Costume Not Included

by Matthew Hughes

  "How reliable?" he said.

  "Rock solid."

  His calculations complete, Grimshaw said, "I'll get my crew."

  "Confiscate their cell phones before they saddle up," Denby cautioned.

  "Not to worry."

  Billy Lee Hardacre used taped music for his broadcasts. He'd heard other televangelists recount horror stories of booze, drugs and illicit sex among their in-house choristers. He been told of one occasion where a live broadcast had teetered on the edge of disaster because a soprano soloist, pregnant by the basso profundo, had had to be manhandled out of camera shot and off the stage before she could make their private disagreements indelibly public.

  For the revelation of the new prophet, he decided to go classical: Also Sprach Zarathustra – better known as the opening theme to 2001: A Space Odyssey. But first came his own segment, his last as the precursor, and Hardacre came on stage, as he usually did, to the strains of Get Happy (Get Ready for the Judgement Day). The set was unlit, except for a plain wooden stool beneath a single spotlight. The preacher came out of the darkness, a cordless microphone in his hand, rested one buttock on the seat, hooked a boot heel on one of the rungs, and smiled into the camera.

  "My friends," he began, "for weeks now I've been telling you that a new light is coming, a new day is about to dawn. Hold on, I said, for the time is almost at hand."

  He paused. "It's hard, waiting for deliverance, in a world that seems to have gone mad. A world where the strong oppress the weak, where the rich rob the poor, where the wise have given themselves over to foolishness. We look to the east and say, 'Where is the sunrise? When will the light come to chase away the darkness?'"

  He shook his head and looked down, silent and pensive. Then he raised his eyes to the camera again and said, "I thank you for your patience, friends. I thank you for your faith. I thank you for your courage, for your willingness to tune in, week after week, to hear me say, 'Hold on, it's coming! The dawn is about to break!'"

  And now his voice rose. "But I'm not going to say that to you today! I'm not going to tell you that you have to wait!" He rose from the stool and moved closer to the camera, and now the spot faded and more lights came up, creamy and golden, to illuminate the stage's backdrop in an illusion of heavenly light. Hardacre stopped at a place where an X was chalked onto the concrete floor and a carefully aimed spotlight created a nimbus of light about his head.

  "Friends," he said, his voice rising another level, "I'm not going to tell you to wait anymore! I'm not going to tell you the one we've been waiting for is on his way!" Beneath his words, the horns and drums of the fanfare began. "I'm not going to say, 'Be patient, have faith.'

  "Because your patience is about to be rewarded! Your faith is about to be vindicated!" The music built in intensity and volume as Hardacre's highly able sound engineer tracked his oration. "Because the waiting is over! Because the one you've waited for…" The music moved into the crescendo, and Hardacre followed its rhythm, waiting for the final roll of the kettledrums, then shouted, "is here!"

  The stage went dark again, only for a second. Then a new spotlight fell upon the curly-haired, bearded man who had been waiting in the darkness. Joshua stood with his hands in his pockets – he'd found that a most agreeable use for pockets. He stared down at his sandal-shod bare feet – he couldn't get used to shoes and socks – and rocked back and forth on his heels and soles. Then he looked up and around, as if not sure where his eyes ought to settle.

  Hardacre, standing out of shot beside camera one, pointed at the instrument's hooded lens. Joshua smiled and nodded – they'd rehearsed this, though without the music, and now he stepped toward the camera until the preacher showed him both palms. The prophet stopped, raised one hand to pensively pinch his lower lip, and remained silent. Five seconds went by, then ten. Hardacre made a rolling motion with one hand, which drew Joshua's attention though he didn't seem to know what the gesture meant.

  Finally, Billy Lee stage-whispered, "Speak!" which caused the other man to blink in surprise.

  "Now?" he said.

  "Yes, now!"

  "I was waiting for you to introduce me."

  "I did!"

  "Not by name."

  "You can do that."

  The prophet frowned. "What's the point of your being a precursor if you don't tell them who I am?"

  "Please," said Hardacre, "get on with it."

  "Do you want to play the music again? That was very… startling music."

  "No! I just want you to talk to the camera."

  The other man shrugged. "As you like." He seemed to gather his thoughts, then said, "Peace be upon you. I am" – he pronounced it carefully – "Joshua Josephson. I am a prophet of the Lord. I've come to talk to you about what the Lord wants from you."

  Here he paused, and Hardacre had the frightening thought that the man was thinking about the issue for the first time. The pause lengthened and the preacher's hand came up, trembling, just about to make the rolling gesture again, when Joshua said, "Not all that much, really. At least, not all that much out of the ordinary."

  The prophet lowered his head, pinched his lip again and took a step to the right, then another, then a third. The spotlight, robotically controlled from a computer in a booth two floors above the studio, tracked him smoothly. So did the camera, operated by the same computer. Joshua looked up, seemed almost surprised to find the device still looking at him, and turned to it again saying, "People always used to ask me: what does the Lord want of us? What are we supposed to be doing?

  "Does he want us to always be praying to him, and thinking about him, trying to get closer to him?" He looked away, tugged on the lip again, then came back to the camera. "Well… no." He paused again, then appeared to hit on something. "Put it this way," he said. "Imagine you take your child somewhere to play. Perhaps you even build a garden for the child to play in, with interesting toys and things to do.

  "Then you put your little one out there and you say, 'Go ahead, have some fun.' But, instead, all it does is sit before you and stare at you and ask you questions." He shrugged. "How are you going to feel?"

  He seemed to be waiting for a response, then realized after a moment that the camera couldn't give him one. "The point is," he said, "that the Lord put us here so he could watch us, not the other way round."

  He put his hands in his pocket and walked up and down again, the spotlight and camera tracking him. After a while, he shaded his eyes and found Hardacre. "Will that do?" he said.

  "No!" cried the preacher, then clapped a hand over his mouth. He had another fifty-three minutes of airtime to fill. He tried another stage whisper. "Tell them what should they do!"

  Joshua twitched his shoulders as if the question wasn't worth a full shrug. "What they should do?"

  "Into the camera! Talk to them directly!"

  The prophet looked into the lens. "Our friend, here, the, um, precursor, wants me to tell you what the Lord wants you to do." He raised a finger and shook it with emphasis. "That hasn't changed since I was here last." He spread his calloused hands. "Be good to one another.

  "An old rabbi used to put it very well: don't do anything to anybody that you wouldn't want somebody to do to you. And, if you can see a way to help, then help. After all, what are we here for, if not to help each other?"

  He gave the matter a little more thought then his face brightened. "Oh, yes," he said, "and don't worry about what it all means. Even the Lord doesn't know that. At least, not yet. He's still working it out. Or, I should say, we're working it out for him. We're all part of a story that the Lord is telling himself."

  "Well," the prophet rubbed his palms together then spread his hands, "nice talking to you. Peace."

  And with that, Joshua Josephson, gave the camera a little flick of his becurled, bearded head, and walked off into the darkness. The robotic spotlight and camera followed him until he stepped over the strip of yellow tape that marked the limit of the coverage zone, then faithful to their programming, the ligh
t turned itself off and the camera went on standby.

  Leaving Billy Lee Hardacre with fifty-three minutes of airtime to fill. In the automated broadcast center, Billy Lee was his own director; he had a device in his pocket with a miniature screen and keyboard. He pulled it out and quickly tapped in a sequence of numbers, and the screen showed an image of himself pitching for donations. A second later, so did all the television sets in the land that were tuned to his program.

  Then he went looking for the prophet.

  Captain Denby didn't know how it was done, but the time traveler had told him that if he signed out a police vehicle – any vehicle that had a global positioning system – he would find the coordinates of Cathy Bannister's grave already entered in it. Sure enough, when he got behind the wheel of an unmarked car in the police garage and turned on the GPS, it told him where to go. Lieutenant Grimshaw and three crime-scene technicians in a van full of technology followed him.

  It took longer to get there than it had on the floating disk, but eventually the woman's voice from the dashboard brought him to the pipe gate that had been open that night in 2001. It was closed now but one of the technicians clipped off the padlock with a pair of bolt cutters, then the two vehicles wound their way along the rutted track that led through the trees.

  The night before, he'd mentally marked the spot under the maple where they'd laid the body. The tree did not look much different after nine years and he led Grimshaw there and pointed to the ground. The lieutenant, beckoned over a technician who brought a five-foot-long steel rod with a tee-bar handle. The technician pushed the rod into the ground in several places, a foot apart. Denby could see that where the grave ought to be, the instrument went in deeper without the man having to put weight on it. In less than a minute, the rough dimensions of the grave were marked out by tiny white flags mounted on sticks stuck into the ground.

  "Definitely been dug into," Grimshaw said. Another of the technicians, a woman, brought him a handheld device covered in black rubber; it had a long metal tube attached to it by a plastic cable. The lieutenant inserted the tube into one of the holes the first probe had made, within the area bounded by the flags on sticks. Grimshaw pressed a button and studied a display for a moment, then he withdrew the probe and put it into one of the holes outside the flagged area. He studied the result for a moment, then said, "Higher methane results inside than outside. I'd say we've got a grave."

  He turned to Denby and said, "Captain, I'm going to ask you to step back." Then he spoke to his crew. "Done right," he said, "this one's a career-maker. Done wrong – that means we fuck up and blow a conviction – it could be a career-ender. So we're not only going to do this right – we're going to do it perfect. Karen, get the camera. It's been nine years, but we'll start with a complete site survey. Let's get to work."

  • • • •

  Hardacre had found two bucket chairs and a small table, and set them up, siting them on strips of tape laid on the floor by another televangelist who used the studio and liked to do an interview format. Then he'd gone and found Joshua, who was wandering around the studio exercising his curiosity, and brought him back. They were both already wearing button microphones and FM radio packs, so all the preacher had to do was get them seated, find the right item on his control's drop-down menu, and let the computer up in the control booth adapt the lighting and camera positioning to the new set-up. He'd had to run another commercial while a second camera rolled forward from the back of the studio, but that gave him to time to explain to the prophet what they were going to do.

  Joshua scratched his black curls. "We're going to talk while they eavesdrop?"

  "Pretty much."

  "That seems like bad manners."

  "Not here."

  "As you say." The prophet leaned back in the chair and crossed his legs.

  "Better if you keep both feet on the floor," Hardacre said. "Sandals without socks give the wrong impression."

  "What impression is that?"

  But the preacher was looking into one of the cameras and saying, "And we're back. I'm talking with Joshua Josephson, prophet of the Lord. Joshua–"

  "Yes?" The man craned his neck to see the camera that had positioned itself behind him so it could shoot Hardacre over his shoulder.

  "This one," Hardacre said, gesturing with his thumb at the camera behind his chair.

  "That one?" The prophet peered into the lens. "But I was talking to the other one before."

  Hardacre took a breath and let it out slowly. "That doesn't matter. Or you can just look at me."

  "It's a complicated business, isn't it?"

  The preacher took another breath. "Earlier, you were saying that God–"

  "Don't say that," Joshua interrupted. "He likes to be called 'the Lord.'" He smiled, like a man remembering an embarrassing faux pas. "I used to call him 'Father,' you know, but that led to some complications." He laughed. "Especially with the Greeks. You wouldn't think they would have taken me literally, but there you go."

  Hardacre opened his mouth for a second try, but the prophet was shaking his head and saying, "I never wanted to include the Greeks. Or the Romans. Waste of time, I thought, talking to pagans. Even if they'd come around to what I was saying, I figured the best they'd do is make the Lord into just another one of their gods – they had a lot of gods, you know. All false, of course, but could you convince them of that?"

  He shook his head again and Hardacre used the opportunity to say, "But your message to–"

  "And then, as it all turned out, I have to say I was mostly right. Even when Constantine made them all convert, they kept a lot of those godlings – started calling them saints and so on, and just kept on burning incense to them and asking for favors and all that pagan hoo-hah."

  "But–" Hardacre began and was rolled over.

  "And you should have seen the trouble that caused in Heaven," Joshua said. "First, all of the pagan gods and demigods were demons." He had been speaking to the preacher, but now he stared over Hardacre's shoulder into the camera and said, "That is, they were fallen angels. Do they know about that business with Lucifer?" he said to Billy Lee.

  "Yes. Now let's–"

  "Good. So here were all these formerly fallen angels coming back and being rehabilitated as saints. Which meant they had privileged access to the Lord. Seats on the right hand. I don't want to say there was resentment among the Thrones and Dominions – not to mention the real human saints who had been martyred by the Romans – but, well, let's say there had to be a period of adjustment."

  Joshua blinked and smiled at Billy Lee. "But listen to me," he said, "prattling on and on. What was it you wanted to talk about?"

  The ground search turned up the usual odds and ends, almost certainly unrelated to the body in the hole, Grimshaw conceded, but they were doing this one "absolutely by the book." Things got more interesting when the technicians got down to the bones themselves. Karen, smallest of the three, lowered herself into the grave and began brushing away the last bits of soil from the bones, pausing every few strokes to let one of the male technicians capture the scene on a digital camera.

  "Here," said the woman, straightening from a crouch and handing Grimshaw a plastic evidence bag. In it was a gold ring set with garnets, Cathy Bannister's birthstone. Her father had given it to her at her high-school graduation. It was known to have disappeared when she did. The lieutenant examined it then said to Denby, "Captain, do you have the file?"

  It was in Denby's car. He went and got it. Grimshaw followed him. They opened the folder on the vehicle's hood and the captain riffled through the material until he came to a picture of the high school girl smiling in cap and gown. The hand that held a rolled-up diploma also showed the ring.

  "Bingo," said the lieutenant. "We'll still do the DNA, but…"

  "You're convinced?" Denby said.

  "Uh huh."

  "Time to call the chief." The detective took out his cell phone, checked the display and saw three green bars. He called up the sp
eed dial menu and punched in a number. The phone rang several times – he could envision J. Edgar Hoople staring at the caller ID and trying to decide whether or not to answer – then the chief's voice said, "What?"

  "Are you sitting down, chief?" the captain said.

  "Don't fuck with me, Denby!"

  "Thought you'd want to know. I'm out in the state forest, off County Road Eight. Grimshaw and his team are with me. We've just dug up Cathy Bannister." At first, Denby thought he was hearing silence on the line, that the chief had disconnected, but when he pressed the phone closer to his ear, he could hear the sound of breathing.

  "You there, chief?" he said. "Do you want to call Public Affairs and set up the press conference? Or do you want me to?"

  Chesney and Melda watched The New New Tabernacle of the Air in their apartment.