by Gant, Gene
“Don’t you put my mama in the same category as you. My mother was nothing like you. I know exactly what you felt when the news flashed that picture of me on television.” The man’s memories from that moment, which I’d absorbed when I took his life, were still vivid in my mind. “You were 100 percent willing to believe that Christ was physically walking the earth again until they slapped that picture of a skinny little guy on the screen who didn’t look the way you thought a ‘real’ guy should look. You thought I was gay, and there was no way in hell Jesus could be gay. Don’t try to flip your damn bigotry back on me.”
“Okay. Enough.” Monica got up from the sofa, carrying the orb with her. “Reverend Titus, please shut up. Micah, come with me.”
This would be my chance, I thought. Once Monica and I were alone, it would be easier to pull a grab and run. It didn’t take long, however, for that plan to fall apart. As she crossed toward me, she passed the orb to Antonio. Then she hooked me by the arm and maneuvered me out of the den.
24
ENTERING THE Reyeses’ kitchen, I went immediately to the table and flung my little self into a chair, cursing every step of the way. I should have just snatched the orb. Instead, I’d allowed them to separate me from it again. Idiot!
Monica followed, practically on my heels. She clasped my shoulders and began to knead the muscles at the base of my neck with her fingers. “Calm down, Micah,” she said soothingly. “Take a deep breath. Relax.”
“I’m relaxed, Monica,” I lied.
She leaned down, looking into my face. “You don’t look relaxed. You look like you want to break something.”
“No, I just want the machine back. You want to help me with that?”
Monica gave my shoulder a pat and went to the refrigerator. She tugged the door open and studied the contents. “Hmm. You want a chocolate soda? They’re delicious.”
“Well, that’s nice of you, offering me somebody else’s groceries. And in their own house too.”
“Antonio told me to make myself at home.” She pulled a bottle of soda from the fridge. “You want one or not?”
I extended my hand toward her. She placed the bottle gently in my palm, and then got a second bottle for herself. “Now I just need to find a bottle opener.” She started to search through the kitchen drawers.
“Here, I got it.” I mentally sent an order to the orb, and the caps detached themselves from both bottles, floating into the trash can under the sink. On an impulse, I sent a second order, this one to freeze the muscles of Antonio, Titus, and Monica.
Monica looked at me and smiled. “Thanks,” she said, gesturing at me with her open bottle. She lifted the bottle to her mouth and took a sip.
Oh well. At least I’d confirmed my suspicion. They had enough control to protect themselves. Unless I caught them off guard, I couldn’t use the orb against them any more than they could use it against me.
“Hey. Where are Antonio’s folks?” It had finally occurred to me that, with all the shouting that had gone on in the den, one or both of Tony’s parents should have come running.
“Don’t worry, we’re not disturbing them, and they won’t disturb us,” Monica said. “Antonio used the machine to put them into a deep sleep.”
Carrying her soda, Monica went to the counter by the window. A half-frosted three-layer devil’s food cake sat on a platter there. Monica put down her soda and picked up the knife that protruded from an open container of chocolate icing. Apparently, this was what she had been busying herself with when I burst into the house looking for the orb.
“Your friend’s a good cook,” she said casually as she scooped up a gob of frosting and resumed working on the cake. “I could never bake anything, not even a cake out of a box. They always fell flat before I could get them out of the oven. But Antonio showed me that the trick to it is to keep the oven closed for at least thirty minutes. Did you know that?”
“I never made a cake before,” I said, wondering why I was even answering the question. “I mostly fry stuff.”
“I’ve always wanted to bake. My mom’s lousy at it, but my grandmom made the best cookies and pies.” The look in Monica’s eyes got softer, just for a moment. “Anyway, you get to taste the very first piece of my very first cake. That turned out okay, I mean.”
I sighed, a bit more heavily than I’d intended. “Monica, you didn’t bring me out here to give me cake-baking tips.”
“I’m just trying to make you comfortable. I don’t want you to be angry. That will only make talking to you harder.”
“I won’t let you use the machine to kill people.”
“Micah—”
“I just don’t get it.” I set my bottle down on the table with a sharp thunk. “The Muslim who blows up Israelis says he’s doing God’s will. The Christian who bombs abortion clinics says he’s doing God’s will. Why does God need us humans to do anything for him? Why can’t he just wipe out all the gays and the Jews and the Arabs and whoever else you religious folk say he hates, if that’s what he wants?”
“You have doubts, Micah,” Monica said in that measured tone reserved for the hopelessly dense. “We—Antonio, Reverend Titus, and I—have faith.”
“Yeah, you have faith, all right. But not in God’s ability to handle his own business.”
Monica slid the knife back into the can of frosting and turned to me. “It is every Christian’s duty to spread the word of God. Christ gave up his life to redeem us. There is no salvation except through him, and he made it every Christian’s duty to spread that message. I believe that with all my heart, Micah. We have to bring the world to salvation. That would be the greatest help we could give our brothers and sisters.” She ran a hand uneasily over her long, wavy hair. “I also have to point out that you’ve been unfocused ever since your resurrection. You may have started out trying to help people, but you ended up just trying to fulfill your own worldly desires and feed your ego. It was wrong for you to use the power to change yourself into a man, even for a few hours. We shouldn’t be using the power for ourselves.”
“Hey, give me a break. I never really thought about using the power to give myself anything until people started trying to kill me for no reason. Then I started wondering why I was going to all the trouble of trying to help people if it just got me shot.”
Monica took another sip from her soda. “You know, I was really hurt when Antonio told me about you earlier. You lied to me.”
That left me perplexed. “How did I lie to you, Monica? What lie did I tell you?”
“You walk around looking like this.” She gestured at me with both hands. “You look like a boy. And that’s the lie.”
“It’s not a lie. This is me. This is who I am.”
“I’m not attracted to girls,” she said, looking even more uncomfortable. “I saw you in that club, and I liked you because I thought you were a boy. You let me think you were a boy, and that’s not fair or honest.”
“Monica, I didn’t come on to you. You came to me. If things had gotten to the point where it looked like you and I were headed toward being more than friends, that’s when I would have told you about me. If you couldn’t deal with that, I would have gone back to just being your friend, or I would have left you alone completely if you told me you didn’t want to be friends anymore. But I don’t go around telling my truth to everyone I meet. I’ve been treated like shit by a lot of people once they find out. So yes, I’m careful about who I tell and when I tell them. That’s not because I’m trying to hide anything; it’s to protect myself. I can’t afford to get my ass kicked every time I meet someone.”
“I wouldn’t have done that to you, Micah. I’m not that kind of person.”
“Well, what would you have done? Tell me how you would have reacted.”
She paused, giving the idea some thought. “I would have told you what you’re doing is a sin in the eyes of God.”
“Monica, that’s your belief, not mine. You can follow whatever religious beliefs you want, but
don’t try to make me live by your rules. You don’t get to do that.”
“You know, from the day I was baptized, I’ve felt that God had a purpose for me to fulfill. A few weeks ago, I started thinking that purpose was for me to preach. But now that this great power has been brought to us, I know I’m meant to make the world into what God wants it to be.” She broke off, perhaps because my mouth was hanging open. “This just isn’t making sense to you, is it?”
“I don’t mean any disrespect, but it’s like saying God meant for you to eat bacon because there’s a hog farm down the road from your house.” I could feel antagonism coming down on me like a head cold. I paused, taking a deep breath to keep myself from snapping at her. “Just saying something is God’s will doesn’t make it so.”
“You’re having problems with this because you don’t think you measure up to the standards we’ll be using.”
“Well, hell yeah. Especially since what you call ‘standards’ is just your own personal opinions. Like I said before, there are billions of people in the world who reject Christianity and believe their own religion is the only truth. Then you have the people who flat-out reject all religion and think their personal code of right and wrong is all they need to get along in life.”
“Which is all the more reason for us to do what we’ve been called to do.”
“People should be able to follow their own religious beliefs. Or to believe in nothing if that’s where their head is. Monica, I don’t care how you put it, if you, Tony, and that Titus guy do this, you’ll be forcing your beliefs on the world.”
“You’ve said repeatedly that you personally believe in God. Don’t you think a commitment to God carries some obligation?”
“To be honest with you, even before all of this happened, I’d been thinking that I should get baptized again. I was twelve the first time and didn’t really understand what it was all about. I just did it because Mama said I should, not because I was ready. I think that’s the problem with a lot of people who belong to churches and mosques. They turn out for the services and wear their crosses and condemn infidels. But they don’t focus on helping people who’re down and in need. They never care about people who aren’t like them. Most of what I see is people who try to prove how holy they are by how many times in a day they pray or recite scripture or make sinners suffer. And sometimes… sometimes… that makes me doubt that God is out there at all.” I shrugged at her. “I can’t let it happen. I can’t let you, Antonio, and Reverend Titus do what you’re planning, Monica.”
The look Monica gave me now showed how confused she was. I sighed and continued. “I can’t go along with killing people for being gay or cheating on their spouses or for not believing Jesus is the Messiah or for not worshipping in church on Sunday—”
“Saturday.”
“What?”
“The Sabbath day is Saturday.”
“But you go to church on Sunday. If I remember this right, you said so yourself just this past Sunday.”
“I know. But Reverend Vaughn, Antonio, and I talked that over, and we agreed the Bible specifies the seventh day of the week as the Sabbath day. We also agreed that Saturday is the seventh day of the week, not Sunday, which is actually the first day of the week. So everyone in the new church will be required to observe Saturday as the Sabbath.”
A hangman’s noose materialized around my neck and yanked me violently into the air, eyes bulging, legs kicking frantically, death rattling in my throat.
Monica laughed uneasily. “Oh, will you stop acting so silly.”
I let the noose vanish and floated down to sit again at the table. I looked closely at Monica and realized that she must have been wearing makeup at Cotton’s Lounge and when I met her after church. There was no makeup now, and I could see a fine sprinkling of tan freckles across the bridge of her nose.
“What am I going to do with you?” I said helplessly. “You got the kind of heart that makes you reach out and take pity on a little punk like me, at least when you thought I was a guy, but give you a little power and you’re ready to kill off half the people in the world.”
“Funny, I thought the same thing about you.” She came to the table, pulled out a chair, and sat across from me. “You have to admit, Micah, you’re guilty of the very thing you’re accusing me of wanting. You’ve murdered a lot of people since you got control of the machine, and you’ve hurt a lot of others.”
“I punished people who bullied me,” I replied adamantly.
“No, you took revenge. Even on your own father.”
I laughed. “What’s in that soda you’re drinking? Vodka or something? My dad beat the crap out of me for years and bailed on my mama and me. And when I found him living under a viaduct, I didn’t leave him there. I gave him a place to stay. How is that taking revenge?”
The look Monica gave me then was lingering and full of pity. It was like the looks the two doctors gave me when they sat me down on a wooden bench in the hospital chapel and told me that my mama had died.
I hated it, her watching me that way. “Stop it.”
“Micah—”
“Just stop it, okay?”
“Where’s your father, Micah?”
And then I remembered.
MONICA HAD accessed my memories stored in the orb, memories I had blocked.
On that Friday night, I was barely conscious, lying on the warm concrete of the loading bay in a slowly spreading swath of my own blood. There was no pain. The three thugs were gone by then, leaving me to die. And the orb was already at work, processing my DNA from the drops of blood that had chanced upon it.
An instant later, the orb transferred my consciousness into its memory banks. Or, at least, that was my perception of it. I seemed to be floating in an intricate, infinite lattice of crystalline red light. There were billions upon billions of other souls here, each a collection of memories and feelings from birth to death. Billions more souls were incomplete, still compiling memories and sensations as they went about their mortal lives.
One of those incomplete souls was walking unsteadily along the driveway toward the loading bay, heading home. I could see through his eyes if I chose, and because there was something familiar about his thoughts, I did so.
His eyes were half closed, his brain and body overcome from inebriation, his thoughts focused only on the twin bed in the little room of the little house I’d grown up in. He wanted to be there, to lie down in that bed, and close his eyes. Rounding the curve in the driveway, he came into the loading bay. There was only the moonlight to see by, and the darkness seemed to close in around him like smoke. He couldn’t see, damn it. Oh Lord, just let me make it to the house, please.
There was a mass on the ground ahead, small and twisted. Must be an old, busted tire off some semi. Don’t trip over the thing.
He shifted to his right, struggling to keep his balance. The air was hot and alive with sound, crickets squeaking at each other, traffic whispering along the street. He was passing the thing on the ground, and his eyes drifted lazily to the left for a glance.
There was blood, black in the darkness. Blood was all over the thing. Not a shredded tire. There were clothes…. He had seen these clothes before.
Ice clutched his heart, shot right up to his brain, and everything became sharp and clear. The face was ruined, the flesh pulped, but he still knew that face. Jesus! Oh God! My little girl! Say something, Michaela! Don’t you die on me! Oh God, somebody help!
I separated myself from Dick’s mind. In that moment, I was nothing but rage. I raged at the humiliation and fear I had felt all my life, beaten by kids bigger than me, beaten by this man, beaten by thugs, intimidated by the police. Those overwhelming emotions caused me to lash out.
Energy drained from the grid of electrical lines crisscrossing the city, from automobiles and airplanes, from the sky itself. Dick sensed the danger even in his drunken grief, although he did not understand it or know its source, and he tried to run. The power gathered into a single, bli
nding flare that coruscated over my father’s body in a brilliant blaze. Mercifully, he felt only a moment of intense shock. His body was vaporized in midstep, vanishing without so much as a cinder to mark the spot where he gasped out his last breath.
MONICA REACHED out and took my forearm, gripping it tightly. My mind barely registered her touch. I stared, stunned.
“I killed him…,” I whispered.
“I’m sorry, Micah.”
“Oh God.”
I don’t know how long I cried there in Antonio’s kitchen. The pain was acute, grief of the kind that is more taxing on the body than hard labor. Monica let the weeping go on, fingers squeezing my arm, eyes averted so as not to intrude upon my shame.
Once the tears stopped, she got up and put her arms around me. I leaned against her, so weak that I would have fallen out of the chair if she had not been there. She didn’t seem to mind that I wiped my wet face on her shoulder.
“You feel better?” she asked.
“Hell, no. I killed my dad.” And I’d shut the act out of my mind, burying it in my subconscious. Yet it troubled me so deeply that my mind had manufactured a whole scene with my father on Monday morning, scolding me for having Monica in my house overnight. I’d essentially had an argument with myself to avoid facing the crushing guilt of what I’d done.
“You have to learn to forgive. Let Christ guide your life, and I guarantee you won’t be able to hold animosity in your heart toward anybody. Not even yourself.”
I didn’t get upset at her for once again making the implication that she was going to use the orb to force her religion on the world. I was still so devastated over what I’d done to my father that I didn’t care about anything else at the moment. “That’s a little too late for my old man,” I mumbled as I gently let go of her.
