They were everywhere she looked, even staring out of the walls. Photographs in faded Kodachrome color, black and white and even sepia-toned daguerreotypes, the ghosts of librarians past, followed her with their earnest seekers’ eyes.
At last, Esme showed her to her room, where she was invited to bathe, nap and order whatever she liked to eat from the staffed kitchen to “gather your forces for this evening.”
Gala took advantage of all three, but couldn’t shake the free-floating dislocation of the drugs and the shock of everything she’d been through. As of this morning, she was an anti-religious zealot, an astral terrorist, an escaped mental patient.
She ordered quiche, a growler of mead and a slice of key lime pie, then took a shower and dropped into a deathlike sleep before it arrived.
She woke up to the pleasant aroma of room service and the antique tinkle of a bell. Through an intercom, Esme invited her to dress and prepare for the evening devotional.
After a calculatedly leisurely meal, Gala chose a pair of new underwear in her size, a pair of sturdy silk stockings that took a lot of abuse before they were ripped enough to suit her, a gown so white, it seemed to attract free-floating particles of dirt out of the air, and a couple CBD gummies someone had left in the underwear drawer. Then she rang the bell.
Esme entered and asked her to come down to lead the program.
“I really don’t know what you guys expect from me,” Gala said. “I mean, you’ve been hella cool and springing me out of the booby-hatch, that was a stone-cold mitzvah . . . but you know I don’t believe in any of this shit, right?”
“Oh, my dear,” Esme said, “that’s exactly why it had to be you.” Gently nudging Gala back to sit on the bed, Esme knelt before her, looking up at Gala with such naked hope that Gala was afraid she’d whip out an engagement ring. “If you believed in God, you’d only see what you believe in. It’s only because you see the world as it truly is, that you will be the one to wake Him up.”
11
Gala was still puzzling that one out as she was led down the stairs and out the front door. The assembled ladies flanked the pathway in white robes, each bearing a candle that made a lantern of her face.
She passed between them, nervously clasping her hands together and reflexively blessing everybody. Seeing the zealous ardor in their eyes, she had to lean in close to Esme and whisper, “So . . . how’s this going down? You gals just gonna form a circle around me and masturbate until we shame God into showing up, or what?”
Esme chuckled. “Nothing as sordid as all that. We’re just going to channel our collective energies, induce a hypnogogic state and let it come naturally.”
Naturally. Somehow, that word took on a sinister new connotation, but Gala couldn’t place why.
She walked down the line of supplicants to the end of the path, feeling them draw together to follow her in a witchy procession into a wooded grove paved with rough-hewn stones in a circle around an ancient, mossy Gaelic cross.
With no idea where to go, Gala stopped in front of it and turned to Esme, who threw her hands up.
“Please welcome Sister Gala into your hearts,” Esme called out. “Lift her up, and she will lead us to glory.”
She waited for them to start chanting or disrobing and dancing round an altar, but they just stood there with their eyes closed and their hands up, their candles outstretched. The flames seemed to dance in a wind that wasn’t there, to twist and flutter and stretch towards her.
She was just watching this, forgetting that anything was expected of her, when she found herself looking down on the flickering waves of light converging on her like the spokes of a wheel.
Before she knew it, the wheel had shrunk until it was only a mote of light on the black face of the Bay, blazing incongruously bright amid the strings and lattices of electricity from the cluster of tiny, shrinking cities. And still she climbed.
She heard a voice that seemed to come from behind her, as if Esme were riding her like a horse. “Now, I can tell you why you don’t believe in God.”
Gala felt as if she were about to fall from an even greater height than that from which she’d dropped the Pope.
With no head to turn, she searched for Esme but couldn’t see her, any more than she could see herself. But she heard the woman as if through a long-distance landline, and knew it was her body that was receiving the message.
“I don’t believe it because it’s bullshit,” she replied. “Every culture tells itself a story . . . ”
“Exactly right! The concept of God has evolved as a mirror of His worshippers, from the earliest solar gods and fertility goddesses to the infinite, cosmically distant pater familias we struggle to accept today. But what always remains constant?”
“He’s always a dick,” Gala blurted.
Esme laughed deliciously. “As I said, He is a mirror of our aspirations and fears. He is seen as creating the world and all its life, but He needs us to worship him, because we create and recreate Him with our belief.”
“When you put it that way, I’m kind of glad He’s not real . . . ”
“Gala honey, I’m trying to make you understand. We don’t believe in God because He’s real. Our God is real because we believe.”
All the while they talked, Gala and Esme drifted further out from Earth, until the moon was a stark eminence looming before them, dwarfing the distant Earth. They descended until the curvature of the barren satellite flattened out to fill half their view and dunes and craters rose up before them.
“Once, God existed, heard prayers, did miracles, punished wickedness and protected His faithful, and the world was in harmony . . . ”
“When He wasn’t flooding it and letting the Devil fuck shit up,” Gala put in.
Skimming over the face of the moon, they raced without a break in the conversation until the Earth fell beneath the horizon. On the “dark” side of the moon, they sprang out into the void again, homing in on a black morsel of meteorite suspended silhouetted by the sun.
“We’re well aware of your thoughts on the subject, dear,” Esme said with the barest scintilla of impatience. “He wasn’t perfect, but He was real, and a reflection of His people.”
“That’s cool, but like . . . Isn’t the definition of a god that they’re perfect? If they’re not, aren’t they just monsters?”
She watched the rock grow larger, blooming into an eccentrically crooked, barbell-shaped asteroid.
“Even so,” Esme said, “try to set aside your mistrust and rancor a moment. We’ve offered nothing but support for your project. Now, we humbly invite you to have a look at ours.”
“It’s a . . . really nice rock, don’t get me wrong . . . ”
“Look again.”
The asteroid seemed to glow with an inner light. Its blackened mineral surface became translucent, then transparent. Within it, suspended like a fossil in amber, was a colossal human form, a Michelangelo sculpture of a titan in a fetal pugilist’s stance.
“So that’s . . . your god?” You people never recovered from seeing 2001 on acid in the 60s, and it shows. Peering closer, she could still not make out any details. The huge, mephitic form seemed to blur or squirm out from under her attention like a ketamine hallucination, or maybe it just wasn’t finished.
“It’s everyone’s God, dear. God once incarnated and ordered the world because we believed in Him. The church fought heresy not to protect their own power, but to keep God alive.
“Every division, every doctrinal schism, weakened the deity until it faltered and failed, and the world was left in chaos. Look at the blighted nunnery where you were so shamefully mistreated. Every member of the sect indulged in their own private misconception of what God is and should be, and what did they accomplish?
Wow, so Magda wins the pool. “And this demiurge of yours, it’ll be god of the Hindus and the Muslims and Jews and everybody who, you know, doesn’t want a god?”
“Don’t look at me that way,” Esme said, which only raised m
ore questions. “We don’t have a litmus test. We hail the saints of all religions. This God is a syncretic gestalt of what humans universally need in a supreme being. We’ve worked for over a century to refine it, and spent decades breathing it into existence. Now, we need only your vital spark to bring it to life.”
“Um . . . okay,” Gala said. “To be honest, I don’t know how I feel about all this . . . ” She didn’t feel it coming until she broke down crying. “Look . . . I’m just not good at this, okay? I answered a prayer the other day. I don’t even know why this is happening to me, but I tried . . . and this girl was about to kill herself. I tried to help her, but her life is so bad, I didn’t know what to tell her. I tried to be cool and level with her, but I fucked it up, Esme, and I don’t even know if she’s still alive or if she’s dead because I’m not even a halfway decent crisis counselor. So maybe I’m not the Chosen One you’re looking for.”
“Oh Gala,” Esme said, clucking her tongue across three hundred thousand miles of vacuum. “You did fine, sweetie. You made the effort. You helped her understand her choices, but you can’t beat yourself up for the choice she made. I only hope you see now why this is a dangerous path to walk alone.”
It was exactly what she needed to hear, and Gala wished she could have given that to Tamara Clugston, even if it was total bullshit. “I don’t feel like you’re hearing me, though. It doesn’t matter who it is. Nobody should be going around playing God! It’s a bad thing when you’re doing it figuratively, like health insurance or the death penalty, but this is the literal definition of that, for fuck’s sake.”
For a second, it almost sounded like Esme was over her shit. “I empathize with you, honey, but consider. You profess to be an atheist, yet you joined a nunnery. You struck out at religious pretenders and bravo to all of that, but what was it you truly wanted? What was the unspoken desire behind all your actions?”
“For people to stop being assholes?”
“For God to exist. A loving, just God. When He manifests as a living presence, the world will see that worship is not a leap of blind faith, and with you as the bearer of His message, it will come to love Him as He loves them.”
“That’s a lot to take in. I feel kind of put on the spot, here.” As it often did when pressed for a weighty decision, her mind went reeling away to the furthest corner of her lizard-brain to regroup.
They wanted her spark? Her nagging spark of doubt had become a brushfire, but she resisted the urge to shout NO, take her ball and go home. Maybe they were telling her the truth. Maybe, just this once, she was wrong. Buying time by making a show of studying the nascent God in its asteroid womb, she wrung out her brain in search of the source of her misgivings.
They say your senses take in so much stimuli that if your brain didn’t instantly forget most of it, you’d be paralyzed or hopelessly insane. Outside her body, without those perceptual filters, she must be taking in everything through her third eye, or whatever. Now she closed it and turned within herself, and rewound the tape.
Poring over the events of the day, she got stuck on something she could just as easily have missed in all the hullabaloo and mishegoss of being crowned the grain-queen of this secret sisterhood, only minutes before. It was so small, and so odd that she noticed it at all, but maybe an eidetic memory was just a happy side-effect of astral projection.
The pictures on the walls.
The one picture nearest the door to your room. You glanced at it going in and once more coming out, but with all those blue-haired acolytes fawning over you, there wasn’t time to process it.
The picture was of another gaggle of middle-aged women in white robes, smiling like they’d just taken second prize at a flower show. The one in the center had a halo of long, wavy brown hair, dark, penetrating eyes and a crooked, guarded smile. Those features looked achingly familiar . . . because she saw them every time she looked in a mirror . . . .
Whispering, “Enhance,” to herself as if she was cleaning up a grainy video image to crystal clarity to reveal a damning plot-point, she pulled that fleeting memory out and enlarged it until she could read the names beneath the picture. Sister Loretta—
“You know . . . ” Gretta said, “it’s funny, but you guys remind me of someone.”
“Who’s that, love?”
“Loretta Weisskopf,” she answered. “My grandmother.”
If it was possible for a bodiless psychic presence to do a double-take, Esme did so. “Of course! She was a stalwart in the initial visualization. This project is in your blood, Gala. You will fulfill it.”
“But like . . . my grandmother was a bit of a bitch. In fact, she was the one who convinced me religion was a bunch of selfish monsters trying to remake the world in their own image. It figures she’d be into something like this. This isn’t a God, it’s not even a Godzilla. This isn’t what the world needs . . . ”
“I’m sorry you feel that way, sweetie. Your grandmother spoke very highly of you. Tragically, your mother chose to waste her powers in attention-seeking, ego-driven pursuits. But you were always our great hope . . . ”
“Well, sorry to disappoint you . . . but I gotta go. This has been nice. Thanks for the pie!”
She tried to leave. She couldn’t. Held as if someone were clamping down on her arms, Gala struggled but was rooted to the point in empty space.
“What the hell are you doing to me?”
“This is all so much easier if you are a willing participant,” Esme said, “but it’s hardly necessary.”
“I think the word you’re looking for is sacrifice,” Gala said. “Back the fuck up, Esme.” Gala pushed with every joule of energy she possessed, but she stayed right where she was.
Stretching and bending, she could shift her perception towards Earth, the western hemisphere, North America, California, the San Francisco Bay, Angel Island and finally down to the Catherine wheel of candlelight in the center of which she still stood, but she viewed it as if through a telescope, powerless to reenter her body or stop it accepting the long, serrated bone handled knife.
Whoa, this can’t be good—
“Esme, stop it . . . ”
“We invoke thee, Gala Murowski, and bind thee to this vessel . . . ”
“What the fuck are you doing?”
On Earth, the sisterhood chanted, “We invoke thee . . . ”
Gala could only watch in horror as her right hand took the knife and began methodically to saw at the flesh of her left wrist.
“Fuck this shit! Fuck all of you! I don’t believe in your God, and I want to go home . . . ”
A shower of deep red blood fountained from her left wrist. Her left hand fluttered and spasmed but it took the knife and clumsily repeated the procedure on her right wrist.
She could not even speak as she watched her body stagger, drop the knife and lean against the cross, could only observe as she realized Esme had left her alone out here.
Down on Earth, Esme was stroking her hair, saying, “There, there,” like she’d just had a fainting spell, and she kept saying it and stroking Gala’s hair until she was lying on the ground. “Dear, you wouldn’t know God if you saw him. You just miss being young.”
When the body she’d always thought of as her other crappy car stopped breathing, she was not sucked up to Heaven or down to Hell, nor did she wink out of existence, but was instead dragged, leglessly kicking and silently screaming, into the murky depths of the asteroid, and the embryo of God.
12
To long for something outside, to penetrate to the heart of the mysterium tremendum, was all she ever wanted. Trembling and beating at the door to the next world all her life even as she denied its existence, because there was no home for her in this one.
Now she had been obliterated, blown out of her body and into an all-powerful incarnation of the world’s collective daddy-issues, and realized it was no different from the lamest jack-off day job she ever held down.
Now she was the Lord of Hosts, the alpha and omega, shape
r of worlds, separator of light from darkness, water from land, man from dust.
She was a puppet.
On the morning after her miraculous ascent into heaven and accompanying compulsory suicide, Gala stirred in her creche of dead star-stuff at the tugging of a hundred tiny disembodied hands. No snooze alarm to slap, no coffee to quicken her sleep-addled wits.
She tried to resist, but they dragged her new body out of its tomb and stretched it out until it was like an ethereal solar sail, a sheet of aluminum foil large enough to wrap up the moon. She could not so much as voice her displeasure as they seemed to rend her into countless glittering shreds and descend with them into the Earth’s atmosphere.
At 7:15 GMT, identical and synchronized manifestations of a humanoid entity standing a mile high and surrounded by a host of seraphim and cherubim manifested above every national capitol and major population center on Earth.
Not even the highest-definition images captured of the phenomenon could penetrate the diaphanous shroud of mist around it, or come to any agreement on the face, whose features fluidly scrambled between an estimated two hundred thousand distinctive visages, none of which matched any file in the world’s collected image databases.
“Be not afraid,” the terrifying giant spoke in a sonic boom of a voice, simultaneously in over 200 languages. “I am the Lord, author of your being. I have returned to proclaim a new age of miracles, but I command you to love each other as I love you, to abandon hatred, greed and violence, or be damned.”
As suddenly as it had appeared, the manifestations dissolved in glittering rays of light that shamed the sun, bolts of lightning spiraling up into the sky. Angels swooped and dove like UFOs before being sucked into the sky like sparks in His wake.
The world was, predictably, rather stirred up by this, and speculation on the extraordinary event in light of the previous few days’ events ran amok. The technology required for such a demonstration far exceeded human capacity, the media’s talking heads proclaimed, but that was no reason to accept divine agency behind such a brazen display.
The Flying None Page 6