by Nolan Edrik
I left the office early. I needed to be alone, needed to drop the pretense that I could do anything but worry. Even in my apartment, I couldn’t function. I tried to watch a Prayer Corps episode, but my attention span had vanished. So I turned the show off and stretched out in the patch of carpet that constituted my bed. Before long, I slipped into the twitchy, foggy realm between consciousness and sleep.
*
My phone rang, and for a second, I wasn’t sure if the sound was in my dream or real life. It rang again, more loudly.
I groped for my phone in the dark and answered.
“It worked, Glenn. It worked.” Hunter’s was voice quavered.
I opened my eyes to check the time. Midnight. “What did?”
“She’s better. The lungs are taking. They started her on a new drug this morning. I don’t know exactly how it works, something about live-cell gene editing and nanoparticle something or other. They woke her up a little bit ago, and now she’s better. She’s better!”
He let out a nervous, relieved giggle. I’d never imagined him capable of such joy. How close to death had she come?
“That’s great,” I said.
The relief washed over me. My prayers were answered. All I’d had to do was give everything, not just 75 percent as I’d done for years. I had to give every penny that I had and trust that God would provide. And He did.
The sudden, miraculous recovery surely would revive Laura and Hunter’s faith as well. They would stop scoffing at my devotion. How could they not? Mere hours after they’d first donated, and after I’d sent in my biggest donation ever, she was cured.
“So what about the malignant cells?” I asked. “You said the new lungs were good, but is the disease still there? Could it come back?”
“They checked for sick cells a few minutes ago and said they were almost gone and that the new medicine should take care of the few what were left,” he said. “How amazing is science?”
Science. The word hit me right in the stomach. So science saved Laura? Not my persistent sacrifices, not the promises of faith that had proven themselves true time and time again. The science that had failed her repeatedly now caused her recovery all of a sudden?
I didn’t know what to say.
“I’m sorry, Glenn, I’m going a mile a minute here. You probably want to talk to her. She’s a little worn out right now, but she’ll call tomorrow morning or afternoon when she’s feeling better.”
*
The next morning, I woke up calm and rested. Sure, I felt disappointed that Laura and Hunter would never acknowledge the real reason for her recovery, but that pattern of disappointment already was etched deep in my soul. I knew the truth, and that would have to suffice. I should be happy that Laura was alive.
I decided to go into the office early. Since I’d been in such a fog the day before, my report was certain to be a mess and need substantial editing.
On the bus ride in, I kept my phone and tablet in my bag and stared out at the quiet, predawn streets. Cars zipped by, their passengers flipping through articles or books or engrossed in shows or news programs, the screens flickering blue and red against the darkness. I imagined they all were reading Caldwell’s messages or listening to Church poetry, fixing serenity deep in their souls before the day’s onslaught.
This reverie was rattled when I saw a news screen flashing at one of the bus stops. “Blockbuster Alien Revelations!” “Meet Our New Neighbors From the Eagle Nebula!” “They’re a Lot Like Us, But The Ways They’re Different Will Shock You!”
I looked away. There would be plenty of time for that mess in a few minutes.
*
I sat down at my desk and closed my eyes for a minute, taking one last sip of calm before firing up my computer and wading into the new Pytheas reports.
I went straight to the Collective’s site. As expected, they had NASA’s big report, which had swelled to 450 pages overnight as academics added to it piece by piece. New pages still were being appended every fifteen minutes, even that morning. There was a lot to sort through, and I skipped right to the part that would interest Caldwell the most: religion.
The first sentence made my heart drop.
*
As I waited outside Caldwell’s office, staring at the massive oak doors, I pondered what I’d do after he fired me. My skills of aggregating and presenting news were useless to anyone other than the Shepherd because everyone else had personalized feeds. Even if I could find any of the specialized clerical work still performed by humans, my long, close association with the Church would scare off secular employers. At the same time, my banishment would make me radioactive to all religious companies.
At least Laura had regained her health. I could be destitute and living in a shelter, but at least she was better. That was my sole consolation. Maybe she and Hunter would let me live in their garage.
I looked over at Barb, who was typing at a sensible, early-morning pace.
“Barb, I’ve enjoyed seeing you first thing every morning,” I said. “You’re a nice person. Thank you.”
The button on her desk lit up before she had time to respond.
*
Caldwell was unshaven. His Bible was closed, and his pen sat retracted on top of his legal pad, which was blank. As soon as I sat down, his red eyes met mine, searching for clues to what I was going to tell him.
“Are we starting with Pytheas today?” I asked.
He nodded.
“OK,” I said. “So the main advancement is that there has been a large transmission of cultural data—”
“What does it say, son? Get to the point.”
“There’s lots in there. They’re from a solar system near the Eagle Nebula, beyond a formation called the Pillars of Creation. They have—”
“What does it say about religion? Do they worship Sun Gods or something?”
I took a deep breath and tried to soak in the moment: the sunlight streaming through the tree branches outside the window, the feeling of importance I got from interacting daily with a world historical figure. This would be among my last moments in the True Church, in Caldwell’s service, and I wanted to remember it all.
“Not exactly,” I said. “They’re Buddhists.”
His head cocked sideways.
“You mean they have a religion similar to Buddhism?”
“No. The precepts are exactly the same. Four Noble Truths, Eight-Spoked Wheel, Karma, Dharma, emptiness, compassion. And they call it Buddhism, too. Their alphabet is different, but the spoken word sounds the same.”
He cracked a thin, desperate smile, an invitation for me to laugh and say I’d been joking. I wasn’t.
“Also, they say that the Buddha on their planet died in what would have been 623 B.C. Earth time, the year Buddha was born here.”
His smile vanished.
“They’re still working out the math on that, though,” I said. “It’s hard to translate the times between the two planets because of the distance between us and different suns and orbits and such. I don’t really understand all that.”
His face went red. I couldn’t tell whether it was from anger or embarrassment.
“There’s a lot more you should know,” I said. I realized everything else I told him would only make my situation worse, but I wanted to say it all so my successor would at least have an easier time. “They also recognize Dalai Lamas but theirs–”
“That’s enough!” he said and pounded on his desk.
I swallowed hard. Here it came. Finally.
He shook in his chair for a moment, and a tear slid out of the corner of his eye, tracing a wet track down his ruddy cheek.
“Get out of here,” he said, trembling.
I gathered my materials quickly and tried to escape the room without triggering an eruption. When he’d fired my predecessor, he’d stomped around the room and shouted and thrown papers. There was a theatrical element to that performance, like a baseball manager chewing out an umpire. This silent boiling was
far more unsettling. I made it all the way to the door before remembering that we’d forgotten a crucial item of business. Despite every instinct toward self-preservation, I had to ask.
“I’m sorry, sir,” I said from across the room. “Do you have a morning message for me to send?”
He stared at the blank pad on his desk.
“There will be no morning message today,” he said through gritted teeth.
*
I returned to my desk and started packing up my belongings. I kept a clean desk, in emulation of Caldwell, so it didn’t take long. There was only my coffee mug, a bottle of vitamins, some loose change, and a picture of my family back when Laura and I were little and mom and dad were still alive.
I didn’t know what else to do while I waited for the termination notice, so I started compiling the day’s report. I knew I wouldn’t be delivering it to Caldwell the next morning, but I wanted to give whoever took my place a head start. Would the tea-and-doughnut guy take over? I realized I’d never learned his name and couldn’t even picture his face.
Anyway, the day stretched on, and I went to lunch and came back expecting the notice in my inbox, but it didn’t come. So I finished out the day still in the employment of the True Church and went home at my usual time.
*
Laura called right after I walked in my apartment.
“Hi, sis,” I said.
“Hey, bruddah,” she said, her voice brimming with energy. I couldn’t remember the last time she’d sounded this good. “Wait. You said it wrong. Say it again.”
“Hey, sistah.”
“That’s better. So how are you?”
“Forget me, how are you? You sound like you’re doing well.”
“Glenn, I’m doing great. Even better than before I got sick. It’s like I’m eighteen again.”
“That’s great. So what was the treatment they used?
“Nanobots and nanoparticles, they said.”
I’d heard about these. So far they’d been used mostly in repairing super-fragile computer components and for manufacturing special materials. There always was talk that doctors would use them in medicine one day.
“I guess I’m one of the first people they’ve ever used them on,” she said. “There was a point where my case looked pretty bad, and they figured it was worth the risk.”
I didn’t know what to think. I pictured white-coated doctors injecting her with these nanobots, the Prayer Corps group hooded and bowed and praying for her, me at my stupid computer compiling my stupid news report while she struggled for life. What would I have done if she’d died? I’d be alone. Entirely so, this time.
“I know this sounds crazy,” she said, “but I can feel these things inside me, fixing me. It doesn’t feel creepy or weird, more like a runner’s high or like I’ve slept a long, deep sleep, then woken up and taken a cold shower and walked out into a sunny cool day.”
“Science is amazing, huh?” I said.
She could sense the frustration in my voice.
“Hey, don’t be like that. I really appreciate all you did. I’m not sure whether the praying helped me, but maybe it did. Maybe it tipped someone’s decision to try the new treatment out on me, maybe the doctor who knew how to work with this treatment was on the fence about going on vacation and got a hunch and decided to stick around for a day. You never know. There’s so much we don’t know and will never know. What’s important is that it helped you too, right? That’s not nothing.”
“I guess.”
There was a television playing in her hospital room, and I could hear the sound growing louder and quieter, louder and quieter. She must be walking again. I couldn’t remember the last time she’d taken more than a few steps on her own.
“No matter what,” she said, “thank you.”
I didn’t know how to respond. “You’re welcome,” didn’t seem to fit.
“You should come visit us soon,” she said. “Your nieces miss you. They’re always asking about Uncle Glenn.”
“Yeah, maybe I will. I may have some free time opening up soon.”
*
The next morning, I went to work at my usual time. To my surprise, no termination notice was on my desk or taped to my screen. I even looked around on the floor to see if it had fallen to the ground. I logged in, and my inbox was empty, too. Caldwell must be planning to fire me in person.
So I finished my report as usual. This one was hard to assemble, mostly because I had to think of a calm way of saying that the whole planet was freaking out about the Pytheas report. New Buddhist sects were forming around the world, college campuses were hosting head-shaving parties, five of the top ten music downloads for the day were chanting tracks, and hedge funds had already bought up the global supplies of burgundy and gold dye.
The Church wouldn’t know how the findings were affecting membership until the weekend, when we’d receive a report on attendance, yet we’d likely take a massive hit.
Yet all this was happening without any effort on the part of the Buddhists. The Seventeenth Dalai Lama had scheduled an appearance for midday to address the issue, which would be his first statement on the matter.
A backlash was forming as well. Extremist Muslim and Christian sects were vandalizing Buddhist statues and temples. A random Japanese tourist was beaten in the streets of Birmingham because of the incorrect assumption that he was a Buddhist.
“The Pytheas report is causing a strong reaction,” I wrote, risking understatement.
*
I turned the corner and entered the reception area outside Caldwell’s office only to see Barb’s desk sitting empty. That desk had never been unoccupied as long as I could remember. Even when Barb had her bypass surgery two years ago, a secretary from the marketing department had taken her place for a week.
Then I heard the whimpering coming from Caldwell’s office. The door was ajar, and Barb was sitting behind the big mahogany desk dabbing at her cheeks with a tissue.
I opened the door the rest of the way and approached her. Even though I knew Caldwell wasn’t there, I still looked around the room as if he might suddenly materialize. Where could he be? He was always there. Did he have an accident on the way into work? A heart attack?
Barb looked up at me, eyes red and brimming with tears. Scattered on the desk were old photos of Caldwell and his sister. Him pushing her on a swing set. Sitting next to each other on the beach with giant, hammy adolescent smiles. Him wearing a royal blue graduation gown, and her raising bunny ears behind his cap.
Barb extended a shaking hand, and in it was a small piece of paper torn from a yellow legal pad.
“This was taped to the door,” she said, then wiped her nose.
I opened the note and read. The handwriting was Caldwell’s.
“What do we do?” Barb sobbed. “What do we do?”
I read the note again.
“I’ve gone away for a while to do some thinking,” it said. “Take care. You’ll be OK.”
*
The maglev trip to Phoenix lasted three hours, and all I could think about the whole ride was how much I hoped Caldwell would be where I expected. With his money, he could have gone anywhere in the world. Visiting the Garden at Gethsemane in Jerusalem. Re-baptizing himself in the Jordan River. Or, heck, lighting butter lamps in the temple at Lhasa.
But I had a hunch he’d gone somewhere else. And as the green Missouri forests blurred into the straw fields of Oklahoma and Texas, then the red sand of New Mexico, I felt more certain I was drawing closer to him.
Watching the outside whip by at 500 miles an hour made my head hurt, so I drew my window shade and turned on my tablet. Buried under the Pytheas news was a small item with the headline, “True Church Founder Caldwell Urges Reflection.”
The story quoted that day’s message to the flock, which I’d taken the initiative to write and publish on my own. I felt surprisingly at peace with that decision, even though I knew it could get me fired, or worse. This particular situation call
ed for boldness. Preventing panic among the members of the True Church was more important there where I’d earn a paycheck.
“…Caldwell urged his congregants to follow his lead in taking a few days to reflect and pray upon the recent news about the probe,” the story read. “At the end of this period, he will make a public pronouncement regarding the church’s position on the developments.”
At least I hoped he would.
*
At the Phoenix station, I hopped a car to Gila Bend. The drive wound through an expanse of sand and scrub brush with low mountains looming in the distance. I imagined the scene as an ocean, the jagged peaks as lush islands in an azure bay. Maybe the idea that was once all water wasn’t so far-fetched. The land was, after all, transforming into an ocean now.
But who was I to know?
*
After driving through the town of Gila Bend, its streets lined with shops selling flip-flops and towels, the car dropped me off at the Arizona Coastal Aquatic Dinosaur Research Center. A plaque outside the red adobe building explained that the museum was founded after an enormous cache of fossils was unearthed during the construction of a private home. Left unsaid on the plaque was that the home, before the site was annexed by the state, had belonged to the High Reverend Shepherd Thomas Caldwell.
I held the car in place while I searched the grounds for Caldwell. First, I looked inside the visitor center. To my sun-blasted eyes, the interior was a collection of shadows. Even without being able to see, I knew he wasn’t in there. I’d been around him long enough that I could sense his energy.
I ducked out back to the garden exhibits, where full-size models of the creatures they’d found loomed inside mockups of their underwater environments. There I found Caldwell staring at a statue of a giant armored fish. He was lightly disguised, with a floppy hat pulled low over his forehead. Below his khaki shorts, his grapefruit-sized calves bulged gleaming white in the desert sun.
I pulled out my phone, released the car, and approached him.
“I didn’t expect to see you here,” he said, without looking away from the plaque he was reading. “I didn’t expect to see anyone, frankly.”