As Pea watches, a drift of rust comes loose from a fifth-floor balcony and tumbles down like dirty snow, all the way to the ground.
MY CHILD . . . says God, and she blinks and then begins:
She stares at the unsightly brick pile of Building 32, and then with a surge of that same unexpected power she felt when Robert attacked her, she holds up her hands toward the building, palms out and fingers splayed, and the structure begins to crumble — slowly first, brick by brick, pane by pane, and then faster, stones and sheets of glass sliding down and smashing down, the foundation collapsing inward layer by layer with a series of reverberant booms. Pea gives a girlish gasp and brings her hands up to her mouth, in awe of what’s happening, astonished by the beautiful devastation she has wrought.
A moment later it is done: Building 32 has collapsed in upon itself, and dust billows outward from the ruin.
PEA, says God with pleasure, and Pea whoops and hops up and down, wide-eyed, girlish, and inside of her mind God laughs, a warm grandfatherly laugh.
She wheels around. In an island in the center of the road, across from where Building 32 had stood, is a statue that Pea remembers from her visits with Arno, a statue she never loved: a mother and child, holding hands and looking up searchingly at the empty sky. Pea makes a kind of snorting noise and concentrates her mind on the statue for a second or two until it smokes and then bursts, first the woman and then the girl, like popping kernels of corn. The pieces of burning metal leap up into the air and then tumble down but do not hurt her. A flock of small birds, startled by the noise, wheel off and scatter into the sky.
Pea’s eyes widen with pleasure. Just down the road is Building 34, its yellowed paint peeling around the corners of the front door. Pea focuses her eyes upon it and raises her hands.
• • • •
And so it goes, all of the first day and into the night — and into the second day and into second night, this is how it goes. Pea working unceasing, never tiring, never slowing. God is always with her, never issuing instructions, only gentle praise. She simply walks about, from the downtown area outward through the winding streets, building by building, tree by tree, working her will on the ugly old world. She works according to her own instincts, leaving certain buildings alone, razing whole blocks when the mood strikes.
And then, by the end of the second day Pea is no longer destroying, but creating.
Still using only her mind and her spirit, still never stooping, never breaking a sweat, she clears the ruins of the buildings she has brought down, and begins to bring up new structures in their stead. She goes back to the site of Building 32 to start, when the idea hits her, and where the worn ugly old glass tower had stood she imagines a twisting glass palace with exactly one hundred rooms, each one a different color, and no sooner does she think of it than it is so.
She returns to all of the rubble fields she has made and fills them with new constructions. Each one is a marvelous structure, architected from her merriest imagining. Here a gingerbread house; here a stately mansion; here a child’s dollhouse scaled up to human size. Where thick and squat Building 19 had stood there rises a great climbing tree of a building, with rooms tucked away inside of it like squirrel-holes in tree knots.
Pea claps her hands with delight. She spins. The world, the new world rises up around her.
YOU ARE DOING WELL, says God, and Pea beams. YOU ARE MY POWERFUL CHILD.
His voice is rich and calm. It is a vast starry horizon, stretching out silver before her glittering eyes.
• • • •
And on the third day, at last, Pea comes to The Center, a massive circular cathedral with many glass windows and many doors. She sighs and crosses her arms, feeling somewhat uneasy. It is hard to believe that Pea spent her childhood, spent her whole life, in thrall of this lousy glass-eyed building. And why? Because it was this building and the people inside of it that her parents were always so fearful of, because if the Center workers were to have discovered that Pea was deaf — that she could not hear the Word of God — they might have taken her away. They might have insisted to Pea’s parents that they leave her behind.
Well everyone is gone now. The Center workers, Pea’s parents, everyone is gone. Only Pea is left. Pea smiles a crooked smile. She tilts her head and raises a finger, and the Center bursts open from the inside, and when the dust clears she rebuilds it in the shape of a birthday cake, with no doors, a form to be admired but never entered.
She stands then, trembling, fearful for the first time that God will be displeased at what she has done to His church.
PERFECT, he says. BEAUTIFUL.
Pea unclenches. She closes her eyes. “Thank you,” she says.
She carries on. Third day into the fourth. Building by building, site by site, she makes the ugly old world better than it was.
• • • •
The world had always looked like this. As long as Pea had been alive. She had never seen it, but it had always looked like this. Ever since it was settled, by the grandfathers’ grandfathers’ grandfathers’ generation. They who had been left behind by the others, the ones who had journeyed on, in search of a habitable planet. This group, Pea’s ancestor’s group, they were to wait here, to make do, until the others returned.
But the others had never returned. Year after year, decade after decade, the founders had done as instructed. They had waited here, they had made do.
And just when despair might have begun, the voice of God started coming. Jennifer Miller in Building 14 first heard the voice of God, and then others did, and then everyone did. There was never any reason to struggle, to make the world beautiful and habitable, because God had told them the future, and the future was short. Soon they would all go through. This was something Robert had always been pointing out; something that had saddened and angered him about the God-days — how after Jennifer Miller, after the voices started, everyone became so enamored of the death to come that they forgot to be alive. Everyone was so busy waiting for heaven to come down, they stopped seeing the world, and the world had thus been slowly falling to bits.
It had made Robert so frustrated. Pea smiles now to think of him, sputtering and sighing and adjusting his glasses on his nose.
It really was a shame that he hadn’t lived for this, to see how Pea was taking their old world and making it shine. Making it glorious after all.
Pea notices a hideous vehicle dock at the end of a row of towers, and the structure disintegrates, all at once, into a cloud of dust, and when the dust clears there is a field of grass, just as Pea had pictured it in her head, dotted with great green trees dripping with bright yellow flowers.
This is all that Robert had wanted, after all, she thinks sadly. To make things look nice. To make their world a beautiful world.
And now, as Pea surveys her newest creation, a shadow falls across her heart.
It is almost sundown now — sundown on the third day. Pea has not heard God for hours.
Along with that small and frightening realization comes a new voice. Soft, soft. She almost can’t hear it.
be careful
Pea’s body tightens. She hunches forward, cocks her head to one side, as if to hear better, even though the voice is inside of her, even though she hopes it won’t speak again. But it does speak —
be smart
It’s a gruff whisper, a rusted knife-edge, jagged and cold.
be warned
Pea doesn’t like it. Unease roils her stomach, in part because she can’t tell who or what this voice is. The voice of God had been so obvious, so self-evident. She had been waiting for it all her life, and then suddenly there it had been. But this voice, this voice is unfamiliar; it has a raspy quality, a darkness that hovers about it like a deep red mist.
do not trust it says. do not —
And then nothing.
Pea breathes in the deserted street, surveying what she has done thus far. She waits to hear God, hoping he will fill the silence, but there is nothing now �
�� only silence in the lonely world.
She goes about her work, resolutely, deciding for now to ignore this new voice. She marches on, bites her lip, narrowing her eyes. She finds her own old building, Building 49, the one where she was born and raised, where her parents died, where she and Robert dragged them out of the kitchen and down the tower stairs. She blinks her eyes and turns the building into a vast play structure, with slides and ladders and swings.
• • • •
She feels, right away, when she wakes on the morning of the fourth day, that everything has changed.
There are still many buildings to go, many ugly tilting electrical poles to be dealt with, but Pea feels fitful and restless. She still has the power, but no longer the glory. She just ducks her head toward whatever building she intends to bring down, just sighs and watches as it tumbles. The three previous days she has felt magical, powerful, glorious, and now she feels like a drudge, like some sort of supernatural construction worker. Boom! A building falls. Pow! A new one rises from its footprint. And again. And again.
“What for?” she thinks, and then she says it out loud. “Why?”
COME, says God.
And Pea, less trusting than she was, less in love with the voice of God, says “Where?”
COME NOW.
“Where?”
God leads Pea’s footsteps back to the outskirts, back to the edge of the built world. Along the fence line, where Robert had tried to kill her and she killed Robert instead. Where first she heard the voice, and it brought her to her knees. She understands that God knows — of course he knows, for He is God and knows everything — he knows that she is growing weary, growing skeptical. Some new miracle is in the offing, and it tightens the fibers of her gut. She arrives at the outskirts and sets her eyes on the bubbling sulfurous pools beyond the fence, and feels the power surge through her and watches in astonishment as the bubbling noxious deadly surface bubbles up and evaporates and disappears into the air. It pops and fizzes as it raises off the earth, and there is a strong smell and then no smell at all — and there, revealed at the bottom of the sea floor are the bodies of Pea’s parents. Her mother and father, who had argued over her and coddled her and tried to protect her for all the days of her life.
The bodies are not decayed, but whole. Though they have been lying at the bottom of the consuming red sea they look like they’ve been asleep.
BEGIN.
“But —”
MY DEAR BEGIN.
no
That other voice, the low contrarian, makes itself louder, gets agitated. no —
She ignores the protesting voice. She can’t help herself. She focuses on the dead bodies on the floor of the sea and angles her head, tilts her chin, narrows her eyes — and she melts the fence, and she keeps staring, and the ground groans and rises miles of red seafloor rising upward until it levels with the abutting beach and it is one vast field of earth, and she keeps staring and the bodies rise and walk toward her.
Pea’s body fills with fear. She stumbles backward.
no says the protesting voice — no, you know better — while God says NOT ALONE, YOU NEEDN’T BE ALONE — and the shambling corpses of her dead parents raise their hands to her, and their flesh is restored but their eyes are all white, nothing but white.
No says the hidden voice and now Pea screams with it, “No!” and shakes her head violently and screams and lets the power cease flowing, and watches as the bodies of her parents slump to the ground like the corpses they were and always had been.
In the pause that follows there are no voices, there is no sound at all, and everything begins to drain out of Pea: her faith and her joy and her spirit. It burbles downward in her like water funneling out of a tub. Pea shuts her eyes and life is a dream, but she opens her eyes because it’s not a dream. It’s all real, and she has to find out what is happening.
“Who are you?”
God doesn’t answer.
you see — do you see —
“Hush,” she tells the secret voice, the contrary voice. She again addresses the one that came as God — that came to everyone as God. The voice that doomed her parents and her people. “What are you?”
YOU MUST UNDERSTAND, the voice begins, and then it hesitates — it hesitates! — and in that hesitation Pea feels her last drop of hope drain away. Her last vestige of faith. The last chance that it really was God singing to her, coaching her and coaxing her along. It’s gone. God, if God is real, would never hesitate. God needs never consider what to say next. Pea looks at the bodies of her mother and father, dead now for good. Dead now for real. She feels lonesome in the way that a person can only really feel lonesome when they’ve accepted that God isn’t real and death is forever.
The voice that isn’t God and never was God says it again: YOU MUST UNDERSTAND —
• • • •
As she is told the story, Pea walks one more time through the world.
It’s remade now. It’s hers.
She skirts between alleys that she has repaved in pink limestone, trails sidewalks she’s dotted with flowering trees.
Eventually, as the full and terrible impact of what the voice is telling her sinks in, she no longer wants to look at it. She wants things to be how they were, but they’ll never be the same again.
She stops in the center of the lonely city and lowers her body into what used to be a black iron bench and is now a love seat, and she looks up at the remade skyline and waits for Him to be done.
• • • •
Everybody fled the old world together. The doomed old world, the dying world. Everybody, those that still lived, they crowded onto ships, they took children by hands, they took what resources remained and set off in search of a new place to be.
The doomed species of a doomed planet sailing away together, fleeing scared into the stars.
When they had to, they split themselves into two groups: One group that sailed on, and one that stayed behind. Stayed behind here, on Pea’s own world, a desolate and just-barely-livable world.
The others went forward and kept on, kept searching. They had promised that they would return, one day, when they had found a real place. They had promised they’d return for those left behind.
Years passed. Generations gave way to generations. Those who had been left behind never gave up hope. They scanned the skies. They built their shabby little world, made what structures they were able to. Drew water, constructed a grid. They did the best that they could, always waiting.
All of this Pea knew already. Her ancestors were the ones who had been left behind on this sad little world. This was the world of her grandparents, the waiting world, the weary world. A world that had by that time given up already, given up on scanning the stars for the returning Others. No wonder it had been so easy for Pea to destroy. No wonder everything had come apart so easily. It wasn’t made of good stuff. It was a drywall world, of plaster, a tent city floating in a scrap of universe, year after year.
But now the voice goes on, to the part that Pea doesn’t know, that she couldn’t have known. He tells her of the other ones, who ventured further while Pea’s grandparents’ grandparents struggled and scraped.
These other ones, they floated forward and fought and experienced great traumas and great chapters of violence — until at last they found an extraordinary place to rest.
“Stop,” Pea says softly.
All of it was sliding into place in her mind, all of it was making sense. Disparate pieces coming together to make a whole idea.
“Stop saying they,” she says. “Say we.”
The voice, after a pause, complied. The voice obeyed her, like she had obeyed the voice.
WE. WE FOUND OURSELVES AN EXTRAORDINARY PLACE TO REST.
Not only was the planet they had found habitable, it seemed to function as a kind of battery, a radiant and living thing on which the long-suffering people could feast and thrive. The people settled there, and they grew. While the ones they had left behind
teetered and scraped, their cousins underwent impossible feats of evolution. Generation by generation, they achieved wild leaps in potential. Disease was eradicated. They fought no more wars. Death was destroyed. Their population grew and grew.
and then you know what
“I do,” she whispers.
then you know what happens next
This smaller voice Pea of course now recognizes as not external but internal — it’s her, it’s just her, her own good sense, pointing out what she always should have known. She writhes in her body, knowing what is coming, fearful of what is coming.
But the story continues, getting closer now to the nub of it, the horrible center.
These others are now a race apart, a different species. They have grown so quickly, and so spectacularly. They need space. They need endless space. No one ever dies, and logically, algorithmically, they know that they need all the space that they can find. They need all the space that there is. And so they set out across the universe, filling the skies of distant planets with the lights of their ships, one by one. Destroying populations at a sweep, seizing worlds instantly.
Except for one.
“Ours,” whispers Pea.
“Yes,” says the God voice, a voice that is suddenly smaller, more intimate, more conversational. A voice that has sidled up beside her, almost intimate. She understands at once that this voice can be anything it wants to be. Be or do anything. “Our ancestors deserved more. Our cousins.”
For their cousins the conquerors devised a wild idea. A hoax — a con — a mercy.
“We gave them this gift of God. They were to have not just death, but a reason to die.” God’s voice, no longer booming or rolling, but cajoling, explaining. “Not just death, but a purpose in dying. A calling! A benefice!”
Pea keeps her eyes closed. She feels tears burn paths down her cheeks. All of it. All of her life. Everything and everyone she’d known —
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