Kingdom Come

by Elliot S Maggin

  “I had no idea it was already this bad, Norman,” Wesley told me as he rearranged the scrambled eggs in his pentagonal plate with the S-emblem embossed across it.

  “It’s not so bad,” I said, guilty about so enjoying the American Way on White I scooped off my round plate. Under my sandwich a graphic of a yellow lightning bolt slashed the ceramic face of the plate.

  “It is,” Wesley said, “and worse.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve been seeing visions, Norman.” He leaned forward to whisper to me, as if anyone else could have heard him over the general chaos. “I’ve been hearing voices.”

  “I have bad dreams, too.”

  “No, not dreams!” he said, pounding the hilt of his fork on the table and hurting his hand. “Visions like I had when I was the Sandman.”

  *

  “Read to me, please, would you, Norman?” Wesley asked me as he pressed the heat-sensitive button that propped up the head of his hospital bed. I think that little outing to Planet Krypton over a year before had been the last time Wesley and I’d come close to having fun together. He was out of breath from his latest screed, which rendered him unconscious for a few minutes and caused me to wonder whether he was already gone from us. “Read from The Revelation of Saint John the Divine, would you, Norman?” Weakly, he pressed the little cloth-bound Bible into my hand.

  “How about Matthew, or Micah,” I suggested. “You don’t need to hear all that apocalyptic stuff with the—”

  He waved his arms and opened his mouth as if to yell. Only short bursts of breath came out, but I agreed to read what he told me to read just to keep the peace, such as it was. He was frail. What was left of him was just the frame of what once had carried my friend Wesley Dodds, that great civilized beast of a man.

  He recited with me as I read: “ ‘Seven thunders will utter their voices. And it was given unto him to make war with the saints.’ ”

  Wesley gathered up a surge of energy and madness and said, “Babylon falls, Norman. Be the one who listens to me,” and twisted around his finger the tube of the intravenous drip that was bypassing his tortured throat to feed him through his forearm. He gave the tube a yank and slid it out from under his flesh. Only a drop of blood oozed from the indentation where the tube had fed his vein. “The sands run out and I can do nothing but wait in my own filth for sleep finally to claim me. Will someone act when I can’t?”

  “Wesley, please”—I tried to ease him back down onto his bed—“take comfort. There is peace awaiting.”

  “Of course there is, Norman, for me,” and he thundered in a voice that, now that I think on it, could not have come in any natural manner from a man so near the end, “but not for you! You’re the poor, pitiful dreamer who comes next.” A nurse in the hall looked in and called for a doctor, then the two of them shoved me away to tie his wrists to the bedposts and resecure the IV drip.

  “I’m sorry,” I said over and over, maybe to the doctor and the nurse, who looked through and beyond me with not even the personal regard they accorded their patients. “I’m sorry,” but for what I was not sure.

  “Hear me, Norman. I owe you much, but I have nothing to leave you except insight. ‘And I will give power unto my two witnesses,’ Norman, do you hear me?” he demanded. “It is yours to be one of those two. Be my witness, Pastor. It’s all in the words of God. It’s all there. The end is near! Read the book!”

  Eventually the doctor and nurse calmed Wesley down and did not think to throw me out, so I picked up the Bible again and read some more from First Corinthians, a book that was a little less incendiary:

  “ ‘Now this I say, Brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God. Behold, I show you a mystery; we shall not all sleep but we shall all be changed…’ ”

  And Wesley did in fact find sleep and somewhere in the night made the change. I officiated his funeral three days later. There were no relatives, only a few of the good people of the church.

  That night, I dreamed.

  CHAPTER 2

  Vision Quest

  Wesley died on a Friday The world ended the following Monday. In my dreams.

  Something in my body was afraid to go to sleep. It was not because of Wesley’s funeral, though he was a close friend. I have spent altogether too much time at funerals in the course of my career for them to affect me one way or the other. People’s lives move me, not their deaths. Ellen used to say that the lifestyle of a minister to an aging congregation gave me a dark sense of humor. I was relieved to find that my poor, deluded wife thought I had a sense of humor at all.

  Monday afternoon we buried Wesley out on the Island in a plot that he’d bought long ago. He’d come to the church questioning what there was to believe in; I wish I could have offered him better answers. Certainly, thankfully, he had them now. I went out there on a rented hoverbus with some of the folks who came to the funeral, but I felt a little off-balance afterward and I did not want to be around my congregants, so I took the commuter train back as far as the outer boroughs of the city. The train—at home in a rail yard far from Metropolis—was clean and spiffy, and the ride was as smooth as the devil’s sales pitch, as my grandma Imogene used to say. My long compartment floated eight or ten inches above the smooth concrete gully that traced the old railroad line as far as the Metro County East Hub. Three city administrations had promised over the past ten years to complete construction in the tube from the Hub under the river into Union Station. The ongoing project had furnished designer shoes and Havana cigars for scores of manufacturers of optical-fiber-laced concrete forms all up and down the Eastern Seaboard for a decade. No one knew how much rubble really existed down there or how much it would cost to clean up and rebuild the tube, even if the rumbles had suddenly stopped.

  The ride along the south coast of the Island was fairly safe and generally peaceful nonetheless. Metahumans tended to be city folk. There were only about a half dozen others in the car making their way into town as the line geared up for the rush period of commuters going back out to the suburbs. So I sat by the window and watched the train make a blur of the Atlantic coast.

  There is a twilight area just before sleep. It is the point at which you begin to put together the disparate visions of your unconscious and see the edges of your dreams. When you find yourself in this twilight area, you have about a minute to put down your book and find a comfortable position. Sometimes you try to finish the paragraph you are reading, and invariably the light stays on all night and you dream about doing calisthenics and you have a stiff neck in the morning. At least that is my experience. I thought I found the twilight as I sat in the train and watched out the window as an enormous golden eagle rose from the oceans dripping water and rising on the wind. It left a wake in the air of pale red, gold, and blue as it powered upward into the sky in the direction of a gargantuan hairy bat that hovered on the wind currents of the stratosphere. We all see things like this in our dreams as a matter of course, so I closed my eyes and put down the copy of an old book by Mort Sahl called Heartland.

  I did not sleep. The skin of my arms was all tingly and electric against the inside of my jacket. My heart beat hard enough for me to hear it as I lay my head against the cushion of my seat. I suppose I was not sleepy, and it occurred to me that the scene I witnessed over the water outside my train window might be real. I pried my eyes open and scanned the horizon, but there was no giant bat, no drenched eagle leaving a primary-colored contrail against the clouds. The few others in the car with me either dozed or played at cards or stared glassily at the scenery. No one reacted to anything untoward. There was no reason to panic. This was interesting.

  Then I slept.

  *

  Sleep was green and white, and the white felt like blood. I have never been very good at remembering my dreams. This time, however, they must have floated somewhere near the edge of my consciousness. I saw a flowing green curtain all the way around me, shielding me from something. I saw through the occas
ional breaks in the curtain a fire of white-hot flame, like the sun. I saw glimpses of a sea of bleach-white human bone scattered over a desert. I saw patterns of ash in the shape of bone crumbling to dust. And there was the American flag, hovering in the sky, flying in my direction—sadly but slowly, as if it had power and glory to spare. As the flag approached me, it began to take the shape of a man.

  “Are you all right, mister?” somebody said.

  “How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people!” somebody else said in a familiar but foreign voice. “How is she become as a widow!”

  “What is he babbling about?” one of the people around me asked.

  “Just sounds. Nonsense. Gibberish,” another said.

  “Mister, you’re scaring me,” yet another voice said. “Please wake up.”

  “She that was great among the nations,” that other voice continued, louder now.

  “His eyes are open,” someone said.

  “But is he awake?” someone else wanted to know.

  “And princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary!”

  There were six or seven people standing around when I realized I was awake and coming out of a dream, and it was my voice that reverberated down the train. I went to pull my voice back but I still heard myself say:

  “She weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks … She hath none to comfort her,” I said before I could stop; I realized I was not speaking in English.

  “It’s not gibberish,” a dark-eyed boy said. “I think it’s Hebrew.”

  It was Hebrew, I realized. I heard the end of it. It was from the book of Lamentations, in the tongue in which the prophet Jeremiah originally wrote it.

  “I’m all right. Thank you,” I told the good people around me. “Really,” I said, wiping the spittle from my mouth as they went back to their seats.

  We were coming into the Madison Heights section at the easternmost edge of Metropolis. We would slip underground and be in the Hub in a few minutes. Then would come the long walk across the bridge into Midtown. I wondered if I had suffered a seizure of some sort, and repeatedly made a fist with both hands to make sure my strength was sufficient. I felt fine physically. I looked behind me to see the dark-eyed boy, the one who had recognized the language I was speaking, sitting two seats behind, and I waved to get his attention. Apparently everyone else in the car was keeping an eye on me. Three people rose halfway from their seats to see if I needed help—or perhaps to protect the boy—then sat back down warily.

  “Sonny? Did you hear all I was saying?”

  “No, sir. Well, maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Was it all in Hebrew?”

  “I’m pretty sure. What I heard, that is.”

  “Did you recognize anything I was saying?”

  “No sir. Just a word here and there. I don’t really speak it. I can just read it when there are vowels.”

  “What do you mean, when there are vowels?”

  “Well, Hebrew doesn’t really have vowels. You just kind of put them in as a temporary guide for people who are learning the language. Kind of like accent marks.” The boy thought a moment, then asked me, “Don’t you know that, sir?”

  “No,” I told him, and I sat back in my seat facing away from him as we entered the darkness of the tunnel. “I don’t understand a word of Hebrew.”

  *

  So now I was speaking in tongues. I had lived in mild fear of this since boyhood.

  Really.

  My maternal grandmother had spoken in tongues. She’d been a suffragette in her early days, but once women had gotten the vote, she no longer had a cause to champion, so she had taken to the evangelical circuit, at first as an audience shill: On a signal, she would go into paroxysms of ecstasy and roll on the ground with the preacher’s summoning of the Spirit upon the crowd; or she would come into a tent meeting on crutches, and then throw them off and walk at the appropriate time. Soon, however, she graduated to preaching, becoming quite well known in evangelical circles. “Reverend Imogene Arcane, First Lady of the Holy Witness,” was how she billed herself. She had gone off on her own and pitched tents and presided over revival meetings all over the South and Midwest in the Depression and the War years. When she had no cripples to heal or heathens to convert, she’d spoken the words of the Scriptures and lost texts in the original languages, or so her roadies and retainers had claimed. It is very difficult to make up nonsense words and sounds and string them together, so they seemed to be from an unfamiliar language. If that, as I suspect, was what Grandma Imogene had done, then she’d marketed her skill very ably.

  My father’s oldest brother, Billy Pring McCay, may have been a better preacher even than Grandma. He’d been an advocate of something he called “Spiritual Expansion.” He’d taught people that they could learn new things and acquire altogether-new abilities—things like skiing or playing the trumpet or speaking dead languages—from meditating on the ability for extended periods. He would go to little towns to “wake up” the missing talents in people whose lives needed a little nudge here and there to make them interesting. He’d cured a lot of cases of math anxiety over the years, and quite a few cases of hysterical blindness. We were all convinced that he’d been the model for the character in that musical comedy about the small-town con man. Uncle Billy had actually been tarred and feathered and deposited on a freight car once when he claimed to be able to train a boys’ marching band in a little town in northern Iowa.

  My great-aunt Rebecca, Grandma Imogene’s older sister, had been a witch, the recognized matriarch of a number of covens of the exponents of the ancient Wicca faith, who danced naked in the forests of the upper Midwest. Rebecca had been far less public about her talents and influence than some of the other extraworldly seekers and scoundrels of the family, and for good reason. Among all of us, Rebecca seemingly had been the one with the most money. She’d lived in a big home with little gargoyles decorating the window panes and lots of animist paraphernalia around its dark interior. Instead of a lawn she had an extensive herb garden, and little flower pots growing sprigs of all sorts of unfamiliar flora had hung near all the entrances and exterior walkways of the big old place. Toward the end of her life she’d become interested in feng shui, the Chinese art of harmonious furniture arrangement, writing one of the first English-language books on the subject, which sold quite well. Before her death she’d told my older sister, Minerva, that she was passing the mantle of her responsibilities on to her. Minerva, a mother of two who had served as an Army nurse in the War in Europe, and active in her local chapter of the Jaycees at the time, had been horrified. To this day, Minerva says, she is forever turning away from her door potential acolytes who appear looking for poultices and cures and blessings.

  None of my generation—neither of my sisters and none of my cousins—seems to have carried on the McCay family tradition. I am the only one who pursued a career in the clergy, but I am sure my ancestors would consider me the wettest blanket of all. I turned out to be a liberal. My ministries have always leaned toward urging couples to make potentially good marriages work, prompting the sick to follow the advice of their doctors, encouraging parents to allow their children to follow their bliss. I marched for civil rights in Selma and in Washington. In the Eighties I went to the old Soviet Union to meet with a delegation of Refuseniks and to South Africa to petition the minority government to release Nelson Mandela from prison. I have spent a lot of time in prisons, mostly as a freelance chaplain but occasionally as a protester engaged in civil disobedience—against segregation when young and against the forcing of metahuman children out of public schools when old. My life has been conventional: a quiet rebellion, I suppose, against the immoderation of my heritage.

  Almost midway through my seventy-seventh year, a widower with few surviving friends and a handful of aging congregants dependent upon me to be their spiritual shepherd, I became a seer of visions and a speaker in tongues.

  On my walk across the Outerboroug
h Bridge I saw a giant checkered clown rising from the river below, but nobody else seemed to see it, so I walked on. I saw the cable of the Governor’s Island Tramway overhead fraying and breaking, with a hundred passengers flying into panic, but no one on the bridge reacted, so I suppressed my urge to run and walked on woodenly until, inevitably, the vision passed and the real tramway continued along its sturdy cable. As I walked the several blocks to my apartment, I heard myself muttering, in the Latin, the fifth chapter of the book of The Revelation of Saint John the Divine, though I had neither read nor spoken any Latin since my days in graduate school. Besides, I’d long suspected that Saint John had been quite as mad as my grandmother while writing that book, and it was included in the New Testament for reasons largely political.

  I was seeing things that, evidence suggested, were not there at all. When I was young they used to call that “tripping.” Back at home I thought about Wesley, and stared for a little while at the picture of Ellen that sits on my night table. I considered calling the Dutch Reformed Ministry Family Services Association to ask if they could recommend a good psychological counselor. A behaviorist, I thought I would specify. Then I decided against it. I was old. Maybe I would die before anyone really noticed.