue for a sermon. Go on, then. I’m all ears.”
Truth be told, Rick likes the way Bertis speaks. It’s a lot like the way Leslie Freemont spoke, except with a different sales pitch. He likes the sound and the flow of the words.
Bertis says, “There is no middle ground between belief and non-belief, Rick, no shades, no mid-tones. Surrender all of your logic and theories to blind faith. What is written is true. My words contain no errors, and a man who spreads the word is holy and must be obeyed. And Rick, there is so much you need to learn. For example, men and women are two different animals and must be treated as such. And now that the Apocalypse has happened, more than ever you must accept belief. You must learn to attack moderates — those people who think a middle ground can exist — and feel pity and disgust for people who believe in a cartoon world of peace and love — it only makes them easier to kill. You must choose between death and becoming someone entirely new.”
“And how will that feel?”
“It will feel, Rick, as if you died and were reincarnated, yet stayed inside your own body.”
“You said reincarnation was a sham.”
“Shush. Your new life will be coloured and perfumed by the sensation of imminent truth. Change your name if you like. Sever all links to the previous world. Disappear from the world completely for months and months. Let those in your life give you up for dead. Let the remains of your former existence be an uninterpreted dream. But remember, you will soon be different, and there aren’t enough words for ‘transform.’ No more excuses for you, Rick: no drugs, no sleeping, no booze, no overworking, no repetition or insulation or efforts to make time disappear. You’re in for the long haul. Can you do that, Rick?”
“I —” Rick stops for a second. “What’s with the way you talk?”
Bertis is genuinely taken aback. “What?”
“The way you talk. Aside from the subject matter, it feels like it’s coming from some different place, or some other part of history. Did you study how to talk like that? Do they teach that in schools — how to talk weird?”
Rachel says, “Bertis is being poetic, Rick. He uses rhythm and regularity of speech to make you forget about yourself so that his words will have a stronger impact. We were taught to recognize poetry in normalcy training. It’s like music — it’s a powerful way to quickly and effectively indoctrinate normals.”
Rick thinks this over, smiles at his sweetheart, and says, “Let me guess, Rachel — you don’t understand music either, do you?”
“No,” replies Rachel. “Much of what normal people think of as art is simply the establishment of repetitive structures that become interesting when they are broken in certain ways.”
Bertis says, “That’s not true, Rachel. Is that all your new relationship to God is — a pattern to be broken?”
“It’s a bit new to me. I haven’t thought it through yet.”
“You’re already in God’s house, Rachel. Now it’s just a matter of locating your room.”
Rick says, “Get real, Bertis. Humans are part of nature, and nature is one great big wood chipper. Sooner or later, everything shoots out the other end in a spray of blood, bones, and hair.”
“No!” shouts Bertis. “That is not true. We are beasts, yet we are divine. We have apprehension. We can ask questions.”
“I thought it was all about believing without questioning.”
“Ahhh . . . arrogance. Man’s curse. Just you watch, Rick — the world makes cat food out of people who think like you.”
“What should I be doing, then?”
“You should be accepting faith, Rick. You should be spreading the good word. You should be etching the good word onto the glass scanning beds of library photocopiers. You should be scraping the truth onto old auto parts and throwing them off bridges so that people digging in the mud in a million years will question the world, too. You should be carving eyeballs into tire treads and onto shoe soles so that your every trail speaks of thinking and faith and belief. You should be designing molecules that crystallize into poems of devotion. You should be making bar codes that print out truth, not lies. You shouldn’t even throw away a piece of litter unless it has the truth stamped on it — a demand for people to reach a finer place!”
Rick is enjoying Bertis’s words — not even because of their content, but because he likes their pattern, their Leslie Freemontishness.
Bertis continues: “Rick, your new life will be tinged with urgency, as though you’re digging out the victims of an avalanche. If you’re not spending every waking moment of your life living the truth, if you’re not plotting every moment to boil the carcass of the old order, then you’re wasting your day.”
“Wow,” says Rick. “That spiel is better than what Leslie Freemont offers.”
/> “That Antichrist. That demon.”
During Bertis’s speech, Rachel has been studying his hands and fingers and his Medic-Alert bracelet, and she suddenly makes a connection. “You have spatulate fingernails.”
“Huh? So what?”
“You’re Leslie Freemont’s son, aren’t you? And I’m guessing that Tara used to be your wife.”
Bertis spits, “You witch!” just as Luke, Karen, and Max enter the room, asking if they’ve found more water.
In one smooth act of choreography, Bertis yanks the tablecloth off the table with his left hand, pulls over the duffle bag, and sets it on his lap. Within a second he has the rifle out of the bag, his right hand on the trigger, and the barrel pointing at Rachel. The bullet hits her chest, and a drop of her blood lands in Rick’s eye.
___
Rick ran to Rachel and wrapped his arms around her. Luke ran over and jumped on top of Bertis, whose face was swelling. He seemed to be having a seizure. Bertis hissed his last words at Luke and Rick — “ God owns everything” — while Luke shouted, “What the hell’s happening out here?”
Rachel looked at Bertis and said, “Peanut allergy.”
“What? How could you know that?”
“His father had it. He said so when he was here. I put peanut dust all over the rifle, just in case,” then her legs buckled, and Rick, assisted by Karen, eased her to the floor. Luke looked at the rifle’s trigger, which was covered in powdered bar mix. “God, what a screwed-up world,” he said.
Rick’s heart lay smashed on the floor like an egg. His sense of time had gone AWOL. He didn’t feel old or young or asleep or dreaming or awake. He was living his whole life inside this one moment. His brain sizzled with hormones and enzymes and misfiring electrical sparks — it was amazing that he could even remember who he was. He probed Rachel’s wound and felt the bullet lodged in her bone. He had the feeling that if he reached deeper into her body he could remove gold coins and keys and tropical birds and diamonds. He thought about the blood flowing through his veins and through Rachel’s. Was her heart beating? Was she cooling off as he sat there with her in his arms?
Luke came over and said, “I’ll make a bandage. I’ll tie these napkins together.”
Rick took the napkins from Luke and held them against Rachel’s wound. He thought, We’re all born separated from God — over and over, life makes sure to let us know this — and yet we’re all real. We have names. We have stories. We mean something. We must. But what if my life is a badly told story? Maybe a badly told story only serves to remind us that there is no life after death.
Karen handed Rick a busing tray filled with melted ice and Rick sucked in a gulp of air as he rinsed away the worst of the blood from Rachel’s chest. Now I know for sure that hate is going to enter my life. I can feel it multiplying within me like a rapidly doubling zygote. And even if I eventually shed that ever-growing hate, let it drop from me like a chunk of concrete — what will fill the hole it leaves? The universe is so large, and the world is so glorious, but here I am with chilled black oil pumping through my veins, and I feel like the unholiest thing on earth.
Luke
Luke is sitting with Karen and trying to remember what day of the week it is. This almost feels like an extravagance from an already-vanished era when knowing the day of the week might somehow have mattered. He asks Karen, “Is it a Tuesday? Was it Wednesday? Will it soon be Thursday? I can’t remember.”
“I can’t either, Luke.”
It feels to Luke like a generic day — or rather, it feels how days must have felt before the seven days of the week were invented. He wonders if the builders of Stonehenge felt this same sense of daylessness. Except with Stonehenge, they probably felt yearlessness and wanted some form of confirmation that the year was about to change, that their winters would end.
Bertis is dead, his corpse dragged out back. Max is resting on a raft of tablecloths; candles light him as he lies still, moaning occasionally. Rachel is alive, but barely, also on a raft of tablecloths, and Rick is by her side, morose and speechless. In the candlelight the blood covering his shirt makes it seem like it is made of Plasticine.
So Luke is sitting with Karen, monitoring Max’s and Rachel’s conditions, giving Max occasional sips of water they discovered in a concealed tray beneath the ice machine.
Outside the cocktail lounge, the chemical dust is still kicking around and Warren is but a fluffy pink speed bump. Until the chemicals stop falling, everybody is going to be marooned in the lounge. Luke tried to go for help, running across the breezeway to the hotel doors, but now they were not only locked as before but barricaded, too. And then, back in the cocktail lounge, he had to strip down like Max and rinse himself off, so now he’s wearing one of Rick’s spare bartender outfits.
Luke knows that technically he ought to be drunk, but he stopped feeling drunk hours ago. He feels super-clear now. He can see everything. And in his mind he’s thinking of a pair of bar magnets he stole decades ago from the high school storeroom, magnets that travelled with him across his life, always stashed in the drawer of his bedside tables alongside a Bible. Luke kept these magnets because he could never figure out why north attracts south and why similar poles repel, but he thought if he looked closely enough, he might see threads hurling themselves across space, fighting each other — visibly fighting each other. In his early twenties he still had the bar magnets, and he asked his older sister, a radiologist, how magnets communicated with each other to either attract or repel. She said, “They have fields around them.”
“Okay, but what’s a field?”
“A field is what surrounds a magnet.”
“That’s a non-answer. How does a field work?”
“Well, we know how to work with fields, to predict how strong they’ll be, how to manipulate them with, say, motion inside of dams, or with particle accelerators.”
“That’s not my question. What I want to know is, are there little electrons down there, like tiny little M&M candy guys wearing boxing gloves, hovering around their poles, duking it out?”
“No, fields don’t operate with particles.”
“So how do they operate?”
“We don’t know.”
“We don’t know?”
“We don’t.”
“So all we know about fields is that they exist.”
“Pretty much. They warp space. You just have to accept that fields are fields, and we’ll probably never understand how they do it. Gravity is a field, too. It does the same thing, except it’s way weaker. It takes a planet the size of earth to generate enough gravitational field to make a rock fall down. One good small magnet can have just as much attractive power.”
“I see.”
But Luke didn’t see. It continued to bother him. If we don’t know what a field is, what else will we never be able to understand? And what other fields exist that are either too big or too small to appreciate on the human level?
Karen says, “I’m sorry about your father. My mother is going through the same thing right now. Alzheimer’s.”
“Huh.” Luke thinks a bit. “I used to think Alzheimer’s was a punishment sent to us as a species for refusing to change our ways.” He pauses a beat. “I hope
that didn’t sound preachy.”
“You mean, refusing to change our ways as individuals?”
“Individually, collectively. I’ve learned over the years that people almost never change. The crap I used to hear from my flock. Most people learn nothing from life. Or if they do, they conveniently forget what they’ve learned when it suits their needs. Most people, given a second chance, screw it up royally. It’s one of those laws of the universe you can’t shake. Maybe they learn something once they get their third chance — after wasting vast sums of time, money, youth, energy. But even if they learn something, it doesn’t mean they’re going to change their lives. Most of them simply become bitter because they never had the strength of spirit to make bold strokes.”
“You probably heard a lot of problems in your line of work.”
“I did. Tell me, has your mother . . . has she forgotten you yet?”
“Yes. Did your father forget you?”
“Yeah. Almost immediately.”
Karen says, “My mom’s sort of turning into an animal now, but I don’t know what kind of animal. She screeches. She makes lowing noises. She has stopped being human. It makes me wonder what it means to be human, as opposed to being something else. But at the same time, I no longer think humans are stuck with our natures the way a dog wants bones or a cat wants to chase mice. There’s a weird kind of hope that comes from that. We can change into something else, even if it’s something we don’t understand.”
“Hmmm,” says Luke. “My battle is trying to decide whether it’s worth making memories if in the end I’m just going to lose them all, through disease or death. What’s the point of it all if I’m just going to go gaga?”
“I hate that expression,” says Karen.
“Sorry.”
“No, it’s okay. The doctors I work for actually use that word every day in the lunchroom. But I still don’t like it.”
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