by Owen Egerton
“Crutch, come on!” War yelled. They were picking their friend up from the cot. They hefted his thick body to his feet. For the first time, Rica saw the fourth man’s face. Yellow, the yellow of spoiled cream. His eyes tire-tread dark. From where Rica sat she could see no white at all. For a moment she could not look away. He was Death.
A chunk of wall crashed to the ground and someone grabbed her arm. It was Pestilence.
“You got a baby in you. Come on!” He dragged her from the cot. People were shoving and screaming. Pestilence was throwing people back, making a path to the stairs.
“Stop it! Stop it!” Rica yelled. She yanked her arm free.
“Come on, lady!”
The room went dark. Panic filled the space like a stench. The people coughed on panic. The people choked on panic. Lines of light shot from the top of the stairwell down through the crush. Hellish shrieks bounced off the walls, threats and protests and animal fear. Like rats, the people squeezed into the stairwell and clogged the path. Rica backed away. There was a madness in the basement, a whirlpool of desperate fear. The desire to survive was killing them. She moved farther and farther back into the dark and away from the swirling. The ground shifted again. Above the chaos, a pipe burst and sprayed down hot water. Eventually the crowd moved upward, the stairwell began to empty. Rica, a hand on her kicking baby, was preparing to follow when she heard the weeping.
She scanned the basement in the dim light coming from the clearing stairwell. In the back, a figure was kneeling by the doctor’s body. It was the woman with the bunned hair, the one who had been helping a child laugh with a quacking hand. The ground shook again and the entire ceiling dropped a foot.
“Hello?” Rica called to the woman. “Can you move?” The woman only cried. Rica crept back, carefully navigating overturned cots and scattered debris. The floor was slick with water and more continued to pour down.
Rica reached the woman and knelt beside her. Gripping the limp hand of the doctor and shaking with sobs, she seemed unaware that Rica was there. Rica placed a hand on her shoulder. “We have to go. We have to go right now.” She pulled on the arm, but the woman was unmovable. Rica glanced back at the stairwell, thirty feet away. Was there time to go for help? The baby kicked inside her. Please God . . . Perhaps she could run, find someone to carry this woman out.
Then it hit. The hardest tremor yet. The room shifted like a birthday present shaken by a child. Stone screeched against stone, falling, the ceiling stuttering down. Rica was still gripping the woman’s arm when she saw the light of the stairwell disappear behind rock and wood.
In a day. In a decade.
HAYDEN FOLLOWED BRENDAN through the last hours of the day. He sat while Brendan studied, listened as he prayed, watched as he spooned hot soup into the mouths of the monastery’s oldest residents, and now as the sun sank low he knelt with the monk in the cemetery. A simple collection of several dozen modest stones on a hill overlooking the chapel. Hayden, Brendan, and a handful of other monks were yanking weeds from between the graves.
The work, to his surprise, agreed with Hayden. There was something distinctly solid about the task. Grab, yank. The sticky green stem and blades followed by the soft, white roots. Sweat in his mouth and eyes. He didn’t even mind the fact that it was a graveyard, a location he would normally avoid at all costs. He wiped his brow and glanced at one of the markers. It was blank. So was the one next to it. They were all blank. Just rough, dark granite monoliths without a name or date.
“Where are the names?” Hayden asked Brendan, who was digging a few feet away.
“My goodness.” Brendan laughed, a fistful of green weeds in his hand. “You work a lifetime to separate yourself from ego, why would you want to carry it to your grave? Ha!” Brendan yanked another fistful of weeds from the ground and held it to his nose, inhaling as if it were a bouquet of roses. He sighed. “All this life popping from death. Wonderful.”
Hayden returned to his own work, glancing occasionally at a nameless grave just before him. For him it was a nightmare, a cold horror, to be deprived of one’s name. He understood a name was not one’s value. That much he had come to discover. But a name held one’s value, much as a wallet held one’s credit cards and cash. Losing your name was essentially losing your wallet. But for these men, these strange, robed, smiling, sleepless men, it was the goal. The ideal. He glanced back and saw Brendan was watching him.
“Hayden,” he said. “There is a you beyond you. And possibly one beyond that.” Brendan hopped to his feet, ran to Hayden, and dropped down beside him. “May I ask you a question, Hayden. Did you dream?”
“When?”
“When you slept? Did you dream?”
“Sure.”
“Dreams! I remember dreams. I miss those. Even the nightmares I miss. What did you dream?”
“I dream of a woman I’ve never met. All the time now. Amazing woman.”
“Oh, women! I miss them, too.” Brendan’s eyes disappeared behind a long blink. His eyes flew open. “Do you love her?”
“She’s a dream. What’s not to love?”
Brendan jumped to his feet, dropping his weeds. He raised his voice to a near yell. “Start with that! Yes? Water that! Tend your weedy heart!” Hayden looked, but the other monks continued their work without so much as a pause. Brendan leaned down and pushed Hayden’s shoulder. “Tell me, who in this world or any world do you love?”
“Ah. My mom? I like my mom and dad.”
“Fine. Good. And . . . ”
“Ah . . . ”
Brendan didn’t wait. He ran a few feet away, fell to his knees, and grabbed handfuls of the sandy soil. “Here! Here in this earth lies my first spiritual mentor. Wisdom in every word. And also the novice who taught me the finest way to boil an egg!” He scooped more dirt. “The scholar who taught me Latin and the brother who sang with such beauty I would lower my voice in choir so I might better hear his, another brother who could have you laugh for a year with a raise of his eyebrow. Oh, he was a wonder!” He weighed the soil in his hands. “All these skills and traits and gifts. But without love they have nothing!” He threw the dirt toward Hayden. Hayden covered his eyes. “They are dead. They are gone. I love them still. If any part of them still exists, it is the part that loved me and God and the world. Even you, Hayden. They love you. You see? You see? That is what we are! You and I will die, too! In a day. In a decade.” Brendan turned away and stared at the long shadows filling the canyon. “Without love a man is dust long before he dies.”
Bacon
THE TWO TRUCKERS, one lean and one fat, covered the small, dark man with a thick blanket and let him sleep on the mat behind their seats. They rolled through the cold Canadian wilds, bypassing towns and cities, mountains and frozen lakes, down across the border into the United States just as the sun was rising.
“Should we tell immigration?” said the thin one, downshifting as they approached the crossing.
“Nah,” said the fat one, glancing back at the sleeping figure. He had only been wearing some kind of robe. He had no wallet, no passport. “They’d lock him up in Cuba or something.”
“But he looks pretty Arab. Could be a terrorist. Could be smuggling bombs?”
“Where? Up his ass?” said the fat one. “Hell, with all the crazy shit happening, the least we can do is give this sad bastard a hand.”
Once stateside they rumbled southward past farms and billboards and Cracker Barrel restaurants. The two truckers whispered pleasantly, occasionally checking on the sleeping passenger and sharing smiles like a couple with a newborn. Just after 10:00 AM the man bolted upright and stared straight out the windshield.
“Hey, look who’s up,” said the fat one. “We thought maybe you’d died back there.” Both truckers laughed. The man looked at both of them and laughed as well. He stared forward again, gripping the back of the seats.
The truck crested a hill and before them the land spread out, an ocean of wheat-gold fields rippling in the morning wind.<
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The man grinned like a child. “Tetha malkoothak.”
The thin trucker shot the fat trucker a look. “Told you he was Arab.”
An hour later they pulled into a truck stop for breakfast. The thin one grabbed a booth and ordered, while the fat one led their passenger to a rack of clothes in the shopping section of the stop.
“Let’s get you out of that dress,” he said. “And I don’t mean it in that way. Ha!”
The man laughed also.
“You don’t understand a thing I’m saying, do you?”
He laughed even harder.
The fat man picked out blue jeans, a red and white flannel shirt, some tennis shoes, and a hat that read GOD BLESS THE U.S. OF A.
“Let’s see. These should fit. You’re short but big in the shoulders. My brother’s got the same build. Shortest kid on the football team, but damn it all if he didn’t knock some asses to the ground. You know what I mean?”
The man nodded.
The trucker waited outside the bathroom while the man tried on the clothes. He leaned against the wall and crossed his arms. Why was he helping this guy? He wasn’t a naturally kind man. Not that he was a cruel man. Average, he’d say. But picking up a stranger, buying him clothes and food, well, it was out of the ordinary. But something about this guy, something about his grin. He was confused, no doubt. But he was happy, too. Probably a little retarded.
The man walked out of the bathroom. The jeans were on backward, the shirt was draped over his shoulders like a shawl with his chest, thick with hair, uncovered. He was still holding the shoes and hat.
Yep. A little retarded.
“Jesus Christ, boy,” the trucker laughed. “Okay, let me help you.”
Back at the booth three plates of bacon, eggs, and grits were laid out. The man gobbled down his plate.
“Boy,” said the thin trucker, “you sure like your bacon, now don’t you?”
The fat trucker smiled at his thin friend. The thin trucker smiled back. They both watched their passenger slurp down another fried egg. It was a good day.
After the meal the three wandered back to the truck. The man stopped before climbing in. He looked to the sky, looked to the sun.
“Don’t stare too long,” the fat trucker said. “You’ll go blind.”
The man looked south and pointed.
“Nope. Gotta head east. We’re due in Chicago tomorrow.”
The man still pointed south.
“Noooo,” the fat trucker said with an exaggerated shake of his head. He pointed east. “We gotta go that way.”
The man nodded. He stepped up to the thin trucker and hugged him hard.
“Whoa,” the trucker said.
The man did the same to the fat trucker. “Okay now,” the trucker said, his cheeks turning a low shade of red.
Then their passenger turned south and walked away.
“Good-bye, fella,” the thin one said. The big one just waved.
The two truckers watched him walk for a while and then climbed into their truck. They drove east in silence. After some miles, one of them spoke.
“You know, Earl. I’m gonna miss that guy.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“Think he’ll die out here?”
“I’m guessing he will.”
Jesuses
NORTH AMERICA WAS crawling with Jesuses. Jesus-12 joined an organic farm commune in Oregon. Another Jesus (Jesus-27) made his way to the Pacific Ocean and walked out onto it. He was last seen by the residents of Seattle skipping over waves and giggling. Jesus-19 walked to Winnipeg, where he was taken in by a homeless shelter, given clothes and food, and taught how to use the Internet.
Jesus-7 wandered into a dress rehearsal of the Havant Church of Christ mime ministry team as they prepared a reprisal of their Easter play Silent Passion. Jesus-7 found the plot confusing and the mime clumsy, but he got the basic idea. Someone very nice and holy was being hurt. Jesus-7 was deeply moved and by the end of the performance had given his heart to the tall mime with the red spots on his wrists.
Jesus-10 made it all the way to New York City and stumbled into a scholarly bookstore near NYU. It was quiet and nearly empty. He liked the smell of old paper. On a shelf near the back, he found a copy of the New Testament written in ancient Aramaic. Jesus sat on the floor of the bookstore and read it from cover to cover. Sometimes he sighed, sometimes he chuckled. Other times, especially toward the end, his brow wrinkled into deep troubled trenches. After reading the last page, he stood up and clutched the book to his chest. Using crude hand signs, he asked the bookseller if this was the only book. The seller, thinking the man meant the only copy in the store, answered yes. Jesus-10 sprinted from the store and raced down the busy street ripping pages out as he went.
The Floaters observed all this with great interest and tried to come up with a plan to repopulate their heavens with Jesuses for the last day and a half of Earth. One solution was to gather up all the wandering Jesuses and give them a good talking-to. But it was doubtful whether that would work. Another idea was to clone more Jesuses. This plan also appeared flawed, as the Floaters had no reason to expect the next batch of Jesuses to perform any more obediently than the first. Finally the Floaters came up with the perfect solution. After some work and ingenuity, the Floaters made several clones of the tall mime artist who had played the leading role in the Havant Church of Christ performance of Silent Passion.
The plan worked smashingly. Jesus was silent and the heavens were happy.
Well, almost.
Hell in North Dakota
THE JESUS DEBACLE was not the only issue of the Heaven Domes. The Floaters were surprised to discover that many of the residents of the domes, in almost all the faiths of the world, did not think they belonged in heaven. Many believed they should be in hell. So the Floaters built a hell in North Dakota. It was a nasty place.
Hell had no light. No sound. Hell was an itchy soul feeling. A restlessness coupled with a certainty that no rest exists. An aimless anger. A soul-deep ennui.
But (and this floored the Floaters) the occupants of hell all seemed incredibly content. A little research revealed that these people had experienced the itchy soul syndrome their entire lives. But now, in hell, the feeling was understood as punishment. Finally their misery had meaning. There was a point to an existence they, in their heart of hearts, felt to be pointless. The Floaters took note.
He’s dead. We’re not.
COMPLETE DARK. BREATHING. Fast, shallow breaths echoing off the surrounding stone and wood, only inches away. She could sense her breath bouncing back. Sense that the world was too close. The air, thick with dust and wet, continued to tremor moments after the ground stilled. Water dripped on Rica’s face and let her know she was alive. The breathing she heard was not hers alone; the woman with the bun was huddled next to her. Rica reached out a hand and felt a slab of concrete slanting just above her head. The woman’s breaths grew faster, shallower. Rica placed her arms around her. “Shhh. It’s all right. Shhh.”
“We’re dead. We’re dead,” the woman mumbled. “I can’t see anything!”
“Take some breaths.” She could feel the woman’s panic twitch like an animal ready to thrash.
The woman tried to stand and smacked her head against the stone slab. “Oh God. Oh God.”
Rica reached through the dark and took both her hands. “Calm down. Quiet.” She said it with authority, like a scolding mother. “You could cave us in. I need your cell phone. Give it to me.”
“What? What? There’s no reception. Hasn’t been for a day.”
“Give it to me.”
The woman fumbled around and placed a thin cell phone in Rica’s hand. Rica touched the screen, shedding a low green light on the space. The rubble surrounded them, closing them in a tight cell no larger than the trunk of a car, though tall enough to kneel. The woman’s face, a hand’s breadth from Rica, was green and black in the dim light. Behind her Rica could make out the doctor’s unmoving arm protru
ding from the debris. Rica faced the woman.
“Look at me. Keep looking at me.” Rica could see the panic churning in her wide pupils. “What’s your name?”
The woman didn’t answer, her gaze darting from the low roof to the close walls, her face trembling. “He’s my husband. My husband . . . ”
Rica squeezed her hands. “Tell me your name,” she ordered.
The woman looked at Rica. “Bethany. I’m Bethany.”
“Bethany. I’m Rica.” Rica nodded, her face nearly touching the woman’s. The woman mirrored her nods. “I’m going to try and find a way out.”
Rica quickly studied the walls, searching for a hole, a crawl space. Chunks of ceiling and tiles of what must have been the floor above were stacked on all sides like a confused game of Jenga. Rica didn’t dare shift anything that might bring the rest of the wreckage down on them. She could feel the weight of the building teetering just above them. Something to her left caught her eye. Movement of some kind. Rica turned on her knees, guarding her belly carefully. One of the cots lay on its side. The ripped fabric bellowed slightly. Rica held an open palm by the hole and felt just a hint of breeze. She set down the cell phone and used both hands to widen the rip. She grabbed the phone and pushed it past the rip. She could make out the first few feet of a narrow hole, only as high the cot’s width.
“Bethany, I need you to listen to me. You need to follow me.”
“It’s too tight. We can’t.”
“We can.”
“We should wait here. We should stay here.” The slab above them squeaked and the jigsaw walls shuddered.
“Bethany, it’s time to go.”
Rica bent to her hands and knees, her belly hovering a few inches from the ground. She pushed past the cot’s fabric and into the passage, gripping the open cell phone. Rica cleared as she crawled, pushing debris behind her and instructing Bethany to do the same. It was slow moving, the sides narrowed, scratching against Rica’s skin. The air tasted stale and thick with grit. Behind her Bethany’s short gasps kept almost perfect rhythm.