"When do you think Christ comes to this planet?" Daniel asked.
"He's here now, with us," said the minister and yawned.
"No, I mean serious. He gonna come soon, you think?"
The minister looked at him with his eyes wide, and then walked over to his coffee machine, which was percolating. "You want a cup of coffee?"
"We have time for that?" Daniel asked.
"Why not?"
"What if Christ came?"
"Where two or more gather in my name, I will be there, or something like that. That's what Christ said. So if we gather in his name, he'll be with us, he is with us. He came. Anyway, this coffee is going to feel like an earthquake, like the world's ending. You like it strong, don't you? Milk and sugar?"
"No, thank you."
The minister poured three spoonfuls of sugar into his black coffee and slurped, his eyes closed. "All right, now I'm ready for the second coming of Christ." He walked over to his desk and turned on his computer. Windows '95 came on. "You play chess?" the minister said. "You must, considering you come from Yugoslavia."
"Croatia," Daniel said. "Yes, I play."
"Here, I got a program that's almost as good as Deep Blue. You want to check it out?"
Daniel stared in disbelief. Clearly the minister didn't worry about the second coming of Christ. It was ten in the morning, and he was only waking up. Cushy job, being a minister. "No time for games. Not now," Daniel said and walked out.
LATER, WHEN His hangover wore off and his guilt about the hangover vanished, and the impression the Biblical verses made on him diminished, Daniel went back to work. There he met a blond Romanian with a black mustache. He knew the guy from before; he too was a Baptist and a construction worker. They talked in a mixture of languages. "Hey, it gets old working like a dog for a living, nicht wahr?"asked the Romanian, Nikolai.
"Yes, konyeshna, "said Daniel.
"Let us organize business, together, and find young blood to do rabota for us."
"Sounds good, but how to zdyelat?"
"l tell you over a glass of wine."
While they were still planning the joint venture, Nikolai visited Daniel, and as the two of them sat and discussed real estate, Mira served them orange juice and hot dogs. Daniel stealthily gave hot dogs to Saint Dalmatian, who, Daniel believed, was still filled with Greek letters. Mira sat down in the armchair and joined in on the discussions, speaking clearly without mixing any of the other languages, and for the first time in a long while Daniel noticed that she was stylish. He wondered why they made love only once a week. Now he could notice her through someone else's eyes and imagine what impression she was making. Her dress was short, and she sat comfortably, crossing her legs, so that her thighs-in thin black stockings that shaded the curves-were as visible as if she were an actress visiting David Letterman's show. Her tight cashmere white sweater made her breasts slope with milky and hazy fullness. Scarlet lipstick luridly accented and exposed her allure, as though her fresh blood had surfaced and spoken, ready to be licked.
Daniel commented, "You could sit up straight, so you wouldn't display yourself."
Nikolai sat stiff, his eyes focused on a cup of rose-hip tea steaming on the wooden table in front of him.
"You're making your visitor uncomfortable," she said.
"Sorry about that," Daniel said to Nikolai, and then to his wife, "At least you look comfortable."
"Why don't you invite me into the partnership? I'm a licensed realestate agent," she said.
AND THEN, ALL evening long, while Mira worked after hours, Daniel daydreamed of sleeping with the Hyde Park woman. I shouldn't think like this, he thought. Christ will be here soon. But that thought now, as he was possessed by lust, drove him to a different conclusion. The end of the world will come, and I will not know what it is like to sleep with another woman, other than my wife. Who knows what I am missing, maybe a true ecstasy. I'll probably go to hell anyway, for I have lusted in my heart, and I have quit reading the Bible, and I have drunk, so what's the difference? At least let me go out in a spasm of ecstasy.
In the morning, around eleven, he called the woman from Hyde Park. Yes, he was welcome to visit, after she came back from her art lesson in the afternoon.
Daniel went to Walgreen's to buy aspirin. He bought a Cincinnati Enquirer and read, in the store, about the heat wave that had gripped the continent, beating all records. When he stepped out of the store at one o'clock, the temperature was above 107 degrees, humidity nearly 100 percent. Daniel could barely breathe, and the air stung his nose and bronchi. He coughed. His eyes watered. He drove downtown to Over the Rhine, an old German neighborhood that was now a ghetto, with gentrified pockets, where white folk could go to their breweries, restaurants, music clubs, and cafes. He drove past Kaldi's cafe; on the other side of the street was a Baptist church, named John 3:16. He knew the verse, of course, what Baptist didn't? People sat on shaded steps, sweating, drinking water and beer. A window pane cracked all by itself, and Daniel thought it did so from sheer heat. Down here with all the asphalt and cement, the temperature was unbearable. He stopped to have iced tea at Kaldi's. As he drank it, he thought he noticed that the waitress-who crossed her legs in a masculine fashion, ankle over knee-wore no underwear. Maybe her underwear was black, so he couldn't tell there was any. He strained to see, hoping she wore none. Maybe that's how she fought heat; maybe she liked to shock people, tease them. Why should he notice, he wondered. Why? Because he was possessed; lust pulled him by the nose and fixed his gaze in search of flesh everywhere.
He drove toward Hyde Park. He stepped out of the car on the edge of Eden Park and watched the thick brown layer of smoke choking the city around the Ohio River, and the river itself foamed, as though it were a cauldron of water boiling over. He couldn't see clearly across the river, into Covington, Kentucky, for the thick brown smog. High up, the clouds were pink and orange. He'd never seen colorful clouds in the middle of the day before. When he walked back to the car, his soles sank into the glossy black asphalt. One of his shoes stayed in the asphalt. He pulled it up with his hands, and as he bent over, the heat from the road scorched him.
Daniel thought that what he saw was not natural. God hadn't created the world to be so dirty-and then it occurred to him: God was choking the world. It was the end of the world. It was happening already. Maybe it would be over in several days. He panicked, suddenly certain that the temperature would continue to rise, and rise. God said he wouldn't flood the earth again. God even said, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake (Genesis 8:21).Yes, it says, "the ground," and doesn't say anything about the air. So He could do it with air. He probably wouldn't burn the earth either. But He could just suffocate the earth in its own stench, sending the heat through the ozone holes. This is it, Christ is coming, and I am choking in the lust of my own eyes.
He rushed home-drove as fast as he could-to tell his wife to get ready for the end of the world.
But at home, his wife was gone. Green beans were simmering on the stove, so she must be somewhere near. Yet he couldn't find her anywhere. He couldn't even find his Saint Dalmatian.
He recalled the verses (Matthew 25:40-41):
Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left.
Two women shall be grinding at the mill- the one shall be taken, and the other left.
This was it; his pious wife was ascended to heaven, as were no doubt the other few pious people, and the rest of them, including Daniel, were left to suffer the seals of God's wrath.
He called his son, but got through only to the son's message machine.
He went to see a Baptist minister, and the minister was home. That did not surprise him. The first shall be last, the last shall be first. Many ministers had fallen, like Swaggart and Bakker. "Have you looked outside?" Daniel said. "The end of the world is here. Have you seen how the air simmers? We are all choking."
"That's a Cincinnati summer for you, my brother."
"You
don't believe in it?"
"In what? The summer? Well, you just hide away from it."
DANIEL FIGURED OUT that the minister didn't believe much. There shall be many false prophets. He thought about it-there were false prophets everywhere. Faithless priests. Davidians. Deepak Chopras. Self-help gurus. Diet gurus (religious practices, fasts without a God). Everybody offering happiness, with false gods, selves. Worship of the ego; wasn't that the root of all evil in the garden? Man and woman imagined that they could be like God, self-sufficient and all-knowing. Now again, men want to be all-knowing, and have the illusion that they are; you just finger computers a bit, and they give you the information you need; computers are nearly omniscient, and of course, many computer operators have the conceit that they themselves are omniscient. Daniel had had a conversation, with a doctor whose house he painted, about what Moses would have done if he'd had a computer with CD-ROM programming; the Ten Commandments would have been written on CD-ROM. Maybe they would have been different; instead of, Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's ass, a commandment might have turned out to be, Thou shalt not spill coffee or any other liquids on the screen while surfing the Net. He shuddered, afraid that his thought was sacrilegious, and then wondered whether Moses climbed Mt. Sinai with a hammer and a chisel to lend to God so the commandments could be engraved into the stone tables, or did God keep such tools, or did God simply blast grooves in the stone with his fiery breath?
He went home alone. Intentionally he left the windows open, to feel the heat. He didn't want to use air-conditioning; he had concluded that air-conditioning was a part of man's arrogance against God-to create a mini-climate, avoid God's winds. No, he'd bear those winds. He wouldn't contribute to the destruction of the world; for it was not God himself who was directly destroying humankind. Humankind was destroying itself through its greed and pleasure seeking.
Usually, they kept the windows not only closed but locked because there was crime in the neighborhood. But what harm could a crime do to him now?
Maybe it was not too late for him to be ascended. He had noticed the end, while most hadn't. He prayed. And after his last "Amen," and he said many of them, he looked up. The moon was scarlet red, and there were three rings around it. He'd seen one, never more, on cold nights, when the moon was full, but now, the moon wasn't even full; it gave off little light, and around it, there was a blue ring, and a red ring, and a hazy white ring. Daniel remembered, And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars ... (Luke 21:25); and ... the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light ... (Mark 13:24).
He didn't sleep. In the morning he turned on CNN, expecting to see reports about the coming of Christ. Would they try to interview Christ before he got to his business of resurrecting the dead and ascending those whod been truly forgiven into heavens? Who would do that? Christiane Amanpour?
Instead, there was a report about how Srebrenica was overrun, and how thousands of Muslim men and boys were rounded up and bussed away into the fields where, according to "unconfirmed reports," mass executions were taking place.
So there it was. Now the brother shall betray the brother to death, and the father the son; and children shall rise up against their parents, and shall cause them to be put to death (Mark 13:12). These were basically the same ethnic group, in Eastern Bosnia, Serbs and Croats of Muslim religious tradition who lost track of being Serbs and Croats, and Serbs of Orthodox tradition, who perhaps lost track of religious tradition, but not of being Serbs. Brother against brother-in the name of God, just to add sacrilege to the massacre, which already was sacrilege.
Daniel decided to go watch the end of the world from Eden Park. There he sat and waited.
On the horizon showed up dark clouds and lightning. He wondered whether God's host was coming. Then a terrible hailstorm came, hail the size of a cliche, a golf ball, although of course, once he could catch it, it was the size of a peanut.
The storm was soon over. Other than a few indents on the roof of his pickup, there was no other damage. The air was cool now, cool and clear, as though the world was washed clean. Daniel felt a moment of sadness. He wondered whether God had changed his mind. What had happened? Like Jonah, who would have liked to see the destruction ...
He drove home. At least his wife then would be back. Who knows where she'd gone that long.
The machine blinked. He played the message. "Hi, here's Nikolai. Just calling so you wouldn't sorgen. Mira and I ... we decided to live together. She says you haven't treated her harasho, and I try my best to help her. Here Schatz, you tell him too, so he knows." There was weeping, and Mira said: "We couldn't go on like that any more. You never paid any attention to me. We'll be in touch about splitting up our property."
Daniel shrieked with laughter. And he thought she'd been ascended to heaven! Cold air streamed through the window. The end of the world. Shit, how could he have been that stupid. And then he was incensed. She had seduced Nikolai right in front of him. She even chided Daniel for noticing it.
He called his daughter, Marina. Marina believed that her mom was kidnapped, and advised him to call the police. He didn't believe his daughter.
He drove off to a pawn shop to buy a gun. Yes, he'll find those scoundrels. Whom should he shoot? Just him? Well, he didn't even know him that well. Her? Obviously, he didn't know her that well either. You could live with someone all your life and never learn. It wasn't worth the bother, shooting somebody, going to court, being pictured in the newspapers as a demented maniac. Ridiculous.
He walked into a phone booth and dialed the tennis player's number in Hyde Park to play Windows '95 with her. No answer. Surely, she was not ascended, he thought, and the thought entertained him. As he laughed, he felt a terrible relief.
He no longer believed in the end of the world and in the prophets, not even the prophets of the global warming effect. He knew his reasoning was not quite right now, as it hadn't been right before, but he was sure that the granite faith of his transatlantic youth was gone. The faith had through years attenuated into a delicate crystalline structure that broke down the light-broke it down into the aura of transcendent, otherworldly, seeking and relishing extreme spectacles of collapse; and this fragile aesthetic faith crumbled in the heat, into a heap of glass dust that could no longer be resurrected into crystal, and that would be lost in the sand of the entropied world as spittle in the ocean.
SOME APPROACHES
TO THE PROBLEM OF THE
SHORTAGE OF TIME
Ursula K. Le Guin
THE LITTLE TINY HOLE THEORY
THE HYPOTHESIS PUT forward by James Osbold of the Lick Observatory, though magnificently comprehensive, presents certain difficulties to agencies seeking practical solutions to the problem. Divested of its mathematical formulation, Dr. Osbold's theory may be described in very approximate terms as positing the existence of an anomaly in the spacetime continuum. The cause of the anomaly is a failure of reality to meet the specifications of the General Theory of Relativity, although only in one minor detail. Its effect on the actual constitution of the universe is a local imperfection or flaw, that is, a hole in the continuum.
The hole, according to Osbold's calculations, is a distinctly spacelike hole. In this spatiality lies its danger, since the imbalance thus constituted in the continuum causes a compensatory influx from the timelike aspects of the cosmos. In other words, time is running out of the hole. This has probably been going on ever since the origin of the universe 12 to 15 billion years ago, but only lately has the leak grown to noticeable proportions.
The propounder of the theory is not pessimistic, remarking that it might be even worse if the anomaly were in the timelike aspect of the continuum, in which case space would be escaping, possibly one dimension at a time, which would cause untold discomfort and confusion; although, Osbold adds, "In that event we might have time enough to do something about it."
Since the theory posits the hole's location somewhere or other, Lick and two Australian
observatories have arranged a coordinated search for local variations in the red shift which might aid in pinpointing the point/instant. "It may still be a very small hole," Osbold says. "Quite tiny. It would not need to be very large to do a good deal of damage. But since the effect is so noticeable here on Earth, I feel we have a good chance of finding the thing perhaps no farther away than the Andromeda Galaxy, and then all we'll need is what you might call a Dutch boy."
THE NON BIODEGRADABLE MOMENT
A TOTALLY DIFFERENT explanation of the time shortage is offered by a research team of the Interco Development Corporation. Their approach to the problem, as presented by N.T. Chaudhuri, an internationally recognised authority on the ecology and ethology of the internal combustion engine, is chemical rather than cosmological. Chaudhuri has proved that the fumes of incompletely burned petroleum fuel, under certain conditions-diffused anxiety is the major predisposing factor-will form a chemical bond with time, "tying down" instants in the same manner as a nucleating agent "ties down" free atoms into molecules. The process is called chronocrystallisation or (in the case of acute anxiety) chronopre- cipitation. The resulting compact arrangement of instants is far more orderly than the pre-existent random "nowness," but unfortunately this decrease in entropy is paid for by a very marked increase in bioinsupport- ability. In fact the petroleum/time compound appears to be absolutely incompatible with life in any form, even anaerobic bacteria, of which so much was hoped.
The present danger, then, as described by team member E Gonzales Park, is that so much of our free time, or radical time properly speaking, will be locked into this noxious compound (which she refers to as petropsychotoxin or PPST) that we will be forced to bring up the vast deposits of PPST which the U.S. government has dumped or stored in various caves, swamps, holes, oceans, and backyards, and deliberately break down the compound, thus releasing free temporal radicals. Senator Helms and several Sunbelt Democrats have already protested. Certainly the process of reclaiming time from PPST is risky, requiring so much oxygen that we might end up, as O. Heiko, a third member of the team, puts it, with plenty of free time but no air.
The Apocalypse Reader Page 15